Reality or fantasy...I can't decide

Okay, I can admit that I have a vivid imagination and at times it has run away with me. This might be one of those times. I was about 50 pages (or fewer) into The Historian and I started to question if what I was reading was actually a work of nonfiction. Let me remind you that this is the story of a quest to locate Dracula. DRACULA. And here I am reading it and the story is too believable to be a work of fiction. The main voice (if you can call it that) of the narrative is the author who has assembled together various pieces of evidence such as letters, manuscripts, book passages, maps, and folk songs to weave the story of her parents mission to find and kill the man who was Vlad the Impaler but more widely known as the mythical vampire, Dracula. Even now as I'm writing this, I feel a thrill of horror that the man Vlad the Impaler was an actual living breathing man. He did unspeakably horrible things in his time (mid to late 15th century) which is why many people felt he was too evil to die outright. This is how the legends that he was an immortal, evil creature came into being. Elizabeth Kostova took this even further by using historical documents that made it all too believable. (I have no desire to check and see if those items mentioned in the book are real or fictional by the way.) I urge you to give this book a try and let me know if you finish it absolutely convinced that it couldn't be real.

Now that I have thoroughly freaked myself out, let me tell you about my next book. About a month ago I reviewed Cinder by Marissa Meyer and I mentioned that it was the start of a series called the Lunar Chronicles. Do you see where this is headed yet? That's right, I'm reading book two in the series, Scarlet! For those of you who heeded my advice and read the first book in the series you will remember that it ended on somewhat of a cliffhanger. This book picks up at that point but it also introduces us to a completely different character, Scarlet, who is on the opposite side of the world from Cinder. She's got problems of her own because her grandmother is missing and she soon discovers that she is in grave danger. Who can she trust? How do the paths of these two girls cross? LET'S FIND OUT!

Bringing a whole new meaning to the term 'connected'

Think A Clockwork Orange meets I, Robot and you're on the right track to grasping the concept of Feed. If you've ever read or watched A Clockwork Orange, you'll remember the made up language/slang called Nadsat which was so complicated that a glossary was included at the back off the book. Feed isn't quite that difficult but it does take a meg long time to get used to (that was a little example there). As veteran readers of the blog will know, I am fascinated (or you could say horrified) by the theory that technology will one day destroy humanity as we know it now. One could even argue that it's already well under way. What M.T. Anderson has done is look at how corporations and the media have shaped our culture and what might happen if we surrender fully to it. This is a worst case scenario (at least I hope it is) of what happens when we cease asking questions and nourishing our natural curiosity. What if we were all tapped into the media and each other in such a way that we soon became mere vessels for corporations to exploit? Would life find a way? Find out by reading Feed and letting your imagination run wild.
  
(I am actually reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova now.) A young woman stumbles upon letters written by her father which detail a quest to find out the truth about Vlad the Impaler (aka the guy who inspired Dracula). She must decide if she wants to follow in her father's footsteps and seek to unravel the mysteries that might just cross over into modern times...