Bookish Thoughts

At this point, I think I'd consider this series better than The Hunger Games . I'm finding Tally to be a much more interesting protagonist than Katniss. Rather than let herself be made a pawn by whoever wants to play, she questions everything. She's not really on anyone's side, and that's because she's aware that everything is much more complicated than either side would like to believe. On the one hand, you have the evil government. And they are evil, there's no mistaking that. They lobotomize everyone on their sixteenth birthdays to keep the population happy and compliant. They maintain a population of primitive humans with a never-ending blood feud so they can study human violence. They've removed choice from everyone except a select few and they'll do everything in their power to maintain this status quo. But they have managed to stabilize the environment and control human population growth. The rebels, of course, are nominally the good guys....

I downloaded the complete Anne Shirley collection on my phone so that I'd have something easy and familiar to read while feeding my son. It helped that I was able to get the whole series for $1. Though I then discovered that the "complete" series only includes 6 of the 8 books for some reason, so I'll have to buy those other two when I get to them. But I've been meaning to re-read these books for a while, now, and this seemed like a good way to go about it. I don't remember having a deep connection to these books, the way so many other girls and women do. I read them in the 7th grade on the suggestion of a friend. Well, actually, I tore through them as fast as I could. And I liked them well enough. But then I moved on to other things. Mostly fantasy. I was surprised by how well the books stood up to my memory of them. There's always a danger, revisiting a book from your childhood, that you will cringe at your former self. But this book was even better ...

This was a lovely coming of age story about what it means to be a man. Set in the mid-eighties, it follows Aristotle through two summers, during which everything changes. He meets Dante, who inspires him to start swimming, reading, and questioning the constants in his life. He goes from 15 to 17 years old and also moves from boy to man in a lot of ways. There are a lot of layers to this story, but they kind of sneak up on you. The language is sparse. It's almost off-putting at first. But it makes a lot of sense for a narrator who spends so much time inside his own head and doesn't really like it there. Aristotle has a lot of anger that he doesn't know how to express. He carries a lot of baggage, mostly thanks to the world around him. His father fought in the Vietnam war and refuses to talk about it, or about anything really. His older brother is in prison, and while his mom will talk about nearly anything, she won't talk about that. So Aristotle learns not to talk a...

I've been meaning to read Zelazny for a long time now. I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction, and he's always there on the periphery. Most of my favorite authors cite him as one of their favorite authors. I get the impression that he is as foundational to the genre as Tolkien, Asimov, and LeGuin. And so when two fantastic books that I read back to back ( Among Others  and Radiance ) both referenced him, I decided it was finally time to seek  him out. While it may have made more sense to start with one of his stand-alone novels, his epic fantasy series, The Chronicles of Amber  called to me. It helped that I found the entire ten-book saga published as a single omnibus, which saved me money (at the expense of my wrists, but alas). What's interesting is that all ten books published together are the same length as a single book in Wheel of Time, The Stormlight Archive , or The Kingkiller Chronicle . Each individual book is less than 200 pages. So I was surprised whe...

This is the first of a three-part memoir, written by Congressman John Lewis. It covers his early life, from his childhood raising chickens on a farm, through meeting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and his work helping to organize and participate in the Nashville sit-ins as a college student. Lewis is a major figure from the Civil Rights movement, and his choice to present his memoir in graphic novel form makes it much more accessible to a wider audience. The story is framed through the present - or the recent past anyway. On the morning of Obama's first inauguration, Lewis meets a pair of young boys in his office and tells them the story of his life. It's a neat way to position him as both hero and human, someone who can and should be emulated. And the framing (and what has happened since) helps drive in both how far the country has come and how far it still has to go. I was really moved by this story, frequently blinking back tears. It went really quick, as graphic memoirs te...

I was surprised by how compelling how found this book, and by how much I liked the main character, Tally. It's possible that this is because I entered into this book with reduced expectations, after a decent break from YA dystopia. This isn't one of the greats of the genre, but it is a solid book (and hopefully series) with a more nuanced view of the world than you often find. Uglies  takes place in a future where everyone undergoes plastic surgery at the age of sixteen to make them "pretty". Really the goal is to make everyone look more or less the same in an effort to stamp out prejudice and create a more equitable society. But Tally doesn't know that. She just knows that she's that last of her friends to undergo the operation, being the youngest, and she can't wait to join them in adulthood. But then she meets Shay, who shares her birthday and isn't at all sure that she wants to undergo the operation. She starts talking about a group of people w...

