Bookish Thoughts

Jingo was a good book to be reading during the election debacle. It may not make anything better, but it's a nice reminder that we've had these problems for a long time and we've been fighting them for a long time. I may be disappointed that we seem to be falling back on old habits rather than moving forward into a bright future. But things are better than they were, and things will continue to get better, because there are and always have been and always will be people who disagree with what apparently remains the status quo. Jingo is about war and the futility of war and patriotism and when it goes too far. It's about fighting people just because they're from a different place or look a little different and how completely stupid that is. It's about all the assumptions we make about "them" and how unfounded and false those assumptions tend to be. In short, this is a wonderful book about a lot of deeper themes that seem especially relevant in toda...

Sarah gave me this book for Halloween, with the thought that short stories would be better for my postpartum brain. Which both did and didn't work out. It might have gone better if I'd found the stories more captivating. Or shorter. As it was, it took me a really long time to get through this book, and that wasn't all due to my sleep deprivation and lack of attention. Kelly Link's stories are all somewhat meandering. And they don't really ever conclude. Just when things start to get interesting they end, often on a cliffhanger. Sometimes this works out. But more often than not I was confused, lost, and just plain uninterested. There were a couple of stories I found interesting. But for the most part this collection fell a little flat for me. It's possible that I would have liked this better if I'd read it at a different time. But with a newborn, I needed something easy to read. And it turns out that short doesn't really equate with easy. A lot of the...

I had wanted to get this review written before I went into labor. But that didn't quite happen. So now I'm here, over a month later, trying to remember what I did and didn't like about this book so I can write about it. At least I managed to finish reading it before I had my kid. Words of Radiance is the second in Sanderson's epic Stormlight Archive, which is supposed to be ten books long. As such, it's a bit hard to judge on it's own. More stuff happens than in the first book, and in some ways the plot advances a lot farther than I expected it to. But it's still mostly about setting things up. This book focuses on Shallan for it's flashbacks, which made me really happy. She's probably my favorite character, at least of the main characters, and her flashbacks do a lot to make her more complex and to explain why she is that way. Although Sanderson holds back his big reveal, which is actually the very beginning of her arc, forever, which had me wo...

I really like Gillian Flynn's books. They're twisty and turny and they don't shy away from the darker aspects of human nature, making for some great psychological thrillers. But I am glad that they tend to be shorter and that she's not all that prolific. Because these books can be hard to read. Reading about horrible people doing horrible things and all the damage they leave in their wake is emotionally draining. But it's so interesting that I can't stop. Sharp Objects is actually Flynn's first book, meaning I've worked my way through her books in reverse. But it's just as dark and compelling as her other books, at least in my opinion. The narrator is a journalist who was abused by her mother and driven to self harm. Fresh out of a stint in a psychiatric hospital, she's sent back to her hometown to report on the disappearances and subsequent murders of two local girls. Which would be bad enough even if she weren't staying in her mother...

I should start this review by saying that I'm not really a fan of this trend of publishing supplemental material in e-book format only. I suppose it makes it easier to fill out background in long series, by not worrying about the printing costs of the short stories and novellas used to flesh out the minor characters. But it makes me feel like my bookshelves are missing something. And I still don't entirely trust that e-publications are really mine to keep forever. With that out of the way, I did download and read The Butcher of Anderson Station , the first novella of The Expanse series, published between the first and second books. At 9000 words, it's really more of a short story, and it didn't take long to read at all. But it fills in some important background. Both how Fred Johnson earned the moniker of butcher and how he joined up with the OPA. The story cuts back and forth between Johnson's memories of Anderson Station and his interrogation by Anderson Dawes...

Sometimes you find out that one of your favorite authors has written about one of your favorite topics and you end up with a new favorite book. It's one of the best experiences you can have as a reader - when a book perfectly meets your sky-high expectations. I started reading Robin McKinley years ago for her fantastic retellings of classic fairy-tales. She's great at taking the traditional damsel in distress and giving her enough strength and motivation to solve her own problems. And those strengths are less about fighting and more about family and friendship and nurturing. They're traits that are traditionally seen as feminine being raised to heroic status because it's through them that the princess saves the day. So when I found out she'd turned her focus to vampires for a book, I knew I had to get my hands on it. If you didn't grow up with Buffy , it's perhaps strange to describe a vampire book, particularly one where the vampires are definitely scar...

After yet another re-read, Hogfather remains one of my favorite comfort-reads. It's one of the best Discworld books, with a strong through line about the power of belief and starring two of the best characters: Death and his granddaughter, Susan. The interesting thing about this book is that it actually works better on re-reads. It takes a while for some of the plot threads to come together and for he various reveals to be made. Which can make it incredibly confusing in the beginning. But once you know the basic point of the story, everything slots neatly into place. The mystery may be gone, but many of the early scenes take on a new richness and humor that more than make up for it. Even better, I'm still picking up on things that I either missed or forgot the first time through. It takes a while for the Discworld books to get this dense and rewarding (and some of them never really do), but it makes the series so worth it. This book works well on it's own, but it wor...

