A couple down, a few to go.

 Sophie here! The book has been read, thoroughly defaced and sent on to South Africa, where I am confident it will at some point become dusty and get pissed on by a lion.

I got the book, as Raye said, in the middle of a schoolwork overload, so most of the reading I did was on the train. You can tell by the sometimes shaky handwriting, especially when I went over the badly-maintained tracks past Otahuhu. I'd never noticed all those damn bumps before. Anyway, sorry about that, I guess.

Mine is the green highlighter and green pen. Raye's is the blue highlighter and black pen. My notations tended to follow and/or answer Raye's, and I didn't try too hard with the snark. I'm a little sorry now, since expectations there seem to be high and I wasted a chunk of my allotted snark-space carefully writing proper curse-words over the author's coy replacements. But the book wasn't bad enough to warrant massive mockery, nor did I like it enough to bring forth the squee.

The lack of understanding of the pace of scientific discovery in that century irritated me until the Afterward, when the author was like, "I know." At which point my irritation morphed to disgust. You can't just handwave sloppy history/science you've just based a entire book on. You just can't, it offends me. If you are going to commit to an historical AU (which steampunk is) then you should really commit to it.

It might not have annoyed me so much if the supposed genius behind the Darwinist creations hadn't been the actual Darwin. He didn't know shit about DNA, and giving him the credit rings hella hollow and like the author thinks the reader is stupid enough to go "Durr, Darwin = evolution = lifey sciencey = DNA, okay." Also, Darwin's theory of evolution was intimately tied up with his life, but Leviathan's author makes no mention of what could have changed about the man's life to make him go from looking at orchids and bees and going, "Dude! They're fucking!" to "Let's make an orchid-bee hybrid that shoots lasers, because I can definitely do that".

All that said, I couldn't help thinking as I read (and I can't remember if I wrote this in the actual book or not) that it would make a great Studio Ghibli film.

Looking forward to your thoughts, cats and kittens.

Progress, Progress, Progress!

Sophie got the book!  Whoo-hoo!  The project has now really begun.  Of course, she hasn't started reading it yet due to massive amounts of school work, but as I put off actually buying the damn thing for so long, can I really blame her?  No, I cannot.  I regret that I won't be getting the book back, and therefore won't see the snarky comments she's bound to make (they'll be super-amusing, I'm sure), but my hopes remain high that Tammy will share them with the rest of us.  And by the rest of us, I mean me, because everyone else will get to see the comments first-hand.

Also, it occurs to me that I forgot to put something I had to Anett in the book.  I shall simply have to mail it to her separately.  Anyway, next post might be from someone else, so look forward to it!

~Raye

Raye's Thoughts on Leviathan

Well, I've finished reading Leviathan, and have shipped it off to Sophie for the exorbitant cost of $25--more than twice what the book itself cost.  I'm going to have to find a cheaper shipping service for the future.  Also, the route of the book has been determined and two more people have joined our project!  From the US, the book is going to New Zealand, South Africa, Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, and Israel, in that order.  

I liked the book--but it did occur to me that choosing to read the first book in a trilogy, when the last book in that trilogy hasn't yet been written, let alone published, is a bad idea.  Especially because this book doesn't really end with a sense of closure.  There are too many mysteries left unsolved!

However, it did fulfill my love of steampunk.  The Clanker v. Darwinist perspective on World War I was really cool, though I wonder how it was determined which side would be which...?  And I'm not entirely sure how all of this Darwinist stuff would work, because it seems that all the animals which were engineered wouldn't be too happy just working for humans, and I really think Leviathan, when deflated, should have probably suffocated, but then that's probably just me being a difficult reader by refusing to suspend my disbelief.  And some of my comments will probably drive Sophie crazy, because I spent a long time drawing parallels between Deryn's situation and that of Alanna in Tamora Pierce's book Alanna: The First Adventure, in which a girl passes herself off as a boy.

I also reached the conclusion that pretty much every character in the book is a complete idiot, but then again, we're all complete idiots, so I suppose that's to be forgiven.

