I’ve been reading my face off lately. Seems like every time I finish a book, I hear about two others I’d like to read, and the library is being exceptionally speedy about sending the book couriers to my front door.

Orson Scott Card – Treason: All right, I know, chastise me now. A sci-fi geek who’d never read any Orson Scott Card. And I probably wouldn’t have read his stuff anytime soon, if not for someone looking for a book over at AskMetafilter. Go ahead, read how the describes it. It sounded amazingly weird to me, so I thought, “What the hell,” and ordered it up from the library.

I expected the novel to take place at least partially in space. And the cover of the book led me to continue that belief. But no, the whole thing takes place on the surface of one planet. But putting that perplexion aside, this novel was surprisingly good. Weird and strange, very imaginative, and really like nothing I’d ever read before. Card did a lovely job of developing the main character throughout his journey, and the universe he created is one I’d love to experience. 7 out of 10. And then the book led me to …

Orson Scott Card – Ender’s Game: I didn’t know anything about this book at all — I just ordered it from the library because Card intrigued me, and this was what looked to be his most famous novel. Reading the introduction to the “author’s definitive edition”, I was perplexed again. Gifted children being taught to go to war against a race of bugs? So it’s Harry Potter in Starship Troopers? But once again, I got sucked into the book and couldn’t stop reading. Ender was an amazing character. And even though I was getting near the end of the book and thought, “They better start getting to the heavy action soon,” I totally didn’t see the twist ending coming. Amazing. 8 out of 10, and I’ve put in a request for the sequel, Speaker for the Dead. It looks like there are eight or nine books total in the Ender series, so I’ll be nibbling at these for quite a while.

Gail Carriger – Changeless: In a previous book post, I scored the first book in this series, Soulless, an 8 out of 10. And I thought this book, second in the series, would get a similar score. Certainly, the story started out clever and witty and interesting, but there were also problems for me. I’m not sure if we, the readers, were supposed to figure out so early on what the big dramatic reveal was. If not, it was handled in a pretty ham-handed manner; throughout the entire book, when certain situations happened, I thought to myself, “Well, it’s because of [big dramatic spoiler], duh.”

But even worse was the ending, after the big dramatic spoiler has been revealed. Carriger sadly uses a classic romance novel trope that drives me crazy — the Big Angry Misunderstanding. In a couple who supposedly love and trust each other, I’ve never understood how one party can suddenly explode in an angry rage, with jealousy and mistrust and fiery venom, without even being willing to listen to their loved one or attempt to see reason. And this angry rage is exceptionally explosive; it felt completely out of character for the rage-filled person. So yay Carriger for the mystery and adventure (although it wasn’t as good as the first book), but a big fat BOO for the relationship, especially the tired trope at the end. 5 out of 10. Although I’ll still read the third in the series, Blameless, when it comes out in September.

Julia Child and Alex Prud’Homme – My Life in France: After watching the movie Julie & Julia, I dropped this book onto my library request list. On the flip side, I refuse to read any of the original Julie/Julia Project blog, because I’ve heard that in it, Julie Powell comes across as a not-very-pleasant person. I also didn’t care for her in any of the interview footage in the DVD featurettes, so there you go. But Julia Child, on the other hand, seems like a delightful woman. This autobiography is a meaty book, and it’s entertaining the entire way through. It covers not only the Childs’ years in France, but also the post-France years with books and TV shows and fame. Throughout it all, Julia Child reads as a charming, inquisitive, fascinating woman who I’d love to have known. 8 out of 10.

The New Atkins for a New You: Written by three doctors who’ve clearly done their homework, this new book updates the Atkins program (the last book from the good doctor himself was published well before his untimely 2003 head-injury death). It takes into account the ten-plus years of new scientific research about low-carb diets and human physiology. If you’re looking into trying the low-carb way of eating, you could do much worse than this for your first book. It does get a little self-indulgent in places, constantly referring to the “Atkins Edge” and other things that aren’t necessarily Atkins-specific, but overall it covers a lot of good territory and updates the Atkins diet in a way that continues to make it easy for anyone and everyone to enjoy. There are even guidelines for vegetarian and vegan versions of Atkins, crazy as that may sound (but then again, I find anything vegan to be crazy; at least with these guidelines, veganism might border on something sort of healthy). 8 out of 10.

Mark Sisson – The Primal Blueprint: The new rage in healthy eating is primal. Or paleo. Or caveman, or whatever else you want to call it. Eating foods that our hunter/gatherer ancestors ate, and exercising the way that they would have, instead of breaking our bodies with too much cardio or running. Primal shares a lot of common ground with low-carb: avoiding grains, eating meat and natural fats (especially animal fats). In his book, Sisson (who writes the great blog Mark’s Daily Apple) outlines his ten commandments of primal living, ranging from eating habits to exercise to playing in the sun.

Sisson doesn’t cover a lot of the scientific evidence to support his plan in the book, but he does make many, many references back to his site/blog, where more information can be found. I think this book is also self-published, which may explain the multitude of typos and grammatical errors. Still, if you’re sick and miserable and unhappy while eating a low-fat diet and exercising to exhaustion, this might be an eye-opening book. Nothing much was new to me, since I already read Mark’s blog (and a dozen other paleo/primal blogs as well), but it was nice to have so much of Mark’s wisdom in one easy-to-reference volume. 7 out of 10.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 11:48 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.