Bookish Thoughts

For years I claimed to hate horror. I can see now how absurd that statement is. When I was growing up, my favorite television show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer . And while it's a bit trite to say that Sandman  changed my life, it certainly awakened any number of nascent interests in me, from mythology to non-linear story-structures. Two of the most formative works from my teenage years, and both are classic examples of horror. But for a long time I didn't know this. In my world, both of these series were classified as fantasy. Horror was Scream  and it's various sequels and spin-offs. Saw  and Halloween  and Final Destination . All those movies were characters died in ever more gruesome fashions. It's a subset of horror that's been popular for a while now. So popular that I thought it was the whole of the genre. It wasn't until I heard someone describe Sandman  as horror that I began to open my eyes and understand how much I actually loved this genre. I like...

In the fourth InCryptid book, Alex and Shelby head to Austrailia to deal with a werewolf outbreak. In this world, werewolves are victims of a rabies-like virus. There's no cure, no treatment, and the only way to prevent a full-on outbreak is to kill anyone who's been infected before they have a chance to bite anyone else. Of course, this is complicated by the fact that you can't tell whether someone's been infected until they turn into a wolf. And further complicated by the fact that the virus isn't restricted to humans. Any mammal can contract and spread lycanthropy. The story here was exciting and well-paced. The mystery was intriguing, and expertly constructed. And the stakes felt believably high. It was just hampered by the fact that I don't really like Alex all that much. He's kind of boring and wishy-washy, and not nearly as much fun as his sister. Lucky for me, the next book turns the spotlight back on Verity. And then it's on to the final Pri...

Saying that this isn't my favorite Sarah MacLean book is a bit like saying that The Truth  isn't my favorite Discworld  book: it's still pretty damn good. MacLean's books are so consistently good that the variation within them is both heightened and almost meaningless. This is the story of Lily and Alec. Lily is Alec's ward, though Alec doesn't actually discover this until she finds herself in the center of a scandal and he swoops in to repair her reputation as much as he can. This dynamic isn't my favorite thing in the world, but MacLean pulls it off pretty well. Mostly by not having is be a long-established thing. Alec was a bit frustrating as a hero. He's got this tragic backstory that leads to commitment issues. But it drags out so long that when he finally spilled his guts I barely killed. Just get over it and admit you love this girl, I wanted to scream. But other than that, he's a very honorable (possibly too honorable), intelligent, kind ...

I haven't actually listened to much (any?) of Jim Gaffigan's stand up. I mostly know him from his stint on My Boys , which I really liked when it was airing and re-watched several times when we first got Netflix. His mostly this cultural presence whose existence I've absorbed through osmosis. I always recognize him, and I see him more than I expect to, but I never really seek him out. And so his memoir, sitting on the shelf at the library used book sale, was just a spur of the moment grab. I recognized his face, and I enjoy his humor more often than not, and it looked like a quick read, so I figured I'd give it a shot. I basically got exactly what I was expecting. Gaffigan is a father of five, and his book (co-written with his wife) is basically about that. He complains about being a dad. Finds humor in the weird things kids do. Complains about being tired all the time. Finds the humor in his exhaustion. It wasn't anything I was terribly unfamiliar with (though ...

I haven't embraced mysteries with quite the fervor that I did romance earlier this year. I've been dabbling with the genre for years, but I'm picky. I need something that will entertain me and keep me engaged. I need the ending to be neither obvious nor out of nowhere. I want to be on pace with the detective. If I figure things out too quickly I get mad at the book. If I can't figure anything out, I get frustrated and the book isn't any fun. It's a delicate balance. But recently, I've found a few authors I really like (Tana French, Gillian Flynn), and that's helped me start to embrace more mysteries and thrillers. I'm coming to appreciate the craft of the genre and how these stories are constructed. Between that and the recent movie version of Murder on the Orient Express , I finally had the push I needed to try out one of the classics. I ended up liking this book a lot more than I expected to. Sure, Poirot is pompous and Christie withholds infor...

Liane Moriarty is great when I want a quick-plotted, entertaining read. She creates incredibly detailed, flawed characters who balance the line of "people I never want to meet" and "people I can unfortunately relate to somehow". She places them in difficult situations and watches everything unravel. And then she tries to tie everything up in the happiest ending possible. Sometimes this works, other times it comes across as trite or manipulative. This book focuses on three couples who attend a BBQ where Something Bad happens. The first half of the book is devoted to teasing out what that Something Bad is while everyone copes (or fails to cope) with the aftermath. The book alternates between the day of the BBQ (starting early in the morning, well before anything has happened), and the fallout a few months later. Moriarty does this to tease out her big reveal for as long as possible. The problem is that she goes on a bit too long. The first half of the book really ...

I bought this book on impulse at the library book sale because I recognized the author, who recently released a short story collection with an interesting name ( Six Months, Three Days, Five Others ) that I've been wanting to read. I knew basically nothing going into it except that it was pretty short. I'm not usually one to take a chance like that (my to-read list is long enough that I often obsessively research a book before actually buying it), but it worked out well this time. The book follows two people: a witch named Patricia and a technophile named Laurence. They meet in a horribly rigid private school in eighth grade. They strike up a tenuous friendship because they're both outcast and desperate for companionship. But when an assassin determined to kill them both starts messing with their lives, they end up separated. Years later they reconnect, only to discover that they're now on opposite sides of a war for the future of the planet. All the Birds in the Sk...

