Bookish Thoughts

I have a lot of dedicated reading spots in my house. There's the papasan downstairs, where I can make a nest of pillows and blankets and curl up in the long winter months. There's the brown couch upstairs, where I have easy access to a glass of wine or cup of tea on the side table. The green couch is on the wrong side of the table for easy drink access, but it has the recliner. Upstairs there's a leather chair in my office, where I can be surrounded by books, and a second leather chair in the bedroom where I can put my feet up on the footstool. In shady summer afternoons I read out in the backyard, avoiding the sun as much as possible. Finally there's the bed, where I can drift off to sleep, sandwiched between the animals. This is, perhaps, overkill. Especially since I do the vast majority of reading on the train. But it's nice to have a different spot for each mood I'm in. And it ended up providing a nice parallel to this book, which I read while bouncing aro...

David Wong's  This Book is Full of Spiders  is technically a sequel to  John Dies at the End . I haven't read the first one, but I really don't think you need to. In fact, the first page of the spider book tells the reader to just ignore everything that happened in the first book. The only confusing bit was that John was in this book, alive and kicking and drinking way too much. So he probably didn't actually die, which makes that first title rather misleading. The second title, though, is not in any way misleading. This book is all about spiders. Many-legged, alien parasites that zombify their victims while they breed and search for new victims. The book plays out like a typical zombie narrative in three acts. The first act counts down to the outbreak, the second to a massacre, and the third to a last-ditch effort to contain the threat by bombing an entire town off the map. Like you do. Our heroes, David, John, David's girlfriend Amy, and her dog Molly try thei...

In some ways,  Chamber of Secrets  is a retread of  Sorcerer's Stone . It follows the same basic mystery plot, with the same red herrings and clues. This is probably why it's most people's least favorite Harry Potter book. That's not to say it's a bad book, though. Rowling is pretty good at setting up a mystery and peppering the clues throughout for the attentive reader to put together. Of course, most people fly through this book too quickly to solve the mystery on their own. Like the rest of the books in this series, it's a compulsive page-turner. It's the first book I ever stayed up way too late to finish after all (good thing it was summer). But it has a structure that rewards re-reads, that stands up to further scrutiny (unlike so many other page-turners I could mention). There's also a lot in this book that becomes hugely important later in the series. We get some of Voldemort's past, come across the first Horcrux, and learn more about the ...

I'll admit, I bought this $30, 800+ page tome in order to read one single short story. Because that short story was written by Patrick Rothfuss about Bast, and I am desperate for new material in that world. Of course, this collection also contains plenty of other stories by plenty of other authors I love, so it felt worth that price tag. Let's go through it story by story, shall we? The Lightning Tree  by Patrick Rothfuss - This story basically chronicles a day in the life of Bast an indeterminate amount of time before the first book starts, but after Kvothe has established himself as Kote, owner of the Waystone Inn. Bast trades secrets and favors with children, gets into some mischief, does some highly questionable and uncomfortable things, but also does some tough and honorable things. He's a tough guy to pin down, because his moral code is skewed by his Fae heritage. This story left me more confused about him than before, but it was a nice little slice of life, none...

I can hardly believe I haven't revisited  Harry Potter  since I started this blog. The last time I read the series was just over four years ago. I actually marked my calendar to figure out how long it took me to read all seven books (just under five weeks), so I know exactly when I last read these books. I also, like so many others, remember the first time I read this book - though the countless re-reads in between have blurred together. It was the summer I turned 13, the first summer we were living in the house where my mom still lives. I was an avid reader, but getting my brother interested was a struggle.  Harry Potter  was the latest in a series of attempts to get him interested in the written word. Every night he and my mom would read a chapter together. When they were about halfway through, he asked me to catch up so we could all read it together. I agreed, even though I was just old enough that it seemed beneath me. But then I screwed up and read the entire ...

I got really excited about this book from the second I heard about it. Big Data is everywhere these days, and it's something I've been working on, adjacently or directly, for years. The data I'm working with now isn't included in the scope of Christian Rudder's work, which focuses on applications in the fields of sociology and psychology. But there was a time when I almost broke into this world. There are even some projects he talks about in this book that I was involved in or hearing really cool talks about. Alas, I never quite broke into it in the way I wanted to. I've remained interested in this field, though. We're experiencing what will be the beginning of an absolute golden age for sociology and psychology. Data is available in unprecedented amounts and ways. It's not only that you can finally look at the behaviors of literally millions of people, but free from a lab those behaviors are far more natural than in any hitherto performed...

