Quick reviews on my February books…

• Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar – Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein
  

  This book explains philosophy through humor in a totally understandable way. This should really be the text book for Philosophy 1000 everywhere, I learned more from this quick read than I did in college. By far! I’d recommend it to anyone who likes to laugh, because even if the philosophy doesn’t interest you the jokes are hilarious.

• Lover Revealed – JR Ward (2-5)
  

  Book 4 in the series – this is where I started to read them in order. This was my least favorite character in the series, but ended up being OK in the end. I didn’t love the story, in fact through most of the book I was rolling my eyes and some of the “solutions” really irked me since they seemed too easy in an overly involved universe. But that might be part of the beauty of this series, instead of long explanations we’re just expected to sort of… accept shit. I guess that’s cool by me, somehow I keep reading them so Ward must be doing something right.

• Lover Unbound -JR Ward (2-8)
  

  I really expected this to be my favorite story of the series because I adore the character in it, but its closer to the bottom of my favorites than I thought it would be. Aside from the retarded ending, the whole concept of the main characters plight really pisses me off. These books go one of two ways; there’s either something wrong with the protagonist to explain their SM fetish and the book concludes with them being “fixed” or the point is to objectify the protagonist to the point of an actual object (ie, Story of O.) At least Lover Unbound is thankfully the former but, it still pisses me off that no one seems to be able to present this fetish in the way so many people seem to enjoy it: as just one other fucking thing people like to do with their spare time.

• Marked – PC and Kristin Cast (2-15)
  

  Back to YA Vampire books, notice a trend, do you? Yeah, I’m not going to pretend I don’t have it in for vampires. Anyway… Marked is a great escape from the heavy themes of adult books. The writing style is different, which took a little getting used to, but overall I really enjoyed the adolescence of it. Plus there’s vampires! The drama seemed a little fast forwarded, but thinking back to high school you could hate your best friend in the morning and be helping her with her paper route by 3PM, so the month long time line didn’t really  bother me in the end. Its just the first in a so far four book series, so there’s plenty of time for more shit to hit the fan too.

• Kissing in Manhattan – David Schickler (2-22)
  

  Flipping to something heavy I jumped into Kissing in Manhattan… which was just tremendously incredible as far as literature goes. Its not just that, however, Schickler has a real gift of turning prose into art and I truly appreciate that kind of work. The book is a collection of short stories centered around tenants of a building in Manhattan called the Preemption. You’d think the name gives it away, but not really. There’s nothing obvious about this book, but as you read it the spiderweb of intricate connections begins to reveal itself in the most beautiful way. A fantastic and fairly quick read.

• Uglies – Scott Westerfeld (2-28)
  

  I did a full review of Uglies, so check that out for more info on this awesome social commentary. A lot of books have bits of that in them, little quips about cliques and social status, but Uglies goes above and beyond by glorifying those things we perceive as “ugly” truths and makes them even more hideous. Also book one of four (so far) and the series just keeps on staying good too.

March will be posted on April 1st (for real, though!)