Clockwork Princess

Note to self: When it’s been over a year since you have read the last book in a series, a refresher might be a good idea. It was almost 18 between reading this book and reading Clockwork Prince and I spent a lot of time looking things up on the internet and hoping I didn’t accidentally fall into a spoiler. I liked the book, but one day when I have some time (you know, when I win the lottery I never buy a ticket for) I am going to reread all three back-to-back so I’m not so confused!

I found what I wrote last August:

I had a hard time getting into Clockwork Princess. It dragged at first but about 5 chapters in it picked up. I'm not sure if it was the book that dragged or if it dragged because it had been so long since I read Clockwork Angel and Clockwork Prince.

Clockwork Princess reveals a lot of genealogy and other details that are relevant to the Mortal Instruments books as well. I am quite tempted to reread the three Infernal Devices books and the first five Mortal Instruments books before the last book comes out. I always reread all of the Harry Potter books before a new one came out and while I knew those books better than these, it always helped.

I thought the epilogue wrapped things up a little too nicely...there seemed to be a little too much of people getting what they wanted even if it was far fetched…

(August 2013)

The Mark of Athena

I was very excited when a message from the library popped up, telling me this book had arrived. But the thing that made me the most excited? On one of the last pages, a few little lines reading: The House of Hades, coming Fall 2013. For whatever reason, correct or incorrect, I thought The Mark of Athena was the last book in the Heroes of Olympus series. I'm so glad there's at least one more book!

I felt like I needed a refresher from The Son of Neptune before I started this one...I kept mixing up which of the "new" characters came from Camp Jupiter and which ones came from Camp Half-Blood.

I liked the book - the adventures were exciting and there were enough of them, but not too many (if that makes sense). I did kind of wish we got to see more of Camp Jupiter and Camp Half-Blood preparing for their inevitable meeting (maybe that will happen in the next book?). The little teaser glimpses of what was going on that the seven got to see through Piper's knife were revealing, but I wanted more!

I'm on track for 16 books in the first four months of 2013...yahoo!

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Demigod Files: A Survival Guide to Greek Gods and Monsters

Hey, you, remember the note-to-self yesterday? Yeah? Well here’s another example for you.

Quick read anyone? Less than an hour! This was fun. And that’s that!

The Heroes of Olympus: The Son of Neptune

I’m waiting somewhat impatiently for my name to come up on the list for The Mark of Athena, but I’ve got a few weeks at least ahead of me…this book followed a similar format to The Lost Hero except this time it was Percy Jackson who had no idea where he was or why. I’m super excited to see Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter join forces in the next book. And I’m super excited that Michelle is also all over these books so I have someone to discuss them with. She’s a little peeved that the third book is Athena and not Minerva, but I think there’s a reason for that…I don’t think that the son of Neptune referred to in the title was Percy Jackson…

And with that, we're finally into October...I'm so far behind, it's unbelievable, but I'm blaming it on the six weeks in trimester number one where the guy who got up at 3:30 am every morning, the preschooler and the pregnant lady were in a competition to see who could go to bed first and our house was usually silent at sleeping by 8:30 pm at the LATEST!

The Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero

Yay...more Percy Jackson, except Percy Jackson is missing and all of a sudden there are Roman demigods running around with the Greek demigods. I really liked this book and how Rick Riordan meshed Greek and Roman mythologies. I really appreciated the glossary at the end that explained who the various gods where and what their Greek equivalent was. I was super impatient to read the next installment...and I have now...so in a few days, that will be up too...

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Last Olympian

And the series ends...I liked this one...and I wasn't too happy that the series was over, but then I discovered that The Heroes of Olympus has the same characters in it! And to me that's a sign that a book or a series is good - if I'm sad there isn't more, I've probably enjoyed it, but if I'm annoyed there isn't more, the story was probably missing something. (This was sad, for sure!)

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Wooohoooo...I remember! This is the one that takes place underground...a lot...and has Daedalus in it! I devoured these books the end of the summer - I think I read 2, 3 and 4 in about five days. Real comments coming soon...really...

