The Woman Who Died a Lot - Jasper Fforde
The Last Dragonslayer - Jasper Fforde
Books I Read:
The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Potzsch
The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club by Laurie Notaro
The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde
Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
I only bought two books this month. When one of your favorite authors releases two books on the same day, what else is a girl supposed to do? I also read them both this month, so I'm pretty pleased with myself.
First up in October was The Hangman's Daughter. I've wanted to read this for awhile, and my sister gave it to me for my birthday. It take place in 1659 in Germany and is about the town hangman during a series of mysterious murders that seem connected to witchcraft. I liked it. Mostly. There was definitely too much description that was a little boring, but it's mostly good. It's also interesting because the author based it on actual ancestors of his.
After that, my Jasper Fforde books came in the mail and I was so excited! The Last Dragonslayer is his first teen book, and it's the story of a girl who works with wizards in a world that is almost out of magic. One day, a prophecy is revealed that the last living dragon will be slain in the next week, and she finds out that she is the last in a long line of dragonslayers. It's really good!
Next I took a break from Fforde to read for book clubs. In my Seven Sisters of Soul book club, we're reading Ready Player One, which I read in July and wrote about here. It was still pretty fresh in my mind, and I probably didn't need to re-read it before book club, but it was so good that I wanted to read it again anyway. Still can't recommend this book highly enough!
For my Read Between the Hines book club, I read The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club. It's a collection of articles Laurie Notaro wrote about her life for a Phoenix newspaper. I don't want to write too much about what I thought here because we haven't met to discuss it yet. I will say that we chose it because we thought it would be similar to Mindy Kaling's book that we read and really enjoyed, and it didn't quite live up to that for me.
Book clubs taken care of, I next went back to Fforde. The Woman Who Died a Lot is the next book in the series that first made me fall in love with Fforde's work. The hero of this series is a woman named Thursday Next who has been a literary cop, seeking out Shakespeare forgers and things like that, and can also jump into novels and have adventures there. Clearly, these books take place in an alternate reality to our own. Literature jokes and references, time travel, action, comedy - these books are right up my alley. Start with The Eyre Affair and read them all!
And finally, I read Robopocalypse. It tells the story of the war between robots and humans and what happened after. If you've read World War Z, it's the same basic idea, but still it's own thing as well. Both books are surprisingly moving, and Robopocalypse doesn't seem that far-fetched. I loved it!
Thanks to a wicked case of strep throat, I made it through twice as many books in October as in September! 2,085 pages ain't bad. I guess that's the one bright side to strep.
Are you reading anything good?
