Bookish Thoughts

This was a blog before it was a book, and I tend not to spend my money on those. When something's free online, why buy another version of it? But I couldn't help myself this time. Slaughterhouse 90210 is one of my favorite blogs, and it will be much easier to proselytize about it if I can shove the book at people when they come over to my house. The conceit of the blog is pretty simple. Maris Kreizman pairs quotes culled from class and modern literature with screenshots of television shows, highlighting the similarities between so-called low-brow and high-brow culture. I first discovered it back when Kevin and I finished Breaking Bad , and I quickly went through that tag . Then I went through all her Buffy match-ups . Then I just went to the beginning of the blog and read the whole thing over the course of a week or so. A lot of the references are actually lost on me. I haven't watched all of the TV shows that appear in the blog, and I can't recognize many of them...

I didn't cry when Terry Pratchett died. This was a combination of many things. I've known he was sick since before I began reading his books. I've known that he was living on borrowed time. In his later years he emerged as a strong advocate for assisted death, and it was always his stance that he wanted to die before he lost his mind completely. Before he stopped being himself. I made peace with that early in my relationship with his books, so when I learned that he died in his bed surrounded by family having recently finished his final book, well it seemed like a close second to his stated desire to die while sitting in the backyard with a nice glass of whiskey. There was also the fact that I learned this news on the ski slope in Colorado shortly before a wedding. Grief wasn't an emotion I was willing to experience that weekend. I could push it back, so I did. When his final book was released, I read a review and started crying. When I finally bought the book, ...

This is an amazing, powerful, heavy book about love and betrayal and war. The story follows two sisters and their lovers and servants in Nigeria in the 1960s, before and during the Nigerian Civil War and the rise and fall of the brief nation, Biafra. I hadn't ever heard of this period in history before I encountered the work of Adichie. That's American education for you. We weren't really involved in this in any way, except for how we shaped it by ignoring it. Inside the pages of the book, one of the character is working on another book, a non-fiction account of the war titled The World Was Silent While We Died . It wasn't just silent then, it remains largely silent now. There's a lot going on here. The politics of the situation are complicated and Adichie does a great job distilling them through the use of ongoing conversations between the characters. Even moreso than in Americanah , debate is a central feature of this book. Well, the first half anyway. Once th...

I almost didn't read this book. Raising Steam  is, at this point, the penultimate book in Terry Pratchett's Discworld  series. Though that's perhaps a bit disingenuous with a series like this. Discworld  has a loose continuity, but each book stands on its own. It's possible to skip one and not lose your place. The setting is more important than any singular plot line. So, this is a late Discworld  book. It's about Moist von Lipwig, who has never been one of my favorite characters. Most fans of the series regard this book as dispensable. It's not considered a stellar example of Pratchett's work. He was, after all, nearing the end of both his career and his life when he wrote this. And the series has been declining in quality for a while. But then, as much as I wanted to get to the final book, a Tiffany Aching story, I found myself unable to start it. I'll get in to this in more detail when I do read that book, but the bottom line is that I wasn'...

Even though the final book in Jordan's (and later Sanderson's) epic Wheel of Time series took me almost a month to read, I still finished the whole series in less than a year. Which I'm pretty proud of. I hardly know how to begin talking about this book, because I really want to talk about the entire series. And it's hard to talk about the last book without talking about the whole series, because it's such a fabulous culmination of so many different plot lines and character threads. The series really is epic, and Sanderson sticks the landing. Then again, I struggled with this book. From the beginning this story has been building to The Last Battle, so it was no surprise that the finale was essentially an 1100-page battle scene. Well, that's not the entirely fair. The book comprised several battles, which built into a very short war. The Last Battle itself occurred in a 250-page chapter, which took me three days to read. Battle scenes bore me. I tend to skip...

One of my first encounters with Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles series was a review of this book, the prequel novella. I'd been strongly considering diving in at that point, but the review, whose opinion I tend to agree with, hated this book. So I backed off. For about a week, at which point Sarah started reading the series and fell in love with it. Which was all I needed to get back on board. Still, I was a bit worried heading into this book. I shouldn't have been. I actually loved it so much that I'm reconsidering how I view the reviewer who hated it. The story follows Levana, the evil stepmother queen of the story proper, and her rise to power. Levana is evil, and has always been evil. But villains never think they're villains. Levanna grew up spoiled and sheltered in a family without love. Her parents were both openly having affairs. Her sister was even more cruel than her. Add in Levana's supernatural manipulation abilities, and there was really no ot...

I'm about halfway through the final Wheel of Time book, but I found myself needing a break. That book is essentially an 1100 page battle, which can be wearing. I'm someone who tends to completely skip over battle scenes in books, so a book, so I've been having a hard-time focusing. I decided I needed a break, and Neil Gaiman's most recent short story collection was exactly the palate cleanser I wanted. I've been a fan of Gaiman since I got American Gods  for my 18th birthday, and a fan of his short stories since college, when I could never find the time to devote to anything longer. So I was excited when he released a new collection. Then I was surprised to discover how many of these stories I'd already read. Not because they're in previous collections (only one appeared in a collection I already owned), but because I follow Gaiman's online presence, and a lot of these have popped up on the web at one point or another. I heard Gaiman perform (is that...

