{"id":13736,"date":"2011-06-14T13:21:46","date_gmt":"2011-06-14T17:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2011\/06\/14\/13736.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:59:58","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:59:58","slug":"short-book-reports-yasf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2011\/06\/14\/short-book-reports-yasf\/","title":{"rendered":"Short Book Reports: YASF"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger has not been doing Book Reports lately, as y&#8217;all may possibly have noticed. I have still been reading books, mind you, and even keeping a log of them, although I have missed several, I&#8217;m sure. As usual. But I haven&#8217;t been blogging each book.\n<P>That&#8217;s because I was finding the mandatory (well, with a self-imposed mandate) blogging dispiriting, and I was resenting it. I did expect to report on books when I felt that I had something to say. Perhaps I just haven&#8217;t had anything to say. Well, and I hope there aren&#8217;t too many of y&#8217;all gently reading this Tohu Bohu out of hopes to read something about books, because the pickings have been sparse.\n<P>So I do want to go back and mention a few books I have read in the first half of the year.\n<ul><li><a href=\"http:\/\/us.penguingroup.com\/nf\/Book\/BookDisplay\/0,,9781595141996,00.html?Zorgamazoo_Robert_Paul_Weston\">Zorgamazoo<\/a>, by Robert Paul Weston is a fun and silly Young Adult fantasy, really aimed more at the pre-teen readers, that is (a) lavishly illustrated and cleverly laid out, and (2) told entirely in rhyme. It&#8217;s nearly 300 pages, and while I did tire a bit of the anapest couplets, still.<\/li><li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/books\/imprints\/childrens\/the-midnight-folk\/\">The Midnight Folk<\/a> is one of those hugely important and influential works of children&#8217;s fantasy that have largely disappeared from the actual shelves. I had never heard of it&#8212;I&#8217;m not sure I had really heard of John Masefield, but if I had, it was in the context of poetry, probably of the Great War. There were some utterly charming bits, but I got tired of the dreamscape stuff pretty quickly. <\/li><li>I don&#8217;t know, now, whether I really am a huge fan of Cornelia Funke; I may dislike as many books as I like (that I&#8217;ve read). Alas, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hachettebookgroup.com\/kids_books_9780316056090.htm\">Reckless<\/a> falls in to the former category. <\/li><li>I finally read <A href=\"http:\/\/store.scholastic.com\/webapp\/wcs\/stores\/servlet\/ProductDisplay_Keys+To+The+Kingdom%2C+The+%237%3A+Lord+Sunday_42690_-1_10052_10051\">Lord Sunday<\/a>, the last book in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scholastic.com\/titles\/keys\/index.htm\">Keys to the Kingdom<\/a> series by Garth Nix. Glad that&#8217;s over. There were some very good things in the series&#8212;there were even some good things in this book&#8212;but on the whole, no, it didn&#8217;t work. Found myself not remembering bits of the earlier books that I probably needed to follow this one, and not caring. <\/li><li>I suppose <a href=\"http:\/\/www.harperteen.com\/books\/Shall-Wear-Midnight-Terry-Pratchett\/?isbn=9780061433047\">I Shall Wear Midnight<\/a> is being marketed as a Young Adult novel, which pretty much means it <i>is<\/i> a YA novel, as there isn&#8217;t a better definition. Still, I don&#8217;t see what distinguishes this from the not-YA Discworld series. Well, it&#8217;s better than many of them, but many of them are better than many of them, because there are a lot of them, so only the very worst ones aren&#8217;t. But this is one of the better ones. <\/li><li><a href=\"http:\/\/us.penguingroup.com\/nf\/Book\/BookDisplay\/0,,9780142409312,00.html?The_Beasts_of_Clawstone_Castle_Eva_Ibbotson\">The Beasts of Clawstone Castle<\/a> is an excellent example of Eva Ibbotson&#8217;s younger-oriented stuff. The only other one I seem to have blogged is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/11\/21\/10063.html\">Which Witch<\/a>. I know I read <a href=\"http:\/\/us.penguingroup.com\/nf\/Book\/BookDisplay\/0,,9780142402320,00.html?Not_Just_a_Witch_Eva_Ibbotson\">Not Just a Witch<\/a> at some point as well, and I must have read others, but none of the names are looking familiar just now. <\/li><li><a href=\"http:\/\/bookwizard.scholastic.com\/tbw\/viewWorkDetail.do?workId=1315490\">The Clockwork Three<\/a>, by Matthew J. Kirby, failed to charm me. Not sure why. It ought to have. And once I got a fair way into it, I enjoyed it without being charmed&#8212;but it&#8217;s the sort of book that ought to have been charming, and charmed I was not. <\/li><li>The only thing that I did not like about <a href=\"http:\/\/us.penguingroup.com\/nf\/Book\/BookDisplay\/0,,9780399244544,00.html\">The Ruins of Gorlan<\/a>, the first in a Ranger&#8217;s Apprentice series by John Flanagan, was a scene where the school bullies are vanquished by being beaten to a pulp. Violence, it seems, was the answer. Which made YHB quite uncomfortable, and I didn&#8217;t really trust the book from that point on. On the other hand&#8212;oops, I forgot the prologue or whatever it was, the first few pages which were nearly unreadable. If I hadn&#8217;t had a recommendation, those pages would have stopped me cold. But I persevered, as was rewarded for it. <\/li><\/ul>\n<p>OK, that&#8217;s the lot of YASF that weren&#8217;t rereads, and that I remembered to jot down, so far this year.\n <p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger is willing to write further on any of those, if GRs have questions, but isn&#8217;t otherwise inspired.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13736"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19367,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13736\/revisions\/19367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}