Bookish Thoughts

As you can see by the time between my two posts about Ready Player One , I had a hard time putting this book down. The plot was incredibly exciting, full of twists and turns. But my initial complaint about the clunky exposition still stands. Cline occasionally has trouble with the "show don't tell" axiom of writing. But when he starts showing the story gets really good. I think the book this one reminded me of the most is The Hunger Games . Great plot, exciting action, fully realized apocalyptic future, hard to put down. But when you step away from it you start to notice some pacing issues. Having read this book, I'm a little surprised it's not being marketed as YA. But maybe it's just that the target audience (people who have some familiarity with the 1980s) is in their 20s and 30s. I really did enjoy this book. I think it will be really interesting to see how it ages, whether someone younger than me could appreciate it as much as I did. I...

If you look back over my blog, you'll notice that in late June and early July I read 12 books. This is a lot, even by my standards (and even considering that half of them were graphic novels). But within the first few pages of Frank Herbert's Dune , I knew I wanted to take my time with this book. It was clear that this book was dense and I'd need to slow down to really understand what was going on. This was driven home by the fact that I needed to reread the first 30 pages a few times before I felt like I had a good grasp of the characters and which ones were important. I'm really glad I took my time with this book. It was excellent, and I enjoyed spreading the experience of reading it out over several weeks. I'm not sure I'll read any of the sequels, but I do expect to come back to this one again. I loved that each conversation included the thoughts of the various participants. It painted a complete picture of who knew what and what they plann...

I first discovered Jenny Lawson when Neil Gaiman linked to a blog entry of hers detailing their meeting at W00tstock. You can go read it here , but the takeaway message is that after asking Gaiman whether unicorns or zombies would win in the battle for world domination, she proceeded to explain why he was completely wrong. I started clicking through her blog which never failed to make me laugh. Jenny is insane, and she has debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. Somehow she manages to find the humor in all of this and pass along her intense joy in life. I'd definitely recommend checking out her blog. Just click through to a few random posts. But make sure you look up the James Garfield Christmas Miracle , which still brings tears to my eyes. Not in a laugh so hard I'm crying way, but in a my faith is restored in humanity way. The book is a lot like her blog. It's somewhat more structured, since she actually had an editor for it, but the style and content are ver...

The eighth volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, Worlds' End , is easily my favorite. It's another collection of short stories, but these are connected with a Chaucer-like framework. Several beings, finding themselves caught in various storms, make their way to the Worlds' End Inn. While the storm rages outside, the pass the time telling stories to each other. The stories are a lot of fun. One concerns the dreams of a city. Another is a fairly standard tale of a girl dressing as a boy so she can live as a sailor. My favorite takes place in an idealized America where a young president is able to unlock the potential of what our country can be. Between stories we return to the Inn, to see the conversations the characters are having there. And to finally discover the reason for the storm that has driven all of them there. In some ways, this volume represents the end of the series, with the next two volumes delving in to what happened and why and what w...

"They deserve their fate, they deserve worse. To leave a child out in the snow-" "Well if they hadn't, he couldn't have grown up to be a prince. Haven't you ever been in a fairy tale before?" The Last Unicorn is a very fun, very self-aware fairy tale. I believe someone recommended it to me after I said I liked The Name of the Wind , a similarly self-aware story. Although I like The Name of the Wind much better, The Last Unicorn was a great way to spend some time. It follows the quest of a unicorn who, upon discovering that she may be the last of her kind, sets out to find out where all the other unicorns went. Along the way she meets the world's worst magician and a very practical woman. Together they travel to Haggard's cursed castle to find out what he has to do with the disappearance of all the unicorns. The fun comes from the characters' awareness (particularly the magician's) that this is a story. There are certain ...

