Bookish Thoughts

I have finally collected all five books in this series, which means I can read it straight through. I've been wanting to revisit the early ones for a while, and it's nice to finally have all my ducks in a roll. Back when Gavin was first born, I attempted to read the first book to him, but I could never get through more than a paragraph or two at a time, which got frustrating. So I've adapted and am now using the series as my bedtime book. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making  was everything I remembered and more. It's a lovely story about beginning to grow up and all the choices you make as you start to navigate that scary path of adolescence. It's about making new friends and figuring out who you are and starting to see and accept the darkness of the world. I hadn't remembered how dark this book gets at the end, and it was a nice counterbalance to all the sweetness that came before it. It grounds the book and makes it more than...

What happens when an unstoppable force meets with an immovable object? Eventually, the force wins. It goes around the object, wears it down until there's nothing left. And so it went with the Oankali and Lilith. For all her pride and stubborness, her campaigning on behalf of the remaining humans and her willingness to sacrifice her own freedom that they might live on, the Oankali have won And the proof is in her children. The last book follows the latest of Lilith's children, who happens to be the first human-born ooloi. He is more alien than ought to be possible for a child with mostly human DNA. But it just drives home how quickly and inexorably the Oankali ultimately work, wiping out the human race in a single generation. It also goes to show that culture plays a much larger part in our development than the Oankali are willing to admit. Raised by Oankali, and an ooloi in particular, Jodahs has far more in common with them than with his human parents. This is the book whe...

The Expanse novellas that Corey releases between books are a fun little expansion of the universe. As they've gone on, they've moved from filling in the background of interesting characters to foreshadowing the future of the series. The last one and this one provide a tantalizing taste of the threat to come in the final third of the series. Strange Dogs  in particular is a fantastic little horror story that relies on the innocence of childhood to move the scary bits along. Cara has grown up on an alien world, so things that seem strange and unnerving to her parents are just commonplace for her. She takes things in stride and neglects to report on strange or new things because nearly everything she experiences is strange and new and that's just part of life. When she discovers some dog-like creatures that restore a dead bird to life, she doesn't tell anyone because she's scared of getting in trouble for breaking her mom's drone. And when her little brother di...

I'll admit that I came to this one with my hackles raised. My feelings toward the original trilogy are strong and complicated, and they get more complicated the more I think about them. In all honestly I hadn't been planning to read it at all. But then I got it as a Christmas present and I can't just not read a book once it's sitting on my shelf. Plus I like The Golden Compass  enough to give this one a chance, since it didn't cost me anything. The truth is that I genuinely liked the beginning of the book. Malcolm is a bright, observant boy who works in a tavern. He gets recruited as a spy inevitably and almost without being aware of it. But he sees a lot and he's smart enough to put things together and subtle enough to get more information. The result is a slow story in a deeply familiar world, where information is slowly parceled out and pieced together. I liked the puzzle of it all. It also seemed like Pullman was addressing one of the bigger weaknesses o...

Full Fathom Five , the third book in Max Gladston's Craft Sequence , was fully as wonderful as the first book. Maybe moreso. It felt a bit more focused than the first one, though that could be because I've learned enough about this world at this point to take certain things for granted. This book mostly follows two different characters: disgraced priestess Kai, who made idols to order for investors before her boss sidelined her for a foolish attempt to save a dying idol's life, and street urchin Izza, who has begun to chafe at the way the other urchins rely on her, especially because she'll have to leave them soon, one way or another. I spent a lot of this book thinking about The Good Place , which keeps asking what we owe to each other. Full Fathom Five  is more concerned with asking who we owe it to. How do you define a community and how do you recognize kindred spirits. Belief, the book says, is what defines a community. And that makes sense in a series about g...

Adulthood Rites  shifts the focus from fully human Lilith to her son, Akin. Akin is mostly human, though he has a bit of Oankali mixed in - the first generation in the slow process of the Oankali ultimately subsuming humanity. He's raised in Oankali tradition, which makes him almost more Oankali than human, a distinction that the Oankali don't really understand. And he's the first male child of this new generation, because the Oankali find human men more unpredictable and unstable than the women. This book got me thinking about the nature vs nurture debate. I believe pretty strongly that nurture has a greater effect on us that nature, and everything I read pushes me further in that direction. Sure, it's our DNA that makes us human rather than chimpanzee. And the two are probably more intricately entwined than we currently understand or that I'm crediting here. Still. Nurture plays a bigger role in our personalities and lives than I think most people credit, becaus...

