11. Skulduggery Pleasant, by Derek Landy

I've got 5 books to report on, so I am starting with the easiest review.

This book cover is hilarious, y/y?

Kids are checking this out left and right at the library, and I found myself on lunch break with nothing to read, so I picked it up. It is about this chick who leads a boring life and then her uncle dies, leaving her all his stuff, and then a LIVING SKELETON named Skulduggery Pleasant comes and saves her from some dude who tries to kill her. Turns out there is this whole huge world of magic people hanging out in the world (except anyone can learn magic it seems like, but most people never notice that they can) and there is some big bad dude out to steal everyone's magic and enslave the nonmagic population. Oh, and lolz, if you though Lord Voldemort was a dumb name, the Big Bad in this book is called Nefarian Serpine. SERIOUSLY?
It's times like these when I am completely astounded by the genius of one Joanne Katherine Rowling. It seems pretty simple to come up with some sort of semiplausible (plausible as fantasy, not reality), world but really difficult to create one that isn't really dumb and with a million holes in it. This book was fun to read. I read it on the plane to Nicaragua and I was thoroughly wrapped up in wanting to know what happened next, but that isn't the only thing that makes a book good. There were no real layers to it. I made no bonds with the characters and in no way did the world created by the author seem real at any point. One mark of a good book is that it sucks you in and you forget you are looking at words on pages because you are seeing the world of the novel as though it were real in your mind's eye. This is hard for any book, but even more hard for a fantasy/sci-fi book, because it has to convince you, even if just for a moment where the story is getting really intense, that it is real. Not real as in within the laws of physics, but real as in you are not thinking "I am reading a book about ___," you are thinking only of what is happening in the story. Harry Potter does that (and of course many others, like LOTR, but that's an entire other league of detailed insanity). JKR puts so much backstory into it that there's not a question you could ask that she wouldn't have the perfect answer lined up for. Derek Landy, with this book, didn't try that hard.

I am going to talk about this even more when I review a book called The Dark is Rising.

It did deal with some pretty neat concepts, though. I like stories that place a lot of importance on names. I have a half baked J novel concept about the magic of names in my head. In this book they talk about how if you know something's real name you can have power over it. In the context of the book it is magic, of course, but it is one of those things that is really just a metaphor for real life. You know, if you know someone's true self you can use it for good or for evil. In the book, everyone has 3 names: your true name (all of them are located in this heavily protected book that no one can read so no one actually knows this), your given name, and your chosen name.

I was pretty pumped about how the main character got to choose her own name. Her given name was Stephanie, and I really hate that name, so I was jazzed she'd get to pick something else so I would get to stop reading "Stephanie," but then she went and picked Valkyrie Cain. Ugh. Skulduggery is a cool name, though. Props, skeleton dude.

So basically it was fun and if there was a sequel (he sort of sets it up for one) I might read it and if they make a movie I might watch it, but I'm not going to be upset if that day never comes.

Pages: 400
Time: Apr 11-14
Rating: 6, maybe 7.5 if I was 12 and the girl wasn't named Stephanie.

4. Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy

I was warned before I read this that it would be violent and gross. It is a good thing I have a strong stomach. I'd read The Road previously, and loved it, but violence has its place in a post-apocalyptic novel. I mean, if the world ended and people weren't roasting babies over an open fire I'd be surprised. But Child of God is just the story of a guy whose house gets repossessed and he gets pissed, wanders off in the woods, goes crazy and starts killing people.
It took me a while to get into the groove of the narration and until the last 20 pages to decide I liked it.

The barren, simple punctuationless prose that made me love The Road seemed less appropriate here. It actually made it hard to concentrate, because I didn't always know what was going on. It was really pretty though. Well, as pretty as a description of necrophilia can be.

I'm not sure what happened, but in the last chapter or so I started really feeling for the guy, and all of a sudden I really enjoyed reading it. I sort of felt tricked, like he'd set it up that way. Like you're supposed to be grossed out by ol' Lester Ballard, and then you sort of sympathize with him in a weird sort of way, and then you think, sort of sarcastically, "well, I guess he is a child of God, just as I am. Ah." I can't decide if it really just got good at the end, or if it just takes that long to really get the book. So I spent most of the book hoping I'd hurry up and get to the good part, while still marking passages that sounded beautiful, and then all of a sudden at the end I loved it.

Either way, McCarthy is sort of a poetic genius. The book is one long ramble about titties and gunshots that doesn't differentiate dialogue from exposition, yes. But it is a really well written ramble.

I'll just post a bit of it. Here he's in a cave, wondering if he'll be able to find his way out.

In the night he heard hounds and called to them but the enormous echo of his voice in the cavern filled him with fear and he would not call again. He heard the mice scurry in the dark. Perhaps they'd nest in his skull, spawn their tiny bald and mewling whelps in the lobed caverns where his brains had been. His bones polished clean as eggshells, centipedes sleeping in their marrowed flutes, his ribs curling slender and whitely like a bone flower in the dark stone bowl.

Damn.

Pages:197
Time: Jan 23-Feb 6
Rating: 6 for subject, Maybe 8 for how much I like the way McCarthy makes a sentence.