Bookish Thoughts

I tried to read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe . I really did. But I just could not get in to it. Defoe's style didn't really help matters. He's a big fan of run-on sentences. Here's a sample of a single sentence from this book. And now, in the managing of my household affairs, I found myself wanting in many things, which I thought at first it was impossible for me to make, as indeed as to some of them it was; for instance, I could never made a cask to be hooped; I had a small runlet or two, as I observed before, but I could never arrive to the capacity of making one by them, though I spend many weeks at it; I could neither put in the heads, or joint the staves so true to one another, as to make them hold water, so I gave that over also. There are, like, four sentences in there trying to get out. And the entire book is like this. As soon as I started to get into a flow, I'd start stumbling across commas again. The sentences are so unwieldy that ...

Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian was an incredibly slow, dry book. There was a good amount of suspense and spookiness surrounding the search for Dracula that spans three generations. But there was a whole lot of history mixed in. I found myself unable to read large chunks at once, because my mind would start to wander. That's not to say it was a bad book, though. The horror was good and some passages were genuinely frightening. It's just that it was mixed in with an incredibly thorough history lesson about the conquest of Transylvania, Hungary, and Bulgaria by the Ottoman Empire. There's a lot of allusion to the historical and present-day conflict between Islam and Christianity in the region. And the legend of Vlad the Impaler is interwoven so seamlessly that I has trouble telling what was fact and what was fiction at times. There was a lot of cool speculation about the legend of Vlad Dracula. And I really liked seeing how that intersected with hist...

Preludes and Nocturnes is the first book of ten in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. This series was actually my introduction to Gaiman. I bought the first one towards the end of high school and spent the majority of college collecting the rest of the volumes. I've since collected all of the additional volumes* as well and have read the series many times. The first installment introduces the protagonist, Morpheus. He is the anthropomorphic representation of Dreams and King of the Dream Realm. The novel opens with him being captured by some arrogant warlocks during the Great War. They had planned to put a stop to death by capturing the anthropomorphic representation of Death so she couldn't go out and collect souls any more. Lucky for them, they ended up with her younger brother instead. The warlocks keep Dream imprisoned for seventy years before he is finally able to escape, thanks to one of his guards growing lax and nodding off on his shift. Once free, Drea...

Back in the fall two new TV series debuted that I was really excited for. Once Upon a Time premiered on ABC and Grimm started up later that week on NBC. Both of these series were focused on fairy tale characters, albeit with different premises. And each of them featured one of my favorite writers (Jane Espenson and David Greenwalt, respectively). Sadly, neither show managed to hold my attention for more than a handful of episodes. One week I forgot to set my DVR to record them, and then I just never bothered to catch up on Hulu. Despite focusing on fairy tales, both fell short of what I wanted. Then I discovered that both shows were both inspired by the same source material: a series of comic books by Bill Willingham called Fables . Twice the series had been pitched as a TV show. And twice the show ended up going in a completely different direction than the comics had. Strangely, the two shows were pitched three years apart, but ended up premiering in the same week b...

Night Watch is the 29th novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. It centers around a really fun time paradox that involves the commander of the city watch traveling back in time thirty years where he acts as his own mentor. I think the time paradox is handled really well. The book follows the idea that even if you change a bunch of little things, most of the bigger things are going to happen anyway. Once some things have been set in motion, there's nothing that can stop it. Even though Vimes changes some details -e.g., anticipating where an attack will come from - the larger events happen as he remembers them. This book wasn't as laugh out loud funny as a lot of other Discworld novels. It was certainly amusing. But it had a different feel. This book seemed deeper and more serious than the ones that came before it. It was still really gripping throughout, though. Almost moreso, since the stakes seemed a bit higher. Night Watch also gave me a much de...

I'd been hearing extraordinary things about John Green's latest novel, The Fault in Our Stars , for a while. They were good enough and numerous enough that I finally decided I simply couldn't wait for the paperback edition. And holy crap you guys, this book. This book . Emotional whiplash in the best possible way. It only took me 14 pages to fall so in love with the main character that I was weeping. A few pages after that the tears turn to laughter. And then Hazel Grace Lancaster went and punched me in the gut with this line: I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn't tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You're a woman. Now die.) The rest of the book was a similar roller coaster ride of emotions as Hazel deals with the cancer that is going to kill her (probably sooner than later) and with the fact that she migh...