In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 26th Year, Week 25/52

It's my half birthday next week, which means I've been doing this for nearly six months.  Huh.

Snuff is a Discworld novel - number 38, and the 8th Watch story.  The second Discworld book I ever read was Jingo, as I believe I mentioned last month, so Vimes holds a special place in my heart.

I enjoyed Snuff.  I've been putting off reading it because, due to Pratchett's illness, Discworld novels are now finite and I didn't want to use them up too early.  I'm glad I did read it, though.  It's about slavery in the same way that Jingo and Monstrous Regiment is about war and it repeats the Pratchett habit of bringing a formerly mook-enemy into the light as a protagonist.

The Last Vampire is a series by Christopher Pike.  It's not my favourite of his books - that would be Remember Me and The Midnight Club - but they're okay.  About a vampire who believes herself to be the last of her kind, but rapidly finds out that she isn't.  I have all seven of them, all in sets of two apart from the last one, so I just read the whole book through.  My mother gave them to my grandmother along with all the Horror High and a few other Pike novels, so I claimed them.  It has the traditional Pike tropes of blonde and blue-eyed Hindus.

The Lost Mind is another one by Pike.  It's about a girl who wakes up with no memory, lying next to the corpse of her best friend.  It's barely 200 pages long, and has the usual Pike tropes of mysticism and murder.

Daddy Long-Legs is a book I read on wikisource after finding out that it's one of my friend's favourite books.  I quite liked it.  It's about an orphaned girl who is given the funds to attend college by a mysterious benefactor whom she is required to write letters to.  The book is made up of her letters, though he never writes back.  I like the heroine, Judy/Jerusha Abbot.  She's strong and determined and sensible and very much knows her own mind.  I think I'll probably read the sequel, Dear Enemy, which is not on wikisource but which is on Project Gutenberg.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is science-fiction.  Harry August lives his life over and over; every time he dies, he wakes up in his newborn baby body, right back at the start of his life.  At the end of his eleventh life, a young girl shows up at his bedside and tells him that the end of the world is a thousand years away and getting faster.  Interesting start, no?  I felt the ending wrapped up far too quickly; it was justified, but it was a little anti-climactic after all the build-up.  It was a good read though.

Finally, Why Evolution is True.  Non-fiction, and a very good, thorough guide to evolution.  It's written in opposition to creationism and "intelligent design", which I already think is ridiculous and requires a lot of anti-scientific thought and outright burying your head in the sand, so he was very much preaching to the choir there.