I've been meaning to read Quiet  for years. My mom read it when it first came out, and she really enjoyed it. And then it kept showing up on the best non-fiction lists. Year after year it remained one of the must-reads. So when I finally got my hands on it, I dove in. The book is about introversion, and it ended up being both more science-based and more balanced than I was expecting. Rather than a straight "rah rah introverts" treatise, it argues that we need all kinds of people and that introverts shouldn't be overlooked simply because they're quieter or more cautious. Sometimes those are exactly the qualities you need. The book charts the rise of extroversion in the United States and how it became the default expectation everywhere, from classrooms to businesses. Everyone is expected to work well with others and make their voice heard and be agreeable and personable and gregarious. But some situations call for people to put their egos aside, or to sit and th...

The second volume of March  closed on John Lewis' speech at the March of Washington, and then included the original text of the speech, which was edited moments before he gave it. In that speech he points out that the Civil Rights Act, while a step forward, did not do enough. Specifically, it did not guarantee African-Americans the right to vote, thus allowing individual states to continue to deny them full citizenship. The third volume focuses on the fight to get the Voting Rights Act passed, ultimately ending back where the first book started, with the inauguration of President Obama. Once again, this book doesn't shy away from the hatred and violence that John Lewis and his cohorts faced in trying to secure their rights. The endless protests trying to get people registered, inevitably followed by beatings and arrests. And more than a few deaths. This book maybe be John Lewis' memoir, and it's certainly skewed towards his perspective, but it functions more as a hi...

Going Postal  may not be Terry Pratchett at the top of his game, but it's pretty close. This book introduces Moist (who is entertaining in the beginning but, much like Rincewind, quickly wears out his welcome) and focuses on an ever more modern Ankh-Morpork. The clacks have been around for several books now, allowing messages to pass quickly both within the city and between the city and the outlying regions. Communication with Sto Lat is near instantaneous and it's even possible to keep up to date with far-flung Genua. But it's all starting to fail. The system was privatized, maintenance was dropped in the name of profit, and now the clacks is down more often than not, while the fat cats who own it grow ever fatter. So Vetinari enlists Moist von Lipwig, notorious conman, to resurrect the failing postal service. What follows is a rollicking adventure, touching on everything from public service to redemption to freedom. The references to Tump Tower feel even more on the n...

Sometimes you come across a book that just isn't for you. You can appreciate that it was well constructed. The characters were well-developed and believable. The symbolism was woven through. And yet, you just don't connect with it. That was this book for me. Where the Crawdads Sing  was basically fine. I might even recommend it in the future. It follows a girl who survives on her own in the North Carolina marshes after being abandoned by her mother, her siblings, and finally her father. She's knowledgeable and self-reliant, trading mussels and fish to get other supplies she needs. But she's also isolated, ditching the truant officer who shows up to take her to school and hiding from nearly everybody who comes across her. Eventually a man in the nearby town is murdered, and everyone decides that she's done it. And while that murder mystery is the center of the book, it also feels secondary to this girl's loneliness and trauma. I think maybe I'm not fami...

Mary Robinette Kowal has a deep compassion for her characters that puts me in mind of Lois McMaster Bujold. It's not that nothing bad ever happens, and there are certainly forces outside of anyone's control making life harder. But she does a great job of humanizing every single character, of making you feel empathy for them and understand their choices. Of pulling happy endings out of a series of compromises and disappointments. Things don't turn out exactly the way you want them to, but they turn out well nonetheless. This is especially apparent in the character of Stetson Parker, who Elma has clashed with since the very beginning. His character arc is possibly the most satisfying one in the entire duology as Kowal deepens and softens him, expands on his back story while also finding ways for him to grow. He's not perfect - no one in these books is - but I ended up really liking him by the end. It's amazing, considering how much I hated him in the previous book. ...

The second volume of John Lewis' graphic memoir spends most of it's focus on the Freedom Riders. During this time, John Lewis rises through the ranks of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), eventually becoming chairman. He also becomes a bigger presence in the Civil Rights movement in general, and the book ends with the March on Washington, with Martin Luther King Jr's famous "I Have a Dream" speech and John Lewis' own speech at the same event. This book really drives home how much work and organization went into the Civil Rights movement. And how much hate and resistance they faced. Learning about these things in school or online, it's easy to distance yourself a bit and focus on the results rather than the process. We always hear about Rosa Parks and her famous refusal to give up her seat. We don't hear about everything else that went into to both creating that moment and leveraging it. By telling his story with pictures, Lewis a...

The sixth book in The Craft Sequence returns to Kai, adding a nice level of symmetry to the series, even if this book is setting on a new era. We now have two books about Tara in Alt Coloumb, two about Caleb Altemoc and his father in Dresedial Lex, and now two about Kai and Izza and the Blue Lady from Kavekana, though this book doesn't take place in Kavekana. Ruin of Angels  sees Kai and Izza travel to Agdel Lex, a new city that the Iskari imposed on the ruins of Alikand after the God Wars. But Alikand is still there, hidden beneath and behind and around the forced order of Agdel Lex. And beneath both of them is the dead city, where the wars are still going on, frozen in a single moment. This is a book about dualities. About the many faces a single person takes on in different situations. About the many different places a single city can be. About history seen from multiple points of view. It's about a pair of sisters who don't entirely know how to relate to each other...

