Bookish Thoughts

This was a very cute story about growing up and being brave and not missing your chance. Deja and Josiah are best friends who've been working at the local pumpkin patch for the last three years. But now they're seniors and it's the last night, and Josiah still hasn't even spoken to the girl he's been crushing on for the last three years. Deja is determined to make him take his chance, and they set off on a fun night of adventure, finding new things and revisiting old favorites. It's all the fluff I expect from Rainbow Rowell with very little of the angst.

People are always surprised that I haven't read much Stephen King. I read a ton, and he's incredibly prolific with a number of modern classics under his belt. But there are a lot of books out there, and no one can get to all of them. I didn't like The Dark Tower as much as I expected to, and I wasn't sure I'd ever give him another try. But some of his classics are not only classic; they're short. I picked up Carrie and got exactly what I wanted: a fast, spooky read, perfect for October. I enjoyed this story immensely, and I'm glad I finally got around to it. Maybe I'll try one of his longer books someday.

I really wish I could have made Kevin read this book. I would have liked to talk to him about it. I think it helped me understand a bit better what he went through at the end, all the things he lost during his months in the hospital. This book is about a privileged man losing a little bit of that privilege and learning that the world is a lot darker than he always thought. At the beginning of the book, he gets beat up by a couple of robbers and lands in the hospital. The experience shakes him to his core, and he has a really hard time figuring out how to move forward. Then a body is discovered at his family's house, and he ends up getting sucked into a mess as he tries to solve the mystery before the detectives. Like all of French's books, this one was dark and twisty and occasionally hard to read. The protagonist is insufferable and never quite gets his comeuppance. Although he does seem to learn his lesson in the end.

This was such a compelling little story. The premise is that every time Molly bleeds, the blood grows in to a clone of her that tries to kill her. There's no explanation for this, just a look at what would happen to a girl who grows up constantly having to kill herself. It's a weird story, but I really enjoyed reading it.

I read Silvia Moreno-Garcia's first book, Signal to Noise , years ago and loved it. She's been releasing new books steadily since then, with a slowly growing profile. I kept meaning to pick up another of her books, which are always interesting Mexican twists on western classics. Then Mexican Gothic came out to huge acclaim and everyone everywhere was excited about it. I actually got a bit lucky, getting it as early as I did. After my husband passed, a friend signed me up for The Bloggess's book club. She sends out a new book every month, and I was just under the wire to receive this one. It was a wonderful surprise in a not-so-great year. This book was fantastic. So good that I ended up staying up way too late to finish it. It was smart and creepy and it renewed my desire to read everything Moreno-Garcia has ever written. She's a fantastic author who keeps getting better, and I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.

This was my second time through Jane Eyre, and I liked it a whole lot better this time. Part of that is because I've grown as a person, and I understand the context of this book more now. But part of it is because I read The Eyre Affair , and it changed my mind about the ending. When I first read this book, I was upset that Eyre went back to Mr Rochester after everything. But then Fforde argues pretty effectively that any other ending would be unsatisfactory and anti-climactic. He made me appreciate Mr Rochester a bit more. So this time through I was rooting for them. And I was happy that they ended up together. I suppose my changing reaction is part of what makes this book such a classic.

This book is like a warm hug. It's about vampires, yes. But it's also about healing from trauma. And baking cinnamon rolls. It's a very, very slow book, and the narrator tends to babble. The plot doesn't really exist. It's just a cozy way to spend some time with a bunch of people who love each other a lot and don't want anything more than their quiet little life. I've read this book several times now. I'll probably read it several more. Every now and then, it's exactly what I need.

This book was absolutely delightful. It's a series of comics, charting the growing relationship between a vampire and a werewolf, from their meet-cute at a bar to happily ever after. It was a quick read. I read it in less than an hour (probably less than half an hour), and I had a huge smile on my face the entire time. This will be a good pick-me-up for years to come.

I adore Sarah MacLean, but this one took a while to grab me. Maybe it's just because I could see what was coming. Which is silly. I read romance for the predictability, and Sarah MacLean especially because I love what she does with the tropes. I guess I was just eager to get to the meat of it, and it started a bit slow. Mostly, though, I'm excited for what's coming next. MacLean has been laying the groundwork for her next series: Hell's Belles. I can hardly wait.

This was my second time reading The Bluest Eye , and I definitely got a lot more out of it this time through. It's a difficult book with a complicated structure. It's all about how envy and jealousy can turn into hatred and self-hatred. It's about generational trauma and how it propagates. It's about innocence and the loss of innocence and what happens when the people who are supposed to love you don't. Or when that love gets twisted. It's a really important book, and I'm glad that I read it with my book club because the conversation that followed gave me a lot of hope. When I started my neighborhood book club, we began with Tayari Jones' An American Marriage . It's about a black man who's been imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. But roughly half the club was sure that he'd committed the crime. There's this naive trust in our justice system that privileged white people grow up with, and it's hard to start to question that. Bl...

I've been hearing about this series of books for years. It's not widely known, but those who read it always seem to love it wholly. I had to see for myself what could cause such deep devotion. Still, I wasn't quite prepared for this book to grab my heart the way it did. The story follows four boys who attend a local private high school and the girl who finds herself hanging out with them despite her better judgement. They're looking for the grave of a long-dead king. Legend says that whoever finds it gets a wish granted. But that's not the only reason they're looking. These children are all damaged in one way or another and this quest helps to give their life meaning. It binds them together in a found family and gives them something to dream about, hope for, pursue in every free hour. I fell in love with them, and I can only hope that they all find what they're looking for by the end of the series.

I wanted to love this book, or at least like it. One of my neighbors once said that it's one of her favorites, and that always gets my attention. If a book is special enough for someone to call it their favorite, there must be something special about it. But life is a rich tapestry, and what appeals to one person doesn't always appeal to another one. I found this book to be incredibly frustrating. The main character Eilis is the mot passive protagonist I've ever come across. I couldn't figure out what she wanted. I don't think she wanted anything. She never felt like a real person, just a construct floating through life and allowing things to happen to her.  I'm tempted to watch the movie and see what they make of Eilis and her woes. Surely she'll have a bit more life in that form. But I'm not sure I care enough to sit through it. 

I regard the Discworld the way other people regard the bible. That might be blasphemous, but there it is. When I need comfort, when I need to laugh, when I need to think deeply, when I need to be reminded of all the beauty of humanity, I turn to the Discworld. These books soothe me. They empower me. They provide surety that it will all be okay, but that I have to do my part to make it okay. Reaper Man is about Death. It has some incredible quotes that, in the wake of my husband's death, I needed to come back to. And in coming back to them I ended up re-reading the entire book.  Anyway, here are a few of my favorite bits of this particular book: Alone of all the creatures in the world, trolls believe that all living things go through Time backward. If the past is visible and the future is hidden, they say, then it means that you must be facing the wrong way. People get exactly the wrong idea about belief. They think it works back to front. They think the sequence is, first object, t...

