Bookish Thoughts

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...