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 Shuya Nanahara and his junior high class of fifteen-year-olds are going on a field trip. Shuya is so optimistic that he’s even brought along alcohol. But on the bus he notices something strange; everyone is falling asleep, and that new tough kid Shogo is trying to break the window. Before he can think too much, he’s asleep, and doesn’t wake up until he’s in a strange classroom, and he and all his friends have cold metal collars around their necks. They are told that they are about to kill one another on an isolated island, and to Shuya’s horror, the seriousness of this proposition is proven when his best friend is killed before his eyes. Shuya’s worst nightmare is about to come true as he tries to protect the girl his best friend loved as his classmates set about playing the game.
I have a lot of conflicted feelings on this book. My most immediate basis for comparison is The Hunger Games. Battle Royale* is set in a dystopia based in Japan, but both essentially involve isolated kids killing each other after being given random weapons. It’s a thriller and apparently both very popular and shocking in Japan. I didn’t find it to be particularly shocking, although it did read very quickly for a 600 page book.
The problems started right at the beginning. I found the writing to be very plain. It’s readable, but there is something very juvenile about the sentence structure. I kept noticing the poor writing and it constantly threw me out of the story. Some of the characters quote poetry and song lyrics, but even these never rise above to form anything I’d consider quotable. I don’t know if this is down to the fault of the author or the translator, but I definitely felt let down. I didn’t like the narrative structure, either. The main focus is Shuya, but the viewpoint switches often. Unfortunately, after a few switches, it becomes apparent that almost every time the author introduces a new student, it means they’re going to die within a few pages. Few of the students are really interesting, but the author also tends to include a flashback from each one of them, introducing background that is generally unnecessary and boring. I get that they’re supposed to be regular kids who are forced into killing each other, the background is showing their personalities and motives, and that’s meant to be shocking, but again, I’m already familiar with the horror of this premise, and so this time it didn’t work. Three to five pages was not enough to make me care.
I also couldn’t say I liked any of the characters. They are only fifteen, but they are all in love with one another. Naturally, most of them are in love with Shuya, but we’re also treated to little dramas between all the other characters that are in love. To me, these seemed like simple crushes, and while everything is intensified in this sort of “game”, I simply got tired of the constant surprise each character exhibited upon learning that someone they barely knew loved them enough to die for them. I couldn’t imagine this happening in real life. Maybe if I was also fifteen years old, when I was convinced that a smile from a boy was everything in the world, I would have found this to be terribly tragic and romantic. As an adult, the students annoyed me without exception. I got tired of reading their irrelevant backstories and I didn’t really care much when any of them died. For some I even found myself flipping ahead to see how long before they died because I was so impatient. The book didn’t engage me at all on an emotional level.
There is also a lot of criticism against girls here which really bothered me. All the boys are convinced that the girls would never kill one another, not only because they’re all good but because a girl wouldn’t have the stomach to do such a thing. Worse, the author seems to agree; the girls are universally portrayed as weak and needing protection by the boys, none of them are intelligent enough to come up with an escape plan, and in general they do absolutely nothing of interest except act stupidly and get themselves killed. The only girl who does fight with some skill is a bully, beautiful but despised universally, who doesn’t hesitate to kill her friends. Even though her behavior is understandable to some extent given her backstory, out of so many girls is there really only one who can stand up to the boys? And does she have to use her body to do it? It just bothered me. I missed the strong, smart girls so prevalent in today’s YA literature.
Largely, this book suffered a lot from comparison with The Hunger Games. There, the concept of kids killing each other is carried out, in my opinion, to the best possible result, providing an emotional, riveting, exciting, and unpredictable read. If I’d read this first, maybe things would have been the other way around, but given what I’ve said here, I doubt it. I can’t say I really hated Battle Royale, as I certainly read it fast enough and wasn’t conscious of all its faults while I was still wading through it, but I didn’t like it very much. It brought up some interesting questions about trust and suspicion between friends, but not enough to save it from bad writing/translating, boring characters, and frustrating structure overall. It’s interesting for anyone who’d like to see what all the fuss is about, but I wouldn’t read it again.
