What have I read lately? A lot, mainly old children's lit. So let's have a few quick reviews.

• Heidi - Unprepossessing little Swiss girl grows up in the mountains, has to live in the city, and converts her city friends to the wonders of the mountains. It's so sincerely written that you don't mind a lot of happenings that would be extremely twee otherwise. Overall, I enjoyed reading this.
• Dear Brutus - Short, sentimental J.M. Barrie play, I like this one because it hits all the expected notes and is enjoyable to read as a short story just as much as a play. It's a quick read but clever.
• Black Beauty - A classic horse story but actually pretty boring? Like, I thought there were supposed to be more exciting parts, but it's basically a tract about animal cruelty. It held the most interest, to me, in its depictions of English life and how horses fitted into society. Black Beauty is such a bland narrator that I couldn't care about his story.
• What Katy Did - A young scamp of a girl with her big family gets into trouble, befalls tragedy, and learns to trust in God and be more ladylike. Resonated with me since I've been laid up with a bum leg for the past few weeks, and Katy's spirit isn't entirely crushed, and she is rather more of a wild child than some of her contemporary spunky female main characters, so I'll allow it.
• What Katy Did At School - A sequel and a pretty entertaining one, all things considered. Katy and her sister Clover go to boarding school and the usual shenanigans are had. Katy is more subdued and so a bit less interesting.
• The King of the Golden River - A charming little fairy tale, not much to it, but delightfully told with a lot of vivid images and plenty of story fairy tale elements.
• Seven Little Australians - Seven Australian children are not paragons of virtue and instead get into scrapes without learning wholesome moral lessons all the time - you know, like real children. I thought that the book was too short; there could have been a lot more to it without the story wearing out its welcome. All of the children were unique and well drawn, and the ending worked.

In conclusion, wow, children in those books are always having horrible things happen to them. Ye gads.

Final Fantasy IX: Part I

My good friend Jacob has persuaded me to try Final Fantasy IX as the introduction to that series. He has been so good as to loan me a copy, and so I will make every attempt to finish the game. In my turn, I shall blog my efforts in hopes of amusing and enlightening my readers. These entries shall be stream of consciousness accounts of what I encounter, and as such may be disjointed. Needless to say, they will also contain spoilers. Well, let us begin.

- ... Wow. For PSX era graphics, for a game I remember reading about in an old gaming mag while still in middle school (or thenabouts), the cutscenes look good. You can tell they're dated, but you don't care. It puts SoA:L (my favorite RPG of Dreamcast era, ported to GCN) to shame.
- Regular graphics, not so much. And everything's so smudgy and pixelated. Then again, I play the Golden Sun games, so I'm used to that.
- So far, so good. Wandering around the city (Alexandria?) trying to go see this show where some abduction is going to go down. No ticket, but instead I get trading cards. Will I have to challenge the castle guards to a children's card game?
- Okay, this card game is pretty darn addictive.
- Annoying children run into me and won't move until I do.
- Wish I understood how they're getting the, like, HP of the different cards. I can't tell if the symbols on them are supposed to be numbers?
- Okay, let's go and move the plot along, if I can figure out how to do that.
- This game has such a fairy tale feel to it.
- Theatre! Jacob knows what I like. X3
- That's actually a fun run of minigame sequences.
- Poor sad princess.
- Mysterious figure. I wonder who that could be.
- And now I have to go search for the missing princess.
- I do like how the viewpoint character changes up. Gives it more of a rounded story feeling.
- Except Steiner moves so slow, and I don't know what I'm looking for. The princess, yeah, but there's so many bland rooms and corridors. Oh well, probably won't be long.
- Ugh, searched everywhere. Well, pretty much. If I can't find her in this last place, I'm checking a guide.
- Staaaaaairs.
- Oh, guess it really is the last place you look.
- Haha, Steiner. I like that guy already.
- Cutscene! And now more chasing.
- Is that band made up of zombies?
- These days it's more shocking if a princess doesn't want to escape/run away/be kidnapped from her privileged, pampered existence. I'll be interested in finding out Garnet's motivation.
- Poor Steiner. He just wants to do a good job.
- Bwahaha, yesss, that play. Jacob, when you read this, know that I fully support putting an homage to it in our stuff. So much melodrama and farce.
- I was wondering when Vivi would show up again.
- Just the sort of coincidence to cause the most plot trouble.
- Harpoon Cannon, fire!
- Did... Did they just fire a literal sun at them or something?
- Not sure what's up with that queen aside from the fact that she is cray cray.
- Garnet's all, "what the heck did I just get myself into?"
- Oh right, those creepy jester guys. Creepy.
- SAVE EARLY. SAVE OFTEN.

