Ghost Brigades

by John Scalzi

Okay, I'll admit, I wasn't that psyched about the first book in this series. I'm not even sure why. I think my family may have inadvertently done it a disservice by raving about it so much before I read it. When I finally got around to it I thought it was pretty "meh". I think my big problem with it was that I couldn't discern a plot. They go up in space, get fancy new bodies, play around with said fancy new bodies, fight various aliens, and then, in the last 100 pages, there's actually a goal and stakes and that part was really exciting. As a whole though, the book felt pretty disjointed to me.

This book did not suffer from that at all! And actually I appreciate "Old Man's War" so much more for having set up this book. "Ghost Brigades" hit the ground running and never stopped! From the very beginning there was mystery and danger and suspense and the entire plot was extremely well-crafted.

I also have to stop and marvel again at Scalzi's knowledge of human nature. He had a character who had never been given a choice and, like many people who have been properly conditioned, never thought about it. When he's made to think about it and forced to make a choice, he gets angry, not at the people/organization suppressing him all this time, but the person (well, alien, actually, but who's keeping track?) giving him and option. It boggled my mind because I never would have considered that reaction but of course it made perfect sense. There's an ease and simplicity to life when we don't have to make any choices and so I totally believed that this character felt angry with the person imposing this change on him. It was brilliant!

I really don't have much more to say about this book. It was a lot of fun, took me all of three days to read, and I would highly recommend it. Also, I got my sic-fi in for this month.

The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

Okay, seriously, when did all the YA books get so depressing? I feel like society is sending children conflicting signals when they tell them to Play! and Enjoy being young! Have a childhood! Read about children dying of cancer! What?

That being said, it was, of course, an excellent book. I fell in love with the narrator right away. She's up front and honest her cancer and the fact that she's dying and how much that sucks. She is also very much a teenage girl. I actually had to double check that the book was written by a man because the narrator sounded so convincingly like a teenage girl.

This book was brilliant in the way it dealt with death and people dealing with death. There's humor and that's a lot of what pulled me into the book and kept me reading - just how funny it was. But it was a dark humor and it was never lost on the reader that the characters are using humor as a defense mechanism. Their situation is unbelievably difficult and unfair and sometimes the only way to deal with life when it gets like that is to laugh at it. Green made me laugh without detracting from the seriousness of his material and the talent that requires just blows my mind.

At the same time, he discusses the fact that we all deal with death in our own way. While August fears oblivion more than anything else, Hazel fears the pain she'll inflict on those left behind when she dies. The two positions are completely opposite to each other and yet it was extremely easy to understand both of them. We all look at the posts on a deceased's Facebook post and see all the messages of love and support (many, as this book points out, by people who hadn't seen the deceased for months, if not longer) and we all want that. We all want to feel that we'll be missed while we're gone.

At the same time, Hazel's point that that very desire is extremely selfish is a completely valid point. Why should we want to cause pain? She doesn't and, as August points out, that makes her a hero - among all the other "heroes" of cancer who "fought so hard" and "were an inspiration to us all".

Bleak House

by Charles Dickens

I'm going to make a confession. For the most part, I tend to think that Dickens is highly overrated. Mostly I find his stuff overly sentimental (see: A Christmas Story *gag*). I also saw someone else mention that high school teachers do Dickens a great disservice by forcing us all to read Great Expectations and I agree with that 100%. I had to read that book at least twice before getting my diploma and I still resent it.

Then I had to read Dombey and Son in college and I had to admit that I actually kind of liked it. The professor who assigned it (one of my favorite teachers ever) said he thought that Bleak House was his best work. So I grabbed it a few years ago and it was sitting on my shelf when I decided it had been awhile since I had read a good old-fashioned Victorian novel and it was time for another one.

I'll admit, this one might have changed my mind on Dickens. While some of his other novels make it obvious that he was publishing them chapter-by-chapter without a chance to go back and revise (something I could never do but hey, we all have our own systems) this one seemed like he might have actually had an outline or something. At 880 pages, it was a very well-thought out, well-planned novel. Not sure if he actually used an outline for this one (no judgment here either way, again, we all have our own systems) or if he actually had a chance to go back and revise but it was awesome. It was a very complex plot with a huge cast of characters (I frequently had to go back to refresh my memory) with a very clear beginning, middle and end.

I won't say that it kept me reading from beginning to end. That would be a lie. It starts off really slow, gradually gains momentum, and then I read the last 150 pages in two days because I couldn't put it down. It has two narrators and one of them is much more difficult to get through than the other. However, the dense narrator is also quite witty. There's a lot of commentary on the British legal system of the time (much of which can be directly related to our current legal system here in the U.S., since we used their system as the basis for our own) which is actually quite funny and often painfully accurate.

His physical descriptions are also awesome. I have mixed feelings about them because there were so many times when I felt dragged down by them. On the one hand, they slowed down my reading and didn't help to further the plot, on the other hand, they really helped bring his scenes to life and I know his physical descriptions are something he's known for - with good reason.

I have a love-hate relationship with his characters. For the most part, they are not full-fleshed characters: rather, they are two-dimensional caricatures. Sometimes this makes them insupportably dull (Esther Summons) while, at other times, it helps brings them to life when he gives them little quirks that belong to them and them alone - such as Mr. Smallweed's tendency to constantly sink into his char. I felt like I was watching a cartoon and it was extremely enjoyable. Also the fact that his name was "Mr. Smallweed". How perfect was that? (Answer: Perfect)

I just have to take this opportunity to clear up a myth before someone makes a comment about how Dickens was overly-wordy because he was paid by the word. He was not paid by the word. Most of his books were published in installments and he was paid per installment. He was overly-wordy because that's the style that most writers of his generation were writing in. In those days, when people bought the book, they wanted big, thick books that would provide hours of entertainment so they could feel that the money they were getting a good value for the money they spent on the book. You know, back when people bought physical books that you had to go to the book shop to pick up. Remember those days?