The Silver Coast and Other Stories, Daniel Powell

The Silver Coast and Other Stories by Daniel Powell

There are obvious components that contribute to the overall success or failure of a book – strength of characterization, effective use of description, and focused plot development are just a few.  But all of these technical factors mean nothing if the story doesn’t elicit some sort of reaction from readers.  One emotion that I often experience whenever I read a solid, well-written book is the incredibly strong desire to write something myself.  Nine times out of ten I don’t act on this desire, but that doesn’t mean I don’t walk around for days thinking about one of the thousand story ideas swimming around in my head.

Daniel Powell’s collection of short stories, The Silver Coast and Other Stories, had my fingers itching for my keyboard after each tale.  Powell’s eleven short but powerful stories transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.  The shorts are stock full of such supernatural elements as memory-eating viruses, magical yet ominous cars, murderous miniscule mermaids, and sinister pie charts.  What’s interesting and fresh about these stories is that Powell plants sci-fi elements into everyday settings.

The Book Thief, Marcus Zusak

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

Note: Apologies for the lack of reviews here at Baltimore Reads in the past month.  Stay tuned for plenty of new reviews in the coming weeks!

Have you ever gotten to the final word of a book and wished there were another five hundred pages, give or take?  You are simply not ready to part with the characters and the world they are living in.  It s almost impossible to pick up another book and start reading right away because you need a few days to reflect and recuperate.

For me, this book was The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak.  I read it last summer and really haven’t stopped thinking about it since.  I have read plenty of books since that time, many of them wonderful reads, but I often found myself yearning for a book that would have the same emotionally resounding impact on me that The Book Thief had.

I recently decided to reread this acclaimed novel (The New York Times called it “life changing”) partly because I was missing the characters terribly, and partly because I wanted to see if it was really as good as I remembered.  I read another one of Zusak’s novels, I Am The Messenger, a few months after I read The Book Thief and I was severely disappointed.  You can catch my review of that book here on Baltimore Reads, but in summary, I though it lacked pretty much everything I remembered The Book Thief thriving on – strong, relatable, lovable characters; a beautifully drawn setting; simple yet jarring writing, and a meticulously crafted plot.  I was nervous that maybe my love for The Book Thief was unwarranted, but from the moment I started rereading I knew this wasn’t the case.  In fact, it was just as good the second time around.

The Millennium Trilogy, Stieg Larsson

The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson

Stieg Larsson’s wildly popular Millennium trilogy has been taking the world by storm since the first installment, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was published in Sweden in 2005.  Since then, the crime series has been published worldwide, has sold over 65 million copies, and has been made into both Swedish and American movies.  Needless to say, readers and movie-goers alike are eating up the twist and turns of the lives of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, an unlikely duo devoted to unearthing the truth in an incredibly corrupt and demented world.  While Larsson passed away in 2004, his posthumous words live on in a series of books that has readers of all types embracing the thrillers with the same intensity that other drastically different series (ie. Harry Potter, Twilight, and most recently The Hunger Games) have garnered in recent years.

So are the books really worth all the hype?  Here is a review of each Millennium book, followed by an assessment of the series as a whole. (I tried to avoid any blatant spoilers; though if you haven’t read the series yet, beware!)

Wonder, R.J. Palacio

Wonder by R.J. Palacio

The first day of school can bring forth many feelings – excitement, anticipation, dread, nausea, etc.  It is especially difficult to walk through the hallways if you’re the “new kid” with the added pressure of adjusting to new environments, teachers, and classmates.  Now imagine having to go through the “new kid” initiation as a ten-year-old boy normal in every aspect except the one that counts the most for first impressions: appearance.

