Bookish Thoughts

Shirley Jackson is one of those authors who just sticks with you. I'm not entirely sure what it is about her writing, but it haunts for years. I read  The Lottery  in high school, and I still think about it from time to time. I'm sure that  We Have Always Lived in the Castle  will be no different. It gets scarier the more I think about it, which is a little strange, but it also keeps getting better. And it's so short that I have no doubt I'll be re-reading it in the future. Probably to celebrate Halloween. The narrator is a young woman named Merricat who, strangely, reminded me a lot of Rothfuss' Auri. When  The Slow Regard of Silent Things  came out earlier this year, Rothfuss took pains to warn his readers that it was an unusual story with an unusual protagonist. Sure to be unlike anything they'd read before. Well Rothfuss has likely never read this book, because the two are more than a little similar. Merricat and Auri have a lot in common. They are ...

I'd forgotten how much I like this book. For some reason, the sixth book always gets lost in the shuffle for me. Must be because it's the penultimate book. I expect it to just be build up for the final book. And in some ways it is. This is the book that introduces us to Horcruxes and fills in Voldemort's past. But there's also a lot of fantastic stuff in here. Even if it does put some strain on Rowling's decision to use a limited third-person perspective. I love all of the relationship stuff that begins happening in this book. Ron and Hermione's jealous dance around each other is perfect and so typical of first romances where people are too scared to just say what they want. Harry's crush on Ginny is wonderful, too, if a little cheesy with the chest monster metaphor. The moment when they finally kiss still thrills me completely, and I always wish she was more of a presence in the final book so that we could see them together a bit more. Overall this book...

Bless Me, Ultima  is a book I missed back in high school. My sophomore year was American Literature. The school decided to start a new class that combined American Lit with American History into a single 3-hour class. But because I was science track, I opted for the regular, easier english and history classes that year. And I ended up with a different reading list because of it. So while all my friends read and fell in love with  Bless Me Ultima , I was keeping busy with  The Great Gatsby  and  Catcher in the Rye . (My friends probably read those, too. I think the advanced class had an expanded reading list, not a different one.) Recently I saw this book on a best-of list, then encountered it at a used book store for $1. Which meant that I basically had to read it. I think I may have enjoyed this book more had I read it in a classroom setting. It reads like a lot of the other books I read for school, heavy on the metaphor. And each chapter works fairly well ...

The first and only time I attended a midnight book release party was when this book came out. It was the summer before my senior year of high school, so a couple of friends and I were easily able to make the trek to the nearest Barnes and Noble by ourselves. The party itself was geared to a much younger audience, but we were bookish and happy to spend some time browsing the shelves before the book was officially released. On the way home I sat in the backseat and read the first chapter aloud for the benefit of the driver. This is also the first time I spoiled myself for something. I care less about this now. I know the shapes of stories well enough to understand what's coming, and spotting the clues is a big part of my enjoyment. But at the time I was genuinely upset that I'd figured out Sirius was going to die from the blurb on the dust jacket. I was even more upset when the text proved my prediction correct. Despite that I remember being excited when this book first came ...

Wyrd Sisters  is a giant step up in the quality of  Discworld  books. There's an interesting and complicated plot, driven by the actions of a cast of delightful characters. There's a wonderful subplot concerning a storm who hopes to one day make it big. There's sharp and subtle commentary on the nature of ruling and of fiction and rumors. And there are enough Shakespeare references to make your head spin, given that this is largely a parody of  Macbeth . It's no wonder that a majority of the fandom considers  Wyrd Sisters  to be the first good book in the series. It is often recommended as a starting point, even though it's technically the second book in the "witches" subseries. But it's so much smarter and more fun and better plotted than anything came before. The first few books can be off putting to people new to Discworld, though they are fun in their own right. But it's so refreshing to get to this point and see the Discworld I've grown ...

