Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Prachett

Summary: Polly decides to go join the army to find her brother. In the mean time, she meets an interesting group of people and has some adventures.

Reaction: The short version is "OMG best book EVAR". The long version would explain that I probably shouldn't say that because of the high probablility of that phrase getting attached to multiple books, and you can't really have several "best" books unless there's some other adjective in there. Regardless, it was still a wonderful book, between the plot twist, the amusing comments, the happily ever after, the moral, etc. I really should have written down some of the amusing lines I came across so I can add them to my collection of amusing quotes. Oh well, I can do that next time. And of course there will be a next time because it was that good of a book. And I think I need to buy a copy so it can live on my bookshelf and I can read it whenever I want (not that I will, but that way I can).

Oh look, I didn't actually post this because I got distracted looking for books about the Andrews Raid. In particular, Wild Train, but also anything else I could find... I think this has something to do with "books to stick on my bookshelf".

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett

Summary: Maurice, Keith, and their rodent friends are running a pied piper scam. But when they come to Bad Blintz, things start getting real interesting real quick.

Reaction: I rather liked the talking rats, some of whom are distinctly ratty and others of whom almost resemble people. I think I liked the ending the most because it suggests that humans and animals could live in harmony if only we could communicate with each other. Altho I guess the rats are kind of an exception because their not-normal-rat-ness was the result of some kind of magic or something. Also, Sandines was rather amusing. Tap-dancing rat FTW!

Airframe, by Michael Crichton

Summary: The book opens with a mysterious aircraft disaster. Now it's up to Casey and her colleagues at Norton Aircraft to figure out what went wrong before news of the disaster has a chance to destroy the future of the company...

Reaction: Very "I want to know what happened!", some exciting plot twists, even a couple chase scenes (which seem kinda gratuitous, but doesn't every Crichton book have/need some chase scenes and near disasters?)

Oh look, I don't have time to finish writing a proper review <--this is mostly an excuse for the fact that I'm failing to come up with anything else to say.

Deception Point, by Dan Brown

Summary: NASA has just made a shocking discovery with major ramifications for the presidential election. Someone tries to kill some of the people vaguely connected with the discovery. They find themselves running for their lives hoping to share their similarly shocking conlcusion with the world. Ha, I had enough vague details to make an entire summary this time.

Reaction: I enjoyed it. Up until near the end when I started getting kinda distracted by what I was going to write here and the fact that it was kinda late. But of course I couldn't wait until today to finish it (ok, technically I did finish it this morning very early; that's not the point). The second half of the book has several narrow escapes (by the last gunfight I was getting rather tired of such things and wondering if maybe instead of the high suspense/drama drawn-out battle they could instead just give me a summarized version: "After much fighting, a kills b after b has shot c. However c still manages to shoot d who spent the entire fight hiding behind something large waiting for a chance to kill a, and meanwhile e and f have disappeared to parts unknown" (This summary is not meant to reflect actual events in this or any other book). Although come to think of it, it was only that large scene where people were getting shot. Mostly. Er, I guess there was another one. Never mind.)

I think one of the things I enjoyed most about this book, much like with The Last Templar (which incidentally I keep getting mixed up with The Da Vinci Code, I think), is the characters. Each character has their own set of motives for what they do and there are no clearly defined battle lines between good and evil. Okay, maybe the protagonists are good and the people trying to kill them are evil. But besides that, one needs another category for, I don't know, unpleasant. Er, maybe one needs two categories so that one can sort the political figures into two rival camps. Anyway, you probably get my point.

Comment about female chraracters: It seems like all female characters in books get referred to by first name and many male characters get referred to by last name. Either that or sometimes first, sometimes last. *gets distracted looking something up* This particular book has a female character referred to exclusively by last name and a male character always referred to by first name (I'm talking only about what name the author uses to refer to said character, not how various characters refer to each other). One thing I noticed about the female character, however, is that she could be replaced with a male character and it would make no difference in the story. Most of the rest are/were involved in some kind of romance with another character, which means that the reader must be continually reminded that the character is female. Or something like that. Uh, yeah. No idea where I'm going with all this.

Comparision with Angels and Demons: 

Criss Cross, by Lynne Rae Perkins

Summary: A segment in the lives of 5 teens. I'm not sure there's any kind of overarching plot or resolution, although some people do change throughout the course of the book and they do set it up for a couple Events Yet To Come, or possibly a sequel. So, yeah. Stuff happens and life goes on.

Reaction: In spite of that rather cynical summary, I did actually enjoy this book. I'm not going to try to make something Big and Important out of it because it seems like basically a pseudo-fluffy book that one reads to pass some time. Hey, maybe I should write a pseudo-fluffy book about bunnies! It couldn't possibly turn out any worse than the ideas my brother and I had about a story starring weasels. Um, yeah. Moving on now...

I Am the Messenger, by Markus Zusak

Summary: Ed Kennedy has a fairly unexciting life before he starts getting playing cards, all aces, in the mail with cryptic instructions on them. Things get a lot more interesting after that, and he learns something about himself in the process, too.

Similarities: I'm pretty sure there's another book I've read about a guy who's hopelessly in love with his female close/best friend, but I have no idea what. This book shares with Deadeye Dick the idea that life continues after the story ends. Also, I now want to read Sophie's World again.

Reaction: Captivating. I kept wanting to know with each task what Ed's supposed to do and how he does it. Roughly 3/4 of the way through the book I notice that it was written in present tense, and that proceeds to annoy the heck out of me for awhile (not that I'm not guilty of doing that. I seem to recall a US history essay that's completely irrelevent to this review where I wrote the entire thing in present tense, and then had to go back and change it because the Boston Tea Party and events around that time are not at all present (unless they're taken in the context of the planet as a whole or even European history.) Wow I'm gotten really off-topic. Um, anyway...) I rather like the message of making the world a better place, one person at a time.

Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut

Summary: Um, stuff happens, more stuff happens, the narrrator refers to things that are going to happen later, no real plot that I can discern. It's bascially the life story of this one guy. (and this time the lack of definable plot doesn't bother me because it's not bloody obvious; it's hidden behind the fact that the story is bascially a string of anecdotes that sometimes bear resemblence to being in chronological order.)

Response: I liked this book, probably because it was random and the guy's experiences were so far from anything else I've seen/heard/read before. With the single exception that the book initially reminded me of Galapagos in that the first few chapters have a bunch of background information as well as giving you an idea what's going to happen later ("These are the characters. The ones marked with a asterisk will be dead by sunset"). Not surprising, considering they have the same author...

I enjoyed this book, but wouldn't recommend it to anyone who expects books to have a reasonable amount of logic in them.