Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz

Across the street, Schuyler saw a cab pull up to the curb, and a tall blond guy stepped out of it. Just as he emerged, another cab barreled down the street on the opposite side. It was swerving recklessly, and at first it looked like it would miss him, but at the last moment, the boy threw himself in its path and disappeared underneath its wheels. [...]

Schuyler ran across the street, fully expecting to see a dead body, but the boy was standing right in front of her, counting the change in his wallet. He slammed the door shut and sent his taxi on its way. He was whole and unhurt.

"You should be dead," she whispered. 

-Blue Bloods


Schuyler Van Alen has a fairly ordinary sort of life--well, by Manhattan standards, at least. She's grown up with her grandmother in a dusty mansion on Riverside Drive and attends school across town at the tony Duchesne. For fun, she enjoys nothing more than hanging out with her best friend Oliver and reading magazines. Every Sunday, she goes to the hospital to visit her mother, who has spent the last fifteen years in a coma--okay, that's a little out of the ordinary.

Things change when Schuyler's classmate Aggie Carondolet is found dead of an apparent drug overdose. One of the most popular girls in school, Aggie was often in the company of Duchesne queen bee Mimi Force, who has never had any use for the offbeat Schuyler. So Schuyler is surprised when Mimi's equally popular twin brother, Jack, approaches her with a theory: Aggie Carondolet didn't just die--she was murdered.

Thus begins Schuyler's initiation into the world of the Blue Bloods--those who are not only the world's most wealthy and influential citizens, but also something far older and more powerful: vampires. Needless to say, life is no longer remotely ordinary for Schuyler.

Melissa de la Cruz has a breezy style that made Blue Bloods an enjoyable light read. Her mythology for vampires is interesting--there is a reincarnation angle that I haven't seen explored before. I did find her penchant for explaining what every character is wearing--down to the brand--somewhat amusing, but I guess it's not totally unexpected for a book set on the label-conscious Upper East Side. All in all, a fun read, and I'm sure I'll be reading more.

Up next: In fact, I've already read the second book in the series, Masquerade. I hope to be back to blog about it before heading out of town for a few days.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars. [...] We live in a galaxy that is about one hundred thousand light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its spiral arms orbit around its center about once every several hundred million years. Our sun is just an ordinary, average-sized yellow star, near the inner edge of one of the spiral arms. We have certainly come a long way since Aristotle and Ptolemy, when we thought that the earth was the center of the universe!

-A Brief History of Time 

Well. Sometimes I get these fancy ideas about what I should be reading. Reading Age of Wonder* reminded me of how much I enjoyed learning about astronomy in college, and it seemed time to delve back into that field. I also thought of how much I like Doctor Who and figured it might be interesting to learn some of the science behind, say, time travel. I remembered hearing about A Brief History of Time, which looked slim and fairly unintimidating when I picked it up from the library. What I didn't take into consideration was that even a layman's guide to astronomy would be way over my head.

Stephen Hawking makes a valiant effort to present things as plainly as possible, but the fact remains that you can only make something like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle so simple--it's a pretty abstract concept for a layperson, as are many of the concepts in discussed in A Brief History of Time. Hawking peppers the text with jokey asides (and has an endearing fondness for exclamation points), but my head was still swimming a lot of the time. There were some concepts that he illustrated pretty clearly: I thought using the ping pong game on a train to talk about relativity was very clear, and I liked his use of the Earth's surface to help explain the boundaries (or lack thereof) in the universe. But when he talked about gluons and the spin of antiparticles and what color a certain quark was, my eyes had a tendency to glaze over.

Still, I don't feel entirely defeated. I'm wondering if there's some other book out there that might be even more simplistic. Or perhaps if I read the same ideas again, a few more of them would click. I'm not by any means a science person, but I'm willing to try--it reminds me of the early days in my AP Physics class in high school, when I optimistically thought I might be good at physics. I think it lasted 3 weeks, tops. After that, things went downhill--aside from the unit on something to do with the moon (I'm hazy on the particulars), which I inexplicably understood quite well. So there's that.

Up next: Already finished Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz, which was quite a change of pace. 

*There's that book again! The book that launched a thousand books, it seems. 

