Bookish Thoughts

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...