Arena One by Morgan Rice

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ArenaOneFormat: eBook
Pub. Date: 02/02/2012
Publisher: Morgan Rice
Type: Fiction ~ Library Book
Pages: 300
Read: 5/11/2013
Rating: no hearts

One of my book groups has a monthly challenge. The challenge was dystopian fiction for the month of May. When I put Dystopian in the search feature of the library this book came up. After starting I realized its not dystopian it is post-apocalyptic. Since I had started it I figured I should finish it.

The novel is set in upstate NY after the 2nd world war which included the firing of nuclear missiles. There are roving bands of Slaverunners, looking for people to entertain them in “Arena Fights”. Brooke lives in the Catskills with her sister hiding from these roving bands, one day her sister is captured and taken to NYC. The rest of the story is Brooke chasing after the gang to rescue her teamed up with Ben, whose brother was also taken.

This was the most ridiculous novel I have ever read. I like the action scenes, they flowed quickly but there was so much that was unbelievable that it interfered with my enjoyment of the book. I can’t really explain without giving away spoilers, just to say I’m glad I was able to read this in a day or I would have probably been upset at how much time was wasted reading it.

If you would like to read the other review with spoilers the password is Spoilers.

Library Loot: May 15 to 21

LibraryLootLibrary Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.

I got two books out from the library this week:

RasputinRasputin: The Untold Story by Joseph T. Fuhrmann

Based on new sources—the definitive biography of Rasputin, with revelations about his life, death, and involvement with the Romanovs A century after his death, Grigory Rasputin remains fascinating: the Russian peasant with hypnotic eyes who befriended Tsar Nicholas II and helped destroy the Russian Empire, but the truth about his strange life has never fully been told. Written by the world’s leading authority on Rasputin, this new biography draws on previously closed Soviet archives to offer new information on Rasputin’s relationship with Empress Alexandra, sensational revelations about his sexual conquests, a re-examination of his murder, and more. Based on long-closed Soviet archives and the author’s decades of research, encompassing sources ranging from baptismal records and forgotten police reports to notes written by Rasputin and personal letters Reveals new information on Rasputin’s family history and strange early life, religious beliefs, and multitudinous sexual adventures as well as his relationship with Empress Alexandra, ability to heal the haemophiliac tsarevich, and more Includes many previously unpublished photos, including contemporary studio photographs of Rasputin and samples of his handwriting Written by historian Joesph T. Fuhrmann, a Rasputin expert whose 1990 biography Rasputin: A Life was widely praised as the best on the subject Synthesizing archival sources with published documents, memoirs, and other studies of Rasputin into a single, comprehensive work, Rasputin: The Untold Story will correct a century’s worth of misconception and error about the life and death of the famous Siberian mystic and healer and the decline and fall of Imperial Russia.

???????Baseball’s Natural The Story of Eddie Waitkus by John Theodore

Baseball’s Natural is John Theodore’s true account of the slick-fielding first baseman who played for the Cubs and the Phillies in the 1940s and became immortalized in baseball lore as the inspiration for Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. Eddie Waitkus grew up in Boston and fought in the Pacific theater in World War II. Following the war, Waitkus became one of the most popular players of his era. In 1949, with his career on the rise, his life changed dramatically in a Chicago hotel when a nineteen-year-old shot him in the chest. Waitkus’s dramatic recovery the next year inspired his teammates as the Phillies won the National League pennant. Although Waitkus survived the shooting, he could never outlive it. Through interviews with Waitkus’s family, fellow servicemen, former ballplayers, and childhood friends, and aided by fifteen photographs, Theodore chronicles Waitkus’s remarkable comeback as well as the difficult years following his Major League career.

Living on the Black by John Feinstein

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LivingonBlack

Format: eBook
Pub. Date: 5/1/2008
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 525
Read: 05/11/2013
Rating: Liked it ♥

This is an account of the lives of two major league pitchers, one for the Yankees and one for the Mets during the entire 2007 season, from off-season work to spring training and real baseball.

