Bookish Thoughts

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...