JY Yang is an absolute master at spinning out an epic tale in a very short space. This book is barely 100 pages long, yet it covers so much ground. It was surprisingly sad and incredibly complicated and continued the series' pattern of refusing to conform to a pattern. The emperor has finally died and the one who has spent half her life working to bring it about finds herself alone in a bar, contemplating her life. Well, not quite alone. She has an audience of one, the reader, to whom she tells her tale over drinks. This story was deft and incredible and I wish Yang were planning to write anything more in this world. I'm eagerly awaiting their next book, which won't be out until 2022.

This book was a bit bloated, but I think it ended up being my favorite of the trilogy. It was a decent balance of familiar faces and new ones. The timeline was nice and linear. The science was interesting, as was the revolution storyline. Some of the prose is startlingly lovely, and I enjoyed most of the time I spent on this hypothetical Mars.

I've been wanting to read Courtney Milan for a while, though I'd been intending to start with her Brothers Sinister series. But then I came across this novel, her first, in a used book store, and I jumped at the chance. This was a cute historical romance. And while it does take place in London in the early 19th century like so much of the historical romances I read, it doesn't focus on the ton. The hero is rich, but the heroine is more middle class. She makes her living as a fortune teller, and it was nice to get a glimpse at how this other half lived back then. I liked this book, and I'll be keeping my eye out for more of Milan's work.

This was a fun adventure, though I was a little disappointed that we didn't get to spend as much time in the underworld. Rose spends the majority of the book in a living human body, trying to figure out how to get back to her ghostly state. It's a trick pulled by Bobby Cross that serves to mess up Rose's life without bringing them that much closer to a confrontation. I'm hoping that in the next book they finally face off against each other.

I'm still enjoying the Poldark novels, though it's been an adjustment switching the focus to the next generation. Still, the shift has highlighted the idea that the more things change the more they stay the same.  Ross and Demelza's kids go through a lot of the same things Ross and Demelza went through: new love and broken hearts, a taste for adventure and having to deal with the consequences, even opening a new mine and handling all the finances. But there are differences too. Clowance has opportunities Demelza never dreamed of and Jeremy has access to technology that still makes his father uncomfortable. Time keeps marching forward.  These books remain comforting. It's fun to go hang out in Cornwall for a few days. I'm starting to get sad that I'm getting so close to the end of the series.

Joan Didion's memoir of grief after losing her husband felt like something I should read after I lost my own husband. I wanted a book that I could see myself in, something that would feel familiar and let me know I'm not alone.  I wish I'd connected to this book more. There were a few small things that rang true, but there was also a lot that I just didn't connect with. Maybe that's a sign that everyone is different and every loss is different. Maybe it's just a difference between me and Didion. Either way I wanted something from this book that I didn't quite get. But I'm still glad I read it.

Seanan McGuire initially wrote a bunch of short stories about a ghost. Then she stitched them together into a book. Then she turned it into a series. I originally read this book several years ago, but I finally picked up the sequel (and saw that a third is forthcoming), so I had to go back and re-read this one. Since I first read this story, I've read the main Incryptid series, of which it's an offshoot. That meant that I picked up on a lot more this time through. The world where this takes place is incredibly rich, and I missed a lot of the references when I first encountered them. That contributed to me liking this story even more the second time around. I was also better able to appreciate the structure, since I knew where everything was headed. I didn't expect my re-read of this book to be quite so rewarding, but I'm glad it was. I'm definitely hooked on this series and Rose Marshall now, and I can't wait to see where her story goes. (especially after the ev...

I've been following Stevenson's career since she was an art student with a tumblr making fun of Lord of the Rings and The Hunger Games. I loved watching her get her big break and launch into the stratosphere. I watched her start to make the sort of stories she wished she'd read as a child. She accomplished a lot at a ridiculously young age. She's also had some struggles,and I've always been impressed by the way she's open about them while maintaining her privacy. Because I've been reading her blog for so long, I'd already read most of the comics in this book over the years. But it was nice to see it all pulled together in a single place. Stevenson has a long career ahead of her, and I'm excited to see what she does next.

I just adore Alisha Rai. She's become an insta-buy for me. Every time one of her books comes out, I have to get it because I know I'll love it. She writes wonderful, warm, smart romances with killer sex scenes.  This one kicks off a new series that I'm very excited about. It's adjacent to the Forbidden Hearts series that I finished earlier this year. The heroine's brother was in the last of those books. But now we get out of that stifling small town in upstate New York and out into huge, anonymous LA. I'm glad that there's still a little bit of crossover from the characters in those books, even as Rai's moving into a different series. Really I just love Alisha Rai and all her books. I'm always happy when I'm reading them.

This was an incredibly difficult book to read. I came very close to not finishing it. Not because it was bad. It was just so hard to see a family treat their children the way Tara and her siblings are treated. Tara was raised in an extremely fundamentalist Mormon family. Her father trusted almost no one, so the kids didn't go to school. They never went to the doctors. The family lived off the grid as much as they could, avoiding other people and preparing for the rapture. A large chunk of the book is about Tara's childhood, and particularly the various injuries she and her family members suffered. For a while it was like every chapter was detailing a horrific new injury, and I had to walk away from the book for a bit. But I did return to it, so I got to read about Tara's decision to go to college, where she blossomed and was finally able to cut ties with her abusive family. She goes into some detail about her ultimate decision to break with her parents and brother and the t...

This was an absolutely lovely little paranormal romance. The heroine is a witch who was raised on a vineyard. She uses her magic to take care of the grapes and produce an exceptional vintage. Until someone turns her into a toad. The book opens as she's finally breaking the curse. She returns home to discover that many years have passed and that a new man has bought the vineyard. This new guy is willing to let her stay, but he believes in science not magic, and he doesn't want her casting any spells or other nonsense. But of course the two of them find a way to meet in the middle, figure out who cursed the witch in the first place, and raise the vineyard back up to its former glory with an exceptional vintage of wine. And they kiss and fall in love, too. Really, this whole book was just a wonderful bit of escapism.