Well, there's our first entry. I have to replay a bit of the game due to some technical difficulties, so I'm going to call this a good stopping point as far as this entry goes. I'll update again soon!

Warm Bodies

I saw the trailer for Warm Bodies when I went with a friend to see Breaking Dawn: Part 2. The latter movie was surprisingly enjoyable in a "this is a bad movie, but dang if it's not hilarious and with far more decapitations than I expected" sort of way, but that's really all there is to say about it, so now that I've gotten that out of the way, let's move on. Warm Bodies, another zombie movie. Except... from the point of view of the zombie? That's pretty novel. And... there's a love interest? Well, this isn't the first time I've seen that. And the trailer in general seemed very snappy, full of quips that didn't fall flat and entertainingly action-filled.

So, at some point soon after I learned that it was based on a book, and on a whim I ordered it from the library. Came in pretty quickly too. Last night I was up late but didn't quite want to sleep yet, so I thought I'd crack it open. Two and a half hours later I turned the last page to the light of the rising sun. (Poetic license; I keep my windows firmly barricaded against any stray beams of natural light.) But anyway, I stayed up way later than I should have due to this surprisingly engaging novel.

So, first thing's first, while it definitely has a theme and message and all that jazz, and the main character is this rather philosophical zombie named R (that being all he can remember of his name), I never felt like I was being beaten over the head with any message of hope and what it means to be human. I mean, that was definitely in there, but it felt right, not forced. The writing was nice, didn't call attention to itself with any fancy gimmicks, just told a briskly-paced story. It's a nice tale of the apocalypse, dark and gritty enough to drive home just how plain terrible it'd be to live after the collapse of civilization, but what with the message of hope and the story not taking itself too seriously, the tone is just right. Same with the characters. None of them are saints, not R or his love interest Julie, but they're good people. Well-developed, too, and the romance is actually very believable, with the characters connecting over things instead of just being based off chemicals. And as for the zombies in general, it's just a darn interesting take on the monster, putting a new twist on why they do what they do and, really, what zombies are. It's hard to discuss without spoiling the journey of the book, including the ending which, somehow, actually worked for me. It's built up and plays out without breaking suspension of disbelief. I shouldn't buy the ending, but I do. This is a strangely good book. I think that says it best. It's a strange book, and I did not expect it to be as engaging as I found it.

One last thing. I think it's best saved until you've read the book yourself.

Too Many Pinkie Pies

Now this was a delightful episode. "Too Many Pinkie Pies" was funny, well-paced, and quite sweet. Pinkie Pie is a ball of energy who loves having fun with her friends. When she has to choose between hanging out with Rainbow Dash and raising a barn with the Apple family, Pinkie remembers a legend about a mirror pond in the Everfree Forest that will allow you to duplicate yourself, and she takes advantage of it. However, the amount of Pinkie Pies quickly explodes out of control, and faced with a Pinkie plague, the town has to do something. Twilight discovers a spell to set things right, but first they need to determine which Pinkie Pie is the real Pinkie Pie - if they can.

This episode reminds me a lot of "Party of One." Pinkie can definitely be obnoxious, but she has good intentions and really cares about her friends. And Pinkie-centric episodes are nice when we get to see her as more than just a source of jokes. My heart went out to her when Pinkie started to see just how far in over her head she'd gotten and realized that she might get sent away from her friends as a consequence of her actions. The other ponies all got some screen time, and I liked the callback joke with the orange frog. The throwaway reference to the older MLP series was a nice touch too. I don't have much to say about the specifics; if I were to pick out the good moments I would have to talk about most of the episode. Overall this is a very solid episode and promises good things for season three.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic - The Crystal Empire Parts 1 & 2

