Bookish Thoughts

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...