The Night Circus

by Erin Morgenstern
4 out of 5 stars

Really different, really engrossing; I highly recommend. I see that people seem to either love or hate this book. I loved it. I wonder if those who hated it were taking everything too literally. You have to be in the mood to suspend reality just a little -- no more than Harry Potter, though, so give it a go. If you enjoy metaphors and symbolism, all the better, but even if you're reading "lightly," this is still a good book.

The story is difficult to synopsise; it is about magic and how magic affects the human condition. Another reviewer wrote a fairly good summary, so I shall steal it: "As a young girl, Celia Bowen is delivered to the father she never knew, a world famous magician whose secret is that his show is genuine magic - not illusions. He teaches Celia to manipulate the world in the same way so that she can compete in a high-stakes game against Marco, an orphan similarly trained by her father's nemesis. The arena for this game is an elaborate, surreal circus. Neither Celia nor Marco knows the extent of the game, nor their opponent, until they have fallen in love with each other." Can't you just see the atsy film trailer already?!

I started out listening, which was great due to Jim Dale's wonderful narration; however, the plot skips around in time a LOT, and I found it really hard to follow...and, for some reason, I could NOT stop my mind from wandering. Maybe I was just distracted with other things in my life. At any rate, I started over with the book, and it was much easier on my brain.

The Wolf Gift

by Anne Rice
2 out of 5 stars

I might give this 2.5 stars, because it did hold my interest OK, but overall, it was a bit...meh. I had a lot higher hopes for an Anne Rice werewolf; this was a letdown.

The whole book lacked conflict, and the characters felt pretty contrived. Definitely the physical prowess and Batman-like traits of of her “man-wolf” were fun to behold, but the whole situation of being a werewolf conflicted so little with his former/real life, that it was almost anticlimactic when the transformation unfolded.

Reuben is a golden boy with a cool job (and a trust fund) from a rich and relatively perfect family, and the events that led to his “infection” handily resulted in him being willed a spectacular (and staffed) secluded mansion that’s a stone’s throw from the moody cliffs of California’s coast and surrounded by redwood forest. Really? Also, what 23 year old uses the word "splendid"?

While I'm not a big fan of the drawn out, agonizing Being-Human*-style werewolf transformation (because that's just gross and about as appealing as menstruation every month), the rippling, orgasmic version Rice presents is kind of lame. And then the wolf-human sex? Um...ick. Seriously, his lover gets off on kissing his dog lips? Do dogs even have lips?

As with a lot of Rice’s stories, there’s a lot of supernatural fog floating about, and, in some ways, it’s almost an excuse to not have to explain things more fully, so it feels like more of a cop out than an element of the story. I could go on about the individual characters, but I’ll just say there was a lot of potential that went unrealized.

As always, Rice’s detailed and lush descriptions are enjoyable – whether she’s describing a dinner party or the gory end to a bad guy, and I’ve always liked that about her work. If you like Anne Rice’s style in general, I’d say give it a whirl if you like this kind of lore – it’s a fairly fast read and much less dark and cumbersome than some of her other books that wander (at times exhaustively) through history and have several story lines going at once.

*i.e., the BBC series

Ready Player One

by Ernest Cline
5 out of 5 stars

You would think that an almost-400-page book about video games and 80s culture might get a little tedious. But you would be wrong. Very, very wrong. I have not been sucked into a book and so sorry it ended since I was 7 and reading The Boxcar Children. (And yes, they are VERY different, I’m just sayin’.) Once I got over the fact that all the cultural references to my misspent youth were being referred to as “classic” and “vintage,” I really, really enjoyed Ready Player One. The story is intriguing, the dialogue is good, detail and description are delicious, and the characters are believable…even Wade’s sidekicks are unique, which is kind of ironic since we spend most of our time with them (like Wade) as avatars in a virtual world. Though one reviewer described this is “nostalgia porn” (in a good way), even if you weren’t into John Hughes, Monty Python, video games, D&D or the arcade scene in general, I think you’ll STILL get a kick out of this book. If you *were* a total geek and know what a hit points are, play a mean game of Joust or owned a Commodore 64 GS, this book will be very, VERY validating for you. :-)

The OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation) has changed the way people around the world live, because the real world in 2044, honestly, sucks. It’s going through everything we fear it will, including environmental, economic and social collapse; resource depletion; and political corruption. As one might expect, only the very rich are safe from that special kind of despair born of poverty and all loss of hope. Unless of course you can plug into the virtual existence known as the OASIS. Ahhhh… It’s aptly named, not just for its escape value, but because it’s the only way humans are able to cling to the things that make us human – individuality, creativity, and character, not to mention the ability to fantasize. And the OASIS is free! You can go to school there, party there, conduct business, hang glide or even get married to your avatar love interest there. Real estate, commerce, adventure, and more…it’s all waiting for you in the OASIS, which is how the company makes its money – selling property, avatar accessories, cars, weapons, spaceships, even planets, that are all nothing but zeros and ones. Brilliant.

However, the inventor of it all is dead, and he’s left his entire fortune as well as the future of his creation to the lucky player who can solve his three-tiered puzzle and find the ultimate Easter egg. The juxtaposition of the two worlds author Ernest Cline creates is really cool, and his attention to not just detail but the nuances of pop culture that give eras like the 80s their distinction is spot on. I have to say, I don’t even really *like* the 80s as a personal reference point, but because I grew up through them and did wear acid washed jeans (with pleats!), it’s hard not to feel a little nostalgic about a time when Rush 2112 was blasting out of my brother’s 8-track player, movies like War Games and Risky Business were hot, and Pac Man was a competitive sport. So an entire book set in the future with characters that have made it their life’s mission to know this time period better than those of us who lived through it? Really quite entertaining, frankly! Oh, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how despicable the villains are. Or how clever (spoiler alert?) our heroes are in prevailing. Oh come on, of course the good guys win! The fun is how they get there.

I alternated between reading and listening to RPO, and both experiences were grand. Reader Wil Wheaton does a bang-up job.

Going Bovine

by Libba Bray
4 out of 5 stars

Overall, this book is difficult to explain. The Goodreads synopsis doesn't do it justice. So I'll steal a better one: "The heart of the story is a hallucinatory (or is it?) quest with many parallels to the hopeless but inspirational efforts of Don Quixote, about whom Cameron had been reading before his illness. Just like the crazy (or was he?) Spaniard, Cam is motivated to go on a journey by a sort of Dulcinea." Only his is a pink-haired angel...and his Sancho is a Mexican-American dwarf game-master hypochondriac. Also there's a Norse god disguised as a garden gnome.

See? Kind of hard to describe, because this is just the tip of the windmill. Just read it -- I think even if you don't love it, you'll get something out of it. Certainly (like a lot of YA fiction) parts were a little predictable (like the ending), but there’s also plenty of weirdness, snarky dialogue, funny characters (including aforementioned yard gnome) and fun randomness, which I always enjoy.

The main character doesn’t start off as terribly likeable, but he grows on you. Some readers have complained about missing details (like how he caught mad cow disease), but I’m not sure that’s really the point. Overall, it seems the message is that you should live life to the fullest and embrace adventure now and then. Even if you're not sure what your purpose is, don't be a slacker, and don't think that you'll be doing anyone any favors if you just coast through life. Not to state the obvious, but I don’t think all the circumstances are meant to be taken literally.