![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ruAmazingly, I've actually managed to finish a couple of books recently! I'm so pleased with myself. <3 So, some quick reviews are in order!
Blood Music by Greg Bear: I finished this book in only a few days, thanks to the fact that 1.) It's fairly short and 2.) I couldn't put it DOWN. Seriously. It gripped me early on and wouldn't let me go until I finished it. In a nutshell, it's about a guy who develops a microbe with intelligence, and in order to save it, injects it into his own bloodstream, where it evolves into a plague that's able to communicate with its hosts. That idea alone got me interested in the book, but what the plague does to its hosts suddenly made it a serious page-turner as I wondered what the microbe was up to--after all, it was THINKING.
About two-thirds of the way through, it took a turn for the WTF-WEIRD. Seriously. The ending made me think of other stories like End of Eva or the Narnia: The Last Battle. It completely messed with my head and left me going "BWUH?". But despite that, I still loved it. It got me thinking, and I think it got my juices flowing in other venues (The idea of thought dictating the laws of physics totally makes me think I should adapt that for Sadriel somehow). Since the book was written in 1985, it shows its age, but that doesn't stop it from being a fascinating story. If you're looking for something different and don't mind having your head messed with, I'd recommend giving it a try.
The Planets by Dava Sobel: After Blood Music I wanted something that was both on a much larger scale and wouldn't grip me as hard so that I could actually put it down and do something more productive once in a while. The Planets gave me both. It's basically a treatise on the planets of our solar system (including Pluto <3), sprinkled with the occasional anecdote, such as about the scientists that worked on it or the missions that explored the planet in question. It's light and fun, and goes a lot into how the planet was discovered (in most cases anyway), the nature of the planet, and so on. Sobel mixes it up too, with some chapters written from a different perspective. The Mars chapter, for example, is told from the perspective of a meteorite from the planet. The novel's not very deep, but it's educational, and harboring a love of the planets myself, I enjoyed it.
Next up to get off my gargantuan reading list: Slant, also by Greg Bear.
Blood Music by Greg Bear: I finished this book in only a few days, thanks to the fact that 1.) It's fairly short and 2.) I couldn't put it DOWN. Seriously. It gripped me early on and wouldn't let me go until I finished it. In a nutshell, it's about a guy who develops a microbe with intelligence, and in order to save it, injects it into his own bloodstream, where it evolves into a plague that's able to communicate with its hosts. That idea alone got me interested in the book, but what the plague does to its hosts suddenly made it a serious page-turner as I wondered what the microbe was up to--after all, it was THINKING.
About two-thirds of the way through, it took a turn for the WTF-WEIRD. Seriously. The ending made me think of other stories like End of Eva or the Narnia: The Last Battle. It completely messed with my head and left me going "BWUH?". But despite that, I still loved it. It got me thinking, and I think it got my juices flowing in other venues (The idea of thought dictating the laws of physics totally makes me think I should adapt that for Sadriel somehow). Since the book was written in 1985, it shows its age, but that doesn't stop it from being a fascinating story. If you're looking for something different and don't mind having your head messed with, I'd recommend giving it a try.
The Planets by Dava Sobel: After Blood Music I wanted something that was both on a much larger scale and wouldn't grip me as hard so that I could actually put it down and do something more productive once in a while. The Planets gave me both. It's basically a treatise on the planets of our solar system (including Pluto <3), sprinkled with the occasional anecdote, such as about the scientists that worked on it or the missions that explored the planet in question. It's light and fun, and goes a lot into how the planet was discovered (in most cases anyway), the nature of the planet, and so on. Sobel mixes it up too, with some chapters written from a different perspective. The Mars chapter, for example, is told from the perspective of a meteorite from the planet. The novel's not very deep, but it's educational, and harboring a love of the planets myself, I enjoyed it.
Next up to get off my gargantuan reading list: Slant, also by Greg Bear.