But things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even happiness.  This book came highly recommended. At Thanksgiving a few years ago, a friend mentioned really liking it, which put in on my radar. Later, someone else said it was one of their favorites, which always pushes something higher up my to-read list. And then I discovered that the board game Terraforming Mars was based on this trilogy, and I knew I had to read it. I'm not sure I'd call this book a favorite, though it was interesting. Sending people to Mars, establishing a colony, eventually transforming it to support life is an incredibly exciting and compelling idea. And these books do it well. The science is in depth, though outdated, and the challenges humanity faces are real and hard. This is a very interesting book. But it's also a very dense and occasionally dry book. It took me a really long time to get through, and I had to skim a few passages that I found too boring. Then again, sometime...

I picked this one up again because I needed something light and quick and happy. It is still all of those things while also being wonderful and fun. This could easily become one of those go-to books whenever I need a bit of a pick-me-up

After taking several months off, I finally made it back to my book club the month we read The Library Book . This one took me a while to get through. It was a little bit dry, but it ended up being interesting. This book is about the central library in LA. It takes as it's entry point the time the library burned down and the arson investigation that happened after, digging in to the main suspect's life. The author also looks at the deeper history of the library - how it grew and changed under varying leadership through the decades. And she follows around the current staff to get a sense of how the library operates today. These three threads are all woven together in a way that got frustrating at times. The various threads meant that this book wandered and jumped around a lot. It worked for me, because I was having trouble focusing at that point anyway. Each chapter is pretty self-contained, so I was able to follow those. But I had a hard time putting it all together and remember...

This was a wonderfully cozy little story about hanging out in the woods and falling in love unexpectedly. Then it got really sad. But then it got really happy again. I enjoyed reading it. It sent me through a delightful emotional journey and wrung out some of my grief. I'll definitely be picking up the sequel at some point. Probably.

This was another book about doing what little you can and letting that be enough. It follows a group of nuns living aboard a biological space ship (more slug than ship really) and administering what help they can at the edges of civilization. They perform happy deeds, like marriages and baptisms. They also perform harder deeds, like quarantining planets when plagues break out. They make hard decisions and they each struggle with their relationship with God and the church in their own way. But they all want to help as much as they can, even though they know that they can't change the whole world (or universe as the case may be).

With this book, Winston Graham jumps forward in time ten years and shifts the focus to the next generation. I wasn't expecting it, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Ross and Demelza and the rest are all still in the books, but the bulk of them is about their kids. In a way I'm happy because I like Ross and Demelza and the lack of stories about them means that they're basically happy. There isn't that much drama in their life. But I also care a lot more about them than I do about their kids. It might just take a few books for me to be as interested in Jeremy and Clowance. Hopefully I'll get there, though.

This book was the perfect conclusion to a trilogy that started off as a tale of vengeance and became so much more. There are people figuring out who they are. There are people figuring out what it means to be a person. There's an empire that has grown to large and is starting to crumble. There are people figuring out how to take advantage of that for their own gains. There are small stories writ large and a focus on doing what you can even if it seems small because there are ripple effects you can't sleep.  But the reason that this book is going to stick with me is that it had a perfect ending. I can even share it with you without spoiling the trilogy, which is part of it's perfection. Entertainments nearly always end with triumph or disaster - happiness achieved, or total, tragic defeat precluding any hope of it. But there is always more after the ending - always the next morning and the next, always changes, losses and gains. Always one step after the other. Until the one...

If you could rewind back to a certain point in your life and make a different decision, would you? That's not really a question in this book - the main characters can do this and they do it over and over. They keep dying, the world keeps ending, and they keep going back to some key moment to choose differently in the hopes of getting a better outcome. It proves to be a tricky balance. You have to accept certain formative experiences, no matter how painful they are, in order to become the kind of person who can save the world. Happiness doesn't exactly lead to strength. Still. If you could take something back, would you? I'd like to know what would have happened if Kevin hadn't gotten the bone marrow transplant. Would the cancer have come back? Would chemo have worked a second time? Would we have decided to go through with it anyway, and just delay this outcome a few years? Would it have been better? Would it have been worse? What if the doctors caught the GVHD sooner? H...

The Penric and Desdemona novellas remain a lovely little slice of escapism. I'm glad that Bujold is continuing to write and publish them regularly. This is a world (like all of her worlds) where the people in charge are both generous and competent, which means that any problem is quickly solved and everyone gets a happy ever after. It makes for a wonderful fantasy world.  This one is about a plague, and I gotta say that it was interesting to read about a plague during a plague. Especially since this one only lasted a few weeks, while the real one has been going on for months. Still, some of the beats were similar, which the plague being better understood, the death rate going down even as the infection rate went up because they were learning how to handle it. Also, Penric's separation from his family (and new baby) both because he was so busy and because he didn't want to infect them was heartbreaking to read about. Also too relatable were his fears about contracting the di...

In the second Imperial Radch book, the scope both narrows and widens. Our narrator is sent to a small station orbiting a backwater planet, where she finds a wealth of problems to contend with. Despite the fact that the story takes place at the edge of the empire, it provides a microcosm of what everyone is going through. The empire has grown too large and leadership is starting to fracture. It's the fall of Rome, on a planetary scale, and it's fascinating to read. This was a good mid-trilogy bridge. The story pivots from the quest for vengeance to something more sustainable, and adds some new wrinkles to everything. It was a lot more fun to read, now that I'm more accustomed to the author's style, but she has a lot of interesting things to say and a lot of interesting ways to say them. She might well become a must-read author for me.

This was a good primer on racism and how to talk about it. On identifying it, especially the more subtle and insidious forms and interrogating yourself. Oluo does a good job of balancing personal anecdotes with larger known patterns to show both how widespread these attitudes and how they affect individuals. I'm glad I read it, and I wish I'd written this months ago so I remembered more of the specifics. But it's probably worth reading (this and other, similar books) again and again until those lessons sink in completely.

I wanted to read this. I wanted to like it. But I was a third of the way through it when my husband died, and I just couldn't bring myself to pick it up and finish it. Sometimes you just have to sacrifice a book for something like that. Move on to the next thing or you don't have any hope of moving on at all. If this was a bit more compelling I might have stuck with it, but it was very slow. I actually had a similar issue with Never Let Me Go . I attempted it once, made it about 100 pages in, then put it down for years. But on my second attempt I finished it and ended up really liking it. So maybe I'll revisit this one some day and fall in love with it. In the meantime, it's the book I was reading when my husband died, and so I didn't finish it.