*This link goes to a new translation which I hope will prove better than the one I read. I am an Amazon Associate and will receive a few pennies if you click these links and buy something from Amazon. I bought this book.
 From the back cover:
The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr’s best-selling look at the new computer revolution, makes a simple and profound statement: Computing is turning into a utility, and the effects of this transition will ultimately change society as completely as the advent of cheap electricity did. From the software business to the newspaper business, from job creation to community formation, from national defense to personal identity, The Big Switch provides a panoramic view of the new world being conjured from the circuits of the “World Wide Computer.”
This is a fascinating, and terrifying book. Anyone who blogs, and probably anyone who reads this blog, really should be reading it. Carr first outlines what computing as a utility really means. He explores the difference that our newest essential utility – electricity – had on our lives, and then extrapolates what happened there to computing and the internet, which has become an essential part of almost everyone’s life in the United States and in many other countries. I really enjoyed these historical sections and I felt like Carr laid everything out clearly enough to make fairly boring subjects sound really exciting and relevant. He makes it really clear that the development of electricity only seems linear in hindsight, and so we cannot really expect the development of the internet to seem the same way at the moment, or expect that all wild predictions about it will eventually come true.
Carr uses the second half of the book to explore what widespread use of the internet has done to society. He attempts to show that rather than widening our horizons, the internet narrows them as we can be more and more specific about who we associate with, what we look for, and what we contribute to. He cites an experiment which showed that even if people had only a mild preference to live around one or two people like them, they ended up with a neighborhood split between different races. He extrapolates this to the internet and it definitely had me thinking about the many splits in the blogosphere. There are definitely splits between just book bloggers, let alone the many other “types” of bloggers out there, so his analogy obviously isn’t far off. He also demonstrates how the great deal of culture happening on the internet for free is seriously degrading jobs, yet another event that has actually come to pass more so than when the book was written. People will now happily research, write articles, and make videos, among other things, and distribute their results for absolutely nothing, all taking away paid jobs. Another aspect of this was how few people are required to run businesses through the internet. There is a guy who runs a dating website in Canada all by himself, earning thousands per day. He shows how the internet is becoming essential and inevitable to our lives, and then how it’s already changing everything. He doesn’t offer any solutions to what he clearly is casting as a problem, but as he demonstrates how wrong predictions have been in the past, it would be almost hypocritical of him to suggest what should be done.
I don’t want to go into more of this book because it truly is fascinating and scary in many ways. As someone who uses the internet daily and often for hours, its relevance to my own activities was quite startling. I read this one for The Newsweek 50 Books for Our Times reading project hosted by My Friend Amy, and seriously, it is worthy of its spot on that list. This is very appropriate for our time. Of course, I suspect it will become outdated because not everything will happen as Carr implies, but The Big Switch is a thoughtful, absorbing, and somewhat terrifying read for 2009, and for 2010.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 Born right in the midst of the Renaissance, Michelangelo is a brilliant artist living through turbulent times in Italy. Though he impresses his first painting master, Michelangelo longs to be a sculpter, only feeling at home with a hammer and chisel in his hand as he brings to life the being inside the stone. Intertwining his life with the influential first family of Florence, the Medicis, Michelangelo does learn to sculpt, but that is only the beginning of the life of one of Italy’s greatest artists.
This massive book is subtitled “a biographical novel of Michelangelo” and it certainly attempts that feat. From his teenage years, before which I’m assuming very little is known, right up to his death, Irving Stone does his very best to cover it all in detail. I learned more about sculpting, painting, and the many other things that Michelangelo gets up to than I’d ever really expected to. We even hear about the particular types of stone in Italy and how they are quarried. I was astounded by the sheer amount of information Stone appears to have gathered on his subject. He has a more extensive bibliography in the back than I’ve seen in some popular non-fiction books.
As for the book itself, I will admit that sometimes its prose drags. Stone is a bit of an old-fashioned writer, as the book is from 1961, and it takes a little adjusting to his style. It doesn’t help that he includes every detail about everything you could possibly imagine. I think, however, that its epic scope and immersion in Michelangelo’s life are totally worth it. I spent days with this book and I really enjoyed those days. I know a little about Renaissance Italy, and it was fascinating to see it from his perspective, particularly because his family wasn’t hugely wealthy. I felt like I was experiencing both the life of the rich and the life of the ordinary, even though Michelangelo himself was truly extraordinary.