Born With Teeth is not at all what I've come to expect from celebrity memoirs. Granted, most of the celebrity memoirs I've read lately have been from comedians. Still, they tended to be light, quick reads. Even the ones that tackled heavier subjects went by pretty fast. This wasn't the case with Kate Mulgrew's memoir, which took me a week to read. And not just because of my pregnancy-induced exhaustion. There's a lot in this book, and it all adds up to Mulgrew being an extraordinary (and distinctly Irish-Catholic) woman. Mulgrew's memoirs is somewhat less focused on the acting aspect of her life than I expected. She mentions most of the TV shows and plays she acted in, and of course she devotes a chapter to Voyager. But there are also chapters devoted to her relationships and romances, her various adventures around the world, and her family. Even though Mulgrew wanted to be an actress from a very young age and worked incredibly hard to achieve that dream (and...

Last year I was hearing a ton about Daniel Jose Older. Both this book and Half-Resurrection Blues  had just come out and they were receiving great reviews. I was excited to read both of them, but I got my hands on Half-Resurrection Blues  first. Sadly, that book was a bit of a let down. It wasn't horrible, just not as good as I'd been expecting. It wasn't enough to dampen my excitement for Shadowshaper , though. In fact, it may have been a good thing that Half-Resurrection Blues  lowered my expectations a bit. Or maybe it didn't need to. But at any rate, I loved this book. It was an excellent, magical, coming-of-age tale about a young girl in Brooklyn. Sierra has a family history of magic, but it's been hidden from her. And now that magic is dying, and it looks like it's going to be up to her to save it before her heritage dies out completely. It's a nice metaphor for the children of immigrants, struggling to find a way to honor their family history and ...

I started hearing about The Expanse months ago. And then I kept hearing about it. And the more I heard, the more it sounded like something I would like. But I couldn't figure out how to watch it. The final episodes were streaming with a cable password, but there was no way to watch the first few episodes. So I broke down and bought the book. It's actually the first in a series that will eventually have 9 books and a similar amount of novellas. The first season of the TV shows only appears to cover the first half of the first book. So I don't entirely know what's going to happen with that ultimately. But the good news is that the book is really good. So good that I went out and bought the first season of the TV show on Blu-Ray. The story takes place in the middle future. Humanity has managed to colonize the moon and Mars and is working to terraform them. There are mining operations and way-stations in the asteroid belt and some research outposts on the moons of Jupit...

By the time I got to the fourth and final Sharing Knife  book, I was used to the slow, meandering pace of these books. I was happy to just hang out in this world with these characters for a couple hundred pages until the excitement started. Bujold has created a fascinating world and populated it with a wealth of nice, interesting characters who I enjoyed spending time with. If there's a fault with this book (and series really), it's that Bujold can't quite bring herself to let anything all that bad happen to her characters. There's certainly something to be said for that. It's nice to read a book where you know everyone will be safe. Though it does drain a lot of suspense out of the action scenes. This is all to say that it took a while for this story to grow on me. It's slow and not much happens, which is different from a lot of stories you get. But I did end up coming around, and I ended up really liking this book and series. I can definitely see myself re...

The sixth volume of Saga takes a much-needed leap forward in time. While I've enjoyed the series a lot so far, I was starting to feel daunted by how long it was potentially going to last. If it was supposed to cover the life of Hazel and she spent the first 5 volumes as an infant (maybe she aged up to toddler? I can't remember), then the series would never end. But when the story picks back up, Hazel is school-aged, probably 6 or 7 years old. It's refreshing to have Hazel take a more active role in her own story. She makes new friends, pushes the plot forward, and is generally a lot more interesting than she was as an infant. It's nice that everyone else has been propelled into the future, too. It's allowed for some new normals to take hold, for characters to establish patterns and relationships rather than being in a constant state of upheaval. I'll admit that I was somewhat lost in parts of this volume. Even moreso than when I read volume 5, where I was ex...

I feel like Career of Evil needs to be reviewed two separate books. The first is the mystery, which is very good and had me guessing until the end (mostly because I missed something pretty obvious). The second is the interpersonal drama Robin and Cormoran are dealing with, which was a mixed bag. The mystery centers on someone who is out to get Cormoran. He starts by mailing the leg of a dead girl to the office. Cormoran immediately comes up with four suspects, because that's the line of work he's in, and most of the book is devoted to eliminating them, one by one, until the last one left is the guilty party. I became convinced early on that the true culprit was none of the men Cormoran identified. Somehow I landed on the theory that it was the son of one of them, even though the text really doesn't support this. Regardless, I got so wrapped up in it that I didn't even come close to actually solving the mystery. But that's okay. I liked that we got a bunch of sc...

The third book in Bujold's Sharing Knife  series is incredibly slow. It follows the first half of Dag and Fawn's honeymoon. Which is largely an idyllic time. Which is kind of boring. Most of the book chronicles their trip downriver on a boat. But it takes about 100 pages to get there. And since it's clear that that's where everything is leading, I was just impatient to get there. Instead Bujold spends a lot of time setting up new characters and potential conflicts and generally building up the world a bit. The climax does eventually kick in, and it's thrilling a satisfying. But I struggled with the rest of the book. What's interesting is that I'm finding I like it better in retrospect (and having finished the fourth book). Bujold ultimately convinced me that it was fun to just hang out in this world with these characters, and I'm remembering the book fondly. I'd probably enjoy it more on a re-read than I did the first time through.