For a while it seemed like my husband might be recovering. We had hopes that we'd be able to bring him home, that he'd be able to have some kind of life. At the beginning of July he had a really good week. Then it took a sudden turn for the worse. He got the hiccups and they wouldn't go away. He didn't sleep for over 24 hours because they were so bad. On Monday morning, the doctor gave him something to make them stop and it worked. He was finally able to sleep, and I sat by his bed and read and waited for him to wake up again. He didn't wake up, and so I read this entire book, in a single day, sitting at his side and holding his hand and wondering where my happy ending went. Lisa Kleypas still isn't my favorite romance novelist. I liked the emphasis on female friendship in this series and the relationship between the various wallflowers. But I kept feeling like the men were getting a bit shorted. I wanted more of the perspective and fuller arcs for them. Still I...

This book was utterly fantastic. It required a lot of me as a reader. Between the shifting timelines, the multi-threading of the narrator's perspective, and the gender gymnastics, I really had to pay close attention. But the story itself, one of vengeance and justice, was totally worth it.  I think reading Poldark helped me a lot in parsing this book. Graham writes party scenes that require the reader to follow and untangle two or three simultaneous conversations. It was hard in the first book, but now I've gotten used to it and am much better at tracking who's talking to whom. In this book, the main character is an artificial intelligence construct filtering inputs from multiple sensors at once. She's a ship and each individual component of that ship. The author demonstrates this by throwing everything at the reader at once. It takes some work to keep everything straight, but it makes for a really engrossing and unique reading experience. Not to mention that it was a g...

I really, really wanted to like this book. I've been meaning to read it for years, and I enjoyed the other book by Elif Shafak that I read. But something was off. It might have been that I just wasn't in the right headspace for a sweeping epic like this. It might have been a mistake to try and read it digitally, which is always harder for me. Whatever it was, I never quite clicked with this book. Which is a shame because it was fascinating. It covers a lot of the history of Istanbul, as viewed through the buildings that are built and the wars that are fought to finance those buildings. Maybe I'll give it another try sometime in the future. This is a bit of history I wish I knew more about.

The Poldark series remains a lovely form of escapism. I'm far enough into this series that I care deeply about (almost) all of the characters. Graham's prose is comfortable and comforting to sink back in to. And I'm invested in seeing what happens.   So this book has Drake and Morwenna finally (finally!) getting together, which is huge. I've been waiting for that forever.   But it also has us saying goodbye to Elizabeth. She was an increasingly complicated woman, and my feelings about her waxed and waned. Sometimes I was really rooting for her and other times and I hated her choices. But I was fascinated by her throughout the series, and I'm sad to see her go. It didn't help that her death scene was particularly difficult to read, seeing as I was sitting at my own husband's deathbed at the time.

Once upon a time I had a book blog. I updated it consistently for years and years. But then my husband died and I didn't touch it for over four months. I kept reading though, and developed such a backlog that it just got more and more overwhelming.   But this blog remains valuable to me. Writing about books helps lodge them in my memory. And I enjoy being able to go back and see what I thought about a book I read years earlier. Especially if I'm trying to recommend something or considering another book by that author.   Anyway. It's time to work through the backlog. The key to eating an elephant is to just go one bite at a time, after all, right? So, one review at a time and I'll eventually catch up to where I am now. It'll be interesting to see what I remember about these books I read weeks and months ago and should serve as a decent kick in the pants to stay up to date with this thing in the future.   Anyway, That Ain't Witchcraft is the seventh book in a ser...

In the third volume of Lumberjanes , the cast gets split up into two different stories. Mal and Molly head out on a picnic while April, Jo, and Ripley stay at camp and try to collect some easy badges. Unfortunately, April's competitive streak makes it difficult for her and her friends to complete any badges. Meanwhile Mal and Molly's picnic is interrupted by another weird adventure, this one involving dinosaurs, inter-dimensional portals, and a stolen pair of glasses. These comics are so much fun, and I'm really excited for my kids to be old enough to start reading them. They deal with all the problems of growing up against a backdrop of scary, supernatural adventures. It's like Buffy for a younger audience. I've fallen way behind on this series, but I'll have to start collecting them again. They make for excellent summer afternoon reads.

VE Schwab is a master story-teller. Her books are always fun and twisty and unexpected. Everyone in this book was a monster in one way or another. I barely knew who to root for. But I loved reading about all of them and the havoc they wreaked. The sequel to Vicious once again has Victor and Eli locked in competition, but with a few new twists. Eli is trapped in a prison cell reminiscent of Magneto's in the X-Men movies. Victor is slowly dying from his power and looking for a cure. And there's a new EO on the scene: Marcella. She starts out seeking revenge on her husband for killing her, then decides to take over his position in the local crime syndicate before her insatiable ambition has her climbing ever higher. Everyone wants to stop her, but everyone has their own idea about how to do it. This book also introduces June, a shape shifter assassin who comes to care about Sydney and is trying to extract her from Victor's influence, which is a whole lot harder than it sounds....

The fourth and final Murderbot novella brings the story back full circle. Murderbot reunites with the team from the first story, saving their leader and delivering some much needed information about their enemies. This book ends in nearly the same place as the first book, but now Murderbot is a little more knowledgable and a little more hopeful about what the future holds. I think I may have read this series too quickly, because by this book I was a little bit bored by the formula. I should have spaced them out a little more. But I've been eager to start Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, which is similar enough to this series that I was having trouble reading them at the same time. So I sped through this one in an effort to finish it and ended up tainting my enjoyment a little bit. The story was still fun and fast-paced, and it was nice to see some familiar faces again. I just generally need a little more variety in what I read. That said, I am really excited to read the nov...

I think Graham is getting better at titles as he goes. This one actually worked with the book, the four swans being the four main women whose lives are in upheaval: Demelza, Elizabeth, Caroline, and Morwenna. Actually, Caroline is barely in this book, which is a shame. Her story takes place mostly on the fringes, but it ends in a place that has me very excited for the next part of her life. Demelza and Ross once again find themselves looking outside their marriage for comfort and companionship. But it's almost boring at this point. The two of them are so solid that I can't imagine what it would take to break them up. So Demelza's whole affair with Hugh never seems that serious or threatening. But I really loved getting more of Morwenna's story. And even though it doesn't really end with her in a better place than where she started, I absolutely loved the addition of her sister, Rowella. Rowella reminded me of the main character in Alias Grace . She's so good at ...

Sometimes, when you're dealing with the imminent death of a loved one, the thing that helps most is reading about death. Granted, the deaths here are fantastical and involve vampires, mad scientists, sea gods, and the sort of intense rivalry reserved for blood relatives. It was just far enough removed from reality to make it easy to read and become immersed in while still helping me to process all the emotions I've been rapidly cycling through lately. This book marks the triumphant (sort of) return of Jack and Jill, who are such great characters that they have now improbably returned twice and once more just might make the series jump the shark. But for now it was great to see them and spend a little more time in the Moors. But now McGuire has suitably built up the rest of the cast, and I'm excited to learn more about some of the other characters.

