Bookish Thoughts

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower is both rough and beautiful. It dredged up a lot of thoughts and feelings and had me balanced precariously between despair and hope for the entire story before finally weighing the scales in favor of hope at the very end. Butler creates a dystopian society in the not-to-distant future. And really, the dystopia isn't too far removed from the current state of things in the US, which made it hit all that much harder. he gap between the rich and poor has become even wider and the middle class, such as it is, is only a step above poverty. Lauren's family owns their own house and they live in a gated community. Between her father's job as a college professor, role as the community's minister, and more than a little gardening and gathering, her life seems fairly stable. But there's never an excess of food or money. There's a constant danger of drug-addicted arsonists or desperate homeless people getting over the wall and d...

The final book in Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles was everything I wanted it to be and more. Not that I wanted much from it beyond everyone getting their happy ending. Which I fully expected to happen. It's a fairy tale, after all, and what good is a fairy tale if it doesn't end "happily ever after"? But it was the road to the happily ever after that really impressed me. The book acknowledges what a difficult task it will be for a bunch of teenagers and young adults to overthrown a queen and end her tyrannical reign. It doesn't seek easy answers, though there are a fair number of happy coincidences. The book relies on the populace being ready for an uprising, and makes use of overwhelming numbers against the queen's mind control powers. The ending was nicely realistic, too. Queen Selene neé Cinder doesn't have much experience running a nation, and it shows. She relies heavily on advisers, lays all her cards on the table in negotiations, and immed...

Kushiel's Dart could essentially be summed up thus: Joscelin: You can't solve all your problems with sex Phèdre: Watch me That hides away a lot of the complexity and intrigue in this story, and glosses over the fact that Joscelin doesn't even show up until 1/3 of the way through, but it does get at the heart of what makes this book so fun and the reason I loved it as much as I did. Phèdre is a courtesan, trained to it from the age of ten. She lives in a world that holds to the doctrine "Love as thou wilt", which means that free love abounds. Everyone is aggressively bisexual, sex is both casual and an act of worship, and monogamous partnerships are formed mostly for political purposes. Phèdre herself has been cursed by one of the gods to experience pain and pleasure as one, meaning that there's also a heavy BDSM component. But Phèdre is also a spy, working in secret for her adoptive father as he attempts to unravel a plot against the throne and prote...

Men at Arms is the second of the City Watch books in the Discworld series. My first time through the series, I wasn't as interested in the watch, at least initially. Their stories tend towards murder mysteries and examinations of socioeconomic divisions and political corruption. It took a while for them to grow on me. But this time through, I'm enjoying them a lot more. This book sees the expansion of the guard in a significant way. Thanks to the Discworld version of affirmative action, the guard has been forced to expand it's members beyond the human men it has so far been populated by. So we start off with the new recruits: a dwarf, a troll, and a woman/werewolf. It's a turning point for the Discworld. This is an early instance of change being accepted, being viewed as progress. Things are getting better. The watch becomes more effective as it becomes more diverse. The end of the book doesn't return to a status quo. Instead, the ramifications here are felt thro...

The final installment in Matt Fraction's Hawkeye  arc provided a thrilling conclusion and as much closure as you can expect from what will probably be an ongoing story arc, even after Fraction moves on. Although it might have worked better if I had a better memory of the previous arcs. I'll probably need to go back and read the entire story at some point to appreciate it all. Which I hope to do this summer. This volume introduces Hawkeye's brother and reveals the ultimate plan of the tracksuit bros. I'm still a little unclear how it all ties together with Kate's adventures in LA, but it was nice to see her ride to the rescue just in time. There's a big shoot out and a siege in an apartment building. The good guys win, mostly, and everything is all right in the end. On a deeper level, there's a really great storyline in here about Hawkeye losing his hearing. Hawkeye is canonically (usually, not in the movies) deaf, so it was nice to see that come around h...

I really wanted to like this book. I wanted to fall head over heels in love with it from the moment I saw it. The book itself is gorgeous. My mother-in-law got me the hardcover version for Christmas, and I can't imagine reading it any other way. The formatting is so integral to the story-telling that I even wonder how this will work as a paperback or e-book. It's part prose, part graphic novel, with a smattering of illustrations, both colored and not, throughout. Even the pages are colored in a sepia-toned gradient to look old-timey. The switches between prose and graphic novel are handled very well, especially in the beginning. It leads to great pacing and lends a sense of loving craftsmanship to the entire book. So it was disappointing to discover that the story itself was subpar. The book jacket describes The Explorer's Guild as an action-packed adventure story in the style of Rudyard Kipling, a return to the "golden age" of adventure stories. Unfortunately ...

In the eternal debate between Star Wars and Star Trek, I always come down firmly on the side of Star Trek. It's not that I don't love Star Wars; I do. But Trek is in my blood. It's what my mom watched when I refused to sleep as an infant. The Next Generation was a constant background in my childhood. It infiltrated every aspect of my life, from my preference for Earl Grey tea to my strong belief that the world is improving and will continue to do so. Despite that, I've only every considered myself a casual fan at best. I'd only ever seen parts of any of the television shows. I've seen exactly one of the movies. I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of the Star Trek universe. I never sought out fan fiction or the novelizations of the series (though I do have my preferred ships). I certainly don't speak Klingon. For the past year and a half (ish) I've set about diving deeper into the show. I sat down and watched the first two seas...