It can be difficult to read someone else's favorite book. Especially if you end up not liking that book. I'd like to be diplomatic and say that I just encountered this book at the wrong time in my life. And maybe that's true. I'm too accustomed to these tropes to feel any suspense or surprise. The book was clearly written for a younger audience. At the same time, I'm tempted to say that this book is just objectively bad. Merlin is an arrogant, foolish boy who makes nonsensical decisions in order to advance the plot. He fucks everything up, but manages to right it all in the end because he's going to be a great wizard and we can't let him actually kill his mother. He gains wisdom and humility far too easily because they are distilled to seven lessons that can be expressed as cheerful platitudes, like "Love is the strongest bond" and "Every life is precious". Worse, the author doesn't trust the reader to remember simple details or m...

Goblet of Fire  is the big, transitional book that takes this series to the next level. The world expands, Voldemort returns, and Harry takes some important steps on the road to adulthood. It's nearly twice as long as the previous book, which I remember being super excited about when it first came out. This time around I was a little worried about the length. But it turns out (and I should have remembered) that this book is still excellently paced. It drags a bit at the end when two entire chapters are devoted to exposition and monologuing, but up until that point the story moves along really well. This is one of the first books that I can remember waiting for. I didn't have to wait long, less than a year. But I was still incredibly excited to finally get my hands on  Goblet of Fire . I had elaborate plans to read the entire thing in one sitting, much as I had with  Chamber of Secrets . It was a bit long for that, and I wasn't really allowed to skip family meals. But I ...

Ugh, this was awful. Standard Boy meets Girl, Girl gets kidnapped, Boy turns out to be a killing machine, kills a bunch of people, rescues Girl, and they live happily ever after. Except worse. But, I have now finished  Sin City . No more guilt about it sitting on my shelf unread.

Terry Pratchett is easily my most-read author. A lot of that comes down to him being so prolific, though that would hardly matter if he weren't also entertaining. If he didn't make me confront the hard questions and look at them from another perspective. A Slip of the Keyboard  is the first book I've read by Sir Terry that was not set on the Discworld. (He's written 40 of those, and I've read 39.) It's not even a work of fiction. It's a collection of essays spanning his entire career. The first section is about the process of writing and being an author. The second section is more autobiographical, about Terry's childhood. The final section, titled "Days of Rage" is mostly about his Alzheimer's diagnosis and his work advocating for assisted death in Britain. The book got a bit repetitive at times. The writing spans several decades, but it's clear that there are some concepts that have stuck with him forever. The idea of fantasy as j...

The third Harry Potter book is easily my favorite in the series. It breaks away from the plot mechanics of the first two. This keeps things interesting and proves that Rowling is more than a one-trick pony. It takes things deeper and story gets a little darker. We begin to learn about Harry's dad and his time at Hogwarts. It's not all pretty. And we get the wonderful twist involving Sirius Black and his quest for vengeance. The last 100 or so pages of this book are just amazing. It's one thing after another, and Rowling manages to maintain a pretty high level of excitement throughout all of it. There's a lot of information to be relayed during the climax, and Rowling intersperses it perfectly with action sequences. I even cried, which is pretty amazing for a book I've read so many times. Though those tears had more to do with Black's ultimate fate than any plot point in this book. There are also plenty of callbacks to the first and second books. Rowling plan...

I have a lot of dedicated reading spots in my house. There's the papasan downstairs, where I can make a nest of pillows and blankets and curl up in the long winter months. There's the brown couch upstairs, where I have easy access to a glass of wine or cup of tea on the side table. The green couch is on the wrong side of the table for easy drink access, but it has the recliner. Upstairs there's a leather chair in my office, where I can be surrounded by books, and a second leather chair in the bedroom where I can put my feet up on the footstool. In shady summer afternoons I read out in the backyard, avoiding the sun as much as possible. Finally there's the bed, where I can drift off to sleep, sandwiched between the animals. This is, perhaps, overkill. Especially since I do the vast majority of reading on the train. But it's nice to have a different spot for each mood I'm in. And it ended up providing a nice parallel to this book, which I read while bouncing aro...