I'll admit that I came in to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child with low expectations. I've been slowly losing interest in JK Rowling's version of the wizarding world for years now. More and more she sticks to a narrow, unresearched view of a world that pales in comparison with the things fans have come up with. She takes credit for diversity after the fact (revealing that Dumbledore is gay or allowing Hermione to be black) without ever explicitly including it in her work. (It shows up in this story in the obvious chemistry between Albus and Scorpius, paired with the shoe-horned in inevitability of Scorpius/Rose). I've been actively consuming Harry Potter fanfiction since I was in high school. Frankly, the world that the fans have come up with is more interesting and more thought-out than the so-called canon. I read this book mostly because I saw fans complaining about it, and I still love the franchise enough to see what all the fuss was about. And I paid full price ...

Come As You Are  is the rare book that you can actually judge by its cover. Which I did. I'd heard the book was good and interesting. But it was the cover art that actually sold me on it. Well, that and a friend recommending it for our struggling book club. This book is all about women's sexuality and the recent research that somehow fails to bust many of the most prevalent myths surrounding it. It goes through those myths systematically breaking them down and replacing them with new theories that aim to describe women as something other than "men, but broken", at least when it comes to sex and orgasms. It gets a little bit repetitive at times. And I was actually already aware of a good chunk of the information presented, thanks to being a smart, curious woman with access to the internet. But there were some chapters with new-to-me information that I found interesting. The style of the book actually took me the most by surprise. It seemed to be aimed specificall...

The second Sharing Knife book picks up mere hours after the first one ends, and then it takes a while to get started. A lot of that is probably due to the fact that the book was split up in separate installments to sell better. But it works out alright if you read them back to back. And when the action finally does kick in, it's well worth the wait. This pick, as I expected, picks up and ties off most of the threads that were left dangling at the end of the previous book. Fawn's family has been mollified, but there's still the issue of Dag's family. Fawn and Dag are firmly a couple at this point, so there's less courtship and more stability between them. Which means a bit less excitement. Which means that it's time for the monsters to come back. And Fawn can use all the stuff she learned in the previous book to save the day. There's a lot of fun world building in this book. A lot of characters working at cross purposes to either uphold the status quo (wh...

My first time through the Discworld series, I didn't fully appreciate the City Watch books. Sure, they were fun and funny. But I always enjoyed the books about Death or the Witches more. This time through, however, I'm finding new depths in the City Watch that has me falling even deeper in love with this series than I was before. Whether that's because I've matured as a reader or a person, or if I'm just catching more the second time around is hard to say. But these books more than any others have me glad that I'm revisiting this series. I think I've mentioned before that Discworld is a good series to grow with. Not grow from childhood to adulthood, like Harry Potter . They're good for your twenties, when you're figuring out what kind of adult you want to be. Pratchett's growth as a writer mirrored and informed my growth as a socially-conscious human. But I think I reached this book slightly before I had the context and vocabulary to deal wit...

This may be the longest I've gone between buying a book and reading that book. I picked it up at a used book store a year and a half ago because it was written by Lois McMaster Bujold. But then I found out that it was part of a series and, this being Bujold, I knew I'd want to read the whole series. What's more, the series is supposed to be more like a single novel broken into four installments than four distinct books. So I waited and looked for the other books and never found them and this one sat neglected on my shelf. This may have been a good thing. In my quest for the rest of the series I learned that, while it's billed as fantasy, it's much closer to romance. That knowledge helped me adjust my expectations. I knew going in that the book was going to focus more on the relationship between Dag and Fawn than on the supernatural malices that populated their world. And in reading The Vorkosigan Series I came to expect Bujold's fondness for May-December roma...

I had been planning to hold off on Brandon Sanderson's epic Stormlight Archive. It's supposed to be 10 books long, and only two of them are published so far. I didn't want this to turn into the sort of situation where I wait so long for the next book that I end up giving up on the series altogether. Waiting until The Wheel of Time was completed worked well for me, and I had planned to apply the same principle here. But in reading Sanderson's other works and blog, I eventually started to realize that the Cosmere isn't really something to be read series by series. It's large and intricate and he's building it as he goes. It makes more sense to read all of his book in publication order to pick up on the clues (and then go read some more on the internet because other people do a better job of spotting and explaining those clues). Besides which, I needed something long to get me through the move so I wouldn't be tempted to go buy more books while we were s...

This is a sweet little ghost story about the things you can't outrun, the things you can't leave behind, the things that refuse to let you go. It follows Rose, who was killed on prom night and now spends her time hitchhiking across the country. Sometimes she accompanies people to their death, sometimes she's able to save them, sometimes she's just along for the ride for a time. It's an urban legend you've probably heard of, and it's a lot of fun to see it from the other perspective. In the beginning, the story jumps back and forth through time a lot. But as it approaches the present, it becomes more linear. Which makes a lot of sense, as this is when Rose, who is telling her own story, starts to gain a sense of purpose and to care about how events follow one after another. Early on, she's just going through the motions and it hardly matters if it's the 1960s or the 1990s. But as she grows, that timeline does start mattering. It's a lot of fun t...

