Bookish Thoughts

 I've come to expect certain things from Alix E Harrow. A deep understanding of tropes and stories. A delight in playing with them. A strong sense of justice and equality. A strong, young woman (or women) fighting for change. Those are all present here. But this being a novella rather than a full novel, they're compressed and occasionally sketched in. I've read her other two books, so I can read between the lines here. But I still found myself wishing for something a little meatier in this Sleeping Beauty modernization. That's really more praise disguised as complaint. I love reading Harrow's work, and I just want more of it. There were some really interesting ideas here - stories being the connection between multiple dimensions, the bones of those stories remaining the same even as the details change, escaping (or not) from your own story. I'm excited that there's a sequel and I'll get to spend a bit more time in this world. Though I also hope that it i...

Sometimes you find yourself so deep into a series, that you just keep reading beyond your enjoyment of it. Because some new twist appears and you have to find out what happens next. Even though you don't really care. I really liked the first Rose Marshall book. It was fun and inventive and told an interesting, ambiguous story. I was lukewarm on the second book. I wouldn't have read or even expected a third book. But then, over in the Incryptid series, which takes place parallel to this series, major changes happened. A big bad was defeated in a way that would have huge repercussions for Rose, and I just had to see that play out. So I guess I got my closure. But having gotten it, I'm not sure I needed it. My problem is with rose herself, who is feeling less like a character and more like a mouthpiece for the author. These books have lost a lot of the ambiguity that made them interesting. People are very definitely either good or bad, and that comes with a whole host of opini...

It's always a little rough when the best thing I can think to say about a book is that it was short. I hear a lot about Elizabeth Strout, and she's got a bunch of award-winning books. But it seems like every time I hear about someone raving about one of her books, it's the third or fourth in a series. Most recently, this happened with Oh, William. My book club nearly decided to read it. My mother-in-law's book club did decide to read it. And she liked it enough to go back and read the first two books. She waxed rhapsodic about this story that changes as the protagonist matures and gains new perspective on her childhood and comes to understand that trauma. And that may all be true. But the first book is (obviously) at the very beginning of that journey, and I had a hard time connecting with it. It was very melancholy, which I found off-putting. It felt like there was a wall between me and Lucy Barton. Every time she approached something interesting, she shied away from ...

 I still love this book. I was a little worried, honestly. It's been a few years since I read it. My life has changed a lot. I think about this book a lot, and I wasn't sure if the version in my mind still resembled the actual book. It was possible that in interpreting and reinterpreting this book over the years, I'd built it up so much in my mind that re-reading it would be an exercise in disappointment. But that didn't happen. I loved this book, and I still love it. Everything I remembered was still there. And there were new things as well. References and details I didn't catch the first time through that just added even more layers. I was also surprised by the subtle ways my perspective changed. I remember not really liking the gothic section the last time I read it. It felt overdone and a little too much. This time I understood it better, and therefore I like it better. But the noir section rubbed me a little wrong. The thing about this book that has me the most...

I first read this book years ago, and I remembered it as a light, feel-good novel. I sold it to my book club as "basically Pixar's Up without the fantastical elements". It's about a curmudgeonly old man who recently lost his wife and sense of purpose. Over the course of the novel he gets pulled into a community, almost against his will, and discovers that life goes on and there's more than one way to be happy. So I was a little surprised by how hard this book hit me this time. I cried. A lot. This book hit differently when you're grieving. All the little things that bring Ove down, all the small lonely moments that I skated right by the first time, loomed a lot larger now.    The book is still uplifting. It ends on a happy note, and Ove is in a much better place. It's a lovely story about neighbors coming together to take care of each other, even when decades of history complicate their relationships. It was just a lot sadder than I remembered. I wonder if...

 I loved reading this book. The prose bordered on poetry, and it flowed so beautifully. The style lent itself really well to expression different idioms and slang and dipping into vernaculars that gave each character her own voice while tying the overall narrative together. I'm a little in awe of it. And of how easy it was to read. Of how much I just wanted to keep reading it. Beyond the style of the book, I loved the structure. The books tells the life stories of twelve different women. They're all different. Different ages, different backgrounds, different beliefs and goals, different struggles and triumphs. But they're also all loosely connected. The connections are obvious in the beginning, but they become more obscure as the book goes on and more characters are introduced. Part of the fun is seeing the ways the stories interact, and what the various women think of each other. Evaristo does such a good job of making these women interesting. Of making them imperfect in d...