Bookish Thoughts

Like The Hunger Games and Ready Player One , Veronica Roth's Divergent was almost impossible to put down. And like those books, it has some serious pacing flaws when you step back and consider the plot. I'm beginning to wonder if there's some secret formula for all these YA books that soar to the top of popularity based on the fact that you just can't seem to put them down. Divergent is the latest (well, maybe not anymore, I'm a bit behind the times) in a string of dystopian novels about a teenaged girl who falls in love and saves the world. This isn't a trend I have any major beef with - more strong female role models is always a good thing - but this book also feels like a serious retread of things I've read before. When the government took control of Tobias and he tried to strangle Tris, I actually thought "No! That already happened to Peeta!" And the five factions were eerily reminiscent of the houses in Harry Potter. The trai...

The Hallowed Hunt is the third book in Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion series. Though that's a bit disingenuous, since this book doesn't take place in Chalion. Nor does it contain any of the characters from the previous two books. Even in cameo roles. Even mentioned in passing. But the gods are the same, as is the universe, so it's part of the same series. There's some chatter among the fans that it should really be referred to as the Five Gods' series, or the Fivefold Path of the Soul series, since all of the books are examinations of this fascinating religion Bujold has created. But either of those names would imply a series of five books. Since there are currently three, with no hint of another forthcoming, those titles don't entirely fit either. The lack of familiar characters is only mildly disappointing, as all of the new ones are really great. There's sweet, naive Ijada who doesn't know a ton about real-world politics, but is p...

Mike Brown's book about about his contributions to our discovery and understanding of the Kuiper Belt is less a pop science book than a history of science. And it might not even be a history book so much as a partial memoir. The science is almost nonexistent, and what little there is is simplified to the point that a third grader could understand it. Though that's probably on purpose, as that's also the reading level at which newspapers are written. Brown's technical achievements are presented in tandem with his courtship and marriage and the birth of his first daughter. While this does detract from the actual science involved, it also makes the book a bit more accessible for the general public. Brown's just a regular guy who happens to have made several discoveries that fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe. And that's helpful when it comes to getting his point across. The book itself is an extended argument for why Pluto sho...

The blurb on the front of the book, taken from the New York Times review, claims that this is a book rich in magic. I can't entirely disagree with that. These are the books that, years ago, finally got my brother reading. I grew up surrounded by books. My mom read constantly when I was a child, and so did I. When I was two I got her to teach me the alphabet. When I was four I taught myself to read by memorizing Green Eggs and Ham and matching the words in my head to those on the page. I surprised everyone at my fifth birthday by reading all of my cards by myself. And I never looked back, inhaling book after book. But it took my brother longer to get on that path. Confused by his disinterest in books (it was probably just that he was more interested in video games) my parents bought series after series in an attempt to get him reading. Narnia never interested him, and neither did Redwall. While many kids' love of reading was ignited by Harry Potter , my brothe...

Unseen Academicals , the 37th book in Sir Terry Pratchett's sprawling Discworld series, is basically about the sport of football (the non-American kind). But that's really just the lens it uses to examine a wealth of topics, from class and traditions to identity and love. Although I suppose you could fold all of those under the topic of prejudice and be done with it. The lines here are arbitrary, and mostly drawn between which team each character happens to support. But those groups prove rather difficult to break free of. For the first 100 pages, the story followed the beats of Romeo and Juliet and I was fully prepared for a modernized look at that classic story. In this case the two star-crossed lovers support different teams, teams that happen to be two of the most intense rivals in the city. But then the Mercutio character failed to actually die and Juliet and her Romeo took a sharp left turn away from the source material. The love story kept going, but ...

The sequel to Catherynne M Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyl and in a Ship of Her Own Making returns to a September who is a no longer quite a child. She has just turned thirteen and is staring down that twisting and treacherous path to adulthood. But just because she's grown up a bit doesn't mean she has nothing left to learn in Fairyland. Instead September must return to deal with the consequences of her first trip there. In the first book, September sacrificed her shadow to save the life of a young girl. Now that shadow has declared herself the ruler of Fairyland-Below and is stealing more shadows to be her loyal subjects. September finds herself on a quest to awaken the legendary Prince Myrrh so he can rule in he'd stead and restore the balance. The quest is fun and full of all manner of interesting characters. Through it all, September learns a lot of the lessons of early adulthood. Sometimes your friends move on to different...

In the second volume of Saga (probably, I devoured them both in quick succession and may have mixed a couple of things up), we start to dig into some of the themes that the series id going to deal with: family, war, pacifism, and hope. We also get some flashbacks that show how Alana and Marko met and fell in love, and how Marko was shaped by his parents and what his rebellion means in the face of that. The second volume contains the introduction of a family group to mirror the protagonists and implications of a third similar family on the horizon. Alana, Marko, and Hazel are still on the run with their babysitter, Izabel. Marko's parents also make an appearance and we can see the similarities between the two groups, with both women being much quicker to resort to violence than their husbands. The Will also finds himself teaming up with a woman who helps him rescue a small child before continuing to pursue Alana and Marko. The Robot Prince is also in hot pursuit, at...

Saga , written by Brian K Vaughn and illustrated by Fiona Staples, is a spectacular book. It's a great mesh of science-fiction and fantasy that spans an entire galaxy. It also manages to have an incredibly intimate scope, following the first week in the life of a child of two people whose races are on opposing sides of a seemingly never-ending war. That first week is, at one point, referred to as the opposite of a honeymoon, which is the perfect description, given how many things go wrong. The worlds of Saga are incredible. The art is amazing and the endless series of new aliens and technology is fantastic. There are highly advanced ships and guns, mixed in with magic. Robots operate alongside unicorns and a really freaky spider-woman hybrid. This book is mostly world building, setting the stage for the story to come. It's largely narrated by the child born on the first page, implying that the story will follow her life wherever that happens to lead. And since...

In the sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms , NK Jemisin deals with the fallout of that books climax in a rather surprising way. The first book focused on the elite ruling class, the people in power and the way they interacted with the gods. The second book shifts focus to the working poor to examine how they've dealt with all this upheaval. The first book ended with an extreme shift in power. A god who was thought dead was reborn. The captor and imprisoned gods switched places and the newly powerful god is out for vengeance. Balance hasn't been restored to the cosmos, but everyone has started down that path. The second book doesn't do anything to further shift power dynamics (I imagine that will wait for the final book), but it does start everyone down the path to healing. All of this is narrated by a blind woman who can see the effects of magic. This ability helps her navigate the complicated world of the gods and their children, the godlings. She, of ...