Bookish Thoughts

Another of the translated books Amazon was giving away, this one is a contemporary Japanese novel about finding your passion. The book follows a group of rather awkward people working to make a new dictionary. It's a lifelong dream of two older men, who are nearing retirement and take a young man under their wings. They mentor him and help him learn to interact better with the world around him. He, in turn, helps usher their dream project (which quickly becomes his dream project) to fruition. There wasn't a ton of conflict in this tale, which is mostly about good-natured and well-intentioned people becoming friends and helping each other out. It can be a nice change of pace to read stories like that. The biggest drama is whether or not they'll meet their deadline. It's something I can relate to, but it's also not like the stakes are all that high. At worst they'll have to push the release back. It was interesting to learn about the process of making a dictio...

The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home  is a nearly perfect ending to a nearly perfect book. I have a small quibble about September's age, which seems terribly inconsistent. But then again time passes differently in Fairyland and even moreso when you get aged up and back down. And the story resonated a bit better with her being older. But it never quite felt fully explained. The rest of the book is so good, though, that I can't be too mad. It does a great job of bringing back all the characters and places we've fallen in love with over the series. September ends the book firmly in adulthood, having taken her destiny into her own hands. She's not the queen, but where she ends up is even better. And of course this book has all the lovely narration of the previous books. It's paced a bit better than them, too. And it was nice to actually spend time with September's friends in the beginning before the adventure kicked off. And then during the adventure, t...

Mara Wilson is one of those child actors who hit puberty and more or less disappeared. For a while it felt like she was everywhere, though she really only had a couple of big movies. But man were they big movies. Matilda  and Mrs. Doubtfire  were definitely staples of my childhood. And then she grew up and I grew up and I honestly didn't give her much thought until she resurfaced in the public eye a few years ago. She didn't make a big splash the way she did as a kid. She wasn't even really acting this time around. She was writing and becoming active on twitter. I started reading some her work and admiring her more. And then she wrote one of my favorite articles on the-toast (about Rizzo and Sandra Dee) and once I realized that I knew I had to get my hands on her book. Reading her essays was a joy. She's a fantastic writer with a subtle humor that I really appreciate. The book runs the gamut from growing up on film sets to dealing with mean girls in high school to le...

Man, reading this book was stressful. At least part of that is because of what was happening in the world when I was reading it. It turns out that dystopian fiction (and especially the second novel in a trilogy when everything gets really bad) is not great escapism when real life is starting to feel like a dystopia. But that doesn't mean it was a bad book. There was a lot to like about it. Mostly, I appreciated the fact that the narration was split between Todd and Viola. Todd is a frustrating protagonist. He was raised in a toxic environment and kept ignorant. This makes him easy to manipulate and means that he spends most of the book following the bad guy's orders and trying to justify it to himself. Viola, on the other hand, is everything I want from a YA heroine. Intelligent, eager to learn, and able to see the bigger picture. She has a strong moral compass, and while she's willing to concede that other's might know more than her, she keeps coming back to what s...

The Question of Red  is another of Amazon's translated works that I picked up for free on world book day. This one was actually translated by the author herself, who is bilingual, and I think that helped retain a lot of the poetry of the original story. Pamuntjak has an incredible gift for language. It was easy to get caught up that language, which made the rest of the story go down easier. Because this tale is deeply tragic. It centers on Amba, a woman named for a character in the Mahabharata who was twice scorned and doomed to a life of bitterness and vengeance. The modern Amba doesn't really believe that her fate is so tied up with that of her namesake. But when she finds herself engaged to a man named Salwa and in love with a man named Bhisma, just like the Amba of the stories, she begins to have her doubts. And to self-sabotage. In attempting to escape her fate, she might just bring it down upon herself. This is a book about stories and how they shape our lives. We tel...

The Word for World is Forest  is a quick little story that reminded me of nothing so much as Avatar . That comparison feels a bit unfair to LeGuin. After all, Avatar  was a movie with a mostly forgettable plot and characters that achieved huge success mostly because it looked cool (and because it tricked us all into shelling out for the more expensive 3D tickets). LeGuin's novella does a whole lot more than look cool. But the bones of the plot are the same. Humanity has discovered a planet with a valuable resource (wood, in this case, which Earth has run out of) and has determined to take it all for themselves, ignoring the local life who are seen as so primitive that our only choice is to either exterminate them or force them into slave labor.The book switches between three points of view: Captain Davidson is heading up one of the logging camps, and he provides the most heinous voice as he keeps finding new ways to justify the atrocities he commits. Raj Lyubov is an anthrop...

Sometimes you just want to be happy and know that everything's going to be alright. Especially with everything going on in the world right now, there's comfort in a formulaic, happy story. I've never read a proper romance before, and I've been meaning to rectify that for some time. Now that I finally have, well, I have half a mind to jettison my current to-read list and read nothing but romance until Trump is out of office. I'm not going to do that. But I'm definitely going to start reading more romance novels. They provide a fantastic anti-dote to the bleakness of the world at large. The one I read, The Rogue Not Taken , was funny and steamy and uplifting. It's about Sophie and King and their journey from enemies to lovers. Sophie and King only know each other by reputation. She's a "Dangerous Daughter", the youngest of a newly-minted Earl who bought his title and whose daughters are doing their utmost to land titled husbands and secure ...