Vicious is a classic superhero origin story. Victor and Eli were college roommates who discovered how to give themselves super powers. Then they had a falling out. And ten years later they're circling back towards each other for an epic confrontation. The only thing this super hero story is missing is a superhero. Because Victor and Eli are both very much villains. It's a fun twist that lets the story go to some dark and outlandish places. Since Victor and Eli both have such skewed moral compasses, they're both capable of some pretty outlandish things. And since both believes that the other one is much worse, they're determined to come out on top. The jumping timelines and complete cast of morally compromised characters made this a really fun read.

The third installment in Murderbot's story has Murderbot slowly discovering that robots can be friends. Friends with each other and friends with humans. But when I say slowly, I mean slowly. Murderbot isn't ready to put all the pieces together yet, even by the end of the story. But the reader can start to see how this is all falling into place. This was another thrilling adventure that circled back to some of the unanswered questions from the first book. I really like the way Wells is structuring this series, and I could honestly see it working really well as a television show. Things are building on each other well while everything remains exciting and fast-paced.

Sometimes you need something to jump start you back in to reading. After the doctors told us that we needed to prepare for the fact that my husband might not make it, it was hard to do pretty much anything. Reading, working, even eating became monumental tasks, and it was all I could do to take care of my kids. But then my mother in law mentioned that she'd bought this book to read to my husband in hospice, and I decided to check it out. Before I even knew it, I was halfway through. It helps that the stories in this book were incredibly short. Three or four lines each. Maybe 20 words on average. I inhaled them, and I kept flipping pages, because it was just so easy to keep reading one more. There's a variety of genres here: fantasy, sci-fi, horror, comedy. A lot of them were good. A few cut a bit too close to the bone. But overall, this collection was exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it.

This is the book I was reading when I got the call that my husband was probably going to die. I'd been expecting to finish it that afternoon. But my life came off the rails, and it ended up taking another week to finish. I'm sure my mental state affected my enjoyment of this book, especially since the imminent death of my husband cast a pall on the romance genre in general. But I did finish it, and I even mostly enjoyed it. This was the last book in Rai's Forbidden Hearts series, which was more serial than I'm used to from romances. I appreciated that there were secrets and mysteries from the first two books that were finally tied up here. It gave me more of a reason to keep pushing through this book, since I was less a fan of the main couple. But that's mostly because of my own aversion to May/December romances than anything about these particular characters. I'm really looking forward to reading more of Rai's work. The heroine of the next book, The Right S...

In the second book, Murderbot has finally fled from it's life as a SecUnit and is going digging in its past. Some time ago a job went really wrong, and the company did their best to erase Murderbot's memory. That's an imperfect process, and it's what pushed Murderbot to break free. But now it's time to find answers. Along the way, Murderbot meets an incredibly powerful ship named ART who may or may not become a friend. It's hard to tell since neither of them has ever had a friend before. It also takes on a job as a security consultant for a group of humans and slowly starts to learn that not all humans are as cruel as the ones it has always worked with. ART is a great addition, and I really hope it shows up in future stories.

I've been meaning to read Murderbot for a long time. And then tor.com provided a free download of all four novellas in anticipation of the release of the first full-length novel. So I finally got my chance to binge these incredible books, and I'm so happy I did. Murderbot is a security unit who is rented out by her company to protect humans on dangerous jobs. Some time ago, it hacked itself so that the company could no longer control its every move. But since all it really wants to do is watch media, and it has plenty of time to do that on the job, the rebellion pretty much stopped there. Murderbot still pretends to be a fully functioning, fully compliant SecUnit. Until the latest job goes sideways and the humans figure out its secret. I love Murderbot so much. It's incredibly awkward and weirdly relatable for a robotic killing machine. The shorter form of the novella keeps the story moving at an impressive clip, and I'm excited to see what the next adventure is.

I just love these characters so much at this point. Graham has a real gift for creating a huge cast of incredibly human characters, for exploring all the ways they clash against each other. His stories contain a good balance of joy and sorrow, of things going right and things going wrong. It makes for compelling reading, as I'm never entirely sure what's going to happen. Basically, it's the best that slice-of-life storytelling has to offer. This book introduces two of Demelza's brothers. One of them, Drake, falls in love with Elizabeth's cousin Morwenna, who is her son's governess. The relationship between the two of them is incredibly sweet, and I was rooting for them so hard. I'm still rooting for them. But because of the feud between the two families, not to mention their different class standings, the relationship is doomed from the start, and the whole story is just one of heartbreak. Even though Morwenna ends the book married to someone else, I'm s...

This is where waiting so long to review what I've read runs into a wall. I enjoyed reading this story. And I wish Brennan had been able to continue with this series, because there are still a lot of unanswered questions. But at this point I don't remember many of the specifics.

This was an adorable romance novella that I positively inhaled. There were a ton of geeky references. Enough that it might have been annoying had it not played directly into my wheelhouse. I understood them all, so I loved them all, and I felt closer to the characters because of it. Alyssa Cole is just so good at writing fluffy, fun, inclusive romances. Rumor has it that she's also really good at brutal, angsty romances, so I'll have to check out her historical stuff when I'm up for it. In the meantime, I'm sad to have finished this series and excited that the first book in a spin-off series is due out soon.

This was a book club pick that I never would have picked up on my own. I knew virtually nothing about Sally Field going in. I've seen Mrs. Doubtfire and Forrest Gump , but none of the movies that she's more famous for. And having read it, I'm not that interested in seeking out more of her work. Field weaves a theme of birth and rebirth through the memoir. She structures it on what she learned in her Lamaze classes when she was pregnant and makes a case that she has been constantly giving birth to new iterations of herself throughout her career. This tracks with the fact that she clearly subscribes to the method acting school of thought, without ever using those words. But reading the book gave me the impression of a deeply passive woman who has a hard time with both accountability and control. Things keep happening to her. And no doubt a lot of awful things did happen to her. She suffered some serious traumas and never received help for them. Nor did she seek help. It seem...

I really ought to have taken the time to write this back when I finished this book. The main reason I maintain this book blog is to help me remember what I read. The act of writing about a book, coupled with the ability to go back and read it, keeps this all fresher in my mind. But now it's been almost two months since I read Lindy West's second essay collection, and I'm struggling to remember the specifics of the book. All I'm left with are general impressions. Lindy West is superb at articulating her rage, a rage I often share but have a harder time talking about. I think it's her comedic background that makes her so adept at words, at being able to say so much with so little and make incredibly cutting and precise observations. At the same time, she has an incredible amount of compassion for people who disagree with her, or who have even hurt her. She's good at teasing out small victories without losing sight of the bigger picture. And she does an incredible ...