David Wong's  This Book is Full of Spiders  is technically a sequel to  John Dies at the End . I haven't read the first one, but I really don't think you need to. In fact, the first page of the spider book tells the reader to just ignore everything that happened in the first book. The only confusing bit was that John was in this book, alive and kicking and drinking way too much. So he probably didn't actually die, which makes that first title rather misleading. The second title, though, is not in any way misleading. This book is all about spiders. Many-legged, alien parasites that zombify their victims while they breed and search for new victims. The book plays out like a typical zombie narrative in three acts. The first act counts down to the outbreak, the second to a massacre, and the third to a last-ditch effort to contain the threat by bombing an entire town off the map. Like you do. Our heroes, David, John, David's girlfriend Amy, and her dog Molly try thei...

In some ways,  Chamber of Secrets  is a retread of  Sorcerer's Stone . It follows the same basic mystery plot, with the same red herrings and clues. This is probably why it's most people's least favorite Harry Potter book. That's not to say it's a bad book, though. Rowling is pretty good at setting up a mystery and peppering the clues throughout for the attentive reader to put together. Of course, most people fly through this book too quickly to solve the mystery on their own. Like the rest of the books in this series, it's a compulsive page-turner. It's the first book I ever stayed up way too late to finish after all (good thing it was summer). But it has a structure that rewards re-reads, that stands up to further scrutiny (unlike so many other page-turners I could mention). There's also a lot in this book that becomes hugely important later in the series. We get some of Voldemort's past, come across the first Horcrux, and learn more about the ...

I'll admit, I bought this $30, 800+ page tome in order to read one single short story. Because that short story was written by Patrick Rothfuss about Bast, and I am desperate for new material in that world. Of course, this collection also contains plenty of other stories by plenty of other authors I love, so it felt worth that price tag. Let's go through it story by story, shall we? The Lightning Tree  by Patrick Rothfuss - This story basically chronicles a day in the life of Bast an indeterminate amount of time before the first book starts, but after Kvothe has established himself as Kote, owner of the Waystone Inn. Bast trades secrets and favors with children, gets into some mischief, does some highly questionable and uncomfortable things, but also does some tough and honorable things. He's a tough guy to pin down, because his moral code is skewed by his Fae heritage. This story left me more confused about him than before, but it was a nice little slice of life, none...

I can hardly believe I haven't revisited  Harry Potter  since I started this blog. The last time I read the series was just over four years ago. I actually marked my calendar to figure out how long it took me to read all seven books (just under five weeks), so I know exactly when I last read these books. I also, like so many others, remember the first time I read this book - though the countless re-reads in between have blurred together. It was the summer I turned 13, the first summer we were living in the house where my mom still lives. I was an avid reader, but getting my brother interested was a struggle.  Harry Potter  was the latest in a series of attempts to get him interested in the written word. Every night he and my mom would read a chapter together. When they were about halfway through, he asked me to catch up so we could all read it together. I agreed, even though I was just old enough that it seemed beneath me. But then I screwed up and read the entire ...

I got really excited about this book from the second I heard about it. Big Data is everywhere these days, and it's something I've been working on, adjacently or directly, for years. The data I'm working with now isn't included in the scope of Christian Rudder's work, which focuses on applications in the fields of sociology and psychology. But there was a time when I almost broke into this world. There are even some projects he talks about in this book that I was involved in or hearing really cool talks about. Alas, I never quite broke into it in the way I wanted to. I've remained interested in this field, though. We're experiencing what will be the beginning of an absolute golden age for sociology and psychology. Data is available in unprecedented amounts and ways. It's not only that you can finally look at the behaviors of literally millions of people, but free from a lab those behaviors are far more natural than in any hitherto performed...