The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan

The palace was as big as the city on Mount Olympus, with wide courtyards, gardens, and columned pavilions. The gardens were sculpted with coral colonies and glowing sea plants. Twenty or thirty buildings were made of abalone, white but gleaming with rainbow colors. Fish and octopi darted in and out of the windows. The paths were lined with glowing pearls like Christmas lights. 

The main courtyard was filled with warriors--mermen with fish tails from the waist down and human bodies from the waist up, except their skin was blue, which I'd never known before. Some were tending the wounded. Some were sharpening spears and swords. One passed us, swimming in a hurry. His eyes were bright green, like that stuff they put in glo-sticks, and his teeth were shark teeth. They don't show you stuff like that in The Little Mermaid.

-The Last Olympian 


I am getting to this entry a wee bit belatedly, since I finished the book about a week ago, but we'll see what I can do, shall we? The Last Olympian is the final book in Rick Riordan's series about the adventures of Percy Jackson, teenage demigod. In The Last Olympian, Percy, a son of Poseidon, has come to his greatest challenge yet: he must take on the vengeful Titans, those whose power was usurped by the Olympians so long ago.

Things aren't looking so good for the Olympians at the moment. One Titan has escaped his prison in Mount Saint Helens and is merrily making his way east, wreaking havoc among the human population as he goes--and even Zeus himself can barely slow him down. Meanwhile, Kronos is heading straight to New York City, home of Mount Olympus, where Percy and his fellow campers are the last--and only--line of defense. With infighting among the gods and demigods and the presence of a spy among them, a happy outcome begins to seem like a dim prospect. Percy has to go to Hades and back--again--to have any chance of saving life as he knows it.

As always, I found that this series is a blend of some truly intriguing, creative ideas and a sensibility that is designed to appeal almost exclusively to younger readers--and, fair enough, it is YA. But there's just something about Percy's voice that is much more teenager-y to me than, say, Harry Potter's. I don't know if it's an American vs. British thing, or because Riordan was a teenage boy himself at one point; because Percy is just not as mature as Harry or perhaps because he had a more normal childhood--for whatever reason, The Last Olympian and other books in this series feel more like books strictly aimed at children than the Harry Potter ones do. I can't say it's a bad thing--again, these are books written for children--but it does dampen my own enthusiasm somewhat.

That having been said, I'm glad I stuck with the series. I found some of the strands of the story to be pretty compelling--I especially liked the resolution to the Percy/Annabeth/Rachel triangle. The treatment of the secondary gods like Hestia was interesting, and I couldn't help but smile at Riordan's characterization of Persephone and Demeter. The spy thing had me turning pages pretty quickly at a certain point (though I thought the resolution was a little rushed). It's a likeable series and I wish it had been more successful as a film venture, as the books seem as though they would have lent themselves very well to adaptation. As it stands, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend these books to a child--I just might not suggest them to an adult.

Up next: Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Yeah. Well, it seemed like a good idea at some point...

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Coraline stopped and listened. She knew she was doing something wrong, and she was trying to listen for her mother coming back, but she heard nothing. Then Coraline put her hand on the doorknob and turned it; and, finally, she opened the door.

It opened on to a dark hallway. The bricks had gone as if they'd never been there. There was a cold, musty smell coming through the open doorway: it smelled like something very old and very slow.

Coraline went through the door.

-Coraline 

First things first: Coraline is a genuinely scary book. I thought, having seen the movie, that I would be fairly well prepared for any spooky bits, but as it turned out that did not help so much at all. It turns out my imagination is even better than a (very good!) film. Yay?

I probably ought to back things up for a moment: plot. In Neil Gaiman's story, British schoolgirl Coraline Jones moves to a new home one summer with her mother and father. Coraline's parents mean well, but they're busy, and Coraline often has to amuse herself. She's often bored, and she's also grown tired of picking at dinners she finds inedible and buying the drabbest of school uniforms. She's looking for adventure.

Then she finds the door described in the passage above. It leads to adventure, to be sure--a whole new world, actually. There Coraline finds another mother and father that at first glance seem just like her own--except dinner there is tastier, and her clothes are nicer, and her parents are ready to drop everything to keep her amused. She could live in this world forever, her other mother tells her, if she'd just do one tiny thing....