Red Rain  was my Christmas present from Kevin this year. He bought it assuming it would be horrible, but hopefully in a good way. Goodreads reviews led me to believe that this would be the case. But it ended up just being bad in a bad way. It's possibly the laziest book I've ever read. There's maybe a case to be made for laziness. Certainly when I was ten years old and inhaling Baby-Sitter's Club novels, their formulaic nature was more comforting than off-putting. I was just learning about literature, and that series was a good way to get a handle on common tropes. Goosebumps  served the same purpose for many other people my age. So maybe part of the problem was that I was never that interested in Goosebumps , so I didn't have any nostalgia to fall back on. But the fact remains that this was a terrible book. The characters were flat and unbelievable. Every thing that happened was "just like in the movies", which didn't lead a lot of credence to th...

When I'm reading a series, I try to review each book before I read the next one. It helps me keep them straight. But that didn't happen this time. As I'm writing this, I've already finished the entire trilogy. It's given me a lot to think about. This trilogy deals deeply with consent and oppression and appropriation, with reproductive freedom and the nature/nurture debate. Plus there are aliens. I'm going to do my best to just talk about the first book, but the fact is that I've been thinking about this for weeks now and I keep thinking about new things. Dawn  focuses on Lilith Iyapo, a human woman who survived an apocalyptic nuclear war - because aliens happened to be passing by and they abducted and healed her and are now holding her captive. The book starts slow, with Lilith waking in a cell and only gradually coming to understand what has happened and where she is. She is eventually released to live with an alien family, where she is coerced into helpi...

The Book of Tea  is a century-old essay about the art and culture of drinking tea. It was written by Okakura Tenshin, a Japanese man living in America, for an American audience. It goes to pains to highlight the differences between western and eastern culture, arguing for the superiority of eastern aesthetics and contentment. I have to say that reading this book was a very calming experience. I curled up in be with a cup of tea and immersed myself in a different kind of life, where simplicity and ceremony are more important than clutter and ambition. Reading this, it was easier to see where Marie Kondo was coming from. I really enjoyed reading this and getting a glimpse into another culture, especially as it was presented with it's best foot forward, so to speak, trying to show Westerners all the things they missed when they started importing and growing their own tea.

This is only the second of Jo Walton's books that I've read, but it's safe to say that it cemented my love of her. She has a way of probing the quieter, more mundane moments of our lives to see what sort of magic pops out. And she tells incredible, incredibly human stories with deeply relatable characters that I just want to hug. In the pantheon of science fiction, this book belongs on the shelf between Arrival and Life After Life . It starts with an old woman in a nursing home. Patricia has dementia, and she is often confused. She remembers two completely different lives: two spouses, two careers, two sets of children. More than that, there are two completely different worlds. One is striving towards peace and knowledge, the other seems intent on destroying itself, neither is exactly our world (as illustrated by JFK's fates). After the introduction, the book goes back to the beginning, to Patricia's early life and the choice that caused her worlds to diverge. ...

This collection of Japanese Fairy Tales that Kevin got me for Christmas was world better than the collection of Hawaiian myths. The stories had actual plots and mostly sensible characters. As sensible as any fairy tale characters are anyway. It helped immensely that this collection was written by a Japanese woman who was deeply familiar with both the stories and the English language. The collection wasn't perfect. I enjoyed reading it, but I still struggled a lot. That said, I'm more willing to attribute those struggles to my lack of familiarity with the culture rather than the authors. Every now and then a turn of phrase or a plot point would catch me completely off guard. It made reading a bit difficult, but the good kind of difficult. My favorite stories were the ones that involved the Dragon King of the Sea. He pops up every now and then to aid good people, punish evil people, or just lead them astray. But he's so completely alien that he was a lot of fun to read ab...

I first discovered the Sandman comics during me senior year in high school. It took my a while to collect all ten, and in the meantime I re-read the ones I had. Then I hauled them all to college with me and read them again and again. Comics were about the only "for fun" reading I could eke out for a few years, and this series was my go-to. Suffice to say that, even though it's now been years since I revisited the series, I know it pretty well. It's one of those foundational works for me, the series that opened up all sorts of other possibilities for me and determined the sorts of stories I continue to gravitate towards. I actually remember when Overture  was first announced and then released years ago. But then I decided to wait for the trade to be released and then I more or less forgot about it. There were so many other books to read. Until I saw this by chance on a shelf of a brand new indie bookstore that was only 1/4 unpacked at the time. I snatched it up. It...

The sixth book in The Expanse series concludes the war that was begun in Nemesis Games . As Holden and crew rally everyone in the solar system to stand against Marco Inaros, he faces mounting pressures from his own people. Inaros is an interesting villain in that he's doomed to failure from the beginning. It's inevitable. His vision is too great and too short-sighted. He's temperamental and incapable of taking responsibility for his failures. Everything is part of the plan, which served him well until he gained too much power to wield it effectively. So the concerns in this story aren't so much about defeating him. That's a given. It's more about repairing and minimizing the damage he's causing. It's about how people come together to help each other, about making peace with the unknown, and forging ahead anyway. This was an incredibly timely book, being concerned as it is with the tug between free will and destiny. Are the big things inevitable or c...