Bookish Thoughts

The seventh volume of Saga deals with love and loss, mostly loss. Hazel and her family find themselves stranded on the comet Phang while their ship refuels. Phang, the book reminds us, is where The Will found Sophie. It's a poor, exploited, downtrodden war zone. But Hazel and her family end up enjoying some of the best months of their lives their. Right up until it all turns to shit. Hazel's older now, and it's fun to see her as a bratty six-year-old. She's dealing with conflicting feelings about her mom's pregnancy, lashing out at her baby-sitter, making new friends with the locals. It's all very sweet and heartwarming, but the impending doom adds a lot of tension. Things go belly-up pretty spectacularly. A new assassin has been sent after the family, but the two warring nations are also conspiring to just get rid of Phang once and for all. Why continue to expend resources when you can just cut your losses? It's always sad to lose characters, but if I...

Homo Deus  is by turns horrific, terrifying, and rage-inducing. It balances this with moments of awe and wonder at all humanity has accomplished and the things we continue to do. Reading this book is like balancing on the knife's edge of despair and optimism. But Harris never quite lets you fall wholly into either emotion. Which means that the book ultimately left me with a weird, unsettled feeling and a whole lot to think about. Harris paints with broad-strokes. He takes the macro view of history, and boy is it macro. Because of that view he makes a lot of sweeping statements and ignores almost all nuance and detail. Sure, he holds up any number of examples, but he never really digs down into the weeds to examine things on a more human level or timescale. A lot of the book is a condensed re-hash of Sapiens , necessary because he's using past trends to inform his predictions about the future. And some of his conclusions didn't sit right with me. Not that I know quite en...

Bujold recently released a new Vorkosigan novella, and the truth is that there just isn't that much to say about it. The Flowers of Vashnoi  takes place shortly after Captain Vorpatril's Alliance  and is told from Ekaterine's point of view. It sees her and Enrique testing out a new batch of butter bugs that the hope will consume the radiation in the Vashnoi district and make it habitable sooner. In the course of this project, they discover people living in the irradiated zone, and they have to figure out what to do about it. This is a pretty short story, and for good reason. You have competent, compassionate, and above all privileged people encountering a problem and immediately doing everything within their power to solve it to everyone's benefit. It's an exercise in wish-fulfillment. What if the people in charge genuinely cared about their people and could quickly bring about meaningful change to better their lives? What if knowing about a problem was nearly t...

Ten Woman  was another of the free books Amazon offered for World Book Day. This one is a Chilean work of fiction translated from Spanish. It follows the lives of nine women who have nothing in common but their therapist. The frame story - which is pretty thin - has them all meeting for the first time and sharing their life stories and the reasons they've been attending therapy. The tenth woman is the therapist herself, who also has a story to share. These stories were interesting, and they painted a diverse picture of womanhood. There was something in each story that I was able to relate to, though some of the women were more similar to me than others. One of them had a startling amount in common with my mom. Others had experiences that were completely foreign, though they were valuable to read about. While I enjoyed reading the individual stories, I struggled with understanding the book as a whole. The women barely interact with each other - each chapter is just a different on...

It's been about fifteen years since I first read this book back in high school, but it turns out that I'm still a little bit in love with Lestat. I guess that first love never really goes away. Reckless, blonde, devil-may-care vampires who fall in love at the drop of a hat do it for me every time. The Vampire Lestat  is a much better book than Interview With a Vampire , mostly because Lestat is a much more interesting character than Louis. He's curious without descending into brooding. He tries to be moral without getting self-righteous about it. He makes mistakes, but he's mostly able to learn from them and move on. And he's just so in love with the world around him that you can't help but fall a bit in love with him, too. This book is epic and romantic. It dragged a bit at times, especially in the middle. But the payoff is so rewarding. I love the deep dive into vampiric lore and how their culture has changed over the centuries. I love the way answers are ...