I finally got my hands on the second and third volumes in John Lewis' graphic memoir, March , so I had to go back and re-read the first one. The memoir as a whole is about Lewis' experiences in the Civil Rights movement, and the first volume is specifically about how he came to be involved with it and his participation in the lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee. It goes in depth with the training Lewis and his fellow students received before the sit-ins, which was quite extensive. And it also shows a lot of the hatred and violence they faced, including attempts on their lives. The story as a whole is told through flashbacks, both John Lewis' memory and the stories he tells a couple of young constituents who come by his office in the Capital. In the present, this is all happening on the day that Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. The frame provides a nice counter-balance to the story, showing how far we've come and how ...

I love advice columns. There are a lot of reasons. Good, practical, applicable advice is certainly part of it. I like having concrete tactics and actions to fall back on in difficult situations. But there's also a weird combination of solidarity and smugness. I like reading about some problems and knowing that I'm not alone. I like reading about other problems and feeling better about my own life. At least I'm not as stupid as some people out there. I think it all comes down to that human connection, conveniently packaged into bite-sized articles. When I'm dealing with a tricky problem - practical or emotional - one of my go-to problem solving methods is to write a letter to an advice columnist. I never send these letters. But the act of writing the letter is beneficial. What's the most succinct way to describe the problem? What information is relevant and what really isn't? What sort of answer am I looking for? A big part of the process is deciding who I want...

I gotta say, I'm actually glad that I wasn't completely in love with this book. I started adding romance novels to my regular rotation earlier this year. I've loved them so much that I was starting to worry that I wasn't being objective about it. (Then again, who really wants to be objective about romance novels? The point is to love them whole-heartedly.) But it turns out that I was just that good at doing my research. I did enjoy this story about a fake date that quickly becomes a whole lot more. Alexa and Drew are both driven, career-focused people who get completely caught off guard by their feelings for each other. Their meet-cute was adorable (and obviously in an elevator). Their friends were totally supportive. Their obstacles were a nice mix of internal (commitment issues) and external (living in different cities). It was a sweet book. But I really struggled with the pacing. Guillory tended to jump forward in time with no warning. The sex scenes were vague an...

If I know you in real life, there's a solid chance I'm buying you this book for Christmas. It's got elements of Contact , Hidden Figures , and The Right Stuff , all wrapped up in a fantastic story that had me crying in all the best ways. The story opens in 1951, with a meteorite landing on Washington D.C. and taking out most of the eastern seaboard. When it's realized that this is likely an extinction event - an extended winter followed by rising temperatures that will eventually make the planet uninhabitable - the space race kicks into high gear. But in this timeline, it's not about being the first to set foot on the moon. It's about figuring out how to establish colonies on the moon and possibly Mars so that humanity keeps going. At the center of all of this is Elma York, a brilliant mathematician and pilot who wants nothing more than to be an astronaut. But this is still America in the 1950s, and despite the stated goal of establishing a colony on the moo...

Well I'm pretty much committed to Seanan McGuire's Incryptid  series at this point. The next two books are already sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. And after that there are only two more that currently exist. (Though I expect there will be at least one more by the time I catch up. McGuire is remarkably good at keeping to her one-book-a-year schedule. Even more impressive that she's maintaining it for at least three series while also writing other stuff. Seriously, she's been publishing books for less than a decade and she's got somewhere in the neighborhood for 50 books and novellas. And then there are the short stories.) To get back to the point, this series is great fun, and I'm enjoying it. Even if I didn't enjoy this book quite as much as the last two. But that really just comes down to the fact that I fell head over heels in love with Verity and I merely like her brother, who narrates this and the next book. (But then it's back to Verity, a...

This is the fourth time I've read The Night Circus  and I still love it just as much as the first time. It is so lush and romantic. The descriptions are absolutely perfect. Precise enough to transport me to the circus and vague enough to make me feel like there's still so much to discover. The romance breaks and heals my heart every time. Tsukiko keeps on getting better and Chandresh gets more tragic and Alexander gets more sinister. I've started fantasizing about trying to recreate the circus in my backyard someday. Maybe I can convince my kid to do it as a themed birthday party. Maybe I'll do it as my own themed-party. And give out copies of the book as party favors. I have ideas for the tents that don't require actual magic but would seem magical. I just want this book to be real. Every time I read it I want it to last forever. And then I end up staying up too late to finish it anyway. The good news is that I can always pick it up and read it again.

The Halloween Tree  was one of my favorite movies as a kid. The VHS tape was bright orange, and we rented it so often that my parents eventually bought it from the rental store. My mom probably picked it up because Leonard Nimoy is the main voice actor. And even though Ray Bradbury himself narrates it, it took me decades to realize that the movie was based on a book. The book follows a group of friends who get side-tracked from trick-or-treating when their friend falls ill. They end up chasing him through time, learning about the origins of Halloween as they hope to catch up with him and save his life. This book is definitely a product of it's time. They made some significant changes to the movie, which were all for the better. But it's still a fun romp through history, as the kids learn about this celebration of death which is really a celebration of life. A way to make our fears smaller so we can deal with them. The book was short enough that I might end up reading it a...

