Bookish Thoughts

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 ...