Introduction to the Book

My friends already know how crazy I am when it comes to fiction based on dinosaurs. I have been known to wax poetic about such books.

In this book, however, Bakker takes facts about dinosaur life and weaves them into a story. So, it is like reading fictionalized non-fiction!

Introduction to the Chai

Now that you have had your book intro, let me proceed by introducing you to another series of blog posts: Books&Chai. Whenever I post with this tag, you will find a book from a genre that goes beautifully with the featured flavor of chai (tea).

Black tea, which is the flavor featured in this post, is known to improve concentration and focus. Since I was reading a book about a very intelligent species, the Utahraptor, I decided black tea would be a smart choice!

Reasons for all that Book-Luvin’

Now, we move on to the six reasons that made for an awesome read:

The Humor

If you have been following this blog, you must know now that for me, humor is an important part in a book. In any book! The more unlikely it seems that the author might be able to create humorous situations (say, like in a book from a bloodthirsty monster’s POV), the more I appreciate it!

I found the two examples from Raptor Red funny as heck!

The Sciency Bits

You can’t have a good fact-based book without some science in it. For me, catching glimpses of the science while being embroiled in Red’s latest adventure was a lot of fun!

This particular quote is from a scene when a male raptor comes face to face with a field of red flowers. What’s more, they smell like rotten meat, which the raptor considers food. This kinda blows up its sensory perception temporarily. Faced with such an evocative color, it doesn’t know whether it is supposed to court the blooms, fear them, or eat them!

This quote is from a scene where Red sees a turtle for the first time. The whole scene was written well enough to have me go Awww and Lol in turns.

The Dino-Facts

I am aware that I could have included these in the sciency bits mentioned above. But, no! These facts were juicy enough to merit their own category. Snippets of how life used to be for different kinds of dinos gave the book an authenticity.

This quote explains how after speciation (birth of a new species from an old one) Utahraptor society had adopted a matriarchal structure.

This one is about how two completely different species banded together for survival. One of them had longer necks that enabled them to check for predators over a wider area. The other one contributed by their sheer numbers.

The Poetic Language

I am a sucker for when a scientists takes a theory or fact and describes it with beautiful language.

The Squicky Bits

Another favorite. There was a bit about how dangerous assassin bugs could be to the raptors. I looked them up and science (and class Insecta) did not disappoint!

Absurd Creature of the Week: The Ferocious Bug That Sucks Prey Dry and Wears Their Corpses

…wears their corpses. I mean corpses! Duuuuuuuuuuuuuude!

A Mixture of it All

The example below is an unholy combo of all the reasons that I have mentioned above. Watch them in action:

Lastly,

What do you think about the book? Do you like the new tag that this review is sporting?

I shopped in two batches this month:

Liberty Book Bazaar

This is the haul I ended bringing home from the bazaar:

While I don’t mind searching for the books in the piles that are dumped on tables in Liberty, I do mind that the collection gets worse and worse every month. I had to do a lot of digging before I ended up with these baubles. The amount of digging has been increasing with each bazaar. In the past, I have defended it when people said that you can’t find any good books there because I did, time and time again. Now, I’m not so sure!

I have yet to read anything by Kim Stanley Robinson, which means this might be the wrong book to start with. I’m going to give it a shot anyway, which is why I bought this.

The Thursday Next series is amazeballs as Icky will tell you. Like what she had to say? Read more of her musings here. I’m slowly collecting all the books in the series. This is such a pretty cover!

My reasons for buying Shogun can be found here.

Roth, Snicket, and the Irish Fairytales Omnibus all looked really interesting!

A look inside the minds that thought up Narnia & Middle Earth? Sign me up!

This will make me stick to my plan of reading more Non-fic. I thought if I started with books on subjects that interested me, success will be more likely.

I loved Night by Elie Wiesel and wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass me by.

It has dinosaurs #nuffsaid

Kitabain

This online site continues to kick ass. It has an amazing collection of sci-fi/fantasy books, which is the only tab that I click on while there anyway. I mean, I found this gem on the site! They are prompt in delivering the books unlike some stores I know. They will never change the price of a book either. The rider will text you before leaving and if you mention a specific time for delivery, they will agree to it without any extra charges. The books are all reasonably priced. If I didn’t love going to bookstores and physically picking out the babies, I’d do all my book shopping from here. The only caveat that continues to be irksome is that often a book will be shown as available when it isn’t. I don’t like it!

Here’s my haul from Kitabain for this month:

The two Douglas Adam’s are so beautiful that they make me want to cry! I have already read the first one in the series, so I just had to get the next two.

