Horror Book # 23 - At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

I really wanted to love At the Mountains of Madness... but I ended up just really liking it instead. Previously I had read a collection of Lovecraft's short stories and absolutely loved it, so I was eager to read some more of his work. The premise here is great... a team of Antarctic explorers discover a huge mountain range that shows evidence of being inhabited by a weird alien race millions of years ago. The whole book is eerie and has a great dark and foreboding tone. Just a few qualms... for the amount of plot the book is a bit stretched out (and it is already a fairly short book so maybe it should have just been a short story), the story also follows the usual Lovecraft plot structure of someone surviving a horrible ordeal and relating it to us with the hopes that we believe him, and the whole sequence in which the narrator is able to tell the entire history (including names) of this previous civilization from a series of sculptures seems a bit unlikely. I'd still recommend it though but I'd go with one of his short story collections first. A-

Horror Book # 37 - Midnight by Dean Koontz

Wikipedia gives a pretty accurate summary of Midnight by Dean Koontz by saying that it is a combination of The Island of Doctor Moreau and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Set in a secluded California coastal town, the story is about a tech company that is experimenting with the residents of the town and inadvertently giving them the ability to transform their bodies. This was the first Koontz book I had read and I enjoyed it. It wasn't the most memorable or original book out there but it did have some good scary scenes and it was fun following the main characters as they tried to avoid any of the transformed citizens and escape the town. I'll give it a B+.

Also it mentions Frankenstein.

Star Trek: New Frontier - The Returned

Sometime around ninth grade I really got into Star Trek and started reading a ton of the books that they put out... like maybe one hundred of them. One of my favorite sub-series was the New Frontier series that was mostly written by Peter David, my favorite of the Star Trek authors. In this series he introduced a new main character, Captain Calhoun, and added a bunch of minor characters from The Next Generation to a crew that takes the Starship Excalibur on crazy adventures. While I stopped reading other Star Trek books I've always kept up on the New Frontier series and was pretty excited when I saw that the LAPL had the newest volume which was released only as an e-book. This volume didn't disappoint... Calhoun goes on a quest to get revenge against an alien species that wiped out his planet and ends up encountering an even worse alien race... and then Q shows up. I'll give this one an
A-.

Also, it mentions Alice in Wonderland.

Book # 150 - The Iliad by Homer

I'm pretty sure that The Iliad is the oldest book on any of my lists. Its age makes it a bit hard to really judge. Basically the whole book is just battle scene after battle scene. And it is surprisingly super violent too. There are tons of stabbings and beheadings and dead bodies being mutilated. And after seven hundred pages I feel like I still don't know everything that I should about the Trojan War. Overall it was a bit of a chore reading it but it had some interesting stuff in there like the interactions on both sides with their gods. I guess I'll give it a B+.

Mystery Book # 1 The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Book 4 of 9)

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is the second collection of short stories that feature Sherlock and Watson solving the usual mysteries. It wasn't quite as good as the first collection but I still enjoyed it overall. The most notable story is The Final Problem which introduces Moriarty and was originally intended to be the final Sherlock story since he seemingly dies in the end. For a story that was supposedly genuinely going to be the end the whole final sequence leaves lots of wiggle room to find a way to bring Sherlock back to life.I'll give this one an A-.

Book # 140 - The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

I'm not really sure what I expected from The Kite Runner... for some reason I imagined that it would be a dense tougher read and was surprised when it turned out to be written at a sixth grade level. I guess since it was a massive best seller that I should have known. I chose to read it now because it is Banned Book Week and once again The Kite Runner made the list of the top ten most challenged books in America. I'm guessing that it gets assigned in high schools now and some people object to it because it has a few shocking violent scenes and a handful of four letter words... but it does seem like the type of book that is written specifically for high school study.

The book is broken into three main parts. The first is about Amir and his best friend Hassan. They live in Afghanistan where Amir's family is wealthy and Hassan's family lives with them as their servants. They're having a pretty good life even though Amir always feels like he can never please his father until one day Hassan is violently attacked and Amir is too afraid to help and runs away. He feels so guilty he can't stand having Hassan around anymore and sets it up so that Hassan's family has to leave. Soon afterwards the Russians invade and Amir and his father flee the country. The middle section is about Amir and his father's life in San Francisco and how they adjust to American life and how Amir still feels guilt and tries to earn the approval of his father. In the final section Amir is in his late thirties and is called back to Afghanistan where he finds out some family secrets and must help Hassan's son and atone for his past cowardice.

I enjoyed it and thought the story was moving and full of emotion. Maybe part of my enjoyment of it was due to it being completely different from Bleak House... it had a tight focus on a few characters that it deeply examined, the story moved along, and I actually wanted to know how it ended.  Along the way it mentions Wuthering Heights and Les Miserables.  I'm starting to notice that when specific books are mentioned (even in a casual way) they give hints at the theme of the book or foreshadow something. I'll give it an A-.

Book # 100- Watership Down by Richard Adams

Somehow I was under the false impression that Watership Down was about rabbits trying not to drown while on a ship. I guess I was wrong. Instead it is about of rabbits that break away from their warren when one of the rabbits have a psychic vision about an impending disaster. So a group leaves and they have some adventures while trying to find a new place to live. They find a nice place and then realize that they forgot to bring any female rabbits with them. So then they get into a conflict with another warren that basically is run by a dictator rabbit when they ask them if any of their females wish to leave.

Overall it is kind of a weird book. You'd imagine that it is a kids book but it really isn't. And then sometimes the rabbits act dumb like rabbits but then they're able to make a plan to escape using a boat and floating down the river. And then there's the issue that one of the rabbits is psychic and can see the future. And the rabbits are also sorta sexist. Which is funny when you consider that apparently rabbits do not live in a male dominated society. Plus somehow they're able to team up with a bird and communicate with him in a different language that apparently all animals know.

Still, it was entertaining even if it went on a bit too long and had way too many different rabbit characters. It also included quotes from The Wind in the Willows and The Brothers Karamazov. I'll give it an A-.