Bookish Thoughts

Somehow I managed to escape childhood without every reading Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time . I'm not sure exactly how this happened except that I was absolutely obsessed with The Baby-Sitter's Club around the time I ought to have read this book. I guess I just missed it in my desire to read more about the residents of Stoneybrooke. Regardless, I have now read A Wrinkle in Time . And while I'm sad that it took me this long, I'm glad I finally got my hands on this book. It follows Meg Murry, her younger brother Charles, and their new friend Calvin on a quest across the universe to save their father from an evil shadow that prizes conformity. There's some fun science fiction in the form of alien planets and beings and a tesseract. Clearly Meg should have been on hand to help the Avengers understand that artifact. Meg herself reminded me a lot of Xander, from Buffy . She's not the smartest person and tends to lash out when she has troub...

For a long time Season of Mists was my favorite volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. It's the volume that really made me fall in love with this series, and it stayed my favorite for a few years until I got around to reading the eighth volume, Worlds' End . (It took me a long time to collect the entire series). The premise of Season of Mists is pretty straight forward. Fed up with his duties and just plain bored, Lucifer quits. He kicks everyone out of hell, locks the door, and gives the key to Dream. This concept completely hooked me. I loved the way this played with Christian mythology. Maybe the Devil is sick and tired of the endless war with heaven. Maybe he'd rather just chill on a beach somewhere. For his part, Dream has to deal with a host of mythological being who all want Hell for their own. Odin, Thor, and Loki want to move in so they can avoid Ragnarok and the end of their world. Egyptian and Japanese gods want to expand their current la...

"Bein' born is craps...How we live is poker " At this point it should probably come as no surprise that Mary Doria Russell has quickly become one of my favorite authors. The only sad thing about Doc  is that now that I've read it, I actually have to wait for Russell's next book to be released. But the happy part is that her next book is a sequel to Doc , so I'll get to spend even more time in the Wild West with these characters. Doc  follows Doc Holliday for the summer he spent in Dodge City when he met the Earp brothers. But like most of Russell's books, it's about a lot more than that. Ostensibly, Doc  is a murder mystery. Except that the kid who died wasn't white, so no one really cares how he died. Then it comes to light that he was robbed of $2000 and suddenly people want to know where that money went. But it's also about Doc's struggle with tuberculosis, his new friendship with Wyatt and Morgan Earo, his contentious...

I grew up watching A Little Princess . So when I found the novel at a used book store for $0.50, I really had no choice but to pick it up. I just had to know how the book went, what changes they had made for the movie. A lot of the changes were superficial. The book takes place in London while the movie is set in New York. In the book Sara lives at the school for several years before her father dies in the book, as opposed to what seems like a few months in the movie. Lavinia has a much larger role in the movie while Ermengarde is more prominent in the book. The biggest change is that Sara's father actually dies in the book. It's his friend that comes to find Sara and holds her fortune for her (actually multiplying it by ten in the meantime. Which made me realize that I don't know what comes after quintuple. Would this be dectuple?) The book also makes a big deal in Sara being unique in her princess status. Where the movie makes it clear that any girl an...

The third installment in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is a collection of short stories, rather than a cohesive arc. However, a line from Death in the final issue helps tie all of the stories together thematically [M]ythologies take longer to die than people believe. They linger on in a kind of dream country that affects all of you. Each of the stories concerns an old mythology. Beliefs and figures that have passed into the realm of stories. Calliope : In the first tale, an author kidnaps the youngest muse and holds her hostage. He rapes her in an effort to get ideas and grows prosperous on his projects. She appeals to Morpheus to free her. He does this by flooding the author's mind with ideas, so many that he can't sort through them in any meaningful way. After Calliope is released, she elects to retire to the dream realm, to continue only in the minds of men. This may be my favorite story of the four collected in this volume. It's certainly the most ...

It's another Discworld novel. Monstrous Regiment is the 31st book that Terry Pratchett wrote in this series. There are only 39 at the moment. I'm nearing the end of the printed books. And I think I'm beginning to leave behind some of my favorite characters. I know that I'm about to dive into Tiffany Aching's arc and meet Moist von Lipwig. There aren't any more Rincewind novels, and I don't think there are any more that prominently feature the Witches, the Wizards, or Death (though I expect all of them to show up somehow in the remaining books). In more ways than one, this felt like a transitional book. The cover art is of a different style than hat of the preceding books. Like the last book, this was less laugh-out-loud funny and more wryly amusing. Parts of it were downright sad. There were also a shocking number of typos. I'm not sure whether that's an effect of Pratchett's advancing Alzheimers (I think this fits the timeline f...

The Doll's House is the second mini-arc in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. At first glance it seems very detached from the Preludes and Nocturnes , but when you have the whole story, you can start to see how the pieces are being set up for Morpheus' ultimate choice at the end of The Kindly Ones . The story mostly follows Rose Walker. She is the granddaughter of Unity Kinkaid, one of the children who suffered from the mysterious sleepy sickness when Morpheus was captured at the beginning of the story. Unity was a dream vortex, a being that can destroy the fabric between dreams and ultimately allow the dream world and reality to mix and become indistinguishable. Because of her sickness (and rape) this characteristic was passed on to Rose. Rose is in Florida, searching for her brother, Jed. When their parents divorced, each got custody of one of the kids. But now that there father is dead and Unity is giving them money, they're looking to reunite the family...

Bitterblue is the third book by Kristin Cashore, set in the fantasy world she created (which could really use a name). It's a standalone novel. You don't really need to have read the other two books first. But it's a lot better if you have read them. Bitterblue takes place eight years after the events of Graceling (and forty or so years after Fire ). Bitterblue has just turned eighteen and is trying to get a handle on the kingdom she's trying to run. But everywhere she turns, there are lies upon lies. She sets out to sort through the lies and get to the truth of her father's destructive reign. All of her research reveals truths that are almost too painful for her to bear and occasionally results in more lies as she attempts to keep her friends safe and determine which of her trusted advisers are lying to her. This book had a lot of fun twists and turns. It was a bit slow in the beginning, but once it got going it was really exciting. There were p...