Zombie-fighting ninja-librarian: September rewind

So I finally finished it. Go me. I like it. There are things about it that annoys me. Lyra and Will’s story is awesome, but the religious criticism gets a bit heavy handed, and some of the stuff in the book doesn’t need to be there. Mary Malone’s story is very long. I love Mary Malone, but I feel like it could have been edited slightly. There’s something about a priest that makes no sense. Pullman also changes Lyra and Marisa Coulter, which annoys me to no end. I like the book because of Lyra and Will and their story, but a lot of it annoys me, so thumb to the side maybe. Although I would say that I think that it was so good that he didn't shy away from the ending. He could easily have made a loophole, but he just stayed with it. Respect for that.

I really liked it. I mean it takes a while for me to get used to the writing and the language, so it took a while to read it. I liked it though. The first classic I read was Wuthering Heights and I was a deeply cynical 18-year-old, so it only annoyed me. I sort of felt like they were too whiny and annoying. Anne and Frederick are more believable to me. They are in love, but they’re not spewing out their emotions all over the place. And Anne is delightful and her family is sort of awful. I love Anne, and I think Captain Wentworth is pretty spectacular. So thumbs up.

Brave new world was cool. I think I read it pretty quickly. It’s freaking weird, and interesting. I felt like a lot of me was screeching because so much of the rhetoric the people in the book are taught goes against what I believe in, like being an individual, which I think is kind of nice. Which is why I found Bernard good. He’s got the same values as me, but in a weird way. Because he isn’t entirely sure how to deal with it. I really liked it. Huxley writes very interestingly. The characters are all engaging and interesting. I really liked it, I can read classics if they’re all like this. Thumbs up for Aldous Huxley.

Let the right one in

So, vampires have become a bit lame and sparkly lately, with Twilight, Vampire diaries and all that falling-in-love with a vampire crap. Let the right one in is a horror book, the vampire is freaking terrifying, it doesn’t help that she’s a child, that only makes it worse. Essentially it’s about this tormented kid called Oskar (it’s Swedish, I read it in Norwegian, so the names are all Swedish) who is 12 years old. He is mocked relentlessly by his peers and doesn’t ever hit back, because it only makes it worse. He doesn’t really have friends, until this kid moves into his building. It’s a girl who is about Oskar’s age, named Eli, and she is weird. The reader gets to know pretty soon that she’s a vampire, and you suspect it from the beginning. She lives with a man who pretends to be her father, but who is actually a pedophile who gets her blood. She befriends Oskar, and a couple of very creepy murders happen in the local community. It’s deeply creepy and disturbing and really cool. And thumbs up.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Three classics this month, one could argue. Uh, I think it’s going right to the top of my favorite books. I don’t know why I like it so much, it’s not like I can identify with a six-year-old girl from the south of the US. I just really loved the book. I loved Scout so much, and I loved Atticus. Atticus is very colored by his era, but he’s still tough and he has his principles and he stands for what’s good and right, and I really loved him for that. The story is really interesting. The writing is awesome. I don’t know why I loved it so much, because it’s very talk-y, but for some reason I loved it. Yey. Huge thumbs up.

For absolutely no other reason than I felt like I’d read a lot of sort of “heavy” books lately I wanted to read something uncomplicated and simple. I had some misgivings cause there is a lot of weird and bad vampire literature. I particularly think about Twilight and the My House of Night-series, I find the first one awful and the other annoying, so I worried. But I loved it though. It’s really fun, and I like Rose, she’s fun and spunky and cool. She is tough and she doesn’t suffer fools. Also the writing is good, because in some of these books they try to force the young people language. In Vampire academy Richelle Mead doesn’t. She just writes like normal people would speak. I was very pleasantly surprised. I didn’t think I’d like it, and I did, so that shows me. Thumbs up.

I was looking for another book, just walking around the bookstore, and suddenly there was a shelf full of books that I really, REALLY, wanted to read. I made a slightly undignified noise, and then realized I couldn’t buy them all because I’m a student and I need food and shelter so I can’t spend my money on books. I did buy Cinder though, because it sounded so fucking awesome. It’s a fairytale retelling of Cinderella. Cinder is a cyborg who lives in New Beijing. She is the best mechanic in town, but cyborgs are looked down on in her world. She gets blamed for her stepsister’s illness, and she is put in the cyborg draft (the authorities are using cyborgs to test antidotes) by her stepmother. She also meets the prince, soon-to-be-emperor, Kai, and tries very hard to hide her cyborg-ness from him. There is also a threat from outside, from the moon. There is so much awesome. I loved it. Thumbs up.