Some of my favorite quotes come from the third Fairyland  book, which sees September traveling to the moon as a criminal and professional revolutionary (she has overthrown two monarchies at this point). There are a lot of lovely passages about what it means to grow up and how to navigate relationships that seem to be constantly changing. Unfortunately, all this great lyrical prose comes at the expense of the plot which is only barely there. It takes nearly half the book to get the gang back together and introduce the main conflict. And then it's resolved almost immediately, which is a bit of a letdown. This book is short, and September herself is angry about how little time she got in Fairyland this time around. But it might be my favorite for all the wisdom the narrator dispenses. There's a lot in here about the power of naming and perceiving and how you become what other people call you but it also matters what you call yourself. Saying no comes up again and again, as som...

It was a lot of fun to re-read The Wee Free Men  at the same time as the Fairyland  books. Tiffany Aching and September have a lot in common, and if they were ever to meet I think they'd be friends. Except that Tiffany may have been able to warn September about the fairies. But I'm getting ahead of myself. In this book, nine-year-old Tiffany starts to discover her destiny. Which isn't written in the stars so much as it's written in her bones. Tiffany is the second-youngest child in a large farm family. She was the baby until her younger brother, Wentworth, the long-awaited son, came along and stole all the attention from her. So now she watches him and does her chores and misses her grandmother. But the the fairy queen shows up and kidnaps Wentworth. And Tiffany, practical, angry Tiffany, who kind of resents her brother for being born, doesn't hesitate to set out looking for him. With the help of the Nac Mac Feegle, the titular Wee Free Men, she begins to learn ...

For World Book Day, Amazon gave away nine books in translation. Not one to turn my nose up at free books, I quickly downloaded all of them. It's a diverse group of books, each of the nine being from a different genre and a different country. The truth is that I probably won't get around to reading most of them. But A River in Darkness  caught my eye immediately, and I knew I had to read it. This is a short, harrowing memoir about one man's escape from North Korea. Ishikawa's father was born in Korea and brought to Japan to work in the war effort. But at the conclusion of WWII, he was basically abandoned, with no country to return to and no help to be found in Japan. In 1960, when Kim Il Sung formed the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and worked with the Japanese government to move millions of stranded Koreans back from Japan. Ishikawa's father jumped at the chance to move himself and his family home. But though they were promised paradise on Earth, a l...

Sense and Sensibility  is not my favorite Austen. It might even be my least favorite Austen. But that's at least partly because I bring a whole lot of emotional baggage to this book. I first read it at the end of college, when I was visiting Europe on my own. I took an overnight train from Madrid to London. I was in a compartment with three other girls my age. I don't think they knew each other, but they all spoke French and Spanish and none of them spoke English. They had a lively conversation and I read this book and felt an incredible mix of emotions that are, I think, unique to that specific time and place in my life. On the brink of adulthood with no plan for the future off on an adventure and surrounded by people I couldn't communicate with. A mere $150 in my bank account to see me through three days in London. The other part of my baggage is that the Dashwoods - Elinor and Marianne's half-brother and his wife - remind me strongly of my father and his second w...

I love a good epic family saga. Especially one that deals with an area of the world or a part of history that I'm not all the familiar with. By watching a large cast of characters interact with and be affected by real historical events, I gain a better understanding of those events. I also have an easier time remembering all the people and dates when I have an emotional story to hang them on. Pachinko  tells the story of a family of Korean immigrants to Japan. The story begins when teenaged Sunja finds herself pregnant by a married man. In order to save face, she marries a minister who is passing through town on his way to Japan, where his brother lives. The book follows the ups and downs of this family of immigrants who do what they can to survive and even thrive in a country that doesn't want them when they have no home to go back to, Before reading this book I had only a passing familiarity with the animosity between Koreans and Japanese. This book helps lay out all the ...

Alif the Unseen  is about a younger hacker in an unnamed Arab state. He begins the book with no real ideals. He helps people get around and hide from the censors in his country, and he's willing to sell this service to anyone who can pay. But when the censors start to come after him, he develops a conscience and ends up leveraging his online social network to help spark a revolution. It was published shortly before the Arab Spring. What started as science-fiction very quickly came true. It happens to all science-fiction, more or less, eventually. The great authors have an uncanny knack for predicting the trajectory of our culture. And that Wilson's predictions so quickly came to fruition speaks to her close involvement with this community. Of course, in her version of events the djinn are real and there's an element of magic to the code Alif writes. But the point stands that not everything in this book ended up being as far-fetched as it may have seemed while it was b...