Stranger in a Strange Land  by Robert Heinlein is one of those books I always felt like I ought to have read. It's an important piece of classic sci-fi that almost any fan of the genre knows about. Even before opening the book I was aware of the word "grok" and everything it means. Thankfully, I was also prepared for the incredible amount of sexism in this book. It's implicit, as in the opening chapters when all the doctors are men and all the women are nurses. Or in the fact that pretty much every man has a wife or female assisstant who does all those little domestic things for him. Or in the fact that, although there are plenty of strong, kick-ass women in this book, every single one of them is defined by her relationship to one of the men. The sexism is also explicit in some areas. Women aren't allowed at the press conference or in the serious men's meeting to discuss the finances and future of the Man from Mars. They're allowed to bri...

The seventh volume of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is most people's favorite. But it's my least favorite. It's not that I dislike Brief Lives . There are some cool themes and some really interesting characters. It's the first time we really get a story focused on the Endless as a family which is cool. But it does this by putting the youngest Endless, Delirium, front and center. This story is her's as much as it is Dream's. The problem is that I'm not overly fond of Delirium. She's annoying. She has trouble moving linearly, which means that the story also has trouble moving linearly. It wanders around and some plot threads are simply left hanging. The story, like Delirium, has a lot of trouble focusing. And I find that really frustrating. But that's okay, because the next volume is one of my favorites in the entire series.

This third volume of Brian Azzarello's 100 Bullets features the Eisner award winning story arc Hang up on the Hang Low. And that award is well deserved. This volume of 100 Bullets was just astounding. I'm really having a ton of fun with this series. And the final issue in the third volume takes the mystery even deeper. The shadowy Agent Graves is a much more accomplished puppet master than I could have guessed before now. And it's starting to be revealed that everything is connected. In fact, the story has gotten complicated (and awesome) enough that I need to go back over what I've already read before I move on to the next volume. This story is proving to be so dense that I'm positive I've missed something. Since I love a good, layered story, I'm sure my appreciation of this one will only grow with time.

I was really excited to dive in to the second installment of Brian Azzarello's 100 Bullets series. As much as I enjoyed the first volume, I was told that the second one is the one that hooks most people. And I can definitely see why. The first volume followed three disparate stories. The only thing they had in common was the mysterious Agent Graves. The second volume seems like it will follow this pattern - the first two issues definitely do. But then it pulls back and offers an initial glimpse behind the curtain. This arc gives more information about Graves, his history, his associates, and this "game" he plays with the 100 bullets. Two secret agencies are introduced: the Trust and the Minutemen. There is some hinting that the Minutemen date back to the Revolutionary War, and I'm really excited to learn more about them. The other big surprise was the return of Dizzy. After her initial story ended and the narrative moved on to a different characte...

Animal Farm is the second installment in Bill Willingham's Fables series. Although I didn't like it quite as much as the first story, it was still pretty enjoyable. I think a lot of the references simply went over my head, since I never read George Orwell's Animal Farm . It becomes obvious pretty quickly that this tale of politics is referencing its namesake quite a bit. But the parts I did understand were cool. The fables, as the refer to themselves are mostly confined to two separate communities. The ones that either are or can pass as human mostly live in NYC in a kind of underground society. The non-human creatures live on a massive farm in upstate New York. Although they have plenty of room, the farm is something of a prison. After all, if a "mundy" were to stumble across a talking pig or s giant, the cover of the fables would be blown. During a routine check on conditions at the farm, Snow White and her sister, Rose Red, discover a conspir...

F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is another book I initially read for school but wanted to revisit. Unlike The Sun Also Rises , I liked this book just as much, if not more the second time through. And since it's less than 200 pages long, I flew through it. The Great Gatsby  is very much about the Roaring 20s. Gatsby is larger than life. He's rather mysterious (though seems to be involved in crime in a big way). He's incredibly eccentric and throws huge parties. And he does it all in the hopes of getting the lovely Daisy back into his life. This book contains a lot of adultery. Everyone seems to be cheating on everyone. Even the side character, Jordan, reveals at the end that she was engaged all the time she was carrying on with Nick. Of course none of this ends well. But there's a lot of fun to be had before everything comes crashing down (kind of like the 20s themselves). I wanted to re-read this book because I saw the trailer for Baz Luhrma...