This book was fantastic. I shouldn't have expected anything less from Sanderson, of course. He always does an amazing job of creating intricate world, captivating magic systems, and complex characters with conflicting motives and goals. Even though he writes incredibly long books, I always get sucked in and finish them much faster than I expect to (which is saying something for me). Warbreaker is a bit of an anomaly. At least, I expected it to be. While you can buy a physical copy, the entire book is available for free, online. Indeed, every draft from the roughest first draft through the first printed edition is available in full, as part of an attempt by Sanderson to connect with his fans. As such, I sort of expected a less-than-stellar book. Why else would it still be free five years after it was published? It also doesn't help that the cover is truly awful. I've come around on it a little bit, but I still can't figure out whether it's supposed to be depicti...

Mary Roach is a delight. Her books are often filed under pop-science, though I think they have more of a historical lean than a scientific one. She picks a topic and then delves into all the interesting little nooks and crannies, resulting in books that are equal parts hilarious and informative. I read Bonk (about the study of human sexuality) ages ago. (Actually, it was the book I was reading when I moved from Colorado to Virginia). Picking up Stiff reminded me that I need to track down the rest of her books. Stiff is about the historical use of human cadavers. They've mostly been used in medicine, everything from organ transplants to labs for student surgeons to strange, traditional treatments. But there have been other uses as well, particularly in the auto industry and the military as we search for ways to make dangerous things safer. There are also chapters about cannibalism (mostly urban legends, from what I gathered) and the disposal of human bodies. For the most part...

It's a little hard to judge White Sand , because it's very obviously the first third of a novel. There are a lot of introductions and a good amount of setup. Then just when things are really starting to get interesting, the book ends. On the bright side, I'm really looking forward to the second installment. Unfortunately, there isn't a release date for it yet. But let's focus on the first volume, which introduces a new world, a new system of magic, and a shocking number of characters. The story opens with the sand mages, and I really though we'd be spending the bulk of the story with them and their desert-society and intricate magic. But it doesn't take long for the story to veer off in a completely different direction. The world quickly expands, new characters and societies are introduced, and by the end we've got a suitably complicated world. There are warring factions. People who disapprove of each other. People who've never even heard of each...

This was a lovely, quick read that probed deeply into questions of responsibility and free will. I've come to expect nothing less from Bujold. The first Penric story managed to make demon possession into an almost cuddly coming of age tale. So it's no surprise that she manages to do the same thing with a grisly murder. The story shifts between three points of view: Penric (and his demon), a murderer on the run from authorities, and the man hunting the murderer. The fun comes in the fact that they're all incredibly sympathetic. Even the murderer. Bujold hasn't written a pure villain since Falling Free , so I should have expected that there would be more to the story than met the eye. I also love the world that Bujold set this story in, and I'm always glad for a chance to return to it. The Curse of Chalion  is how I found her in the first place, so this setting has a special place in my heart. The world is a little disparate. Other than the gods, it's hard to ...

Although Lumberjanes has since been promoted to ongoing comic, it was originally intended to be 8 issues long. As such, the first and second volume (which contain those 8 issues) make for a nice, complete story. Which means that, as much as I've enjoyed this series, I'll probably stop here. But this was a great story about girls at camp confronting supernatural creatures. I probably should have re-read the first volume to refresh myself on the story so far. But it didn't take me too long to settle back into this story. And I was able to figure out most of what I needed to know from context. I probably missed out on some suspense, but that's alright. I can always read the two volumes back to back in the future to get the complete story. For now, the back half of the story actually works pretty well on its own. It helps that the main villain is introduced here, having lurked in the shadows for the first four issues. And now that the friendships between the main girls...

I really ought to have picked up this book ages ago. I loved Marie Brennan's Onyx Court  series, and this one has dragons. I put it off because it got somewhat mixed reviews. But then the good ones started to outweigh the bad ones and I decided to give it a shot. The good news is that now I don't have to wait too long for the final book to come out. I can read through the whole series pretty quickly. The series is about dragons, but from a scientific perspective and with a Victorian slant. As such, it's a bit slower than a typical dragon story.  The focus is more on learning and discovery than fire and treasure. But that doesn't mean there isn't action. The book has more than one thrilling dragon attack, it's just that the dragons are treated as animals rather than mythical creatures. Like big cats or bears. The book is structured as a memoir. The aging Lady Trent is finally telling the truth about her youthful adventures and how she came to be a leading e...

The Hero and the Crown is a prequel to The Blue Sword , and I think it's the superior book. It tells the story of Aerin, the hero Harry spends much of The Blue Sword trying to live up to, and it reveals that she's just as human as anyone else. Mostly. This story takes place a few generations before the other one, and there are some pretty significant cultural differences between the two. One of the fun parts of this book was seeing how many of those changes were initiated by Aerin. For example, she begins riding a horse without reins so as to better handle a sword while doing so, and that eventually filters out to the next generation of warriors. It really speaks to the sort of influential figure she becomes. There were other fun parallels between the two books, including a conversation that is repeated verbatim several decades later. But the real reason I liked this book better is the pacing. That's tied somewhat to Aerin being a more active character. She takes the ...