First, the musical numbers. I'm sorry to say that I found them mostly uninspired. "The Ballad of the Crystal Empire" was nice enough, being both pleasing to listen to and serving as a montage of preparations for the fair, but "The Failure Song" and "The Success Song" did nothing for me and felt shoe-horned in to meet a quota of musical numbers. Less is more, folks, and always remember that musical numbers really should only happen when the character's emotions reach a point where just talking won't cut it. I was not buying that as the case for Twilight here. Maybe for "The Failure Song" but definitely not "The Success Song." And, perhaps more crucially, if you removed these two songs, nothing would be lost, which is a good way of identifying extraneous musical numbers. Take "The Failure Song." We've already seen Twilight over-prepare for the test before leaving for Canterlot, and the first two seasons also show her scholarly abilities and growth as a person (well, pony). And her lament about not being prepared for the task which Celestia set her is also covered before the song even starts, when Twilight voices just such concerns to her mentor. I also think that the tone of song doesn't fit with the relatively darker tone of the rest of the two-parter. It feels too Disney coming off the heels of a fairly tense book scene (if you'll pardon the theatre lingo). There's some legitimately discomfiting stuff in these episodes, and there's some mood whiplash here.

But as far as the actual story goes, I have no complaint. Twilight is summoned by Princess Celestia to save the Crystal Empire by stopping Kind Sombra from stealing back control of the empire with his black crystals. I'm kind of hazy on the details, having only watched this once, but the best parts of the episode don't deal with minutia, they focus on Twilight's character arc. Enjoyable parts include the very first scene with her packing for a test in Canterlot and having a mini-version of her "Lesson Zero" freakout. She may have learned her lesson then, but that doesn't mean that Twilight's studies aren't the most important thing to her after friends and family. Besides this scene being funny, it also hearkens back to previous character moments as well as setting up how important it is to Twilight to pass this episode's test. I liked seeing Princess Luna again, and there were some cryptic exchanges between the two princesses of which I was unsure whether they were just for setting up the atmosphere of the episode or if they were hinting at a possible plot arc for this season, in the same way that the Grand Galloping Gala was a plot arc for the first season. We'll skip the first song, as I've already talked about it. When Twilight and friends arrive in the north and meet Shining Armor, that was actually fairly, well, not scary, but definitely eerier than I'd been expecting. Something I did expect which didn't come to pass was that the black crystal chunks on Shining Armor's horn would factor more into the plot than to block his magic, but I guess having him get possessed would be too much like what happened to his bride last season. The Crystal Empire itself was really freaking eerie, sort of deserted and dystopian. And the overhanging sense of oncoming doom kept the tension in the episode high. I was glad that the story followed through on Twilight having to find the Crystal Heart alone; again, that keeps the stakes high and the focus on the character who is undergoing a development arc. And Spike coming along made sense; he's her number one assistant, a nice foil for her, and the way they helped each other helped Twilight learn something about herself and helping others. This time was different from the usual sort of friendship lesson. Instead of learning to work as a team to overcome an obstacle, it was, as Princess Celestia said, about self-sacrifice, about acting on your own, but still for the good of others. And even though it hurt for Twilight to go against the conditions of the test, she made the call without much dithering, because she knew it was the right thing.

Twilight Sparkle is the protagonist of this story, but Friendship is Magic is overall an ensemble show, and the narrative for these episodes does a nice balance of keeping her at the center of things while not giving the other ponies short shrift. Rarity acts completely in character, being a supportive friend even while she is understandably distracted by all of the shiny things. Applejack is the loyal lancer to Twilight, holding down the fort and keeping things on track. Rainbow Dash is headstrong, unthinking, and a source of comic relief, especially when paired with inoffensive and timid Fluttershy. And Pinkie is just Pinkie. These five all get moments to themselves, such as when they're searching for information and running the fair, which helps balance the episode. And Spike is allowed his fair share of screen time as well, and his relationship with Twilight is, as always, adorable.

Overall I was very pleased with these two episodes as the opener for season three. Unlike some highly anticipated pieces of media, the build-up did not let down all of the fanbase's hopes and dreams. On a completely unrelated note, I think I might start crossposting my Golden Sun: Dark Dawn reviews/gameblogs here from my old blog. Keep an eye out for that, as well as for more MLP and other reviews.

