Bookish Thoughts

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...