Robin McKinley has quickly become one of those authors whose books I will always pick up. Even when I know next to nothing about them, I know I'm in for a thoughtful fantasy adventure that will be worth my time. The Blue Sword  is a well-loved story about a young woman who chafes at society's restrictions on young women. But after she's kidnapped she gets a chance to live the life she's always wanted. The story is a lot of fun, and the world is really rich. If I have one complaint it's that Harry (short for Angharad) is proud to a fault. And that fault is that she never asks any questions. She's goes with the flow so well that I started to get frustrated. This girl is kidnapped, told she has magical powers and a destiny, trained for battle, and sent into a competition to determine her skills, and she just accepts all of it. There are a few scenes where she misses her family, sort of. But she never gets angry or even curious really. I think this also contri...

I read the sequel to this book, This Book is Full of Spiders , a few years ago. I liked it fine. People tend to get fanatically devoted to these books, and I felt like the sequel didn't live up to the hype. I enjoyed it but not as much as I'd expected to. Still, when I saw the first one at a library sale, I felt like it was worth picking up. That was a mistake. Sure, this book is a head trip of a horror novel. It combines absurdity with out-of-nowhere plot twists to keep the reader feeling off balance. And that's all find and good. The problem is the rampant immaturity in this book. I think it's partially on purpose. The guys tasked with saving the world are woefully unprepared, and that's where some of the humor comes from. They're twenty-something slackers who act like they're still in high school. By which I mean that the protagonists of YA novels tend to be more thoughtful and level-headed than these two. What really got to me were the frequent slu...

Going back through the Discworld series has reminded me just how much I love the witches. And that reminder prompted me to look up why I'd forgotten. It turns out there's only one more book featuring the witches, which is sad. Although that is one of my favorite books in the entire series. And there's still all of Tiffany Aching to look forward to. Still, this book introduces the incomparable Agnes Nitt, and it's a shame that she's only in one more book. She's a wonderful character, constantly struggling between being polite and not being a doormat. She wants to be seen for who she is, rather than what she looks like, but she's still struggling to figure out who she is and who she wants to be. That may or may not be a with, but it's definitely not propping other people out without any recognition. Maskerade is a lovely send-up of The Phantom of the Opera , with Agnes in the role of a much stronger and smarter Christine. Though that's entirely b...

I probably shouldn't have read another book about a circus so close on the heels of The Night Circus . There was just no way it could live up to that magical story. Which isn't to say that this book is bad. Although I do think it lacked that little something special that would make it memorable. The book was fine, and I enjoyed it. It's just not one that I'm going to be returning to or thinking about for much longer. The story is pretty straightforward. A man drops out of vet school when his parents die and leave him penniless. He joins a struggling circus where he cares for the animals and falls in love with a performer who's married to an abusive man. Of course, he's the only one in the circus who cares that her husband is a complete jerk. They bond over an elephant who only speaks Polish and ultimately live happily ever after. Except that the entire story is told retroactively from the a very sad, lonely retirement home. That summary is probably not ent...

Men We Reaped  is a very good, very difficult book. It will break your heart without offering any hope or comfort. There are no solutions to the problems presented here, just hope that knowledge of the problems might lead to change. Over the course of five years, Jesmyn Ward lost 5 of her friends and family members. They were killed by drugs and guns, by drunk drivers and personal demons. They were killed, ultimately by a nameless, faceless "they", a society that couldn't be bothered to care whether they lived or died. Ward approaches the story from two directions. She presents the deaths in reverse chronological order, alternating with chapters of her childhood in Mississippi. This structure allows her to build to the heart of her grief: the death of her brother when he was 19 years old. Killed by a drunk driver who ultimately served 5 months in jail for fleeing the scene. The structure lends itself very well to the story. As the deaths advance back in time, Ward b...

I still want to live in this book. I suppose I'll just have to settle for re-visiting it once a year or so. The Night Circus is a fantastic, romantic story with just enough magic to intrigue and just enough description to let the reader's imagination run wild. It's a comfortable book, and it's perfect to take on vacation. I liked it even better the second time through. I knew what was going to happen, so I was able to meander through the book a little more. I took my time and stretched out, and I caught a bunch of things I skipped right by on the first time when I just wanted to know how it all ended up. I still read it in essentially one sitting, but that's just because I happened to be at an airport and on a plane without much else to do. The story felt richer this time around, as I picked up on some thematic background that I'd missed the first time through. Most notably the fear of ending up along that gets threaded through the story and ultimately pu...

With this act, I bring one death into the world . That quote has been circling in my head since early in my pregnancy. It's something I've been trying to come to terms with, but I'm not sure I ever really will. We created a life. A whole entire life. And it's quickly going to get beyond our control. Thanks to this quote, I've been pulled to re-read this book for months now. It took me a while to get around to it. It always does. My stack of books is big enough that months often pass between me deciding to read something and actually reading it. Sometimes years. In this case, the delay ended up working out well. I re-read Barrayar when I was just about 5 months pregnant, which is how pregnant Cordelia is when the attempt on Aral's life throws everything into chaos and her fetus is transplanted to a uterine replicator with slim hope for survival. It's not often that you get a science-fiction book about pregnancy. I can't think of any others off th...

It's been a few years since I started the Vorkosigan series, and I wanted to go back and revisit the beginning for a number of reasons. Partly because the only unread book I have left is the new Cordelia book, and I wanted to brush up on her and Aral's relationship before I picked that up. And partly because Cordelia's pregnancy in Barrayar has been on my mind since I got pregnant. Shards of Honor is short and in the same omnibus as Barrayar , so it was easy to just go ahead and read it, too. I was worried that this book wouldn't hold up. The series as a whole gets much better as it progresses, both as the world becomes more detailed and as Bujold becomes a better writer. Plus, I tried to make Kevin read this once, and he never finished it. So I was pleased to discover that I enjoyed this book even more the second time through. A lot of that is how familiar I am with these worlds now. The history of Barrayar is familiar to me, so I'm not constantly puzzling ou...

Ever since I read Gone Girl , I've been wanting to read the rest of Gillian Flynn's work. She's amazing at creating dark, creepy scenarios that keep you guessing. It's not the sort of thing I want to read all the time. But every now and then they're a lot of fun, a nice break from what I usually read. This one follows Libby Day decades after the massacre of her family when she was seven years old. At the time she testified against her brother, who has been in jail ever since. But new evidence suggests that he may have been innocent, and Libby is finally convinced to begin investigating and coming to terms with the discrepancies between her own memories and what she was subtly coached to say. The narrative flips back and forth between Libby's quest in the present and the actions of her mother and brother on the day of the murder. The structure kept the tension high as it seemed to reveal and then deny both motive and opportunity for various characters. And th...

I saw the movie based on this book ages ago. My mom read the book at about the same time, but I didn't pick it up. It was during a time in my life that I wanted light and easy books, escapist fantasies. This book was a bit too heavy for me to commit to. But I did eventually get around to it. And I'm glad I did. It's a beautiful rumination on friendship and family. On class and culture. On guilt and atonement. It's about the ties that nothing, not distance or time or betrayal, can break completely. We first meet the protagonist, Amir, as a young boy in Afghanistan. His father is a wealthy businessman and great philanthropist. They live comfortably, in a nice house with servants. Amir's father gives back to the community in every way he can, from building and funding an orphanage to giving money to every homeless person he comes across. His great disappointment is Amir, who is constantly failing to live up to his expectations. Amir and Hassan, the servant's ...

I should read more mysteries. I was very resistant to the idea of mysteries a few years ago, but I think that's because my experience with the genre began and ended with Dan Brown. As lauded as he is (or was), he doesn't write very good mysteries. I always figured out the answer before the characters, and then felt like the characters were stupid for not seeing the answer. But it turns out that there's a lot of really good mysteries out there that do keep me guessing until the end. The latest of these is Tana French's In the Woods , which kicks off the Dublin Murder Squad series. Although I get the impression that each novel in the series centers on a different protagonist, making the location rather than the detective the connective tissue. It's an idea that intrigues me, and I liked the first one enough to track down then next, if only to read more of French's writing. She crafts a great mystery here, that delves into psychological thriller territory. The ...

Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye , is a classic for a reason. The language is lovely, straddling the line between poetry and prose. And the subject matter is heavy, with more layers revealed the longer you sit with it. Structurally, Morrison reminds me of Ray Bradbury, though that could just be because I read Dandelion Wine  so recently. This is less of a novel and more a series of vignettes, told from multiple points of view. But unlike Dandelion Wine , where the goal was to invoke a sense of nostalgia for small towns and childhood summers, Morrison uses the various stories to demonstrate how damaging institutional racism and abuse can be. The subject of the story, Pecola, is utterly destroyed by novel's end. It's not just the various hardships she faces, both overt and more subtle, that break her down. It's her complete lack of resilience, thanks to her crappy home life and lack of real friends. There is literally no one to love her, and it ruins her li...

It's not lying. It's telling a good story. Following her previous novel about Doc Holliday meeting Wyatt Earp in Dodge City, Mary Doria Russell decided to tackle the gun fight at the OK Corral. Epitaph isn't exactly a sequel to Doc . It has the same characters, sure, and reading the first one will give you a better understanding of Doc Holliday and his relationship with Wyatt Earp, as portrayed by Russell. But this is a separate story entirely. While the story ends up focusing mostly on Wyatt Earp, Russell goes to great lengths to humanize everyone involved in the gun fight. As such, scenes are occasionally rewound to be shown from another perspective. Motives are occasionally given after the fact, but they're always given. Unless, of course, the historic record remained completely silent. Everyone had an opinion about this near-mythical gunfight and the fallout from it. There are countless contradictory accounts, and Russell did her best to sort through them all...

