Bookish Thoughts

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

In which a seventeen year old Miles Vorkosigan accidentally acquires a full mercenary fleet. The Warrior's Apprentice is the first book in the Vorkosigan series to feature Miles as a protagonist. It begins with him breaking both of his legs during the entrance exam for the military academy he hopes to attend. With no clear course for the future, he decides to visit his grandmother for a few weeks. But while on Beta Colony his compassion compels him to save first the pilot of an obsolete ship and then a deserter. One thing leads to another and before you know it Miles finds himself involved in a Civil War as the admiral of a Mercenary Fleet that's been hired by one side. It's amazing how much luck is actually involved in this, though Miles also has an interesting mix of compassion, honor, and audacity that makes it impossible for him to give up once he's gotten started. Instead he keeps moving forward, amassing more loyal followers as he goes. I was a

I had the hardest time getting into The Lies of Locke Lamora . It was frustrating because everyone around me was absolutely raving about it. And given the premise - a group of thieves pull cons on rich people - I was sure I'd like it, too, if I could just give it a chance. But giving it that chance proved difficult. This was partly due to timing. I started it on a beach weekend, then continued while we had a house guest. For the first week I was reading in dribs and drabs of 10 minutes at a time. When I finally had 3 hours to devote to reading, I wanted a book I could just finish in that time. This was compounded by the format of the book. Scott Lynch plays fast and loose with linear time. He jumps between two main timelines - Locke's childhood and the present-day heist. Within those timelines, he continues to jump around, or abandon plot altogether for 3-4 pages of exposition. More than usual I was re-reading earlier passages trying to figure out if I'd mis

Sometimes you accidentally buy too many books. The fact that there are over 15 books sitting on your shelf, waiting to be read, begins to stress you out. So you have to take a break from the epic you're currently reading to knock out one of the shorter books. One of the ones that only takes a few hours to get through. And sometimes that backfires, because that short, easy book ends up being really complicated and it takes over your life in a way that leaves you unable to engage with any other literature for a while. On Friday, I reached a section break in The Lies of Locke Lamora and decided that it was a good place to step back from that book for a bit. I've been enjoying it, but I've also been reading in fits and starts due to a lack of both attention span and time. I figured a quick palate cleanser would help me refocus. And maybe it will. In the meantime, we need to talk about Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime . I reme

The third book in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is a huge leap forward in terms of quality. Equal Rites is basically a precursor to the Tiffany Aching books that Pratchett wrote more recently. It focuses on young Eskarina Smith, an eight-year-old girl (based on Pratchett's daughter) on a journey to become a wizard. Around this time, Pratchett had noticed an interesting trend in fantasy literature: men get to be wizards while women have to be witches. Wizards get cool, flashy magic. They get to save the world and be important. Witches are old and ugly and evil and usually get burned at the stake. So we get a book that tries to fight that dichotomy, while at the same time elevating witch magic and arguing that maybe wizard magic isn't all it's cracked up to be. There are some great puns in this book, side with side with some truly cutting commentary about the differences between the sexes. The plot is far more cohesive than in any of the previous t

The second volume of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye run contains the much lauded Pizza Dog story, an issue told entirely from the point of view of Clint Barton's dog. But that episode comes last, and it's so much sadder than I expected it to be. The thing is, Barton is kind of a fuckup. He tries to do the right thing. He tries really hard. He's an avenger after all. But he has a tendency to get in over his head. And in this volume, some of his mistakes from the previous volume come back to haunt him. There's the gang he forcefully bought the apartment building from, to save the tenants' homes and the girl who he probably shouldn't have gotten involved with. Both show up again, bringing more trouble and leaving Barton with even more danger hanging over his head. Even worse is the slow disintegration of his relationship with Kate Bishop, the other Hawkeye. Their relationship seemed rock solid in the first volume, but in this one cracks start to app

Song of the Wanderer is the much anticipated (by me, anyway) sequel to Brian Coville's Into the Land of the Unicorns . It follows Cara's journey to reunite with her grandmother, last seen in the first chapter of the first book, and bring her back to Luster. She sets out from the Queen's court with a decent-sized group that keeps growing larger over the course of her journey, until she eventually finds her grandmother, has a tense confrontation with Beloved, hater and hunter of the Unicorns, and makes it safely back to the Queen's court. The group Cara travels with is a bit unwieldy, and some of the characters end up getting the shaft. Two of the unicorns are just barely sketched out, more caricatures than actual characters. I was beyond excited when the Dimblethum returned, as he was by far my favorite character in the first book. I was less enthralled by the gryphon, who does the too-cute I'm not actually cussing because this is a children's book