Bookish Thoughts

This is still one of my favorite books. I still wish I could live inside of it. Re-reading it every year has become a tradition, and there's not that much more to say. If you haven't read it yet, you should.

I have no doubt that this book will resonate strongly for some people. They'll read it and love it and find meaning and connection. But I'm not one of those people. And because of that I couldn't really enjoy this book. This is a quick horror story about a punk anarchist collective that's being tormented by a spirit. A handful of them summoned said spirit to help them maintain their anarchy. It's supposed to kill anyone who wields power over another. But now it's killing the original summoners and the town can't decide whether to stop it or embrace it. The book makes some basic assumptions about anarchy that I can't bring myself to agree with. It's based on a lot of ifs that I don't think hold up well in the real world. So I found the whole premise difficult. Then there's the submersion in the punk subculture. It makes for a nice shorthand for world building, but my lack of familiarity with it just meant that I knew I was missing things. ...

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the theatrical release of Star Wars Episode IV , the editors of this book collected forty short stories, each of which retells a scene from the movie from the point of view of a minor character in that scene. The stormtrooper who stunned Leia, the sand person who attacked Luke, Aunt Beru, etc. I've been wanting to get my hand's on this book since I heard about it. This was a really fun concept, and a lot of the stories were very inventive. It was interesting to consider different points of view, and some of the stories were really out there. Nnendi Okorafor tells her story from the point of view of the trash monster, for example. And being incredibly familiar with the movie only made it that much more fun to see other people's takes on both well-known and unknown characters. But the lack of cohesion was a little frustrating. Especially in the sections that took place in Mos Eisley and Yavin 4. There were so many characters to choose f...

It's been a while since I read or enjoyed The Oatmeal. I stopped finding it amusing fairly early on. But there's no denying that there was a time when it was everywhere. And when I saw this collection of his comics at the library book sale, I threw it in my bag without thinking. This collection is a bit of a throwback, containing a lot of his earlier work. As such, there was a certain nostalgia factor for me. These were comics I remember reading and enjoying back in the day when they all got passed around and linked. So I did enjoy this book. And I'm glad I picked it up for relatively cheap.

This is my second time through Station Eleven.  The first time I read it, I inhaled the entire book in a day. This time I made an effort to stretch it out (by juggling a few other books at the same time) so I could absorb it a little more slowly. This is the sort of book that rewards deeper thought, and it definitely gave me a lot to think about. Station Eleven  is very concerned with home and with interrogating the idea that you can't go home again. It opens with a flu that kills over 99% of the world's population in a few days, leaving the remaining few to find a way to live in a vastly changed world. Small settlements pop up here and there, but the post-apocalypse story focuses on a traveling theater troupe. In a very real sense, these people can't go home again. There's no home to go to, and the main characters have chosen to make their home on the road. Even the pre-apocalypse characters, Arthur and Miranda, have left behind their hometown in favor of making a ...

I've read a lot of contemporary and historical romance, and October seemed like a good month to dive into paranormal romance. Especially since I saw a trio of vampire romance novels at the library book sale. I'm a sucker for vampires, so I was excited to see how they combine with romance. Unfortunately, I wasn't really a fan of this book. With any vampire story you have to accept the author's own particular twist on the lore, and I couldn't quite get there with this book. The romance relied a bit too much on fate and destiny for me to believe that these two people actually loved each other. And it didn't help that she didn't find out he was a vampire until the very end of the book. I want my heroines going in to their vampiric romances with eyes wide open. I ended up way more interested in the side plots than the main romance. Which was a shame because they both ended up fizzling out and not being that interesting in the end. Maybe I'll check out the...

When Gone Girl  came out, there was a ton of buzz around it, most centered on the shocking twist. It was like The Sixth Sense  all over again, with everyone swearing you had to read it but refusing to tell you anything about it. Sometimes stories can rely on these twists to much, making that the only worthwhile thing about them. And they end up falling apart once you know the secret. But Gone Girl  holds up incredibly well. Even knowing what Amy's plotting from the beginning, it remains gripping and thrilling. Gillian Flynn populates the novel with some truly horrible, selfish, twisted people, and it's so much fun to watch them play games with each other and see how Amy comes out on top of everyone. It helps that she's the most ruthless and least moral. She'll literally do whatever it takes to get what she wants, including killing a (mostly) innocent guy. (Seriously, though, Desi was just as bad as the rest of them.) I really enjoyed my re-read of this book. Knowing...

