Bookish Thoughts

Wow. I doubt I could ever do what Joe Simpson does over the pages of this book. While climbing the 20,000+ foot tall Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, Joe Simpson falls and breaks his leg.  He and his climbing partner, Simon Yates, work out a system that gets them most of the way down the mountain in 300 foot intervals. But as they near the base of the mountain, Yates is forced to cut the rope in order to save is own life. Simpson falls 100 feet and miraculously lands on a ledge about 50 feet down a crevasse.  The crevasse looks bottomless, and Yates has no reason to believe that Joe survived the fall, so he returns to camp alone. Somehow, Simpson finds the strength to climb, slide, hop, and crawl his way back to camp over the next several days.  I read the book, and I'm still not sure how he did it.  It's sheer force of will that keeps him going. What Simpson goes through is horrifying.  He hallucinates and nearly succumbs to madness several times on h

This book is a collection of forty modern retellings of fairy tales.  The inspirations are pulled from all over the world.  Some of the tales are more faithful to the source material than others.  But all of them remain true to the form. I love fairy tales.  This dates back to my early days watching Disney films.  I grew up in the golden age of Disney, when The Little Mermaid , Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King were first released.  The Little Mermaid was the first movie I ever saw in the theater and I was downright terrified of Ursula.  Cinderella was the first movie I ever owned, and I remember being excited when my dad told me we didn't have to take it back to the store. I graduated from Disney to the real fairy tales.  The Little Mermaid experiences excruciating pain every time she takes a step with her new legs.  In the end she turns to sea foam and floats away when her prince chooses a different girl (one that can actually talk).  Sleeping Beauty

Fire is the second book by Kristin Cashore.  It's a prequel to Graceling , but there's only one character who appears in both books and Fire takes place thirty years earlier in an entirely different world. Both Fire and Graceling take place on the same continent.  But there's a mountain range running down the middle of the continent that it so treacherous to cross no one attempts it (or even wonders what might be on the other side).  The world is effectively divided into a western part (where Graceling is set) and an eastern part (where Fire is set).  In Graceling , there are people born with extreme skills, marked by mismatched eyes.  They don't seem to exist on the other half of the continent at all.  Instead there are monsters, and Fire is the last human monster.  Monster versions of every animal species exists, from bugs and fish to wolves and raptors.  Monsters are distinguished by their vivid coloring and their ability to read and control minds.

Spoiler Alert: Don't read this book Serpent's Storm is the third book in Amber Benson's series about Calliope Reaper-Jones, also known as Death's Daughter.  Callie just wants to be a normal girl, living in NYC, working and shopping and going about her life.  She even put a forgetting spell on herself so she would think she was normal (and basically abandoned her family in the process).  But when her dad (Death) gets kidnapped, she has to step up as a member of her family.  The forgetting spell is broken and she gets thrust back into the supernatural world she tried so hard to leave behind. Honestly, I barely know why I read these books.  I grabbed the first two solely because Amber Benson wrote them.  The first one ( Death's Daughter ) was fun, and I think I liked the second one ( Cat's Claw ) more.  The world is actually really great.  Amber Benson draws on a lot of different mythologies and her characterizations of the old gods tend to be sna

Witches and vampires in one book!  How could I not love this? My most recent trip to Terry Pratchett's Discworld was via Carpe Jugulum .  In this book, the king and queen of Lancre have just given birth to their first daughter.  Being the forward-looking monarch he is, King Verence decides to invite the rulers of all the neighboring kingdoms, including the vampires next door, to the naming ceremony.  But these aren't your old, dusty vampires; they're modern vampyres. I thought of Andrew every single time I read that word. Once the vampyres have received their invitation to the princess's naming ceremony, they're free to enter the kingdom of Lancre.  They intend to take over the kingdom and use its inhabitants as an all-you-can-eat buffet.  It's up to the witches to stop them and save the day. There's also an Christian Omnian priest along for the ride.  He's an interesting character in that he's constantly questioning himself and h