Urgh...

I have to wake up for an 8:30 class tomorrow. My roommate got a grin out of that when I told her. I also have a first day assignment due Tuesday. This is shaping up to be a rough first week.

In book review news I am actually reading several books at once which is not something I do normally and it is fragmenting my brain accordingly. I have not finished any of these books but I can provide analysis on each of them (perhaps revealing why I've yet to finish them). I recently scolded my friend Tim for judging a book before he had finished so I won't say that these books are bad. Merely that most of them start out that way. I'm determined to finish all of them eventually, though. "Eventually" however, can simply mean at some point in my life.

1.) Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett: Not Pratchett's best, I'm sorry to say. It's one of his more abstract views on the fabric of reality. It also doesn't feature any of my favorite characters. Vetinari pops up occasionally, but not nearly enough to keep me interested, and the main protagonists are clearly throw-away characters that I'll never see again aside from Gaspode the Wonder Dog. While Gaspode is funny I'm more interested in humans.

2.) Angels and Demons by Dan Brown: The fact that this book got published makes me feel a whole lot better about my chances. The premise is all right, but the villains are flat comic-book like people who seem to be evil just for the sake of it and the good guys aren't much better developed. The style lacks the usual eloquence that I expect from a good book. It is written as a novel yet it has all the mental depth of a James Bond film.

3.) Phantom by Terry Goodkind: I already did a long preliminary review on this so I'll just briefly update to say that I'm still having issues with this book. I usually accept Goodkind's violence and gore because the story is so compelling and action-packed. But the characters have done practically nothing for the past hundred pages or so but reminisce about how horrible the evil New Order army is and how they rape and kill everyone. Yes. I get it. I KNOW. Move on with the story! I also like Goodkind's philosophy, but when the characters do nothing but ponder for fifty or so pages I begin to squirm. Plus Goodkind's male fantasies are showing through more than they usually do which once again leads to the bad fan fiction feel. At least two all-powerful beautiful women want to copulate with Richard (who is ALREADY MARRIED to another beautiful and all-powerful woman) and this nearly escalated into a cat fight. Luckily it didn't because I would have had to throw the book at the wall at that point and it's rather heavy and the walls here already have holes...

4.) Rasputin's Daughter by Robert Alexander: This is actually the best book I've been reading so far. I just picked it up randomly in the library because I've always been interested in Russian history of the Romanov era and the cover has a both disturbing yet captivating image of a haunted and angry-looking young woman. I got to Chapter 6 before forcing myself to put it down. It's a highly suspenseful account of the week before Rasputin's infamous murder told from the perspective of his teenaged daughter. I like that while it doesn't say Rasputin was a good person, his daughter clearly loved him, so it's a much different account than we normally get. She doesn't try to hide his rather questionable activities, but she has come to accept them, so she doesn't portray Rasputin as the center of all evil. Plus it's a murder mystery to boot and far more artfully written than Dan Brown's in any case. Probably the only reason I haven't finished it is because I know that, if I pick it up again, I won't do anything else for the rest of the day.

This is also an unprecedented amount of books for me to be reading all at once. I can't remember the last time I read so many, in any case, so I hope I don't go insane when school starts.