This was a delightfully quick read that reminded me rather strongly of We Have Always Lived in the Castle . The book opens on Korede helping her sister Ayoola dispose of the body of her most recent boyfriend. Ayoola claims she killed him in self-defense. But this is the third boyfriend she's killed and Korede is starting to wonder. And when Ayoola starts dating the man that Korede has a crush on, she finds herself with divided loyalties. Ayoola is a terrifying creation. She's beautiful and charming and she has always gotten her way. Men fawn over her, and she uses her power over them to get whatever she wants. She's so good at playing the victim, naive and innocent and badly in need of protection, that sometimes it's hard to tell how much she believes this role she's playing, how much it's actually a role at all. I had so much fun reading this book, anticipating Ayoola's next appearance and wondering how Korede would react to her, what she'd decide t...

Every time I try to analyze this collection of Sandman  shorts, I want it to be more coherent than it is. There's no underlying theme or message or motif in these stories. They were initially spread across the run much more than they appear to be in this collection. So some but not all of them are named for months, and some but not all concern themselves with names. Dream himself doesn't even appear in all of the stories (though the one he's absent from takes place most wholly in his kingdom). Given that, it only makes sense to tackle each story individually. Fear of Falling : This is an incredibly short story that is nonetheless one of the most remembered and quoted from the entire run. A director is scared of his new play failing and is planning to abandon it before that happens. His anxiety manifests as a dream in which he falls off the top of the cliff and sees only two options: die or wake up. But Dream appears to him and presents a third option in what is probably t...

I first read this book three or four years ago, and it has really stuck with me. My thoughts return to it again and again, especially with the current political climate, not to mention the actual climate. I've recommended it to more people than I can remember and loaned my copies out enough times that I have no idea what happened to them. So when they announced a re-issue with a new introduction by NK Jemisin, it was all the excuse I needed to buy new copies and re-read them. Having now re-read the first book, I'm seeing how much the two blurred together in my mind. And I think it was actually the second one that impacted me the most. This one started out a lot more slowly than I remembered. They weren't on the road for nearly as much of the book as I thought they were, and a lot of things that I thought were in this book weren't. But I think I actually liked it more this time around. I've lived and learned a lot in the past few years, and I have a greater appre...

How do I talk about this book without talking about the ending? I'm not sure I can. I don't think the ending ruined the trilogy, or even this book. There's still a lot that I loved in it. But the ending overshadowed everything else. And being right at the end, it's the freshest in my mind. I can't decide if I think it was lazy or not. It reminded me a bit of Breaking Dawn , where the whole story builds up to a conclusion that just doesn't happen because Stephenie Meyer didn't want to write it. Erika Johansen seemed to chicken out from writing the hard ending that her book was heading towards. The part that really gets me is that it felt like such a bait and switch. Most of the chapters begin with epigraphs that seem to imply a very different ending than the one Johansen gives us. Recognizable characters, like Father Tyler and Glee, provide commentary on the events of this book as if writing about it with the benefit of hindsight. "Don't worry,...

I love this book so much. Every time I read it, I get something new out of it. It's fantastic and dense and remains a glittering kaleidoscope of a story. This time through I recognized a lot more of the references to Greek mythology, having recently read The Odyssey , and I'm a little floored by how well Valente wove all those references into her story. And I still love the way she bounces between genres while somehow creating a cohesive whole. That said, I'm not as big a fan of the Gothic section, which gets a bit unwieldy at times. But I suspect that has more to do with my own unfamiliarity with that particular genre. The fairy tale and closed-room mysteries are delightful, balancing perfectly between homage and send-up of their respective genres, and if I read a bit more Gothic literature, I'm sure I'd find that section to be equally ingenious. Valente uses all those genre trappings and tropes to remind that reader that a life is not a story. A person can...

If knowledge is power, then ignorance cannot be bliss. I first read this critique of high school American History textbooks when I was in high school. I was just precocious enough that I couldn't resist the title. Especially since I was at the bookstore to pick up a text that we'd received a censored version of in English class. I was keenly aware that my teachers were holding information back, and I was not happy about it. Loewen argues that kids hate history because the textbooks have removed everything interesting from it. Historical figures are presented as two-dimensional heroes rather than complex people and every major decision is presented as a foregone conclusion rather than the result of a complicated debate with many competing interests. In an attempt to make (white, male) students proud of America, the textbooks authors remove anything that might paint the country in a bad light. The narrative that's left is flimsy, inconsistent, and largely untrue. There...