Bookish Thoughts

As I get farther into The Dresden Files , it gets harder and harder to talk about these books without giving away plot points from the previous books. In some ways, the series is structured like a television show. There's an overarching plot that ties everything together, but each book also focuses on it's own plot that can feel only loosely connected to what's going on in the wider world. In Turn Coat , a lot of this starts to come together. Dresden's disparate cases of the past several years are seen to be part of a larger pattern designed to incite chaos across the supernatural world. Age old alliances have been unbalanced or simply shattered over the course of the series. It keeps things interesting, as Dresden's allies and enemies tend to switch places depending on the situation. And now it starts to reveal itself as part of the larger plan. For several books now, Dresden has suspected that there's a mole inside the Wizard's White Cou...

Having almost finished Discworld , it was fun to go back to the beginning and see where it all started, with The Color of Magic . I always made a point of reading these books in publication order, and from the beginning I fully intended to read the entire series. You know, eventually. But it's not like I ever pushed myself through a book I didn't like. I remember enjoying every installment in this series on some level (well except for Eric , but that's just because I never read Faust ). So it was surprising to realize how rough the first book is. There are hints of the direction Discworld will go. We're introduced to some of the basic building blocks, like Ankh-Morpork and the Patrician and the various Guilds. Magic is dying out, but given how rare it is to find it in later books, it still seemed like there was a lot here. What really struck me was how different so many of the characters are. Death hasn't gone through is arc yet and comes off incre...

Robin McKinley's Deerskin has been haunting me for a while. I first heard about it back in high school. I read and fell in love with a short story. I forget the name and author of that story and have thus been unable to find it again. But somehow the fact that it was inspired by a book called Deerskin stuck in my head. Over the years I've wanted to read it, but I've had a hard time finding it. Sometimes I got distracted by other books and simply forgot that this was the one I went to the bookstore to find. More often I looked and looked but couldn't find it. I considered ordering it online once or twice, but a part of me felt like that was cheating. I can't really explain that except to say that I'd lived with this book in the back of my head for so long that I felt like I needed to stumble on it naturally. And I finally did. Last weekend, after spending too long at the mall looking for a pair of jeans and failing to find a dress for my rehe...

In the tenth book of The Dresden Files , Harry agrees to do a small favor for someone and quickly finds himself in way over his head. Meanwhile the main plot of the series is just treading water while everyone gets moved into place. I really don't expect a lot from The Dresden Files . They're like popcorn action movies. Something that's entertaining, but that I don't really think too hard about. The plots are convoluted but not necessarily complicated. There are a ton of characters - both allies and enemies of Harry. But keeping them all straight is what the internet is for. And I definitely kept my tablet close at hand so I could keep looking things up while I read this. This book brought back a lot of characters from the past. Both faerie courts are in play, as are the Denarians and the Knights of the Cross. The Archive shows up, along with a warden, Thomas, and the ever-present Murphy. It almost felt like an attempt to reintroduce a bunch of these c...

The reading challenge for April was to revisit a book from your childhood. It was immediately obvious that I needed to read Little House in the Big Woods , which is one of the first books I really remember reading. It was definitely my first favorite book. Returning to it makes it even more obvious how much this book shaped me as a person and a reader. Looking at my reading habits now, it probably seems strange that my early reading experiences weren't more influenced by an iconic fantasy book. The truth is that I didn't really become interested in fantasy until high school, when I wanted a more drastic escape from reality. My first love was historical fiction, particularly fiction about early America. I gobbled up the American Girl books, along with books like Naya Nuki , Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry , and The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle . But it all began with Laura Ingalls and her little house. This book is less of a cohesive story and more of a series ...

It's always a little weird to know how a story ends before you even read it. I came into this series halfway through and looped back around to the beginning after I finished everything else that had been written. Thanks to those later books I knew before I began that Lady Lune and Michael Deven would fall in love and that Lune would be the Queen of Onyx Court by the end of the book. But knowing the ending did nothing to spoil the fun of getting there. Midnight Never Come isn't quite as good as the books that came later. But that's mostly because Brennan grew as an author. And that's not to say that this book was in any way bad. It was just lacking a little something that's present in A Star Shall Fall and With Fate Conspire . For one, it limits itself to two point of view characters, while the later books allow glimpses of many more motives. It was also far more straightforward, and I preferred the slightly meandering quality of the other books. Th...