Classics Considered

There was no intention on my part to read two dystopian novels at the same time.  I was already in motion to read 1984 - an embarrassingly long-overdue attempt - when I heard a novelization of Pan's Labyrinth was to be released in July.  I got in the library line quickly (these things go like hot cakes), and soon, with del Toro/Funke's fantasy horror in one hand and Orwell's bleak dystopia in the other, made the abrupt leap from "light summer fluff" to "not-sure-if-I'll-sleep-tonight bedtime stories." So... What Were You Thinking!? 1984 requires little introduction.  In Western culture, at least, terms such as Big Brother and doublethink flavor our vocabulary as glib reminders that a British author back in 1948 foretold the existence of increasingly powerful, monolithic, and tech-savvy governments.  We see signs of it everywhere today, from more innocuous instruments such as traffic cameras to the disturbing birth of China's Social C...

It's London in the 1930s, and Christopher Banks has what most people want: his dream job.  After a childhood of playing detective with his best friend Akira, Christopher grew up to be one of England's leading private investigators, highly sought after both professionally and socially.  In spite of his success, he can't forget the life he left behind him in Shanghai, nor the fact that his parents remain missing there and unaccounted for.  Christopher's greatest hope is to go back to Shanghai to find them, even if it means returning to a war zone.  It turns out, however, that new relationships - including his love for a lonely socialite - make committing to his past the hardest case to solve. This book could not have had a more promising premise.  I've raved about the nuances of Empire of the Sun (another story about an English boy in Shanghai), and I know Ishiguro can be incredibly subtle .  I also love a good mystery with a Sherlock Holmesian characte...

In this second round of the Deal Me In challenge, I was excited to read a classic by Ray Bradbury , whose works are new to me.  "A Sound of Thunder" is one of his best-known science fictions, and it's about a man named Eckels who signs up to go back in time on a safari - hunting dinosaurs, that is. I guess I will always compare these kinds of plots to The Lost World  by Conan Doyle, a big favorite of mine.  My overall feeling about "A Sound of Thunder" was that, in scope, it was trying too hard.  It covered the two big topics, prehistoric life and time travel, but there wasn't a lot of development, and the reader was asked to take a lot at face value.  For example, (spoiler in white):   Eckels's behavior seemed perfectly natural to me, and it's hard to imagine him being the first offender.  There were some good descriptions throughout, but also gratuitous cussing that felt like filler. 1.5 stars.  Decent read for waiting at the doctor's office,...

When I chose Wieland: or, The Transformation for my history class, I was not expecting a masterpiece of plot, philosophy, or characters.  I did expect a good old-fashioned Gothic tale with a dash of melodrama, an eerie edifice, and maybe a ghost or two.  Sadly, this is the third book connected to my class that disappointed me, and while it was vastly more fast-paced, it was also quite a bit worse than The House of the Seven Gables or The Prairie .  Would I read more Charles Brockden Brown ?  Maybe, someday.  Not in the near future. Wieland introduces us to the narrator, Clara Wieland, her brother Theodore and his family, and their mutual friend, Henry Pleyel.  These characters live in a surreal sort of isolated, literati circle, centered around Theodore's home, Mettingen (which would seem to fit better in Victorian England than its actual setting: pre-Revolutionary America).  Their perfect lives become interrupted by seemingly supernatural occurren...