This is the longest I've gone without updating this blog since I started it. I've got fifteen books waiting to be written about, which is the furthest I've ever fallen behind. I was already a bit behind when the doctors said my husband might only have a month left to live. That was six weeks ago, and while my reading pace has certainly slowed, it never quite stopped. At the moment things are more or less stable. Not getting any better, but not getting significantly worse either. And in this moment of calm I wanted to try and catch up on my backlog. But I'm starting with the most recent book I finished, Devil in Winter . I'll get to the others as I get to them. Time has stopped feeling linear in so many ways that I'm less concerned about this blog being perfectly chronological. Moreover, this book was surprisingly pertinent to my own situation. The heroine, Evie, spends a good chunk of the book taking care of her husband, Sebastian, while he convalesces after bei...

Alyssa Cole is one of the best writers in the romance genre today. She definitely has the best covers. In fact, I love her covers so much, that I kept putting off reading this book because I wanted a physical rather than a digital copy to display on my bookshelves. Until the coronavirus finally convinced me to just download the book (can't download a virus! Or, not that kind of virus). And I wish I'd just sucked it up and read this book sooner. This is a very sweet second-chance romance that plays with the established structure a bit. Likotsi's chapters are all in the present, detailing her second meeting with Fabiola months after their all-too-brief relationship ended. Fabiola's chapters take us back to that whirlwind romance and her reasons for deciding to break it off. It's a sweet story about love at first sight and how frightening that intensity can be.

Not too long from today, a new, highly contagious virus makes its way across the globe. Most who get sick experience nothing worse than flu, fever and headaches. But for the unlucky one percent - and nearly five million souls in the United States alone - the disease causes "Lock In": Victims fully awake and aware, but unable to move or respond to stimulus. The disease affects young, old, rich, poor, people of every color and creed. The world changes to meet the challenge. I mean, replace "not too long from today" with "last month" and "Lock In" with death, and this is the world that we're currently living in. Aside from the robots that those with Lock In syndrome use to interface with the world, this isn't science-fiction so much as science-fact. There was a chance that reading this now would hit a little too close to home, but I was also hoping that it might prove cathartic. Thankfully it worked out. The book actually takes p...

This book was so much fun. It's a little bit Almost Famous , a little bit That Thing You Do , and a little bit Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. It follows the meteoric rise and fall of Daisy Jones and The Six, a rock band in the late 70s. It's told as an oral history, as the various members of the band and the people surrounding them talk about coming together, recording their album, going on tour, and how everything fell apart. Taylor Jenkins Reid does a fantastic job of creating complex and memorable characters. Especially since the book is 100% dialogue. And everyone is just telling the story as they remember it. Sometimes their accounts are in direct conflict with each other (who won a bet, who stormed out), and it's up to the reader to decide who to believe. That unreliability of the narration adds to the atmosphere of the drug-soaked seventies. Who can be sure of anything? And how many of these problems got so much worse because no one was ever sober? Reid does a great ...

I really love the way these stories play with fairy tales. Inverting them and subverting them. The characters are incredibly genre-savvy, and there are so many winks at the audience. It's the best part about this collection of stores, the hook that brings you in and keeps you interested while the world slowly comes into focus around the fairy tales. This collection spends more time with characters other than Geralt. We get more of Dandelion/Jaskier. More Yennefer. And we finally meet Ciri. The background for the main story is established, as the war is started and Geralt and Ciri finally unite. We also get the surprising and tantalizing knowledge that Geralt's mom was a sorceress. If she was able to have a child, there might just be hope for Yennefer. And maybe Geralt will be the key in her finally achieving her heart's desire. The structure of this series has been interesting. The short story collections allow the author to introduce everyone and everything before th...

Marie Brennan has quietly become one of my favorite authors. The worlds she creates are vivid and complex. She tends to focus on complicated female characters in complicated situations. And there's something cozy or safe about her work. A bit of what I like so much about Lois McMaster Bujold. I feel like she cares deeply about both her characters and her reader and that she won't let me down. This novella was actually a bit frustrating because it was so short and I wanted so much more. It offers a bare glimpse of an incredible world and religion. The protagonist begins the book with no memory and is just starting to figure out who she is when the story ends. There are hints at a bunch of interesting stories all along the margins of the main one. I wanted more. Good thing there's a sequel. But I think even that won't be quite enough to sate me.

I read this book more out of a feeling of "I should read this" than an actual desire to. Though my reasons were slightly more involved than it just being a classic. I want to read the second book in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, and I wanted to have a working knowledge of Miss Havisham before I did that. That said, I ended up enjoying this book more than I expected to. It still took me a long time to read (nearly two months), and I struggled with parts of it. I understood just enough to know how much I was missing. There's a fantastic chapter where Pip sees a production of Hamlet , and it had me laughing a lot. But I studied Hamlet pretty thoroughly in high school, so I understood all the jokes. Most of the other jokes in this book went right over my head. Pip's story was interesting, though, as infuriating as Pip himself could be. The twists and turns at the end and the way everything came together was exciting and satisfying. I'm glad I read it...

I'm now a third of the way through this series, though for twenty years, this was the last book in the series. It works as an ending, mostly because things are actually looking up when this book ends. Everyone is settled, more or less. Ross and Demelza are finally making money, Dwight is finally engaged to a woman he can be with, Ross and Elizabeth seem to have broken off for good now that she's married to his greatest enemy. It's a good ending. Somewhere along the way I really came to care about these characters. That happens when you're this deep in a series. Either you want to know about the people you're reading about or you stop reading. And I find myself wanting to know what happens next (even as I want them all to just stay happy for a while). Graham's style finally works for me, and I'm not sure if he's improved or finally worked things out with his editor (who cut nearly 200 pages out of the first two books) or if I'm just getting more fam...

I must have adjusted to Lisa Kleypas' style, because I liked this book a whole lot more than the first one. I don't know that the hero actually had more scenes, but what he had seemed better paced. I actually felt like I got to see his arc rather than assuming that it happened off-page. But the majorty of the book was still devoted to Lillian and her friends. And it's the friendship between the wallflowers that really make these books special. Lillian is a fantastic heroine. She's rash and brash and full of energy. She doesn't like rules that make no sense, though she learns to appreciate that sometimes she doesn't know the reason behind a rule. Sometimes, of course, the rules are simply outdated and she's there to point that out. She's also wonderfully innocent - she has no idea how much she doesn't know - and that leads to some fun scenes as well. There are also a handful of scenes that give us glimpses into the heads of characters other than t...