Reading the first page of this book was live diving into a pile of pillows. This is a cozy little story about a baker who enjoys a simple life with her family in the wake of a supernatural war that decimated the human population. She just wants to make cinnamon rolls and read trashy novels. And then she gets kidnapped by vampires and finds herself in way over her head. I loved it when I read it two years ago, and re-reading it was a bit like coming home. The narrator and main character, Rae "Sunshine" Seddon, babbles. She goes off on tangents and loses herself down rabbit holes. The story gets a bit circuitous, as she occasionally backs up to explain this or that detail. And I could see people getting frustrated with her. But I honestly love it, and I think McKinley pulls off the chatterbox character superbly. It adds a level of cozy intimacy to the book, like you're hanging out with a mug of tea while your best friend tells you about the crazy weekend she just had. P...

Red as Blood  answers the burning question: What if the Disney Princesses were all Satanists? That's probably not fair. Especially since this book was written before Disney Princesses became a thing. But it retells a bunch of fairy-tales and twists them around so that the good guys become bad guys, and the bad guys become misunderstood underdogs. Mostly by making the princesses worship Satan. Like most short story collections, this was a bit of a mixed bag. There were a couple that I really liked. Anyone who makes Snow White a vampire has my heart forever. And the Beauty and the Beast tale was fun, even if it didn't seem like it belonged in the book. It's a science-fiction romp about falling in love with an alien, rather than a more traditional creepy fairy tale. But it was fun. Some of them never quite came together. The Sleeping Beauty story was so ambiguous that I was just confused. And the Red Riding Hood tale, which admittedly had a great idea (Grandma is a werew...

This book is almost too bright. Which is maybe an odd way to describe a book. It's so bright that it gives me a headache, the kind I got when I was in Alaska in June and the sun was always in my eyes. Which, again, is an odd way to describe a book that I love deeply. But it's true. The first time I read it, I had a stomach bug, so I figured that was why I felt a little off. This time through I felt fine, and I still got a headache, right at the exact same spot. This book glitters and shimmers, and it's sometimes hard to look at. But it's even harder to look away. So. Headache. My second time through this book, I got a chance to marvel at how French constructed her mystery. I was actually surprised to realize that she tells you who the author is right on the third page. Then again, much like The Secret History , this mystery is more about why than who. What did Lexie do that fractured the group? I love books that hold up well on a re-read, and I think it can be espec...

This was not my favorite work of Bradbury's. A lot of the stories in this collection fell flat or just missed their mark, and I was more eager for them to be over than I was to actually read them. I was most disappointed by "The Small Assassin". The idea of a newborn baby actively trying to kill it's parents has a lot of potential, but the execution wasn't quite there. I was on board for the mom being increasingly unnerved by her son and the dad not really taking it seriously. The beginning was nice and creepy. But a lot of the story also had me wondering if Bradbury ever had kids. Turns out he did, and the disconnect may have just been due to different times and cultures. I wanted to connect with this story, and it never quite happened. There were a couple of stories that I did enjoy, particularly the one about the man with wings who has given up flying until his kids turn him into a kite (in a cute way). He also makes an appearance in a different story, abou...

Much like the other books in this series, Patternmaster  left me wanting more.  Butler has a lot of ideas that she just sort of hints at rather than expanding fully. And a lot of characters that could be interesting if they were ever developed beyond what was necessary for the plot. Teray was the only character I felt like I got to know properly. Even Coransee, the main antagonist, remained mostly a mystery. This was compounded by the plot that moved at the speed of light. Nothing ever got a chance to breathe before the next thing happened and relationships developed so quickly that I had a hard time believing they were real. I definitely prefer character-driven fiction to plot-driven. If I don't believe in the characters then I'm just never going to care about the story. And that's been my problem with this series. If we're going to be dealing with difficult moral choices, then I need people to be making those choices, not 2-dimensional archetypes.

House of Leaves  is about a haunted house. Or rather, it's about the documentary that was made about that haunted house (made by Will Navidson and his friends and family). Though it's actually an academic treatise on that documentary (which may or may not exist), written by Zampano. And it also has the notes of Johnny Truant, who assembled Zampano's notes and writings into an actual book. And then there are the unnamed editors who occasionally provide a translation that Truant couldn't find or otherwise clarify something. It's a layered book. And it keeps jumping between the stories, some of which exist only in the footnotes or appendices. The text itself plays on the confusion, by playing with font and layout. Though actually what looks like a dense, confusing book ends up being surprisingly easy to read. The book teaches you to read it as you go, so that by the time you're digging a mirror out of your purse to read a section on the metro you barely even noti...

This book was rough to read. And it's rough to revisit now and talk about. Which is probably why I've been putting this off for so long. Like Fire and Fury , this book dives deep into the Trump administration. Woodward interviewed countless people to get a sense of everything that's going on in the White House. Unlike that book, Woodward tries hard to remain neutral. More facts and less salacious gossip-mongering. Of course, with this administration, things still get horrific and I had to pick my jaw up off the floor a number of times. I think I'm glad I read it. If nothing else it's good to be reminded of the myriad things I should be paying attention to but that keep slipping off the radar. As I saw someone say on the internet today "this is less a 24-hour news cycle and more like that episode of Battlestar Gallactica where the cylons keep showing up every 33 minutes". Fatigue sets in, and it's hard to keep all the details straight. Recaps like t...

