Bookish Thoughts

When I try to describe  Station Eleven , the word tapestry comes to mind. Or maybe jigsaw puzzle. This book is about an apocalyptic event that destroys civilization as we know it and the years following. It's about finding hope again, and love and inspiration, in the wake of a catastrophe. Station Eleven  deals with the fallout of a strain of flu that is highly contagious, highly lethal, and very quick moving. Most people are dead within a day of showing first symptoms, and anyone who comes in contact with them is dead a day later. Only those who mange to avoid exposure are spared, but they're faced with a world that has ground to a halt. Survival is the first order of business. But the Travelling Symphony, who wander between settlements performing music and plays, have decided that Seven of Nine was right: Survival is insufficient. The book bounces back and forth, between timelines and characters, creating a picture of what happened during the outbreak and in the decades ...

Gregor the Overlander  is a fun, quick read that follows the  Alice in Wonderland  template pretty closely, but with a few key changes that add a lot of emotional resonance. Gregor doesn't fall into the Underland alone, he follows his baby sister in, which means he spends a lot of the book taking care of a toddler. He's also reluctant to stay, knowing how much his mother will worry when her kids don't come home. It takes a lot - the promise of finding out what happened to his missing father - to bring him around to the idea of adventuring. Then again, there are parts of this book that remind me of nearly every other book in this genre. There's a quest and a prophecy. Friends and enemies met along the way. A world to be saved by a chosen one, and a map for how to do that. There are more twists, though. I'm not sure I've read many of these books that contain actual death and betrayal, and then deal with the shock and grief that come in their wake. I saw Henry...

This is How You Lose Her  is a series of short stories about failed and failing relationships. All but one of the stories is about Yunior, the narrator of most of  The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao  (he dated Oscar's sister). The one that isn't about Yunior almost feels like it doesn't fit in the book at all, but it might be my favorite of the stories for that very reason. Yunior is an asshole. A jerk. A cheater. A mysoginist. A bad, bad guy despite his opening claim that he isn't. He never quite seems to grasp that "keeping" a woman involves respecting her and talking to her and treating her like a person. As far as Yunior is concerned, women are sums of their beautiful parts: hair, breasts, ass, pussy. If one isn't up to hanging out, it's no big deal to go pick up another one. And so he cheats continuously, and he never sees anything wrong with it. I was less interested in Yunior's failed relationships than the bits of his life that are r...

Holy shit. This book is the perfect example of how (and maybe why) I tend to be so behind the times in the book world. It came out three years ago, and there was a ton of hype. Everyone was talking about it. They read it in on sitting! The twist was so incredible! No one saw it coming and no one could put it down. I was skeptical (I had somewhat recently been burned by the Twilight hype). I found out what that twist was (Amy did it!) and decided I didn't want to read it. My mother-in-law even lent it to me and it sat on the side table for months while I studiously ignored it, refusing to be pulled into the hype. And then it got turned into a movie so the hype continued. But then an interesting thing happened. I continued to see people talking about  Gone Girl . About Gillian Flynn's other books. I read one of her short stories and was intrigued. It seemed like there might be something more here than an unexpected twist midway through the book. So when I saw it at the used...

Somewhere along the way, the Wheel of Time books became comfort reads. I don't necessarily need anything to happen. There are 6 books left to tie up loose ends (and one prequel that details how two characters met). I know many of the big plot points that are yet to come. In the meantime, I'm content to sit back and hang out with these characters in this world. Some still bug me, but it's the sort of affectionate annoyance you get for younger siblings. Oh Perrin, I'll think as I shake my head, will you ever figure out this marriage thing? Kudos to Robert Jordan for creating such an incredibly detailed and immersive world. With so many well-realized characters. Yes, I still have to look many of them up, especially the tertiary characters who only seem to show up once every other book. But a quick trip to the WoT wiki is enough to jog my memory. In the meantime, I'm learning more about the geography, history, and politics of this world than I think I ever knew about ...