The first I ever heard of Scott Lynch was him vehemently defending one of the characters in this book. The character in question is one Zamira Drakasha. She's a pirate captain. She's middle-aged. She's black. And she's a mom, who brings her toddlers on the high seas with her. Some fans were upset, claiming that this was unrealistic wish fulfillment. To which Lynch replied that he's writing speculative fiction, not history. Wish fulfillment is the name of the game. Seriously though, you should go read his whole response. It's pretty amazing. I filed that bit away until one friend and then another began gushing about Lynch's books, and I had no choice but to pick them up. Zamira wasn't in the first book, though it was still a very good novel. If a bit uneven. But I knew she featured in the second one, and I was excited to meet her. Imagine my disappointment when it took her over half of the 760 page book to show up. Actually it wasn'...

If you frequent certain corners of the internet, it seemed like Roxane Gay was everywhere this summer. She released her novel An Untamed State to huge critical acclaim. I saw two different online book clubs devote their time to reading it as soon as it came out. Shortly thereafter, she released a collection of essays called Bad Feminist . Both of these books made it on to the New York Times Bestseller list. I first heard about her because I began reading The Rumpus , where she was a contributing editor, right around the time An Untamed State came out. I hadn't heard about her before, but it wasn't long before I was seeing links to her writing all over the place . Then one of my favorite sites, The Toast , announced that she would be running their first vertical starting in mid-October. I knew that I had to seek out more. I picked up Bad Feminist because it seemed easier than An Untamed State . The latter is about a women who is kidnapped, assaulted, and raped. It ...

I bought this book back in June, but I've been waiting until it was properly fall to read it. I was hoping for a good foggy, chilly day on which I could be spooked. The weather never cooperated with me, though. It mostly stayed warm and sunny. With my stack running low, I ended up settling for a dark and stormy night instead. In the end I suppose that's just as a good. The Illustrated Man  is a collection of short stories. Most of them are spooky and set in the future where space travel is possible and nearly common place. One or two fell a bit flat for me, but for the most part they were really good. I was even able to suspend my disbelief and accept that Venus is basically a jungle planet. Talk about an old theory. Most of the stories were a lot of fun, though. It was a great book to get me in the mood for Halloween.

John Scalzi's novel, Redshirts , has a very fun premise. It's told from the point of view of an ensign, stationed on board a ship where ensigns have an unusually high likelihood of being killed in strange ways on away missions. It doesn't take too long for Dahl and his friends, all new transfers to the ship, to figure this out and start searching for a way to stay alive, despite the heavily stacked odds. This book is a really straightforward, quick read. It's almost bare bones, making it much more plot driven than character driven. But that plot is exciting and twisty, growing ever more meta until the fourth wall eventually shatters. It was, at times, a bit too clever for me. But fun nonetheless, and packed with Star Trek and Galaxy Quest references. A fun bit of escapism to wile away a few hours.

It took me a year and a half, but I finally made it through the last book assigned by my book club (I'm still sad it dissolved). Now that I've made it, 13 books in to The Dresden Files , I'm more stumped than ever that the dude thought this would be a good place for new readers to begin the series. There are so many things you would miss if you started here. And given that it operates as more of a direct sequel than any other book in the series, it's probably the absolute worst place to begin reading about Harry Dresden. At the end of the previous book, Dresden died. He's sent back to solve his murder and ends up in the middle of a ghostly war along the way. Solving his murder is actually a pretty minor part of the story. It's mostly taken up by the effect his death had on the people he loved and the city he protected. And lots of strange ghost battles. You need the history of the previous books for the emotions of this one to hit you. Murphy...

The early part of the Discworld series sure is full of Rincewind. Three of the first five books star him, including Sourcery . It's a little disappointing, since I don't remember liking Rincewind very much. Though I think my dislike of him builds over the course of his series. I also don't really remember reading this book. Which at least means that I probably didn't hate it. To my pleasant surprise, I found myself enjoying this book more than I expected to on the re-read. Rincewind is still at the point that I identify with him. He just wants a quiet, boring life. None of these death-defying adventures that keep tripping him up. And I get that. I'd be perfectly happy with a little cottage and a quiet job in a library. I think it's in his next book that Rincewind really starts to become insufferable. There's a lot in here that I forgot, from the Ice Giants to the genie to the Pedestrians of the Apocalypse (their horses get stolen). It was fu...

