Win an ARC of BUMPED!

Megan McCafferty is one of my FAVORITE authors, and I'm super excited about her new book, BUMPED, coming out in April (you'll see that it's on my to-read list). However, there's a blog giving away a free ARC of the book. Go check it out!

Books Read: 5/100
Currently Reading: Life After Genius by M. Ann Jacoby

5/100: Across the Universe

The best way to describe Across the Universe by Beth Revis is that it's a mash-up of The Giver and Uglies with a bit of Wall-E thrown in there.

Odd, I know. But I love all three of those things, which tells you that this is a good book.

It's the first in a planned trilogy, which I'm thankful for, since that helps me overlook some of the issues I had with the book. Across the Universe tells the story of Amy, a girl who is cryogenically frozen with her parents to go on a spaceship to terraform a new planet, Centauri-Earth. This journey will take 300 years, hence the freezing. However, Amy is pulled out of her state 50 years too soon--and the only way that could have happened is if someone tried to murder her. When she awakens, she meets a boy named Elder, who is in training to be the warden of the ship she is on. Elder is in the midst of discovering secrets about the ship and his role in its leadership. The book is told through the alternating perspectives of Elder and Amy.

There is a lot to love about this book. It's original, and it's got a great tone to it. Revis does a great job of letting your emotions follow along with Amy and Elder's. And I think Revis does a FANTASTIC job of writing Amy's emotions. Amy is 17, so it would be real easy for this book to devolve into melodrama. But Amy's reactions to major events in her life are very earnest, and her struggles with her feelings for her old boyfriend, Jason (even though, logically, she knows he's dead by the time she wakes up), ring true. It's refreshing to see a heroine who isn't boy-crazy, but isn't totally without romantic feelings. You know, someone who actually acts like a 17-year-old girl. It's definitely one of the book's strongest points.

I can't talk a lot about Elder without giving away a lot of the book, so let me put it this way: considering the context that Revis has placed him in, she's done an excellent job at capturing that sort of character.

My major complaint is not with the story itself, but with the telling of it. There are few instances where the writing isn't as smooth as it should be. For instance, on the whole ship, there is only one medical doctor. This isn't really made clear until later in the book, so when Elder calls him "Doc" and Amy calls him "the doctor," I was confused as to who each was actually talking about. I get that that's not terribly major, but sometimes it's the little things, you know?

The book does take awhile to get started, but as soon as I read this exchange, I was hooked:

"He sounds like a regular Hitler to me," Amy mutters.
I wonder what she means by that. Eldest always taught me that Hitler was a wise, cultured leader for his people. Maybe that's what she means: Eldest is a strong leader, like Hitler was.

My other beef relates to the fact that while all the major questions are answered, they're done in such a way that I'm not even sure if they're all answered. The answers are a bit muddled. Even now that I'm finished with the book, I'm still left with a lot of questions. Actually, now that I think about it, there is one mystery that wasn't solved. It was mentioned at the beginning of the book and never mentioned again after Amy is pulled out of stasis. It's nothing huge, per se, but the way it was presented makes me think that it was important.

And there was this great big buildup to the "secret" of the ship, and when we finally learn what it is, everything happens so fast and action is taken that I don't really have time to process it all correctly. And since it did happen so quickly, I didn't really feel like there was any "true" danger for our protagonists. I had only just grasped the severity of the conflict, and as soon as that happened, it was all over. In fact, during the reveal, I began to see the Big Bad's side of the issue--and that maybe they weren't so wrong in their way of thinking. That's not a bad thing. Just something to consider. However, this leads me to believe that Revis has something bigger and better planned for books 2 and 3, so I'm remaining cautiously optimistic at this point.

There was a bit of a random plot twist thrown in at the end (that I halfway suspected at various points during the novel), which definitely adds to the story, but it seems VERY thrown in there at the last minute. It doesn't feel out of place, per se, but it's not necessarily integrated into the story all that well, either. Like, there are things that happen earlier in the novel that don't make any sense considering what you learn at the end. It's a bit of sloppy writing, but since it is such a good, believable twist, I'm willing to overlook it.

And then Elder says something in the last chapter he narrates that kind of sours my opinion of him. It's not so much WHAT he says, but how Revis has written it. Because what he says actually makes sense within the context of the story and is absolutely believable for his character. But it's somewhat devoid of context and that makes for a bit of character assassination on his part. However, I'm sure it will be addressed in the later books, so I'm going to let it go for the time being.

This is a dystopian novel, and I liked how it didn't go straight from dystopia to utopia. No society is perfect. There will be problems--and that's what the subsequent books in this series will address--at least, I hope they will!

This book is definitely worth reading. In terms of how I felt while reading it, it reminded me a lot of The Host, which is easily one of my favorite Sci-Fi novels. So basically, that's a glowing recommendation from me. As this post attests, this book is not without a few minor faults, but if you read it with the idea that it's part of a trilogy, those faults are easy to get past.