For all that I've said I'm happy to wait as long as it takes for the third Kingkiller book, reading the second one got me really excited for it. I have so many unanswered questions, and there are so many tantalizing hints about what's to come, that a part of me just wants to get my hands on it now. But then I tell myself to be patient. I love the first two books because they are basically perfect. The amount of work and care that Rothfuss put into them is clearly evident. He worked hard on them and he's working hard on the next one. And if I have to wait another decade, at least I know that I'll be getting a perfect book at the end of it. This book is perhaps even more episodic than the first one. Or maybe it's just more evident because Kvothe is moving around a lot more. Either way, people tend to complain about the pacing of this one more. But I maintain that it's better than the first. It has Felurian (true story: there's one page in the Felurian ...

When the world gets hard, when it seems like politicians don't care or that progress is being eroded away, when I feel myself giving in to anger and despair, I turn to Rebecca Solnit. She never fails to make me feel better. Her essays give me perspective about how far we've come in a remarkably short time. They give me a sense of solidarity that helps me raise my voice and continue to fight. She reminds me that despair is for lazy people, and we have to work for hope, but it's worth it. This collection opens with an extended rumination on silence and all the ways it harms us. Then there are several shorter essays, including "Men Explain Lolita to Me". This essay was actually my introduction to Rebecca Solnit several years ago, and I've re-read it several time. It was a treat to come across it again. Solnit's essay collections are all slim, but they pack an incredible punch. She just released a new one, and I'm excited to get my hands on it (though ...

What Should Be Wild  is a dark fairy tale about a young girl coming of age and dealing with a family curse. It's moody and atmospheric, and it was a great way to get in the mood for Fall. The book centers on Maisie, a young girl who can't touch anyone. Contact with her skin instantly kills anything that's alive. It also brings back to life anything that's dead, which is handy when her father is first starting to understand her strange powers. He isolates her, for everyone's protection, and conducts experiments in the hopes of finding a cure. But as Maisie gets older, she starts to chafe at the restrictions placed on her. And when her father goes missing, she decides to head into the wider world and find him. Meanwhile, the book follows several of Maisie's ancestors who have, for one reason or another, become trapped in the wood behind the family estate. They don't age and nothing in the wood dies. But the birth of Maisie (and her dark shadow who's gr...

Valente's books are like gorgeous puzzles. In the beginning it's all a jumble, and I'm wondering what I've gotten myself into. The prose is lovely, but the story is elusive. The more I read, the more the picture comes into focus. But it always seems to be a bit backwards. Mood, then themes, then plot. I understand what her books are about long before I really understand what's happening in them. As pieces click into place, previous passages make more sense, and I find myself flipping back to re-read bits and pick up clues and just plain marvel at what a master of the form she is. So. Palimpsest . This is a book about a sexually-transmitted city. It's about loneliness and obsession. It's about sacrifice and change. It's about making connections and remaking yourself and finding love. Palimpsest is a fantastical city. It's filled with wonders, a new one around every corner. The only way to get there is to have sex with someone who's already bee...

This is Sarah MacLean's first book, and it's pretty much guaranteed that I will now track down and read everything she's written. It didn't feature any of the characters I've come to love from her more recent books. But it does have the wonderful, bold Callie and Gabriel, who can't help but fall head over heels for her. Callie has spent the last decade playing by the rules. She has an immaculate reputation and nothing else to show for it. When her younger sister gets engaged, and it looks like Callie is destined for a life of spinsterhood, she sets out to enjoy all the things she's been denying herself. Along the way she captures the attention of notorious rake, Gabriel. Gabriel has just discovered his half-sister, and he needs help introducing her into society. He strikes a bargain with Callie - she helps his sister and he'll help her. But before he knows it, he's in way over his head. This book was a ton of fun, and Callie strikes an excellent ...

Liane Moriarty has a gift for writing incredibly readable books about complicated, interesting characters in difficult circumstances. I fly through her books - they always seem half as long as they actually are - but I end up with a ton to think about afterwards. If this is "chick lit", then I'm ashamed to have shunned the genre for so long. What Alice Forgot  is my favorite of her books so far. The story follows Alice Love, who collapses at the gym and loses ten years of her life. She wakes up believing that she's twenty-nine years old, she and her husband are renovating their dream house, and she's pregnant with their first kid. Life is wonderful and full of possibilities. Unfortunately, none of that is true. Alice is confronted by a series of shocks. She has three children, all school-aged. Her mother has remarried and her sister is barely speaking to her. Worst of all, she and her husband are in the midst of a messy divorce. And no one can provide her with...

Sometimes the best thing you can say about a book is that it's short. This is another book that I should have just walked away from in the first 50 pages. But I keep finding myself in these obligation situations where I feel like I owe it to someone else to finish reading a book. Like I said, at least this one was short. This book is all about communication and the ways that misunderstandings and arguments can arise from a simple mismatch in communication style. Pauses that are too long or too short. Expecting to engage in a negotiation versus getting right to the point. Too much or too little focus on body language and tone. Ironically, I had serious issues with the author's style. The information in here is interesting. But it's also dated and the book feels anecdotal. The author is a professor of linguistics, so I'm sure she has done a lot of research along with her own studies. But there's no mention of methodology. Just countless of examples of people faili...