It's interesting to completely hate the ending of one book, and then finding yourself rooting for the exact same ending in a different book. But Fforde managed to write a pretty sympathetic Rochester. A Mr. Rochester that I could cheer on, and who I felt almost deserved to be happy with Jane by the end of the book. Though that could also be because he just skipped over the grosser aspects of Rochester's character, focusing on his good qualities, and the limitations imposed on him by being a fictional character. Jasper Fforde writes some really weird stuff. And while The Eyre Affair wasn't as much a trip as Shades of Grey , it was still a strange experience. Albeit, an experience that I could empathize with a bit more. This is a world that I almost want to live in. The Eyre Affair takes place in an alternate-London in 1985. In this alternate world, England has been at war with Russia for over 100 years, time travel is possible, and the boundary between fic...

Robin McKinley is fantastic at re-imagining fairy tales in a way that puts women and their relationships with each other front and center. This retelling of Sleeping Beauty is no exception. The story focuses on Rosie, her upbringing by two fairies, and her deep friendship with next door neighbor, Peony. On the fringes are the Queen's mourning for her mother and the plans of the vengeful Pernicia. This is very much a comfort read. It does some fun things with mechanics of the traditional story. The gifts from the fairy godparents, things like curling hair, pale skin, and a beautiful singing voice, play out wonderfully. The curse and the country's reaction to spindles is fun. And I loved, absolutely loved, that the kiss that brings the princess out of her cursed sleep is delivered not by the prince (who she does love, truly) but by her best friend, with whom she shares everything. The only downfall of the book is the confusion of the narrative, which jumps aroun...

I have a weird relationship with Ursula K Le Guin's work. I feel like I'm supposed to like her more than I actually do. Not that I actively dislike her. But I always find myself disagreeing with her about something fundamental. As beautiful as her prose tends to be, and as forward-thinking and progressive as many of her ideas are, we just seem to be coming from different places. I think it boils down to the fact that she's espousing feminist ideas from a generation or two ago, and they simply aren't radical enough to interest me. The Left Hand of Darkness does some interesting things with gender by essentially getting rid of it in all but on character and making that one character undeniably alien. A more strange stranger in a stranger land than anything Heinlein ever conceived. And to an extent it's interesting to see this alien, Genly Ai, continuously project gender onto everyone around him. It makes sense. As the book points out the very first t...

He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo. When news broke that HBO was developing an adaptation Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, I began seeing it everywhere. And it being written by Margaret Atwood, I decided to pick up the first book, Oryx and Crake . Oryx and Crake is narrated by a man who calls himself Snowman. He is, for all he knows, the last human left alive. He acts as a prophet to strange, human-like beings called the Children of Crake, in between finding food, getting drunk on what little alcohol remains, and reminiscing about his former life, when he was known as Jimmy, he had a best friend named Crake, and he was in love with a woman named Oryx. The book alternates between the present and past. Though Jimmy is hardly in a state to think about things linearly, so it all occasionally gets mixed together. As the novel prog...

He's an adolescent jinni, proud, impulsive, and selfish. She's a newborn golem, intelligent and hard-working, but scared. When they both find themselves transplanted to Manhattan at the turn of the twentieth century, they need to figure out how to carve out places for themselves. And when they meet, a fulfilling, but rocky friendship forms. Helene Wecker's debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni , is just lovely. It deals with immigration and lower Manhattan at the turn of the century, when people are arriving from all over the world and carving out neighborhoods for their communities. It asks interesting questions about identity, about how to balance individuality with community, about religion and human nature. The narrative winds its way through the first year the golem and the jinni spend in New York. They arrive separately, though on the same day. And while they are kept apart for a while, as Wecker explores the Jewish community on the Lower East Side and...

