Readers Response 2 + Vocabulary Words

1/7/11-1/14/11
1. Precedent
Def.- A legal decision or form of proceeding serving as an authoritative rule or pattern in future similar or analogous cases.

2. Egregious
Def.- Extraordinaryinsomebadway;glaring;

3. pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
Def.- An obscure term ostensibly referring to a lung disease caused by silica dust, sometimes cited as one of the longest words in the English language.


Morpheus Road: The Light
by D.J MacHale
p.1-p.341
rating: 7.5/10

Morpheus Road: The Light is by the author of the Pendragon series, and focuses on Marshall Seaver a high school student, who is being haunted. It starts with Cooper Foley, Marshall's best friend sent to a solitary summer in a log cabin going missing. Marshall , after breaking a glass ball belonging to his mother, is haunted by the character that he created, the gravedigger. Marshall and  Coopers sister try to locate cooper and why gravedigger drives people mad and keeps asking Marshall to walk the Morpheus Road with him, and eventually the book ends it a over the top, blow-your-mind finale that has so many spoilers I wont even describe it here. The Light falls into the "fantasy-horror" genre, which works with MacHale's style of writing really well, his precise description and well-worked plot keeps the story moving at a breathless pace without it feeling rushed. Another thing i loved was the eerie feeling created while reading this book that's scary without being overly bloody or gory. The book really toys with your mind and keeps you on the edge of your toes ad leaves you wondering what happens next. Of course, I've come to expect this from MacHale in the Pendragon series, it's just great that he could continue that great style of writing in this new series. There also is one thing i didn't like about this book was that it was somewhat hard to follow, especially near the end. MacHale is known to have complicated plots with a giant build up and a explosion of a finale, and this is no different. What this results in is sequences where i had re-read pages or several pages to really understand the book. In fact I read the last 50 or so pages again because the ending was so intricate. This is actually the main problem I had with "The Soldiers of Halla", the last and my least favorite of the Pendragon books. This guy really loves epic finales for books, even if he has to throw in something that's totally unrelated to what's happened leading up to the ending. It's like having the epic ending of Lord of the Rings 3 being the end to Lord of the Rings 1. The Ending and the rest of the story just don't match.Other than that issue, this was a great book and I recommend this to anyone who likes mystery, fantasy, and horror.

104

Holy Mackerel!! I just looked down at my page views and it said 104 page views. Thanks readers, i had no idea people were looking here so much! I will try to post more often, i know I've been really bad at that lately. In fact, it's one of my new years resolutions! Thanks 4 reading!!

Readers response 1

Half-Moon Investigations
by Eoin Colfer
p.1-p. 290(end)
rating: 2/10

Note:I've started to add ratings to my readers responses to make them more like professional book reviews. Enjoy!
       I bought "Half-moon investigations" at a bookstore that was going out of business and selling every single one of its books for 1 dollar. I picked up this book, because Eoin Colfer is the author of the Artemis Fowl books, The Wish List, and the Supernaturalists which are all books I loved. Now, after I've read it, I want my dollar back. Half-Moon investigations is a incredibly boring, hard to follow story with a terrible, muddled plot which focuses on a boy ( Fletcher Moon) who is a private eye who tries to solve the mystery of the missing hair of a celebrity, which leads him to investigate an arson which he is blamed for, which leads him to investigate a series of theft in the neighborhood. The catch is, the person who hired him to find the hair is a crazy 10 year old who wants to kill all boys, a fact he finds out after the arson happens. Fletcher investigates further until he figures out the culprit is 10 year old's sister, until later it is revealed that it was actually her dad. Oh, and he's investigating all this undercover pretending to be a member of the Sharkey family, who are suspects for all the crimes. Confused yet? Of course, this is only my interpretation of the book, I kind of zoned out at the end, because it was so long and unnecessarily dragged out, which, in a nutshell, was the primary problem with the book. There was also the fact that the beginning of the story read like this book was a sequel to another book( I actually checked online to make sure),and gives you a feeling as if you're missing out on part of the story. Comparing this to the Artemis Fowl books(also by Eoin Colfer), I felt that there were two things the "Fowl" books had that "Half-Moon" didn't have, which are good dialogue and plot. In Artemis Fowl, the story is filled with amusing conversations filled with wit and humor between the main characters, which keeps the plot moving at a brisk pace and making characters have their own unique. "Half-moon" lacks all of this, I never laughed or even cracked a smile at the crappy robotic dialogue, and the plot reminds me of Spider-man 3 because they both have serious action plots which seem like they are really, really bad comedies. Right now I'm trying to find something i can say about this book that's positive, and so far I've come up with nothing. Coming from a man like Eoin Colfer who gave us great books like Artemis fowl and The Wish list, this book was a 290 page pile of dirt that got boring after the 1st page and made me long for it to end. I'm glad I didn't pay full price of $16.95 for the biggest book disappointment since the 39 clues. Like I said, i'm not even sure if it was worth the buck i paid.