An old Year-end Review for 2003

While cleaning up my hard drive, I found files where I kept track of the books I read for a given year. Someone had given me the idea (back in the 90s, I believe) to open a text file, and add the name of the book I'd read. What follows below looks like an "end of the year" post made to a bulletin board somewhere. If it's 2003, it's past my time on Usenet. Many of these may have appeared elsewhere in this blog, if not the entire post itself. I'll post these files one per month.

2003: The Year in Review

I know this is a couple of weeks late, but what the hey, I'll post it anyway.

Books read in 2003. Not many as I drove to work for most of the year, losing my prime reading time on the subway. (At bedtime, I'm usually too exhausted to get more than a handful of pages. Teaching will do that.) And getting 12 teaching credits took up a lot of time. (Textbooks are excluded from my list.)

Anyway:

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien. I was reading it when the year started, having never read it before.

Congo, Michael Crichton: Library sale book. Enjoyed it.

Mostly Harmless, Douglas Adams: Mostly crap.

Some "Buffy" book about Faeries by the author of Ghost Roads (another Buffy book I read a couple of years back). Actually, it was a good thing that I had read Ghost Roads because the author makes a lot of Buffy references, most of which I think I caught, from the show. When she tossed in a G.R. character reference, I was thrown at first. (Hey, that's non-canon stuff!)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J. K. Rowling: Probably my favorite one to date (though subject to change). I was totally taken in by this one, waiting for something so fricking obviously to happen and then have an alternate that I didn't suspect happen.

Destiny's Road, Larry Niven: Enjoyed it, very much. A world-building travelogue with a story wrapped around it so that you dont' realize that you have a world-building travelogue. (That's the way to do it.)

Kingmakers Sword, Ann Marston: First part of a trilogy I stumbled across a few years back. I found part I in the library. Great book, and it didn't matter that I know how some of it would turn out because I had read part II.

The Western King, Ann Marston: I had to reread it after part I. Still as good on the second read-through. Better, because I had part I as an intro this time.

(part three is on reserve at the library)

Holes, Louis Sachar: Saw the movie, so I read the book. I'll rank it as the best movie adaptation of a kids book that I've seen. Enjoyed the book, and appreciated that there was a little more to some of the characters in the book.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Dyson Sphere: Thought it would be good, but I didn't particularly care for it. Like the use of Hortas, hated the story and the ending. Added Note: I didn't write down the author's name?

Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling: Didn't thrill me as much as the others. The "one year per book" rule was a little strained as was the Tri-Wizard Tournament. Could've been shorter.

Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix, J. K. Rowling: OK, I'm caught up with the Potter books now. Liked it better than four, but I thought that some of it was either forced or unnecessary.

The Harry Potter books weren't a re-read. They were a first read. I was late to the party with those. I was initially turned off by online friends who complained how Scholastic Books had overly "Americanized" the first book.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Rowling, Tiffany)

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts I & II, J. K. Rowling and John Tiffany, 2016

First of all, if you don't like reading scripts, you are not going to like this. This is the script of the play, though I wonder how they staged some of it. But that's the magic of theater, isn't it?

The story picks up right where Book 7 (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) leaves off, at the Epilogue in Kings Crossing. It even replays that scene.

We learn that it isn't easy being the son of Harry Potter (and it still isn't easy being Harry Potter), nor being the son of Draco Malfoy. Albus Severus Potter meets Scorpius Malfoy, and they become friends, which is facilitated by Sorting Hat placing Potter in Slytherin. (Gasp!) Who is this Cursed Child of the title? Is it poor Scorpius, rumored to be the son of Voldemort and Astoria Greengrass, Draco's late wife, who was sent back in time to be impregnated, to carry on the Malfoy name when Draco wasn't up to the task? (Such an idea seems silly on the face on it, but I think it served one purpose: to plant the seed that some Time Turners still exist).

(Here's where I wish I had written this up back in January -- the point of this blog is to help me remember these details!)

As the story unravels, we meet Amos Diggory, father of the deceased Cedric, and Amos's niece. The three of them hatch a plan to steal a Time Turner (there is a secret one, which survives, should it prove needed) and go back and save Cedric's life. But whatever they do, playing with time, has serious consequences, including people disappearing (such as Ron and Hermione's daughter, Rose, because the two never got together).