Half-baked metaphors

Today I made dinner. It was a rather last-minute thing. I received the recipe by e-mail and was told to get to it. Okay. Go downstairs, raise my eyebrows at the printout. Eight ingredients? Minced garlic? Dry sherry? Well, aren't we fancy tonight? So okay, in the kitchen I start pulling out the ingredients. Ground beef, yeah. We're missing egg noodles, so we're going with rotini and penne instead, combining two partial boxes. The sherry's there, and so's the Worcestershire sauce, but we only have one can of tomato soup, so I'll have to sub in some diced tomatoes in too large a can size. There's sliced cheddar in the fridge, but no Parmesan, so let's go with mozzarella instead. I hate dishes like this anyway (I've got a lovely rant about Italian food I'll do if anyone ever gives me an opening in conversation), so what do I care if we've got the wrong cheese?

Well, I get started. Boil some water for noodles and just guesstimate the right amount, pour 'em in to cook. Start browning the meat, and chop some garlic while that's happening. Life pro tip, gotta peel garlic a bit before you get to the good stuff, and also, there are several cloves for each bulb. So don't just throw a whole thing under the chopper. Where was I going with this? Ah, yes. I don't remember about draining the meat until after I'd added the tomato sauce (because you'd think they would put something that important in the instructions), the noodles don't seem to be softening at all, the whole mess is too big for the pan, and by the time I get this hot mess (both literally and figuratively) in the oven, I am wiped out and prickling with annoyance.

You know what, though? It turned out swell. Everyone raved about my casserole. Even I didn't think it was terrible. It occurred to me later that this whole experience is an imperfect metaphor for writing. For your rough draft you've got your recipe, your outline of what you expect the story to be about. Your ingredients are all the characters, settings, plot devices, and the like, which you may have to swap out or change at a moment's notice for the betterment of the story. You slop the whole thing together, wincing at every mistake or every clunky paragraph, but the important thing is getting it in the over, finalizing that draft. And I guess you could compare the oven to editing, but that's a bit more of a stretch. Still, it can take something as simple and unexpected as a come-from-behind success at making dinner to drive home the point that fussing over perfection every step of the way while writing is counter-productive. So I'm not going to get in my own way. When I get back to cooking up this short story in a bit, I'm going to press forward, write what excites me, and shove that tasty first draft in the oven.

... Now I've made myself hungry again.

Moshidora

When I first heard the concept behind Moshidora, it cracked me up. A high school girl manages her high school's baseball team using Peter Drucker's business book Management. How were they going to pull that off? I expected a comedy about a failing team that pulls wacky stunts as they vainly try to apply corporate management techniques into their training. I was not expecting a heartfelt slice-of-life show that balanced comedy and drama in a sincerely told and uplifting story. For whatever reason, baseball media seems to be especially good at this sort of underdog tale.

Kawashima Minami volunteers to manage her high school's baseball team when her best friend, and the team's current manager, Miyata Yuki is hospitalized. Minami hates baseball and knows nothing about management, but being a gung-ho young woman she visits the bookstore and finds a volume with which to educate herself about the latter. The team is full of unmotivated and discouraged young men, but Minami applies herself, and with the help of Yuki and team member Nikai, she employs Drucker's techniques to energize and focus the team, setting their sights on the Nationals.

Now, I'm not such an anime connoisseur that I can comment knowledgeably on production aspects such as animation, sound, voice acting, and the like. I will say that you're not missing anything if you skip the first two minutes of each episode, which is the introduction and opening theme, the latter of which is pretty terrible. The ending theme isn't bad, but it's nothing special. The animation is good enough that if you're just a casual viewer, like I am, you'll have no cause for complaint. Occasionally the series makes use of super-deformed art for comedic effect. The story is well-told and well-paced. We get some early episodes setting up how Minami transforms the team using management best practices, and then the series tones down on introducing new terms and concepts and goes into showing how the efforts of Minami and the others are working out for the team. There are some predictably dramatic moments, but they're handled very well. Nothing overblown; the characters act how you'd expect high school kids to act under pressure or grief. Overall, this is a funny, sweet stories that tells an uplifting story in just the right amount of time.

Musings of a real nerd girl

Over the past few days quite a few posts about "fake geek girls" have popped up on my radar. If you're not familiar with the concept, a fake geek girl is a girl who pretends to be into nerdy things just to appear attractive to nerd boys. A poser, basically. Now, if you're worried about whether you or someone you know may not, in fact, be a real nerd girl, worry no more: simply take this test and find out! And real nerds no longer need to worry about their status being doubted. Now you can just get fandom certified and have your geek cred ready to produce at any challenge.