Jasper Fforde's novel, Shades of Grey , is a complete mind fuck. This book is weird, deliciously so, but also in a way that can kind of make your head hurt. It throws you in to a far-future dystopia in which everyone's perception of color is greatly reduced and class is determined by how much and what part of the color spectrum they can see. This book doesn't hold your hand. It throws you in the deep end and expects you to figure things out. The language is strange and references to the past (our society) are always mangled. But if you can stick with it, the rewards are great. The humor is subtle, but wonderful. The characters are fascinating and wholly real. And the society is just endlessly fascinating. I had to read this book in bits and pieces, taking breaks to absorb everything. That said, it picks up towards the end, and I flew through the last 100 pages or so. There's a ton of world-building in the beginning, and half the fun was figuring out wh...

The final installment in Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy is absolutely fantastic. As a finale, it's more than I could have hoped for. It's deeply satisfying, making up for all the frustration that preceded it. I must have felt every emotion while I was reading it, from joy to terror to deep sadness. Sometimes all at once, which is really amazing. The book, and really the whole trilogy, is about growing up. Not in a YA coming-of-age way. It's about your twenties. About the stretch of time between when the law declares you an adult and you figure out the kind of person you want to be. For Quentin (and all his friends, really) this takes a while. It's a long process, and Quentin's immaturity makes the first two books frustrating. But in The Magician's Land he finally comes into his own. He deals with the consequences of his actions, faces up to the demons of his past, and muddles his way to becoming a mature, compassionate person. Someone you ...

I don't read a lot of crime novels. I've picked up the occasional mystery, and I did get into the Girl With a Dragon Tattoo books (also known as the Millenium Trilogy, but apparently no one else knows that) when they were popular. I usually find them enjoyable, but they aren't the bread and butter of my reading. But when I found out JK Rowling had penned a book (soon to be series) in this genre, I had to check it out. Not urgently, obviously, but it's been floating on my to-read list, and I finally found a paperback copy. Not being an expert in the genre, I guess I can't really talk about how it stacks up against other crime and mystery novels. But I found it very enjoyable. The mystery was well-paced, and the clues scattered throughout. There were plenty of reasonable suspects, which kept me on my toes. And I came very close to figuring it out, but hadn't quite put all of the pieces together before Strike's big monologue reveal. (I may have ...

Susanna Clark's debut novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell , is a big, unwieldy book. It's slow, character driven is the term. The plot takes forever to show up, and once it does it still seems barely there. There are 200 hundred footnotes, used to contain exposition or go off on tangents. The characters are selfish and prickly. And I loved it. I loved this book so much, I took several breaks from it so that I wouldn't finish it too soon. Which isn't an experience you often have with a 1000+ page book. It was amazing how short it felt, how long I spent with it and how quickly I ended up reading it, despite myself. The book mostly deals with the relationship of two magicians in the early 1800s, their attempts to bring magic back to England, their dealings with the government and the Napoleonic Wars, and their ultimate falling out and its consequences. Around the edges of this we get the story of the woman Norrell sacrificed to further is career, of S...

Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear' Snuff has been sitting on my shelf for a while. It's towards the end of the Discworld series (only one, possibly two more after this), and I was waiting for the right time to pick it up. I'd even started re-reading the series already and was debating digging into this one around the time I got to Guards, Guards! so I could contrast Vimes at the beginning and end of his arc. But then the world went to shit, or maybe it's always been shit, but at any rate shit went down in Ferguson, MO, and I spent a lot of time reading tweets and first-hand accounts and critiques and criticisms and falling into a deep sadness. And one of the things I saw being circulated on the fringes was that quote up above. So ...

With the fourth Discworld book, we're really getting into the Discworld I recognize. Death is hanging out, trying to figure out humanity. The characters make epic mistakes out of ignorance and do their best to fix them. There are a ton of puns, some sadness that hits you right in the gut, and a few great observations about how the world and stories work. What's weird is that this isn't quite the Death I recognize. It's a little strange to think that Death has a character arc. He seems so unchangeable and final all of the time. But he definitely becomes more empathetic towards humanity over the course of the series. I think a lot of that happens in his next book Reaper Man , but you can see the beginnings of it here. He's curious and he's lonely and he turns to humans to help with this. Unfortunately that leaves an opening for his apprentice to royally screw things up. But then, fixing that is what reminds him of who he is. All in all this was ...

