Bookish Thoughts

I didn't like this book as much as Three Parts Dead . I don't know how much of that is sophomore slump and how much of it was just Gladstone changing things up a bit. Ultimately I did enjoy this book and found it just as interesting and thought-provoking as the first one. But it took me a lot longer to get there. At least part of that is because Caleb is a difficult protagonist. And he's the only point of view we get in this book, aside from a few brief interludes. So we have a much narrower scope and a lot of time spent with a character that I took a long time to warm up to. I suppose it's no surprise that I wasn't as immediately or intensely excited about this book. The thing about Caleb is that he's content. And that's just not that interesting. He likes his work. He likes his life. He's not hugely passionate about anything, but neither is he deeply dissatisfied. His biggest problem is his relationship with his father, who was a priest of the fall...

Towards the end of Born a Crime , Trevor Noah talks about the time he was arrested under suspicion of stealing a car. He pauses to explain how this all works in South Africa - the difference between jail and prison, what a bail hearing is, what happens if you can't make bail. It's a shitty, rigged system. Then he points out that it's basically the same system we have in America. Noah's memoir of growing up in South Africa during and immediately after Apartheid is full of stuff like this. The racism there is formalized and explicit. His very existence is against the law, and he spends his childhood never quite fitting in anywhere because no one quite knows how to classify him. But he reminds the audience again and again, sometimes subtly and other times less so, that this is hardly unique to South Africa. They studied things that worked and didn't work around the world, and the US was one of their primary sources of inspiration. The book itself is really interest...

The Tempest  may just win an award for the thing I've been intending to read for the longest time. Back in 6th grade, my drama teacher gave me a copy and told me that I'd like it because of the magical elements. And it's one of Shakespeare's shorter plays - an excellent entry point for a precocious tween. But I never got around to it. I know enough to recognize the references I see all around me. Prospero in Night Circus  and his disappointment when his daughter rejects the name Miranda. "Hell is empty and all the devils are here" quoted or misquoted every time we as a nation take another step backwards. Caliban's War  in the Expanse  series and Full Fathom Five  in the Craft Sequence . I finally decided that enough was enough. Surely I was missing even more references than I was recognizing. As my teacher recognized all those years ago, this is one of those foundational works that ought to be required for anyone with a healthy interest in SFF. So I pi...

Kevin got me this book for Christmas, and I really tried to read it. It's a collection of Hawaiin myths, most of them about five pages long. It seemed like perfect bedtime reading. But it was awful. Disorganized and poorly translated to the point of being almost unreadable. As short as these stories were, I often got bored and lost the thread halfway through, which left me wondering what had just happened and what the point was more often than not. About three-quarters of the way through, I finally gave up. I wanted to like this. I wanted to learn more about Hawaiin myth, because they have a huge pantheon of gods that I know very little about. I at least have some of the basics now: Maui to trickster, Pele the quick-tempered and jealous god of lava, and so on. But any entertainment was drowned out by confusion. Information is never introduced in a natural way to build tension, instead slipped in right before it's needed. It didn't help that I picked up on one or two mis...

Like the first Science of the Discworld  book, this one alternates between non-fiction chapters and a story about the Discworld wizards exploring our world. The author's classify the non-fiction chapters as extended footnotes for the "story" chapters, and I guess that makes sense of the organization. Though those so-called footnotes are twice as long as the non-footnote material. Where the first book followed a linear time progression from big bang to the creation of life on earth, this one jumps around a bit more in time. As do the wizards. And while it coalesces around certain themes, this book ended up feeling a bit all over the place to me. It's much more thought experiment, being a history of civilization and philosophy and something of an extended argument against religion and for science. Which is all well and good, but it isn't entirely what I was expecting. There were, as always, a few fun tidbits. But this book ended up feeling a little all over the ...

I finally made it to the end of LM Montgomery's series about Anne Shirley Blythe, and man was it worth it to get to this gem of a book. Rilla of Ingleside  is easily the best book of the series, throwing Anne's idyllic world into turmoil during the first world war. The rest of the series may have gotten repetitive and boring, but it makes the hardship and tragedy in this one stand out that much more. This book follow's Anne's youngest daughter. At the outset, she's eager to grow up, go to parties, get a boyfriend or two, and generally enjoy her youth. Unlike her brothers and sisters, she has no real ambition beyond enjoying her late teens. But all that gets thrown out the window by world events. One by one, Rilla's brothers sign up and travel to the front. Instead of parties and dates, Rilla finds herself organizing Red Cross fundraisers and raising a baby whose mother died and whose father left for the war and hasn't been heard of since. She has to grow...

On some level, whatever I read after Three Parts Dead  was going to suffer by comparison. That book was so perfect for me that it was unlikely I would like the next one as much. But I don't think that's the only reason that I was lukewarm on this book. This book, the second in King's The Dark Tower  series was fine. Parts of it were exciting. Parts were interesting. But overall I feel like I just didn't get it. I spent a lot of it wondering what the point was, and I never really warmed up to any of the characters. I bought the next two books in the series, and I'll probably get around to reading them. But I'm not particularly excited about them, and I don't really see myself finishing this series at this point. A lot of people love it, and I expected to have stronger feelings after two book. I think maybe this one just isn't for me.

