rhapsodic.org is a weblog by Valette Keller

Book Reports

I've been slacking posting about the books I've read in the last month or so. I am aiming to finish 15 books before the end of January, and have already finished 9. I do not foresee this goal being a problem.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - I know a woman online who sometimes goes by the handle of jonathanstrange. Her username is the only reason I decided to read this book. I think I grabbed it at the bookstore and was almost about to pay for it when Steve came up and announced that he already owned it and there was no need for me to buy another copy.

Turns out there was no need for me to read it, either.

This book is like 6 million pages of dreary descriptions of leaves and magic and England and boringness. Some of the chapters on the war were interesting, but much too long.

And the footnotes! Good God, the footnotes almost killed me. I usually have to read all footnotes and whatnot, but half of this book is comprised of footnotes that have nothing to do with anything. The author should have just saved all of those short little stories, fleshed them out and published them separately.

I actually started it in May and just had to put it down for a while. I honestly thought I wouldn't pick it back up again, but then I ran out of books. So I finished it. And I don't feel any better for doing so.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Picked this up because 1/ it was cheap, and 2/ I had heard about it because a number of my friends had read it. It was a quick read.

I really didn't care that much about the political issues the main character cared about. I skimmed most of the first bit on the history of financial institutions in Sweden, and found that once the locked box island mystery had been solved I again didn't care about the main character getting his reputation back.

The tattooed girl was interesting, but mostly two-dimensional. The mystery on the island was very interesting to unravel, and I'm glad that the twist I expected never happened in lieu of a much better twist.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers - I scored this book at a book swap. Only after I was snuggled into bed and had read the first few pages did I realize it was nonfiction.

The author has a tendency to get distracted: for a book on human cadavers, the author spends too much time on animal cadavers. The book started off strong but then kind of petered out, as though the author had already used her best material in the first two chapters.

Some of the information was interesting and new to me, requiring a few passages to be read aloud to Steve who was always, "Yeah I remember hearing something about that." But I wish the author had stuck more closely to the topic.