The first I ever heard of Scott Lynch was him vehemently defending one of the characters in this book. The character in question is one Zamira Drakasha. She's a pirate captain. She's middle-aged. She's black. And she's a mom, who brings her toddlers on the high seas with her. Some fans were upset, claiming that this was unrealistic wish fulfillment. To which Lynch replied that he's writing speculative fiction, not history. Wish fulfillment is the name of the game. Seriously though, you should go read his whole response. It's pretty amazing. I filed that bit away until one friend and then another began gushing about Lynch's books, and I had no choice but to pick them up. Zamira wasn't in the first book, though it was still a very good novel. If a bit uneven. But I knew she featured in the second one, and I was excited to meet her. Imagine my disappointment when it took her over half of the 760 page book to show up. Actually it wasn'...

If you frequent certain corners of the internet, it seemed like Roxane Gay was everywhere this summer. She released her novel An Untamed State to huge critical acclaim. I saw two different online book clubs devote their time to reading it as soon as it came out. Shortly thereafter, she released a collection of essays called Bad Feminist . Both of these books made it on to the New York Times Bestseller list. I first heard about her because I began reading The Rumpus , where she was a contributing editor, right around the time An Untamed State came out. I hadn't heard about her before, but it wasn't long before I was seeing links to her writing all over the place . Then one of my favorite sites, The Toast , announced that she would be running their first vertical starting in mid-October. I knew that I had to seek out more. I picked up Bad Feminist because it seemed easier than An Untamed State . The latter is about a women who is kidnapped, assaulted, and raped. It ...

I bought this book back in June, but I've been waiting until it was properly fall to read it. I was hoping for a good foggy, chilly day on which I could be spooked. The weather never cooperated with me, though. It mostly stayed warm and sunny. With my stack running low, I ended up settling for a dark and stormy night instead. In the end I suppose that's just as a good. The Illustrated Man  is a collection of short stories. Most of them are spooky and set in the future where space travel is possible and nearly common place. One or two fell a bit flat for me, but for the most part they were really good. I was even able to suspend my disbelief and accept that Venus is basically a jungle planet. Talk about an old theory. Most of the stories were a lot of fun, though. It was a great book to get me in the mood for Halloween.

John Scalzi's novel, Redshirts , has a very fun premise. It's told from the point of view of an ensign, stationed on board a ship where ensigns have an unusually high likelihood of being killed in strange ways on away missions. It doesn't take too long for Dahl and his friends, all new transfers to the ship, to figure this out and start searching for a way to stay alive, despite the heavily stacked odds. This book is a really straightforward, quick read. It's almost bare bones, making it much more plot driven than character driven. But that plot is exciting and twisty, growing ever more meta until the fourth wall eventually shatters. It was, at times, a bit too clever for me. But fun nonetheless, and packed with Star Trek and Galaxy Quest references. A fun bit of escapism to wile away a few hours.

It took me a year and a half, but I finally made it through the last book assigned by my book club (I'm still sad it dissolved). Now that I've made it, 13 books in to The Dresden Files , I'm more stumped than ever that the dude thought this would be a good place for new readers to begin the series. There are so many things you would miss if you started here. And given that it operates as more of a direct sequel than any other book in the series, it's probably the absolute worst place to begin reading about Harry Dresden. At the end of the previous book, Dresden died. He's sent back to solve his murder and ends up in the middle of a ghostly war along the way. Solving his murder is actually a pretty minor part of the story. It's mostly taken up by the effect his death had on the people he loved and the city he protected. And lots of strange ghost battles. You need the history of the previous books for the emotions of this one to hit you. Murphy...

The early part of the Discworld series sure is full of Rincewind. Three of the first five books star him, including Sourcery . It's a little disappointing, since I don't remember liking Rincewind very much. Though I think my dislike of him builds over the course of his series. I also don't really remember reading this book. Which at least means that I probably didn't hate it. To my pleasant surprise, I found myself enjoying this book more than I expected to on the re-read. Rincewind is still at the point that I identify with him. He just wants a quiet, boring life. None of these death-defying adventures that keep tripping him up. And I get that. I'd be perfectly happy with a little cottage and a quiet job in a library. I think it's in his next book that Rincewind really starts to become insufferable. There's a lot in here that I forgot, from the Ice Giants to the genie to the Pedestrians of the Apocalypse (their horses get stolen). It was fu...