Like any place where everything seems perfect, this other world is actually rotten to the core. It's also, Coraline discovers, not so easy to escape. She finds herself in extraordinary danger as she attempts to regain the life she once found so boring.

I've given some thought as to why I found Coraline so scary, and I think it's a mix of a couple of things. One is the way that Gaiman takes what should be Coraline's safe haven (her home, her family) and twists it into the stuff of nightmares. I don't wish to spoil the story, but there's a bit toward the end with the other father--just unbelievably creepy to me. I also think that the fact that Coraline is essentially on her own in this other world makes things quite scary. In the film, at least, she has her friend Wybie, but in the book she's quite alone with the exception of a mysterious, unnamed cat. If I were all alone in that place as an adult I'd be petrified, so it's difficult for me to imagine the terror of encountering this other world as a child. Shiver. Well done, Mr. Gaiman.

Up next: Still lagging a bit behind in updating this blog, so I've already finished Rick Riordan's The Last Olympian.

Young Romantics by Daisy Hay

Meanwhile, the goings-on at Diodati were a fertile topic for gossip and speculation. The local hotelier did a brisk trade in sailing trips on the lake during which shocked English visitors could inspect the washing drying outside Byron's villa for evidence of female inhabitants--telescopes were thoughtfully included in the ticket price.

-Young Romantics

I'd fully intended to read Young Romantics some time ago--in April, even, for National Poetry Month. I checked it out of the library after reading of Age of Wonder and realizing that, despite my love of Keats, my knowledge of poetry from that era was still pretty lacking. But then I discovered Inspector Lynley, and I wanted to read Blue Latitudes while Age of Wonder was still fresh in my mind...and well, here we are. Better late than never.

I picked out Young Romantics because I thought it would give me a nice overview of Shelley, Byron, and Keats and further my understanding of the relationships they had with one another and with others in their circle. I discovered as I began to read, though, that Daisy Hay's focus was clearly on Shelley and Leigh Hunt, the poet and critic.* If I'd read the book jacket a bit more carefully, I would have already known this, but it turned out to be fine. I missed Keats, who was absent for long sections of the book, but I did already read a comprehensive account of his life. Byron figured somewhat more prominently. He also came off like a big ole jerk.

I had kind of a sketchy idea of Byron as a ladies' (and gents', to be fair) man; someone talented and charismatic and a bit of a rogue. I did not, however, know that he spent some time fumbling toward ecstasy with his own half-sister. Nor was I aware of his cruel streak--the way he treated Claire Clairmont (Mary Shelley's stepsister), the mother of his illegitimate child, was pretty terrible. 

And while Shelley comes off better than Byron, he still could be remarkably callous, especially in his treatment of women. I did enjoy getting to learn more about his relationship with Mary, which had more scandalous origins than I had realized, and I liked Mary quite a lot in general. It was because of that, I think, that I still found the account of Shelley's death quite moving, even though I hadn't particularly warmed to him. It was just so sudden, and so senseless, and he was just so young.

It can be difficult to learn about artists--once you've discovered something negative about someone, be it merely unpleasant or truly awful, it can be hard to divorce that from your appreciation of an artist's work. Perhaps I'm judging Byron unfairly, even.For the moment, I will say that Young Romantics has definitely influenced my opinion of him as a person, but I can't deny that he wrote beautifully.  As for Shelley, I now know more of his life than I do of his works, so I shall have to remedy that at some point in the future. Neither seems likely to replace Keats as my favorite Romantic poet--and not just because Keats seems by far the pleasantest of the bunch (though it doesn't hurt).

I feel as though I'm giving short shrift to the women in the book, which is unfortunate. The treatment of Mary Shelley and Claire Claremont, in particular, is a great credit to Daisy Hay. I feel as though I got a true sense of the place of these women in the literary circle of their day--they often weren't considered equals of the poets whose company they kept, but they certainly had their smarts and a fair degree of influence on the men. I don't know that I ever would have thought to explore the further works of Mary Shelley before, but I have to say I'm now intrigued. Much like Age of Wonder, I have a feeling Young Romantics will be leading me to more books before long.

Up next: Already finished Coraline, so I just need to come back to write it up.

*Hay mentions in passing that Hunt was the basis for the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House. It makes so much sense--oh, that elderly child.