Unlike the other volumes in the Sin City series, the sixth one, Booze, Broads, and Bullets , is a collection of one-offs rather than a single arc. Each story is about 20 pages long, and this made it a lot easier to get through than most of the other books. There were a few stories in here that I actually really liked. There was an awesome female assassin who appeared in two, first becoming initiated and then going on a job. There was an actual story about the Old Town Ladies seeking revenge that didn't have a single man in it, except the creep they were killing. There were a couple of great stories starring Marv, who has strangely found a place in my heart. I like Marv. He might be my favorite character in this entire mess of a series. There were other stories that were less interesting, but at least they were over fast. Next up, the final volume in the series. It's been sitting on my shelf for years, but I've never worked up to actually reading it. That ...

I was surprised by how much I liked this installment of Sin City, which concerns the ladies of Old Town as they seek revenge on the mob for killing one of their own, likely sparking a mob war in the process. The premise was good, and it's nice to see acknowledgement that this is a chosen family, with ties as strong as any other family. Something of a haven for girls and women who have it much harder than the men of Sin City. That said, it'd be even better if the entire thing weren't framed as Dwight's story. It's not his story and he really has no place narrating it or driving the action. He says he's doing it as a favor to Gail (of course), but it would have been so much better if Gail had been leading the charge. If Miho had ever gotten a line of dialogue, or if she'd managed to kill all the mob goons without her breasts constantly falling out of her shirt. The entire fight scene was like a game of "spot the nipple". But like I s...

I started reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go way back in college. Or possibly just after college. I remember hearing that Joss Whedon has used it as partial inspiration for Dollhouse , which didn't premiere until 2009, and I think that's why my mom bought it. But things are hazy. The point is that, for one reason or another, I got 2/3 of the way through the book and then stopped reading it. It's haunted me vaguely ever since, so when I found a cheap copy at McKay's I had to buy it. This book is something of a mystery with some mild science-fiction elements. Really mild. I'd hardly classify it as sci-fi at all, really. Sure it's about advanced technology and its ramifications on humanity and society. But it's much more personal than that. More intimate than the books I typically classify as science-fiction. The narrator, Kathy, is a carer and has been for many years when the novel opens. She's approaching the end of her career...

This may have been the most disappointing story yet. I remember liking it well enough in the movie, but it may just be that I liked Jessica Alba. Because here, Nancy is nothing more than a male fantasy. Specifically, Hartigan's fantasy. And is there anything grosser than a 60+ year old man obsessing over an 11 year old girl? I can't decide whether it makes this story better or worse if you pretend the back half is just a coma dream of Hartigan's. Skinny little Nancy Callahan, waiting for him for all those years. Nancy occupies an interesting place of being both virgin and whore. She begins the story as an eleven year old kidnapping victim. A girl Hartigan saves from being raped. Then she grows up to be a stripper, the reason most of these lowlifes come to Kadie's in the first place. But as soon as Hartigan's back she flips back to innocent naivete while also seducing him. It's such an obvious, awful fantasy. The story itself also failed to come...

The third Sin City story leaves me torn. We being with Dwight, some time after the events of A Dame to Kill For , threatening Shellie's ex-boyfriend. He chases him to Old Town, where the ladies set him up and kill him, only to discover he's a cop. So they plan to hide his body, only a snitch tells the mob anyway, and then they have to deal with that. It's so twisty and turny that even right after reading it I'm wondering how all the pieces fit together. Mostly what I like is the ladies of Old Town. They protect themselves and each other. They have claimed their territory and will fight like hell to defend it from anyone who tries to tell them what to do. They're pretty awesome (if also constantly posing in scantily clad costumes, because they are also, ultimately, just here to fulfill male fantasies). What don't I like? Pretty much everything else. I hate that Dwight is even a part of this story, and that he continues to be able to commit to one ...

