Read Harder: Vol. 3

This year, I plan on chronicling my adventures with Book Riot’s 2016 Read Harder Challenge.

It’s always tough to talk about the third book in a series without giving away anything important, but I’m going to do my best. I flailed a bit about Pierce Brown‘s Red Rising about two years ago and it ended up being one of my favorite books that year. The overly simplified recap?  The series is set on Mars. Our hero, Darrow, is pulled up from his slave existence and sent to infiltrate high-society to spark a revolution.

In Morning Star, the revolution has spread far beyond Darrow’s spy games to a complete uprising, with most of the low-colors in the caste system warily banding together to overthrow the ruling Golds. Brown has expanded his toying with Greek and Roman mythology to include Norse legends and mythology – including a valiant warrior named Ragnar, his shield-maiden sister Sefi, and a veritable army of Valkyries. The book is stuffed with rousing war speeches, space battles, and political maneuvers.  If Red Rising has shades of Ender’s Game and Golden Son is a bureaucratic chess game, Morning Star throws the two into a blender, and comes out with Battlestar Galactica (Starbuck and Darrow would definitely be friends).

If you are into this, then Morning Star is for you.

As for the reading challenge, this will cover you for:

• Read a book over 500 pages – it clocks in at 518
• Read a book about politics, in your country or another (fiction or non fiction) – a stretch, sure, but it works

— Jess

Read Harder: Vol. 1

This year, I plan on chronicling my adventures with Book Riot’s 2016 Read Harder Challenge.

Read a play

I thought, for a hot second, about re-reading something from my high school English classes. But then I remembered that I hated Hedda Gabler, and while I love Shakespeare, I just didn’t have it in me. I wanted something short and funny. Arsenic and Old Lace, maybe?

Written in 1939 by Joseph Kesselring, it opened in 1941 and ran for 1,444 performances. This dark comedy is centered around the Brewster family — our hero Mortimer, his two brothers and their spinster aunts. And aside from Mortimer, they’re all insane.

Teddy believes he is Panama Canal-era Theordore Roosevelt, digging locks in the basement. Jonathan has just had surgery to conceal his identity (he now looks like Boris Karloff and was, in fact, played by Karloff on stage) and is on the run with his alcoholic doctor. The dear, sweet aunts have taken to murdering elderly gentlemen by offering them a bit of company and a glass of home-made elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine, and “just a pinch” of cyanide. Poor Mortimer just wants to get married.

If farce and dark comedy is your jam, I can’t recommend this enough. And check out the movie, directed by Frank Capra; it stars Cary Grant as Mortimer and Peter Lorre as the surgeon, Dr. Einstein. I saw it as a kid and I think it informed my sense of humor as much as any Muppets or Mel Brooks movie.

— Jess