Bookish Thoughts

I struggled with this book. It was interesting, and I think it's important. But it also felt a little shallow and contrived. Things were a bit too perfect, whole passages felt like they'd been lifted from a textbook. So while this book was certainly affecting (and yes I cried) it also left me feeling manipulated and distrustful. Which is a shame, because I think there's important information here. But the presentation has me questioning everything. The book follows Alice, a fifty-year old professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard, who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. My only other reference point for this disease is that one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, had it. So I can't claim to be an expert in any way. But after watching Pratchett struggle for many years, and continue to work and fight and speak out, this book felt rushed. The titular character, Alice, goes from a lecturing professor to unable to recognize her own children in less tha...

Speak  is already considered a classic, appearing in high school classrooms across the country. After reading it, it's easy to see why. This is a short, easy to read book that speaks powerfully about depression and isolation. It's specific in a way that makes it very easy to relate to. The story follows Melinda through her freshman year of high school. Shortly before the year began, she was abandoned by all of her friends. She enters the year as a pariah, shunned by nearly the entire student body. This, coupled with her parents' neglect, causes her to retreat into herself. She doesn't speak unless it's necessary. She doesn't engage with her classes or her teachers. She's just trying to survive, to get through high school and out the other side where things will hopefully be better. Of course, four years is an awfully long time. Especially for a teenager. As the book progresses, she starts to find small ways to move forward, to heal from the trauma she ex...

At it's core, this is a story about a family curse. The book alternates between two timelines. The past timeline details the events that led to the family being cursed and its immediate repercussions. In the present, the latest descendant discovers this curse on his family and takes steps to break it. But breaking the curse might break him. Woven around this skeleton are any number of fantastical elements: a travelling circus, mermaids, and tarot cards. Tying it all together is a book, handed down through generations, lost and found, until it shows up right where it needs to be. This book was slow and atmospheric. There isn't a lot of action, it's more about relationships that are built up and tested, strained and repaired and sometimes broken entirely. It's about the ways your family and history can trap you. The things you need to do to break free and live your own life. I really loved this book. The family saga is epic, and the magic is woven in so subtly you c...

Anne's House of Dreams  was a million times better than Anne of Windy Poplars . I think the latter suffered from a whole lot of nostalgia and a poor balancing of ideas. But this book gets back to what I loved about Anne in the first place. She and Gilbert get married and move into their first home together. They meet their new neighbors and begin to make a life for themselves. This book felt like an actual novel rather than a series of vignettes. It let Anne be human again. A wonderful, irrepressible human who charms everyone she meets and finds ways to solve every problem she comes up against. But it let her be wrong. It let her be disliked (temporarily). It let her experience tragedy and come through the other side. More importantly, this book introduced Miss Cornelia Bryant, who is officially one of my favorite literary characters ever. A spinster who never has a nice word to say about a man or a mean word to say about a woman. She spends all of her free time sewing clothes ...

I liked The Book Thief  so much that I decided to give Zusak's other popular book, I Am the Messenger , a try. First things first, the two books are absolutely nothing alike. I Am the Messenger  is a feel-good coming of age novel with a happy, if strange, ending. The story follows Ed, an under-aged cab driver with no direction in life. Until he starts receiving obscure messages on playing cards that encourage him to perform acts of kindness around his city. Along the way he makes some friends, becomes more involved in his community, and discovers a sense of purpose. There are a few things that I think could have been handled better. A handful of things that made me cringe. But for the most part, this was a surprisingly uplifting and affecting journey. Some of the things Ed does are as simple as buying someone an ice cream cone. Others as complicated as restoring a sense of family duty to a pair of brothers. And through it all is the mystery of who's sending Ed on these mis...

The Outlaws of Sherwood , Robin McKinley's take on the legend of Robin Hood, was a fun bit of escapist reading that I stretched out over Thanksgiving. Unlike her other books, there's no magic or fantastical element here. Which makes sense. Robin Hood isn't a fairy tale so much as a folk hero, and as such he's much more grounded in reality. McKinley attempts something akin to historical fiction here (while acknowledging that some things that are key to the legend aren't exactly historically accurate). I think she mostly succeeds, and I think where she didn't meet my expectations it's my expectations that were wrong. She really does spin an interesting tale, taking into account real concerns and hurdles. She increases the number of female characters, and gives them all interesting stories. (And love interests, because even though this isn't a fairy tale it kind of is). Mostly I liked this book right up until the end, which just didn't work for me. ...

