Bookish Thoughts

Robin McKinley has quickly become one of those authors whose books I will always pick up. Even when I know next to nothing about them, I know I'm in for a thoughtful fantasy adventure that will be worth my time. The Blue Sword  is a well-loved story about a young woman who chafes at society's restrictions on young women. But after she's kidnapped she gets a chance to live the life she's always wanted. The story is a lot of fun, and the world is really rich. If I have one complaint it's that Harry (short for Angharad) is proud to a fault. And that fault is that she never asks any questions. She's goes with the flow so well that I started to get frustrated. This girl is kidnapped, told she has magical powers and a destiny, trained for battle, and sent into a competition to determine her skills, and she just accepts all of it. There are a few scenes where she misses her family, sort of. But she never gets angry or even curious really. I think this also contri...

I read the sequel to this book, This Book is Full of Spiders , a few years ago. I liked it fine. People tend to get fanatically devoted to these books, and I felt like the sequel didn't live up to the hype. I enjoyed it but not as much as I'd expected to. Still, when I saw the first one at a library sale, I felt like it was worth picking up. That was a mistake. Sure, this book is a head trip of a horror novel. It combines absurdity with out-of-nowhere plot twists to keep the reader feeling off balance. And that's all find and good. The problem is the rampant immaturity in this book. I think it's partially on purpose. The guys tasked with saving the world are woefully unprepared, and that's where some of the humor comes from. They're twenty-something slackers who act like they're still in high school. By which I mean that the protagonists of YA novels tend to be more thoughtful and level-headed than these two. What really got to me were the frequent slu...

Going back through the Discworld series has reminded me just how much I love the witches. And that reminder prompted me to look up why I'd forgotten. It turns out there's only one more book featuring the witches, which is sad. Although that is one of my favorite books in the entire series. And there's still all of Tiffany Aching to look forward to. Still, this book introduces the incomparable Agnes Nitt, and it's a shame that she's only in one more book. She's a wonderful character, constantly struggling between being polite and not being a doormat. She wants to be seen for who she is, rather than what she looks like, but she's still struggling to figure out who she is and who she wants to be. That may or may not be a with, but it's definitely not propping other people out without any recognition. Maskerade is a lovely send-up of The Phantom of the Opera , with Agnes in the role of a much stronger and smarter Christine. Though that's entirely b...

I probably shouldn't have read another book about a circus so close on the heels of The Night Circus . There was just no way it could live up to that magical story. Which isn't to say that this book is bad. Although I do think it lacked that little something special that would make it memorable. The book was fine, and I enjoyed it. It's just not one that I'm going to be returning to or thinking about for much longer. The story is pretty straightforward. A man drops out of vet school when his parents die and leave him penniless. He joins a struggling circus where he cares for the animals and falls in love with a performer who's married to an abusive man. Of course, he's the only one in the circus who cares that her husband is a complete jerk. They bond over an elephant who only speaks Polish and ultimately live happily ever after. Except that the entire story is told retroactively from the a very sad, lonely retirement home. That summary is probably not ent...

Men We Reaped  is a very good, very difficult book. It will break your heart without offering any hope or comfort. There are no solutions to the problems presented here, just hope that knowledge of the problems might lead to change. Over the course of five years, Jesmyn Ward lost 5 of her friends and family members. They were killed by drugs and guns, by drunk drivers and personal demons. They were killed, ultimately by a nameless, faceless "they", a society that couldn't be bothered to care whether they lived or died. Ward approaches the story from two directions. She presents the deaths in reverse chronological order, alternating with chapters of her childhood in Mississippi. This structure allows her to build to the heart of her grief: the death of her brother when he was 19 years old. Killed by a drunk driver who ultimately served 5 months in jail for fleeing the scene. The structure lends itself very well to the story. As the deaths advance back in time, Ward b...

I still want to live in this book. I suppose I'll just have to settle for re-visiting it once a year or so. The Night Circus is a fantastic, romantic story with just enough magic to intrigue and just enough description to let the reader's imagination run wild. It's a comfortable book, and it's perfect to take on vacation. I liked it even better the second time through. I knew what was going to happen, so I was able to meander through the book a little more. I took my time and stretched out, and I caught a bunch of things I skipped right by on the first time when I just wanted to know how it all ended up. I still read it in essentially one sitting, but that's just because I happened to be at an airport and on a plane without much else to do. The story felt richer this time around, as I picked up on some thematic background that I'd missed the first time through. Most notably the fear of ending up along that gets threaded through the story and ultimately pu...

With this act, I bring one death into the world . That quote has been circling in my head since early in my pregnancy. It's something I've been trying to come to terms with, but I'm not sure I ever really will. We created a life. A whole entire life. And it's quickly going to get beyond our control. Thanks to this quote, I've been pulled to re-read this book for months now. It took me a while to get around to it. It always does. My stack of books is big enough that months often pass between me deciding to read something and actually reading it. Sometimes years. In this case, the delay ended up working out well. I re-read Barrayar when I was just about 5 months pregnant, which is how pregnant Cordelia is when the attempt on Aral's life throws everything into chaos and her fetus is transplanted to a uterine replicator with slim hope for survival. It's not often that you get a science-fiction book about pregnancy. I can't think of any others off th...