Anyway, though, the dream has now become a reality, because the project has actually been enacted!  Hooray!  Huzzah!  Yippee!  Now onto continuing my steampunk kick with The Golden Compass, because it totally is steampunk, even if I didn't realize it the first, oh, dozen times I read it.

Happy reading!

~Raye

Book 1 - Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan

Well, I've picked out the first book.  I haven't purchased it yet - I have to get paid before I can do that - but I've picked it out.  It's one I've perused before, but haven't actually read, and it seems no one else in the group has read it before, either, so that's good.  Anyway, as the post title indicates, I've decided the first book is going to be Scott Westerfeld's (I always want to spell it "Westerfield" but that's not right) Leviathan.  Here's the School Library Journal review of it, so you know what we're in for:

"This is World War I as never seen before. The story begins the same: on June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife are assassinated, triggering a sequence of alliances that plunges the world into war. But that is where the similarity ends. This global conflict is between the Clankers, who put their faith in machines, and the Darwinists, whose technology is based on the development of new species. After the assassination of his parents, Prince Aleksandar's people turn on him. Accompanied by a small group of loyal servants, the young Clanker flees Austria in a Cyklop Stormwalker, a war machine that walks on two legs. Meanwhile, as Deryn Sharp trains to be an airman with the British Air Service, she prays that no one will discover that she is a girl. She serves on the Leviathan, a massive biological airship that resembles an enormous flying whale and functions as a self-contained ecosystem. When it crashes in Switzerland, the two teens cross paths, and suddenly the line between enemy and ally is no longer clearly defined. The ending leaves plenty of room for a sequel, and that's a good thing because readers will be begging for more. Enhanced by Thompson's intricate black-and-white illustrations, Westerfeld's brilliantly constructed imaginary world will capture readers from the first page. Full of nonstop action, this steampunk adventure is sure to become a classic."

And from Westerfeld's website:

"Prince Aleksander, would-be heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, is on the run. His own people have turned on him. His title is worthless. All he has is a battletorn war machine and a loyal crew of men.  Deryn Sharp is a commoner, disguised as a boy in the British Air Service. She’s a brilliant airman. But her secret is in constant danger of being discovered.  With World War I brewing, Alek and Deryn’s paths cross in the most unexpected way…taking them on a fantastical, around-the-world adventure that will change both their lives forever."

Well.  It certainly sounds promising, no?  Why this one?  Because I've developed a love for steampunk over the last few years, and this is one of the few truly promising books in that genre that I've come across (others being Kenneth Oppel's Matt Cruse books, if you want to check those out - they're Airborn, Skybreaker, and Starclimber).  As of now, it's been determined that I'm going to send the book to New Zealand; after that, it will have to stop in Norway and Britain, though we're not sure on the order of those two yet, before finally ending up in Israel, where Tammy will get to keep it, and she's going to buy the next book (prospectively one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books) and start it on its journey!  I should have the book in just a few days, and then it won't take long at all for me to read, annotate, and send off.  And then the journey will have begun.

~Raye

The Beginning

Well, here it is: the first post.  An explanation of who we are and what we're doing, and why.

I'm Chelsea, aka Raye, and I had the awesome idea that me and my friends across the world, in Norway, New Zealand, Britain, and Israel, send each other books to read, write in, and send on.  I'm purchasing and sending on the first book - which will be featured as soon as I get it.  Other people might end up joining in, but for now I think it's just the four of us.

So, how did we meet?  The short answer is, for the most part, we haven't.  Only Sophie and Anett (New Zealand and Norway, respectively) have met each other in real life.  For the most part, we just talk on the forums at GaiaOnline.com, one of the best websites in the whole wide world.  And even Sophie and Anett met online, before visiting each other in their home countries.

So, it's a pretty simple background we've got going on here.  Buy a book; read it; mark it up a little, with favorite quotations, comments, etc; send it on.

It's gonna be great.

~Raye