Bookish Thoughts

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...