Thought Train to Pusan

Or as I like to call it: City of Why Can’t You Guys Just Communicate a Little Better? And so, after a strong first novel and slightly less-engaging sequel, this installment to Cassandra Claire’s Mortal Instruments series hits the third-book-slump for a number of reasons. While the story is still engaging if you have become invested in these characters from the previous books, there is a definite increase in melodrama and love-angst in City of Glass . Furthermore, many of the plot twists and outcomes can be seen coming from a mile away, making it far less exciting than say, City of Bones with all it’s amusing turns. Although I must admit, I did accidentally spoil one of the big twists for myself before reading this book (I was dorking around on the internet, rookie mistake, I know), but I still feel as though you could see where all of this was headed very easily. [Hold on to your hats, kids, if you haven’t read any of these books before, this plot description is likely to ...

Whenever I read a young-adult series, I find that I fall in love with the first book, only to be extremely disappointed by each sequel that comes to follow it (I’m looking at you, Maze Runner , a series I still haven’t finished from frustration with the second novel). Because of this, when I embarked on reading City of Bones before the film adaptation is released this week [Jonathan Rhys Meyers film career, back from grave!], I also decided to read City of Ashes immediately afterwards. While City of Ashes does experience a bit of a sequel slump, it’s not nearly as drastic as I feared it would be, and is still quite good. In any case, the first two books of The Mortal Instruments series have definitely made me want to continue reading to see what happens: I’m enjoying them a lot. Maybe it’s my love of all that fantasy, angels and demons stuff (which we can see in the fact that I never met a Supernatural reference I didn’t want to make). Or maybe it’s that everything seems to ...

  (With art by J.K. Woodward) A crossover between Star Trek: The Next Generation and Pond-era Doctor Who? It’s like a super geeky fantasy dream! Written as a short serial of 8 issues collected into two volumes, this idea totally roped me in, but in the end was a bit disappointing. There was potential here to do so much, but inevitably all the conflicts and conclusions felt… easy, I guess? And the action was very swayed to feel much more like a general 2-part episode of Doctor Who than a Star Trek story. At the end of the day, however, Assimilation^2 is a fun little story that combines two worlds that may not otherwise meet, if not in a very memorable fashion. The main conflict in Assimilation^2 centers around a combined attack on Federation planets between the Borg and Cybermen, who are using each other’s technologies in order to co-conquer the human race. Upon this crossover of threats, the TARDIS chooses to mobilize between universes and appear on the Holodeck of the ...

Written as a series of short, connecting poems, the young-adult novel Burned tells the tale of a young girl in a strictly religious and abusive household who is sent away for the summer after her father finds her in a compromising position. A few years back, I read another work by Ellen Hopkins, written in a similar style, called Impulse , and absolutely loved it. But did I love this one? Not as such. While Burned does bring up some interesting questions regarding faith and spirituality in a person, there were too many problems that I found in this novel that I just couldn’t get around, many of which involved that subject of religion which the novel was trying to address in the first place. But more on that in a minute: The story of Burned focuses on 16 year-old Pattyn, the oldest of 7 daughters, all raised to be Mormon by an alcoholic, ex-army father, and detached mother who is often beaten by her husband. As Pattyn is growing up, she is finding herself to be questioning a wo...

I first read this iconic Ray Bradbury novel for my 9 th grade English class. And while I may have pretended otherwise, my 15 year-old self didn’t really… get it. Also, apparently while reading it, we were supposed to mark down every figure of speech we ran across and label them accordingly: boy did I do an atrocious job at this, as half of them I just didn’t even notice, and many others that I did notice were marked completely incorrectly (yes, I still have that same copy from 8-ish years ago). But now I am older and I thought I would give this book another go. And did I understand on this second occasion? Well, I definitely feel like I got a lot more out of it reading it this time. And it truly is beautifully written, with some eerie predictions of our present day, made all the way back at its publication in the 50s. I’m sure many people have already read this book, but in any case, Fahrenheit 451 focuses on the issues of censorship and the control or manipulation mass media ...