You Suck: A Love Story by Christopher Moore

This is a sequel to his earlier vampire novel, Bloodsucking Fiends, which I’m pretty sure I’ve read, but can’t remember, even after having read the sequel with the same characters.

It’s typical Christopher Moore fare. Light, silly, brain candy.

I read this at the beach at the same time that steakums was reading Moore’s Fool, an account of King Lear from the perspective of the fool. At one point, she turned to me and said, “This book is great! You really need to read it.” “I’m sure it’s great,” I replied, “but does it have an un-dead smurf hooker in it?”

“No,” she admitted, “It does not. I guess you win.”

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ETA: I see that there is a third in the series, Bite Me: A Love Story, which stars a vampire cat and the best character from You Suck, Abby Normal, the would-be minion. Something else for the Amazon Wish List.

The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, book 1) by Rick Riordan

This is a fine young-adult novel about a new half-blood hero. It was fairly well written, and held my interest through out. If I had a complaint, it was that it read like a book that wanted to be a screenplay.

Comparisons to Harry Potter are inevitable, as this is about a boy in an unfortunate home environment, who discovers that he has secret powers and gets shipped off to a camp for other kids like him, where he discovers he is even more unique than even the other unusual kids there. Then, he teams up with a boy and a girl his age and goes on dangerous adventures.

I have heard that the later 4 books are better, so I look forward to checking them out.

29: A Novel by Adena Halpern

I read this on the plane back from Mexico a few weeks back. I wasn’t going to put it in my book log, because I was too embarrassed. It’s essentially a member of the Freaky Friday/18 Again/Topsy-Turvy genre of old people becoming young for a time.

It’s annoying, and poorly written, and predictable. The airport bookstore had this, or a bunch of conservative political commentary.

The moral of the story is to always pack enough books.

Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident by Eoin Colfer
Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code by Eoin Colfer

I actually read these before I read the 6th Hitchhiker’s book. I’m not sure I would have bothered the other way around.

These books are okay for young adult fiction, sort of. Not terribly well written, but with some good bits. They’re short, and breezy.

Meh.

A Fictional History of the United States (with Huge Chunks Missing) by T Cooper and Adam Mansbach

Essentially this is a collection of short stories with a half-hearted attempt to sprinkle them throughout United States historical periods.

Like most collections, there were some good, some amusing, some meh. Nothing I would go out of my way to recommend to anyone. I don’t remember why I put this on my wishlist, but I got it through PaperBackSwap.com, so it wasn’t very expensive.