Bookish Thoughts

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...