Immediately after meeting Miles' clone, Mark, in  Brothers in Arms , we get to spend a ton of time inside his head in  Mirror Dance . The chapters alternate between Mark and Miles as they both struggle to come to terms with the idea of having a brother. Among political intrigue and epic fights, of course. The book opens with Mark attempting to free some of his fellow clones from House Bharaputra on Jackson's Whole. Unbeknownst to him is that Miles has a rough history with another house. Which becomes a problem, since Mark is impersonating Miles to pull this off. He fails swiftly and spectacularly, and Miles has to ride in to the rescue. Then their positions are flipped, and Mark has to figure out how to save Miles. There's some great action at both the beginning and the end of this book. The middle slows down significantly in order to take an extended pit stop on Barrayar, so Miles can get to know his biological parents. I'd forgotten how much I loved (and missed) C...

I felt a little bad when I abandoned  Middlemarch  after 120 pages. I don't often abandon books, and there's always some residual guilt that comes along with it. But then I picked up Junot Diaz's  The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , and I fell head over heels in love on practically the first page. This is why I let myself abandon books - so I have more time to spend with the ones I enjoy. The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao  is not just about Oscar Wao. It's about his entire family, going back to the time of his grandfather, who was cursed. The entire family struggles with the curse, coming back again and again to play out the same tragedies, unable to break free. But it's also about the Dominican Republic, the immigrant experience in America and diaspora. About not really being able to go home, but not quite fitting in in your new home either. It's about the toxicity of machismo culture, which Oscar struggles to live up to his entire life and Lola may o...

Ugh. Okay. It may be unfair of me to "review" this book, since I didn't make it very far. But I've talked about other books I've abandoned, so I'm talking about this one, too. Middlemarch  is one of those beloved classics that everyone is supposed to have read. It's a staple of literature, telling the story of a small, English town in the early 1800s. A sprawling tale, encompassing a wealth of people and years. And it is so goddamned boring. I couldn't bring myself to care about any of these characters. Whether that's because there were too many, meaning that as soon as I might care about someone they disappeared, or whether they were actually just caricatures (the prissy maiden, the uptight doctor, the foolish eldest son), or whether I just couldn't penetrate the language I have no idea. I would read a page or two, realize I hadn't absorbed any of it, and just not care to try and re-read it. What it comes down to is that I was bo...

In the third installment of Catherynne M Valente's  Fairyland  series, September is growing up. She's worried she won't even be able to return to Fairyland this year, but that quickly becomes the least of her problems. She has to find her friends, confront her fate, battle a yeti, and deal with all the confusing emotions that come with growing up and falling in love. Valente's prose is, as always, enchanting. The narrator shares more than a few insights and jokes with the reader. There's things September isn't ready to learn. Things that children reading this book would probably skip right over. Wisdom you only really earn by growing up the hard way, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when you can't provide easy shortcuts for the younger set. This whole series is really just lovely to read. It's the sort of language you can get lost in, and I was moved to tears more than once. September's journey to adulthood is at once specific and common...

I've been waiting to get to this book practically since I started reading the Vorkosigan series. Not this book in the sense that I really wanted to read  Brothers in Arms . But things happen here that I've been waiting a long time for. Miles finally visits Earth! I wasn't entirely sure, back at the beginning of the series, if Earth was still an inhabited planet, or even a habitable planet, or if it ever had been in this universe. It slowly became clear that the Vorkosigan universe did start with Earth, and it was fun to visit. It remains a cultural hub and the most populated (and livable) planet, even if it doesn't have the most military or economic might in the known universe. But more importantly, this is the book where we finally meet Miles' clone, Mark. Though he doesn't get that name until close to the end of the story. I'd been spoiled for his eventual appearance by reading summaries of the books while I was trying to figure out their order. I've...

Boy, Snow, Bird  is Helen Oyeyemi's latest book and the third one of hers that I've read. It got a lot of attention last year, and after I fell deeply in love with  Mr. Fox , I had to pick this one up. This one didn't speak to me on quite the level that  Mr. Fox  did, and I really didn't like the ending, but it's overall a good book and an interesting meditation on race and womanhood. This story uses the framework of Snow White to comment on beauty and families and secrets. Boy doesn't set out to become a wicked stepmother, and she sort of redeems herself by the end, but she does send Snow away, jealous on some level of her beauty. Snow was born to a couple who were both from light-skinned black families. They had fled the south for Massachusetts, where they were able to pass as white. And the whole family was overjoyed when Snow was born lighter than anyone else in the family, beautiful and with a life of opportunities ahead of her. Of course her mother die...