Before we get to 2007 John Feinstein gives us a history of their lives leading up to this year.

Even though I am a big baseball and Yankee fan I didn’t quite love this book. At one point I remembered how 2007 ended and almost quit. It is incredibly detailed, at time too detailed which tended to make it drag at points. It was an almost game by game narrative, which makes it good that he was writing about pitchers who don’t play every game. The book also contains thoughts and observations from team mates and friends and family members. A very fascinating account of life in the major leagues that I feel could have been shorter than it was.

Still if you are a baseball fan I would recommend it.

Ascendant by Diana Peterfreund

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AscendantKiller Unicorns #2

Format: eBook
Pub. Date: 2010
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Type: Fiction ~ Library Book
Pages: 292
Read: 05/07/2013
Rating: Liked it (barely)

This book did not thrill me as much as the first did. I thought that the author was trying to make this as realistic as possible as in, “What would happen if all of a sudden unicorn’s were real?” That the only thing different about this world is it has unicorns. That being the case, in addition to the hunters, you now have a group trying to ‘save’ the unicorn. There is even a PETA like group protesting in this book and Astrid’s cousin is trying to get Unicorn’s declared an endangered species, Astrid’s mother is still being a total drip.

There are loose ends that never get explained, and people act out of character. I don’t know if there is a third book after this, I don’t think I will be reading it if there is.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

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BigSleepFormat: eBook
Pub. Date: 1939
Publisher: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1939
Type: Fiction ~ Library Book
Pages: 185
Read: 5/3/2013
Rating: Liked it ♥♡

This is considered the start of the modern detective story. I also heard that about The Murders in the Rue Morgue, but no matter. This is a very enjoyable read. At 185 pages I finished it in a day. There are a ton of characters, and one murder that, according to rumor, Chandler forgot about when he was writing the book so it is unsolved. The book starts with Philip Marlowe being hired to deal with a blackmailer, who ends up getting murdered. A lot of people get murdered and Marlowe is in the thick of it.

Chandlers descriptions are vivid and sharp, his protagonist is a no nonsense guy with apparently no sentimentality. Some have described this book as confusing and convoluted, I thought it was busy and filled with characters but thought the story line flowed, I didn’t have much trouble following it. I recommend this book.

Rampant by Diana Peterfreund

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5495243Killer Unicorns #1

Format: eBook
Pub. Date: 2009
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Type: Fiction ~ Library Book
Pages: 305
Read: 05/01/2013
Rating: Liked it ♥♡

“Real unicorns are venomous, man-eating monsters with huge fangs and razor-sharp horns. Fortunately, they’ve been extinct for a hundred and fifty years.

Or not.”

When I saw “Killer Unicorns” I thought, “This is the book for me.” I’ve always liked books that completely pervert fairytales because fairytales are misogynistic and promote child abuse.

This is a young adult book, surprisingly it doesn’t have a lot of teenager angst. Astrid talks about her crazy mother and then realizes that her mother’s not so crazy, mainly because she sees a Unicorn, and it attacks her boyfriend. He then dumps her and she heads to Rome to be trained to hunt unicorns, because her life is ruined and she might as well enter a convent.

It’s a lot for a teenage girl to handle it, Astrid manages, finding strength she didn’t know she had and help from a very unexpected source. And danger from someone she and the other hunters thought they could trust. Overall I enjoyed this book and have already started on book 2.

While this is billed as young adult, it does deal with some adult issues, one in particular is very serious and can be disturbing, it is something very common with teenage girls unfortunately and one that I saw coming. I would not recommend this for very young teenagers.

Library Loot: April 24 to April 30

LibraryLootLibrary Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.

One of my book groups is doing a Young Adult book read this month. I wasn’t going to participate, but then I was on the Library website and saw this e-book. It looked intriguing so I got it. I love the delightful twist it puts on a fantasy staple. But if you have ever read the Dresden Files you already know that Unicorns that are not sweet little ponies.