Ever since I read Americanah I can't get enough of Chimimanda Ngozie Adichie's work. It's a shame she's written so few books (so far), but I'm stretching them out as long as I can. Purple Hibiscus is her first novel, and it definitely reads like a first novel. Not that it's bad. It's wonderful and sad and hopeful just like her other work. But it's not as polished as the novels that came later. Not as layered or dense or long. The story is narrated by Kambili, a sheltered 15-year-old whose world-view shatters when she finally gets out from under her father's control for a brief time. Kambili is young and naive. She's been taught to worship her father, and so she does. But his abuse of her, her brother, and her mother, obvious to the reader from the beginning, becomes harder and harder for Kambili to accept. Kambili is a strange mix of naive and wise. The naivete makes sense. Every aspect of her life is controlled by her father, who will pu...

I'd been half intending to read this book for a while. It seemed like one of those books I should read, even though it only half interested me. Then I read this fantastic essay titled Men Explain Lolita to Me , and shortly after that I came across this book at a library sale. And that was that. I ended up liking this book much more than I expected to, for the most part. I entered into it worried that I would miss most of the literary references. I've only read 2/3 of Lolita , after all. But the book stretches far beyond Nabakov's most famous work, encompassing not only his other work but a wealth of classic Western authors. Most of the references are explained well enough that I was able to understand them even if I hadn't read the source material. Though the book was much more interesting when I was familiar with the work being discussed and could compare my own interpretation to that of Nafisi and her students. The book is divided into four sections. Lolita concer...

American Gods remains one of my favorite books. It's been a while since I last picked it up, but with the new upcoming television series I had to revisit it. This isn't a book I've ever been able to read quickly. The plot is slow and meandering, and I always take my time to meander through it. I just love spending time in this world where gods are real and dying. Where America is both a promise of a fresh start and a short attention span. I love the old, stubborn gods and the new, fragile, scared gods and all the little weird corners of this immense country I call home. I'm really excited to see how the television adaption plays out. They're only doing 1/3 of the book in the first season, which actually makes sense plot-wise. It's everything before Shadow gets to Laketown, which would mean that Laketown takes up the entirety of season 2 which would be great. But for now there's still a lot of exciting stuff. And I'm interested to see how the "C...

When I went to see Hamilton on Broadway a few weeks ago, I couldn't stop myself from buying Hamlton: The Revolution , a behind the scenes look at how Hamilton made it to Broadway, complete with pictures, annotated lyrics, and interviews with nearly every member of the cast and crew. The book alternates between chapters about the development of the musical and annotated song lyrics. The author even does a decent job of tying each chapter in to the song following it, which keeping things mostly chronological. There's not a ton to say about this book. If you're a fan of the musical, you'll definitely enjoy it. It's packed with fun facts and interesting tidbits. I read it really quickly (two listen throughs of the soundtrack and occasional breaks to interject some of the songs that are referenced by the musical), and it will remain on my coffee table for the foreseeable future.

After I gave up on The Dresden Files, I was in the market for another urban fantasy series. These tend to be quick, fast-paced, and fun, which adds some nice seasoning to my regular line up of books. Sometimes you just want an adventure where you don't have to think too hard. I'd been hearing a lot of good things about Daniel Jose Older lately. Between this series and his YA novel Shadowshaper (which I also still really want to read), he seemed like a pretty safe bet. It also helped that this series takes place in the same neighborhood where a friend of mine lives - I was even able to pinpoint his apartment on the map at the front of the book. So it was a little disappointing that this book didn't quite live up to my expectations. There were certainly some highlights. The neighborhood feels very real and lived and it's mostly populated by non-white characters. I also liked that after the main character gets stabbed through the abdomen he spends two weeks in bed and...

Interesting Times is arguably the worst of the Discworld books. Eric is my least favorite, but I think that has more to do with my lack of familiarity with Faust than anything else. I miss most of the jokes in that book. But in this one it's not so much that I miss the jokes as that they are awful and insensitive and the whole book is just a vehicle for delivering them. The story focuses on Rincewind, which is the first sign that I won't like it. He's interesting enough in his first books, but he fails to really grow as a character at all, so reading about him gets really repetitive. This time around he gets sent to the Agataen Empire, a conglomeration of Asian stereotypes, where he is expected to lead a revolution. But absolutely no one is interested in him actually doing that. What you end up with is a book that can't decide whether it's making fun of China or Japan because it doesn't seem to understand that there's a difference between the two. A ...

The final book in Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy was probably about 100 pages longer than it needed to be. I enjoyed these books, largely due to the incredible world-building and wonderful cast of characters. But man did this book drag on, especially towards the end. The cover promises dragons. The plot talks about dragons. There are definitely going to be dragons in this book. But not until the last 20 pages or so, when Hobb has done everything she can to make you think that maybe there won't be dragons after all. (There are dragons.) Ultimately I didn't like this book as much as the first two. It starts off better. But most of the political intrigue is traded in for a long and seemingly fruitless trek through the mountains in the winter. The ending is ultimately satisfying, but it takes so damn long to get there. I came close to giving up or just skipping ahead to the last few chapters. Which is a hefty complaint, but there was still a lot to like about this book. Ther...

