Hosung Choi từ Chopal, Himachal Pradesh , India

nimto

11/06/2024

Dữ liệu người dùng, đánh giá và đề xuất cho sách

Hosung Choi Sách lại (10)

2019-12-17 05:30

Giúp Con Ngủ Trọn Đêm Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi:

Peter Klein's novel The Dancing Valkyrie has a lot of potential. It has a title that sounds smart and a cover that could easily scare anyone who would think of approaching you on the subway. It's also a vampire novel, which is always interesting. Unfortunately, these redeeming qualities become moot once you actually start to read the novel. Supposedly the author wanted to write an original vampire novel. No reincarnations of Dracula or Nosferatu here. Instead the vampires are very similar to real people-they can go out in the sun, they need food. However, since they are vampires they also need blood and are immortal. This idea is interesting but personally the traditional vampires seem more believable, if you can call fictional creatures believable. The novel centers on Mary Hoffman as she learns how to be a vampire from her Beth and Joseph (her mentors if you will), recruits Renfield-like underlings, and runs into Van Helsing-a vampire who kills other vampires. Along the way she also has more sex than is really necessary outside of a racy romance novel. The first strike against Klein's story comes from his main character. Aside from choosing to write from an unconvincing woman's perspective in the novel, Mary is not a character that I was able to like. She's a stripper-because she likes to dance nude-and she moonlights as a librarian, which offends my sensibilities because I work at a library. Foibles aside, Mary-like the rest of the characters appear one dimensional throughout the narrative. Klein throws in some random curse words now and then, to make the characters more authentic perhaps. Instead it just seems out of place. Worse still, the characters all sound the same. Mary's dialogue sounds so much like Joseph's that I actually confused the two at one point. This lack of individuality brings me to the main problem with The Dancing Valkyrie, aside from its being thin on plot. The writing is flat. The story starts with Mary adjusting to being a vampire and first meeting Joseph. From there Klein takes six chapters to explain how Beth found Mary and bit her. To his credit, Klein tries to create a vivid story by being descriptive. Unfortunately he fails miserably. The result is the feeling that you are reading the same lines over and over and over again-because that is basically what you are doing.

2019-12-17 07:30

Thực Thi (Tái Bản 2018) Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi:

I always judge a really satisfying book by the way that, when I am done reading it, I put it down on the table and let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding. This edition is really four books, so it's hard to review collectively. The first book, Wild Seed, is probably the best (and longest). It tells two intertwined stories: that of Doro, a spirit thousands of years old who inhabits the bodies of humans by using their bodies as a temporary vessel as he "feeds" upon them, and Anyanwe, a shapeshifter who has lived for hundreds of years by using her supernatural abilities to heal and rebuild her own body. Doro selectively breeds humans in an attempt to create superior beings with psychic and telekinetic powers, and the book doesn't shy away from this by masking it in metaphor: Doro is a slave trader, and those he breeds and controls are all, to varying extents, his property. This alone makes the work nearly unique among SF works; the horror of the plot device is magnified by the very real American race relations of the setting. Anyanwu is forced to struggle between her desire to care for the children that Doro has fathered with her ("wearing" different bodies each time) and her need to escape his grasp. Five stars. The second book, Mind of My Mind, is set in the present day. Doro's breeding has created a widely dispersed population of troubled psychics, many of whom succumb to mental illness or suicide because of the torment their powers cause. One of his children, at the maturation of her powers, finds that she can connect telepathically to all the others to form a network ("The Pattern") from which she can both draw power and control everyone else. Four stars. The third book (Clay's Ark) is only tangentially related to the previous two. In it, a crashed spacecraft's escaped inhabitant spreads a virulent extraterrestrial plague to everyone he comes in contact with. The mechanism of the disease is almost certainly an intentional nod to the AIDS epidemic. Those who survive the initial infection develop mutant powers of enhanced speed and reflexes, but with a terribly desperate need to spread the infection to others. The small rural community he infects struggles to remain isolated enough to keep the rest of (post-apocalype, by the way) humanity safe while culling enough uninfected outsiders to satisfy their needs. Three stars. The final book, Patternmaster, is my least favorite. Despite the chronology of the stories, this was Butler's first published work, and it's not that strong. It is set far in the future, where The Pattern has grown stronger and links everyone on earth that possesses psychic ability, leaving un-gifted individuals as the "mute" servant class for their psychic masters. Two stars.

Người đọc Hosung Choi từ Chopal, Himachal Pradesh , India

Người dùng coi những cuốn sách này là thú vị nhất trong năm 2017-2018, ban biên tập của cổng thông tin "Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn" khuyến cáo rằng tất cả các độc giả sẽ làm quen với văn học này.