More so, this book somehow made me long to actually see Michelangelo’s sculptures for myself. I’m glad I live in the UK now, because I can plan a trip to Italy and see all of his existing sculptures and paintings. The Agony and the Ecstasy has made me appreciate just what it took to produce such art, and as a result I expect my admiration of it will be far greater. This is a wonderful book, and I do recommend it.
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 Bob Arctor is a spy for the government. In his daily life, he does Substance D with his friends. In his working life, he is called Fred, wears a scramble suit to protect his identity, and reports on those friends, specifically seeking to identify those who are dealers and use them to work up the chain and get higher dealers. Even though he sees the effect of Substance D on his friends and others who need treatment, he has to keep doing it to maintain his cover, and becomes an addict. Eventually he winds up spying on himself at the precise time that the drug starts to destroy his mind. So goes the life of the main character in this introspective look at drug culture and its frightening possibilities.
I have to admit that I was bored by this book. In my defense, I’d already seen the film while it was still in the preview stage at college, and my friends and I spent a good amount of time discussing it and picking it apart. So I already knew everything that was coming, including the ending which I think is very appropriate and somewhat haunting, and as a result I don’t think I liked the book as much as I might have otherwise. As most of us do, though, whenever a movie is based on a book it’s like a compulsion. I just had to read it and finish it and see how it measured up.
Overall, I found that there was far too much rambling done by the addicts. I know that this is probably true-to-life, as this book is dedicated to many of Dick’s friends who were either permanently damaged or killed as a result of their drug abuse, and he includes himself on the list of the damaged. Even so, is it wrong to admit that I found it boring and hard to follow? Perhaps it’s a perspective I needed, but I have no plan to do drugs, and so their ramblings were unfamiliar to me. It’s a rare 200 page book that takes me more than a day to read, but this one did, and I fell asleep twice in the day with it still open.
Perhaps Dick’s greatest accomplishment is that he manages not to condemn any of them for what they do. As he writes in the prologue, they only meant to have fun, and then continued even as they started to suffer the effects. They were addicted, of course, and so are the characters in the book, unable to do anything for themselves and eventually reduced to mindless, forgetful drones. He adds the twist in the end that is really what makes the reader think about society.
A Scanner Darkly is a clever dystopia, but I think I would have appreciated it more without knowing the story beforehand.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 Raised to a rigorous Norman standard, Judith, niece to the new Norman king of England, William the Conquerer, is alarmed at her unexpected attraction to an English lord, Waltheof of Huntingdon. The attraction is more than mutual, and Waltheof immediately petitions for her hand in marriage. Witnessing their peculiar attraction is young Simon de Senlis, son of the king’s chamberlain, who is injured by Judith’s boldness in choosing a horse she can’t handle. While Judith and Waltheof are undeniably attracted to one another, setting aside their differences for the sake of their marriage is perhaps more than this couple can bear.
I love Elizabeth Chadwick’s books. Her medieval settings are rich with color and life, while her characters could stroll off the page remarkably easily. Even with this detail, however, which I know she meticulously researches, all of her novels are driven by their characters and their complex relationships with one another. I thought this book was a simple romance, but it turns out to be a multi-generational story of forgiveness for all of the characters. They are for the most part historical characters and Chadwick fleshes out the bare bones of their recorded lives to give us a living, breathing story that is a pleasure to read.
It’s hard to pick out what I appreciate the most here. Despite its five hundred pages, the story simply flew by, and a great deal happens over the course of the narrative. The book is never boring or slow despite the length and I was in fact eager to see what happened next, because things did not go at all as I’d predicted. I wondered how she was going to fill 500 pages with one romance, but of course there is more than that; two romances and even a crusade. Chadwick slips in little historical details over the course of the book, like the way the Normans cut their hair as opposed to the English, or the metal bands that Waltheof wears around his wrists from his Viking ancestors.
