Another monthish, another update...
Recently Read:
Meddling Kids (Edgar Cantero, horror/humor/mystery, in hardcover): In 1977, the four kids of the Blyton Summer Detective Club (and the dog, Sean) unmasked the culprit behind a series of monster sightings at Sleepy Lake in rural Oregon... a caper that got their pictures in the paper and everything, the crowning moment of their friendship - and their last case. Years later, in 1990, the kids are all grown up - but still haunted by that last case, particularly the things they saw that night in the old abandoned mansion that were too realistic to possibly have been thrown together by a half-baked crook in a cheap monster costume. Finally, wandering tomboy Andy decides enough is enough: she rounds up the other surviving members of the group (leader Peter having overdosed at the peak of a Hollywood career, though his ghost still haunts fellow member Nate), including a descendant of the original Sean, and heads back to Blyton Hills to re-open the case. This time, they find themselves meddling in something more sinister than a petty crook, a caper with Lovecraftian overtones and a villain they just might not live long enough to stop...
This is an odd tale, an homage to and sendup of classic teen detective series like Scooby-Doo and Hardy Boys, told in a borderline-hallucinatory style that often pauses to mention camera angles or close-ups, sometimes breaks dialog into script format, and even busts the fourth wall to acknowledge line breaks and chapter endings. This isn't set in Earth as we know it, but a sort of darker, grittier overlay on the cartoon-sketch world that old kid detective series inhabited. The characters are a little older, a slight bit deeper, but still caricatures at heart, befitting their world and the caper at hand. Some elements didn't quite come together right, and the ending clunked a little, but overall I found it a unique and worthwhile read, even if it wasn't quite up my alley. (And I'll admit I was attracted by the retro Day-Glo cover...)
Frindle (Andrew Clements, children's fiction, in paperback): Nick Allen doesn't mean to be a troublemaker; he just gets his big ideas and has to test them, plus he finds manipulating teachers more stimulating than the in-class lessons. In fifth grade, he finally meets his match in the legendary Mrs. Granger, a sharp lady who is the first to effectively counter his usual antics. An assignment to find out the origin of words leads Nick to his greatest idea (and teacher tweak) ever: he will invent his own new word, "frindle" instead of "pen." Even Nick becomes astonished at just how far this idea of his goes - through the school, the town, and across the nation.
This is a nice exploration of word origins, told in a story of student vs. teacher and innovation vs. tradition. Mrs. Granger insists that the dictionary holds all words in the language - but the words only mean anything if everyone agrees they do, and the language changes all the time despite being printed in a big, authoritarian book. Nick could've easily come across as a brat (at least, to grown-up readers), but he's rather sympathetic, a boy who is clearly underchallenged by the system and thus tends to turn his classrooms into real-world labs for his many big ideas... the kind of kid who might change the world someday unless stomped down by authority. (Perhaps the greatest flight of fancy Clements indulges in here is Nick not being stomped down harder and more thoroughly, as happens far too often in real life.) The ending shows how the experiment changed the lives of both boy and teacher with a rather sweet finale. Would make a good companion read with Bruce Coville's My Teacher is an Alien series (the premise of which involves how human children have spectacular potential that is usually destroyed during grade school.)
Starfire: A Red Peace (Book 1 of the Starfire trilogy, Spencer Ellsworth, sci-fi, on Kindle): After years of war across the sundered galaxy, the Resistance - rebellious vat-born crossbreed soldiers led by John Starfire - have finally thrown down their former masters, the blueblood Imperial humans. Bt the slaughter doesn't stop there, as Starfire places the entire human species in the cross-hairs for the next phase of "consolidation." One of Starfire's officers and a lowly crossbreed star pilot may be all that stands between the Resistance and a galaxy-wide fate worse than mere genocide...
A fast-paced space opera with more than a whiff of George Lucas about it, Starfire grabbed me fairly quickly and never let go. The characters are more Han Solo than Luke Skywalker, both jaded by harsh existences, yet forced to rise above their cynicism and and personal concerns when they realize the greater threat. I expect I'll follow at least through the second book.
Currently Reading:
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Frans de Waal, science/animals, on Nook/in paperback): An exploration of animal intelligence and consciousness, and how the notion of human uniqueness becomes shakier with each new discovery.
I started reading this on Nook via Overdrive, and wound up buying the paperback book. An interesting look at the field of animal cognition, a field tainted for too long (and still tainted) by antiquated notions of humans being the "top rung" of an imaginary ladder, or somehow separate from all other species. A few of these experiments were touched on in Virginia Morell's Animal Wise, but many here are new to me. de Waal's background in primate studies adds a different dimension than Morell's book, too. Enjoying it so far.
Imaginary Animals (Boria Sax, folklore/mythology, in hardcover): An examination of imaginary beasts and beings created by humans throughout the ages.
It looked like a decent bestiary-type book, looking at the mythic origins and "evolution" of beasts like unicorns and dragons through various cultures. Unfortunately, it keeps sidetracking itself with navel-gazing. It's like a book written that kid in class who, assigned to write a report on trees, instead composes a twenty-page essay questioning the origins and psychological connotations of the word "tree," speculating what a tree itself might think of this assignment or if it acknowledges fellow woody plants as trees, and asking whether anyone can definitively prove that the world in which trees exist, or students to write papers about trees, actually isn't just a passing figment of imagination. The author is also prone to making odd leaps of thought, such as a declaration that some monstrous human hybrids embody mankind's unconscious conflicts over eating animal meat. Where the heck did that come from, and why is that the only possibly interpretation? Tooth-grinding at times, though when it does talk about imaginary animals, it can be okay, touching on some beasts/beings I don't recall my other bestiaries covering. It also has several new-to-me illustrations of various imaginary animals. I'm having to take this one in small doses.
I'm also poking at a title on my Kindle, but - despite it apparently being an award-winning Western - it's just ticking so many cliche/stereotype boxes I'm having a real hard time getting into it. (Not long ago, a character was about to make a plot-progressing declaration... only to suffer a coughing fit, and the other character decided a walking tour of their town and a change of venue was called for, effectively padding the story by a few pages. My first thought was: was this a NaNoWriMo book? That's the kind of pointless padding one throws in on a slow day to meet the daily word count... but that's supposed to be first draft stuff, not published novel stuff.) I'm probably going to give up on it, as I have plenty or more interesting books in queue.