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...