Book #103 of 2016:
How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell (How to Train Your Dragon #1)
Very different and substantially worse than its movie adaptation. (And also far less diverse – no female characters have lines, and neither Hiccup nor Toothless have disabilities as they do in the film.) The audiobook was elevated by David Tennant’s superb narration, but the story itself isn’t nearly as clever as it thinks it is.
★★☆☆☆
Book #102 of 2016:
The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen (The Ascendance Trilogy #1)
The False Prince has a crackerjack plot, focusing around a group of orphans collected in secret and competing to be the one chosen by their new master to impersonate the missing heir to their kingdom’s throne. It feels a little like The Lies of Locke Lamora in its audacious impersonation schemes, but the protagonist that kept coming to mind as I read this book was actually Darrow from the Red Rising series. Like him, the orphan Sage excels at thinking his way out of tight spaces, creating opportunities where the reader and other characters least expect it. I did see a few of the twists coming, but Sage is such an engaging character that I didn’t really mind. I can’t wait to see where the story goes after this.
★★★★☆
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Movie #19 of 2016:
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)
Much like The Search for Spock, it seems like not a whole lot happens in this film. It’s basically just Spock’s brother trying to recruit the Enterprise crew into joining his weird cult thing, with no real stakes or clear reason for bringing back these characters yet again.
I’ve been surprised by how different the TOS movie series is from the show that preceded it. I like them both – okay, I like certain sections of both – but I really was expecting the movies to just be like longer episodes of the show, kind of how TAS was essentially just shorter episodes. But the movie franchise really is its own thing. It feels like a very distinct series from the show, and this is unfortunately one of the weaker installments.
★★☆☆☆
Movie #18 of 2016:
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
I really used to think people were joking about the Star Trek movies, when they said that the even ones were good and the odd ones were bad. But that’s honestly exactly how it’s been shaping up so far. I was expecting Star Trek IV to be SUPER goofy, based on its ridiculous premise. I mean, time travel back to 1980s earth to rescue some whales? I knew about that even before I saw my first Star Trek episode, and I think I had just assumed this whole time that that was where the original series jumped the shark. But it’s actually something of a high point, with great character work, plot, and action mixed in with the expected humor.
★★★★☆
Book #17 of 2016:
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
I feel as though this movie just kind of… happened, without much happening. It’s frustrating that it basically undoes the ending of the previous film too, which retroactively weakens that one somewhat. And it spends practically the whole runtime getting to that point — It’s like that ridiculous section in Doctor Who: The End of Time that jumps through all these hoops to show how the Master survived his apparent death, only, like, stretched out into an entire feature film.
★★☆☆☆
Book #101 of 2016:
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
I think there are probably three groups of people that will get something out of this book: 1) long-distance runners, 2) aspiring novelists, and 3) fans of Haruki Murakami’s own novels. Only being in the first category myself, I wasn’t really hooked on what Murakami had to say here, as he ponders the connections between his running and writing habits. But it is something of a novelty to read a memoir focused on running, and I think most runners will recognize a bit of themselves in these essays.
★★★☆☆
Book #100 of 2016:
Mastiff by Tamora Pierce (Beka Cooper #3)
Beka Cooper’s final case is also her biggest, with the Tortall guardswoman chasing after a kidnapped prince all over the country. But although it’s been fun to watch Beka grow in both competence and confidence as this series progressed, Mastiff is somewhat lacking as her story’s finale. We’ve never been told a lot about the politics of this period in the realm’s history, which makes the stakes of the kidnapping feel less urgent than they should. There’s also a last-minute betrayal that doesn’t feel adequately set up either, plus several lingering plot threads from the two earlier books that don’t really get resolved. As fun as it always is to follow Cooper on a hunt, it’s hard to say she’s going out on top of her game.
This book: ★★★☆☆
Overall series: ★★★★☆
Book ranking: 2 > 1 > 3
Book #99 of 2016:
Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, the Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22 by Erica Heller
Erica Heller has definitely inherited her father’s droll sense of humor, and she uses it to good effect in this memoir of their family life. I’ve read several of Joseph Heller’s novels before, including his most famous work that gives this one its title, but I went into this book fairly ignorant of anything about the man’s personal biography. As it turns out, he was – perhaps unsurprisingly – a complicated and contradictory person, but his daughter presents a clear-eyed portrait of the man alongside her own personal reflections. An interesting read for any Heller fan.
★★★☆☆
Book #98 of 2016:
Linger by Maggie Stiefvater (The Wolves of Mercy Falls #2)
This book was sadder than the first one in the Wolves of Mercy Falls series, but it also had less in the way of ridiculous teenage hormones, so that was a nice change. Plus I really appreciated how it dealt with teen/parent fights in that all-too-rare way that made both sides seem reasonable. These books do seem to resemble Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle series, in that they get better the less there’s an overt villain on the scene.
★★★☆☆
Book #97 of 2016:
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
I like Randall Munroe’s xkcd webcomic, but this book of outlandish inquiries was a big letdown. A few of the passages stand out, like which US state is flown over by the most airplanes each day, or what would be the last light to go out if humans stopped all power upkeep, but most of the others reduce to a very simple formula. “Question: What if something impossible happened? Answer: Massive explosions and/or global extinction.” Munroe also has a recurring section in between his ‘serious scientific answers’ where he basically just makes fun of questions that he thought weren’t worth his time, which is even more galling when you realize that he doesn’t seem to have changed any of the askers’ names. It feels mean-spirited and left a real sour taste in my mouth.
★★☆☆☆
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