Bookish Thoughts

Christopher Moore is an author that people (men) always seem to think I'll love. They tell me he's hillarious, that he has an incredible grasp of the human condition which leads to reaistic and sympathetic characters you can't help but identify with. These people are wrong, and Christopher Moore remains an author that I just don't understand. Years ago I read his book, Blooduscking Fiends , which may be the worst vampire story I've ever read. And I've read then entire Twilight series. Despite this, I always felt like I ought to give Lamb  a chance. It's often held up as his best work, the book that serves as the best introduction to his work. So when I saw it at a used book sale, I picked it up. And when I listened to Jesus Christ Superstar  this past Easter, I got the itch to read another take on the man behind the myth. The good news is that this book wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. There are some genuinely insteresting ideas in here, particu...

I tend to be a year or more behind the literature world. This is mostly because I prefer paperbacks to hardbacks, and you usually have to wait a year for those. I also get most of my books used (I go through so many that this is more economical), and that usually adds another year or two to the delay. This helps me avoid some of the hype and weed out the mediocre books with good marketing teams. If people are still talking about a book two or three years after its release, odds are good that it's worth reading. I'm generally pretty good at not getting my hopes up right when a book comes out, even if it sounds like something I'd enjoy. Then again, sometimes I hear about a book and it sounds so perfect for me that I either rush out and buy it immediately or I spend an entire year itching to get my hands on it. And when a book is compared to American Gods  (one of my favorites) as often as The Library at Mount Char  was, I'm bound to obsess over it until I get my hands o...

The thrilling conclusion to Justin Cronin's Passage trilogy is certainly epic. And meandering. Once again, he jumps back into the past to flesh out the backstory of characters in the present. This time with a lengthy look into what Zero was like as a human that could almost be its own book. This sounds like a complaint, but it's not really. Cronin takes the same care with his characters and settings that Robert Jordan did in The Wheel of Time . He manages to be more concise, but only because his scope is (amazingly) smaller than Jordan's was. And because his baddies don't keep resurrecting themselves. Dead is actually dead in this world. Looking back on the trilogy as a whole, I'm glad I read it. I enjoyed it a lot. But I'm not sure I'd ever recommend it. It hit so many of my specific buttons that I'd have trouble believing someone else would like it as much as me. It's immense and slow. It's about vampires. It's a little bit mystic beyo...

Rejected Princesses was a blog before it was a book. And Kevin had no idea how much I enjoyed that blog when he bought me the book for Christmas. The author does a great deal of research into remarkable women from both history and mythology. He summarizes their stories, pointedly leaving in the messy bits, and presents each with an illustration done in the style of Disney. Each story is given a maturity rating and trigger warnings are provided if necessary. The book is arranged so that the stories get progressively more mature as you work through it. The stories are nice and short. I read one or two while I ate breakfast most mornings for a few months. They don't go into a lot of depth, but they provide a nice jumping off point for learning more about the women presented. Some of them are heroic, some are villainous, some fall somewhere in between. But they're all more complicated than a kid's movie would want to present, and Porath makes a genuine effort to leave tho...

This book was absolutely gorgeous. I picked it up without knowing anything about it because Isabelle Allende is Jane's favorite author on Jane the Virgin . I'd been wanting to wade into the romance genre and this seemed like as good a place as any to start. That said, I'm not sure this qualifies as a romance. Then again, I don't really know enough about the genre to make a claim like that. Regardless of whether it's a romance (and it does have true love and a happy ending, which is probably enough to qualify), it's also a wonderfully rich and beautiful coming-of-age tale set during the San Francisco gold rush. Eliza is a young Chilean girl, adopted and raised by Anglican parents to be a proper, upper-class Christian. But when she finds herself pregnant, she throws caution to the wind and follows her lover to San Francisco, certain that they're destined to be together. The language of this book is stunning, particularly when Allende describes young love. ...