Saturday, March 28, 2015

Book Blogger Hop March 27th - April 2nd: Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Boxcar Willie All Recorded Wreck of the Old 97

Book Blogger Hop

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: Which books have you read in the past month that still have you thinking back to the storyline and the characters?

I've read two works this past month in which the characters have stayed with me. The first is Saga, an ongoing graphic story that thus far has been compiled into four volumes. The story has had several twists and turns thus far as it follows the lives of Alana and Marko and their daughter Hazel, and their trials and tribulations have stuck with me. But it isn't only their stories that make Saga interesting, it is the supporting characters such as Marko's mother Klara, the couple's spectral babysitter Izabel, the author J. Oswald Heist, the freelance bounty hunter The Will, and Marko's ex-fiancee Gwendolyn that resonate with me as a reader. Even the bit characters such as the tabloid reporters on the trail of the story of Alana's defection with Marko seem to draw one in.

The other story I read recently that has me reflecting on the characters is Dream Houses, a novella by Genevieve Valentine. The only true character is really the viewpoint character Amadis, but she interacts with an A.I. Capella throughout the story. She also "interacts" with the rest of the crew on her deep space freighter and her estranged brother, but only through Amadis' recounted memories. The issue is that the story is written in such a way as to call into question whether any of the events that take place within it are actually real, or if they are simply jumbled and confused hallucinations. Is Capella a mercurial and somewhat malicious artificial intelligence, or is this impression merely a fiction created by Amadis? This, and many other elements of Dream Houses, amounts to a mystery that the author steadfastly refuses to give the answer to. And, like so many other books of this type, the ambiguity is part of what makes the story so good.

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: Trajan Became Roman Emperor in 98 A.D.

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