Bookish Thoughts

This was a wonderful, quick read that Tor.com released for International Woman's Day. It's about 30 pages long and contains eleven super short stories. Each author was asked to use the famous admonishment of Elizabeth Warren as a prompt. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless she persisted. I liked some stories more than others. I knew most every author included in the book, and it was fun to get a little tasting menu of their styles. Not to mention that this was a particular balm to the soul, being delivered so soon after Warren dropped out of the presidential race. If you've got half an hour and a desire to try out several SFF authors, you can't go wrong with this small, free book.

Like most of Jo Walton's books, this was a slow burn that grew on me as I read it. It gained depth as it went, until it finished as an entirely different sort of story than when it started. Farthing  (and it's two sequels which I may or may not read at some point) takes place in an alternate version of 1949, just outside London. In this world, England has reached a truce with Hitler and let him have the continent. America never entered the war, becoming increasingly isolationist. And fascism is on the rise in all sorts of insidious little ways. Lucy and her husband are spending the weekend with her parents at the estate, something that has been increasingly rare since Lucy went against their wishes and married a Jewish man. When a man is murdered, it quickly becomes apparent that the real murderer is trying to frame Lucy's husband, David. And politics being what they are, there's not much anyone can do about it. This starts a cozy murder mystery, with the point of...

This book was utterly delightful. It's a play on the classic Victorian novel. Think Jane Austen. Except that all of the characters are dragons, which makes it even more fun. At the beginning of the book, an old patriarch dies, stirring up all manner of trouble. He has five surviving children, and while he tries to split up his estate fairly, the inevitable squabbles threaten to tear the family apart. The book follows the five children, two of whom are married with kids of their own. The unmarried male is working in town, building a life for himself. The two unmarried female dragons are split up for the first time in their lives, each sent to live a different sibling until marriages can be arranged for them. Along the way, they (and we) learn about various injustices in their society. It's pretty clear from the beginning how everything will end up. Happily ever afters for the good guys, just desserts for the bad guys, and dancing and merriment all around. But it's the ...

This is only the second of Jo Walton's books that I've read, but it's safe to say that it cemented my love of her. She has a way of probing the quieter, more mundane moments of our lives to see what sort of magic pops out. And she tells incredible, incredibly human stories with deeply relatable characters that I just want to hug. In the pantheon of science fiction, this book belongs on the shelf between Arrival and Life After Life . It starts with an old woman in a nursing home. Patricia has dementia, and she is often confused. She remembers two completely different lives: two spouses, two careers, two sets of children. More than that, there are two completely different worlds. One is striving towards peace and knowledge, the other seems intent on destroying itself, neither is exactly our world (as illustrated by JFK's fates). After the introduction, the book goes back to the beginning, to Patricia's early life and the choice that caused her worlds to diverge. ...

While the quickest way to get me to read a book is to give it to me and then tell me you want to borrow it (which is what happened with the book I read prior to this), I do eventually get around to all the books people tell me to read. At least the ones I remember. Among Others  came onto my radar nearly five years ago at a friend's wedding. Another guest and I got to talking about books and after comparing notes she told me that I must read Jo Walton's Among Others , which had just come out. The problem is that Jo Walton is surprisingly difficult to find, in both new and used book stores (and I try to avoid Amazon for physical books, even though they're slowly sinking their claws into me with the kindle and my need to read one-handed while nursing my son). And there are a million other books on my to-read list. And so it took a while for me to stumble across this book and pick it up. But I'm so glad I finally did. In fact, I'm glad I waited as long as I did. I ...