I love the internet.

But like I said before, quite a few posts on this subject have showed up recently, and I think I know why. This article discusses the latest bout of disgusting misogyny from the comics industry, a rant by comics artist Tony Harris about how cosplay girls aren't real comics fans and are just doing it for the attention. Harris' lovely piece of badly written vitriol is just the latest example of how the battle for nerdy equality is far from won. But there's hope. Both men and women are speaking out against the prevailing culture of objectification. Happily enough, I've never really had any of this sexism directed at me personally, or I haven't noticed it if it was. (I can be rather oblivious.) But I've seen plenty of the sweeping generalizations demeaning women who are into nerdy things, and it certainly gets me fired up. In the end, we just need to stay strong, pull together, and continue to resist this treatment instead of passively accepting it. I'm lucky to know plenty of nerdy lads who hold women in equal regard, and I'm thankful for these friends every time I hear of things like this.

Hardmode

I play NaNoWriMo on hardmode. One of the biggest things they stress is to let yourself go crazy and not worry about little things like spelling errors and clunky sentences. Well, that was good for me in the early years, when getting three thousand words in one month was an accomplishment and I thought that description was something that happened to other people, but these days I'm no longer a casual, to continue with the gamer theme. I play NaNoWriMo on hardmode, and that means I correct spelling errors as soon as I see the little red squiggly line, and I'll rewrite sentences if I can think of a better way to phrase something at that moment. I don't compulsively edit my work on a large scale, and I have a healthy enough sense of what can wait and what can't, but these days I take some pride in my writing, enough that I don't care to be sloppy just for the sake of sloppiness. I also research without guilt. If I want to know the correct form of address for the eldest son of a duke, I will browse the internet until I find out, never mind how long it takes, even if I happen to be in the middle of a word war.

But of course I wouldn't humble-brag about my hardmode tendencies if it were just for those little foibles. Oh, no, when I say hardmode, I do mean it. Four days ago I took 8000+ words, scrapped them, and began again from scratch, simply because my story at the time wasn't holding my interest. And that, I firmly feel, is a much worse problem than any sort of writer's block. If you're blocked and angry because of it, then you have emotion towards your story. You want to finish it, and whatever's keeping you from doing so angers you because of the depth of your connection with the narrative. But a lack of interest... That's killer. If the author isn't interested, how could a reader ever be? I had a writer's block, I guess, but the real problem was the lack of any motivation to work through it. I wasn't cudgeling my brain to figure out what happened next because I didn't care about what happened next. The perils of writing with an outline.

So now, after four days of writing I'm back to pretty much where I was after ten. I switched to the new idea midway through a day and thus only wrote one thousand then, but these past three days have seen 2.5k apiece. I will need to see about 2.5k a day every day from now on, but I'm not worried. I like my new story much better. I get to use a character concept I've been itching to take for a spin for a while now, the setting is much smaller in scale, and I'm running two different plots concurrently, romance and adventure, which satisfies my main tastes. And with that, I return to my novel, getting closer to victory one word at a time.

2001: A Space Odyssey

So apparently I forgot to review 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. No idea how that happened; I thought it was an amazing book. Nothing else I've ever read managed to convey the sheer sense of awe and longing that fills me when I contemplate the vast potentiality of the universe, nor the sense of impotent horror when confronted with the unforgiving void of space. The story starts on our own planet, but in a time so distant in the past that a human finding herself there would effectively feel an alien. We meet the ancestors of present humans and see an alien presence interact with them and give the primitive beings a push towards evolving. And then, millions of years later we're in modern times, excited and curious to learn more about some strange happenings on the moon, where there's now a colony. A strange monolith has been discovered, and an expedition is launched. That's where HAL 9000 comes in. Having only known about 2001 through pop cultural osmosis before this point, I had thought the entire book would be about the strangely doomed space expedition, but that's just one facet of the story. And I actually enjoyed the description of life aboard the Discovery One and the part about Jupiter more than the stuff with Hal, although I enjoyed the entire book. I used to be incredibly fascinated by space exploration when I was younger, and I still am. Thinking about it, Jupiter was the highlight of the book for me. But the book continues from there, with events with Hal coming to a head, and then onward to the final destination of Japetus and what's discovered there. Although I think any sort of definite ending would have been a slight let-down (human imagination is limited, and whatever an author speculates, however creative, can't quite compare to the sense of mystery and hidden wonders), what Clarke came up with grips the imagination as well as could be possible, giving an achingly vast sense of scale and emptiness of the universe, of strange wonders that we'll never experience but which could, possibly even must be out there.