The final book in Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events  is more of an epilogue than a conclusion. Anything that Snicket intended to answer was answered in the last book. In this one, the orphans come to terms with the fact that you don't always get to learn all the answers, and they figure out how to move on. I knew going in that a lot of people were disappointed with this book. I set my expectations low and was ultimately pretty pleased with it. The book leaves the reader with a lot of uncertainty, but it's ultimately about the uncertainty of life, so it makes sense. The orphans get some answers about their parents, but it's from a journal that was written before they were born. They have to reconcile that information with what they knew of their parents growing up, and the result is ultimately ambiguous. But they have to make decisions on that ambuguity. Because that's how life goes. This series, overall, has been about growing up. It's been about...

I picked this book up in the airport in Istanbul when we were there in October. I'd been meaning to read Elif Shafak's work for a while, and since she's one of Turkey's most popular authors, it seemed like a good souvenir. I wasn't really sure what it was about, except that my mother-in-law really enjoyed it as an Armenian American. And boy, does this book dive into the Armenian-Turkish conflict. I'm glad I married in to an Armenian family and had some context for this book going into it. Granted, that's all from the Armenian side of things. But it was still good background to have. The book follows two families. One is Armenian-American, living in San Francisco after the grandmother was forced out during the genocide. The other lives in Turkey. The Armenians are focused on the past. Everything they do and believe is shaped by the genocide, even for young Armanoush who is threee generations removed from it. The Turkish family is more focused on the pr...

I went in to this book thinking how nice it was to finally reach the point of the Discworld series where we get some continuity from book to book. Which speaks to my aggressive blocking out of Rincewind more than anything. Rincewind has, up to this point, essentially had one long adventure broken up over four books. But as they are my least favorite books in the series, I tend to forget them. The witches, on the other hand, are some of my favorite characters. And though this is the fourth book Esme Weatherwax has appeared in, it's the first one to really deal with the consequences of a previous book. Back in Wyrd Sisters , Magrat fell in love with Verence. Then she ran away from the whole thing in Witches Abroad . And now she's returning to discover that Verence has already planned their entire wedding and it's happening soon. There are also elves, set on coming to our world and ruining everything in service of their own entertainment and short attention spans. So Gran...

Out is not a book I would have ever come across on my own. It's a crime novel out of Japan. It was published there in 1997, and it won several awards, leading to it being translated to English in 2003. It was the most recent pick for my book club, and I dutifully read it, even though it turns out I won't be able to attend this time around. I've read a handful of crime novels over the years, most notably Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, but it's not a genre I generally gravitate towards. When I want those kinds of stories it's a lot easier to flip on Law and Order or one of its descendants. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I am far from a connoisseur of this genre. And I'm not sure this book convinced me that I want to dive deeper into it. The story kicks off when a seemingly timid housewife kills her abusive husband and recruits her work friends to help her deal with the aftermath. They dismember and dispose of the body. But mistakes pile...

Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle is an absolutely lovely coming-of-age story about first love and family obligation. It's set sometime in the 1930s in Rural England. The patriarch of the family wrote a critically acclaimed novel some ten years before the book opens, and took a 40 year lease on a castle that he thought would inspire his next great work. But that never happened, and the family has slid into abject poverty. The book is narrated by middle child Cassandra, who has procured a notebook and decided to keep a journal as practice for the novel she wants to write. Lucky for her, exciting things start to happen almost immediately, giving her a lot of new experiences to write about and new emotions to suss out between the pages of her journals. The family's landlord - who they haven't paid rent to in years - dies, and his grandsons come from America to take stock of their inheritance. Cassandra's older sister, Rose, becomes determined to marry one of them...

I'm not sure how to begin talking about this book, which is strange and haunting and loose almost to the point of unraveling. I finished it wondering what I had just read, what had happened, what it all meant. But it was definitely very spooky, which is mostly of what I wanted from it. The story unfolds as the journal of Sarah Crowe. In the wake of her ex-lover's death and in an attempt to complete a new novel, she takes up residence in an old farmhouse in Rhode Island. There's an enormous tree on the property with an unsettling history, and strange things begin happening. Except that it's not clear at all whether or not they're really happening. It quickly becomes apparent that Sarah is not a reliable narrator at all. The question really becomes: how unreliable is she? She admits to making up some things. She has gaps in her memory. It's not at all clear whether she's actually being haunted or whether she's suffering a psychotic break i...

I know I just said that The Gathering Storm was likely going to be my favorite book in this series. I have to immediately retract that statement, because Towers of Midnight knocked it out of the park. I had so much fun reading this book that, even though it's the longest book I've ever read (clocking in at 1220 pages) (and barring Bone , a 1300 page comic), I almost wish it had been longer. At least there's one more book after this (followed by everything the amazingly prolific Sanderson has written). The thing that makes this book so great is the sense of hope that permeates it. Unlike the last book, which focused on moving Rand and Egwene into the positions they needed to be in for the last battle, this book widens to include every other character. And it's amazing. Character arcs are finished off as person after person embraces their strengths and sheds their last doubts. Side plots are tied off as everyone heads to the Final Battle. Reunions bring ch...

