The Aliens Are Back, And They're Breeding!

I went to the bookstore with my mom last week, and lo and behold! Gini Koch's newest Alien book had actually arrived! (I'd looked for it just after release date, and every Chapter's store but the one I was at had a copy or three...)



So I picked it up, and saved it for reading on my three day holiday last week. (As a Christmas present, I had a room booked for me at a hotel an hour and a half from my home. Not so I could do any tourist-type things, but just so that I could relax in a room with a jacuzzi and a big bed and a television with lots of channels. It was wonderful!)

As soon as I was unpacked, the book was opened. I read it in the chair, in the jacuzzi, in the bed. I read from the time I got there at about one in the afternoon until I finally finished at one in the morning. By which you can tell it was riveting.

So, first off, the bad news. I'm not, and have never been, a Jeff fan. So sue me. He's too perfect, except for the jealousy thing, which I find disturbing more than endearing. Second, he may be a ladies' man, but I'm not a man's lady.

Which is to say, I'm a die-hard Kitty fan. I'll fight Jeff for her. :D

Seriously, any woman who reaches into her purse to find weapons with which to kill the bad alien superbing and comes up with a ball point pen or hairspray, and then actually proceeds to make it work--that woman is my type of woman! No other description needed. I can work with her music choices--I'm pretty open to anything that's not rap, even if I do prefer Beethoven to Aerosmith.

And it's pretty obvious where she gets her mojo from--her mother is awesome, too, and her long-suffering father is totally true-to-life in his eye-rolling glory. (And Kitty, don't worry that you never really knew what your parents did for a living. Does any child really know her parents before she becomes an adult? I sure didn't!)

Of all the guys in the book though, I have to say I prefer the humans over the aliens. Chuckie is a great character--revenge of the nerds, and all that. Reader is just plain hilarious.

And I just realized I have to take that back--there is one alien who gets more words in this book than he has in previous books, and it's all to the good. Richard White, the Pontifex, steps off the page and into reality as an extremely able partner for Kitty, who once again is left to save the day. He's the only alien so far that's made me want to turn straight...

I do have to say that getting Jeff out of the Armani and into jeans (which does actually happen in this book) is a Good Thing, and amusing to boot. Hope it happens again. (Hint, hint.)

All in all, this one was a very fast-paced and captivating read. The best book of the series so far, in my opinion, though it beats out the first by only a hair. Lots of action, lots of really gut-busting humour, and a bit of truly flesh-creeping horror thrown in. I can't wait for the next one!

The Problem With This Statement...

Blogging every day is really stretching my thinking muscles. I don't want my posts to be insubstantial pieces of fluff about what I had for breakfast (toast, if you really care...). At the same time, there's not a lot of time to research and write in-depth posts. And I notice that I'm jumping around quite a bit, probably because if I wrote on the same topic every single day, I'd soon exhaust it. Plus, I'd get bored pretty quickly. For those reasons, I'll probably slack off on the pace a bit when May is over. But for now, it's a good challenge for me. I'm really proud that I made it through last week without missing even Mother's Day!

Today's post comes courtesy of a statement on this site. They say:

Why do I need The Staff Recommends?

Because deciding what to read is a difficult proposition. Each year, better than 175,000 books are published, and you’re going to read what, 10? 15? 50? Books can be pricey, a real investment of money and time—you can’t afford to choose poorly. Or, you’re going on vacation and packing space is limited. Do you want to be stuck with a dud? The Staff Recommends makes sure you’ll have a dud-free reading life.

There are a few problems with that statement. Yes, there are a lot of books published every year. No, I don't have time to read them all. Then again, unless they're employing one heck of a lot of readers, neither do they. They're only reading a small percentage of the books publihsed, and even then they're probably skip reading.

And they only read books that are sent to them by publishers. And the publisher send them, hoping to get them featured. And if they are featured, the publishers pony up. It's advertising, plain and simple.

Books are expensive. That much is true. But I have a few weapons that keep me from making "mistakes" when I purchase a book.

1) When I buy a book from a bookstore, I'll read at least a little of it in addition to the jacket blurb in order to see if it's something I'd like to read. If I can do this, I almost never end up with a "dud."

2) I find reviews on the web from fans who read books that are like the ones I read. I generally read several such reviews if I'm considering purchasing a book by an author I haven't read before. These reviews are not paid for. They're not advertising by publishers in any way, shape or form. They're from fans who have read the book and enjoyed it.

3) If I decide I'd like to read a book, unless I know absolutely that I want it on my shelf (like any book written by this author), I'll check the public library for it first. If I enjoy it enough to want to read it more than two or three times, and I have the money, I'll go and buy it.

4) I don't consider having a "dud free reading life" to be a realistic or desirable goal. Sometimes, I have to read something I don't like and analyze it in order to find out why I like what I like.

5) Last but not least, I find that while allowing someone other to myself dictate what I read does open me to a wider book selection that I might otherwise peruse, most of the "duds" I've read have been the recommendations of "experts," or alternatively wildly popular books. (DaVinci Code and Twilight come to mind...)

The moral of this little sermon is this: If you really want to avoid "dud" books altogether, don't read. If you want to widen your reading list, and are willing to take a few chances, instead of reading the recommendations of paid critics, enter your likes and dislikes into Stumble, and start looking for reviews of books on topics that interest you. I can guarantee that you'll find some good ones.

Books I Almost Read

I figured I'd give you an update on my reading list. I've been sort of skip reading two books this week, which is how I read when what I'm reading either doesn't grab me, or grabs me a bit too hard. The books evened out to one in each category this time around:

Catcher in the Rye is one of those books that's on every list of "must reads" that I've ever seen, so I thought I'd put it on my list for "school." But nobody told me it was about a self-centered adolescent boy who thinks he knows everything to begin with and in consequence learns very little in the course of the story. It's self-indulgent crap, or at least it would be if written as an autobiography. At least the parts I've managed to force myself to read are like that, and it sure doesn't make me want to read more. I loathe adolescent angst and self-indulgence. When my kids were that age, I told them after the first episode to cut it and skip to age 20. It didn't really work, but since my kids were pretty level-headed and outward focussed to begin with, I didn't have too much of the crap to deal with.

If I'm reluctant to live through it with my own children, whom I love, I'm not going to suffer through the angst of a fictional kid whose attitude makes me dislike him within the first paragraph. So strike that one off my list. I've got better things to do with my time, like pick lint out of my navel.

(ETA: I found this abridged version on-line a few hours after I posted. Would have saved me a couple of hours of trying to slog through the book if I'd found it last week...)

2) My Sister's Keeper, by Jodi Picoult, is an example of a book that grabs me too much for me to read front to back in one sitting. Anna is a thirteen-year-old girl who is also going through adolescent angst, but I find it easier to sympathize with a character whose angst is caused by the fact that loved or not, she's basically an object to her parents, a who was conceived solely to be a blood and marrow donor for her older sister, who has leukemia.

I've actually read, in a number of short sessions, most of the novel. And it's raised some interesting questions for me to consider. Is what Anna's parents did moral or right? Without a matching donor, their eldest daughter would have died. But a healthy child was made to undergo medical "treatment" without her consent in order to save her sister's life. Should authorities have stepped in on Anna's behalf earlier than they did? Would doctors really condone such a thing? And at what age is a child able to give informed consent? Because in the end, it's the older sister who tells Anna not to donate, indicating that the rights of both children may have been violated.

Hefty questions, and a tear-jerker of a book.