Bookish Thoughts

The second Y: The Last Man  book chronicles a series of adventures Yorick, Ampersand, 355, and Dr. Mann have as they continue their journey to California. Some were a lot of fun. Others were weird and off-putting. But it was all entertaining, and I'm still very excited to see what comes next. The first arc deals with three astronauts on the ISS who are returning to Earth. The trio includes two men, and Yorick is excited by the prospect of not being the last man on Earth anymore. This arc helps tie off a few loose threads, particularly the Israelis and their weird conspiracy with Yorick's mom (not the president - I was mistaken). Once all that business is taken care of, we get to follow the main group for a while and the background characters are largely relegated to the back-burner. We see a traveling theater company trying to keep art alive in a small, conservative town. We meet one of 355's oldest friends. And then they encounter a scary militant group in Arizona...

I have to admit, I was never really a fan of the choose your own adventure books that everyone seemed to love when we were kids. I was to cautious to properly appreciate them. So many of the branches led to horrific deaths, and I didn't like those endings. I'd quickly find the single happy (safe, boring) ending and then sit there smugly while my friends recounted the various horribly consequences of their choices. I completely missed the point. Or maybe those books just weren't for me. But a chose-your-own romance? Where every ending is a guaranteed happily ever after? That's something I can get behind. My Lady's Choosing  is a loving parody or romance novels and the women who read them. Everything is heightened. The protagonist/reader falls in love at the drop of a hat and switches her affections to the next potential love interest just as easily. It was a lot of fun to read, and to zoom through all the different romance tropes and backtracking from each new ha...

In the second book of The Enchanted Forest Chronicles , Kazul, king of the dragons, has been kidnapped by the evil wizards who have a new scheme to steal magic. It's up to Cimorene, Morwen, and a few new friends to rescue her and thwart the wizards' latest plan. For some reason I was expecting this whole series to about Cimorene, but this one's told from the point of view of Mendenbar, who she eventually marries. In the beginning I was a little sad about this perspective switch. But it doesn't take long for Mendenbar to seek out Morwen who sends him to Cimorene. This is a fairly short children's book, after all. There isn't that much time to waste. Mandenbar and Cimorene become fast friends. They're both practical and curious, and I was glad that the book made a note of all the long, wandering conversations they had on their quest. Especially because it was obvious pretty early on that these two were going to fall in love and get married. And if that fal...

To celebrate their tenth anniversary, Tor.com released an e-book collection of selected essays from the past ten years. I like tor.com, and the book was free, and I needed something new for my phone, so I downloaded it. I'd already read about half of these essays, but I was happy to read them again. They celebrate science fiction and fantasy. Most of them celebrate specific things about specific works. For the most part, the essays were fun and quick to read, and a lot of them gave me a new perspective on something I don't think about all the time. I did skip two of the essays. There was a long one about Galadriel that just didn't interest me. If I cared that much about Tolkien's elves, I would have managed to read The Silmarillion  by now. And I skipped one about The Raven Cycle . It was basically a love letter to the series, and it looked like it was going to be spoiler-heavy. Since I'm hoping to read that series sooner rather than later (although let's be...

I hated this book. If it hadn't been chosen for my book club, I would have given up after thirty pages. But seeing as I'm organizing and hosting the book club, I couldn't just not read the book. So I powered through (frequently swapping to a different book for a break), and ended up with nice long list of grievances. The broadest of those is that this book is lazy. The author relies overmuch on cliches and stereotypes. Worse, it seems obviously padded to hit a respectable 300 pages. But there were more than a few completely blank pages between chapters. I got the impression that he struggled to hit a minimum page count, which is a shame. There were plenty of places that the characters could have been better fleshed out. The narrator, Joe, and his interview subject, Carl, are the only two characters who even come close to feeling like actual people. Which makes sense, since the book is basically about them. But even here there were some pretty big missteps. The author el...