An American Marriage  was the pick for the first meeting of the book club I'm trying to get started in my neighborhood. I had never heard of it, and I probably wouldn't have picked it up on my own, but the point of a book club is to expand your horizons. I ended up liking it, though I don't know that I'll actively seek out more like it in the future. Still, it sparked an interesting debate. And it was short enough to read in two days. The book is about a marriage that falls apart. Roy and Celestial have been married for just over a year and have just started trying to get pregnant when he is convicted of a crime he didn't commit and sent to prison for twelve years. He's released after five years, ready to pick up where he left off with Celestial, only to discover that she has moved on. I think the marriage would have failed even if Roy hadn't been sent to jail. He and Celestial have some serious communication problems in the beginning of the book, and he...

This was an absolutely adorable teenage romance. Simon is a closeted gay teenager who has been emailing with another closeted gay teenager in his high school. Of course, they don't know each other's identities, but as they become closer, Simon becomes more and more anxious to meet. Their slow burn relationship is the heart of the book. But in the real world, someone has discovered that Simon is gay, and now he's being blackmailed. This is further complicated by the fact that the blackmailer knows of the existence of Simon's pen pal, though not his identity. But Simon is most worried that he'll lose that relationship, which is quickly becoming one of the most important ones in his life. What most impressed me about this book was Albertalli's ability to sketch out Simon's friends and suggest entire private worlds that Simon is simply too self-absorbed to see. Not that Simon doesn't have some justification. He's a sixteen year old boy dealing with a...

In the final installment of Jemisin's excellent Broken Earth  trilogy, Essun and Nassun are racing to put an end to the war that's been tearing their planet apart for millenia. They have very different goals, one wanting to save the world and start over and the other wanting to just end it all. They grapple with whether or not all this suffering is worth it. And meanwhile, Hoa takes us back to the beginning, and the part he played in starting this war. The ending was thrilling and incredible, with as much redemption as could be managed. Nassun and Essun don't really get a chance to repair their broken relationship, but there's a lovely moment of grace that suggests forgiveness is possible. That said, the ending was also somewhat creepy, as the frame story is finally revealed in full. It's teased from the very beginning - how many stories are written in the second person? Still, the reveal of exactly why Hoa was telling Essun this story was a bit of a shock. Thou...

In the second Fairyland book, September has to deal with some unintended consequences of her actions in the first book. When she sacrificed her shadow to save a child, it seemed like a purely good action. But now her shadow has crowned herself Queen of Fairyland Below and is slowly stealing everyone else's shadows (and with them, their magic). These book are all about growing up, and this one has September coming to terms with consequences, saying goodbye to friends, being introduced to betrayal, and learning how to make hard choices. September is thirteen now and getting her first taste of adulthood. The language remains as lyrical as ever, and it's a delight to see more of Fairyland with September and her friends. Of course, we've only got the shadows of her friends now. They act different, because September has suddenly become privy to the bits of themselves they usually keep hidden. It's a nice little metaphor for getting to know someone better and suddenly wond...

I've been really enjoying Max Gladstone's Craft   Sequence so far. In fact, it has a good chance of being one of my favorite series. The themes, the characters, and the writing have all made me fall in love with this world and these stories. That said, I wonder if Gladstone might not have made a mistake in the way he ordered the books. The first five books were not written in internal chronological order. The publication order is 3, 2, 5, 1, 4. For the first three this didn't make much of a difference, since they all focused on different characters. But Last First Snow  is a direct prequel to Two Serpents Rise , and I think it drained some of the tension from the book. I actually liked Last First Snow better than Two Serpents Rise. The characters were more interesting, and I liked having multiple points of view. The plot was structured much better. And I loved learning more about Elayne Kevarian who has been such an enigmatic figure thus far. Gladstone does an excellen...