The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett

I continue my sampling of Discworld novels with the first in the series The Color of Magic. It follows Rincewind, a wizard that knows only one spell, and Twoflower, the first person to ever visit Discworld as a tourist, as they have comic misadventures that involve the usual fantasy tropes... dragons, trolls, barbarians, etc... Maybe I was just anxious to get on to reading another book but I just didn't seem to get into this one as much and it seemed a bit tedious. I'll have to give this one a C+.

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

Mr. Mercedes is one of those rare Stephen King books that wouldn't actually be classified as "horror", but somehow I still found it to be one of his scariest books. The plot revolves around a retired detective's search for guy that ran over a bunch of people for no reason and trying to prevent this killer from blowing up a bomb at a public event. I found it a bit unnerving because one- I've actually been hit by a car and two - there are crazy people out there that set off bombs and kill lots of people for no reason. So unlike most King novels... this one deals with bad things that can actually happen.

The middle part of the book was a bit slow and the detective seemed a bit generic but overall I enjoyed it and it built up to a suspenseful ending. The killer was only kinda interesting... I'm a bit conflicted by King's need to make the character realistic versus interesting. He's portrayed as the kind of mundane young man that would actually do these horrible things due to his own inadequacies and problems growing up instead of as an over the top character like the Tooth Fairy from Red Dragon. But then I guess not every cop versus serial killer book can be as good as Red Dragon.  So I'll give this one a B.

Mort by Terry Prachett

I'm giving Discworld another shot with Mort. I liked Guards, Guards, but didn't quite love it. In this Discworld story, Death (skeleton, hooded black robe, scythe) takes an awkward teenager, Mort, as an apprentice and comic misadventures ensue. The main problem being that when Death asks Mort to take over for a day he mistakenly kills an assassin instead of a young princess that was his intended target. This of course creates a paradox for reality and Mort has to fix it. Funny all the way though. I'll give this one an A-.

Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

I don't really have too much to say about Children of Dune. It is the third book in the series and it picks up a few years after the previous book. The Atreides twins are starting to grow up but even though they are children they have the full knowledge of their ancestors. Leto II has a vision on how best to lead the empire created by his father and he has to navigate the usual things that occur in Dune novels (assassination attempts, political maneuvering by different houses and the Bene Gesserit, acceptance by the Fremen). It isn't a classic like the first book but it is more exciting than Dune Messiah. I guess I'll got with a B+.

Book # 85 - The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The copy of The Scarlet Letter that I read was the same one that I read way back in 10th grade... which was 23 years ago. Maybe because the text was so marked up and I had underlined everything that 16 year old me thought was important the whole book seemed kind of heavy handed. It didn't seem like a book anyone would read for amusement but rather something that would get assigned to a teenager to try and get them to critically examine a text. Still I enjoyed the book on some level but it wasn't as great as I remembered it.

My main problem with it is that the "plot" doesn't really have any forward movement and the main protagonist doesn't really do anything the entire book. As most people know, the book is about Hester Prynne, a woman found guilty of adultery in a Puritanical society, and forced to live with a large scarlet "A" on her clothes. The father of her child is the local minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, and instead of confessing that he is the father he decides to keep it hidden and to psychologically torture himself. It isn't until about eighty percent of the way through the book that the characters actually decide to do something about this situation... so for most of the book not much really happens. It also doesn't help that Dimmesdale is such a wuss that he is not the most likable character.  I'll have to give it a B+.


So for anyone keeping track... this blog is now exactly three years old and The Scarlet Letter was the 50th book from the list I've read.

My progress on each of the lists:
Best Novels 1-100: 50 read
Best Novels 101-200: 4 read
Best Mysteries 1-101: 18 read
Best Science Fiction 1-50: 16 read
Best Horror 1-50: 14 read


As for how I got copies of all the books:
52 were purchased as used books at either libraries or used book stores
39 were books either me or Lucinda previously owned
14 were purchased new
14 were given to me as gifts
11 were library books

7 were checked out from the LAPL as ebooks (my new favorite way to get books!)

2 were borrowed from someone
2 were free ebooks in the public domain
1 was a purchased book for the Kindle

And my updated rankings:

1. The Lord of the Rings 2. Dune 3. Les Misérables

4. Invisible Man

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

6. Don Quixote

7. The Hobbit

8. A Farewell to Arms

9. The Trial

10. David Copperfield

11. Great Expectations

12. Harry Potter

13. The Stand

14. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

15. Pale Fire

16. The Handmaid's Tale

17. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

18. The Chronicles of Narnia

19. The Name of the Rose

20. The Great Gatsby

21. The Sound and the Fury

22. Frankenstein

23. Lord of the Flies

24. The Color Purple

25. Things Fall Apart

26. Wind in the Willows

27. Anne of Green Gables

28. Rebecca

29. Atonement

30. One Hundred Years of Solitude

31. Native Son

32. Anna Karenina

33. Sons and Lovers

34. War and Peace

35. A Passage to India

36. The Count of Monte Cristo

37. The Scarlet Letter

38. Winnie-the-Pooh

39. Emma

40. Charlotte's Web

41. Wuthering Heights

42. Remembrance of Things Past

43. Possession

44. His Dark Materials

45. Absalom, Absalom

46. The Ambassadors

47. To the Lighthouse

48. Mrs. Dalloway

49. Gone with the Wind

50. Atlas Shrugged

Book # 99 Atonement by Ian McEwan

I gotta say, Atonement was an interesting book and I liked it more than I thought I would. The ending twist was still powerful even though I knew it was coming since I had already seen the movie. The main character is Briony - a young teenage girl a few years before WWII. One day she unwittingly witnesses a couple of events between her older sister and a young man named Robbie, and her active imagination misinterprets what actually happened. This later leads her to mistakenly and somewhat knowingly accuse Robbie falsely of a crime. The story then picks up during WWII and we see that after serving his time in prison Robbie is fighting in the war and Briony has become a nurse helping the wounded. The book then ends with Briony as an old woman writing a book about her experience.

Overall I enjoyed the book and thought McEwan's style was reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's but with actual narrative drive that made me want to find out what would happen next. The only sequence that took me out of the story was when Briony receives a letter from a publisher that critiques a story of hers that was apparently "the first draft" of the first part of the book that ends before Briony commits her crime. It seemed kind of weird to suddenly have bit of a 'meta' moment in the middle of this story. Anyway, I'll give this one an A.

Also it mentions Emma.

Book # 48 Remembrance of Things Past (Part 7 of 7)- The Past Recaptured by Marcel Proust

I'm finally finished with Remembrance of Things Past! Hooray - no more Proust for me! I'm so glad to be done with this book I feel like celebrating!

So in this final book not much happens at all. In the first half the Narrator talks about different peoples' opinions on World War One and just briefly mentions that he was in a sanatorium for some time. The second half of the book just kind of meanders about and he touches on several topics and talks about getting reacquainted with the people from the book later on in his life. There is quite a bit of musing about getting older. There is also a very interesting sequence about how chance plays such a large part in life and how the offhand remark of a friend or acquaintance can alter the direction your life goes. This is something I often think about so I could relate to what he was saying. At one point he also mentions Madame Bovary.

I'm so glad to finish that I'll give this one a B-.