As you can imagine, they have to fix things, without making things worse, including confessing to the people in a doomed world what's going on, to get their help to set things right.

I can agree with someone's online assessment that it's a nice story, but I wouldn't want it to be canon. It reads like fan fiction, but only because it's a little light in its words -- it is a script, after all. Plus, there are limits to theater.

Unlike each Potter book, this one spans several years, and there are big gaps, where you might wonder what the characters are doing. It tells a story, but it closed off others and will make life difficult for other stories to take place. I guess we all have ideas where we'd like the Potter people to go and to do afterward -- or even in those missing years before the Epilogue.

Statistics: library e-book loan, script, continued series

The Casual Vacancy (Rowling)

The Casual Vacancy, by J. K. Rowling, 2012

Had The Casual Vacancy been written by anyone other than J. K. Rowling, I probably would've given up on it a long time ago. Instead I kept coming back to it, and my "enjoyment" might have suffered because of it.

First off, it its neither Harry Potter nor Hogwarts, but I knew that going in. It's not a kids' book either. The language and situations are quite adult, even when it's handling the situations of teens in school from both sides of the tracks.

My biggest problem with the book was that I felt like I'd stumbled into a soap opera with a huge cast of characters, making it difficult to remember who was who and what they were involved in. (Can't tell the players without a scorecard, and all that.) I found it confusing to focus on what make be important because I really didn't know where the story was once I got past Barry Fairbrother passing away, leaving an open seat on the parish council, the term for which is a "casual vacancy". People then go to work scheming for that seat while a whole bunch of other stuff happens, which may or may not be relevant.

I stopped reading this several times, switching to other books and then returning. At one point, I heard that there would be an HBO adaptation, so I waited for that, hoping to get a better handle on the characters. While it worked for some characters, I realized pretty quickly that they'd changed some characters, reduced and/or eliminated others. I figured that they changed the storyline a bit given how much they had to condense it.

The downside to this approach is that after seeing the ending, I didn't know if I even wanted to finish the book. Not because I knew the ending, but because I thought it was a crappy ending and that I'd be wasting my time. But I also realize that they changed the story, so maybe they changed the ending. It turns out that they had, but I still hated it. The entire book seemed to be a pointless exercise, and maybe that was the point.

My reading list was started on paper to remind myself of the details of the books that I've read, to refresh my memory if I want to have a discussion about it, not to be a review blog. However, there isn't much about this that I want to remember that I think I'll need to be reminded of, so I'll leave that stuff out of this one.

I also have to trust my gut, and if I can't get past the second chapter, maybe I shouldn't bother. If it takes me two years, off and on, to read a book, then there are better choices out there, regardless of the name on the cover.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J. K. Rowling

OK, I'm caught up with the Potter books now. Liked it better than four, but I thought that some of it was either forced or unnecessary.

I believe this got me caught up with the Harry Potter books and I had to wait for the new books to be published. I thought that the tournament was a little strained because it didn't really fit into the one book per year format that Rowling had set.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling

Didn't thrill me as much as the others. The "one year per book" rule was a little strained as was the Tri-Wizard Tournament. Could've been shorter.

It was still a good story and better than a lot of stuff I'd been reading, and it did move the series along, but it was a little bit of a letdown after the third book.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J. K. Rowling

Excellent. She keeps expanding on the characters without betraying or retconning anything we already knew.

Probably my favorite one to date (though subject to change). I was totally taken in by this one, waiting for something so fricking obvious to happen and then have an alternate, which I didn't suspect, happen.

The second entry came from a file on an old hard drive, not from my log.

Of the series, this was probably my favorite standalone book. It was better than Goblet of Fire, and the final three books were more of a continuous narrative working toward the climatic battle.

Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone (Rowling)

Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, J. K Rowling

I finally got around to reading this just before the movie came out. A simple and quick read, but deceptive. It reads like a series of misadventures at school, but they all tie together at the end (which is partly why the movie fell a little short). The "pre"-school bit went on too long and the ending was a little lacking. Actually, it's the kind of story that's fun to read when you're reading it, but if you think about it too much, it loses something. But it's still better than a lot of the dreck out there.