The Penultimate Peril is the longest book in the Series of Unfortunate Events , and it took me by far the longest to read. Okay, that was mostly the fault of Hallowiener, but still. This book was exciting, with twists I didn't see coming, though I should have. And it actually provides more answers than new questions, though there are still a few mysteries remaining for the last book. The Baudelaires are now full-fledged volunteers, and they spend much of the book trying to figure out who they can trust and what is going on. Of course they're still children and pretty new at this whole spy thing, so they don't figure out much. But they get some answers anyway. The sugar bowl is still mostly a mystery, but by the end of the book its location is known. Olaf's motives are finally revealed and it adds a new dimension to the story, further muddying the waters between right and wrong. The mysterious J.S. is finally revealed, and some of the less awful guardi...

My plan to catch up with the classics continues with Frankenstein , a classic horror story that's considered by many to be the first science fiction novel (and it was written by Mary Shelley when she was 19 years old!) I struggled with the language, as I often do with books this old. But it was short enough that it didn't take me too long to read. And it helped that I'm familiar enough with the story to follow along with the basic beats of the plot. That said, this book was nothing like what I expected. It's framed as a series of letters an arctic explorer is sending to his sister, when he discovers a half-dead Frankenstein who is pursuing his creation across the ice. At one point we dig deeper into the creature's story, outlining his first two years of life. And in the midst of that we learn the story of the DeLacey's, the family from which the creature learns about humanity. I love when stories push in like this, and it was a pleasant surprise t...

This was not my favorite in Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events. It mostly boils down to the gimmick we get this time around. Every book so far has had a gimmick of some sort, and I've mostly been able to enjoy or ignore them. But here it just grated. We meet the captain of a submarine who repeats everything he says 3 or 4 times in different words. And uses "Aye" the way you use "stop" in telegrams - between every sentence. The Count Olaf and his group show up with the most annoying new laugh ever. I skipped whole paragraphs of dialogue because I couldn't stand to read it. Apart from that, it's a good installment. The stakes are definitely getting higher. The Baudelaires meet a new friend only to be betrayed by her. Sunny has a very close brush with death. The whole good vs evil starts to become murkier, as one of Olaf's henchmen reveals hidden depths and motivations. There are still a lot of questions to be answered, but this...

The third book of The Lunar Chronicles brings Rapunzel into the group of fairy-tale heroines going up against the wicked queen Levana. Though she's named Cress (short for Crescent Moon) in this book. True to the science fiction setting, she's been trapped in a satellite orbiting the Earth for the past seven years. She's used that time to hone both her hacking skills and her imagination, and so she joins up as one of the more naive yet skilled allies. This book was a lot of fun. It's thoroughly predictable, both because I'm familiar with the fairy tale and because it's a tad formulaic. But despite knowing what was coming, I had a ton of fun reading this. The action starts right off the bat, with Cress joining our known band almost immediately. This was more satisfying than the last book, which kept Cinder and Scarlet separate until the very end. The characters get to hang out in new configurations, which keeps everything fresh and fun. My only g...

I loved this book so much. I'm already biased in favor of anything about vampires, so that's probably not a huge shocker. But this was a fantastic story that made the vampires sympathetic. It also pulled a neat trick of dealing with racism by way of a metaphor, but keeping a black character at the front and center of it. The narrator of the story is a young vampire named Shori, who wakes up all alone and with no memory of who or what she is. Over the course of the book, more and more of her personal and cultural history are revealed, and I was hooked every step of the way. I found everything about this to be fascinating. My only gripe is the language, which was straightforward to the point that it distracted me. It makes sense for an amnesiac child to speak in short, direct sentences. And the language did eventually fade into the background of the gripping tale. But I've been reading so much beautiful prose lately that it was a bit of a shock to come acros...

I've been meaning to read more of Emma Donaghue's work ever since I devoured Room a few years ago. I liked that novel so much that I picked up Frog Music with no idea of what it was about. I almost never do that, but it worked out great. Frog Music was a fantastic piece of historical fiction that's far enough outside my wheelhouse that I may not have picked it up otherwise. The story takes place over August and September 1876 in San Francisco. There's a heat wave and a small pox epidemic and amid all this a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is murdered. Her friend, Blanche, is with her when it happens are finds herself trying to find the perpetrator before he comes after her. Her quest is spliced with flashbacks, detailing how she met Jenny and the events that led to her death. It turns out that this is an actual unsolved mystery, and nearly all of the characters in the book were real people. There's a great afterward that gets into some of Donaghue...

Zadie Smith is an interesting writer. Her books don't have a lot of plot, and they tend to be a bit all over the place. But the longer you sit with them, the more depths you find. These books are dense, and they take a lot of digesting. I liked On Beauty more than White Teeth . This book is tighter, more focused. Both the beginning and ending make sense to me in the context of the entire story. I know why Smith started where she did, with Jerome's emails. And I liked the ending. It was a bit abrupt, very loose and ambiguous. But it makes sense for this story. This book follows a family living in a small liberal college town in Massachusetts as they interact with a much more conservative family, the patriarch of which is their patriarch's greatest rival. Smith pokes into politics, race, class. And while she didn't really change my mind about anything, I thought she did a decent job of presenting both sides of the arguments, skewering the ones that becam...

