Bookish Thoughts

When life's getting you down, reach for a romance novel. Even better, reach for a romance novel by Alyssa Cole. A Duke by Default  is the second in Cole's Reluctant Royals series. It follows "Hot Mess" Portia as she travels from NYC to Scotland for a 3-month internship with a sword-maker, the latest in a long line of attempts to get her life on track. Approaching thirty and with a bunch of degrees and internships but no real career prospects, Portia is hoping to make a fresh start and discard her worst habits. Those habits include drinking, having sex with random guys, and failing to follow-through on projects she's starting. But her resolve to avoid sex is sorely tested when she meets her new boss and sparks immediately fly. Said boss, Tavish McKenzie, is a gruff Scotsman with a heart of gold. He's stretched thin, running a community center out of his armory, and he's hoping that an apprentice will ease some of the burden. That all goes out the window...

Every now and then you come across a perfect piece of literature. The Only Harmless Great Thing  was Tor's free download this month. Once I'd downloaded it, I cracked it open to peek at the first sentence (as I do nearly every time I receive a book). I then proceeded to inhale the entire thing in one long gulp. It's a good thing it's short. This story re-imagines history a bit to explore labor rights and animal rights and the power of a story. It jumps between two different timelines and at least four different perspectives, two of which belong to elephants. Each section is short, but they pack a punch. There isn't a single word wasted in this incredibly tight, affecting story. The Only Harmless Great Thing  is beautiful and sad and haunting. It's about the mistakes humans make that are so much bigger than a single life. And the attempts to rectify those mistakes that fall impossibly short. And the catharsis of grand gestures. And the way history gets re-wri...

The Winter People  was my All Hallows Read gift this year, but I decided to save it to read in colder weather. And I'm so glad I did. Something about being surrounded by a fresh blanket of snow made this book a lot more affecting. Freezing weather and fresh snow make outdoor activities so much harder, and being attuned to that added an extra layer of tension to this book. The story alternates between 1908 and the present day. In the past, Sara Harrison Shea and her husband lose their young daughter. But Sara knows a spell to bring her back to life, at least for a few days. And when she decides to do just that, the consequences are beyond what she could have imagined. In the present day, Ruthie's mom has gone missing, and Ruthie suddenly finds herself responsible for her younger sister while searching for her mom and accidentally digging up some family secrets that ought to have stayed buried. This was a delightfully creepy story about grief and consequences. It got tighter ...

The third volume of the Sandman  series isn't an overarching arc at all. Rather it collects four individual stories into a single collection. Given that, I'm going to take each story separately. Calliope:  Initially, this was one of my favorite stories in Sandman . When I was first collecting the series (a process that took me years), I revisited this story again and again. In later years it lost it's shine somewhat, and I became hugely critical of it. Now I think I've landed somewhere in the middle. This is a story of exploitation. Calliope is a muse who has been captured. She's held hostage by an author who literally rapes her as a way of getting new ideas. When he sells her to another author rather than setting her free, as he'd promised, she loses her last shred of hope and asks Dream to help her. My issue with this story basically comes down to Calliope and her treatment, both by the fictional authors who hold her hostage (Erasmus Fry and Richard Mado...

Sorcerer to the Crown  has been bouncing on and off my to-read list since it came out in 2015. There was a whole lot of buzz initially, and then it never quite died away. I was excited to finally get my hands on it and find out what all the fuss was about. I have to admit that it wasn't quite what I expected. Both the title and the cover made me think this would be more action-packed. Somehow I thought it would be high fantasy. Despite the fact that I was so wrong about this book, I found it absolutely delightful. The story initially reminded me of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell . Magic in England is dying out, and it appears to be because of a falling out between fairies and humans. There's a lot of intrigue and politics - Napoleon even shows up on the edges of the story. But this book has so much more going for it. For one thing, it's not 1000 pages long with 200+ footnotes. (Okay, I loved those footnotes, but they do take a damn long time to read. Sometimes you wa...

So far, 2019 has been a year of disappointments and unmet expectations. Or maybe it's just a string of books that haven't matched my mood. Maybe I've had a hard time enjoying books because my real life has been so stressful and exhausting (though books are supposed to help with that). Or maybe I'm just working through some of the chaff on my TBR and it all hit at once. There are a bunch of books on my shelf that I'm really excited about, after all. I just need to get to them. Whatever the reason, I didn't like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn  nearly as much as I expected to. Which was a letdown. This story seemed right up my alley. But it reminded me a lot of Angela's Ashes , another book that took me entirely too long to read. I found the story to be entirely too slow and a little bit disjointed. I could never really seem to get invested in any of the characters or in what was happening to them. It probably didn't help that I was in the middle of this wh...

