Bookish Thoughts

Valente's books are like gorgeous puzzles. In the beginning it's all a jumble, and I'm wondering what I've gotten myself into. The prose is lovely, but the story is elusive. The more I read, the more the picture comes into focus. But it always seems to be a bit backwards. Mood, then themes, then plot. I understand what her books are about long before I really understand what's happening in them. As pieces click into place, previous passages make more sense, and I find myself flipping back to re-read bits and pick up clues and just plain marvel at what a master of the form she is. So. Palimpsest . This is a book about a sexually-transmitted city. It's about loneliness and obsession. It's about sacrifice and change. It's about making connections and remaking yourself and finding love. Palimpsest is a fantastical city. It's filled with wonders, a new one around every corner. The only way to get there is to have sex with someone who's already bee...

This is Sarah MacLean's first book, and it's pretty much guaranteed that I will now track down and read everything she's written. It didn't feature any of the characters I've come to love from her more recent books. But it does have the wonderful, bold Callie and Gabriel, who can't help but fall head over heels for her. Callie has spent the last decade playing by the rules. She has an immaculate reputation and nothing else to show for it. When her younger sister gets engaged, and it looks like Callie is destined for a life of spinsterhood, she sets out to enjoy all the things she's been denying herself. Along the way she captures the attention of notorious rake, Gabriel. Gabriel has just discovered his half-sister, and he needs help introducing her into society. He strikes a bargain with Callie - she helps his sister and he'll help her. But before he knows it, he's in way over his head. This book was a ton of fun, and Callie strikes an excellent ...

Liane Moriarty has a gift for writing incredibly readable books about complicated, interesting characters in difficult circumstances. I fly through her books - they always seem half as long as they actually are - but I end up with a ton to think about afterwards. If this is "chick lit", then I'm ashamed to have shunned the genre for so long. What Alice Forgot  is my favorite of her books so far. The story follows Alice Love, who collapses at the gym and loses ten years of her life. She wakes up believing that she's twenty-nine years old, she and her husband are renovating their dream house, and she's pregnant with their first kid. Life is wonderful and full of possibilities. Unfortunately, none of that is true. Alice is confronted by a series of shocks. She has three children, all school-aged. Her mother has remarried and her sister is barely speaking to her. Worst of all, she and her husband are in the midst of a messy divorce. And no one can provide her with...

Sometimes the best thing you can say about a book is that it's short. This is another book that I should have just walked away from in the first 50 pages. But I keep finding myself in these obligation situations where I feel like I owe it to someone else to finish reading a book. Like I said, at least this one was short. This book is all about communication and the ways that misunderstandings and arguments can arise from a simple mismatch in communication style. Pauses that are too long or too short. Expecting to engage in a negotiation versus getting right to the point. Too much or too little focus on body language and tone. Ironically, I had serious issues with the author's style. The information in here is interesting. But it's also dated and the book feels anecdotal. The author is a professor of linguistics, so I'm sure she has done a lot of research along with her own studies. But there's no mention of methodology. Just countless of examples of people faili...

This is one of those books that I debated not finishing. It's a history of the world, seen through the lens of salt. It's all about how salt has influenced trade, taxes, and cuisine around the world. How it helped to globalize the economy and the culture, and what's changed as we've begun to understand it (and chemistry) better and salt has gone from rare to common. This is all interesting stuff, and I honestly learned a lot while I was reading this book. Which is why I pushed through and finished it. I kept coming across interesting facts that I found myself having to share with Kevin. It gave me a new appreciation for the food I was eating and all the many uses of salt in our world. It made me want to visit the Italian Riviera But it was also an incredibly dry, boring book. There were innumerable lists, and it was easy to get bogged down in all the details. All the ins and outs of tax codes and ship building got tiresome and difficult to navigate. I wanted a bit m...

I love these stories about insular groups of young adults that lead to murder. It makes me grateful that my own time in an insular, dysfunctional group didn't result in anyone's death. The Secret History  follows a group of six college students, studying Greek and the classics at a small Vermont college. At the very beginning, the narrator, Richard, reveals that five of them murdered the sixth. Then the story backs up a few months to tell the story of how this murder came about, and what happened afterwards. In a lot of ways, this felt like a book I might read for school. Not that I didn't like it. But it's rich and dense, and I almost feel like I'm supposed to be writing an essay about the imagery or the use of Greek or something. It's reminiscent of a lot of books I did read for school. Like A Separate Peace , we have a group of rich kids at an elite school who seem to be making all their own problems. Plus an undercurrent of repressed homosexuality. And lik...

