Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

So much better than I remember at 15. I had completely forgotten about Caesar's ghost and really anything except for Caesar's death. I found the battle scenes exciting and the citizens of Rome, idiots.  When I read this the first time, I remember being impressed with Antony and feeling bad for Caesar. This time, I can enjoy the more subtle complexities of each character and can understand why serious actors are drawn to them. My pity now lies with Brutus. Poor dumb Brutus. If Caesars fault was hubris, then Brutus' fault was honor. My 10th grade teacher would be impressed.

Gilded by Christina Farley

I really wanted to like this book. It was pretty fast paced, which was good, but I just didn't find myself liking any of the characters except the bad guy. I'm not the target audience, but I enjoy a lot of YA. Even though it was an interesting concept and the fact that it was re-telling a Korean myth was awesome, as a whole, the characters were one-dimensional and Jae in particular, too Mary Sue for my taste. There was a little too much imagery to the point that it was distracting. 

I would recommend it to a middle school audience. Good moral and female protagonist are a win. Just not for me. Will not be reading others in series, but wish the author luck. 15 Chapters were enough for me.

The Time Machine by HG Wells

I sometimes had to stop to remind myself what year this book was written. HG Wells was so advanced for his time, arguably the founding father of some of my most favorite genres. I read this in a youngsters comic version when I was twelve, so this was my first time actually reading the book and it was amazingly good. I sometimes forget how well some classics are written and how we'll they still fit in. I must admit I had to limit my reading to daytime, as the first time I was reading it past midnight, my tiredness, the darkness, and the description of the morlocks, made it somewhat difficult to sleep. I guess it's a testament to how good the book was right? I especially was surprised when I started sympathizing with the morlocks and later the crab creatures and un distinguishable black blobs of the future. Who really knows what we may evolve to so we can sustain life, and what biological changes we will make to adapt to a changing planet? It's funny, I was just reading a scientific journal recently that stated that if and when we do trek into space or different worlds, we have no idea how much our bodies will change do to atmospheric things like microgravity and sunlight or lack thereof. NASA now records astronauts lose bone mass, and their heads swell from the fluids spacing out differently from lack of gravity, and in turn the pressure eyeballs face, re shapes them and flattens them at the back, inside the head. Of course these are all tiny changes, and we are just barely scratching the surface of space travel, but HG Wells wasn't too far off a few hundred years ago. Who knows what we have in-store as a species.

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