I was expecting this book to be sad. It opens with the death of a sixteen-year-old girl and follows the aftermath as her family slowly falls apart. But somehow I wasn't quite prepared for just how unrelentingly tragic it is. The tragedy stretches back years, detailing the forced compromises and abandoned dreams that led to a teenage girl with more secrets than her family could even begin to suspect. Lydia's death is the mystery at the heart of the book. Was it murder or suicide? What could have compelled her to leave her house in the middle of the night? Answering these questions takes you back to not just Lydia's childhood, but to her parents' courtship and their childhoods as well. Her father is Chinese-American, and he spend his whole life wanting to blend in. Her mother is determined to be a doctor, to study physics, to do anything but end up as a housewife like her mother. But those dreams are deferred in favor of her kids, and then deferred again and again unt...

The second book in NK Jemisin's Dreamblood  duology picks up ten years after the end of the first one. It follows a mostly new cast of characters, primarily the son of the deposed king and the first woman allowed to train as a priest. The characters from the first book do appear, though they are older and more cynical this time around. This book sets aside many of the questions of the previous book, notably the discussion around end of life care and assisted death. Instead it focuses on the way cultures change with time, how they deal and fail to deal when that change is imposed from the outside, and how they go about reclaiming themselves. This book is about a revolution. The people of Gujaareh have been under Kisuati rule for a decade now, in the wake of their corrupt prince's death. They have begun to chafe under that rule and are looking for a way to reclaim their city, even if it means returning to the system that so recently failed them. Jemisin is fantastic at crea...

It took me a while to recognize the shape of this story. It's billed as science fiction, but it doesn't read like the science fiction I'm used to. I spent a lot of time looking for clues that this story took place in the future as opposed to the past. They're there, but they're subtle and not really relevant to the story. Tigers are extinct. Computers are ubiquitous but old and rarely used. It eventually became clear that the creation myth in this world is also the story of the end of the world as we know it. But this book actually has more elements of fantasy. Magic is real. Our main character is a sorcerer-in-training. She can turn into animals and visit the world of the dead. Her lover is also magically inclined and a fantastic healer, though he doesn't pass the initiation rite necessary to becoming a sorcerer. There's a wonderful amount of magic and even that hallmark of fantasy literature: dragons. This all helps to obscure the fact that the book take...

Dandelion Wine is a book steeped in nostalgia. On the surface it's about being twelve years old in the summer time. But it's also about remembering being twelve years old in the summer time. It's about growing up and growing old, remembering your past and letting it go. This book is more a series of connected short stories. They all take place in the same town, and they're all observed and commented on by Douglas and his brother, Tom. They're the main players in a few of the stories, but in others they're just on the fringes. As will happen in a short story collection, even an informal one like this, I liked some stories better than others. I really liked the commentary of the two boys as they struggled to make sense of an adult world. And I liked the overall feel of the book. Bradbury's language is very poetic, well-suited to describing childhood summers. There were some elements of science-fiction (a happiness machine) and magic (the cure for a feve...

This book seemed to be all anyone was talking about last Spring. I heard fairy tales. I heard Beauty and the Beast. I heard Baba Yaga. That was enough to convince to me to stop listening until I could get my hands on the book. This book has elements of both of those stories, and other fairy tales besides, but it is very much it's own thing. Any resemblance to Beauty and the Beast or Baba Yaga is nothing more than an homage, an acknowledgment of the classics. And Uprooted  is well positioned to become one of those classics. The story follows Agnieszka as she becomes apprenticed to the local wizard lord. The relationship is contentious, and their magical styles are completely different. Watching them bristle and snipe and eventually grow to a grudging respect, and then something more, was a lot of fun. But the heart of the book is Agnieszka's relationship with her lifelong friend Kasia. Their bond is strong and beautiful. The two take turns saving each other and growing clo...

I was hesitant, going into this volume of Saga. The fourth volume felt like so much treading water, moving pieces around without really advancing the story. Then there was the fact that it's been so long since I last read any Saga that I wasn't sure I'd still be able to follow the plots. I considered re-reading the whole thing. But I ultimately picked up just the fifth volume, figuring I could go back if I needed to. I shouldn't have worried. This volume does a good job of catching everything up in the first issue. I was a little lost on one or two characters, but it didn't matter too much. I was able to follow the story well enough and the emotional beats all landed as intended. Most importantly, I really enjoyed this volume, and I think that's because a fair number of plot points finally get wrapped up. There are new plot threads spinning out, but there's also a significant time jump which necessitates a few endings. Prince Robot IV finds his kid, The...

I first heard about Scott Pilgrim in college. My memory says that this is because the movie came out, but it turns out that the movie wasn't released until two years after I'd graduated. So it must have just been that a friend really liked the comics, enough that they stuck in my mind. Regardless, they went on my to-read list, where they've been sitting ever since. For nearly a decade now. When the movie did come out, I refrained from going to see it, still intending to read the source material first. But there was always something more interesting, and I never got around to it. Until I was finally gifted the first volume this Christmas. I should have read these back in college. I probably would have enjoyed them a lot more. It's not that the story's bad. There's a cute romance and some fun jokes and some genuine weirdness that elevates this slightly above the standard rom-coms. But there were also elements that made me uncomfortable. The biggest one of th...