Another book to add to the genre of young adult female (always female!?) characters making bad decisions for the sake of a more catastrophic plot. And while the world is perfectly fine, there's nothing really stellar about this dystopia in particular. I found myself speeding up the audiobook just to get it over with faster because I didn't hate it enough to refuse to finish it, but it felt like there were better things for me to do with my time. I always feel slightly guilty doing that, as though I somehow owe the narrator an apology for not listening to the book as intended.
Also, I refuse to believe that the teenagers of the future speak like Bill and Ted. My suspension of disbelief ends there.

This is the second alien invasion story where birds are involved that I've read in as many months, which is odd because I usually shy away from the genre. But this one came very well recommended and rightly so. Yancey writes with impressive conviction from the beginning and you buy into his premise and characters immediately. It's a very well told story and, as a reader, I found myself more than willing to forgive him the occasional bending of the laws of probability for the sake of drama.

I confess, I don't actually own a dead-tree copy of Frankenstein. I own about 7 different ebook versions from different publishers, but I don't have a version to consult on, say, a random Friday night when I decide to read Grimly's graphic novel version.
So I can't comment on the fidelity to the text, though the adaptation seemed to consist predominantly of excerpting rather than rewriting. The biggest change--and the best, in my humble opinion--was that Grimly told the creature's story almost solely through the visual language of comics rather than the more text-heavy Frankensteinian narrative. Frankenstein itself is a nested text--we're reading Robert Walton's letters to his sister in which Walton writes the story narrated to him by Victor Frankenstein who, in turn, is told his creation's story. But with each nest, the visual component is further foregrounded.
Obviously, this is not a review of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Never let a grad student write a short book review for one of her dissertation texts. It's an assessment of Grimly's success in illustrating the story/adapting it into a graphic novel. On a formal, critical level, I thought he made some brilliant choices--the aforementioned visual/nested narrative link, e.g. or how, as the creature learns to speak, dialogue bubbles become more intelligible. On an aesthetic level, the artistic style drove me crazy. I don't know quite what about Grimly's....let's call it "whimsically hideous" approach was ineffective, but there was a grotesqueness to the characters that seemed odd. First of all, when everyone looks absurd, the creature is not disnguishably awful and that threw me off. And, honestly, I tend to fall on the gothic side of the gothic/horror and I like my villains to look fairer and feel fouler, to paraphrase a certain hobbit
The work itself was quite good, but it was definitely not for me.

This book was fascinating for what it was (and for its index, which is invaluable to me right now), but part of me still finds that the claims he makes hold up only insofar as they apply to literary scholars and, while Armstrong is persuasive in his arguments regarding what it is in our brains that make reading possible and enjoyable for us, his overall pitch to neurologists seems less cogent and grounded than it might be.

But his presentation of the neurological research within a humanities context and in a way that neither trivializes the work nor makes absurd claims about the hard problem of qualia was excellent and this book has been very well stickied.

Another of the elemental series by two vastly different, yet conveniently married authors. It's hard to look at the together, so we'll look at them separately.

Dickinson is, as always, an exquisite writer whose language has a real poetry and whose stories always feel like spiderwebs - intricately spun and slighty insubstantial. The experience of reading them is a fascinating one and the distance that Dickinson somehow creates between reader and story always makes me feel like I'm peering through a microscope or binoculars in order to glimpse something so impossibly different, something only accessible through the poetry of his language. Which is lovely and lends itself to a range of styles, but is sometimes rather cold.

McKinley, I should note, is the exact opposite. She doesn't give the pinhole view into her characters' heads, she lifts you up and dumps you bodily into their mind, their worldview and their lies. If Dickinson reminds me of gossamer, McKinley reminds me of steel cables. Once you're in that story, you are IN it. I once commented that McKinely has many characters, but only one real style; fortunately, it's an excellent style and it provokes an almost visceral reaction to the characters in me.

I enjoyed both sets of stories, but McKinley has been one of my favorite authors since I was about eight years old, so I will concede that I loved hers more. But I recommend both writers unreservedly; though very different, they both are excellent examples of how to tell a story.

Did I mention that the stories themselves were some of the most fascinating and innovative I've read in fantasy in a long time. "First Flight" in particular, struck me because it was the first time I'd seen anyone do something new with the humans flying dragons thing..it didn't feel like a rehash of Pern even though it shared so many of the same elements. That's the mark of a good author - innovation in old ideas, and if you like it, you have to look at what she can do with fairy tales.