This is one of those books that I debated not finishing. It's a history of the world, seen through the lens of salt. It's all about how salt has influenced trade, taxes, and cuisine around the world. How it helped to globalize the economy and the culture, and what's changed as we've begun to understand it (and chemistry) better and salt has gone from rare to common. This is all interesting stuff, and I honestly learned a lot while I was reading this book. Which is why I pushed through and finished it. I kept coming across interesting facts that I found myself having to share with Kevin. It gave me a new appreciation for the food I was eating and all the many uses of salt in our world. It made me want to visit the Italian Riviera But it was also an incredibly dry, boring book. There were innumerable lists, and it was easy to get bogged down in all the details. All the ins and outs of tax codes and ship building got tiresome and difficult to navigate. I wanted a bit m...

I love these stories about insular groups of young adults that lead to murder. It makes me grateful that my own time in an insular, dysfunctional group didn't result in anyone's death. The Secret History  follows a group of six college students, studying Greek and the classics at a small Vermont college. At the very beginning, the narrator, Richard, reveals that five of them murdered the sixth. Then the story backs up a few months to tell the story of how this murder came about, and what happened afterwards. In a lot of ways, this felt like a book I might read for school. Not that I didn't like it. But it's rich and dense, and I almost feel like I'm supposed to be writing an essay about the imagery or the use of Greek or something. It's reminiscent of a lot of books I did read for school. Like A Separate Peace , we have a group of rich kids at an elite school who seem to be making all their own problems. Plus an undercurrent of repressed homosexuality. And lik...

I inhaled this book. I took a long lunch because I couldn't put it down. I cried on the metro to the point that I had to dig kleenex out of my purse. I let my kid watch Sesame Street so I could keep reading. I stayed up past my bedtime to finish it. I loved this book. The Kiss Quotient  is about Stella: an autistic econometrician (she writes the algorithms that drive internet ads) whose mom is making noise about wanting grandchildren. But Stella's never had much luck with men and dating and particularly sex. So she does what she's always done when she needs to master a new skill: she hires a professional. Enter Michael, a male escort who's trying to earn money to pay for his mom's medical bills. Stella engages him for a series of sessions to help her get better at sex so she can enter the dating pool with confidence and find a husband to make her mom happy. But it quickly becomes apparent that the problem isn't Stella, but all the assholes out there. And tha...

I mean this in the best possible way: this book is like is Twilight  grew up. By which I mean that the vampire in this book finds himself besotted with an actual adult: a tenured professor of history with a particular interest in alchemy. They're somewhat more mature about their whirlwind romance, and Diana starts off with the backbone that Bella didn't find until halfway through the last book. But this is still a whirlwind romance between an over-protective and possessive vampire and a naive and somewhat ignorant woman who's only too happy to be swept off her feet. I loved every minute of it. It's not a perfect book. The exposition can get a bit clumsy. The romance is possibly too dark for some tastes and there's some questionable things about it. But this is fantasy, not real life. Sometimes you just want to get lost in a chilly story about a girl and the over-protective vampire who has fallen head over heels for her and, oh yeah, they have to save the world. ...

Re-reading the Tiffany Aching books has been a joy. Pratchett is at the height of his game here, and these books are basically perfect. I can't wait to share these books with my kid, and in the meantime I've been pushing them on all the neighborhood kids. Though they're mostly still too young for them, too. (Actually, my proudest moment was when a conservative mom was asking me for book recs for her daughter, and I convinced her to buy a series by beloved anarchist Ursula K LeGuin). Anyway, this is the second of Tiffany Aching's adventures. She's leaving home to spend some time as an apprentice to a witch. She meets some other witches her own age, learns that being a witch is mostly doing things that other people don't want to do, and has to deal with a hiver to boot. The hiver is a collection of sense and memories that takes over bodies, collecting new memories and basically doing whatever it wants. It's attracted to power, so it's attracted to Tiff...

This book was a bit of a slog. As much as I like Octavia Butler's books, she definitely has some issues. And this one puts them in sharp relief. Butler has great ideas, and she does a great job of using science fiction to comment on society. I usually come out of her books with a lot to think about. That's part of the problem, really. I want more from her. Her books have a tendency to resemble outlines more than stories. There's no connective tissue between the big events. Characters are introduced as plot points and discarded as soon as they're not useful anymore. At the end of Ming of My Mind , I was frustrated that Doro and Anyanwu both died. I had become invested in their relationship over the centuries and in their competing visions for the future. But Mary was interesting enough, and I was looking forward to seeing where her story went. It turns out that it went nowhere. This book deals with an entire different set of characters facing an entirely different ...

Sarah MacLean may officially be one of my favorite authors. One of those "buy a book just because she wrote it" authors. I've read three so far (with two more sitting on my shelf), and I'm in love. This one wasn't about new love, but rather a second chance at old love, after everything went wrong. It's about Sophie's older sister, Sera, who went missing after a traumatic stillbirth. She shows up years later to demand a divorce from her husband, the duke. The only problem is that the minute she disappeared, he realized how much he loved her, and now the last thing he wants is to divorce her. So her sets about planning to win her back. This book is filled to the brim with sweet, sweet angst. Sera and Malcolm have a wealth of issues to work out. Flashbacks help fill in how things went so very, very wrong. And the question hanging over the whole book is whether love is enough. It's a romance novel, so of course love wins the day. But what I appreciat...

