Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Finished it.

Great book.

Do I really have to tell you that?

Storm Front

This book I actually picked up by accident looking for a different book by the same title but different author. (Virginia Anderson wrote the book I ended up reading.)

Anyway, Storm Front is a suspense/mystery type of book. It can sort of be suspenseful if you accept without question the utterly bizarre behavior of the characters, otherwise it is just sort of lame. The mystery part of it is a complete failure. It seems to me the author got to the climax of the book where the murderer had to be revealed without any sort of plan, and so she just picked the least likely person and tried to tie it all together (and failed to) afterwards.

This book is really not worth anyone's time.

A Dirty Job

After spending most of the summer reading children's novels (Harry Potter, Coraline, Discworld) this was a nice reminder of adult literature.

As a fan of the darker side of humor, I found this book absurdly hilarious. I am quite assured there is no deeper moral message, no themes that have to be analyzed, nothing that would make me re-evaluate my life, but rather this book was just written to be funny.

You will probably find future posts concerning other books by Christopher Moore.

Fragile Things

As far as I can tell, this is the Neil Gaiman's second and most recent compilation of short stories. Personally, I didn't like it as much as Smoke and Mirrors, but it has a few high points. Fairy Reel is a good poem, Bitter Grounds is a story I felt I related to all too much (particularly the first paragraph.) But, probably the best story in this compilation is the last one, The Monarch of the Glen.

This last story continues with the character Shadow out of Gaiman's novel American Gods, which allowed the character depth that usually can't be achieved due to the limitations of short stories being short.