I came at this book from an interesting angle. At my mother-in-law's suggestion I watched the movie before reading the book so that I could experience the various layers of the text.  I can't really judge, having never experienced this story any other way, but I'm gonna go ahead and say she was right. Knowing the ending made certain scenes much more horrific. And it made it easier to follow what was going on. The story in the movie is far more linear than the one presented in the book. It makes sense for the book. For the bulk of the story, time has no real meaning or relevance. And presenting the action as a series of disjointed events which may have happened in any order fits with the frame of Pi remembering this journey. That said, it bugged me that Richard Parker was named, but not revealed to be a tiger, until well after he arrived on the life boat. Though that's probably just because I knew he was a tiger and was waiting impatiently for that reveal....

This story was not adapted in the first Sin City movie, which I remember throwing me off the first time I read it. Especially because its sequel, contained in the next book, I think, was in the movie. Which means that while we get Dwight interacting with Shelly, Gail, and Manute, they're at a different point in their relationships. And Dwight still has his original face. I must say that Dwight is an asshole. A killer and a monster without even the skewed moral code of Marv. Somehow he manages to string a number of women along, which is especially weird in a story about the one who got away. The one he'll never stop loving. Dwight may have a soft spot for Ava, the eponymous Dame, but he also has ongoing relationships with both Shelly and Gail. Relationships into which he seems to put nothing but apologies ("I'm a jerk. I'm sorry."), but out of which he takes cover, alibis, and extensive surgery. It's not a very flattering picture of women. ...

The second Sin City movie is hitting theaters in less than a month (finally), so I decided it was time to go back and revisit the comics. And finally read the last volume, which has been sitting on my shelf for who knows how long. I saw the first Sin City movie my freshman year of college and very quickly became obsessed. Even with all the violence, I thought it was one of the prettiest movies I'd even seen. The use of color was amazing. And it really looked like a comic book up on the screen. I started buying the comics, and was excited to see just how closely the movie followed them. The first one, The Hard Goodbye , follows a meathead named Marv on his quest for vengeance for a dead hooker named Goldie. This is made harder by the fact that everyone, from the cops to Goldie's twin sister, believes that Marv himself did it. But, as he puts it, Marv kills his way to the truth, discovering a cannibal with connections at the highest level of the church. Marv'...

It's a little hard to review this book as a whole, because it is quite cleanly divided into two parts. Sure, Miles' primary antagonist remains a constant, but since he's hidden off-stage for most of the middle of the book, I didn't really make that connection right away. Which led to the book feeling a bit disjointed. Well, maybe not disjointed. It actually reminded me of the Star Wars movies, structure-wise. With the two distinct acts. And since this story is also about a war set in space, that comparison is pretty apt. The two halves were each pretty interesting on their own, though I preferred the second half. Miles spends the first half of the book stuck as a meteorological officer in an arctic base camp trying to keep his nose clean. It really picks up in the second half when he gets a freer reign and reunites with the Dendarii Mercenaries. It's always a treat to see Miles taking command, but it's even cooler to see him finally learning to...

Mountains of Mourning is a Vorkosigan novella, included in the Young Miles omnibus between The Warrior's Apprentice and The Vor Game . It's only 90 pages long, but I still felt like it deserved it's own entry. This story is wonderful and dense. It takes place about three years after the conclusion of The Warrior's Apprentice . Miles has just graduated from the officer's academy and is on leave pending his first assignment. His plans to relax and goof off are interrupted when his father assigns him to investigate a murder charge from a woman in their district. What unfolds requires the reader to be familiar with Barrayar's history, as laid out in previous books. Barrayar was isolated from the rest of the galaxy for a long time and is only recently (during Miles' lifetime) catching up with the social and technological progress that has passed it by. Historically, mutated or deformed babies were murdered at birth. There's a lot of bigotry a...