I have finally arrived at the end of the series - almost. Three books left, and they're the ones Sanderson wrote after Robert Jordan died. This book begins with a note from Sanderson, explaining his process and that he wasn't trying to imitate Jordan's style so much as do right by the characters and story. And I think he did a pretty excellent job of doing just that. This book was a big step up from the last two. It flowed a lot better. A lot of the subplots I was tired of were left behind. More importantly, Sanderson did a better job of integrating the various stories. Jordan had gotten in the habit of dividing his books by different characters, essentially writing 3 or 4 books focused on different characters and then just stapling them together. Sanderson switches between everyone more often, which makes everything feel more connected. The best part of this book, though, was the focus on Egwene. She and Rand have the two most important story-lines in thi...

This is a book I ought to have judged by the cover. Because looking at the cover - an mage of Tina Fey's head photoshopped onto a man's body - filled me with exactly the same mixture of emotions as the book did. I think it was supposed to be funny, but it mostly just left me uncomfortable. My biggest problem is that Fey's feminism is dated. Which is to say it fails to be intersectional. Fey is mostly concerned with the plight of the middle-class white woman. She's basically a poster child for Lean In , juggling a family and her dream job and making it look easy (because of that full-time nanny she employs, who she can barely even talk to). Fey's racism and homophobia come through in interesting ways. Even in the story where she learns an important lesson about not using gay people as props in her own story, she manages to use a cast of gay people as props to teach her a lesson. One she clearly never internalized. There were things I could relate to...

When I first heard about The Bees , I was excited to read it. It's the tale of a worker bee, Flora 717, who discovers secrets within her hive and must save her sisters. It sounded like it would be different, unlike anything else I was reading. Unfortunately, despite the cast of bees, the book ended up being familiar and predictable. I shouldn't be that surprised. There are no new stories, after all. But bees have nothing to add to the story of a dystopian society that must be overhauled. In fact they rather detract from it, since I had a hard time viewing this working hive as a dystopian society. I did learn some fun facts about bees (all cross checked on the internet.) Bees communicate by dance as well as scent, they kill any males who are still around when winter approaches, and they make a bread-like substance from pollen. It was also interesting that Flora managed to be the most obedient and dutiful rebel ever. She doesn't overthrown tradition so much ...

Amy Poehler's memoir is a little bit all over the place. Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy it. I mostly did. There are fun stories about working as an improv comic and on SNL. Stories about childhood and friendship. But the book isn't all that cohesive. It's barely in order. It's almost like Poehler wrote until she had something nearly book length and then padded it with pictures, quotes, and dialogue from her work. (Ben and Leslie's proposal and wedding vows and recreated entirely.) I wasn't really expecting more from a celebrity memoir. And I'm glad I picked this up for a buck at a used book store. I probably would have been let down had I paid full price. It was a quick fluffy read that served to get me out of the slump I was starting to fall into (Does only reading ~50 pages a day count as a slump?) Parts of it made me uncomfortable, but most of it was funny and comforting. And sometimes that's all you want.

Considered by many to be the best book in the Discworld series, Small Gods stands up really well to a second reading. And probably will to a third or fourth as well. It's a ruthless take-down of organized religion, while managing to be respectful of faith itself. This book displays Pratchett at his peak, with a razor wit, a tight plot, and a most satisfying ending. It's no wonder that many people recommend this as an entry point to the series. Despite being the 13th book, it takes place nearly a century before the rest of the series, showing how one of the major Discworld religions, Omnianism, came to exist in it's present form. Other than the ripples the church sends out through the remainder of the series, and the brief reappearance of the history monks, this book doesn't really tie into the rest of the series. It helps with the world-building, but these characters are long dead by the time Esme Weatherwax and Sam Vimes show up on the scene. But for a...

This book dragged for me, and I'm not entirely sure why. There's a lot of plot progression, especially compared to the last book. Several subplots get tied up. But they were subplots that I've long since lost interest in. The characters I love the most were barely in this book. So I had a hard time maintaining interest beyond a few chapters. That said, it's nice to have so many subplots tied up. Mat and Tuon  and married and have gone their separate ways. Which is actually something of a disappointment. I was hoping for more of the two of them interacting, especially once they were married. But at least Mat is back with the Red Band, in command where he belongs. Meanwhile, Perrin has rescued Faile, meaning that they are reunited after entirely too long. And Elayne has survived a siege and gotten herself crowned Queen of Andor. There were some other, more interesting developments. Egwene is infiltrating the White Tower from the inside. Lan is riding int...

The tenth of Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events is definitely my favorite so far. It slows down enough to let the story breath and to let the Baudelaires finally find some answers. All three of the orphans grow in different ways, and it's so rewarding to see how far they've come. Sunny's vocabulary in particular is getting to be a lot of fun as the nonsense words she spoke in the beginning are being traded in for words that apply to her situation, such as lox or futile. It's becoming much easier to interpret her meaning, and that plays against Snicket's interpretation in fun ways. The mysteries are also beginning to unravel. As I expected, VFD stands for Volunteer Fire Department. But it also stands for nearly everything else, which results in some fun connections and wordplay. The third Quagmire triplet, Quigley, is revealed to be alive, and I'm looking forward to his reunion with his siblings. And we got some appearances from pa...