Every now and then I come across a book that feels like it was written just for me: Sunshine , Among Others , Mr. Fox . I love these books deeply, but I have a hard time recommending them to people. They're so specific to my interests and so dear to my heart that I worry what will happen if my friends don't end up loving them like I do. Three Parts Dead  is another book that feels like it was written just for me. But this one feels like it was written for all my friends, too. Instead of holding this one close to my heart, I'm shoving it at all of my friends. Upon finishing it, I immediately gushed about it on a friend's Facebook page. I told another friend she had to read it immediately. I'm considering slipping it into my husband's suitcase for his upcoming business trip. I want to talk about this book (this series). I want to get excited and point things out to my friends and see all the things I missed. This isn't a book that spoke directly to my soul...

On re-read, I enjoyed The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents  much more than when I initially read it. I'm not sure why exactly this is. Whether I'm better acquainted with children's literature in general now or with Pratchett's children's literature in particular and have a better understanding of what it tries to and can accomplish. Or whether it's because I read it along with Mark Oshiro, who loved it and pointed out all the wonderful nuance that I wasn't as attuned to my first time through. Regardless, I really enjoyed this book this time around. So much so that I'm seriously considering using it to introduce Gavin to the Discworld in a few years. (Let's be real, it was either going to be this or Tiffany Aching, and this one is geared towards slightly younger children than that sub-series). But it pulls of the neat trick of dealing with really big questions and refusing to provide easy answers. And in a kid's book, too. The rats in ...

This is probably going to be one of those trilogies where I just pretend that the second and third books don't exist. I don't think either adds much to what was a near-perfect little horror story. Which maybe isn't the fault of the books or the author. This trilogy trades on disorientation and suspense, and it's really hard to maintain those for any length of time. That's why Lovecraft only really wrote short stories. Acceptance  tries to explain what happened both before and after Annihilation . And while it's interesting, it's pretty unnecessary. I'm glad the biologist made it to the island and found something like peace. She got as close to a happy ending as she was going to (before she turned into a leviathan anyway). The story of the lighthouse keeper was interesting, but, again, I don't feel like it added much to the story. Aside from the interlude into the biologist's story, this book sort of lost me in the middle. I had a hard time ta...

I wasn't going to read this book. It was barely a blip on my radar. But then my mother in law bought it to boost sales and piss Trump off. Since our Amazon accounts are linked, I have access to all her books, so when I went to look for my next phone book, it was just sitting there waiting for me. I was curious enough to open it, and then I couldn't quite look away. I spent most this book oscillating between terror and schadenfreude. No one wishes Clinton had won the election more than Trump, and his misery is a tiny silver lining in all of this. But his incompetence inspires fury and horror far more often than it inspires pleasure. Though it is nice when he ties himself in knots and fails to push through some of his more horrifying ideas. Wolff quickly establishes the three factions vying for influence and attention: Steve Bannon, Jared and Ivanka, and Reince Priebus. Then he shows how their constant warring and undermining combined with Trump's pathological desire to b...

I enjoyed The Rules of Magic  much more than Practical Magic . At least part of that is that I didn't bring a bunch of preconceived notions and expectations to my reading. There's no movie version of The Rules of Magic  that I've watched more times than I can count. But a bigger part is that The Rules of Magic  did the things I was expecting Practical Magic  to do. It almost seems to have more in common with the movie than the book it was actually based on. In Practical Magic  the movie, the girls have different opinions about love, but they embrace magic. They make wishes and cast spells and brew potions. In Practical Magic  the book, Sally and Gillian both reject magic, and with it their family. In  The Rules of Magic , the aunts and their brother embrace magic, against the counsel of their mother. They defy their fates to varying degrees of success, suffering victories and defeats throughout their lives. But they all learn that it ultimately does ...

The Glass Castle  is the slightly horrifying memoir of Jeannette Walls, who was raised by a couple of dreamers who eschewed modern society and all its responsibilities and requirements. Her mother was an artist who bristled at the idea of holding down a steady job. Her father was a big dreamer, sure he was on the verge of making it rich. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic, who drank more money that he earned. The result was a family that was constantly on the move, running from debts and responsibilities, and a group of children who learned to be mature and resourceful beyond their years. Despite her unstable childhood, Walls clearly has a deep love for both of her parents. She introduces her father first through his ideas and his intelligence. He has big plans, and it seems like he has the brains to pull them off. He just doesn't have the patience. Or, it becomes more and more clear as the book goes on, the sobriety. This book was an incredible story of resourcefulness an...

Authority  pulls back a bit from Annihilation  to provide a bigger picture and answer some questions. Not too many questions, though. Annihilation  was laser focused on an unreliable narrator with incomplete and occasionally incorrect information. Authority  adds more characters and shifts its focus to the organization that's been organizing the expeditions that were detailed in the first book. Albeit, it's also told from the perspective of an outsider, the new director who has only just arrived on the scene and is tasked with making sense of the mess that's been left behind in the wake of the last expedition. Like the first book, this one kept me off balance, which was definitely intentional. But it occasionally got frustrating. The book plays fast and loose with time, slipping into flashbacks and jumping forward only to loop back with almost no warning. It helps adds to the general feeling of paranoia, but it also felt a little cheap and obvious at times, and it ...