Longklaw.com

I’ve knocked out 2 books recently. Big deal!

The first one was The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. I became interested in it because the movie is coming out in December and Peter Jackson made the movie. The story starts in 1973 and it’s about a teenage girl that was raped and murdered by a neighbor. She’s up in her own personalized heaven, which she calls “my heaven”, and watches over her family and her killer over the next several years. She can’t directly affect anything on Earth, but there are times when people see her or feel that she’s near. The book is mostly about her family and friends as they deal with their grief over losing her. It’s very melancholy at times. It’s a pretty good book, but I’ll probably like watching as a movie more than liked reading the book.

The second one was Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer. Sawyer is the guy that wrote Flashforward. For some reason I thought this was a sequel to Flashforward, but it’s not. It takes place about 40 years in the future. In 2009 (their past), we received a transmission from aliens and we sent a response. This book is centered on the response they sent to our response. An extremely rich guy, who is a major benefactor to SETI, wants the woman who translated the original message to work on the new message. She and her husband are in their 80s now and don’t think they have much time left. The benefactor pays for her and her husband to have a rejuvenation procedure, which is called a “rollback”. They decide to reverse their bodies back to age 25. The procedure works for her husband and not for her. The book focuses on her struggling to decrypt the code and him trying to adjust to being young again while having a much older wife. You do see a lot of flashbacks to back when she was working on the original 2009 message. I didn’t like those parts as much. It’s a pretty good book overall. Short and sweet.

• Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself
• Joe Abercrombie, Before They Are Hanged
• Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings
• World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks
• Serenity Found, Jane Espenson
• The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
• Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Stanislaw Lem
• The Stormcaller, Tom Lloyd
• The Day Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko
• The Twilight Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko
• The Final Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko
• Inside Straight, George R.R. Martin
• Busted Flush, George R.R. Martin
• The Final Crusade, Chaite Naasiri
• The Darker Mask, George Phillips
• Unholy Domain, Dan Ronco
• The Tales of Beedle the Bard, J.K. Rowling
• The Final Empire, Brandon Sanderson
• The Well of Ascension, Brandon Sanderson
• The Hero of Ages, Brandon Sanderson
• The Gathering Storm, Brandon Sanderson
• Flashfoward, Robert J. Sawyer
• Flashfoward, Robert J. Sawyer
• The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
• Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare