Book # 56 & Sci-Fi Book # 19- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Well droogs I've just reread A Clockwork Orange, a work that I read a long time ago as a molodoy nadsat. As a malchick I messel it was quite horrorshow, the only difficulty being able to understand the nadsat slang, but now with this polezny Internet veshch I can look up a glossary of slovos in a minoota and just breeze through it real skorry. And I'm glad to say as a starry veck it is even better and makes one think about free will. Though it is hard not to continually think of the sinny while reading it. My only shilarny about the whole veshch is wanting to know if the 21st chapter was intended to be included by Burgess or not. Apparently he kind of went back and forth on it, but maybe that's not a baddiwad veshch. As a nadsat I thought it dobby without but now I've probably changed by mind. It is like choose your own ending! How oomny! A.

Sci-Fi Book # 16- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

Maybe after reading Ulysses and The Hunt for Red October I enjoyed A Wrinkle in Time a bit more than I should since it is a nice and easy kids book. I'm not sure how it was never really on my radar growing up. If there's any criticism it is that a lot of the stuff that goes on in the plot seems a bit arbitrary and lacking in details... but hey I guess that's explained away as this being a children's book. I liked all of the characters... the kids seemed well characterized and the three Mrs. Ws were a lot of fun and I was left wanting some more of their back story. Let's go A-.

Mystery Book # 84 - The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

Way back in high school I gave Tom Clancy a try. Reading The Hunt for Red October  now just reinforces what I thought back then... His plots are decent but there are just too many details about stuff I don't need to know. I feel like I learned something about how submarines work and the inner workings of our military but really I have no clue if any of it is actually accurate. Still I enjoyed it for the most part, B+.

Book # 4 - Ulysses by James Joyce

Well it was bound to happen... I finally got to a book that is highly acclaimed (# 4 on the list!) and did absolutely NOTHING for me. That book being Ulysses by James Joyce. Now I can see why people admire the technique and varying styles within the book... but to me that's all it is. This was a huge chore to get through. The only upside is that it put me soundly to sleep every night for a month and a half. I could probably go on and on about how much I didn't enjoy it. Sure there isn't really a "story", and I'm fine with that but neither did it capture any type of emotion for me. It is just chapter after long chapter in varying experimental styles. To me it is just style over substance. Sure maybe I just don't "get it" but the book seems to try and alienate the common reader at every turn. I'm not sure what kind of person would even enjoy this book. It seems like a book written purely to be studied and not enjoyed. Supposedly it is funny... but I just didn't get the jokes. Maybe Joyce is laughing at me from the afterlife because I actually sat and read the whole darn thing. Maybe for me one of the problems is the length of some of the chapters that are totally experimental. Like there's one chapter that is a nonsensical hallucination that takes a couple of hours to get through. Another chapter is written as someone's thoughts. Now that chapter is unique in the way it captures the fragmented way people think... but 1. I don't care about this character , 2. this character doesn't have novel or interesting thoughts, and 3. it takes at least two hours to read. So I don't think I can really even give it a grade. It gets a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  but is placed only above Atlas Shrugged in my rankings. Also it mentions Don Quixote. 

Horror Book # 25 - Books of Blood Vol.4 by Clive Barker

So while I was taking a break from reading nightly for a bit I still needed something to read if I went out for lunch. And so that's how I ended up reading Books of Blood Vol. 4 entirely on my phone. And it only took two months! This volume has five stories and all of them were pretty solid and definitely scary. My favorite is the one about a guy's hands that take on a life of their own and decide to rebel. A-.

Gwendy's Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar

This may have been the first Stephen King book I've read that I thought was too short! Gwendy's Button Box is a nice short novella about a young girl, Gwendy, that is given a magical box by another incarnation of RF. Will the box corrupt her? Destroy her life? Maybe because it is a collaboration the ending here is completely satisfying. Let's say it gets a B+.

Mystery Book # 67 - Stick by Elmore Leonard

Wow... almost two months between entries. See this is what happens when I decide that the next book I'm going to read is something that is super long and generally considered a difficult and not fun read (Ulysses). So instead of reading that specific book I find ways to procrastinate. First I started using my small window of free time each day to watch television instead of read...(Westworld! Check it out!). Then I put holds on library books (like Stick) and figured I'd have to read Ulysses after those... So someday I'll start Ulysses... just not yet.

Anyway, Stick is pretty much what I expected from an Elmore Leonard book... a likable criminal type gets in trouble with unlikable more criminal types and finds a way to scam their way out of a jam. I enjoyed it but the details are already evaporating out of my memory. Maybe I'll watch the movie version from 1985, it looks like it has a good cast but then I won't have time for Ulysses. B