The Knife of Never Letting Go  is the first in a young adult science fiction dystopian trilogy. I remember hearing about it back when the last book was released. Not any of the plot details, just the very strong emotions it seemed to elicit in the people who had read it. It fits right in with the other young adult dystopian literature that came out around the same time. The book follows Todd Hewitt, the last boy in a town full of men. The women all died shortly after Todd was born, leaving him as the last baby. He's grown up on an alien world, in a town where everyone's thoughts are broadcast for everyone else to hear. It's a bit of an off-putting premise, but I'm glad I didn't let it scare me away from the books completely. Shortly before his thirteenth birthday, Todd comes across a girl on the outskirts of his town. It quickly becomes clear that he's been lied to for his entire life. But before he can properly wrap his mind around that, the plot kicks off ...

I'm not sure where the line is drawn between period piece and historical fiction. I'm sure there's some official criteria when it comes to defining the two. But without looking that up, I'm going to call Little Fires Everywhere  a period piece, mostly because I can't quite handle historical fiction being set during my childhood. I'm not that old yet. This book is set in the late 90s, the year I was in sixth grade. There were a lot of background references to popular music, television shows, and movies that I recognized. That bit of nostalgia was really fun, but it was just icing on the cake that is this story. Little Fires Everywhere  is about motherhood. There are two central families. Mrsh Richardson has four kids, all in high school. She has a great husband, a nice house, a career as a journalist. She's done everything right and has followed all of the rules. Then Mia and Pearl move in to the neighborhood and shake her to her core. Mia is an artist wh...

I have been slow to fall in love with Ursula K LeGuin. I struggled with Earthsea (which I actually want to revisit now). I ultimately really enjoyed  The Left Hand of Darkness , though I had a hard time with the middle of it. I loved  The Dispossessed . And I actually really liked LeGuin's intro to my edition of The Left Hand of Darkness . In the wake of her recent death (and because I loved The Dispossessed  so much), I wanted to read more of her work. And her non-fiction seemed like the next logical move. I have to say, this was a bit of a mixed bag. I really enjoyed some of the essays. Others fell flat. A third of the book is book reviews, mostly of books and authors I'd never heard of. But the books I had heard of are ones with a special place in my heart, so now my to-read list has once again grown bigger. An aside, one of the reviews is for a collection of short stories by Italo Calvino that had been translated from Italian. They seemed interesting and quirky. A...

This book broke my heart. After Broken Harbor , I'd been expecting another terrifying read from Tana French. Instead I got a deeply sad tale about friendship and the things young girls will do to protect (or destroy) each other. The murder victim in this book is a teenaged boy, found on the campus of a girl's boarding school. A year after his death, the case has gone cold, until a new clue narrows the suspect pool to eight teenaged girls, and the detectives find themselves caught in a web of high school drama and endless lies, trying to tease apart exactly what happened. Reading this book, I kept thinking back to my college experience. For a few brief, shining months, I had what these girls have. A group of girl friends that you are impossibly close with. You live together and share everything. You're ride or die for each other, and it seems like it will stay that way forever. And then something goes wrong. And because everything is so heightened, it goes really wrong, an...

The fourth book in Valente's Fairyland series is a bit of a departure from the series so far. It follows a whole new cast of characters, and in some ways it acts as a mirror to the first book. This one is about Hawthorn, a troll who's plucked from his crib by a wind and taken to our world as a changeling. He has a difficult childhood. It's hard for him to figure out the rules of our world, and it's hard for his parents to relate to the new, changed him. But eventually he meets another changeling and finds his way back to Fairyland, where we start to understand the scope of the problems that September is at the root of. The beginning of the book is a lot of fun, filled with callbacks to the beginning of the first book. Hawthorn's journey to our world isn't so different than September's first journey to Fairyland. And the meddlesome winds all seem to be reading from the same script. Then again, the beginning of the book is heartbreaking. We're not follow...

The eighth volume of Saga is all about the families we make and all the different ways we go about making them. It deals with some heavy issues, and I occasionally felt that it was a bit heavy-handed. That said it was nice for the authors to take such direct and clear stands on abortion and trans* issues. And it's all part of an ongoing story that's fantastic. So if I found a page or two a little after-school-special-y, well whatever. At the end of the previous issue, the fetus Alana was carrying died. Now the family is racing to find a doctor willing to abort it before Alana dies, too. Along the way we get a nice little story about what might have been, if Hazel's brother had been born, that dovetails nicely with a teaser ending about the (non-biological) brother she eventually finds. That's the other thing this issue has: long awaited reunions. And dedicated issues to catch up with a few other characters. No jumping around and only the bare minimum of teasing. It ...

This book was utterly delightful. It's a play on the classic Victorian novel. Think Jane Austen. Except that all of the characters are dragons, which makes it even more fun. At the beginning of the book, an old patriarch dies, stirring up all manner of trouble. He has five surviving children, and while he tries to split up his estate fairly, the inevitable squabbles threaten to tear the family apart. The book follows the five children, two of whom are married with kids of their own. The unmarried male is working in town, building a life for himself. The two unmarried female dragons are split up for the first time in their lives, each sent to live a different sibling until marriages can be arranged for them. Along the way, they (and we) learn about various injustices in their society. It's pretty clear from the beginning how everything will end up. Happily ever afters for the good guys, just desserts for the bad guys, and dancing and merriment all around. But it's the ...