Bookish Thoughts

I'd been meaning to read more Diana Wynne Jones for a while, so when I found this The Dark Lord of Derkholm for $0.65 at a used book store I couldn't pass it up. It was really enjoyable, written for a younger audience like most of her work. The premise was definitely original, and it was a lot of fun to see how it played out. The world in the book is a fantasy land where magic is real and dragons and elves and dwarves roam the countryside. It's under the control of a man from another world, who makes everyone do his bidding with the aid of a demon. His will is to turn the world into a tourist trap that he can make a ton of money off of. He has all sorts of demands, including a dark lord, several battles, and the kidnapping of some tourists, so make these vacations more authentic. Or at least more in line with what he considers to be authentic. However, the tours are taking their toll on the local economy and everyone's getting sick of them. Who wants t...

Brandon Sanderson is doing something special with his Mistborn universe. Something I didn't really grasp until I dove into this book and started looking at some of the reviews and supplemental material on line. There's this tendency in high fantasy to force the world into a medieval setting and then keep it there for thousands of years. One of my friends complained about this back in high school when we were all really in to the Sword of Truth series. Humanity just isn't that stagnant. We innovate. We revolt. We change the world. And we do it on increasingly shorter time scales, because we're able to stand on the shoulders of the people who came before. Sanderson wanted to do something different. He wanted to create a world with a unique magic system and then track that magic through the evolution of the society. Mistborn was conceived as a trilogy of trilogies, with one taking place in the medieval feudal society fantasy lovers all recognize, one tak...

The Boy Genius and the Mogul tells the story of the invention of television. This is one of those inventions where you can't really point to one person. It's not like the lightbulb and Thomas Edison or the cotton gin and Eli Whitney. Television was something that a lot of people were working towards at the same time, a race to create this new technology that everyone expected and could tell was very near. It was also at the time when science shifted from lone men with a lot of money and leisure time inventing things on their own to massive, well-funded research divisions under the umbrella of technology companies. So there isn't really one person who can take credit for the invention of television. But there are a handful of key people, and one in particular whose ideas, at least, were a few years ahead of everyone else. The book focuses in on Phil Farnsworth (namesake for the professor in Futurama ), a young genius who worked tirelessly to get a television i...

It turns out that when you're stuck in a room without internet for two days, doing regression testing on a machine so slow it takes half an hour to compile your code and 2-3 hours to load data and run through each test, you can get a lot of reading done. Which is how I finished this 500+ page book in two days. I'm glad it was as entertaining and engrossing as it was, or I might have started to pull my hair out. With Fate Conspire is the fourth (and probably final) book in the Onyx Court series by Marie Brennan. I read the third one when Kevin gave it to me for Christmas last year, but I haven't read the first two yet. Though after reading this one, tracking them down has become a priority. This book has a few characters in common with A Star Shall Fall , but they've been shuffled around. The protagonists from that book have either died (the mortals) or moved into supporting roles (the faeries). I don't remember if any of the protagonists from this bo...

Toni Morrison's Beloved  was a difficult book to read. Not only does it deal with the painful and uncomfortable subject of slavery (always interesting to find yourself cast as the ultimate evil), this is non-linear story-telling taken to an extreme. This book wanders. The narrative is slippery. It slides from person to person. From present to past to deeper past and back. Keeping track of whose point of view your in takes work. Piecing together the timeline takes more. It's the sort of book where you find yourself flipping back to make sure you didn't miss a page, re-reading a passage to check if that really just happened. The language flows and, like a poem, you get caught up in it, half-forgetting that there's a plot and characters driving this story because the prose is so beautiful. It tricks you into reading and then stabs you in the heart. Because I had to keep backtracking and pausing, this book took me a lot longer to read than the 275 pages wo...

Barrayar is a direct sequel to Shards of Honor , picking up days (if not hours) after than one ends. It explores the chaos that the emperor's death has thrust the planet into, which Aral Vorkosigan is tasked with trying to stopper. And all while he and his new wife prepare for their first child. The most interesting part of this book, to me, was the intense culture shock that Cordelia experiences on almost every page. She grew up in the progressive and technologically advanced Betan Colony. Barrayar has only recently rejoined the galactic society, following a self-imposed exile that lasted for eighty years. The exile resulted in a paranoid and blood-thirsty society whose technology and culture are not up to Cordelia's standards. The center of this shock, and the story, is Cordelia's pregnancy. She grew up in a society where reproduction is closely regulated by the government and also almost wholly taken over by technology. In Cordelia's world, childre...

The Vorkosigan Saga , Lois McMaster Bujold's science-fiction epic, is one of those series that wasn't written in order. This means that the publication order doesn't match the internal chronological order, which results in a lot of fights about what order you're supposed to read the books in. Add in the fact that most of the series has been reprinted in omnibus collections that don't necessarily match either of those orders, and jumping into this series is a bit confusing. So I decided to just pick a starting point and go from there. By the time I've read the whole thing, it should all make sense, right? Assuming I can track down all the short stories, anyway, which can be more difficult to find. I picked up Cordelia's Honor , which contains Shards of Honor (the first published novel and third in the series) and Barrayar (the thirteenth published work and fifth in the series). This was mostly because the first book was published in 1986, f...