Book Reviews for June

Hello again! Although I had a plethora of free time this month (in theory, any way, with school out of the way), I have only read two new books. There are a few reasons for this: Firstly, I have very limited access to new books at the moment, and Secondly, I'm working on finishing a load of really long and/or dense books that I started last summer but was unable to finish due to being in Hawaii. So instead of speeding through a tall stack of new books, I'm currently reading "Le Morte d'Arthur", "The Portrait of a Lady", "The Pioneers", "Great Expectations", and other books like that which require a bit more time to get through than, say, "Neverwhere"--I'm making progress and enjoying myself, but have not quite finished them completely. Also, I've been really busy taking care of siblings, cooking, cleaning, dancing, and writing. Yes, writing! I should have the next part of "The Sons of Cwendor" available both here, on Facebook, and at "The Radish Room" sometime over the course of the next week, so stay tuned!

Anyway, here's my reviews of my two reads of June.

Heir Apparent, by Vivian Vande Velde

My brother really likes this book; I also like it, just not as much. The premise is an entertaining one: A girl playing a full-immersion fantasy role-playing computer game must win the thing before a computer error crashes the system--and thus fries her brain. This book would be especially entertaining for fans of such computer games. I've played (and enjoyed) a few, so some of her frustrations, like how whenever she dies in the game she has to go all the way back to the beginning and start anew, were hilarious. Unfortunately, however, to make a book with such a premise really effective, the player's difficulties must be believable. I had worked out a way by which she could win only a few chapters into the story, and it took her almost two hundred pages more to finally come up with a way to win on her own--which ended up being remarkably similar to the one I had theorized way back when. This ultimately made the story become very tedious at times, as I was impatient with the heroine. Also, the ending is a bit lacklustre, and there's some political, preachy aspects of the plotline that I didn't care for.

Fahrenheit 451

My only other read, and thus my book of the month! I actually did really like this book, though. It's scarily accurate in its depiction of a futuristic society where people walk around with music-playing 'seashells' plugged into their ears all day, obsess over television shows which are projected on screens which cover living room walls 360-degrees, and pedestrians are so rare, they can be arrested. Sound familiar? The story is intense and thought-provoking and sprinkled with terrifying moments, beautiful moments, and sharp sorrow, as well as being an overall ode to books and reading. Bradbury's writing is so poetic and lyrical that I sometimes was confused by it--when he first started talking about a Mechanical Hound, I thought that was a metaphor for something, like the Locusts of the "Martian Chronicles", and it took me a while to realize that, no, this really WAS a robotic dog!--but when that is my biggest problem with a story, that means the story is very, very good. I strongly recommend this book. It's not as good as "Martian Chronicles" in my opinion, but it's certainly as good a read as "Something Wicked This Way Comes".