Bookmarks - The Taking

The Taking: written by Dean Koontz, copyright 2004, Random House published.

A couple wakes up to torrential rain outside their California mountains home and realises something is wrong when the TV starts giving strange news and eventually cuts out.
Leaving their house the couple encounter many strange creatures and organisms as they try to gather and save children with the help of a pack of dogs and some other people.
People are dying and going missing all over the place.

Definitely an apocalypse novel. And a darn good one.

Suspenseful with some truly creepy parts, this is a horror story with some possible religious overtones.

I would recommend this book to everyone, except if you are prone to nightmares about the world ending.

Bookmarks - Blindness

Blindness, written by José Saramago is copyright 1995, though I read the English translation copyright 1997 (Prof. Juan Sager). First published in English by the Harvill Press, and originally written in Portuguese.

A man suddenly goes blind in the middle of an intersection and sets off a chain of events in which everyone (or very nearly) in the world is going blind for no apparent reason.

Camps are set up to quarantine the White Blindness and we are in the first of these following the story of the man's wife, the only (known) person who has not gone blind.

An apocalyptic novel as we watch the degradation of human dignity and decency, as well as society.

I don't know whether it is because this book is translated, or that Portuguese writing is inhereantly difficult (though I will go with the former), but this book was a chore to read.
The idioms and phrases (as would be expected) were unfamiliar to me, the spacing was just wrong.
I don't care what you are trying to prove, an exchange of dialogue should not be done all in one sentence.

Imagine two people talking:

"Hello, it is nice to see you."
"And you too, a lovely day we are having."
"Quite! And did you catch the game on the telly last night?"
"No, I'm afraid I missed it. Who won?"

Logical. It switches back and forth between the two speakers with clear distinctions, even without explicit he-said she-saids (though that would be nice, as it can get confusing it someone were to pause and not say anything, throwing off the balance.)

But in the story it is written such:
Hello, it is nice to see you, And you too, a lovely day we are having, Quite, and did you catch the game on the telly last night, No, I'm afraid I missed it, who won

And this will go on for (quite literally) a page or more.
Nothing to break the speakers except capitals(sometimes) and commas. No periods, no quotation marks, no spacing.
I think the most annoying times are when (as shown above) someone has a comma in their speech. Did the person change, or just part of the sentence?

Regardless of these technical issues, the story was engaging (enough for me to keep fighting the book) and was well written (as far as pacing and plot points go).

~*~ Also has been made into a major motion picture, if you did not know.

Bookmarks - This World We Live In

Hey guys, back with another segment of Bookmarks! I've tried to build up a cushion of posts, so maybe this weekly thing will work out. Who knows.

Next on the docket is a teen novel, it is This World We Live In by Susan Beth Pfeffer, and is apparently the third companion in a series (Last Surviors). Oops.
(Interestingly a quote on the rear cover by the School Library Journal says this: "It is a testament to the author's skill that This World We Live In can be read as a stand alone novel. In fact, new readers might not even realise that the earlier titles exist.")

Regardless, copyright 2010, published by Graphia, apparently an "imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing company". Yep.

Anyway. This was a reasonably good novel.

Set a year after the moon was hit by a massive meteor that altered it's orbit and started wreaking havoc on the earth's various systems.

Yes, it is a post-apocalyptic(PA) novel.

Set in diary format, we are listening to a 16-18 year old girl's life as things change for her and her family once more (as if the world coming to an end wasn't enough change!).
First winter starts to break, and the rains come. Then family arrives and bring new challenges and people into the mix.

The novel reeks of mother-daughter conflict, and left me wanting to yell at both of them to just f'ing talk to each other. A fair bit happens in the novel, and as stated in that quote, it is a perfectly good stand-alone novel.

All in all it was... mediocre. I liked it well enough, and read it through with no difficulty or slogging. But it is not raising any large emotions by any means.

A good read if you need a diary or alt-format book, an acceptable choice for a PA novel, especially for those just beginning to dip into the genre.

~*~ If you are interested in reading the previous two they are Life as We Knew It and The Dead & The Gone, both by Susan Pfeffer.

Three little reviews:`

As part of a school project I had to write some little reviews of some teen books (which, face it, are the bulk of my reading age group). I thought I would share them here, in keeping with that desire to mix in elements from my last blog with this one. (Though I have still not interspersed those posts). Click-through pictures for an Amazon link.

The First Rule of Torching: Cleanse with fire.

Z by Michael Thomas Ford is a fast paced action packed story of life after the zombie wars.

Josh is an average teenager, fifteen years old and loves video games. His favorite game is the virtual reality game of the zombie war, where he can play a Torcher and annihilate zombies.But w

hen another player of the game contacts him and asks if he would like to play for real, he is putting more than his mother's disapproval on the line. People are disappearing and his friends are acting strange. And then there is

the mysterious drug “Z" that he is growing more and more defendant on…

Mitty hates homework...

Especially his biology paper. So when he finds three old medical textbooks in his mother's decorating things, with an envelope of scabs in one, he thinks he is saved. Until he starts reading up on the disease. As things start speeding up and spiraling out of control, Mitty believes he has small pox, and that he is putting his home at risk. But before he knows it, he is more at risk than he could have ever imagined.

A fast and consuming book, Code Orange by Caroline Cooney will have you on the edge of your seat. Interspersed with real facts about small pox and viruses in general, it is also very informative.

Welcome to the Apocalypse…

If you enjoyed the Hunger Games you will love the story of Deuce. In the tunnels under New York tribes of people live, fight and die by rules set out by the oldest among them. Deuce has just recieved her name and has become a Huntress. Given the strange outsider Fade as a partner, Deuce's once easy to understand existence is widened and broken all together. On the run from her Tribe Deuce has to face the notions she once considered paramount to survival.

A steady and engrossing adventure novel, Enclave by Ann Aguire is the first book in the Razorland series.

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Anyway. If any of those sound interesting, feel free to go pick them up, or ask me about them. I quite enjoyed them all, but if they aren't to your taste no hard feelings.

And of course you are welcome to leave me a comment with the kind of book you like and I can try and recommend you one.