Bookish Thoughts

This book was basically perfect, and not just because I managed to read the entire thing during one of Gavin's naps. It's been a long time since I inhaled an entire book in one sitting, and it was a good feeling. Men Explain Things to Me  was expertly constructed, allowing the essays to build off of and inform each other. Each essay is preceded by an oil painting by Ana Teresa Fernandez. In the middle of the book, Solnit includes an essay about one of these paintings and the series that it's from. It helps clarify why she chose to include this artist's work, which speaks to the goal of the book. Perhaps it's a bit on the nose for Solnit to spell out her intentions like that. But essays, unlike fiction, need to be crystal clear. I hadn't read the titular essay in total before picking up this book, though I had read a later spin on it,  Men Explain Lolita to Me , which was published after this book. Despite this, I remember when the original essay was publishe...

I discovered Isabel Allende about a year ago, and I've really liked her books so far. I was prepared to fall head over heels in love with this one, which is the one everyone always references when they talk about her. Unfortunately that didn't quite happen. But I think it had more to do with mismatched expectations than the book itself. This is Allende's first novel, and I had to remind myself of that while I was reading it. It's not quite as polished as some of her later works. I particularly had trouble with the shifting narrators. The book shifts between two first person narratives. But the identity of the second narrator is revealed so late in the book (and looking back, refers to herself in the third person more often than not) that there might as well have been three narrators. Except that the epilogue makes it pretty clear there were only two. When I wasn't struggling with who was telling the story, I mostly enjoyed it. It's an epic family saga, set a...

The Prisoner of Limnos  is pretty much the definition of a feel-good story. Lois McMaster Bujold is incapable of not giving her characters the happiest possible ending. So there are no real surprises here. There's excitement but not much tension. And everyone ends up right where you hope and know they will. There's a lot to be said for comfort reads like this. Where characters clearly state what they want, value open, frank communication, and find their way to the same page. It's nice to watch characters do what they're good at and do it well. It's nice to know that two people who are so clearly meant for each other will end up together. It's not that there aren't obstacles. But they're met head-on by mature adults, and it turns out that they aren't so hard to overcome after all. The only downfall of a story like this is that there isn't a ton to be said. I love Bujold. I'm so glad she's continuing to publish novellas. I wish there we...

This book felt like something of a bait and switch. It purports to be about Anne's children. In fact, it's mostly about the neighboring children, who recently moved in with their widowed father, the new minister in Ingleside. It makes sense. Anne and Gilbert have been established as basically perfect, so there would be very little conflict in a book about their children, who are also likely to be perfect. Or at least perfectly supported and encouraged. The book would be unbearably saccharine and preachy, much like Anne of Windy Poplars  was. Still, it would have been nice to get some indication of that in the cover art or book blurb or something. Rainbow Valley  was fun. A bit of a return to the first book in the series, with the younger characters. At this point, it's all feeling a bit formulaic. I'm picking up on the smallest hints, and I know exactly what's going to happen all the way through. There's one book left. A lot of people have said that it's...

I forget how I heard about this book, but as soon as I did, I became obsessed with reading it. It's an experimental sort of book, a collaboration between JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst. It's definitely a different sort of reading experience that any other I've had before. This is a book of many layers, and it requires the reader to keep track of a bunch of stuff at once. The foundation is the "fictional" book, Book of Theseus . Fictional is in quotes because that book does, obviously, exist. You read it as part of reading this book. But all the other information about it, the author and his life and the 19 books he wrote before it, do not actually exist except in the world of this book. Book of Theseus  is presented as the final book this author, Straka, ever wrote. And he actually died before he finished it. So his longtime friend and translator finished it for him and had it published posthumously. Footnotes throughout the book comment on their relationship, as we...

Going into this book, I had a lot of meta information. The author released the entire trilogy in one year. There's a movie coming out next month. It has an all-female cast. Weird shit happens. But I didn't know a ton about the book itself. That ended up being a good thing. I'm not entirely sure I would have picked this book up on it's own, or at least been as eager as I was to read it. I would have had all these preconceived notions about what it was and I would have shied away, always reaching for something else. As it is, I ended up enjoying this book a lot. It wasn't until I was almost done with it that I made the connection to Lovecraft. When the biologist finally confronts the Crawler, I was very strongly reminded of the handful of Lovecraft stories I read several years ago. The eldritch horror that the mind cannot even comprehend was a signature of his, and I was excited to see it pop up again in modern literature. It turns out that there's some of a...