This was a fun collection of short stories for kids, from the very beginning of Terry Pratchett's career. He was still a teen-aged journalist when he wrote these stories for the paper he was working for. The collection was something of a mixed bag. I really liked some of the stories. Others never quite came together for me. Part of that is because I can't help but judge Pratchett's work against his later stuff. Comparing where he was in the beginning of his career to the heights to which he would eventually soar isn't fair, but I can't quite help it. On it's own, this is a wonderful collection of stories that I'll be thrilled to read to my kid in a few years. You can see the seeds of ideas and themes that Pratchett would go on to wrestle with later in life. The stories are cute and funny and often manage to subvert expectations. It'd be nice if there were more girls, but that's something Pratchett eventually got a lot better about.

This isn't a book so much as an extended essay. Framed as a letter to his teenaged son, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about what it means to be black in America. About the boundaries he had always assumed were firmly in place in his life and the ways he's grown past them. About friends he's made and friends he's lost and his anger at the injustice that seems to plague everyone he knows. About his hopes and fears for his son and the things that he both does and does not want to change. This wasn't written for me, but it's one of those pieces that it's important everyone reads. It's probably even more important that the people it wasn't written for read it. It provides a very different view of America than the one I've had my entire life, one that needs to be integrated if we're ever going to make this country great. That said, there were things I could identify with deeply. The way college can help you find your tribe and expand your worldview, ...

Years ago I read a short story by Aimee Bender ("The Color Master") and fell deeply in love with her writing. I don't usually become quite so attached to an author based on such a small sampling of work. But that story was just that good. It made me miss my metro stop, which has only happened to me two other times in my life (Patrick Rothfuss and Brandon Sanderson. So that's the kind of company she's in in my mind). I wanted to read more of her work, but I was also scared. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake  was always there on the shelf at the bookstore, taunting me. It couldn't possibly be as good as that short story I read. Maybe that short story wasn't even as good as I remembered. But I re-read The Color Master, and I still loved it, so when I saw her novel at the library sale, it finally felt like time to pick it up. I shouldn't be surprised that I loved this book, which is about family and sorrow and expectations. It went in a very differe...

I was long overdue for a re-read of The Name of the Wind , which remains one of my favorite books. Even if the third book is never released, the first two will probably stay in my favorites list. They're so rich and dense, packed with magic and music and the mundanity of life. But the thing that really makes these books sing is Rothfuss' masterful use of language. The tenth anniversary of this book just came out, and if it takes another ten years to get every word perfect in the third book, I think it will be worth it. I have plenty of other books to read in the meantime. And I can always re-read this one, looking for new clues and soaking in the incredible world Rothfuss built. On this re-read, I took particular note of the dialogue. Throughout the book, characters often fall into rhyming or metered language. It's subtle, and hidden well in the paragraphs, but once you know to look for it, this book brims over with poetry. It was a lot of fun to pick up on it this time t...

I've mentioned this before: I don't read books in order. I flip back and forth. Re-reading passages and looking to see how long is left in a chapter or a scene. How long before a certain character goes away or comes back. I almost always read the last page before I'm even a quarter of the way through the book. And then I check out the acknowledgments and supplemental materials. So I quickly discovered that the last page of this book just says [this page intentionally left blank]. It was a little weird, but this whole book is a little weird. There are flow charts and diagrams peppered throughout. I didn't think much of it. A little more than halfway through the book, the main character starts reading the book while also writing it because of a crazy time paradox. Like I said, this book is weird. Anyway, he quickly gets tired of reading the book like a chump and jumps ahead to the end to see where his life ends up. But he knew he was going to do that, and he's not...

Alan Cumming's memoir, which focuses on his relationship with his father, is absolutely stunning. It's heartbreaking and hard to read, absolutely devastating at times. But Alan Cumming is a man of grace and kindness, and his writing positively pulses with it. The book is also funny and heartwarming and forgiving. Cumming flips back and forth between two timelines. He explores his childhood, growing up with an abusive father. Interwoven with this is his time filming an episode of Who Do You Think You Are , during which he learned about the life and death of his maternal grandfather. Cumming does an amazing job jumping back and forth between the two timelines, allowing them to inform and enrich each other. Ultimately, this book is Cumming's journey to acceptance. He learns more about his family, lets that inform who he is, discards the things he doesn't want. The most amazing thing is his ability to forgive his father for everything he put him through and continued to...