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven was a book club pick that I was particularly excited for. I've been meaning to read Sherman Alexie's work for years, so it was nice to finally have a firm excuse to put him at the top of my reading list. This collection of short stories packs a punch. Many of the stories are short, but they're dense. I had trouble reading more than two or three at a time, meaning that it took me a week to read the book. Which is saying something, since I frequently read books of similar length in a single day. But these stories took a lot of digesting. There's a lot of pain and anger that can't be funneled into anything except writing, so the reader experiences the full force of it. I was frequently caught off guard by single sentences that exploded into my brain and refused to let me go on. There are a lot of repeated themes: poverty, alcoholism, basketball, stories. This is another reason it helped to slow down with t...

Oh gods, I've gotten so far behind on these. I blame Hamilton . Just be glad that listening to that musical also slowed down my book consumption. Republic of Thieves is the third of Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards books, and it might just be my favorite. Mostly because this is the book that finally introduces Sabetha, who has been lurking just off stage for the last two books. Like Lynch's other books, this one alternates between two different timelines. In the present, Locke and Jean are recruited to run one side of an election. They are pitted against Sabetha, and the contest is deliciously close, as both sides have all the same training and tricks. The second timeline takes place when all three are teenagers, spending a summer with an acting troupe. It was so much fun to see Locke and Sabetha dance around each other, both as awkward teenagers and accomplished adults. And I loved the way their courtship ended. It managed to ruin things in the present w...

Given the title of the series, and all the bad things that have happened to the Baudelaires thus far, I shouldn't really be surprised when the story takes a dark turn. But man does this book get dark. People get thrown to the lions. The orphans have very real and difficult concerns about whether they are crossing too many lines in their attempts to capture/escape from Count Olaf. By the end, Sunny has been separated from her older siblings and is being held captive by Olaf and his associates. In this book the kids start failing hard. Violet is unable to complete her invention. Klaus loses access to an incredibly useful library. An adult seems to be both willing and able to help them, only to betray them and die a grisly death. They lose any advantage they had over Olaf, and are plunged into their most perilous circumstances yet. Not to say there isn't hope. But I can't really bring myself to believe that one of their parents is alive. Still, the next book ...

The Baudelaire's are on the run! In this book they don't have to deal with some sub-par guardian for the first time. But that means that they're fending for themselves. More than ever they're relying on each other to stay alive and one step ahead of Count Olaf. In fact, in this book, the orphans go on the offensive. They're actively looking for information that will help them defeat Count Olaf once and for all. There's more of a mystery surrounding the death of their parents than first appeared, and so far there are more questions than answers, but that just means that the story is starting to get really exciting. My favorite part, though, is Sunny's amazing vocabulary. She still speaks in single words that Snickett then translates for the reader. But those words are getting longer. They are often directly related to their meaning. Once or twice Sunny says exactly what she means. I'm really excited about where this series is going. No...

I've been meaning to read this book for years, and now I'm kicking myself for not getting to it sooner. It might actually be a perfect coming of age story that deals refuses to shy away from a wealth of tough issues or lose it's hope or humor, while also having fun with the more common tropes of First Love and The Big Game. The story is sort of a diary of main character Arnold "Junior" Spirit, and it's peppered with his illustrations and cartoons. They're a great addition to the story, sometimes merely illustrating characters or ideas, other times containing bits of the narrative. It's a fun way to pull in Junior's passion and make the book feel a lot more personal and unique. Junior spends the book struggling to reconcile past and future, his individuality with his community (or communities). He leaves the reservation to attend the better funded white school in town. As the first person to do this, he receives crap from all direc...

The second book in The Lunar Chronicles twists the story of Little Red Riding Hood into Meyer's futuristic world. But it does this while continuing to follow Cinder's adventures as she escapes from jail and plots her next course and Emperor Kai's political problems. I would have liked for Scarlet and Cinder to meet up a little earlier, but this is still a fun and thrilling adventure that I enjoyed even more than the first one. I like the modifications Meyer made to the story, connecting Scarlet's grandmother to Cinder's past so there would be a reason for both girls to go looking for her. Scarlet is smart and practical and slow to trust, but the devious wold eventually wins her over anyway. I almost started trusting Wolf, even though I knew he would eventually betray Scarlet. That's what the wolf does. But he's more complicated than simple bad guy here, and that makes for a fun and interesting love interest for Scarlet. Meyer does an excell...

The Book of Unknown Americans is about immigrants. Specifically, immigrants from Latin America. It focuses on the intertwining stories of two families: the Riveras from Mexico (narrated by mother, Alma) and the Toros from Paraguay (narrated by youngest son, Mayor). The two families live in the same apartment complex in Delaware, and the life stories of the other residents are sprinkled through the main narrative. I enjoyed the main narrative, though I found the side stories to be distracting and a bit simplistic. They were told in a way that seemed to give the people telling them more self-awareness than they exhibited in any other part of the story. It seemed a bit too concerned with explaining motivations, rather than letting the reader infer them from the histories themselves. I also got distracted by the less than linear timeline. The two main overlapping viewpoints occasionally got ahead of one another, requiring the other one to back up and fill in the blanks. ...

Diplomatic Immunity  was not quite as good as the preceding Vorkosigan books. That speaks more to how fantastic those books were, than to any major flaws in this one, though. It lacked nothing except that little something extra that I've come to expect from Bujold. The way she has with words and characters that leaves my laughing out loud and crying tears of both sadness and joy. There was one incredibly awe-inspiring scene, when the quaddie ballet is being described. I really wish it was something I could actually witness. The quaddies were originally designed to be null-gee workers, but with the advent of artificial gravity technology they instead established a mostly null-gee colony in an asteroid belt. Their society has been based there for 200 years, evolving and changing and slowly reintegrating into the world of downsiders, as they call humans with legs. As for the rest of the story...maybe I'm just getting used to the formula. Miles is sent to quaddie ...