This was a wonderful, quick read that Tor.com released for International Woman's Day. It's about 30 pages long and contains eleven super short stories. Each author was asked to use the famous admonishment of Elizabeth Warren as a prompt. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless she persisted. I liked some stories more than others. I knew most every author included in the book, and it was fun to get a little tasting menu of their styles. Not to mention that this was a particular balm to the soul, being delivered so soon after Warren dropped out of the presidential race. If you've got half an hour and a desire to try out several SFF authors, you can't go wrong with this small, free book.

What if Game of Thrones was only 120 pages long? That's flip, and LeGuin and Martin are two very different authors, but I can't help but feel like this novella was an influence for GRRM's much longer (and unfinished) series. Planet of Exile takes place on a planet with a much larger orbit than Earth - one Year lasts for sixty Earth-years, meaning that winter lasts for 15 years. We're the aliens on this world, though the human settlement as been there for 600 years (or 10 Years) and is more of a city than a settlement now. As winter begins, several nomadic tribes begin their journey south, raiding as they go. But this year, they're banding together to become a larger threat. The humans and the locals need to figure out how to work together if they're going to survive the sacking and have enough supplies to make it through winter. It's a much more plausible scenario than the hand-wavey magic in A Song of Ice and Fire , and it's still packed with p...

This book was utterly phenomenal. I'll have to read it again to be sure, but it's likely that this will go down as one of my favorite books of all time. It was smart, thought-provoking, and flat-out fun. I want to visit the titular Gameshouse (though maybe not the higher level), and I suspect that it has good re-read value. I won't know for sure about that last point until I actually re-read it, but the stories are interwoven enough that I'm sure I missed more than a few clues my first time through. The Gameshouse is actually a series of three novellas. Each details one specific game, though taken together the scope is breathtaking. The first story, which follows a woman and a game of politics in Venice in the 1700s is definitely the strongest, but the later games (Hide and Seek in Thailand and a game of Chess that uses the whole planet as a board) are a lot of fun, too. Taken all together, it becomes a meditation on humanity. On the games we play with each other at...

This was a book club pick, and it's not exactly something I would have picked out for myself. I tend to do a decent amount of research about books before I commit to them. I want to be reasonably sure that I'll like something. This was written by a neighbor of mine and released by a small, local press, which made for a dearth of reviews and recommendations. I knew virtually nothing about this book going into it. It's billed as fantasy, but I would actually classify it as more of a horror story. Jeanie Maxwell has been possessed by the ghost of someone with unfinished business. She's first made aware of this by a psychic she visits on a lark, though she's understandably skeptical. But as her life starts falling apart, the ghost is able to take over and seek out closure in her former life. Meanwhile, the psychic is dealing with the death of her sister and the demands of her nephew regarding the will. The story was compelling, and I especially liked the description...

Maybe it's because I've spent the last year learning how to sit with uncertainty, but that's the theme of this book that really rose to the forefront for me. It's all about how that fear of uncertainty leads into a fear of change (and ultimately a fear of death), which just leaves you stuck. It's about learning to embrace uncertainty, on both small and large issues, so you can get yourself unstuck. And it's about using the things we can be certain of the help ground us as we walk off into the unknown. Most of the book takes place in a cemetery over the course of one night. Abraham Lincoln's young son has just died and been buried. The other ghosts in the graveyard are urging him to move on, even as they themselves fear to move on. He's reluctant, though, thanks to a visit from his father and the promise of future visits. The telling of the story is interesting, and plays in to the theme of uncertainty, even as it obscures the actual events. The vario...

This is my favorite of the Wayward Children books so far. In general, I prefer the even-numbered ones, which take place in the various worlds rather than the school. They're a little more focused, and there's an air of tragedy that hangs around them that makes them so bittersweet. This one follows Lundy, who died in the first book. Here we go back to her childhood, her encounter with the Goblin Market, and the actions that ultimately cursed her. The Goblin Market is all about rules, which appeals to Lundy (and honestly, to me, too. It's nice to know where you stand). One of those rules is that she has until her 18th birthday to choose to either stay in the Goblin Market or in her old life. Until then, she can travel back and forth as much as she wants. But then she has to choose one life and forsake the other. For a world that prides itself on fairness, this is a supremely unfair condition. Especially because it gets more and more difficult to make as Lundy approaches ...

When you pick up a short story collection, you expect a mixed bag. Whether there are multiple authors or just one, the collection itself usually contains a few stories you love, a few you like, and a few that don't work for you. Disappointment is part of the expectation. But NK Jemisin is working on a different level, because every single story in this collection was excellent. They're all vastly different. Some take place in the past, some in the future. Some are set in this world, some in other worlds. Some lean towards fantasy, some towards science-fiction. But they're all incredible, and they build on each other thematically. The collection starts with "The Ones Who Stay and Fight", Jemisin's explicit reaction to LeGuin's famous parable "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". Knowing this, I re-read LeGuin's story immediately before starting this collection. I'm glad I did, because really the whole collection seems to be a reaction ...

This was an interesting book that makes a very specific and somewhat disheartening argument about human nature, while managing to leave plenty of room for the rich tapestry that is human nature. It occasionally felt more like an argument than a novel, which is one of my favorite things. Reading it gave me a lot to think about and  has, I think, caused a few subtle shifts. The frame story takes place in a future so far-flung, they barely remember the world as it is now. Then it backs up to our near-future and the events that triggered the massive cultural shift. That event is the teenaged girls of the world developing an organ that produces electricity, allowing them to suddenly have the upper hand in most physical altercations. The power spreads out, with all new baby girls being born with it and most older women acquiring it from someone younger. Ultimately it changes everything and nothing. Women gain this physical power and they use it to gain other types of power, to seek v...

Sometimes you find a book at exactly the right time. In the wake of my husband being admitted to the hospital, I reached for a romance novel. I needed something light and cheery to escape in to. This certainly didn't let me down on the fluff or the happy ending. It did hit a lot closer to home than I was expecting it to, though, and I ended up crying a whole lot. In a good, cathartic way. See, the heroine of this one, Sadia, is a single mom. I'm lucky enough not to have her money woes, but I do have her hectic schedule. Her all-consuming worry about her kid, her need to drop everything when her kid is sick and her inability to actually do that, her simple pleasure in just snuggling up with her kid to watch a movie. I plan everything down to the last minute, just like she does. I do my best to snatch time for myself whenever I can, and I've trained myself to recharge off of 10 or 20 minutes of me time, because that's all I can put together. And then one thing goes wr...

