Bookish Thoughts

Jingo was a good book to be reading during the election debacle. It may not make anything better, but it's a nice reminder that we've had these problems for a long time and we've been fighting them for a long time. I may be disappointed that we seem to be falling back on old habits rather than moving forward into a bright future. But things are better than they were, and things will continue to get better, because there are and always have been and always will be people who disagree with what apparently remains the status quo. Jingo is about war and the futility of war and patriotism and when it goes too far. It's about fighting people just because they're from a different place or look a little different and how completely stupid that is. It's about all the assumptions we make about "them" and how unfounded and false those assumptions tend to be. In short, this is a wonderful book about a lot of deeper themes that seem especially relevant in toda...

Sarah gave me this book for Halloween, with the thought that short stories would be better for my postpartum brain. Which both did and didn't work out. It might have gone better if I'd found the stories more captivating. Or shorter. As it was, it took me a really long time to get through this book, and that wasn't all due to my sleep deprivation and lack of attention. Kelly Link's stories are all somewhat meandering. And they don't really ever conclude. Just when things start to get interesting they end, often on a cliffhanger. Sometimes this works out. But more often than not I was confused, lost, and just plain uninterested. There were a couple of stories I found interesting. But for the most part this collection fell a little flat for me. It's possible that I would have liked this better if I'd read it at a different time. But with a newborn, I needed something easy to read. And it turns out that short doesn't really equate with easy. A lot of the...

I had wanted to get this review written before I went into labor. But that didn't quite happen. So now I'm here, over a month later, trying to remember what I did and didn't like about this book so I can write about it. At least I managed to finish reading it before I had my kid. Words of Radiance is the second in Sanderson's epic Stormlight Archive, which is supposed to be ten books long. As such, it's a bit hard to judge on it's own. More stuff happens than in the first book, and in some ways the plot advances a lot farther than I expected it to. But it's still mostly about setting things up. This book focuses on Shallan for it's flashbacks, which made me really happy. She's probably my favorite character, at least of the main characters, and her flashbacks do a lot to make her more complex and to explain why she is that way. Although Sanderson holds back his big reveal, which is actually the very beginning of her arc, forever, which had me wo...