I read a lot, and I keep a log. Here’s this year’s log and the complete log (which goes back to the beginning of 1999). Read the posts in this section to find out what I thought about these books.
I do not plan to continue reading the books in the series. The writing is not nearly as tight, polished, and thoughtful as Veronica Roth’s writing in the Divergent series.
I am reading this because I saw the 2018 movie.
Genre: fiction (young-adult fantasy/dystopia)
Date started / date finished: 30-Nov-18 to 03-Dec-18
Length: 518
ISBN: 9781786540249
Originally published in: 2012
Amazon link: The Darkest Minds
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was not very fast-paced for a thriller. For many pages, the journalist character conversed with his ageing employer or sat in a cabin reading documents about an old, unsolved case. The girl is an interesting character. I don’t really want to read any of the other books about her, though. This one had too much sex, violence, and violent sex for my taste. I mean, I like George Martin’s Ice and Fire series, but his characters live in a separate, fictional world, whereas I’m fairly convinced, never having been there, that Sweden is a real place.
I have finished my book club reading for the year so now I can read stuff that’s just sitting on the shelf…
Genre: fiction (thriller)
Date started / date finished: 26-Nov-18 to 30-Nov-18
Length: 554
ISBN: 9781847246929
Originally published in: 2005/2008
Amazon link: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
What does “free-market” mean? Does it mean everything is for sale to everyone all the time, for whatever price a buyer and seller can agree on? Maybe not. There are cases where everyone involved benefits from a common set of rules, whether those rules are created by a government, a financial exchange board, a consortium of private hospitals, or a professional association of lawyers and judges.
This book was cheerful, interesting, and accessible. If anything, I found it too accessible; I felt I didn’t need quite so much explanation and exemplification of the relevant concepts. Still, the sections on the “market” for kidneys alone make the book worth reading: markets among large groups of cooperating participants don’t just provide us with a variety of pleasant goods and services, they save lives. With highly trained, specialized minds like Roth’s working on improving methods of organ exchange, we have reason to hope for even better results in the future.
From the title, I would have imagined a law book about wills, but it’s an economics book about markets.
Genre: non-fiction (popular economics)
Date started / date finished: 17-Nov-18 to 25-Nov-18
Length: 231
ISBN: 9780544291133
Originally published in: 2015
Amazon link: Who Gets What and Why
The structure of Station Eleven is undeniably clever. (The skill that must have been required is comparable to Toni Morrison’s when she crafted the story of Beloved.) Only gradually do readers piece together the relationships between the characters as Station Eleven skips around in time. Some slivers of story are from the time when a global plague first hits, and some are from the empty, bleak years following the deaths of most of the Earth’s people.
I found the story depressing. I tend to dislike stories about epidemics; they make me feel both disgusted and powerless. Add to my distaste for unstoppable illness the inevitable collapse of civilized society, which gives rise to the spread of lawlessness and dangerous cults, and you have a recipe for misery. The faint glimmer of hope tacked on at the end failed to console me in the slightest.
I keep hearing about this book.
Genre: fiction (speculative fiction)
Date started / date finished: 13-Nov-18 to 17-Nov-18
Length: 333
ISBN: 9780804172448
Originally published in: 2014
Amazon link: Station Eleven
The Diamond of Darkhold, the fourth and last City of Ember book, is not my favorite in the series. Still, DuPrau on a bad day is a better writer than most folks out there!
Here are three of her ideas I particularly liked.
Trogg had a knack for figuring things out, Doon had to admit it. And yet he did not see Trogg as a truly intelligent person. Trogg seemed to think that he knew everything, but strangely enough, it was exactly this that made him seem stupid to Doon. A person who thought he knew everything simply didn’t understand how much there was to know. (120)
Trogg and his family are ignorant and destructive. They think books are useful—for fuel. Doon is horrified that they don’t believe “figuring out squiggles” (reading) can teach them anything they don’t already know. See pages 139–140.
“I don’t agree that it’s good to speak only when spoken to…. If everyone did that, no one would ever speak at all! What you mean is that people should only speak when you speak to them.” (150)
I was reminded of The City of Ember when I read The Ship. I decided to go back and re-read it, and read the two sequels and the prequel. (Previously, I only read City of Ember itself and the first sequel.)
Genre: fiction (children’s fantasy)
Date started / date finished: 10-Nov-18 to 13-Nov-18
Length: 285
ISBN: 9780375855719
Originally published in: 2008
Amazon link: The Diamond of Darkhold
The Prophet of Yonwood, the third and prequel City of Ember book, is the one in the series that people seem to have a tendency of skipping. Do not make that mistake!
