Bookish Thoughts

I first read Slaughterhouse Five for an assignment in high school. Afterwards, the only parts that stuck with me were the time travel and the aliens. I was actually confused the first time I saw it referred to as an anti-war book, because I honestly didn't remember there being anything about war in it at all. The fact that I read it as part of a literature on war assignment didn't quite register with me. Most of the other kids read  Catch-22  or  The Things They Carried  or  A Farewell to Arms . My teacher actually recommended that I read  Slaughterhouse Five ; I don't think it was on the approved reading list. So I read it, and I do remember liking it. Some of the philosophical musings about time and free will stuck with me, even if the war bits didn't. The only part of the book that I really remembered was this passage describing Billy's limited perspective of time: The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were lookin...

A Feast For Crows requires a bit of a shift in expectations. The first three books largely focused on the Starks and Lannisters. Sure, there were Dany chapters that took us across the Narrow Sea and Jon Snow chapters on the Wall and north of it. We occasionally got to see what Stannis was up to in the second and third books; although the Baratheon family is pretty firmly entwined with both the Starks and the Lannisters via the late King Robert. The second book also shed a bit of light on Theon Greyjoy. But again, Theon was so tied to the Starks that this hardly seemed like a major departure. This all changes in the fourth book, when the world doubles in size while simultaneously narrowing in scope. Over half of the book is dedicated to three characters: Cersei, Jaime, and Brienne. Arya, Sansa, and Sam each get a few chapters, but several key characters are missing (Tyrion, Bran, and Jon). Instead, GRRM introduces two new kingdoms with all new casts of characters and co...

Sometimes I think Neil Gaiman is a bit too clever for his own good. Having read Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book , Gaiman's Graveyard Book makes a lot more sense. And with The Jungle Book to compare to, I find that I'm liking The Graveyard Book a lot more. Both stories follow a young boy being brought up in extraordinary circumstances. Mowgli is raised by wolves, with a panther and a bear to teach him. Bod is raised by ghosts and receives similar tutelage from a vampire and a werewolf. Mowgli is plagued by the tiger, Shere Khan, who has been trying to kill him since he was a baby; Bod has a similar relationship with the man Jack. The Graveyard Book is more linear than The Jungle Book . It also sticks with (what I assumed to be) the main character for longer. The entirety of The Graveyard Boo k is about Bod, but Mowgli is only featured in the first three of The Jungle Book's seven chapters. That actually confused me a great deal, and I spent most of the ...

The Graveyard Book is cute. It's a children's book written by Nail Gaiman, and it's definitely a children's book. The plot is barely there and doesn't matter nearly as much as the story of Bod, told in a series of vignettes. Nobody "Bod" Owens' family was murdered when he was a year old. Somehow he escaped and toddled up to the graveyard where the ghosts adopted him and kept him safe from this man who was still trying to kill him. From there we meet the first living friend Bod makes, watch him get kidnapped by ghouls, see him befriend the ghost of a witch and obtain a headstone for her unmarked grave. Bod participates in the Danse Macabre. He attends school for a short time, but eventually has to drop out because he's drawing too much attention to himself and the man who killed his family is still out there trying to finish the job. In the final chapter, all of these stories feed into the climactic battle between Bod and the man ...