I've been meaning to read Y: The Last Man for a while now. It's written by Brian K Vaughan, the same guy responsible for Saga . But unlike Saga , this story is actually complete. I finally managed to get my hands on the first (of five) deluxe books, which collects the first ten issues. And now I'm going to be spending my birthday money on the remaining books. Because I am hooked. The story mostly follows Yorick. He and his pet monkey, Ampersand, are the only males left in the world after some unknown cataclysmic event caused the immediate death of everyone with a Y chromosome. All Yorick wants to do is find his girlfriend, but everyone else has their own plans for him. Yorick's mom is a congresswoman, doing her best to help hold the government together in DC after most of the government officials have died. The Secretary of Agriculture has been rapidly promoted to president, reminding me of Battlestar Galactica . Though I think this women is less qualified, and som...

Dealing with Dragons  is the first book in The Enchanted Forest Chronicles , though not the first book written. Patricia Wrede wrote the last book first, then came back to write a prequel, and eventually it turned into a series of four books. I never encountered it as a child, though now I wish I had. Cimorene is a princess who'd rather not be. She's the seventh daughter, and she'd much rather do practical things like cooking and fencing than learn about etiquette and dancing. When her parents arrange her engagement to an arrogant and boring prince, she runs away from home. Cimorene lives in a world that is very aware of fairy tale tropes. People expect stories and know how to spot the sign posts. It's not unheard of for a dragon to kidnap a princess and a prince or knight to then rescue her, winning her hand in marriage along the way. Indeed, Cimorene meets three other princesses living in the dragon caves with her. But she's the first to volunteer for this lif...

There's a lot to like about Liane Morairty. She writes these compulsively readable books about complicated women making difficult choices. I'm a little bit in awe of the way she balances that dark complexity with her breezy style. Her books feel half as long as they actually are because I read them so quickly. The Husband's Secret  is about the fallout after a wife discovers a terrible secret that her husband has been keeping from her for as long as they've known each other. Her perfectly ordered world starts to crumble as she tries to figure out what to do with her knowledge. And the longer she waits to make a decision, the harder it becomes to do anything at all. Her story intersects with that of two other women. One is the elderly secretary at her daughters' primary school who lost her own daughter thirty years previously. The other is another mom who is in town ostensibly to help out her injured mother but is really fleeing from the news that her husband has...

Good Omens  was my favorite book for a very long time. I've re-read it more times than I can count. I once gave a copy to my mom for Christmas and then immediately stole it back. It's sitting on my book shelf right now. This book never failed to make me laugh or to make me think about what it means to be a good and moral person (or a god worth worshiping). I've read it so many times that I practically have it memorized. But I think I might be outgrowing it. Or maybe it's just that it isn't aging well. I still like a lot of what it says about humanity and morality and taking responsibility. But this time through I found myself cringing at as many of the jokes as I laughed at. Shadwell as a character no longer makes much sense to me. Or maybe it's the way people react to him. I can certainly imagine an angry, conservative, little man who hates everyone indiscriminately and insults anyone he interacts with. I can't imagine all these people finding it charmi...

Embassytown  has an incredibly steep learning curve. I had to read the beginning several times to make sense of it all, and even then I felt a bit lost for a good chunk of the book. At first, Mieville reminded me strongly of Jasper Fforde, who tends to lean on the absurdity to make a point. This is a book about language, and Mieville plays a lot with language in the course of it. There are all sorts of made-up words that you have to figure out from context - no helpful glossary here. And it takes a while for some of that context to click into place. But since this is also a book about miscommunications and the struggle to understand someone incredibly different from you, I bet a lot of that's on purpose to. Ultimately, I like this book for the workout it gave my brain. I had to think hard, and I felt a little bit stretched out when I finished it. The way I used to feel at the end of a semester of college. But I'm not sure I want to work quite that hard right now. Maybe in a...

Monstrous Regiment  is one of the best Discworld  books, though I'm not sure how well it's going to age. I think it will still retain value as a product of its time, but I think people are starting to do a better and more nuanced job of tackling some of these themes. Not that that's Pratchett's fault. Some of the language didn't exist fifteen years ago when he wrote this book. If he wrote it today (if he were alive today) I think it would be that much better. Which is saying something because, as I said, this is one of the best Discworld  books. The book follows young Polly "Oliver" "Ozzer" Perks, who joins the army in the final days of the war in the hopes of finding her brother and bringing him home safely. Polly is genuinely worried about her brother, who has always needed someone to look after him. But she's also worried about what will happen to her if he dies - as a girl she can't legally inherit her father's business. And so ...