5495243Rampant by Diana Peterfreund
Forget everything you ever knew about unicorns…

Real unicorns are venomous, man-eating monsters with huge fangs and razor-sharp horns. Fortunately, they’ve been extinct for a hundred and fifty years.

Or not.

Astrid had always scoffed at her eccentric mother’s stories about killer unicorns. But when one of the monsters attacks her boyfriend—thereby ruining any chance of him taking her to the prom—Astrid finds herself headed to Rome to train as a unicorn hunter at the ancient cloisters the hunters have used for centuries.

However, at the cloisters all is not what it seems. Outside, the unicorns wait to attack. And within, Astrid faces other, unexpected threats: from the crumbling, bone-covered walls that vibrate with a terrible power to the hidden agendas of her fellow hunters to—perhaps most dangerously of all—her growing attraction to a handsome art student … an attraction that could jeopardize everything. From Goodreads

Abandoned books

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GulagThe Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I really tried to finish this book, I was determined. Then I got sick, when I got back to it after getting over being sick I couldn’t get back into it. Then a person on GoodReads said, “Don’t bother.” or something like that. Normally I don’t let statements like that influence me, but I was already getting tired of it. So this book has gone on my “dnf” shelf on Goodreads.




UlyssUlysses by James Joyce

Literature, as Joyce tells us through the character of Stephen Dedalus, ‘is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man’. Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, Ulysses has survived bowderlization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishingly wide-ranging allusions confirm its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his introduction Ulysses is ‘An endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin on 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.’

This book I never really got into, I gave it a good try, but it just never engaged me. It’s on my e-reader, I own it, so I might get back to it. I went back to Jane Eyre after 20 years so there’s a good chance I might get back to this book.

4214 (1)Life of Pi by Yann Martel

This was another book that came to me highly recommended. So I tried it. It was rather slow going at first, I kept waiting for the things I had read about in the reviews. This is one of those books that leaves breadcrumbs. I was following the bread crumbs getting interested, then I got sick. When I’m sick I can’t read books, so I started reading reviews, unfortunately I read a book with a spoiler, normally spoilers don’t bother me, but this time, it ruined the book for me. It was a library book, so I can get it again if not knowing how it ‘really ends’ starts to drive me mad.

Ted and Ann by Rebecca Morris

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12856638The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy
Format: eBook (Kindle)
Pub. Date: 9/16/2011
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Type: Non-Fiction, True Crime
Pages: 256 pages
Read: 4/17/2013
Rating: Liked it ♥♡

Some people were rather amazed that this is the first book about Ted Bundy I have read. For some reason I have made a conscience effort to not read about Ted Bundy.

It seems important to mention that because I may have liked this book more than others because there are many details about Ted Bundy I am not familiar with. That being said, I would say this book was not a ‘page turner’, but it was interesting. It dealt mainly with the aftereffects of the disappearance of Ann Burr. Mainly how her family coped with her disappearance, the investigation, how the police felt they had ‘failed the family’. Although there is no evidence to support it, there are some people who feel Ted Bundy is responsible for her disappearance and death. This is brought out and the reasons these people believe it.

This book also contains some historical information about Ted Bundy, his parents, his childhood habits and so on. I would recommend this book.

New books

My friends came down to the city yesterday, after getting tea in SoHo, one of my friends wanted to get her nails done. She suggested I take the others to the Strand to wait. That is never a good idea. I bought six books, but since it was the Strand, I only spent $20. Of the six books two were brand-new, and 4 were hard-backs, one of the new books was list priced at $24.95.

  • Bad Seeds in the Big Apple ~ Patrick Downey
  • All Around the Town ~ Herbert Asbury
  • The Boleyn Inheritance ~ Philippa Gregory
  • Faces of Poverty ~ Jill Duerr Berrick
  • Stolen Lives ~ Malika Oufkir
  • Debating Sexual Correctness ~ Adele M. Stan

What books have you gotten lately?