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29 July 2008
Sink your teeth into this worthy sequel
1 of 1 found this helpful New Moon picks up a few months after Twlight left off, with Edward and Bella just as in love as ever and life proceeding as normally as it can when your boyfriend is a vampire. Bella's big problem is that with her birthday, she technically becomes older than Edward, and is still insistent on becoming a vampire so that she can be with him forever. Edward doesn't see things her way, and disaster strikes when an accidental paper cut at her birthday party causes the Cullens to have to fight to resist the sight of her blood. With this danger on his mind, Edward convinces Bella he no longer needs her and he and his family leave Forks.
This book is big on emotion; Meyer does an incredible job of forcing us to feel Bella's pain at losing Edward and her moments of joy when she realizes that doing dangerous stunts bring on the "sound" of his voice. We're led to understand the growing friendship between Bella and Jake, and Meyer pulls us in with the reveal of Jake's own problems. The relief Bella feels upon seeing Alice and then the terror of Edward's dilemma are all events that caused my heart to jump. Rarely do I get so caught up in the lives of characters, but Meyer makes it impossible not to. The fact that she moves her stories along less on action (though there is plenty of that at times) than on emotion is the driving success of both Twlight and New Moon, and the imprint all of the characters leave on you as you close the last page makes you want to simply turn the book over and begin again.
Highly, highly recommended for all who love well-drawn characters and inventive story-telling. Just be prepared to be disappointed as you are forced to wait for the next installment!
29 July 2008
It was a'right
3 of 3 found this helpful Twilight is a teen romance novel about a young girl named Bella and her love of a teen vampire named Edward. When Bella moves to Forks to live with her dad, she is doing her immature mother a favor or so she thinks. Unfortunately her dad, "Charlie" is just as clueless as mom in the parenting department. When Bella meets an intriguing boy at school, she swiftly falls head over heels for him only to discover :gasp: that Edward is a vampire.
I found the vampire ecology of Meyer's world intriguing. I liked Edward and his family. I found Jacob (the secondary love interest) kind of bland. Bella and her parents annoyed me. Her mother is a very selfish person who thinks more of her new hubby than her own daughter. Her immaturity grated this reader. I found Charlie slightly better, but felt he should've been more of a parent to Bella and less of a 'roommate'. He is seldom around and lets Bella do many things on her own. Bella herself was agonizingly bland at times. I think she fell for Edward too quickly and then the story sort of went nowhere. There is only so much you can take of: Bella lurves Edward, Edward lurves Bella... but that's pretty much the middle section of the book. The book picks up towards the end, but overall I was left with an unsatisfied feeling. Bella's character alternates between a codepenant love for Edward and feelings of inadequacy. "why me?"
Nits: I felt the characters didn't act particularly like teenagers. Bella acted like a grown woman most of the time. I disliked her calling her father by his first name, and how she pretty much played housewife for him, cooking, cleaning, etc. The girl is a teenager. Dad is a grown man. He can learn to cook. I kind of wish Edward had been turned at a later age. To be perpetually 17 must be kind of tough to pull off as your girlfriend ages.
Overall OK characterization in the vampire department, but a bit thin plotwise for this reader.
05 August 2008
*** THE GOOD & THE BAD**** ALTHOUGH A MUST HAVE
The good: Nicely designed; excellent high-ISO photo quality; relatively fast; above-average movie quality; face detection.
The bad: Photos tend to have purple fringing; no optical viewfinder
The bottom line: The Canon PowerShot SD750 has an attractive design, large LCD, and excellent photo quality for an ultracompact.
Specs: Digital camera type: Ultracompact; Resolution: 7.1 megapixels; Optical zoom: 3 x + more
Sandwiched between similar 7-megapixel siblings--the PowerShot SD800 IS on one side and the PowerShot SD1000 on the other--the Canon PowerShot SD750 nevertheless manages to distinguish itself as a well-designed, practical option for snapshooters who favor big LCDs over optical viewfinders.
The 5.3-ounce SD750 doesn't quite match the SD1000 for compactness, but its 3.6x2.2x0.8 inch body will fit just as comfortably in a pants pocket. It comes in silver and silver with black accents, the latter design recalling the early film Elphs. The Touch Dial Control--so named for its optional ability to display a virtual dial when you simply touch the control--quickly accesses the small set of shooting options, including ISO speed, flash mode, macro/infinite focus, and continuous/timer. Though it doesn't offer manual or semi-manual exposure modes, it does supply a host of color enhancements and scene modes, exposure compensation, and a choice of three metering modes.
For focus, Canon provides a face-detection AF mode, which automatically locates a face (just one) and determines focus and metering for it. That's in addition to the company's standard AiAF automatic focus-point selector and center focus. The face-detect AF works reasonably well, but the option is buried within the menus and only works in conjunction with the AiAF; that is, if it doesn't find a face, it falls back on AiAF. I generally don't like the automatic focus selection on any camera--they never seem to find the desired subject, just the closest. So I don't like the face-detection option stuck in a set-it-and-forget-it location. You may feel otherwise.
Overall, however, I find the SD750's layout intelligent and comfortable to use. It has a big 3-inch LCD for framing and playback. The LCD appears bright and easy to see, even in direct sunlight, although it also tends to look a bit coarse.
Photo and movie quality rank high for an ultracompact. In fact, despite almost identical innards with the SD1000--they both use the same sensor, f /2.8-4.9 35mm-105mm (35mm equivalent) 3X zoom lens, and Digic III processor--the photos from the SD750 look a bit better, especially vis-a-vis high ISO noise. As measured by CNET Labs' tests and in photo samples, the SD750's noise profile generally outperformed both the SD1000 and the SD800 IS. With the exception of photos shot under our extremely warm tungsten lights, white balance, exposure, and saturation look very good. Movies look equally good, in part because Canon captures in MJPEG, which uses far less compression than other cameras' MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 formats. As a result, a 30fps 640x480 movie uses about 2MB per second of storage.