Bookish Thoughts

Usually, when I find an author I enjoy as much as Catherynne Valente, I rush out to buy and read as many of their books as I can, always searching for the next one. But that doesn't seem to be happening with this particular author. Valente has written a whole bunch of books. I've read four of them. But I've read all four of them twice. And I'll probably read them many more times. I'll get around to the rest of her work, too. Everything she's written sounds interesting, and her books are all so different from each other and from anything else I've read. Maybe that's part of it. When I find an author I like and I want to read more like that, I find the rest of the author's books. But Valente doesn't work like that. Radiance  is an entirely different book than the Fairyland  series. Her latest, Space Opera  (Eurovision in Space), is wholly different again, as are the books on her backlist like Palimpsest  (a sexually-transmitted city) and Six Gun ...

This is the book I wanted The Science of Discworld II: The Globe  to be. It deals with the same material and comes at it from the same perspective, but it's much better organized and more comprehensive, with less of a tendency to wander into the "what if" of it all. Sapeins  is a comprehensive history of humankind, looking at large trends over the existence of our species and mostly glossing over details. Harari focuses on large, sweeping trends in an effort to find larger patterns. He breaks this history down into three revolutions. The cognitive revolution, when humans leaped to the top of the food chain. The agricultural revolution, when we went from hunter/gatherers to farmers and started building cities. And the scientific revolution, when we admitted our ignorance and started making great strides in understanding. The thing that sets us apart from other animals, Harari argues and I find myself agreeing, is our ability to tell stories. To make up fictions and e...

This isn't quite my favorite Discworld  book, but I'd argue that it's the best Discworld  book. This is Pratchett at his peak - tackling a timely and timeless issue with compassion and humor and forcing the reader to reckon with their own point of view. Pratchett makes excellent use of a time-travel paradox to send Vimes back to the past thirty years to mentor his own, younger self. This happens to coincide with a brutal regime change in Ankh-Morpork. No peaceful transition of power here - there are assassinations and revolutions, blood and fire, and Vimes just trying to prevent as much death as possible. On my first time through the series, this is the book where I finally fell in love with Vimes, where I finally saw what everyone else was seeing. He lays a foundation of morality for his younger self, one that will stick with him through the ups and downs (mostly downs) to come. It's a neat little origin story, one that acknowledges how much growth is still to come...

In The Fifth Season , the world ends. In The Obelisk Gate , the characters figure out what they're going to do about it. The thing is that the world hasn't ended so much as changed. The constant refrain throughout the book is that the planet will be just fine. It's the future of humanity that's in question now. But the bulk of humanity is no more than innocent bystanders in a war that's been going on for millennia. A war that, we're told, has more than one side. A war for which this will be the final decisive battle. The scope expands in this book. The end of the last book revealed that this story is being told to Essun by Hoa, which sparked my biggest question and one that doesn't even come close to being answered in this installment. But it must be in the conclusion. It's such a specific and unique framing device that there has to be a reason for it. But instead of addressing that question, since Hoa and Essum both presumably know the answer to it, h...

I have to say that Slammerkin  was a bit of a disappointment. It wasn't bad, and by the end I even mostly enjoyed it. But after Room  and Frog Music , I was expecting a more compelling story, and it was just lacking. I suppose that's the risk of reading an author's works backwards. It didn't help that parts of the book were reminiscent of Alias Grace , another book that a lot of people liked that never quite grabbed me. Maybe it's the genre - murderous maids in the 1700s might just not be my thing. At least this one leaned into the guilt of the maid in question, rather than playing a coy game about whether or not she committed the crime she was accused of. Slammerkin  started slow and bleak. Everything that could go wrong for Mary does. Growing up poor, she longs for a better life, and she has the brains to achieve it if she only lived in a different time and place. Instead her desire for a pretty red ribbon ends in the peddlar raping her. When her mom discovers...

My favorite thing about NK Jemisin is that she makes her readers work hard. She creates these fantastically rich worlds with intricate magic systems that inform complex societies. She builds up entire cultures, buttressed by new vocabulary and gods. And then she just throws you in the deep end and expects you to learn how to navigate it all. This works so well because she is a brilliant writer, expertly dropping hints throughout the narrative that help expand the world while the plot rushes forward. Her books take a little while to get invested in because they have such a steep learning curve. But it's always worth it. This is a rather long way of saying that I returned to the prologue at least four or five times while I was reading the rest of the book. The prologue is so incredibly dense that it took a long time to digest. I think the entire first book is actually contained in those first few pages, though it takes the entire book to make all of that clear. It was a treat to ...

This was a brief but very affecting memoir written by a Turkish lawyer and activist about discovering her Grandmother's origins. It's only in recent years that the Armenian Genocide is coming to be recognized as the atrocity it was. Turkey has done it's best to erase this part of it's history. But as Fetihye Cetin and others like her come to learn about and embrace their heritage, that denial is slipping away. This book is as much about Cetin's journey to process her grandmother's story as it is about that story itself. As such, it jumps around a little in an attempt to lay all the groundwork for the story. This mostly worked, though it was occasionally jarring to jump between Cetin's present and her grandmother's childhood. By the end it all comes together, and it makes sense why she explains the things she does. Cetin doesn't linger over the horrors her grandmother experienced on the death march to Aleppo, but she doesn't shy away from them...