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Title: Trickster’s Queen
Author: Tamora Pierce

Thoughts: Yes, another book by Tamora Pierce, but I promise the next one won’t be by her. This one follows the book Trickster’s Choice and it’s a book that is extremely fast paced and it makes you want to keep reading it straight through even though you know that you can’t really afford to (well, I can’t because I’m in college and have other reading obligations and class and stuff). In fact, I stayed up way too late one night because I had to finish this book or at least felt like I had to. Of course this was also the night that I also stayed up to finish playing Magical Starsign so, yeah. The ending wasn’t exactly to my liking because something I wanted to happen didn’t happen, but everything else I wanted did, so I’m pleased. Also, I am glad that the right queen ended up on the throne.

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This game was for Nintendo DS and I finished it a day or two ago finally after taking a break from it for about a week or two. I took a break mostly because I was close to the end and I sorta get cold feet before the last couple of bosses. The game however, came out to be easier to beat than I had feared. I did get stuck at one point in the game (basically the place where you have to choose between two planets) because I was having trouble with my strategy, but once I got my strategy figured out and actually remembered to save constantly through out the game, I had no trouble.

As for the content of the game, well, it was kinda lame. It’s cutesy and the puns are horrid. Someone must’ve been obsessed with food related names when naming various things throughout the game. And sometimes the dialogue really sucked. It’s short though for an RPG. Another negative was that you had to basically exclusively use the stylus with the game, which hurt my hands actually. Most games I can use a combination of the stylus and the buttons, but this one…well, it just didn’t really work that way.

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Title: Trickster’s Choice
Author: Tamora Pierce

Thoughts: I love my trickster deities. Really I do. Kyprioth is a rather delightful one, being perfectly annoying and fond of guady things. He reminds me quite a bit of Loki to be honest. I also love the importance of crows in this book. I especially love Nawat, the crow turned man. He reminds me a lot of a character that I write and his naivety was cute. I kinda wanted to kidnap him for my own. Also, I really liked the character of Aly because she’s just different and she’s not really a warrior or a magic user - she’s a spy type person. The fact that this story actually took place outside of Tortall was really fun because it was nice to see more of a different culture in that universe.

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Title: The Realms of the Gods
Author: Tamora Pierce

Thoughts: This is the fourth book of The Immortals quartet and I definitely like it better than the first two books and it’s tied with the third book as my favorite. I think I would’ve really liked the book to be longer to be honest and for the journey through the Divine Realms to be longer. Actually I thought that the journey was longer from last time I read, but I am older after all. Also I think I confused it with another set of books. But I really liked the cute darklings and I got rather upset when Goldstreak died. They were cute and clever.

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Title: Emperor Mage
Author: Tamora Pierce

Thoughts: I’d say that this third book of The Immortals quartet is one of my favorites in the quartet, though it is tied with the fourth one. Probably because things start getting more interesting and you finally see more than just Tortall. The new Carthaki characters interested me, especially the heir to the throne because you could see he would be a better emperor than the current one. I liked him. I also was fascinated with the Graveyard Hag, the Carthaki patron goddess. I think that’s what really made that book interesting was her involvement in the plot.

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Title: Wolf-speaker
Author: Tamora Pierce

Thoughts: Of course, having read the first book of The Immortals, I would follow that up with the second book. This book follows Daine when she goes to Fief Dunlath, where a pack of wolves that know her have summoned her. There in the valley, the humans living there have been mining and disturbing the country side and the animals in the woods. This is why the wolves ask Daine to come, however what is going on is far more sinister than what it seems at first.

As for my personal thoughts on the book, it was a good enough book to read for leisure. Since I’ve read it before, there wasn’t much in the way of surprises, plus, I’m also just not that into Daine and my favorite character, Numair wasn’t in it as much as I would’ve liked. I guess that’s because Daine is the main character. Oh! And you get introduced to the basilisk Tkaa, who is like my absolute favorite fictional basilisk. I find Pierce’s concept of the basilisk pretty awesome, particularly the part where he changes things into stone by sound and the fact that he eats stone and prefers them “aged”.

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I’ve finally finished watching all 52 episodes of Fushigi Yuugi. I enjoyed watching, even though I got very overwhelmed by the fact that I would watch six or seven episodes in a row since that’s the number of episodes on each DVD disc.

My favorite characters were Yui Hongo and Chichiri. Yui just was more of my kind of character than Miaka because she was much more serious and I could identify with her feelings more such as the feeling of being betrayed by a friend and being jealous. Chichiri I liked because…I have a soft spot for characters who have that traveling monk thing going on.

It’s hard for me to exactly say what I think about it because I watched over about two to three weeks, but for those who like shoujo anime, especially ones from the 90’s, it’s one to watch.

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Title: Wild Magic
Author: Tamora Pierce

Thoughts: This book is the first book in the Immortals quartet by Tamora Pierce and I have to admit that this particular work by this author isn’t my favorite. It just doesn’t have the same sense of awesome that the Song of the Lioness quartet had. It’s okay for introducing you to the main character, Daine and to be honest, while she’s somewhat interesting, I think I’d like to know more about Numair than her. Since I’ve read this quartet in the past, I think that you learn more about him in the third book and since I’m still on the second one, I’ll be glad to get to it.

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Title: America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction
Author: Jon Stewart and others

Thoughts: The humor in this book is very…much like my father’s sense of humor, except better. Though perhaps my father got some of his jokes from the Daily Show since he watches it anyways. As for what I think of the book - well it certainly made me chuckle at times and do several “spit-takes”. Some of the humor was a bit crude for me, at least the part with the naked Supreme Court Justices bothered me. I liked the first chapter the most because it was made more funny to me by my knowledge of history as some of the humor was very historically based.

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Yesterday, I had arrived back at college and today I started my spring semester classes. I had two classes today, one being a Western history course, taught by an instructor that I was already familiar with and the other being my Introduction to Abnormal Psychology class. Both seem do-able as long as I make sure to do the work and attend class. It’s the attending class part that seems to be the problem most of the time, but now that I have most of my classes after 12, I think I might have a better chance of not being lazy.

My German 3 class is a web course, so I can work on that anytime as long as I finish all the work by Saturday and I’ve already started on this week’s work and I’ve scheduled what I’ll do over the course of the week.

As for other things I’m doing, I’m reading two books at the moment. The first one is America (the book) by Jon Stewart and the second one is Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce. Wild Magic is the first book in the Immortals quartet and I have the other three books and plan to read those right after I read the first book.

As for things I’m watching and playing? Well, I’m currently in the midst of watching Fushigi Yuugi via Netflix (13 episodes left) and I will likely post what I think about it when I’m finished with it. On my Nintendo DS, I’ve been playing Magical Starsign, which I’m close to completing. However, I’m taking a bit of a break from it so I can read and play a new game that I’ve acquired We ♥ Katamari. It’s very addicting. Also, I need to make time for college of course.

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