R.J. Palacio’s Wonder stars August Pullman, a boy born with a genetic mutation that has resulted in various facial deformities.  Homeschooling was the only way to keep August on track while he had countless surgeries to correct these deformities, but as the first day of fifth grade draws near, his parents agree that it is time to give mainstream schooling a shot.  August is understandably against this decision at first, but after a visit to Beecher Prep, the local middle school, he accepts his fate and shows up with the rest of the boys and girls his age on the first day of school.  Wonder chronicles August’s experiences during his fifth-grade school year, which span from extremely heartbreaking to incredibly uplifting.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

If you had told me six years ago, while I was in the midst of a very challenging high school biology class, that I would someday voluntarily read a scientific non-fiction book in my spare time, I probably would have had my doubts.  If you had proceeded to tell me that it was a 500-page tome on the history of cancer and that I would read it cover-to-cover, I would have definitely laughed in your face.  I was (and still am) an avid reader and writer; science was never really my “thing.”  And yet Siddhartha Mukherjee, a cancer physician and researcher at Columbia University, manages to transform the ins-and-outs of the science world into everyone’s “thing” in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

The Emperor of All Maladies is aptly subtitled “a biography” because in essence, cancer is the main character, and its life is chronicled from its beginnings to its current state.  It is easy to consider an abstract ailment as just that – an invisible, untouchable, difficult-to-grasp disease.  Mukherjee portrays cancer as an actual being, a mutation of ourselves hell-bent on completing the task at hand – unstoppable and chaotic cell proliferation.  By describing cancer as something more than rogue, mutated cells, Mukherjee makes it possible for anyone – doctor or patient, scientist or regular-Joes like you and me – to appreciate and understand just how awesomely unbelievable the power of this deadly disease is, and how awesomely devoted and determined the doctors and scientists are who hunted (and are still hunting) for a cure.

Tastes Like Human: The Shark Guys’ Book of Bitingly Funny Lists, Noel Boivin and Chris Lombardo

Tastes Like Human by Noel Boivin and Chris Lombardo

If kamikaze ants, Jesus pancakes, and cross-country lawn-mower drivers sound interesting to you, then you may want to pick up Tastes Like Human: The Shark Guys’ Book of Bitingly Funny Lists by Noel Boivin and Chris Lombardo.  Anyone fascinated by the absurdity and quirkiness of our world and the human race would find Tastes Like Human a worthwhile read.  Boivin and Lombardo, popularly known as “The Shark Guys” ever since their previous book, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery, have their own website where they posts lists galore and have taken their fondness for lists to book form with Tastes Like Human.

The Shark Guys note at the beginning of Tastes Like Human that their lists aren’t meant to be trivia but simply a collection of topics they (and typically others) find interesting.  Within the pages you’ll find stories of unlucky lottery players, human-animal marriages, horny cult leaders, and religious fanatics who experience divine visions in the most unlikely of places.  The Shark Guys also bestow upon readers their own thoughts and opinions in list form, from offering advice to PETA on how they should campaign for animal rights (i.e. banning cowbells in music, saving roaches with a “Raid on Raid) to informing the public of general etiquette guidelines at the ATM.

White Planet, Ash Silverlock

White Planet by Ash Silverlock

A lot of people enjoy reading because it gives them the opportunity to immerse themselves in a completely different world.  Readers can transport themselves into past eras or imagined futures, travel to distant countries or discover new cultures.  In some cases, authors successfully create entirely fictional and fantastical worlds for readers to visit, where the places and creatures within are given life by the unbridled imagination of the writer (i.e. The Lord of The Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter).

White Planet, a new fantasy novel by Ash Silverlock, introduces readers to the icy and mysterious planet of Rygarth, where a small colony of humans is struggling to survive in inhospitable conditions amongst dangerous creatures.  As the first part of the series The Ice World Chronicles, White Planet sets the foundation for the story surrounding the Tunguskan Icehold and its place within Rygarth.  It opens with a scene in the Meeting Hall, where two Shapers (enemies of humans with magical powers) come bearing a warning – a deadly creature from the past has returned.  Sixteen-year-old Gideon finds it difficult to believe the Shapers, who have been known to play deadly tricks on humans and cannot be trusted, but Tunguskan hunters set out to investigate nonetheless.  What transpires throughout the rest of White Planet stems from the Shapers’ warning.  Hunters encounter vicious “beastmen,” whole colonies of humans are found slaughtered, and even other planets become aware of the darkness that is threatening to engulf Rygarth and permanently exterminate human beings from its surface.