Bookish Thoughts

Every now and then you come across a perfect book. Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, which has since been turned into a Tony-winning musical, is one of those times. It's a close examination of her relationship with her father, jumping back and forth through time to examine it from multiple angles, always revealing a new layer. Bechdel does a great job of capturing an immensely complicated relationship, one that has left its mark long after its conclusion. Bechdel's father gave up a glamorous overseas life to run the family funeral parlor when his own father died, shortly before Alison was born. He was strict and eccentric, clearly filled with regrets but bound to his family and hometown by duty. He died when Alison was twenty, and though the circumstances are blurry, she concludes it was suicide. It came on the heels of her decision to come out as a lesbian to her family, which was overshadowed by the revelation that her father was also gay. Her reflections on her childh...

Probably the best thing about this book is that I now have Warren Zevon's Werewolves in London stuck in my head. I won this book in the Worldbuilder's Lottery this past year. Every year, Patrick Rothfuss does a big fundraiser to raise money for Heifer International. There are auctions of donated items, and there's also a pile of stuff that goes in the lottery. Ever $10 donated earns you one drawing for the lottery. There's a lot of good stuff in there. There are also a few duds. This isn't a book I ever would have picked up on my own. And even after I won it, the main selling point was that it was short. I could read it in a couple of days. Which I did. I was half-distracted the entire time, because this book never quite captured my attention. But it relies so heavily on well-worn tropes, that even that half of my attention span followed along with the plot pretty easily. Technically this is the first book in a trilogy, which appears to be part of a larger wo...

Until recently, this was the last book in the Vorkosigan Saga . As such, reading it is a lot like hanging out with a good friend. The novel opens with Miles escaping from a kidnapping, which is the first time since Borders of Infinity that the story starts mid-action and catches the reader up as it goes. It was nice to just be thrown in immediately, without any prologue or preamble before the excitement. The mystery is pretty straightforward, and Miles does what he does best in cutting through to the center of it. The big idea in this book is cryo-freezing, and how that effects society. When people opt to be frozen instead of dying, in the hopes of extending their lifespan at some future time, then what becomes of their money? Their voting power? On this planet, it gets held in trust by corporations who are on the verge of taking over the entire world, causing an ever-widening gap between the richest and the poorest. Miles does what he does and blows this whole scheme apart with t...

Soul Music is definitely the punniest Discworld novel so far. Every other line seems to be a joke or a reference. Since the theme of this book is classic rock, most of those puns are references to real world bands and songs. It's fun to pick up on them, and that was a big part of my enjoyment of this book the first time I read it. In my memory, this was one of my favorite Discworld stories, probably because it was one of the first where I was able to pick up on all of the jokes. It also centers on Death, which is always fun, and introduces his granddaughter, Susan, who is one of the greatest characters in the entire series. But despite these highlights, this book didn't quite live up to my memory of it. I didn't dislike it, but it felt disconnected in the way Discworld books often do. There's a story about Death attempting to forget, a story about Susan attempting to fill his shoes while he's away without leave, and a story about living music possessing a yo...

Ms. Marvel continues to be a perfectly executed coming-of-age story. In this volume, Kamala finally has to confront the people in her life. She comes clean to her mom about her dual identity and she confronts the feelings between her and her friend Bruno. She also teams up with Captain Marvel to save her brother from her ex-crush. And it's all set against a backdrop of the end of the world, which gives Kamala the motivation to get a lot of this off of her chest while also providing a neat metaphor for the end of childhood. This was a pretty satisfying end, at least to Ms. Marvel's first main arch. And I think it is an end. Marvel recently revamped their entire universe. There is a Ms. Marvel Volume 5 available for pre-order on Amazon, but it starts back over at issue 1, which has me wondering how much of a reset we're looking at. Which is to say, that I'm not sure yet whether or not I'll continue with Ms. Marvel. I'll have to wait and see where the story pi...

Sanderson said that this book was a lot easier to write than Shadows of Self . He actually wrote it first, before backing up and writing the previous one. And it shows. Not that Shadows of Self  was bad, but this one was a lot more exciting. There was a lot more going on. It flowed better, and I read it faster, even though it was longer. It also helped that Sanderson refrained from killing off any more female characters, including Wax's sister, who I was really worried about up until the end. This book also started to connect more with the greater Cosmere than any of the other books I've read in that universe so far. To be fair, I wasn't aware of the Cosmere when I read the first Mistborn trilogy, so it's likely that I missed some hints in those books. But it was nice to start to see some of those wider connections. The downside of this is all the things I'm missing, or that I've already missed, or that I just forgot. I already feel like I need to go back a...

This is a book I've been hearing about for a while. Not in the "you should read this" sense; more in the "you haven't read this?" sense. From the title, I knew it took place in a strange bookstore, and I assumed there would be an element of magical realism. Used bookstores seem ripe for magical realism. Except that there isn't a fantasy element to this story at all. It could be considered science fiction by some, except for the fact that I am intimately familiar with all of the technology mentioned in this book. So what we have is a plot that seems ripped from a modern science fiction book (it reminded me of Ready Player One , had that book been well-written), but firmly rooted in the current world. The story is a bit of an adventure and a bit of a mystery. There's a code to be discovered and cracked, and an entire secret society that's been built up around this code. Add in a fantastic love interest (who also walks away and is allowed to wal...

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...