Bookwi.se

Summary: Roald Dahl’s autobiography of his childhood written for children.

As you can imagine, I spend a good bit of money on books.  I saw an estimate that the average household only buys 1 to 2 books a year.  And that nearly half of the book purchases are from about 5 percent of readers.  If that is actually true, I would not be surprised if I am in the top 1 percent.

I try to read books that I pick up free on kindle.  And I often listen to the monthly free audiobook from christianaudio.com.  And I do get some free books to review.  However, I pay full price for most books I review and that gets expensive.

My regular source of free books is my local library.  I almost never go and check out a book in person.  I mostly avoid paper books.  But I do check out audiobooks via the Overdrive system from my local library.  The main problem with Overdrive in my area is that everything is always checked out.  So I often will go for weeks and get nothing.  This week I had three of my holds come up all the same day.

Boy by Roald Dahl was a bit of a whim book.  I know it is a bit of anathema for many children’s book lovers, but I have not read much by him.  Boy is a autobiography oriented toward elementary students.  Growing up I read a lot of biographies.

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Summary: A funny (occasionally crass), but real self-help book for married men.

Last week Orgasms are for Women and Marriage is for Men was offered free for kindle.  Because I try to post virtually all of the free Christian kindle book on Bookwi.se, I ran across it.  I do not always look into a book, but those that seem a bit sketchy or maybe categorized wrong I try to look at.

I read the intro before posting it and then read the rest of the book over the weekend.  It is a quick book (around 50 pages) and most people will read it in about an hour.

I think that it is a mostly helpful book.  It is written under a pseudonym, but the author claims to be a former pastor and marriage counselor.  He said that in his experience, 99% of the motivation for marriage and premarital counseling was to get the counselor to change their spouse’s behavior (this seems about right to me).  This book is oriented around the idea that you cannot control the other person, you can only control yourself.  So get your stuff together and forget about theirs.

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Summary: A cynically nihilistic take on some of the most beloved fantasy books.

As much as I enjoy books stealing ideas and remaking stories (like Fuzzy Nation), Lev Grossman has soured me on the concept for a while.

I was not a big fan of the first book of this series, The Magicians.  I thought it was really well written and had some great ideas.  But I just did not like the characters.  But I still wanted to read the second book.  It was written so well, I figured the second would have to be better.

After having read it, I think this opening line from an Amazon review gets it exactly right.  “Joyless, dismal, and cynically nihilistic–that was the first novel in this series.”

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Summary: The parallel book to Lost Hero

This is a book that is hard to discuss without at least some spoilers.  The Percy Jackson Series was a complete series based around the character Percy Jackson, son of the Greek God Poseidon, as he discovers that he is a demigod and works to save the gods from being other thrown by the Titans.

This series is after the first series, but has some of the same characters.  So I would read Percy Jackson first, then this.  In the first book (spoilers start here) we are introduced to Jason Grace, son of Jupiter and his two friends Leo and Piper.  What is revealed at the end of the first book is that the Greek Gods also have Roman sides to them and there is a whole world of Roman demigods that have been kept apart from the Greek demigods.

Jason was from the Roman side and was sent to Camp Half-Blood (the Greek side) by Hera in order to join the Greek and Roman demigods together to overthrow Gaia and the Giants.

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