Book Review: Miss Peregrine's School for Gifted Children, by Ransom Riggs

This one had some potential; it definitely started out pretty good. Confused boy...Jeff? Larry? James? Something like that...we'll call him Jeff. (I probably should remember his name, since I just finished this book not 5 minutes ago.) Anyway, Jeff has a seemingly crazy Grandpa who says he grew up with a bunch of 'peculiar' kids with a bunch of special powers. No one believes crazy Grandpa, but one day Grandpa gets killed by a scary monster. Maybe he wasn't so crazy after all!

Spoiler: he wasn't crazy. He really did live with a bunch of peculiar kids with special powers...in a big secret mansion...cared for by a time-traveling shape shifting headmistress...in a plot that was absolutely nothing like X-Men whatsoever.

The X-Peculiars befriend Jeff and together they must defeat the monster things that killed Jeff's Grandpa. Along the way, they will:

• Swear a lot. PG-13 language, but a lot of it. 
• Travel to distant lands using very flimsy excuses
• Play on a dangerous island with the permission of Jeff's dad, who is really very cool with his son playing on a dangerous like Scottish island that they've never been to and that the locals warn is very dangerous. 
• Try their darnedest to not re-create the nearly exact plot to all of the X Men movies

Unfortunately, they fail in their endeavor of the last bullet. It's almost exactly like most of the X Men movies. All-powerful headmistress with super powers who gets conveniently knocked out of commission at the end, forcing the heroes to face the bad guys on their own, mutant powers, feeling different, being discriminated against, having characters survive the holocaust, and so on.

The good news is, if you like the X Men movies and have a terrible memory, you will not mind this book. It's kind of a Hunger Games for teenage guys, I guess, since there is some light romance but it's all very guy perspective-y. So there's that. 

The author leaves the ending wide open for a sequel, and in fact I've already checked it out from the library. Even though this book was derivative and not technically that good, it was interspersed with some interesting creepy authentic old-timey photos throughout. The author tried to weave them into the story, and hilariously failed, but they're still cool pictures and they help the story move along. 

I recommend this book to people who would prefer to read words rather than stare at their open palms. This book was significantly better than trying to read my hands, which have no words on them whatsoever, unless I'm trying to remember someone's name or other important data, in which case, my hands say 'Tuesday, 7:30.' Again: the book would win. Marginally.

Book Review: Before I Go To Sleep, by SJ Watson

So this was an interesting book, made even more so by the fact that I have absolutely no idea how I came to decide to read it. I must have read about it on some blog, only I can't find it on any of the regular blogs I read. At some point I put it in my library queue and that was that.

I got the audio CD version, and found that it was the first book on CD that I've ever heard that was narrated by a woman. So that was a change of pace, and one that took a lot of getting used to as it was a British woman no less. 

The book itself is kindof a bit of Memento where the lead character has amnesia and can only remember things for a short period of time. For this woman, she retains memories until she goes to sleep at night. The next day, she's forgotten everything that's happened in the last 20 years.

There are a number of twists and turns, but almost none of them turn out to be quite as interesting as the book suggests they could be. In the end, the 'real' story is really pretty safe and straightforward. With a premise like this, it could have gone a lot further but never did. It's kind of like Inception, which is a great movie but, let's face it, no one really dreams of anything all that creative at all in it. Tom Hardy says, "Don't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling," and he's dreamed up a larger gun, but why doesn't he dream up like a rainbow-colored space rabbit that has laser beam eyeballs instead? That would have been perfectly within the acceptable world of Inception. I guess a slightly larger gun costs less? 

The prose is written extremely girly. I was 100% positive the author was a woman. It turns out it's a dude. Somehow. So I guess that's good, sort of? I definitely believed that the author had the female perspective down pat. Hope you like about 300 pages of worrying about wrinkles and stretch marks because the character is sad that she's older now!

Anyhoo, I'd say to skip this one. There's a bit of language here and there and the back story you eventually discover will just frustrate you that it's not cooler. Rent Inception instead, and watch it with 3-D glasses, even if you didn't get the 3-D version.

JOBS: The Ongoing Series

5th Job: Detailing Cars for My Dad's Friends, St. George, UT

Let's see, where were we? 

When last we discussed jobs, I had just finished up talking about my job cleaning up The Boulders building project for my Dad. The sequel to that job was in detailing cars for my Dad's somewhat well-to-do-friends.

I started off on my own on this little entrepreneurial endeavor, but added my sister, Hillary. We both needed the money, which if I recall was $20 a car - a pretty decent deal by today's standards, plus I think Dad's friends let us clean their cars every 2 weeks or so. So there was a pretty significant amount of charity going on here.

Still, that put gas in the tank, and we got to drive around in a Mercedes Benz and whatever the 1992 version of Escalades were. We would drive them to our house and wash and wax them and then pretty thoroughly detail them inside. Today I want to say that each car took about 3 hours? Possibly? 

