Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn by Mark Twain

Dad and I listened to this one in the car over about a 3-week period. I read this when I was a junior in high school. I didn't find it funny at all then. This time around, I laughed at how stupid Tom and Huck are all of the time. I "became" Dad and would talk aloud to them in my frustration at "freeing" Tom.
I liked listening to this book on tape. It definitely helped not having to decipher the Missouri dialogue. I particularly liked the reader's emphasis on the words elegant, style, and regular.
We will start listening to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer tomorrow. Technically, Tom Sawyer comes first, but Huck Finn is what the library had available when Dad decided he wanted to listen to some Twain.
Question: Have you reread anything from high school with different results (i.e. you like it now and you didn't then or vice versa)?

Voyager by Diana Gabaldon

This book is part 3 in the Outlander series. I enjoyed this story better than the last one, but I ran into a wall with this one and finally finished it by reading it instead of listening to it. I just found that I was missing the printed word.
There's been so much on the news lately about Amazon and e-readers, but I'm just not sure I buy into them. I don't want to be a dinosaur, but I love holding a text in my hands.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

I reread this book last week. Once again, it possessed me. The writing is not that fab, but the plot is just all-consuming. Her imaginary world built on reality is amazing!
I don't really have any comments on this book, I just want to record that I read it.

Friday, July 2, 2010

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella by Stephenie Meyer
So, I bought this book mainly because I felt it completed my collection of Twilight novels. (BTW: This novella is 178 pages; I generally think of them as being 75-125 pages. It totally rocks that S.M. can convince 14-year-olds that 178 pages is a novella when I couldn't even get them to read a 10-page short story for homework. I suppose this is a result of writing 500-page novels. Yay for S.M.!) I even mentioned this book, pardon me, novella, to Dawn Wenning, and she responded with a remark about Bree's apparent insignificance in the novel Eclipse. I totally agreed until I read this novella. It totally rocks!
Observations:
  • If you have already watched the movie (this is Friday, it came out Wednesday) but maybe didn't remember who Bree was from when you read the novel two years ago (like yours truly), Bree is the young-ish girl in the newborn army that the camera focuses on every now and then who is ultimately taken care of by Felix.
  • If you haven't read the portion of a novel (though not a novella!) that is Midnight Sun, read it ASAP! Go to http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/midnightsun.html to read the story of Midnight Sun and then choose the appropriate link. While not quite the same as the light shed on Alaska and the Cullen's family life in MS, I feel this novella sheds similar light on dark places of which I had no idea they even existed in Eclipse.
  • It took me a while to get to a place in this novella where the story started to interact with interesting characters from the novel.