Welcome back to The Book Report. As always I’m your host, EuGeNeRoCkS, and I’ll be bringing you the latest and greatest book reviews and news, among other things.
BOOK NEWS
The second book in the Wizard of Oz series is being adapted into a comic, following the minor success of the first. Marvels full article is at http://marvel.com/news/comicstories.8489.WWPhilly_~apos~09~colon~_The_Marvelous_Land_of_Oz.
The cover for the wonderful wizard of Oz #7
The release date of Lord Sunday has been pushed back to a rumoured February 2010. As long as the book is longer than Superior Saturday, I’m fine with that.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE GENRE? POLL RESULTS
The results for the poll are in and Fantasy has won!!! Of course, I wouldn’t bore you with a history of Pixies and Dwarfs, so I thought of something much more fun. It’s just a simple fact really.
You see, the first known writings known to mankind were small stories about fantastical creatures and events. But who really still believes in hippogriffs? So, they are now called myths, which are the original Fantasy.
And now for that fact that I promised.
Every single genre in book history is really just a sub-genre of Fantasy.
Sci-Fi is just Fantasy but with a bit of logic sprinkled through so that it might be barely expectable in the laws of science.
Horror is scary Fantasy.
A murder mystery is..... Well.... Out of all the other genres placed on this list a murder mystery is the least related to Fantasy. Everything in, say, an Agatha Christie novel is perfectly realistic and could happen, but once again it’s a Fantasy because what the author is doing is Fantasising about a detective who solves these wonderful and terribly hard mysteries.
What used to be Fantasy has changed and evolved, until eventually it has become its own sub-genre. When you say Fantasy now days, what you usually mean is something called high Fantasy. This was made incredibly popular by J.R.R Tolkien. *Lord of the Rings*
Believe it or not, in terms of books that actually sold well, Fantasy wasn’t that big a thing until the giant tidal wave created by Tolkien, C.S Lewis, and a couple more (less remembered authors) hit the shore.
If it wasn’t for them, books like Harry Potter wouldn’t exist, or at least be completely different to what they are now, so we better be thankful that they did what they did!!!
Hippogriff!!!!!!
BOOK REVIEW
Title: Frankenstein
Author: Mary Shelley
Genre: Sci-Fi/Gothic Horror (Although really in it’s in a genre of its own.)
Age Recommendation: It’s currently not considered very fashionable to put an age recommendation on classics, but I have to say that this book was written for adults, and it reads like that, even of the idea, on the surface, sounds rather silly for the modern world.
Blurb: Obsessed with creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley’s chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her love Percy Shelley near Byron’s villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world’s most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.
The cover says it all.
Really, look at that person on the front cover. I certainly don’t see any bolts coming out of his neck, do you? And I can’t seem to see any green skin ever. How very strange.
What’s this? Frankenstein’s (Creature) can seem to speak coherent sentences. This can’t be the slow moving; grumbling monster that’s embedded in the public consciousness, can it?
I hate the public consciousness.
Turns out the people who made those old Frankenstein movies were illiterate, or where playing Chinese whispers, because those movies haven’t a thing to do with the books.
Oh well. Moving on...
Frankenstein is a perfect example of how much books have changed. This sucker is 225 pages long of writing this big. Not so perfect for the average aeroplane trip, which is what most books try to aim for these days. The story moves along at a slow pace, most of which involves a lot pondering. And I mean pondering. Frankenstein ponders. Frankenstein’s Creature ponders. The Ship Captain ponders. (Which results in a letter that’s length has the realism of a three headed monkey.)
In short, the book has a lot of pondering.
Now I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing, just that it’s not ideally suited for these couple of generations and I’m going to be rating this book based on how much I enjoyed it, not how high up it is held in the public consciousness. A lot of reviewers do that to take the easy way out.
So how much did I enjoy it? Quite a lot, actually. The thing about these books is that they’re not the type of book that you read for five minute intervals. You really need to dedicate a entire weekend to them. If you don’t do that, then, quite frankly, you’re going to find this book as atrociously boring.
Rating: 7.9
And so that’s it for another issue of The Book Report. Come back next month for reviews for both Predators Gold which is the second book in the Mortal Engines quartet, and the film adaption of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Adios!!!
EuGeNeRoCkS
A sketch of The House for Garth Nix’s latest series: The Keys To The Kingdom. Is should be noted though that according to Garth Nix “It's not a very satisfactory sketch in many ways, because the House is actually more complex and I'd need some sort of three-dimensional projection to show this.”
Title: Mortal Engines
PORTAL is one of the best puzzle games ever. The core idea might seem simple: go through one portal, come out the other. But add things like gravity and killer robots (pictured) into the mix and you got yourself a deal.
TWILIGHT, the latest in a long line book to film adaptions.