Books Read: 5/100
Currently Reading: Between books

4/100: Water for Elephants

Books Read: 4/100
Currently Reading: Still deciding

In order to reach my goal of 100 books, I need to be reading 8-9 books per month. So I'm already a little behind. Whoops. Generally speaking, I'm a pretty fast reader, but if I'm reading a book that I'm not that into, it takes me awhile. Also, I'm watching Community and playing way too much Pokemon. Clearly, I have my priorities in order.

Anyways, I just finished reading Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. I've had this book for about a year now, but when I saw the trailer for the movie, I decided I should probably get around to reading it.



It was...okay. I guess I was expecting more from it, since I've heard nothing but good things about it. Sure, there's a nice little twist at the end, but other than that, everything that happens in the book is so...expected. The hero and the heroine get together in the end, the villains are punished, and everyone gets the second chance they so deserve. I was waiting to be shocked, for my heart to be ripped from my chest, to be emotionally MOVED in some way, but that just didn't happen with this book.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love books where the hero and the heroine ride off into the wind and live happily ever after. But only if that story is tonally appropriate to the rest of the story, which I don't think is the case here. This story is extremely well-researched, and it shows the often gritty side of life on a train circus. For God's sake, the story starts with the narrator's parents dying and him finding out that he doesn't even get to inherit the veterinary practice that his father has been working at his whole life. Jacob goes back to school and tries to finish his exams, but he just can't do it. Destitute and alone in the world, he hops a train and finds himself working on a circus. That's pretty freaking grim! And I think that, for the most part, the tone remains dark throughout the rest of the book. So when all loose ends are tied up at the end, it feels so....forced. Artificial. At one point Jacob says something to the woman he loves and it sounds EXACTLY like a line out of a Harlequin romance novel. Seriously.

Like I said, it's not the happy ending I mind; it's that the tone of the of the book doesn't support that type of ending. Especially considering that this book takes place during the Depression...look, things just don't magically work out like that. It's too perfect for the time period, and it's too perfect for this type of fiction.

I realize I'm kind of focusing on the negative here. This is still a good book, and the scenes with the animals and other circus folk are charming and engaging. It definitely takes you into a world you've never seen before, so it's worth a read for sure.

The Beginning. Again.

So in April of 2010, I realized that I had already read 35 books that year. Which for four months into the year, is pretty impressive. Especially considering that was my second-to-last semester of undergrad. I decided that in addition to my 365 Portrait Project, I was going to try and read 100 books by December 31st, 2010.

I kept reading at a pretty decent clip throughout the summer. By August 15th, when I went back to school, I had read 55 books. Which was a little behind, numbers-wise, but I thought I could do it. But then it was my last semester of undergrad, and I had to write my senior thesis (which ended up being 140 pages long) so, understandably, I got a little distracted and knew I couldn't make my goal. Plus, I was still having to keep up with my 365 Project as well. I had a lot on my plate.

But now it's 2011. My 365 Project is over (and finished with flying colors). I finished my undergraduate degree last month. I am ready for a new project--well, new in the sense that it is my official focus of this year to read 100 books by December 31st.

It's going to be a trip, that much I know. And I wasn't planning to keep a blog, but in going over my 365 project from last year, I liked the blogging element I added into it. So I'm going to try this blog thing out and see how it goes. Don't fear. I have a B.A. in English. I am a trained professional at this writing thing. Either that or I wasted $80,000 on that degree.

The rules:
Complete 100 books by December 31st.
The books must exceed 150 pages in length.
Manga is not included in the book count.

Other than that, any book is free game. Re-reads are all good (and apparently, re-reading books isn't as common as I think it is? Post on that sometime later). And yes, even JF and YA. I'm not fond of book challenges that exclude these two genres and dismiss them as some sort of paraliterature. If not for these two genres, though, we would never have become voracious readers as children and in turn, voracious readers as adults. And sometimes, you just have to return to your roots. So yes, there will probably be more than a fair share of YA/JF represented in these 100 books.

I'm not keeping a strict to-read list. I have a shortish list of books that I want to read (or books that I'm waiting to come out, like Bumped and Goliath), but I don't really hold myself to any sort of organized list. My reading habits are very mood dependent. I can't keep a pile of books by my bed, hoping that'll force me to read them, because it's very possible that I could not be in the mood to read those books for months on end. Sad but true.

And then, of course, there's the bad book cleanse. Which I'll talk about later.

So what's this blog for? I'm not going to be posting about every book I read. That's a lot of books. And sometimes I won't have anything particularly interesting to say about a book, especially if it's one of my habitual re-reads. And it's not just about books. It'll be about reading habits, libraries, anything book related. So I guess this is kind of a general book blog with the undercurrent of this 100 books-in-a-year thing.

So that's what it's all about, I guess. Welcome to the year of 20,000 pages.