Bookish Thoughts

"Louis, Louis, Louis. Still whining after all these years." That quote isn't actually from the book. It's Lestat's final line in the 1994 movie adaptation. But, damn, is it an appropriate summation of this book. Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire was a genre changer. It was the first mainstream media that took a sympathetic view towards vampires. They're just lonely immortals at the top of the food chain who spend their free time reading poetry, visiting the opera, and looking for other vampires to share eternity with. Not all the different from you or me. This also introduced a dynamic that has been repeated in vampire literature ever since. We get Louis, the brooding brunette who doesn't want to kill people; Lestat, the partying blonde who's just out to have a good time and who cares about the body count; and Claudia, the super special girl that they're both obsessed with. This dynamic has gotten a ton of mileage from Bu...

No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace A Thread of Grace is about Jewish refugees in Northern Italy during World War II. But like Mary Doria Russell's other books, it's about so much more than that. Tapestry is a good word to describe this book. There are a lot of characters, and their stories weave together to paint a picture of the last two years of WWII. The number of characters is a bit overwhelming at the beginning, but Russell is so good at creating distinct people that it doesn't take too long to begin sorting them out. There's also a list at the beginning of the book that outlines the characters, their aliases, and their basic relationships. The list is helpful, though I accidentally spoiled myself for a plot point via one of the descriptive aliases. The book tells the amazingly true story of many Italians' simple refusal to report on their Jewish friends, family, and neighbors. The book is d...

The Hobbit is a pretty awesome introduction to JJR Tolkien's Middle-Earth. It's a fun children's book with danger and adventure and cool new creatures. It's definitely lighter and less dense that The Lord of the Rings , but gets you interested in this world and what else is going on. The chapters in the first half of the book follow a fairly basic formula. Bilbo and the dwarves meet some new creature on their journey to the Lonely Mountain. These creatures include fairly benign beings like the elves, eagles, and Beorn. There are also villains, like the trolls, orcs, spiders, and Gollum. Over the course of the book, Bilbo become more confident in his skills as he goes from hiding from the trolls to defeating the spiders and saving all his friends. The back half of the book is more concerned with Smaug, whose defeat Bilbo contributes to but isn't responsible for. Then there's a battle over who gets to keep the treasure and finally Bilbo gets to go...

In my opinion, George Orwell's 1984 is incredibly overrated. Yes, there are some interesting political ideas. Yes, it's important to read this book and be on guard against a society like the one portrayed happening. Yes, we still refer back to this book constantly when we talk about things like Big Borther, Newspeak, and Double Think. But the characters are boring and hard to sympathize with and the plot is barely there. Seriously, thirty pages of this book was devoted to Goldstein's analysis of Oceana. As dry as it was, it was probably the point of the entire book. There were a couple of things that stood out as interesting. One was the presentation of Big Brother and Goldstein, which set them up in a God/Satan dynamic. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counterrevolutio...

About fifty pages into The Restaurant at the End of the Universe , Douglas Adam's sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , I began to have the feeling that I'd read it before. The scene of Zaphod climbing down the building which stuck in the ground at a 45 degree angle was eerily familiar. I already knew that the end of the universe was a temporal reference, not a spatial one, but I chalked that up to probably being a Futurama episode I'd half-forgotten. By the time Arthur and Ford arrived on Earth 20,000 years before it will have been blown up, I knew I'd already read this book. But it had taken me the entire book to reach that conclusion. Even though I just finished this book, those are still the only three details that are sticking in my mind. It's not that this book is bad. It was entertaining. But it was like a mediocre episode of Futurama. Something I'm bound to forget the details of because I'm simply not paying close enough...