Bookish Thoughts

This book was utterly phenomenal. I'll have to read it again to be sure, but it's likely that this will go down as one of my favorite books of all time. It was smart, thought-provoking, and flat-out fun. I want to visit the titular Gameshouse (though maybe not the higher level), and I suspect that it has good re-read value. I won't know for sure about that last point until I actually re-read it, but the stories are interwoven enough that I'm sure I missed more than a few clues my first time through. The Gameshouse is actually a series of three novellas. Each details one specific game, though taken together the scope is breathtaking. The first story, which follows a woman and a game of politics in Venice in the 1700s is definitely the strongest, but the later games (Hide and Seek in Thailand and a game of Chess that uses the whole planet as a board) are a lot of fun, too. Taken all together, it becomes a meditation on humanity. On the games we play with each other at...

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August  is that rare book that I finished and immediately handed to Kevin so he could read it. It's a fun twist on the time travel narrative and pokes at some interesting questions about the end of the world and our duty to future generations. Harry August, and others like him, keeps reliving his life over and over. When he dies, he goes back to the beginning to be born again. But this isn't a Billy Pilgrim situation where he's just come unstuck from time. While the circumstances of his birth and early life are always the same, Harry retains all knowledge from his previous lives. This initially leads to some time in mental institutions and various houses of various gods as he tries to figure out what's happening. But before long he's gaming the system to make his life easier. The story is very jumbled, at least in the beginning. His first several lives are relayed in bits and pieces, grouped thematically more than chronologically...