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Titan’s Curse

More Percy Jackson! And maybe when I move away from Percy Jackson, these posts will become more interesting...this was the book that had Artemis' hunters in it and I liked it, but that's about all I can remember (I've read 8 Rick Riordan books in the last little while and I can't keep them straight...)

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters

Okay, here we go...I finished this book at the end of August and now with pregnant brain, remembering that far back is like asking me what I had for breakfast on July 27, 1989.

The Sea of Monsters is the second of five books in the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series and I inhaled it in two days. Again, I was reminded that my knowledge of mythology sucks...maybe once I get through the back log of the sixteen books I need to write about, I can choose a book on mythology as my next book...I liked it enough to read the next three...let's leave it at that...

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

This book was on my 2011 Christmas list. This is noteable because I don't know the last time I read a Christmas or birthday book so quickly. Probably Christmas 2008. Baby J gave me The Hour I First Believed and we were in Kelowna and so I read it. But I have an entire shelf in our bookcase dedicated to birthday and Christmas books, many of which I asked for, that I haven't time to read yet.

But back to Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. It took me a few attempts to get into the first chapter and then I was hooked. Monsters, mystery, time travel, old photographs, and it is even sort of set in World War II...what more could I ask for? Oh yeah, a great plot and awesome writing. And this book had it all. I should have written this six weeks (ish) ago when I finished the book so that my thoughts were fresh, but unfortunately life had other plans for me.

I am planning on rereading this one - it was definitely that good and I feel like I was so excited about it, I may have read it too quickly and missed something! Not bad for a book I put on my Christmas list just because it was on some "Books to Buy for Christmas" list and the old photographs intrigued me. Sometimes maybe it is okay to judge a book by its cover!

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

So my thought that I would stop reading kids/young adults fantasy series and concentrate on some of the books piling up in my house? Yeah, it's just not happening. For ages I've wanted to read the Percy Jackson books, but I didn't want to buy them and because my library browsing tends to be anything adjacent to the small kids section of the library, I never picked them up. And then this book made it into one of the turning racks within easy reach of the picture books.

I read it in a day, but that's not surprising since it's geared towards the under-12 crowd. I liked it...it was slightly predictable (I guessed who the bad guy was almost right away), but it was good. Again it was a great reminder to me that I need to brush up on my Greek mythology. The Google machine? It was my friend again. I went to the library last week to pick up the four books I had on hold (which is another reason books are piling up in my house. I need to stop putting holds on things and instead just adding to the massively huge list of books I'd like to read someday) and managed to come home with two more from this series. Maybe by the time I finish the Percy Jackson books I will have a better grasp on Greek mythology. And maybe (but not likely) I won't be drawn into Rick Riordan's world of mythology. Yeah. Fat chance. I'm already hooked.

The Enchantress: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

BIG SPOILER ALERT

So the series is done. The secrets have all been exposed. Or have they?

As with the other books, The Enchantress one picked up immediately where the previous book (The Warlock) left off. I wasn't as excited about this book as the others: all the way through I wished the other five were nearby so that I could thumb through them for some little kernel Scott mentioned previously that would help make the current book make sense.

The only character that really developed and grew in this book was Virgina Dare...learning a little more of her back story made her motivations much more clear. I never really got the feeling she was a "bad guy" except that her association with John Dee (who also turned out not to be a through and through "bad guy" in the end. He didn't really redeem himself, but he did show that he was a human capable of human emotions) pointed that way. I'm not sure if I needed the end of the Warlock to help me along, but I had trouble with the whole thing with Josh becoming Marethyu and living a bunch of parallel existences (in Isis and Osiris' Shadowrealm, on Earth etc) I have heard rumours that Scott is writing a series about the Earthlords and the first installment is going to be released sometime in 2013, so I'm wondering if some of the loose ends will be tied up there.

Scott's own website suggests that not everything will be revealed in the last book.

screen shot from Scott's website

I'm hoping that's the case, because ugh. My reading of the end is that the prophecy [The two that are one must become the one that is all. One to save the world, one to destroy it] came true because Sophie saved our world and Josh destroyed Danu Talis. But I still have lots of questions. Did Isis and Osiris really die? What happened to Will and Billy the Kid and Machiavelli and Black Hawk? Where the three simluatneous battles necessary [I felt like they were big screen fodder]? If Marethyu was taking Nicholas and Perenelle back to Paris to die, how did the three of them manage to make it to Niten and Aoife's wedding? How did they get Aoife back from the Shadowrealm she went to to imprison Coatlicue? What adventures did Sophie have the 700 (I think) years from the destruction of Danu Talis until she returned to earth? What was Virginia Dare queen of? What happened to Bastet?

