New Moon

I hear these books are popular with the kids these days...

I have to say I think this book is better than Twilight. Twilight spent its first half on the relatively interesting "girl meets vamp" plot and the second on a fairly routine "girl gets chased by bad vamps" story. New Moon's first half is slow ("Bella mopes") but picks up around the time Jacob wolfs out. (SPOILER!) And bonus, far fewer descriptions of the household chores Bella does. Am I the only one to think she wants to be a vampire so she can quit cooking dinner every two pages?

So far in the series I am mystified that everyone isn't "Team Jacob". Edward is so freaking controlling and has a superiority complex like you wouldn't believe. Jacob treats her like an equal. Even though he's...A YEAR YOUNGER (gasp) (Seriously, memo to Stephanie Meyers, way to reinforce the idea that women lose value as they age, Bella finds the idea of being 30 literally worse than death, and because she is one year older than Jacob, she thinks the idea of them being together is ridiculous, PS, the fact your brother's named Jacob? SUPER CREEPY)

My understanding is that soon Jacob will also be acting like a donkey's behind, leaving me no choice but to join "Team bang my head against the wall".

Frankly I have a hard time taking vampires seriously as romantic heroes. Maybe too much Buffy, maybe because they are dead. I think the last word on vampires belongs to Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "That's not your friend, that's the thing that killed him"

A Wrinkle in Time

I have been entering my kids books into blogger and I came across this book, I favorite of mine in the junior high era. Meg Murray and her little brother Charles Wallace don't fit in very well. They appear to the town as either idiots or genius and everyone thinks they are strange. Plus their father is mysteriously missing. One dark and stormy night they travel through time via tesseract (the wrinkle in time) as well as space to rescue their father from where he is being held. A popular boy from Meg's grade -Calvin O'Keefe joins them and find he fits in better with Meg's family than his own. The story it great, exciting and fun, but as a kid, Nerdy Meg finding a a person who likes her and feeling useful on the hunt for her father were the highlights of the book for me. This book is a Newberry award winner.

Archangel

I first read this book about 6 years ago, but I remember liking it a lot and I wanted to give Daily Book Buddy readers a thorough report so, just for you, I reread the book. It's a fantasy/sci-fi book, but to be honest, to me it seems to fit just as neatly into the romance category. The book is set in a world where angels (yes with wings and stuff) walk among men. The land is divided into three territories and each has its own group of angels who live high in the mountains but come into human territory to assist them by praying on their behalf. Gabriel is about to become the Archangel, the highest ranking angel, who has authority over all three territories. Before he does so he must find the woman who is destined to be his wife as she must sing with him at the ceremony or their world will be destroyed by Jehovah. The oracle identifies Rachel as the woman, but he still must search her out. When he finds her she is a slave and while happy to be freed, she's not really keen on marrying him. Eventually both Gabriel and Rachel realized their paths are more intertwined than they knew, and they must work together to avert catastrophe. The book seemed a bit more of cliched upon rereading, but I don't know if that is just because it was familiar due to having read it before. It's well written, kind of fun and I think most of you can probably tell if it's the kind of book you'd like. This is the first in a trilogy, but I have not read the the third book.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The post that has been almost ten years in the making! Deathly Hallows is a worthwhile finale to the series. Many, many elements from the preceding six volumes reappear making the book very satisfying to a careful reader. The final battles with He-Who-Must-Not-Be Named are exciting, although maybe not as scary as some of the ones in Order of the Phoenix. Almost every character we've met joins the fight one side or the other which makes from some unexpected situations. I felt Rowling was a bit heavy handed comparing Voldemort to Hitler (the whole mudblood/pure blood thing) and the final chapter was a bit too cute. A great book, a great series, a few flaws, but what can you do?

The Dark Tower

The link above takes you to a boxed set of the first four books in Stephen King's Dark Tower series. My husband has read all of these (mostly listening to them on audio) and enjoyed them but the intensity one of my friends from my old job has about these books is what made me decide to include them here. He once remarked that if he were to ever get a tattoo, it would be a symbol of the Dark Tower. Since not many people get tattoos to commemorate books, this got my attention. He recommends reading the first two books of the series before making up your mind about them, as he feels the first book is a prologue that sets up some of the action in the other books. These books are entries in "road books" such as Lord of the Rings (which he feels these books are modern equivalent too) where a disparate group of people meet up and begin traveling together to achieve a common goal --getting to the Dark Tower and defeating the Crimson King among other bad guys (including the Man in Black-- no, not Johnny Cash). Many characters are very easy to identify with and King makes them feel very real. For King fans, these books bring in several characters from his other works and King himself appears as a character.

On a Pale Horse

I first read this book, On A Pale Horse by Piers Anthony, when I was in high school at the recommendation of my friend Beth, who LOVED Piers Anthony and my high school boyfriend, Jacob, who said this series was the only good stuff by Piers Anthony. I don't think these are the only good books he's written, but they are the best, and this one is the best of the best, by far. The premise is --what if Death were a job? The book opens a magically enhanced version of our world, with Zane alone and in despair, trying to kill himself. However as he sees a corporal version of death approach him (think hood, skull, scythe) he panics and turns the gun on him, killing Death instead of himself. By doing this he assumes the office of death. Zane tries to fight this, refusing to reap souls, but eventally embraces his role (sort of), sorting through the souls of those who fall somewhere in the middle of good and bad. His pale horse, Mortis, changes from a steed to a car at the flip of a button and he has a computerized system to help him in his work. There is an entire series, called the Incarnations of Immortality, which include time, nature, fate, war, and good and evil.