Like any good female millenial, I loved this movie in high school. I can't even count the number of times I tried to watch it with my friends. I even have a vague memory of trying to watch it while I was in labor, but things were honestly pretty blurry by then. I hadn't realized it was based on a book until a few months ago when I heard the prequel was coming out. But I was immediately anxious to read it and see all the things the movie left out. Here's the thing, though. The movie significantly changed the book. I barely even recognized it as the same story. Sure, Sally falls in love and her husband dies young, leaving her depressed and bitter. Sure, Gillian accidentally kills her abusive boyfriend and runs to her sister for help. But other than that, the similarities are merely superficial. In the book, the aunts border on neglectful, rather than fun. They never wanted kids, and they only keep Sally and Gillian around out of a sense of duty. But they do nothing at all...

I'd been saving this book to read while I was in Mexico over New Year's. Then it was so short and so good that I ended up finishing it almost before we arrived. Like Water for Chocolate  is part cookbook, part romance, part family epic. It centers on Tita. As the youngest daughter, she's destined to remain single and care for her mother for her entire life. When she falls in love, her mother does everything in her power to prevent the two from getting together, leading to much strife and drama. But Tita is the family cook, and her emotions come spilling out in her food, like The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake  in reverse. Everything in this book was heightened, from the emotion to the conflicts. It was no surprise that this all occasionally erupted in magical displays. But it also all stayed grounded through the traditional recipes that Tita prepared for her family. Those recipes are woven in in a way that makes you think you just might be able to replicate them. But ...

I've been waffling about The Dark Tower  for years now. I've wanted to read it. But I didn't know if I wanted it to be my first Stephen King. But his other books are all so long, and the first of these was, at least, very short. Then the movie came out and I bought The Gunslinger . Then everyone hated the movie, so I let it sit on my shelf for a while. Then I picked up the second book at a used book sale on a whim and decided that it was finally time to just sit down and read this. I didn't entirely know what to expect, going in to it. I've heard that it's slow and boring, easily the worst book of the series. I've also heard that it's the best book of the series. Several people told me it was their favorite book, bar none. I had plenty of room to make up my own mind about this book. What happened, which I did not expect, was that I fell somewhere in the middle. This book was fine. It was slow, but I didn't mind that. It had a really interesting s...

The Redwall  series was one of my favorites when I was younger. I basically inhaled these books in middle school, trading them back and forth with my best friend and reading them sprawled in chairs at my house or hers. We were completely captivated by this world and the rodents and small mammals, both noble and treacherous, who inhabited it. There was always another fight between the forces of good and evil, another quest to go on, another new friend to make. I'm pleased to say that this book basically holds up to my memory of it. It's a bit simplistic, things are a bit easier for Matthias than I was expecting, but that's alright. This is a book for children. It's a classic hero's journey. The good guys are all stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily identified. Everyone lives happily ever after. You have to believe in the lie when you're a kid. And it was fun to revisit it as an adult. My favorite part of this book was the extended quest with riddles tha...

The real draw of The Last Hero  is the artwork. The story itself is fun and interesting. It's probably the best of all the stories that involve Rincewind and Cohen, because those two are best in small doses. But it also does a good job of incorporating all the other characters, from Lord Vetinari and Captain Carrot, to the wizards, the gods, and, of course, Death. And it half seems like that was just so Paul Kidby would have an excuse to draw all of these characters. The story is simple and straight forward, with a classic Pratchett twist. Having read some of his earlier work I have a much greater appreciation for this story. It's still lacking in some ways, and there were a number of characters I wish had been woven into the story (like literally any female character at all who resides on the Discworld). But the artwork is stunning, and that's really what this book is about. The fantastic illustration of the characters, the gods, and the Great A'Tuin.

Mindy Kaling's second book of essays is just as light and smart and quick and fun as her first book. This one focuses more on her adult life, and particularly on her time working on The Mindy Project . Kaling talks about work and her attitude towards working hard (which I deeply disagree with, but I'm also not as successful or driven as she is). She talks about dating and fashion and not being traditionally thin, especially by Hollywood standards. And she does it all with her trademark humor. I'm not sure I would ever want to be friends with Kaling. She's a very intense person, and it would be a lot for me to handle in person. But she's exactly the kind of person whose work I enjoy, and who I'm confident will continue to produce funny things.

It's always interesting when a story gets as much hype as Big Little Lies  has over the past year. There's always a chance that it won't live up to it. Then again, these things are often receiving all that attention for a reason, and they're usually worth checking out. The trick is to time it so that you're expectations match up with reality. This time, it worked. I loved this book. I read it so much faster than I expected to, partly because I couldn't put it down and partly because it was just that easy to read. The story opens as a murder mystery, but the mystery is doubled. Not only do you not know who the killer is, you don't know who the victim is. The book then rewinds six months to plot out all the events leading up to the murder. Full disclosure: I went into this book knowing who would die. I had a pretty good idea who the killer was (I ended up being wrong, actually). But that didn't detract from the experience at all. On the contrary, the a...