Bookish Thoughts

I liked A Dance With Dragons  so much more than A Feast For Crows . I positively flew through this book. I've been trying to put my finger on exactly why this was. I think it was a mix of liking the characters more, the book itself being more action-packed, and having two interesting plots to bounce between with plenty of side stories thrown in for spice. This book mostly bounces back and forth between the North and the East. In the North, Jon Snow is trying to figure out how to defend the wall. Stannis is preparing to battle the Boltons. And Bran is off turning into a tree. There's some cool stuff about integrating the wildlings in with the men of the Night's Watch. Plus Melisandre gets a chapter that shows she really is a true believer which I wasn't entirely expecting from her. I really liked getting to see things from her perspective. In the East, Dany is trying to maintain control of Meereen. Meanwhile, suitors are descending on her from all corn...

As I approached the end of the second installment in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings I began to remember why it's been so long since I read this book. Why I never got around to the Appendices or The Silmarillion.  This book gets bleak and then it gets a bit boring. It's like the fourth season of Battlestar Galactica. There's only so much depression I can take before I stop connecting with the characters and lose interest. The Two Towers  is split in half. The first half focuses on the members of the fellowship who aren't continuing on to Mordor. Merry and Pippin get kidnapped by orcs and find themselves in the Entwood just in time to incite the Ents to destroying Isengard and defeating Saruman. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli get sidetracked in their attempts to rescue Merry and Pippin and drawn into a battle to protect the horse lords of Rohan. Despite being so disconnected from the main plot, I really liked this half of the book. The action jumps between the ...

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is the 28th book in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and the first YA novel. It's a twist on the classic tale of the Pied Piper in which the Piper is actually a con artist. Or rather, he's being manipulated by a con artist. I've put off this review for so long that I barely remember what I wanted to talk about. That's what I get for procrastinating. I do remember enjoying the book a lot. The pied piper, a young boy named Kyle, is pretty boring. But I think he's supposed to be. He's being conned by a talking cat named Maurice who is also stringing along a horde of talking rats. Together they travel from town to town. The rats go out and make themselves known. The kid shows up, demands $30 and plays his pipe. The rats leave. It's a good system, but the rats are getting restless. They're developing morals along with the ability to speak and are starting to think that maybe ripping off hu...

The Handmaid's Tale , by Margaret Atwood, is another book that I read in high school but wanted to revisit. It takes place in a near-future version of America, called Gilead, where religious fundamentalists have taken over and basically obliterated women's rights. This story is narrated by Offred, a handmaid in the employ of a Commander named Fred. She lives in his house and is forced to copulate with him once a month. She also walks into town every day to buy food as part of her regimented exercise program. Her main purpose is to get pregnant. After she successfully has a child, she will be shipped off to another house at which point the process will start all over again. If she goes six years without getting pregnant, she will be declared an Unwoman and will be sent to a forced labor camp for the rest of her life. Offred alternates between describing her life as a handmaid and reminiscing about the time before when she had a husband, a daughter, a job, a ban...

This is a bit of a departure for me. Managing MS: Straight Talk From a Thirty-One Year Survivor isn't the kind of book I'd typically pick up. So why did I? Well my Aunt Debbie wrote it. Which also means that any review I give will be incredibly biased. I want this book to sell lots because I want my aunt to be successful. She's been wanting to write a book for many years and with new internet-based publishing, that dream was finally realized. My aunt is a pretty amazing person. Reading her book was incredibly eye-opening for me. She's been in a wheel chair for as long as I can remember, though when I was younger she was able to walk short distances with the aid of a walker. She can still stand enough to transfer from her wheelchair to the toilet, or to unload the dishwasher, but this has more to do with locking her legs, than utilizing the muscles in them. Whenever she leaves her home, she's in a scooter. The scooter never felt like a huge hindranc...

I skipped ahead a bit in my consumption of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Part of it was that I momentarily forgot which order the books were in (I just bought three and got a bit confused) and part of it was that I was so excited to dive into the Tiffany Aching arc. Unlike the rest of Discworld , which is aimed at adults, the Tiffany Aching subseries is YA. Tiffany is a nine-year-old witch in training who must save her baby brother from "The Queen". The plot is familiar. And the story hits many of the same beats as The Snow Queen ; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Golden Compass; and Labyrinth . Ultimately the young girl saves the boy who has been kidnapped by outwitting or otherwise defeating the Queen (or Rebel, Rebel King) who is holding him hostage. That's not the point. It's the details that make a story like this worth revisiting. Is the Queen sufficiently scary? Is the danger real, but not so extreme as to present an imp...