I really enjoyed reading this book, which as breezy and surprisingly funny. But now that I've finished with it, I can almost feel it fading from my memory. There are a few keys points and interesting factoids that will no doubt stick with me. But overall, this book was pretty superficial in it's survey of the state of Big Data Analysis and where it's going in the future. I guess my issue is that this book didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know or suspect. Access to massive data sets is giving us unparalleled insights into human behavior. But we're still learning how to wrangle those data sets. Some insights confirm our long-held suspicions. Others run counter to our intuitions. And while there are hypotheses to explain those results, they have yet to be thoroughly tested. Still more insights will surely be overturned soon, as we become better at understanding what all this data is telling us. In his conclusion, Stephens-Davidowitz points out th...

One of the things I'm discovering as I dip my toe into the Romance waters is that this is a very personal genre. It's formulaic, sure. Two people meet, are attracted, face a variety of obstacles, and ultimately admit that they love each other. There's a kiss or a proposal or a marriage or something to cement that happily ever after. But for the broad strokes, you know what's going to happen. And so, moreso than in other genres, the appreciation of romance comes down to the details. Are these characters you enjoy rooting for? Is this someone you would be attracted to? Do you find the obstacles believable? And then it gets to be more explicitly about preferences. Historical vs contemporary. Steamy sex scenes vs chaste kissing. Friends to lovers or enemies to lovers or love at first sight. The point I'm trying to make here is that, in evaluating whether or not you liked a particular romance, you end up revealing a lot about yourself. I think that may be part of why ...

This book, really this whole trilogy, was stressful. I'm glad I made it through, but it was definitely rough going. I almost put the book down and walked away from it entirely, though I'm glad I didn't. But that's not the author's fault. It's just that reading a book about fighting a fascist despot hit a bit too close to home in the current political climate. It didn't help that the metaphor was a bit too perfect. Information flows free on this planet in a way that's overwhelming. And the mayor/president is better at controlling it than anyone else. At using it for his own ends. He's ultimately able to directly control other people, which raises the uncomfortable question of just how responsible Todd is for his actions. The thing is that Todd does some really despicable things. The enemy singles him out as the worst of all humans because he knew that what he was doing was wrong but he did it anyway. But he was coerced. And the question remains op...

This is a hugely divisive collection of poetry written by a young woman and dealing mainly with the trauma she suffered as a child and teenager. There's a lot of trauma to unpack - an abusive mother, an eating disorder, possible sexual assault, losing family members to cancer and suicide within a month of each other. And Amanda Lovelace does a decent job of distilling that to a handful of words, which I suppose is what poetry is all about. At the same time, this whole collection felt a little lazy and immature to me. These poems were reminiscent of the stuff I wrote in high school and posted on ffn. I'm honestly a little surprised this got published. It might just be that this is intended for a younger audience - like those Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul books. Remember those? If you liked Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul  and want basically that in poetry form, this is probably the book for you. If you're looking for something more mature or polished, skip this co...

This book may have supplanted Full Fathom Five  as my favorite book of Gladstone's Craft Sequence  (so far). While that one was a little tighter and more focused, this one was just so epic and complicated and perfect. Gladstone has referred to the first five book of the series as functioning somewhat like the first season of a television show. Using that metaphor, this was the perfect finale to a number of arcs, even though it's not the last book chronologically. Four Roads Cross  takes us back to Alt Coulomb, with Tara and Abelard and Shale. A big part of the reason I loved this book is that Cat and Raz are back, and they might be my favorite minor characters in the entire series. It also draws on every other book, tying off loose threads that I barely realized were hanging and deftly introducing a bunch of new characters. With this book I feel like I finally have a handle on how this world works and how magic works in it. Gladstone has created a staggeringly complic...