I'm just past the halfway point of Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, and I have to say that it's getting really good. The seventh book brings the orphans to a village, where instead of a single guardian they will be raised by the proverbial village. It doesn't work out so well, although they do meet Hector, who may be the best adult they've ever encountered, other than Uncle Monty. They have to evade Count Olaf while searching for the Quagmire triplets (who are handily nearby). There's a series of poems that form a puzzle. The answer was obvious pretty early on, but I actually couldn't figure out how it related to the poems until Snicket laid it all out. There are also clues towards the greater narrative. Another eye tattoo appears, this time on the ankle of a would-be ally who appears to be a relative of the author. The "v" in VFD appears to stand for volunteer (volunteer fire department? I'm trying so hard not to spoil m...

In the Wheel of Time prequel, New Spring , Jordan provides a glimpse of the world twenty years before the series proper begins. As it opens, the Aiel War is ending. The Dragon has just been reborn. Moiraine and Siuan are Accepted in the tower. The story details Moiraine and Siuan's discovery of the dragon and how their quest to find and guide him began. It also shows the first meeting of Moiraine and Lan, ending with him becoming her warder. This book was a lot of fun, especially from a world-building perspective. It's nice to see the White Tower whole and functioning as it ought to. Getting more detail about life as an Accepted and Moiraine's test for the Shawl and induction into the Blue Ajah was great. The characters in the series proper leap-frogged the whole process, so there was no chance of seeing those rituals any other way. What's more, Moiraine and Siuan's story here really drives home how unprepared Egwene, Elayne, and Nynaeve are to beco...

Falling Free  is an early novel in the Vorkosigan series. It was written shortly after  Shards of Honor ,  The Warrior's Apprentice , and  Ethan of Athos , when Bujold hadn't quite decided on Miles as the protagonist. It takes place 200 years before any of the other books, back when space exploration was fairly young and Barrayar was in isolation. It tells the story of the quaddies, gentically engineered humans designed for zero-gee work before the invention of artificial gravity. This is not a favorite book in the series, being both an early work and disconnected from all of the main characters I went in with low expectations and was pleasantly surprised by home much I liked it. It's not the smoothest or most layered of Bujold's work, and she dives into technical stuff in a slightly distracting way. But the characters are amazing, and the plot, while straight-forward, is fun and interesting. My favorite part is that we get a few points of view from the chief ant...

Snicket continues to play with the formula, resulting in what is my favorite book of the series so far. It's nice when the Baudelaire's get some good mixed in with the bad. It makes the story more interesting. Never-ending misery is ultimately boring (try reading  The Two Towers ). A few bright spots keep the story fresh and interesting. More importantly, they keep hope alive. So the Baudelaires are sent to a married couple. And while the wife is greedy and treacherous, the husband is kind. Even if his good intentions come to nothing due to his weak will and distaste for arguments, at least he tries to treat the orphans well while they're under his care. Additionally, Count Olaf is barely in this book. He sneaks around the edges even more than usual, so the orphans have to be more proactive than usual. They uncover his plot and come close to thwarting it. They find the Quagmire triplets and come close to freeing them. Alas, it's only the sixth book, so nothing can q...

Back in high school, all of my friends took AP English and I didn't. At the time it made sense. Mudd really didn't care about AP English, and since my high school capped us at 3 AP courses, I filled that space with physics and calculus. I don't regret that decision, but I did miss out on some interesting books. So I'm going back to fill in these gaps, and the latest "missed" book is Tess. I can't even really remember how my friends reacted to this book. I'm not entirely sure how I would have reacted to it. Or how it was taught. I doubt I'd have been ready for it when I was 17. But now I shuddered almost immediately when Alec was introduced - ignoring Tess' boundaries from the start and then blaming her for his every transgression. Even Angel, presented as the perfect man, comes across as pretty awful. Really this is a book about how much it sucks to be a woman. Tess is raped. Her child dies before it can be baptized. She falls in love and l...

By this point in The Dresden Files, a lot has changed. The war with the Red Court has ended in their annihilation. Dresden discovered a daughter. He died, spent some time as a ghost, and has now come back to life in the guise of the Winter Knight working for Mab. The first 100 or so pages of the book serve to orient us in the new world, but I had some trouble getting through them. It wasn't until Harry started to reconnect with his old friends and make amends that I became really engaged. Alas, by then, another change had become apparent. Harry has always leered at women in a way that made me uncomfortable. I brushed it aside in favor of the excitement of his adventures. And he seemed to be getting better. As he gathered more female allies around him and forged all sorts of different relationships with women, I really thought he was becoming less misogynistic. But in this book he levels up in a way that has me wondering if Jim Butcher has ever actually interacted with a woman. ...