I saw The Reason I Jump  on The Daily Show back when I still watched The Daily Show (back when Jon Stewart still hosted it), so it's been years that this book has been floating around in the back of my head as something I should read. And then I found it at the library's used book sale and snapped it up. My impulsive book purchases are rarely quite as impulsive as they seem. This book was written by a thirteen-year-old, nonverbal, autistic boy in Japan. He explains his day-to-day life to a neurotypical audience, in a effort to make himself and people like him better understood. All he really wants is understanding and patience and the opportunity to have a fulfilling life where he isn't constantly pitied and made to feel like a burden. This was more of an interview than a story. Actually, it was more of a questionnaire, with Higashida briefly given answers to a bunch of questions. These are interspersed with a handful of short stories. The book was interesting and insig...

The Ballad of Black Tom  was Tor.com's free download back in October. I'd been hearing good things about Victor LaValle for years ( The Changeling  is currently sitting on my shelf waiting to be read), and besides, who can say no to free? So I downloaded it. But it took me a while to get around to reading it. The thing is, this novella is a direct response to one of HP Lovecraft's stories: "The Horror at Red Hook". And I really meant to read that one first. It's available for free on line and I even have a copy in a collection of Lovecraft's work at home. But I never quite got around to it. It's widely considered the most overtly racist piece of work by a horrifically racist author. And who wants to read a story with an endorsement like that? I ended up skimming this article about the original story and then dove in to LaValle's response. I really ought to have actually read Lovecraft's original story first. The Ballad of Black Tom  is suc...

Before the Fall  was my first book club book of 2019. And I have to say that I had some trepidation at the beginning. The book centers on the crash of a private jet. A pair of wealthy, powerful couples are on board, along with one couple's children. And there's a down-on-his-luck artist that one of the wives befriended in the weeks before the crash. The artist and the young son are the only ones to survive the crash, and it sets off a whirlwind of media attention as everyone tries to figure out what happened. I was worried in the beginning, because the book seemed set to talk about fate and destiny. How did these lives lead to this moment, and was every step inevitable. And that's uncomfortable because when one kid survives and the other dies and you start talking about what's meant to be....well this is a big part of the reason that I don't truck with religion. But the book pulled through and ended up doing a really elegant job of making a point that I agree wi...

The Doll's House  is my least favorite arc in the entire Sandman  series. For me, the horror in this installment crosses the line and makes me truly uncomfortable. John Dee slowly torturing and killing everyone in the diner in 24 Hours  is disturbing. But there's an element of fantasy, of metaphor, that makes it a bit more palatable. This arc has some pretty horrific child abuse coupled with a serial killer convention. And while Morpheus metes out justice to everyone involved, I find myself squirming through a lot of this. Then again, The Doll's House  introduces Rose Walker and Hob Gadling, two of the best characters in the entire series. Men of Good Fortune , Gadling's introduction, is one of my favorite single issues. Gadling declares that he's not going to die, and Morpheus sets up a recurring meeting with him - once every hundred years - to see how his life is going. The story leans into the old adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same, ...

I suppose you can love an author without necessarily loving all of their books. Even though Radiance  changed my world and Palimpsest  still has me thinking hard. Even though the Fairyland  series will always have a special place in my heart. This book just didn't do it for me. I might have liked it better if I were more familiar with the Brontes and their work. Or maybe my expectations were just too high, or too different from what I got. It's not that this is a bad book. It's just not really the book I was expecting. It follows the four Bronte siblings on an adventure to a magical land. One that they've created while playing with their toys. And it occupies a strange place of being an adventure for children and being chock full of the kind of Bronte trivia that requires some serious study. A series of trips to Wikipedia really only left me with the feeling that I was missing a lot. So. Not my favorite. But there are still plenty of other books by Valente that ca...

The people over at Serial Box are on a mission to bring back serialized fiction. They talk about combining the best aspects of novels and television shows, but this isn't really a new idea. It's just been dressed up a bit for the internet. Stories are broken down into "seasons" and "episodes". Theoretically, each episode should be a self-contained story that takes about 45 minutes to read (just like a TV show!), and the episodes build into an arc that forms a season. (And eventually extends into multiple seasons. Just like TV! Except you're reading, not watching.) The biggest problem with this format is that you can cram a lot more information into a 45-minute television show than you can into an equivalent-length short story. So a lot of the early episodes are made up of broad strokes. It takes a while, longer than normal, to start caring about the characters and what they're doing. But I did eventually start caring. I read the entire first sea...