I still need to watch the Kubrick flick, but if it's even half as good as the novel, it will be well worth it.

The Tomorrow Code

Brian Falkner's The Tomorrow Code is chilling YA sci-fi. The first time I read this book I remember staying up late to finish it because if I tried to sleep without reading the end, I knew I would be plagued with nightmares. This is a book with an agenda; the message of ecology and human meddling isn't hidden. However, the story is told well enough that this is actually very effective instead of being preachy.

Tane and Rebecca are two New Zealand teenagers who are both intellectually gifted. When Tane comes up with a hypothetical way to listen for messages sent from the future, Rebecca realizes it, and the two are shocked to find that such messages do exist - and their contents are chilling. Now the two of them, with Tane's brother, must figure out how to prevent the disaster to which the messages cryptically allude. Throw in some well-written YA relationship drama along with the science, and add a dash of post-apocalyptic horror, and you've got this book.

The Wavering of Haruhi Suzumiya

As always, the writing and translation of these books blow me away. The Wavering of Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa is the sixth book in the Haruhi series and another volume of short stories. First up is "Live Alive," which relates the events of the cultural festival for which the SOS Brigade filmed their movie. Kyon wanders the school looking for things to do and witnesses a most unique concert. We come to see just how much Haruhi has grown as a person since the beginning of the school year. This was always one of my favorite episodes in the anime, and it owes that to being based on a very solid, sweet story.

"The Adventures of Asahina Mikuru Episode 00" is next, and it is the story of the cultural festival movie, as narrated by Kyon. His narration is the only thing that makes this amusing, since, after all, the movie itself is supposed to suck. This one's a fun enough read, but I'd be highly surprised if it made anyone's short list of favorites. There's just not all that much to it. Although there is a conversation of veiled significance between Nagato and Koizumi which provides a little bit of interest.

"Love at First Sight" is a Nagato-centric tale. A former classmate of Kyon's has fallen in love with the alien bookworm at first sight and begs for Kyon to deliver a message. Said message leads to some cute comedy when Haruhi, of course, misunderstands, but soon the matter is put right and the brigade heads off to watch the admirer play a football game in hopes of impressing his beloved. The story is full of speculation about the nature of love and Nagato, and it overall is a good piece for characterization.

"Where Did The Cat Go?" beats out "The Adventures of Asahina Mikuru" and tops my list of absolute least favorite Haruhi stories. This one is boring and lacks any of the promised sense of mystery. I suppose it would be better to read it as another characterization piece, because that's where any of the redeeming value is. Plus, it does have Tsuruya, so that's something.

"The Melancholy of Mikuru Asahina" is the finale tale, and this one perhaps beats "Live Alive" as my favorite story in this volume. It's all about Kyon and Mikuru, with the other three brigade members only having incidental parts. Mikuru is usually only seen by Kyon, and thus the reader through his narration, as a cute moe mascot, but this time we get to see some sides of her which are usually hidden. There's a foreboding feel to the story which even the wacky final section doesn't quite mitigate.

The seventh volume doesn't come out until June, but it picks up where the last short story left off in theme. Overall, Wavering is a fun installment in the series and contains valuable information and characterization for any fan, not to be missed.

Little Women

I'm such a canon purist. I'm listening to the soundtrack for the musical adaptation of Little Women, and while the music is fun and spirited (and Sutton Foster is just, well, astonishing), what I have gleaned from the songs and the Wikipedia article shows me that the musical plays fast and loose with the particulars of the story. I guess that the musical is a bit too overstated for the quiet, humble tale that is the book. Well, I've not read the libretto, so perhaps not, but I'm left with reservations.

I don't know to which I was first exposed, the 1994 movie (which I recently bought online in a DVD sale and am eagerly awaiting since it is among the many, many titles lacking from Netflix's streaming library) or the Great Illustrated Classics version. I always liked the story, although I lamented that spoiled Amy shared my name rather than spirited Jo (because what girl wouldn't want to be like Jo?). A year or so ago I read the first volume of Little Women and was indignant to find that the library book I'd received didn't have the second part as well. At that point I didn't know that it was two books in the main story (yeah, I know there are two sequels as well). And the really good bits, the payoff only comes in part two.