The tenth book in Jordan's epic  Wheel of Time  series is essentially a catch up book. At the end of the previous book, Rand and Nynaeve removed the taint from saidin. For the first half (or two-thirds, really) of this book, we look at what each of the other main characters was doing when that happened. Then there are some minor baby steps towards the next bits of those characters arcs. But for the most part, this is 820 pages without a plot. I can see giving up at this point in the series. It's frustrating when nothing happens for an entire book. But I had my expectations tempered. I knew this book was the low point of the series. I know the next book is much more action-packed. I know the most frustrating plot lines (well, Perrin's) are about to get tied off so the characters can rejoin the main story. I persevered through this book to get to the end. And that's all there really is to say about it. You always get that episode of television right shortly before the...

Snicket continues to tweak his formula just enough to keep me interested in the Baudelaire orphans. In the fifth book they are sent to a boarding school, rather than to live with another long lost family member. Although things don't really improve for them there (their lives have been getting steadily worse since poor Monty died), they do finally make some friends their own age. I also liked that Count Olaf's plan was a little subtler this time around. Although I could see what he was doing, the poor orphans were completely at a loss. And they still came close to defeating him. As close as they ever do anyway. With hostages to free, a solid clue about why all of this is happening, and a promise of more complicated plots, I'm excited to keep reading. The formula will change up eventually (I think in the seventh book - halfway through). In the meantime, it's fun to watch the orphans grow ever more resourceful.

It's not a stretch to call  Witches Abroad  one of my most influential books. It might very well be my most influential book. It changed the way I look at the world, especially at stories. This book points out tropes and then picks them apart and undermines them, all while playing by the rules of the narrative. After reading it, I started paying much closer attention to everything else I was reading. I developed a feel for stories and began to really understand how they work and why. On it's surface,  Witches Abroad  is a silly book that combines fairy tales and road trips. The witches travel to Genua to defeat an evil fairy godmother, and along the way they encounter any number of "rural myths", from Sleeping Beauty to Dracula to Little Red Riding Hood. It's those encounters, all leading up to the final encounter that add so much hilarity and richness to the book. Moreso than any other Discworld book, and this is a common theme in the series, this book is about...

This was a cute little novella about the days leading up to Miles and Ekaterin's wedding. It's told from the point of view of Armsman Roic, who has fallen slightly out of favor after the events of  A Civil Campaign . Here he's given a chance to redeem himself by discovering and foiling a plot on Ekaterin's life with the help of Sergeant Taura. It was a treat to see Taura again, and especially to see her attempting to fit in to Barrayaran culture. Armsman Roic's growing feelings for her are really sweet, as are his fumbling attempts to get in her good graces. Ultimately she's able to have it all: a week being treated like a fairy tale princess, an opportunity to save the day, and the attraction of a good man. I'm left wondering how long she'll live though. When she was first introduced, she was given a lifespan of maybe 20 years. Thanks to "medical advances" that's now been extended to 26 years, which is great. I love Taura and I certainly...

In  The Miserable Mill , the Baudelaire orphans once again encounter an uncaring guardian, a plot by Count Olaf to get their money, and an almost complete lack of help from the adults around them. Snicket isn't making huge changes to his formula (yet), but he's having a lot of fun playing around with the details. This time around, Count Olaf stays off page for more than half the book. Everyone knows he's going to show up eventually, and waiting for it to happen creates some great tension. And when he finally does arrive, it's even a bit surprising because of his disguise of choice this time around. We also get some more hints at his past. This book introduces and then kills Dr. Orwell, another of Olaf's associates who hadn't yet been introduced. But she is also associated with the eye Olaf has tattooed on his ankle. It appears on the cover of her book and her home/office is designed to look like it. Violet and Klaus are also forced to switch places a bit thi...

With  A Civil Campaign  the Vorkosigan Saga turns its focus away from galactic affairs to focus on the domestic. Emperor Gregor's wedding is coming up soon. Miles is trying to woo Ekaterin without her knowing, to disastrous results. Mark and Kareen are back from a year of university and trying to figure out how they fit back on Barrayar, both independently and as a couple. And a couple of local counts are about to make history. This book is absolutely delightful. The centerpiece is a dinner party that is such a beautiful disaster my reading kept getting interrupted by my laughter. Every possible thing goes wrong, and then some more stuff goes wrong on top of it. Leading up to the dinner, everyone is laying in plans to achieve their own goals. Following the dinner, everyone is struggling to pick up the pieces and figure out how to move forward. There's really a lot to love about this book, which does a brilliant job of calling on the whole history of the series up to this p...

I've been meaning to get around to the Lunar Chronicles for a while now. Then Sarah read and loved them, and that pushed me over the edge. The first book,  Cinder , is a wonderful retelling of Cinderella, set in the distant future. Cinder is a cyborg, property of her stepmother and sole breadwinner for the family. All she really wants is to escape her life. But just as she starts to figure out how to do that, she gets caught up in much larger events . This story is incredibly well constructed. It's a classic fairy-tale, so you'll know many of the basic plot points going in. Cinder has an evil stepmother. There's a ball and a fancy dress and a prince. But there are some fun twists, too. My favorite is that Cinder ends up being her own fairy godmother, repairing an ancient car that she uses to get to the ball. She also loses her entire foot at said ball, rather than just her show, because her foot is robotic and doesn't fit very well besides. The series itself wea...