I admit that I put off reading it because I thought it was going to be a didactic mess. From the word “prophet” in the title and the image of a nuclear bomb on the cover, I assumed it would be a finger-wagging book about the human tendency to commit murder on a shockingly large scale for merely political reasons. That is not what it is about.
The book is also not about Ember until you get to the very, very end, so don’t read it thinking you’ll learn much about Lina and Doon’s world. Read it because it contains a fresh and interesting new story.
The story of Nickie, a newcomer to Yonwood, and Grover, a friend she meets there, has important messages to convey about the fraught relationship between morality and authority.
I was reminded of The City of Ember when I read The Ship. I decided to go back and re-read it, and read the two sequels and the prequel. (Previously, I only read City of Ember itself and the first sequel.)
Genre: fiction (children’s fantasy)
Date started / date finished: 07-Nov-18 to 10-Nov-18
Length: 289
ISBN: 9780440421245
Originally published in: 2006
Amazon link: The Prophet of Yonwood
The People of Sparks, the sequel to The City of Ember, is a harsh wake-up call for Doon and Lina’s cave people, and for readers. Secrets, lies, tricks, and brooding resentment explode in a conflict between the people of Ember and the people of Sparks, who have agreed to feed and shelter them.
While the first book in the Ember series was triumphant, and glorified curiosity, tenacity, and problem-solving, this book puts uglier human tendencies in the spotlight. It’s not as much fun to read, but it’s well thought-out, well written, and ultimately still satisfying.
I was reminded of The City of Ember when I read The Ship. I decided to go back and re-read it, and read the two sequels and the prequel. (Previously, I only read City of Ember itself and the first sequel.)
Genre: fiction (children’s fantasy)
Date started / date finished: 05-Nov-18 to 06-Nov-18
Length: 338
ISBN: 0375828249
Originally published in: 2004
Amazon link: The People of Sparks
The more I think about The City of Ember, the more I like it.
Deep underground, the people of Ember have never seen the sun and don’t even know it exists. The builders of their city planned for them to emerge, but that plan was lost and forgotten, and now Ember is running out of supplies, and its generator, without which there is no light, is breaking down. Will the builders return to save the people of Ember, as some believe? Does the mayor have a plan for his people? Or will it be up to Lina and Doon to rediscover the lost exit to the surface?
The setting is richly imagined, and the plot and characters live up to a unique and fascinating premise. The real strength of the book is the thematic content, though. Ember (the book) is not a riveting but meaningless retro-futuristic adventure like Ember (the movie); it has a wealth of moral lessons that come across as relevant rather than didactic.
The core message of the book is to uphold dedication to thinking over complacency, to admire planning and forethought rather than taking things as they come, to act rather than wait.
Other themes are that curiosity is good, that we should pay attention and notice things, that we should take our family, friends, and responsibilities seriously, that getting away with something doesn’t make it right.
See below for a chapter-by-chapter plot summary and some key quotes.
You might also want to check out the Shmoop literature guide for City of Ember.
But really, if you haven’t, you should read the book yourself!
A more accurate title for this novel might be: The Adventures of the Strangely Wise and Poetical Free Spirit Huckleberry Finn, and the Hapless Runaway Slave Jim, Interrupted by the Heartless Cloudcuckoolander Tom Sawyer.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was required reading in my 10th-grade English class. I didn’t like it. Years later, now that I’ve re-read it, I still don’t like it, but I have more insight into what makes it a good book as well as what annoys me about it.
See below for the strengths of the book and what annoyed me about it, a plot summary (with SPOILERS), and what stood out as well as when and why I read it.
Continue reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The House of the Mosque is a perfectly good literary novel but not my cup of tea. I tend to feel like family sagas are pointless even when they’re interesting.
This one tells the story of a family that lives in the titular house of the mosque in a town in Iran. Over the course of the book, time passes, and times change. Different characters, confronted with modernity, make different choices, or fall victim to changes outside their control. It’s an informative but melancholy book.
On the subject of modern Iran, I have previously read the autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, the non-fictional account Taken Hostage, by David Farber, and the lengthy novel Whirlwind, by James Clavell. The House of the Mosque is less dramatic than Whirlwind and has less true-to-life impact than either of the non-fiction books. (I made essentially the same observation about the American family saga Roots, which I think is flawed both as fiction and as non-fiction.)
I am reading this for the Singapore Ladies’ Book Group for November.
Genre: fiction (historical, family saga)
Date started / date finished: 01-Nov-18 to 02-Nov-18
Length: 449
ISBN: ASIN B0033TI4BC
Originally published in: 2010
Amazon link: The House of the Mosque
