Bookish Thoughts

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 The science is in depth, though outdated, and the challenges humanity faces are real and hard.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...