Our biggest ever 'score' came from one of the guys let us detail his ski-doos. That was a big money job, although I found it nearly impossible to clean ski-doos. They were already clean-they lived in the water, after all. So washing them just felt like I was being too ironic for my own good. But we washed them and then tried to wax them, but the was didn't really do anything. They seemed to be made out of an odd plasticy material. At the time I guessed fiberglass, but I strongly suspect it was closer to 'completely normal plastic.'

Today I would absolutely clean those ski-doos with some kind of hard water remover, and I would try to find a special wax that would actually do something other than just make them all slightly slipperier ski doos that nonetheless look identical to how they looked 10 minutes ago. There's got to be a special product for that. I would also probably advertise, so I could get more clients than 2 of my Dad's friends. It was around this time in my life that others probably realized I was not exactly destined for greatness.

Edward Gorey

"More is happening out there than we are aware of. It is possibly due to some unknown direful circumstance.” 
-Edward Gorey

Movie Review: The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug (or, "The Hobbit: Hope You Like Decapitations")

So...The Hobbit, part 2. I didn't really like The Hobbit, part 1. I though it was boring and slow and really dark and violent. But it did look cool, and that matters to me in a 3-hour movie. I would have rather watched these movies than 3 hours of, say, ESPN. But that's a pretty low bar.

Still, The Hobbit 2 was much better than the first movie. They put a lot more interesting things in this one and it has a lot better set pieces. Locations were great, and there were some actual entertaining sequences, most notably the barrel river escape sequence. That was really well done.

But this one is still really dark and violent. It's been about 25 years since I last read The Hobbit but I remember it being about 90% to do with Gollum in the mountain and there was a part with trolls and MAYBE there was a dragon in there towards the end somewhere, and that was about it. I don't remember it crawling with horrifying orcs and spiders and having the Hobbits decapitate most of them in really explicit detail. Why can't movies just be light and fun anymore?

Plus, it's the 2nd movie-we really need to start killing off dwarves. I know I just said the movie should be lighter and now I'm calling for killing at least half of the cast, but they really don't serve any point anymore and they don't have distinctive personalities, really. Have half of them be eaten by the dragon, maybe. That would be fun.

I really think they were created so that their names would sound funny when Gandolf read them all out. It's like 'Dwarlin, Marlin, Tweeby, Feeby, Deeby, Oin, Gro'in, Flo'in, Ziddy, Fiddy, Biddy, Burry, Surry, Tarlin, Farlin, and our leader, Thorin Oakenshield."

So go and see it, sure. There's nothing else out, and it's clean other than for the NC-17 - rated violence. If you're looking for the Desolation of Smaug, however, look elsewhere. This movie is more like 'the two and a half hours of dwarves getting captured by everyone in middle earth, and the exploration of the boring lives of minor side characters, and then the monologue of Smaug.' There's no desolation. That appears to be held off for the last movie, which I assume is called "The Hobbit and the Dragon Whose Named is Pronounced Differently by Everyone in the Movie."

Book Review: Tyrannosaur Canyon, by Douglas Preston

I guess Douglas Preston has become my new Michael Crichton. Ever since MC passed away, the literary world has really lacked for a very entertaining, interesting author. DP in my opinion doesn't have as unique of a voice as MC, and he sorely lacks for humor, but he writes very cinematic-like movies; ones that you can very easily see being turned into movies, though so far I don't think any of them actually have. But they're clean and they're fun and they make for a good read.

Preston reminds me of Crichton because he, like MC, extensively researches his books. This book has a great deal of scientific information in it, and you can tell in parts where the military is speaking or lab techs are speaking that the jargon they're using and processes they're describing are accurate. That helps the books feel somewhat more realistic.

Tyrannosaur Canyon was, to me, a lot stronger than Cabinet of Curiosities. The story is more straightforward and it had some decent twists. I won't give away anything because the main crux of the story doesn't really get revealed until about 40% of the way through the book. But basically it's the story of a treasure hunter who gets murdered at the beginning of the book; a man finds him and, before he dies, he gives the man a notebook containing a highly encrypted code, and asks him to get it to his estranged daughter. The story is about staying away from the murderer, trying to find this daughter, trying to identify the treasure hunter, and trying to find his treasure.

The book is really well-paced. But, like Cabinet of Curiosities, there's not really a single laugh in the entire thing. Humor can go a long way in books like this, and this could have really used a lighter touch here and there. And although I liked the ending, I thought the location of the entire last 20% of the book was one of the least interesting locations the author could have picked. It's even more frustrating because the location just PRIOR to the whole ending location is a cool spooky abandoned gold mine. Why not hang out in there?

Still, good characters, a good story, decent twists, and clean dialogue and situations for the most part entirely throughout made this a recommended read.