Book Wrap Up for July (Part 1)

For this month I read 11 books, and it would great if I could keep up that pace so I meet my goal of 75 books read this year, but I don't see that happening with college starting soon.

1.Incarceron (Incarceron #1)by Catherine Fisher

People trying to escape out of a prison that is controlled by an out of control AI system. Outside of the prison, everything has been stopped in time in the 17th century. What I am sure was supposed to be a big mystery, is figured out pretty early in the story, and the main female character comes off as a spoiled brat, which is probably to show how much different her life is from the people in the prison, but I ended up not caring what happened to her. When the story was written in the prison, I really enjoyed it, but then it switched back to outside and I just wanted to go back to reading about the prison world.

2.The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

Set in 1962, its an alternate reality fiction story where the Axis powers won the war. I enjoyed this book, was interesting reading how things have changed in the world with the Axis powers winning the war, but the ending?? There really isn't one, its open ended, so if you like having your stories finished and wrapped up nicely, that might annoy you.

3.Blood Red Road (Dust Lands #1)by Moira Young
 
It does take a few pages to get use to the prose, but after that it didn't bug me. Its your typical YA dystopian story, there were big parts of it that made me think of a bad Mad Max rip off. One of the best characters of the story is a bird, I didn't think any of the characters were really that developed which is a problem when the story is so character driven and we should care about them. Will I read the second one? I might give it a look just to see what happens to the bird :p

4.Dust and Decay (Benny Imura #2)by Jonathan Maberry

I hadn't read the first in the series but that wasn't an issue since its easy to figure out what happened reading the first few chapters of the second book. YA zombie dystopian fiction :) Quick enjoyable read, can't really say anything other then that. The characters are slightly more developed then the previous book, so with some of them, you are rooting for them not to get bit. I did enjoy the little inserts about the zombies, they didn't seem out of place and helped move the story along.

5.The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson, Rod Bradbury (Translator)

I liked this book, but after awhile I just got sick of the main character Allan meeting all these different people. Yes, I know he is 100 years old, he would have done a lot in 100 years,and its only a story, but come on. It just ended up feeling like the author was just picking important/semi-important people from recent history, pretty much name dropping. I really just wanted to find out what happened to the characters in the present day of the story. I found them a lot more interesting then what had happened in Allan's past, which seemed to be: Allan meets important person,gets in trouble, gets lucky, ends up out of trouble. And repeat :/

The story was easy to follow, the characters, while not always believable, were written well enough to start caring for a few of them. There were a few funny moments where I did laugh, but not as much as people said I would.

Part 2 coming up :) I know that not everyone likes reading book reviews, but by posting them it helps me remember what a book was about and maybe give someone an idea for something to read.