I struggled mightily with this book. I very nearly abandoned it (and perhaps I should have). But it's a classic and it's not very long and I was already well over halfway through it. Instead I took an extended break and then picked at it, ten pages at a time, until I finally reached the end. I'm not sure whether or not I'm glad I stuck with it. I am, perhaps, glad I read it. But I can't say that I liked it very much. The language was the biggest barrier to me. It demands too much attention for me to read a paragraph at a time while keeping half an eye on my son. But neither could I sink into it for very long. After twenty pages or so I'd find myself bored. Overwhelmed by the language and trying to hold on to what I'd just read. A more generous person might say that it's a book to be savored. And perhaps it is. If you can find anything in it that you want to savor. See the real problem is that I didn't care for either Therese or Carol. I couldn...

Not only are there no happy endings, she told him, there aren't even any endings  - Neil Gaiman, American Gods When I think about trying to describe this book, the word I keep coming back to is kaleidoscope. It's a shiny, glittery, swirling ride that keeps circling back on itself with slight variations in the pattern. It's dizzying and beautiful and it doesn't want to be constrained by a single beginning, a single ending. It starts over several times, introducing beginnings late in the novel. And while the ending may be a foregone conclusion, it's also blurry and messy and happens a few times in a few different ways. More than that, Valente experiments with style in a way I've never encountered in a single novel before. It steals from just about every genre you can name: noir, gothic, fairy tale, science fiction, murder mystery, western, radio broadcast, and on and on. The blurb on the back of the book begins " Radiance  is a decopunk pulp SF, alt-histo...

While the quickest way to get me to read a book is to give it to me and then tell me you want to borrow it (which is what happened with the book I read prior to this), I do eventually get around to all the books people tell me to read. At least the ones I remember. Among Others  came onto my radar nearly five years ago at a friend's wedding. Another guest and I got to talking about books and after comparing notes she told me that I must read Jo Walton's Among Others , which had just come out. The problem is that Jo Walton is surprisingly difficult to find, in both new and used book stores (and I try to avoid Amazon for physical books, even though they're slowly sinking their claws into me with the kindle and my need to read one-handed while nursing my son). And there are a million other books on my to-read list. And so it took a while for me to stumble across this book and pick it up. But I'm so glad I finally did. In fact, I'm glad I waited as long as I did. I ...

I hadn't known that the main character in Carl Sagan's Contact  was based on a real person until my mother-in-law gave me this book for my birthday. It's a biography of Dr. Jill Tater, inspiration for Ellie Arroway, who as devoted almost her entire life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. As such, it's also a history of that field of study. The subject matter is interesting, especially when it comes to the financial struggles, under-the-table deals and slapped together technology that are more apparent in SETI than any other field of science. And Dr. Tarter is certainly an interesting woman. But I had a hard time with this book. Mostly because I still can't figure out how the author meant to organize it. There was probably a method to her madness, but I found the book jumped around too much for me to really follow the thread of Dr. Tarter's life. Her second husband is mentioned two chapters before her divorce, in a way that makes it seem like her ...

This is not a book I'd typically pick up. Having picked it up, it's not the sort of book I'd typically stick with to the end. But a coworker wrote it. She gifted it to me after I read All the Light We Cannot See  and The Book Thief  in quick succession because she assumed I was interested in WWII literature. And it's not that I'm not, but there's only so much you can read about any one topic and about WWII in particular. So going in to this, I was not particularly excited to be reading about a German soldier and his time in an American POW camp. The thing is, the story ended up being pretty interesting. There was a grace and elegance to it that was fighting to get out. But it was fighting hard through rough and stilted language. As a rough draft, it's pretty good. As a published novel, well, this is the problem with self-publishing. The book is in desperate need of an editor. The problem is two-fold. English is not the author's native language. There...