The first time I picked up  The Martian  I only made it two pages in before I rolled my eyes so hard that I had to put the book down and step away. It took a month before I was ready to try again. The exposition is...clumsy. Straight out of a story I or one of my friends might have written when we were 14 and had just discovered fanfiction.net. I guess that's what you get with self-publishing. The author's voice eventually faded into the character of Mark Watney. It helped that he introduced a bunch of other characters back on Earth around page 50. And while they may have been two-dimensional, they at least distracted from Watney himself and made the story a bit more bearable. But ultimately I didn't like this book. It was fast and readable, so I finished it pretty quickly, but I came out of it feeling angry and condescended to. Andy Weir doesn't seem to trust the reader. He reiterates plot points pages after they've happened, because they're about to be rel...

Another book, another distant relative, another dastardly plot from Count Olaf. I can see how these books could start to feel repetitive. But since they're aimed at a much younger audience, that is probably part of the point. The thing to do is look at the details. The new guardian is not quite as wonderful as Uncle Monty was. She's terrified of everything. She's constantly correcting everyone's grammar, even that of infant Sunny who barely knows real words yet, let alone proper grammar. So even though she sees through Count Olaf's latest disguise as Captain Sham, she fails to do anything to protect the children in her care. She's ultimately eaten by leeches (probably. I wouldn't be too surprised if she showed up again in a later book. There's some good stuff in here about facing your fears and finding courage. And also about how annoying pedantry is. The plot twists and turns in exciting ways, and the orphans once again team up to save the day, desp...

Janet Mock's  Redefining Realness  is part memoir, part Intro to Trans Issues. It's an incredibly accessible primer on the struggles and barriers many trans people face, grounded by Janet's personal experiences.  She was incredibly lucky in some ways and unlucky in others, and she's quick to point out the factors that made her transition easier (a loving supportive family and access to resources at school) and the ways in which she fell through the cracks (a victim of sexual abuse, occasionally homeless). She does a good job of tying her experience in with research about trans people in general, and her story remains incredibly personal while also showing the reader a much wider world. Redefining Realness  tells the story of Janet's childhood and her slow but steady journey to womanhood. She continually references literature and authors she found comfort in over the years, particularly Maya Angelou's work and Zora Neale Hurston's  Their Eyes Were Watching ...

Komarr  is the opposite of a heart-breaking story. It starts by introducing us to Ekaterin, a woman who has been in a loveless and emotional abusive marriage for the past 10 years. She's grown steadily smaller, shrinking in on herself, to accommodate a husband with awful luck and a disease he won't admit to having. Or allow his son to be tested and treated for. Your heart breaks in that first chapter. But then, as Ekaterin slowly comes back to herself, rediscovering her sense of humor, her backbone, and her passion for botany, our heart gets put back together right alongside hers. Miles is in Komarr, a newly minted Imperial Auditor along to observe Professor Vorthys who has been doing this a lot longer and who happens to be Ekaterin's uncle. Miles meets and is instantly besotted by the married (and later widowed) Ekaterin. She in turn gets swept up in the case, the revelations of which first give her the strength she needs to finally leave her husband and then leave her w...

Matriarch  was a Christmas gift from Kevin. Something he picked up dirt cheap at a discount bookstore to put in my stocking. This worked out great with  A Star Shall Fall  a couple of years ago, so it makes sense he'd turn it into an annual tradition. But it took me a while to work up to this book. It's the fourth in a series, and I wasn't about to see out the first three books just to read this one. Especially because at least one of those books is no longer available in print. Which doesn't bode well for the series. So I went in with reservations, fully prepared to abandon the book after the first few chapters. It was definitely confusing at first. I ended up googling the plots of the first three books to catch myself up. I'm still not sure I'm straight on the various alien species, but I sorted it out enough for the story to make sense. And surprisingly enough, it drew me in and held my attention right up to the end. Like any good sci-fi, this story holds...

In  The Reptile Room  we begin to settle into what will be the pattern of the series. The Baudelaire orphans are sent to live with a distant and eccentric relative. Everything is wonderful for a few days. But then Count Olaf finds them, insinuates himself into their life, and kills the new guardian. The orphans find themselves needing to thwart yet another of his plots. This one involves poisonous snakes and a trip to Peru. This series could easily get repetitive, but given that it's written for 10-year-olds, that's probably part of the point. Kids like things to be repeated over and over. I still find comfort in the familiarity of a story where I know what's going to happen in broad strokes. The real pleasure always comes in the details, and the details here are pretty great. Snicket has a better grasp of his language and humor. His wordplay is more specific to the story at hand, and he has fun with some tongue twisters that need to be logicked out. The plot is a bit m...

Like every other book in this series,  Winter's Heart  is incredibly slow to start. But then it starts accelerating, and by the end you don't want to put the book down. It took me the entire bus ride from DC to NYC to read the prologue (which is over 10% of the book), and the ride back to get through Perrin's chapters that are so disconnected and full of moping and miscommunication that I hardly care. There are some characters in that subplot that I care about a lot, but right now it feels stuck. After that, though, we get Elayne and Mat and all sorts of excitement. There's more about the Seanchan, more poilitics and intrigue. Rand finally carries through with his plot to rid saidin of the taint, and another Forsaken goes down in the meantime. Although they are effectively immortal, and now that Lanfear is back I'm sure Osan'gar will pop up again at some point. The thing that I really appreciate about these books is that, while the characters all have their ...