The first book has the characters as girls, but now they're all young women and more complex. For one thing, I was extremely relieved and gratified by the character development Amy saw. For another, during the first part, you could see Laurie falling heavily for Jo, and, like Laurie, I, and probably plenty of other readers, thought he and Jo totally went together (I recall reading that Alcott totally ticked off the shippers in her own time by not having Jo and Laurie end up together). So when she turned him down, I knew what was coming, and I wasn't sure I'd buy it. No worries. The professor was introduced and developed in a charming fashion, and it became easy to see how well he and Jo complemented each other. And what I really enjoyed was in the home stretch of events leading up to the proposal (actually both sets of proposals in part two), how the romance was not overblown and dramatic, but simple and true, Jo with her awkwardness in the rain, Laurie's rowboat metaphor, things like that make the story all the more endearing. And if occasionally the moralizing seems a little trite to our modern sympathies, well, the sincerity of the work redeems it.

The Girl of Fire and Thorns

Now this is good YA fantasy. Rae Carson's The Girl of Fire and Thorns is an exciting and rewarding read. Start with a heroine, a shy, overweight princess who's also a chosen one and who is being married to a king she's never met. Throw in a surprising knowledge of tactics and the suggestion of hidden depths. Then add palace intrigue, prophecies, and magic, all in a setting based more on Spain than England, unlike a lot of fantasy novels. Basically, there's a lot going on here, and it's all well done. Elisa is a heroine you quickly come to root for. She grows, she learns about herself, and her weight doesn't end up defining her, while there's no magical beautification either. I started reading this with a bit of skepticism that it might be just another YA fantasy novel, but I quickly came to the point where I couldn't put it down. For everyone who wants a book that's not afraid to be different, check this out. Oh, and, yes, there is romance, but that's just another aspect that Carson handles deftly and realistically.

To Kill a Mockingbird - 10/35

How do you find the words to do justice to a classic like To Kill a Mockingbird? Harper Lee's masterpiece is one of the first classics I was exposed to. My mom had borrowed the book on tape from the library and was listening to it in the car. I was in maybe the fourth grade or so, not that much older than Scout. I guess my sister would have been in kindergarten. Anyway, we would be in the car sometimes when Mom listened to the book, which was read by a female narrator with a soothing, mellow voice, and before long we began to get invested in the story. I remember scolding my mom for listening to it when we weren't in the car and bugging her for updates about what we'd missed. It's not so surprising. The story's told from Scout's point of view, and she is not quite six years old when the novel begins. Even though it's the recollection of an older Scout, the events are still related in a simple, understandable style. As a kid, I could follow the events of life in Maycomb County: Scout, Jem, and Dill making up games and trying to get Boo Radley to come out of the house, the puzzling rituals of school, having to deal with adults who have forgotten what it's like to be a kid. I know that I obviously didn't get everything the first time I heard the story, but when we got to reading it in eighth grade English, I was over the moon because I loved this book. There's something about how it's written. Scout tells us the pace of life in Maycomb is slow, and so is the pacing of the book, but it's artful, done for effect, and thus accentuates the sense of setting instead of detracting from the book at all. The characters are wonderful. Atticus Finch is perhaps the most lauded figure in modern fiction; he's a quiet paragon of morality, but he's still a real person, not a cardboard saint. Scout is an engaging narrator and a cute kid. I never really liked Jem much, but mainly because of how realistic a portrayal of a boy that age he is. The whole town of Maycomb is populated by real characters. Miss Maudie, Mrs. Dubose, Misses Tutti and Frutti Barber, Mr. Underwood, Aunt Alexandra, Miss Stephanie Crawford, Boo Radley, and the list could go on. They all bring life to the lovingly detailed town. This is a book that's definitely character-driven over plot driven. The pivotal courtroom scenes don't actually take up all that much of the book, though the trial's impact on the story is pervasive. Because of the gifted, human storytelling, this is a book that I have continued to come back to and read again and again. And I always pull something different from it.

Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea

Although it falls oh-so-terribly far outside my usual choice of reading, I found myself in stitches while reading Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea. Chelsea Handler presents us with a hilarious collection of short essays about a variety of topics, including her first babysitting job, taking her father on vacation, a disturbing massage experience, and a birthday party for someone no one attending actually liked. Some essays feature comedic comeuppances, others give Chelsea the last laugh. They're all quite short, extended anecdotes, really, and the book is a fast read. Nonetheless I couldn't put it down and plan to check out more of Ms. Handler's writing when I'm looking for something light and entertaining.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet - 11/35

A Swiftly Tilting Planet is another L'Engle book, but this time Charles Wallace is the main character, not Meg. It's Thanksgiving, and the Murry family is gathered for the dinner. Calvin, now Meg's husband, is at a conference in England, but his mother, a harsh, crude woman, has joined them. When news comes for Mr. Murry that a mad South American dictator is threatening nuclear war, the joyful celebration is overshadowed by fear. Calvin's mother has something to say on the matter, however, speaking an ancient rune and charging Charles Wallace with doing something about the situation. And because he's a Murry, the family to whom weird things happen which must be taken in stride, he does indeed do something. He partners up with a unicorn and travels through time in order to change an ancient feud, using the rune and his ability to go Within.

Although I miss Meg in this book, she's still around, staying connected with Charles Wallace through a special kind of telepathy. And I really enjoyed the theme of the past repeating itself and being changed; that's a favorite of mine. Also enjoyed were the different stories unfolding in each of the different eras, and some of the side trips Charles Wallace and Gaudior embarked on.

Mr. Popper's Penguins - 9/35

There's not really much to say about Mr. Popper's Penguins. I know they recently made a movie adaptation, but from the little I saw of it on television, one's better to steer clear of it and just read the charming novel upon which the film was based. The premise is this: Mr. Popper, a house painter, has a great love of learning about the world, especially Antarctica. He reads all about it and follows Admiral Drake's Antarctic expedition's progress over the radio. And then a funny thing happens. The Admiral responds to one of Mr. Popper's fan letters and sends him a present, a penguin of his own. The Popper household is turned upside down adjusting to the new family member, and soon the penguin is joined by others. What follows are a series of wacky but sweet adventures as the Popper family takes their performing penguins on tour. This is definitely a book for young readers, but if you want a whimsical diversion, it's worth checking out.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - 8/35

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was mildly disappointing. I was expecting this classic sci-fi novel to be... more. The idea of live animals as a status symbol in a dying world was interesting, and I was intrigued by the idea of artificial intelligence so real that it's indistinguishable from humans. But the execution of the story felt sloppy. Maybe that was intentional, a style thing. I'm finding it hard to articulate how or why it made me feel this way. There was a lot of rushing around, a lot of suspense that got dropped. Some concepts, like Mercerism, were mentioned but not really explained. It's just some new religious thing. The androids and the Mission Street Hall of Justice, that whole bit was just plain confusing. It was an interesting enough read, and I'll check out Blade Runner eventually too, but this novel won't become a favorite.

Tam Lin

If you know the story of Tam Lin, then you may be puzzled when you first dive into Pamela Dean's daunting volume of the same name. The life of college student Janet Carter during the 1970s seems a far cry from any sort of fairy tale (though the source material is actually a Scottish ballad, anyway). Dean takes her time bringing the main plot to bear, instead establishing and developing her characters, their relationships, and the setting of Blackstock College. She also gives free rein to an obvious love of literature and language; if anything threatens to shatter suspension of disbelief it's how amazingly well-read in the most arcane of literature these kids are. Still, Janet is the daughter of an English professor and the rest of her crew all have equally valid reasons for being walking literary anthologies. And if you love such subjects, it's a joy to read about new and familiar pieces and see how they fit into the story. Even though the book is based off the ballad "Tam Lin," that's hardly the only story that finds itself woven into the novel. Shakespeare, Stoppard, Fry, and Keats are all names tossed around casually while maintaining high significance to the plot.

And, yes, there is a plot, even if it takes its time becoming evident. The ending is quite satisfying, and it's worth the four hundred pages it takes to get to that point. Janet reminds me a fair bit of Meg Murry from A Wrinkle in Time, that same flawed yet likeable, somewhat stubborn personality. Same slightly unbelievable smarts, too. Books like these always spur me to read more classics and tough stuff, just to prove my book nerd cred. Anyway, this one's highly recommended. It can be a bit daunting and confusing, but if you just give the book the benefit of the doubt, you'll be glad you did.