More! I want more!

I think I will probably reread this series, but I need to do it when I have all six books together...so I will either be buying them at some point in the future or I'll move back to Kelowna for the sole purpose of borrowing them from Michelle. Okay, maybe not about the Kelowna part, but I might see if she'd trust me with them in Vancouver for a while.

City of Lost Souls

City of Lost Souls is the fifth of six in the Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments series. I wasn't thrilled with the ending of the last book and some of that spilled over into this book. It got a bit strange and there was a lot of waiting for something to happen. I will read the sixth book because I need to know what happens, but I am not as excited about it as I was about the first three book in this series or the books in The Infernal Devices. The best part of this book? I managed to get a brand spanking new copy because I was one of the first in (the virtual) line when they received the shipment!

I also heard that Cassandra Clare is writing another trilogy called The Dark Artifices that takes place sometime in the future. From what I've seen it appears that the books will follow a similar plot line to the other two series - talented teenaged Shadowhunters who have intense romantic feelings for one another that are problematic in someway. What do you think, should I read those too or am I going to be increasingly annoyed??

The Warlock: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT (unless you've read the first four books, then you're probably okay)

The Warlock. The Deceiver. The Traitor. There were a few warlocks in this book. As I've made my way through The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, I have discovered that I really need to read it with a dictionary, an open web browser and maybe a professor of mythology by my side. I think this is a series that I will one day want to share with J, but I need to better educate myself on mythology. My biggest problem is that most of the myths I know about, apart from the Bible, are Roman and some Greek. Michael Scott doesn't just include those two, he also refers to Mayan, Egyptian, Norse, Irish, and Japanese myths among others. The books are also full of other historical figures, some of whom were instantly recognizable (Mr. William Shakespeare or Joan of Arc anyone?), some of whom I recognized but had very little context for (Machiavelli, Billy the Kid), and some who are most certainly interesting but I had no idea who they were in any context (Virginia Dare).

I read The Necromancer and The Warlock back-to-back over a few quick days. I was away from home with J and had lots of downtime and when I finished The Necromancer, I literally put it down and picked up The Warlock and kept reading. That's mostly why my post on The Necromancer is so short and refers to this one. I can't remember where one book ends and the other begins.

The Enchantress, the last book in the series, is due out very soon and I get to have one of the first copies from the library, fresh off the shelves, before anyone else reads it and I'm hoping that soon there might be a box set, maybe of trade paperbacks, so that I can read them slowly and refer to earlier books as I plug along. Oh, and so I can pay closer attention to the covers.

I wish I had made a map of the main characters and their relationships and drawn myself a family tree of sorts, because I can't remember who goes with whom now...

So far I've enjoyed this series. I am looking forward to the last book and to rereading all of them too...

The Necromancer: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

Book four in Michael Scott's series about Sophie, Josh, the Flamels and a very interesting cast of supporting characters was good. I am feeling like I'd like to have all of them around me when I read them though...more about this with The Warlock, coming soon to a blog near you...

Princess of the Midnight Ball

Princess of the Midnight Ball is The Twelve Dancing Princesses. I wasn't sure how the fairy tale would be extended to novel length, but I really like how Jessica Day George did it. I don't have a whole lot to say about this book, but I am planning to read the others - I'm looking forward to the Cinderella adaptation - Princess of Glass.

The Sorceress: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

First of all, I need to remember to take these pictures with my camera, not my pathetic phone. What a hideous picture!

Secondly, I need to post these soon after I read the book...especially when I am reading a ton of books, close together.

