Bookish Thoughts

This book asks the question: what would you do if you knew you only had one day to live? It takes place in a world very much like ours, but with one key difference. On the day you die, you receive a call in the early morning hours letting you know that it's your last day. No information on how you die or exactly what time. Just that you have less than 24 hours to live. So what do you do? The story follows two teenaged boys - Mateo and Rufus - on the last day of their life. They reach out to each other through an app called "Last Friend". They have different goals for the day, but they agree to help each other through, to stand by each other until the very end. Whenever that ends up being. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that these two boys are both so very young. There's a lot that they meant to do that they won't be able to. And their last day is largely about making peace with that. About saying good bye to their loved ones and trying to squeeze in all...

It's been fun to watch John Scalzi grow as an author over the course of this series. It started off as pretty basic military sci-fi (albeit with a fun protagonist/narrator), and has become a sandbox for him to slowly start experimenting. In this book, he decides to play with structure a bit and composes the novel out of thirteen inter-connected short-stories. I love when authors decide to take chances like this, and I think it paid off big here. The short stories mostly follow a diplomatic team as they race around the galaxy trying to form unions with other alien species in the wake of the rift between the Colonial Union and Earth. Some of them are longer, some are shorter. Some of the stories aren't about them at all and their relevance only becomes clear later. All in all, I'm impressed with what Scalzi pulls off here. I'm getting excited to read more of his stuff (lucky for me he's nearly done with a new trilogy that I'll be able to dive into when I finish ...

Tor.com releases a lot of short fiction for free on their website. But somehow I never actually read any of it until they bind it up in a digital book and I can get to it on my kindle app. It's just easier to read that way, I guess. Anyway, the Spring bundle had five stories in it. Knowledgeable Creatures: This story hooked me from the beginning. I love a good narrator, and this world-weary canine PI was just familiar and just strange enough to hold my attention hostage. The story hints at a much wider world that I would happily read several books about. I wonder if they'll ever get written. 1/0: This was a beautiful story about the upsides of AI. So often, these stories become all doom and gloom as the computer learns more and more and attempts to "save" humanity from itself. By placing the learning AI in the hands of children in a refugee camp, this becomes a very hopeful story about the future. There's a way in which we will all be alright, so long as we ca...

Lately I've been seeking out books that don't require too much mental energy from me. I finally picked up the rest of this trilogy at a used book sale, so it seemed like the perfect time to revisit this fun, frothy book about people with more money than sense. Really this book is just fun. I love seeing the ridiculous things the super rich choose to spend their money on, the ways they determine how they're better than everyone else, and the ever-practical every-girl Rachel navigate everything. It was also great to go back and see the things they had changed for the movie. I'm excited to get to the rest of this trilogy now and live vicariously through people who spend freely on absurd things.

My favorite thing about Ursula LeGuin's work is how hard it makes me think. I don't always agree with her, but in reading her arguments I find I have to sharpen my own. I usually come out of her books either having my mind (slightly) changed or feeling much more secure in my own beliefs. It's a fantastic experience. It's also a ton of work. This collection of essays was much more accessible and easier to read than her fiction tends to be. In most cases, she's distilled her ideas into 4-ish page essays. It's a great way to engage with her thoughts without having to do all the work that, say, The Left Hand of Darkness , requires of you. I really liked these essays, which were mostly ruminations on the end of life, as she came to the end of hers. I only wish there had been a few more about her cat, Pard. But I suppose I can always go to her blog for more of that content.

It took me a while to get in to this book, but that was more an issue of timing than the book itself. I shouldn't start epic tomes when I know I'm going to be too busy to read for a week. When I did manage to sink into the story, I got a fun, swashbuckling adventure about an idealistic young man. Which is exactly what I wanted. I particularly enjoyed the narrator of this book. The mystery of her identity (which I figured out long before she revealed herself, as the book expected me to) was a fun hook dragging me through some of the more tedious sections. And her occasional snarky asides added some fun flavor to the book. I loved when the narrator is a character, and Allende did an excellent job of that here. The only thing this book is really lacking is a sequel. Just when it was really getting good, when Diego de la Vega had fully embraced his identity as Zorro and completed his first mission, the book ended. This was more of an origin tale than a series of adventures. And...

It only took a couple of chapters for me to remember how much I absolutely love Sarah MacLean's books. Actually it didn't really take that long, but that's when I came up for air because I needed to sleep. Hattie is a force of nature in this book, and I fell in love with her from the first moment I met her. So it's no wonder that Beast did, too. The banter between these two was perfect, the sex scenes were amazing, and the plot was thrilling. In my head, Beast was played by Tom Hardy, thanks to all his grunting. Being able to visualize the hero like that made this book all the more enjoyable. Also, half the fun of these books, now that I've read literally everything MacLean has written, is seeing the cameos of characters from earlier books. I'm sure they were there in the other books I've read. But since I worked through her books out of order, I missed a lot of them. Here I was able to recognize all sorts of minor characters and it really makes her worl...

Autonomous  is all about, you guessed it, autonomy. It asks what it means to be in charge of your own life, to what extent you can be, and how to find the balance between independence and interconnectedness. The story takes place in the far future where drug patents have severely restricted who has access to medicine. Pirates work to reverse-engineer and sell these drugs on the black market. And the drug companies send people after them to protect their intellectual property. This is all interesting stuff, but the book is also shockingly violent. I had a hard time with the various interrogation scenes and ended up really hating a character. The book didn't condemn that character nearly enough for me (it didn't help that large sections were narrated by his love-interest who wasn't really thinking critically about the harm the two of them were causing). My hatred of said character and the book's efforts to humanize him ended up making me dislike this book more than I ot...

I picked this book up expecting a light, happy, young adult romance. Instead I got put through an emotional wringer. This book broke my heart. Then is painstakingly pieced it back together again only to completely shatter it at the end. And then it left me with the smallest sliver of hope. It was very nearly perfect, and I'm mad at myself for taking this long to read it. Eleanor and Park  is about the love story of two teenagers (Eleanor and Park) in Omaha in 1986. They bond over comics and mix tapes, they fumble their way together with all the awkwardness and intensity of teenagers falling love for the first time. And then they suddenly have to grow up and they do it imperfectly and wonderfully and it just left me ruined. Park is half Korean and sticks out like a sore thumb in his little midwest town. He's not quite manly enough to win his father's approval, but his mother's love nearly makes up for it. He's incredibly atrtactive and weird and quiet, which puts...

This is such a short book, made shorter by the fact that it's poetry rather than prose and each poem is presented in both Spanish and English. I still barely finished it. I keep wanting to read more poetry, and sometimes I do come across poems that speak to me. But these weren't them. I really tried to give this collection a shot, to linger over the poems rather than speeding through them. But Neruda's work just isn't for me.