I inhaled this book. I took a long lunch because I couldn't put it down. I cried on the metro to the point that I had to dig kleenex out of my purse. I let my kid watch Sesame Street so I could keep reading. I stayed up past my bedtime to finish it. I loved this book. The Kiss Quotient  is about Stella: an autistic econometrician (she writes the algorithms that drive internet ads) whose mom is making noise about wanting grandchildren. But Stella's never had much luck with men and dating and particularly sex. So she does what she's always done when she needs to master a new skill: she hires a professional. Enter Michael, a male escort who's trying to earn money to pay for his mom's medical bills. Stella engages him for a series of sessions to help her get better at sex so she can enter the dating pool with confidence and find a husband to make her mom happy. But it quickly becomes apparent that the problem isn't Stella, but all the assholes out there. And tha...

I mean this in the best possible way: this book is like is Twilight  grew up. By which I mean that the vampire in this book finds himself besotted with an actual adult: a tenured professor of history with a particular interest in alchemy. They're somewhat more mature about their whirlwind romance, and Diana starts off with the backbone that Bella didn't find until halfway through the last book. But this is still a whirlwind romance between an over-protective and possessive vampire and a naive and somewhat ignorant woman who's only too happy to be swept off her feet. I loved every minute of it. It's not a perfect book. The exposition can get a bit clumsy. The romance is possibly too dark for some tastes and there's some questionable things about it. But this is fantasy, not real life. Sometimes you just want to get lost in a chilly story about a girl and the over-protective vampire who has fallen head over heels for her and, oh yeah, they have to save the world. ...

Re-reading the Tiffany Aching books has been a joy. Pratchett is at the height of his game here, and these books are basically perfect. I can't wait to share these books with my kid, and in the meantime I've been pushing them on all the neighborhood kids. Though they're mostly still too young for them, too. (Actually, my proudest moment was when a conservative mom was asking me for book recs for her daughter, and I convinced her to buy a series by beloved anarchist Ursula K LeGuin). Anyway, this is the second of Tiffany Aching's adventures. She's leaving home to spend some time as an apprentice to a witch. She meets some other witches her own age, learns that being a witch is mostly doing things that other people don't want to do, and has to deal with a hiver to boot. The hiver is a collection of sense and memories that takes over bodies, collecting new memories and basically doing whatever it wants. It's attracted to power, so it's attracted to Tiff...

This book was a bit of a slog. As much as I like Octavia Butler's books, she definitely has some issues. And this one puts them in sharp relief. Butler has great ideas, and she does a great job of using science fiction to comment on society. I usually come out of her books with a lot to think about. That's part of the problem, really. I want more from her. Her books have a tendency to resemble outlines more than stories. There's no connective tissue between the big events. Characters are introduced as plot points and discarded as soon as they're not useful anymore. At the end of Ming of My Mind , I was frustrated that Doro and Anyanwu both died. I had become invested in their relationship over the centuries and in their competing visions for the future. But Mary was interesting enough, and I was looking forward to seeing where her story went. It turns out that it went nowhere. This book deals with an entire different set of characters facing an entirely different ...

Sarah MacLean may officially be one of my favorite authors. One of those "buy a book just because she wrote it" authors. I've read three so far (with two more sitting on my shelf), and I'm in love. This one wasn't about new love, but rather a second chance at old love, after everything went wrong. It's about Sophie's older sister, Sera, who went missing after a traumatic stillbirth. She shows up years later to demand a divorce from her husband, the duke. The only problem is that the minute she disappeared, he realized how much he loved her, and now the last thing he wants is to divorce her. So her sets about planning to win her back. This book is filled to the brim with sweet, sweet angst. Sera and Malcolm have a wealth of issues to work out. Flashbacks help fill in how things went so very, very wrong. And the question hanging over the whole book is whether love is enough. It's a romance novel, so of course love wins the day. But what I appreciat...