The whole point of a book club is to read books that you wouldn't otherwise pick up. And I can say with certainty that I never would have read That Kind of Mother  if my book club hadn't picked it. It's got an interesting premise - a white woman adopts a black son and comes face to face with racism in America at the end of the twentieth century. But it's written by a man, and I'm a little wary of a man trying to write about motherhood. Ultimately this book seemed to be lacking...something. It was unfocused, and I think that had to do with the main character's lack of focus. Rebecca has a hard time understanding that the people around her are actually people. Her marriage is barely a marriage at all (I would have divorced him long before Rebecca did). Her most meaningful relationship seems to be with Princess Diana - a celebrity that she's never even met. Towards the end of the book Cheryl accuses Rebecca as seeing her as nothing more than a side characte...

I have to admit that I was a little wary coming into this book. Sure, everyone loved it. It's been recommended to me countless times. But I'm used to family sagas being a lot longer than this. I'm used to authors spending at least 500 pages with three, maybe four generations of a single family. To follow a family for eight generations? And to do it in 300 pages? I worried that the book would jump too much, that I'd be bitter about not spending more time with some of the characters. I shouldn't have worried, really. It took a couple of chapters to adjust my expectations. This isn't a typical family saga so much as it is a series of short stories, or even vignettes, connected because they're all about people who share blood. By the end of the book, the individual chapters have built up something much greater than the sum of it's parts: a sweeping family epic that illuminates how British colonialism and the slave trade continue to have ripple effects toda...

The final volume of Y: The Last Man delivers a mostly satisfying, somewhat tragic ending that wraps up Yorick's epic quest to find his lost love. Everyone converges on Paris for final confrontations, epic reunions, and a few surprising revelations. And then life goes on, as it must. I'm going to have to re-read this whole series again at some point. It took me far too long to pick up on the slow burn romance between Yorick and 355, maybe because it was such an incredibly well done slow burn. But, like Yorick, I was blinded by the quest for Beth. I couldn't see what was right in front of me.  His resolution with Beth (and even Beth 2 and Beth Jr) was fantastic. It hit all the right beats of joy and awkwardness and betrayal and despair. Things were broken between them, and she was ultimately more of a fantasy than a real girl. I'm glad he was able to let her go in the end. I'm mad, though, about 355's death. It was shocking and jaw-dropping and ultimately fr...

The Penelopiad  is Margaret Atwood's exploration of Penelope, wife of Odysseus in The Odyssey . What was she up to while he was gone for twenty years? How did she raise her son and manage her household and fend off all those suitors? And what of the twelve maids who seemed to alternate between loyalty and betrayal and were ultimately hanged? Atwood alternates between prose sections from Penelope's point of view and a Greek Chorus of the hanged maids told in a variety of styles, most of them verse. They offer a counterpoint, sometimes directly contradicting what Penelope claims and allowing Atwood to maintain ambiguity about a story that cannot, ultimately, be known. This book was fine. Or at least it was short. I've been hankering to re-read The Odyssey , particularly the new translation by Emily Wilson, and I thought this might help get me in the mood. But perhaps I should have waited to read it afterwards, with the original material fresher in my mind. Ultimately I di...

Sometimes Octavia Butler's books feel more like outlines than novels. She's all about big ideas, and she gets them across in a really succinct way. Her books are brief, but they haunt me for years afterward, as I continue to turn over the ideas in my head. But sometimes it feels like this comes at the expense of the characters and their relationships with one another. Butler tends to focus in on the major turning points in her characters' lives, filling in the intervening years with a few brief sentences, letting a single scene capture a decade of character growth. She does it well, but I came out of this book wanting more. There are so many characters that we meet so briefly. I wanted more from Jan and Ada, I wanted to know more about what happened to Clay (holy crap, is he the Clay in Clay's Ark?). But this book is about Doro and his protege, Mary. And it's really only about them. Even Emma, née Anwanyu, has been relegated to Doro's sounding board and cons...

The second Incryptid book delivers another exciting adventure. Verity is still torn between her desire to be a professional dancer and her duty to protect the Cryptid population from over-eager monster hunters. But when Dominic tells her that the Covenant's threatened purge of Manhattan is imminent, it's not much of a choice at all. Like Verity's parents, I thought it was obvious from early on that dance was never going to be her future. So while I liked the push and pull of her two lives in the first book, I appreciated that she quickly came to the same conclusion here. When the chips are down, she's going to help her friends, because that's the kind of person she is. Which doesn't mean that she can't or won't grieve that dance career, or that she didn't need her year in NYC to come to that decision. But it was nice to see her life come into focus for her. It was also fun to see a bunch of the cast from the previous book. Though now those friend...

I love this book. It's one of my favorites. I've read it several times, and it's just as good each time. There are so many layers here, so many hints and mysteries, that each re-read rewards me with a little more understanding, a few more answers to my questions. When Pat Rothfuss announced the 10th Anniversary Edition, I had to get it. And while it sat on my shelf for a while before I got around to reading it, the anticipation just makes it that much sweeter. I've talked about this book, at length, on this blog. So I'm just going to talk about the fancy new edition now. There's a new (equally opaque) map. There are discussions of the calendar and the money. Most of this information can be gleaned from the text, but it's nice to have it all laid out in an easy-to-reference place. There's even a pronunciation guide. But best of all, there are illustrations. A bunch of them, showing key scenes in the book. The illustrations were the whole reason I wa...

