Bookish Thoughts

Dreamers of the Day is the fourth novel by Mary Doria Russell, who has already cemented herself as one of my favorite authors. I'd heard this book wasn't as good as her previous three and almost avoided it for this reason. I'm really glad I didn't. While it's true that it's not as good as The Sparrow, Children of God , or A Thread of Grace , it's still an incredibly good book. Dreamers of the Day is part romance, part historical fiction. The narrator,  a forty-year-old school teacher named Agnes Shanklin, inherits a large amount of money that allows her to take her dream vacation to Cairo. By a twist of narration, Agnes happens to meet T. E. Lawrence and Winston Churchill who are in the process of redrawing national boundaries in the Middle East following the Great War. Agnes finds herself on the outskirts of these talks as she spends some time with Lawrence, Churchill, and various other players. Although she doesn't participate them, ...

After plowing through Kvothe's adventure, Douglas Adams' Life, The Universe, and Everything was just the palate cleanser I needed before moving back into more dense literature. This book was a lot of fun. I liked it way more than The Restaurant at the End of the Universe . I think a big part of this was that this book actually had a plot. The universe is about to end. So Arthur Dent and friends must reconvene in order to save it. Okay, so Dent spends the majority of the book majorly confused and sort of passively going along with anything that happens to him. But since I was almost as confused, it was nice that people kept stopping to explain things to him. The convoluted history of one war-mongering species inadvertently leading to the extreme xenophobic tendencies of a second species many years later was lots of fun to read about. And the way this ancient war manifested itself as Cricket was the icing that made this a Hitchhiker's cake. I was a little di...

My friends warned me that while The Wise Man's Fear was a good follow-up, it wasn't as good as The Name of the Wind . I'd heard that there were pacing issues, that it was too drawn out and took too long to end. I must disagree. I liked the sequel even more than the first book. There was more adventure, more heroics, more epic mistakes. I had no issues with pacing, thinking it was perfect pretty much throughout. I liked spending time in Faerie and Ademre. I liked the way the book slowly wound down for the last hundred pages. I liked the way Rothfuss gathered up all the loose threads while still leaving plenty to wonder about for the final installment. I cannot wait to see how this story wraps up. I'm going to split this up geographically in an effort to organize my thoughts. There was just so much in this book that I want to talk about and gush over. That means that this got a bit long, but that's to be expected given how long the book was. The Univ...

Good lord this book is boring. I really liked Fellowship of the Ring.  There were fun adventures and we got to meet interesting people and explore Middle Earth. The first half of The Two Towers  is like this, too. But then it just gets bleak. And in this installment there's a whole lot of war followed by way too many sappy good byes. Seriously, this book takes longer to end than the movie does, which is pretty impressive. If you like reading about war, then this book is great. There are epic battles and heroic moments. But that bores me. Not to mention that the prose comes across as biblical. I honestly can't remember if this happened in the earlier installments or if it was unique to this book. It could be the I was so disenchanted with the plot that the language was bothering me more. Or it could have really been different. Either way, this book was a struggle. I honestly almost gave it up a few times. But I'm stubborn. I couldn't just not finish thi...

With the upcoming release of the movie version of The Hunger Games , I decided to pause briefly in my consumption of Kvothe's tale so I could re-read the book and have it fresh in my mind. I read the whole trilogy about a year and a half ago in roughly a week. This story grabs hold of you and just doesn't let go. Reading the book the second time was a similar experience. Some of the flaws were a bit more obvious this time around. There are oddly formed sentences. Collins is perhaps a bit too fond of flashbacks, especially in the first third of the book. And Katniss' obliviousness of Peeta's true feelings for her gets a bit annoying. Even with all that, this book is hard to put down. Once again I found myself up until midnight*, trying to read just one more chapter. I finally had to stop in the middle of a chapter in order to avoid a cliffhanger and get some sleep. The book is action-packed and exciting. Collins' decision to narrate the entire thing...

A whole bunch of people recommended The Name of the Wind to me. Everyone was convinced it was exactly the kind of book I would love. And so it moved up my to-read list pretty quickly. I started looking at reviews on a few sites - GoodReads , Amazon , and The AV Club - and everyone had great things to say about it. I didn't read most of the reviews because I wanted to stay as unspoiled as possible, but the sheer number of five star reviews grabbed my interest. The thing that really pushed me over the edge was Patrick Rothfuss' list of Books You Should Read , mostly the fact that he included Buffy on his list of books. Of course every one was right. This book was a lot of fun to read. It's been a while since I completely forgot where I was. Since it took flashing lights to alert me to the fact that the train I was on had reached the end of the line. Since I was sitting at my desk at work, desperately trying to read just one more chapter while my computer rest...

I finished Cat's Cradle a couple of weeks ago, but I haven't come up with anything to say about it beyond "it's absurd and delightful". So that's what I'm leaving you with. I liked it. I'm definitely going to add some more Kurt Vonnegut to my library.