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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
kevinrubin has commented on (4) products
King Dork 01
by
Frank Portman
kevinrubin
, May 29, 2009
The front cover says "if you're in a band or wish you were, if you loved or hated 'Catcher in the Rye', if you like girls or are one... King Dork will rock you're world". Being pretty neutral about 'Catcher in the Rye' (I liked it, didn't "love" it) and never having been in a band, with only casual daydreams about that, I guess I only qualify here with the "like girls" category... This is Tom Henderson's story about his life as a totally unpopular dork in high school. He has one friend, Sam Hellerman because for all the years of the schools making kids line up alphabetically, they were next to each other, and he's about equally unpopular. Both of them are picked on and beaten up on a regular basis by the kids Tom calls "normal". Meanwhile the two of them have band, whose name changes on a frequent basis, Baby Batter, Plasma Nukes, Tennis with Guitars (this came about after playing air guitar with tennis rackets during gym class and the teacher getting upset and trying to make them equally angry by asking "how would you like it if I played tennis with guitars?"), The Underpants Machine, The Stoned Marmadukes, Oxford English, Balls Deep, Elephants of Style, Chi-Mos, and so forth... They make up their own stage names and what they do, they come up with the first few album titles and covers... The only thing they don't really do is make music! And even though they fantasize about their band's music changing the world, fortunately they never come up with "Wyld Stallyns". Throughout the story Tom talks about the "cult of Rye" because all the teachers put such an emphasis on reading "The Catcher in the Rye" including his English teacher who has them waste time copying pages from it and using some of its words in sentences. Tom also finds some of his late father's old books, with underlines, margin notes and even a folded up, coded note and then becomes obsessed with unraveling his father's history and trying to solve how he actually died, which was deemed an accident by the Santa Carla (yes, the same fictional city as "The Lost Boys") police department where he was an investigator, but a suicide by Tom's mother and possibly a murder... By the end, they enter their band in a school talent show which has quite an effect on their social standing in school. They suck hardcore, but the whole school likes their lyrics. And it ends with Tom saying "but honestly, I've got my mind on other things. Girls and rock and roll, I mean. Everything else is trivial." Overall, it was pretty good and Portman did a good job writing Tom as sort of 21st century Holden Caulfield. I got tired of some of the "Catcher in the Rye" discussions, and got confused about all the murder mystery ideas at the end. It would've been better to have it narrated that Tom and Sam discussed it than share the half baked, incomplete, uninformed ideas with us readers. I certainly felt some kinship with Tom's opening description of himself, "I fit the traditional mould of the brainy, freaky, oddball kid who reads too much, so bright that his genius is sometimes mistaken for just being retarded. I know a lot of trivia, and I often use words that sound made up but actually out to be in the dictionary. But I can never quite figure out anything to say if someone addresses me directly...."
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A Fall Of Moondust
by
Arthur C Clarke
kevinrubin
, May 21, 2009
It's fun reading hard science fiction novels from earlier times. This one is from 1960, before Yuri Gagarin's first flight into space, and long before his most famous novel, "2001: A Space Odyssey" and before Kennedy challenged America to put a man on the moon... It's a standard disaster and rescue story. In this case a boat that's sunk beneath the surface of a sea of dust on the moon. The plot is very linear, with only one problem being dealt with at a time and only one disaster at a time. Each time a problem happens (the boat sinking further, the temperature rising, etc.) it's fixed before the next occurs. Clarke mostly glosses over the too-technical details involved, though he does give us readers a quick lecture on the difference between weight and mass and how that affects (or doesn't, in this case) a construction worker in low gravity. Most of the characters take things easy enough and any psychological problems are solved quickly so the tension never builds to nail biting or edge-of-the-seat levels.
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Black Order Sigma Force 03
by
James Rollins
kevinrubin
, May 21, 2009
Sort of a James Bond meets Angels and Demons thing here... But faster paced than either of them. Some of this is straight from James Bond... We have the bad guys in their mountain fortress, including its own internal railway system. We have the hero at an auction for a rare item, although in this case it's his companion who, with nimble fingers, swaps the real item for a fake and tells the hero that if he'd won it "I would've said it was a fake". Another scene right out of Star Wars. Our captured hero tries to save his friends' lives by telling the supreme evil bad guy the secret information and the bad guy says "I believe you're right. Now kill his friends." A little later there's "Open the blast shield!" too... And we've got the fantastic, futuristic energy source that can be used for many things, including supplying power, genetic manipulation and mass destruction, depending who controls it. And by the end this gets combined with prayer and mysticism... Whoah! And why, oh why, are the heros so dumb? In Rollins' Sigma Force, they're all ex-special forces operators who got recruited by DARPA for it's super elite team, sent back to college to earn multiple PhD's each as part of their training. Why do they keep making stupid mistakes? How can they keep letting a fifteen year old runaway girl outsmart them, steal their wallets and continually make them do what she wants? This book follows after "Map of Bones" and makes some references to events in that story, Gray's relationship with Rachel, Monk's loss of a hand, Monk and Kat's relationship (bearing fruit in this book). Mostly it could probably be read without having read "Map of Bones" which I read without having read any previous Sigma Force novels. Overall, it's fast, action-packed and entertaining, as long as you can suspend disbelief in a few places and don't expect anything deep...
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Astra & Flondrix
by
Seamus Cullen
kevinrubin
, May 16, 2009
My first introduction to this book was in high school when my creative writing teacher, Mr. Bucy, brought it to class. He held it up and said "this book has all the sexual acts I'd thought possible by page 50". And while I was curious, I was not one of the two students who raced to the front of the room when he set it down on a stool with the instructions "now nobody come up here to get it". It's a retelling of the classic faery story, of a faery boy with a human father and elven mother, much along the lines of an x-rated version of Lord Dunsany's "The King of Elfland's Daughter". In this a teenaged faery boy, Astra meets an equally hormone-loaded teenage elf maiden, Flondrix and in love, they together travel fairy to break the enchanted curse laid on Astra's human father, King Barlocks, who must vicariously experience puberty in the son he doesn't know he has. Along the way we meet more elves, dwarves, witches, mice and an evil sorcerer... What my teacher told us may not have been far off the mark, except that being a fantasy novel, many of the characters have vastly different shapes and sizes from humans, making it a very interesting read (more than that probably isn't appropriate for a family-friendly site like this!). The writing quality is pretty clumsy, but then that isn't necessarily what it's all about.
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