Third, I'm kind of looking forward to this series being done. But that might be because I have read four whole books and two partial books since I read The Sorceress, so my memory might be fuzzy. I am still convinced I need a good, basic course in world mythology, so I'll work on that. In any case, I liked this book well enough - it takes place simultaneously in San Francisco and London...there's time travelling...there's magic and twins and twin magic. I have The Necromancer sitting on the table waiting for me to finish another book and then I'll be back in the thick of the Nicholas Flamel world...

The Magician: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

Whew. I finished this at the physio yesterday. I've figured it out, the physio is part of the reason I've been devouring book...I spend an hour 2-3 times a week lying on her table with the acupuncture needles or vibrating cup things or heat on my leg and that gives me a nice quite hour to read. No kid. No phone. No husband. No chores. No distractions. I also spend about 30 minutes each session on the bike and elliptical, so there's that too...

Anyway.

The Magician mostly takes place in Paris and introduces some new characters like Machiavelli and Joan of Arc. Seriously. It also provides more information on Nicholas Flamel's background and I'm beginning to wonder about him...

I've mentioned my obsession with London and how I always feel homesick when I read a book about it over there, but I also have this thing for Paris. I always wanted to go to Paris and for a while I thought I wanted to live there. And then I visited Paris and I didn't like it. And then I visited it again and I figured it would be fabulous the second time, but I didn't like it. But you know what, I visited it again and I still didn't like it.

But I still want to go back...especially after reading books about Paris (like this one) so I'm now in "Let's visit Paris" mode.

I'm still enjoying this series - I love all of the characters - the traditional mythology ones and the quirky others (Hi there Joan)...I am planning to do some background reading once my library book pile is substantially reduced.

Clockwork Prince

Ahhh...I've been waiting for this book for ages...and it came out last fall, but the waiting list was huge! I had to get it back right away too as there are something like 200+ people waiting for it after me!

Where do I start?

I really should have reread, or at least skimmed, Clockwork Angel before I started Clockwork Prince. I read it so long ago that I had trouble recalling some of the basics of the plot...I feel like this is a series (along with the Mortal Instruments) that will one day find it has a home on my bookshelves...

Will and Jem. Tessa. Jessamine and Sophie. The Fairchilds. The Herondales. Mortmain. Vampires. Shadowhunters. Downworlders. The Clave. The Institute. The Silent Brothers. I don't even know where to start.

I think I might actually like the Infernal Devices more than the Mortal Instruments, but that may just be my London obsession showing...

I like Tessa and she reminds me of Clarry - both in her innocence of a world she is part of but didn't grow up in and her overall being. I still haven't figured out WHAT she is (but that's probably the point!) or why she was in the City of Glass...

This booked was fast paced and not without some interesting twists and turns. I finished it much faster than I thought I would, which might be why I feel like I need to reread parts of it.

I'm torn between Will and Jem and I'm not sure if Tessa made the right decision...And I'm still mad about the last few pages of City of Fallen Angels. I'm itching for the next Cassandra Clare book - City Of Lost Souls is out in May.

Has anyone read any Cassandra Clare? What do you think about Will and Jem? And (totally about a different book) what do you think of the last scene in City of Fallen Angels?

The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

I have had this book waiting in the wings for so long...and I had to finish it last night because the library wants it back today. I can't wait to start the second book, but before I do that I have another book that the library wants back on Tuesday that I have to finish first. Because I know I won't be able to renew it because there were something like 200 people on the waitlist after me. But more about that book in a few days.

The Alchemyst was book number nine in February. I got off to a slow start to the month - only two books in the first seventeen days, but I made up for it with seven books in the last twelve days. I don't think that's a sustainable number for me, but whatever, this month it happened. I happened to have a four day holiday that involved a plane ride and two sick days in the last part of the month, so that likely helped me out.

I had seen the various books in this series floating around the library for a few months and finally was able to grab the first three a few weeks ago. And then, after I had them, the series was highly recommended by a couple of friends, so I figured I had chosen some winners.

This book was great - I love how modern times and mythologies of multiple cultures are interwoven. I love the characters. I do not love how these books have made me acutely aware that I have little knowledge of most mythology...but I can easily remedy that! I keep looking characters up on the internet, just like Josh.

Once I'm done this series I think I need a break from the YA Fantasy genre...Ancient mythologies might be a good choice...we'll see...