The two Frank Herberts are also the next parts in the Dune series that I need to read. These might be paperbacks but they’re in awesome condition as promised by the bookseller. My buddy read with Weird Enough can be found here.

The next couple consists of two compilations of sci-fi stories and I love how I get to sample the work of an author by reading a short story by them. It helps me decide if I want to try a novel written by that author or not. Also, one of them had a story by Clifford Simak and since I recently read and fell in love with his book, All is Grass, I was like:

Then there are Asimov and Aldiss who are basically must-reads if you are into sci-fi, so I HAD to buy those. Right? Also, I loved Asimov’s Bicentennial Man and mention him here in my new short story for Wringo Ink.

Abercombie is an author that I have been wanting to try for a while now. Friends who like the kind of stuff that I do swear by him, so I thought what the heck!

For my previous book shopping posts, go here, here, and here.

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GR Synopsis

Jasper Fforde has done it again in this genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment. After two rollicking New York Times bestselling adventures through Western literature, resourceful literary detective Thursday Next definitely needs some downtime. And what better place for a respite than in the hidden depths of the Well of Lost Plots, where all unpublished books reside? But peace and quiet remain elusive for Thursday, who soon discovers that the Well is a veritable linguistic free-for-all, where grammasites run rampant, plot devices are hawked on the black market, and lousy books—like the one she has taken up residence in—are scrapped for salvage. To make matters worse, a murderer is stalking the personnel of Jurisfiction and it’s up to Thursday to save the day. A brilliant feat of literary showmanship filled with wit, fantasy, and effervescent originality, this Ffordian tour de force is the most exciting Thursday Next adventure yet.

My Comments

Technically, this isn't a library languisher since I have already read it but whatever. I just bought it and feel like showing it off. This series is full of quirky characters that I love reading about. The dodo, Pickwick, is my favorite!

The Library Languishers Series features a book that languishes in my physical library. The picture quality will always be sucky. Depend on it!

This is not a review. This is me gushing about the fact that The Bonehunters did not disappoint. However,  you should avoid reading this series, if you are not interested in the following:

It Has Dragons:

The book had two ghosts who haunted lizard skeletons, were compulsive liars, had a secret agenda, and were actually dragons! This is how they talk:

"Beauteous mistresses, curvaceous, languid, sultry, occasionally simpering..."

 

It Includes Practical Concerns:

An assassin who would be wearing concealed weapons on her person, 

"a score of aches from knife pommels and scabbards attested that they remained strapped about her person..."

 It Could Make you Think:

You'd be reading and suddenly, there'd be words that just make you stop and read them over and over again! 

"A single god, no matter how benign, is tortured into a multitude of masks, each shaped by the secret desires, hungers, fears, and joys of the individual mortal, who but plays a game of obsequious approbation."

 

It Rewards its Readers:

"And gods run when they see a Bridgeburner." 

If you have stuck with this series so far, then you will reap the rewards with one-liners and zingers like the one mentioned above. 

It is Unique:

This is a world where gods are as good as their worshipers. 

"Mess with mortals, Poliel." he said, wheeling his horse round, "and you pay."

Old deities fall and new ones ascend all the time. There are layers upon layers of complications that you won't even grasp at until much much later. This is why, the books can still manage to surprise and delight readers re-reading them for the 7th or 8th time! 

Oh, the Humor can Earn you Stares if Read in Public:

Part of it comes from insane situations. To be able to inject humor into situations that'd otherwise leave a reader weeping is one of Erikson's amazing qualities. You might think that a person about to die cracking a joke is unrealistic but this is military humor. As we follow soldiers who see things that would drive any other person insane, they use this kind of gallows humor to keep themselves functional. The other part comes out of love -- or hate -- for the characters.

"Saw your mouth moving -- some kind of spell or something? Didn't know you were a mage..." "I'm not. I was saying, "I hope this works".

It has Well-Written Female Characters:

Firstly, there are a lot of them. Just in this book, there was the Empress, her Adjunct, the Adjunct's lover, a drunk captain who was bad at her job when sobered up, the trouble-maker soldier who loved throwing knives at people, the deity who was going around possessing people, the assassin who murdered most of the empress' team of elite assassins by herself, and so on. They're just there...within the story, just as you would find them in real life.   

You Will Feel Pain:

Erikson can clue a reader into the significance of what is happening and how it is related to what has already happened with just one sentence. This one made me cry:

"You fight for the Wickans and for the Khundryl Burned Tears this night. We choose to witness."

  If you love epic fantasy, then the MBotF is one series that you just cannot miss!

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