I loved this volume of Y: The Last Man. We're heading into the endgame, so obviously it's time to back up and see how everyone got here. There are a handful of arcs that move the plot forward. But there are also a lot of one-off issues that give us flashbacks of all the main characters. I loved learning more about them and what their lives were like before the "gendercide". As for the main story - the main group is forced to split up. Everything moves forward. Doctor Mann tracks down her mom, walking right into the trap Toyota set for her. Yorick is finally reunited with Ampersand and learns that Beth is headed to Paris. Beth 2 has a baby (!) and she and Hero head back to the Hot Suite in Ohio. There are kids again, which is fantastic. Except that hope gets yanked away with the return f Tse'elon right at the end. But it's all the flashbacks that really sold this one for me. We get a look at 355's early childhood and her recruitment into the Culper Ring...

I've been hearing good things about Jacqueline Woodson's memoir in verse since before it came out. It won so many awards that you practically can't see the original cover anymore. I'm so glad I finally got around to reading it. While this book is technically marketed towards children (it's recommended for ages 10 and up), it works incredibly well no matter what age you are. Woodson focuses on her time as a child. She was born in Ohio, but she left when she was barely a year old. She and her siblings lived with their grandparents in South Carolina for several years before her mother moved them all to Brooklyn. But this isn't just about Woodson either. There's an incredible sense of family and history in these pages, and it's clear that this has had a profound effect on Woodson and her sense of place in the world. A lot of the book takes place before she's even born or could possibly have memories, which is a bit unusual for a memoir. She talks abo...

I've read enough of Butler's work at this point that I can't help but compare this book to her others. Certain things keeps popping up - long timelines, characters who gradually compromise their morals, and, of course, supernatural powers. From the beginning, Anyanwu reminded me strongly of the Ooloi of the Oankali in Butler's Xenogenesis series. She has the same long life, the same ability to alter her own body which leads to incredible healing abilities. But Anyanwu differs from the Ooloi in that she can only heal herself, and in that she's comparatively reclusive. All she wants is a family. Enter Doro, who inhabits the other qualities of the Ooloi: a fascination with genetics and a tendency to disregard humans as nothing more than breeding stock - pawns in his millenia-long experiments. But what Doro really wants is someone like him, not for companionship so much as the knowledge that he isn't alone in the universe. The book follows the push and pull be...

I absolutely adored this book. It stars Naledi Smith, a graduate student with a lot on her plate. She's studying for finals, working as a research assistant, trying to nail down her summer plans, and waiting tables to support herself. So when she finds out that she's the long lost fiance of an African prince, well she just assumes it's a scam and ignores the whole thing. Said prince, Thabiso, of the small (fictional) nation Thesolo, has plans to track down his fiance and find out why her parents fled the country, betraying everyone close to them in the process. But when he meets her, and discovers that her parents died shortly after they arrived in America, leaving her with no knowledge of where she came from or why she left, he finds himself intrigued. And when a case of mistaken identity gives him a chance to get to know her without all the royal baggage, he jumps at the opportunity. Hijinks ensue, as they are wont to do. Thankfully, the prince's true identity is ...

This was easily my least favorite of the series. I wonder how much of that is because this one was written first, when the author didn't have quite as clear an idea about the world. But a good chunk of it was the first person, which really bothered me in the beginning. I eventually got used to it, but it felt like such a weird departure, and I don't know that it helped with the story. It was also weird to know so much more than the main character, who is deliberately and infuriatingly being kept in the dark. There are magical mumbo-jumbo reasons for this. But it was weird to watch him stumble through this adventure knowing everything that would happen and why. But the characters remained endearing (except for Suz who quickly got on my nerves). The fire witch was fantastic, and I loved how much she and Daystar grew to rely on and trust each other. Overall, this series was short and sweet. The first and third books will remain my favorite (not coincidentally, Cimorene and M...

The third installment of Y: The Last Man  sees our trio on more adventures. They finally reach Dr. Mann's lab, only for Ampersand to be kidnapped, kicking off another journey. Yorick and Hero are finally reunited in a non-murdery way. And we meet some pirates! This was basically a series of exciting adventures. I enjoyed them, though not quite as much as the previous arcs. It was fun to meet another Beth, and to get confirmation that the original Beth is still alive. Ultimately I don't feel like I have a lot to say about this book, though. It was fun and entertaining. The main mysteries are still chugging along, though it doesn't feel like we're any closer to solving them. This is a middle book. No intriguing beginnings or astonishing endings. Just lots of treading water. Though there are those pirates I mentioned. Sigh, I should have written this review earlier. When this volume wasn't all mixed up with the next one in my head. That'll teach me to fall so...

Rebecca Solnit is probably my favorite essayist at this point. I don't agree with everything she says. In fact, my experience of reading her is similar to my experience with LeGuin. It's like having a conversation with a mentor. Someone who has decades more experience than I do, but with whom I can disagree. Someone who gets me thinking. I'm actually coming around to Solnit's definition of hope and it's reliance on not making any assumptions about the future. I still need to believe that things will get better, but Solnit's definition demands action. I've said before that Octavia Butler taught me, in Earthseed , how to hold despair and hope together in my heart and choose hope. Solnit teaches me again and again what that decision means and how to keep making it on a daily basis. This collection of essays was actually written when W was president, shortly after we declared war on Iraq. In some ways that feels like a simpler time, though that could just be...