The characters are real and as frustrating sometimes as they are lovable. I wanted to shake both Judith and Waltheof as they struggled so much over their differences, but they truly came from different cultures. Simple attraction couldn’t overcome the vast difference in what they wanted from their lives and what they thought was appropriate, and this could be as true of any twenty-first century couple as it is of this eleventh century one. Their descendants are very charismatic and in fact more appealing than Judith and Waltheof, which brought the story to a very enjoyable conclusion.
I’ve really enjoyed all of Elizabeth Chadwick’s books so far, and The Winter Mantle is no exception. I highly recommend any of her books for engrossing historical fiction.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 When her dear family friend Greg is killed in mysterious circumstances, Kate Daniels goes on the hunt for his killer. She is a mercenary, if a poorly-paid one, with impressive magic skills and a tough attitude. Kate doesn’t expect to be drawn into a dangerous rivalry between vampires and shapeshifters, but she might just be up to the challenge as she searches for the enemy who is intent on turning these two powerful groups of society against one another.
This was markedly and interestingly different from the urban fantasy I’ve been reading lately. Yes, it has the traditional kick-butt heroine, as well as a large contingent of typical supernatural creatures, like vampires. But this world is not a familiar one, even if the book is set in Atlanta. For one thing, the magic is only up sometimes, and while it is average human technology often fails to work, until everything returns to normal before the next wave of magic. For another, these creatures are not sexy. Vampires are properly disgusting, their bodies morphing into hideous wall-crawling creatures as their minds completely vanish. They’re controlled by external people, who can even speak through them. Shapeshifters are similarly disgusting, their most powerful form lying between human and beast, and when they change they end up sweaty, naked, and shaking in human form.
I’ll admit that when I started this book, that world was not what I expected. I expected the magical creatures to be as sexy as they are in the rest of the books I’ve read. As I got accustomed to the world, however, I began to like this darker version of an urban fantasy world. It felt like something different, and while I obviously still love Sookie Stackhouse and Mercy Thompson, it was nice to be in a world where blood sucking is disgusting as I always thought it should be.
The beginning of the book was a little too consumed with info dumping to my taste, and Kate is snarky to the point of pushing people away, but somewhere around halfway through I really started to enjoy it. The plot picked up, I had a suspect for the bad guy, and there are some entertaining diversions. This is a good story, and I’m looking forward to more in this world when I don’t have to be informed all about it before I can begin to be engaged.
Magic Bites is a different, but still very engaging, version of urban fantasy. It appeals to my gritty fantasy side but would probably still appeal to fans of books with tough heroines and engaging storylines. Recommended.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 Percy hasn’t even made it through his eighth grade year before he’s embroiled in another difficult magical situation. He and his friends Annabeth and Thalia attempt to save their friend Grover from a boarding school in Maine. In the process, they discover two new half-bloods, essential for the failing camp, but they also realize that a new enemy is after them. Following a prophecy, Percy goes on an adventure to save the world – and their friends – once again.
This is my favorite of all of these books so far. I’ve actually become fond of these characters and I enjoy the fact that the books are getting somewhat more serious. They’re still clearly written for children, but now I feel that I can more fully appreciate them, too. There are new tensions arising as the kids are starting to grow up, most particularly in my mind a romance situation between Percy and Annabeth, although neither of them seem to realize it just yet.
Besides that, I can more clearly remember eighth grade than sixth grade, and I think the books will continue to improve as the characters grow. Or maybe Riordan is just getting better at broader appeal. It’s hard to say.
This book is as full of action as the first two. Right from the first page, Percy and his friends are tossed into a suspenseful adventure, with some new characters added to balance out the absence of a couple of the older ones. We learn a little more backstory as well about the gods and a few of the characters, which was all very interesting and never slows the story down.
The Titan’s Curse was an enjoyable, very speedy read with some unexpected turns. I am looking forward to the next book in the series.
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 For once, Percy has endured a relatively uneventful year at a school, although he’s been stuck with an awkward friend, Tyson. That’s until a game of dodgeball goes wrong and Percy gets blamed. When he heads to his summer refuge, the camp for half-bloods, he finds that Thalia’s tree is dying and the camp’s borders are failing. It’s no longer safe. Even though Percy and his friends are told not to, they head off to save one of their friends and their camp from destruction.
