Some Blog Site

Here are some more mini-reviews of books, thanks to having too many books in the summer to read so they piled up and I eventually got to them. I’m going in order of when I read them.

First up: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Victoria Forester

And now, the thrilling conclusion to last week’s story, or rather, to the trilogy The Girl Who Could Fly.

At least that’s what I was hoping for. I mostly got a conclusion, but she left a couple of loose ends to have an opening for a fourth book. If you read the second book of the trilogy and liked it, then you should read this one.

Next up: The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

This is the second book in the Discworld series. Maybe “series” is the wrong word for Discworld, more like collection of books. But this one definitely directly follows The Color of Magic. I still like his writing. If you liked the first book, go ahead with this one. If you didn’t read the first book, don’t start with this one.

Next up: Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

Like everyone else this year, I read Theo of Golden. Also like everyone else, I read it because a couple people I knew were reading it and all raved about it.

I liked it, it was worth reading.

Do not skip ahead, do not read the last part of the book early.

The book starts off seeming like a “slice of life” story. It ends up being a few slices of life and works in a plot. And some life lessons. The chapters are on the short side, so it’s a good book for reading in spurts, since you can set it down whenever you need to and pick it back up later without having to get back into it.

Next up: Sorcerer of the North by John Flanagan

This is book 5 of the Ranger’s Apprentice series. It follows book 4, but does not continue its plot.

This book was good, in the same vein as the rest of the series. The main characters are there, they get into trouble, they get out of trouble. If you’ve read books 1-4 then you’ll know what to expect. The only thing to note is that this is only the first half of the story – this book ends in a “to be continued” situation. So make sure you have easy access to book 6 after this.

Last up: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

I didn’t know much about this book, other than it was in our library and somewhere it made a list of good sci-fi books.

This took a long time to read. Unlike Theo of Golden, this book has long chapters and complex threads and I could not just read it whenever – I had to set aside blocks of time to read this.

But it was worth it.

There’s a bit of world-building involved, but more interesting was the species-building in the story. It takes a bit to understand the creatures in the story, because Vinge does not explain things right away. And that’s what makes the book good – you have to think about what you’ve read and put in effort to understand what’s going on. It also brings about a bit of joy of discovery, rather than having everything laid out for you. He doesn’t try to hide things, but because of the uniqueness of the worlds and species in the story, I didn’t quite catch onto some things until a chapter or two later, and then earlier things made more sense.

There is a plot, it’s not just worlds and species. There’s a main plot and then some side plots, the story is told from a few points of view. The conclusion was not exactly what I expected, but it was a conclusion. I later learned there is a sequel, but I’m not sure if I want to try that yet, just in case it doesn’t live up to this book.

---

That’s it for this review. More book reviews coming up later this year.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.