Summer Reading Review

I’ve continued my journey through the classics over the past month, with a slight detour through modern fiction.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Currently reading; barely into chapter three but so for the regurgitation of hedonism is a bit sickening.

One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

Rating: Four Stars

Started reading Jasper Fforde’s latest novel in the Thursday Next series and realized I’d forgotten a lot of details from the preceding four novels (The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten). So I put down OnOTIM and picked up The Eyre Affair and read through it and the three others before diving back into OnOTIM. I really love this series (along with Fforde’s other series- the Nursery Crimes) and the latest addition did not disappoint. I did feel however that the ending was compacted and rushed compared to the pace of the rest of the novel. My husband also enjoys this fantasy series so I’d say the appeal is definitely cross gender. It’s got everything to love: romance, drama, action, mystery, time travel, sarcasm and dry wit.

My Antonia

Rating: Five Stars

Willa Cather’s historical love story is beautiful. Her gift with descriptive text is unmatched; I was able to pull myself easily into the Nebraskan landscape she gloriously describes. My favorite excerpts below:

“She threw her arms around me, and her dear face was all wet with tears. I stood watching their white dresses glimmer smaller and smaller down the sidewalk as they went away. I have had no other success that pulled at my heartstrings like that one.”

“The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility.”

“If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

War of the Worlds

Rating: Two Stars

Very short novel that didn’t convey any deep meaning or instill deep identification or sympathy with the characters. Forgettable.

A Tale of Two Cities

Rating: Four Stars

I would have rated Dickens’ classic novel with five stars if it weren’t for his style in use of language. Something about the way he wrote causes difficulty in reading comprehension; I often found myself rereading sentences or paragraphs to discern what was happening in the scene or what the characters were trying to convey with their speech. Aside from the language style, the novel holds up brilliantly on all other aspects to be judged. The characters are strongly developed, the descriptive narrative paints the picture of scene well, and the plot is engaging. It’s also a happy bonus for me when the story teaches a moral lesson in parallel with the narrative unfolding and that is just what AToTC accomplishes. It speaks volumes on revenge, mob rule and sacrificial love.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Rating: Two Stars

The quality of writing in this novel is sophomoric and it shows in the dialogue and the descriptive text. Might be a good simple read for children but there are much better novels for adult consumption.

Board Game Review: Expeditions Gears of Corruption

L ast year I reviewed Expeditions and ranked it #1 among all Stonemaier games on account of the challenging intellectual puzzle it presents. This year I have played my way through the new expansion, Gears of Corruption , and I’m delighted to let you know that it makes the base game even better. That the expansion so cohesively builds on the base game should not be a surprise to anyone who closely examines the original box for Expeditions. All expansion components perfectly fit in that box including the 2 new mechs that nestle in the placeholder cubbies clearly made for them. That can’t be coincidence. There might a few features rolled into Corruption of Gears that were developed as a result of consumer feedback on the base game (I’m looking at you, wild meeple), but my theory is that Stonemaier did a Lord of the Rings maneuver with this game and its expansions, designing the entire game with most of the additions integrated up front, and then breaking it into base + expansions fo...

Board Game Review: Hues and Cues

Last week we received Hues and Cues from The Op Games. We recently finished playing through Scooby-Doo Escape from the Haunted Mansion (a fantastic game in The Op Games catalogue designed by Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim, and Kami Mandell that you should absolutely pick up to play with your family) and wanted to give another game from the same publisher a go. I picked Hues and Cues because I’ve been pleasantly surprised by other “test whether our minds think the same way” games such as The Mind and Wavelength. In Hues and Cues , players gather around a large central board comprised of 480 graduating colors of the rainbow surrounded by an x-y axis and scoring table. White and black (which are technically not colors) are conspicuously absent as are shades (mixtures of color + black; e.g., grey) and tints (mixtures of color + white; e.g., cream). On each player’s turn, they draw a card with four colors and the x-y axis codes of those colors depicted and they select one. They a...

Board Game Review: Expeditions

Expeditions is my favorite game in the Stonemaier Games portfolio to date. The game is a sequel to Scythe, and continues the narrative years in the future. It has taken everything I loved in Scythe and expanded on it, while chucking out everything I didn’t care for (the combat). Designed by Jamey Stegmaier, Expeditions brings us into an age when a meteorite has crash landed into Siberia and things begin to go sideways for all who encounter it. One team after another sets out to investigate the crash site and they are never heard from again. No one knows what happened to them. Now it’s our turn to find out what’s really going on, each of us leading a competing expedition team into Siberia to bring back desperately needed answers. During a game of Expeditions, all players are seated around the game board, which is made up of individually placed hex tiles laid out as shown above. At the bottom of the game board is an insert affectionately known as the base camp. The base camp holds ...