Since I knew The Sea of Monsters was more of a MG book going in, I found myself enjoying it a lot more than The Lightning Thief. When I kept the audience in mind, I found this a very engaging read. The characters are all still endearing. I loved the addition of Tyson and I felt that he really helped Percy to grow and develop as a character, which if you’re reading this blog, you know I really appreciate. He also brought up an interesting issue that Percy needed to explore – that being the son of a god is not necessarily a wonderful thing that will get you out of every scrape you land in. It makes the story more interesting and more relevant for real kids, even if obviously no modern child is going to get on a ship to rescue their satyr friend.
This is a fast-paced, enjoyable book. Percy and his friends don’t rest from the first page onwards. This book does, however, stand alone a bit less than the first did. A reader new to the series would probably pick up on what was happening thanks to Percy’s explanations, but the story ends on an intriguing twist that will have readers looking for the next book in the series. There are also references to a prophecy that will probably apply when Percy is sixteen – if he makes it that far – which makes it clear that we’ll have to read the entire series to know what happens. I’m looking forward to continuing when I need a light, humorous, fast-paced read.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 This is the third book in a series. If you haven’t read The Thief and The Queen of Attolia, don’t read this review yet!
Eugenides, the Queen’s Thief of Eddis, is now the King of Attolia. Through the eyes of a young guard, Costis, Eugenides is an incapable ruler deserving only his disrespect. When he punches Eugenides in the face, Costis expects dismissal, if not execution, but instead finds himself promoted and near the king at all times. As his derision for Eugenides slowly turns into respect, the rest of the court also realizes that this King of Attolia is far more capable than he wants to let on.
I have really, really enjoyed this series and I’m glad there is another one coming. There is just so much to like about this book. Having read the first two, I knew Eugenides was capable even without one of his hands and I was certain he was playing a game. While it’s frustrating to watch everyone mock him, given how fond I became of him, it’s incredibly gratifying to watch the tide change and his careful plan unveil itself. This is a well-plotted book and it unfolds in a way that made me want to keep reading to figure out what was actually going on. It’s subtle but fascinating and complex. Eugenides in particular has developed a ton over the course of the series, but he’s so well written that it’s obvious he’s still the clever boy turned into a man with a great amount of struggle behind him.
There is also the love story here between the King and Queen of Attolia. We never see things from their viewpoint, just from outsiders, which is a refreshing approach to a romance. We know they feel for each other, but their romance still changes and grows, and the fact that we’re never in their heads makes us curious as to what is going on. This is also great because Turner trusts her readers to figure things out for themselves. She doesn’t always spell out the fact that they’re in love, she just shows it.
I’m going to keep this review short because otherwise I’d just continue gushing about The King of Attolia. If you appreciate YA fantasy, I really recommend this series. You won’t be sorry.
I’m an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 This is a collection of humorous essays drawn from the author’s life, covering fun topics from his elementary school speech counselor to the time a Frenchman thought he was a thief and went happily on in English about it to his girlfriend, not realizing that Sedaris was an American and understood every word he said. Through his high drug years, his failed stint as a teacher, and even the time he almost saw a girl get killed, David Sedaris makes his readers laugh even as sometimes we know we really shouldn’t.
I had such a strange experience with this book. It was my last choice for the read-a-thon and even though I wasn’t that tired, at first I didn’t find it all that funny. I read the first few essays a little perplexed. When I tried imagining someone reading the book out loud to me, I thought it was more entertaining, but still, sort of “eh.” This mirrored the experience my husband had had with it a few weeks ago when he was looking for a humorous read. Then, all of a sudden, it became hilarious. I’m not sure whether I got used to Sedaris’s writing or whether the later stories were just funnier than the earlier ones, but I began laughing out loud more and more often. And now that I’ve finished, I want to read more of his work. I think for once an audiobook might be better; a lot of people have remarked that Sedaris is funnier in person.
I’ve lost most of the grasp of this book as it’s been a while and I’d read so much during the read-a-thon, so I’m just going to leave it at that. Me Talk Pretty One Day is definitely a funny read; if it starts off not so much, keep reading, and hopefully you will also suddenly realize that this man is hilarious.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
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