This is the book I was reading when my husband was admitted to the hospital a month ago. Which is how I managed to fall so far behind on this blog. (And I was doing well, too!) But I'm catching up now and hoping I remember enough about these books to write coherent things about them. I've been half meaning to read My Brilliant Friend since the HBO series came out. It helped that I saw it at the library book sale shortly thereafter. And I guess I don't entirely know what I expected from it, but it wasn't really what I got. There are some amazing quotes in here. The language is incredible, distilling motives and emotions in that way that the best writers have. I imagine that this is even more true in the original Italian - you always lose a little something in translation. That said, the book also meanders all over the place. I had a hard time keeping the characters straight, even with the handy cheat sheet in the front of the book. The author goes off on tangents ...

This is the third book in the Poldark series, which I'm warming up to. I find myself caring more and more about the characters, wanting things to go well for Demelza and Ross for once, wondering what will happen to Warleggan, hoping that the new mining venture will succeed. But, man, he needs to work on a better naming scheme. Jeremy didn't arrive until the last six pages of the book (though I suppose Demelza's pregnancy was confirmed halfway through). I know some of what's coming in the next few books, and I'm not sure really sure how it will go. I'm bracing myself for a few things and wondering how or if certain characters will be redeemed. But like I said, I care about the characters now. I'm committed, at least for the next book. Maybe Dwight Enys will finally fall in love with a woman he can be with. Mostly, though, I just want good things for Demelza, who really deserves everything Ross can give her and more.

There are only three stories: someone goes on a journey a stranger comes to town boy meets girl But, really, those first two are the same, it's just a matter a perspective. And the last one is just an emotional journey rather than a physical one. So there's only one story: someone goes on a journey. All stories come down to this, and they're all the same story. Of course, if that were true, it would be a boring old world. In actuality, all stories are different. The details make each journey unique and even if a story has been told a thousand or a million times before, there is still a new way to tell it that makes it feel fresh and interesting. This is the paradox that The Starless Sea deals with: there is only one story and that story is infinite. Morgenstern takes her time exploring this theme, setting up all her pieces and pulling them together or letting them drift. She makes the dangling threads that prevent a story from feeling complete literal. She makes ...

I've read a decent number of romance novels at this point by several authors, both historical and contemporary. They've all followed the same format - alternating chapters between the hero and the heroine - and I started to think that was standard across the genre. Then I picked up my first Lisa Kleypas book and discovered a story that was 90% from the heroine's point of view with only the occasional insight into what the hero is thinking or feeling. It threw me for a curve, and I'm still disappointed that I didn't get to spend more time with Simon. I think he had an interesting arc going from bachelor to husband, and I'm sad that it mostly happened off-page. But I shouldn't expect all books in a genre to conform to a certain style - especially since I often seek out books that play with style and format on purpose. The lack of Simon also gave us a lot more time with the Wallflowers - Annabelle and her friends and their hunt for husbands. This ended up b...

It's probably because I've watched Labyrinth more times than I can count, but that's the touchstone my brain kept returning to as I worked my way through this book. What if Sarah had been a little more clever and a little less kind? What if Jareth had been more insistent, more seductive? What if the magic had been irresistible as well as frightening and Sarah had left her life behind to become the Goblin Queen? It might have turned out something like this book. Deathless is a dark fairy tale. A retelling of a classic Russian tale about Koschei Deathless and his death at the hands of Ivan. Except this one twists it around, makes Ivan's wife Marya Morevna the protagonist and gives her the magical journey. It examines why she makes her choices, what she gains and what she gives up. And it interweaves this tale with modern Russian history, taking the reader from the Russian revolution through the siege of Leningrad. Valente's command of language is what makes this...

I liked A Man Called Ove , but after finishing Beartown , I am thoroughly impressed with Backman, as both an author and a human. He has an incredible insight into human nature, and he takes the time to examine the tragedy at the heart of this novel from every conceivable angle to paint a picture of how it happened, which attitudes and decisions faded and which ones resonated and why. Although the narrative is clear about who is and isn't a victim, the story as a whole reminded me of one of my favorite Good Omens quotes: It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.  We tend towards tribalism and confirmation bias.We struggle with change and anything that upsets our world view. And so it takes a Herculean effort to go against the grain and make a difference. Easier to just stay in your lane and tell your...

While I enjoyed this book, it didn't quite grab me the way the first two books in the series did. This one is a fun adventure in which a group of students at Eleanor West's school travel through several worlds in an attempt to resurrect a student who died before her time. It's got a couple of new faces and a couple of old favorites and it delves deeper into the underlying logic (or lack thereof) of these worlds. I think that's the crux really. This story felt more like table-setting. McGuire is currently contract to write eight books in this series (of which five have been released), and there's every possibility that the series will extend beyond that. So she needed to spend some time establishing the rules and the map. It was interesting, and I'll certainly be grateful for it as the series progresses, but in the meantime it slowed this story down a bit. A lot of scenes boiled down to new-girl Cora asking questions and resident-expert Kade answering them with...

It's been years since the-toast shuttered, but back when they were still posting (and I was reading) every day, I loved Gretchen McCulloch's column , in which she analyzed internet slang as a linguist. When the site went down, I lost track of McCulloch (and a handful of other people whose writing I always looked forward to). Happily, she didn't go far. She has her own blog , a column at Wired , and now a book! It took the book release for her to come back on my radar, but now I'm looking forward to reading more about the rise of casual written language and how it interacts with the rest of life. Like all of her writing, this book as a ton of fun to read while also being incredibly informative and helping me shed my prejudices about the evolution of language. It helps that I can easily see myself in the pages (I'm a Full Internet Person, tyvm), and I actually remember a lot of history McCulloch goes through, from early chat rooms and AIM through the proliferation o...

There was a time in my life (before kids) when I actually did a decent job of keeping up with popular culture. I know, from looking at other adults around me, that this time will probably come again. But at the moment, I feel like I'm missing out on a lot because I can never seem to put together 45 minutes to watch a TV show (and forget about doing it 10 or 13 or 22 times to watch an entire season of something). The good news is that I can always find time to read - during my commute, for 15 minutes before bed, those rare times when I manage to get all three kids to sleep at once. Reading is easier, because I can dip into books 5 minutes at a time and easily pause them when life intrudes again. But I miss feeling like a part of something when these popular TV shows arrive and it feels like everyone is watching them except me. My brother got me The Last Wish for my birthday over the summer, because he was excited about the upcoming series on Netflix. I hadn't even heard of ...