Bookish Thoughts

It's always nice to revisit a book and discover that it's every bit as good as you remember it. Maybe even better. It's been nearly a decade since I first read The Sparrow  and it's sequel, but it's stuck with me over the years. It's dense and powerful and there's a lot to mull over. I've been meaning to revisit it for years, and I finally convinced my book club to read it last month, which gave me the motivation to finally pick it back up. This time, I knew where everything was going from the beginning. And it gave me a deeper appreciation for the structure and pacing and foreshadowing of the book. It really is a masterpiece, using the mystery to drag the reader through the slower beginning and then ramping up at the end. I also enjoyed discussing it with my book club this time. A lot of them are way more familiar with the bible than I am, so they pointed out a lot of references that I missed. It was neat to get a different perspective on the book, ...

It's not lying. It's telling a good story. Following her previous novel about Doc Holliday meeting Wyatt Earp in Dodge City, Mary Doria Russell decided to tackle the gun fight at the OK Corral. Epitaph isn't exactly a sequel to Doc . It has the same characters, sure, and reading the first one will give you a better understanding of Doc Holliday and his relationship with Wyatt Earp, as portrayed by Russell. But this is a separate story entirely. While the story ends up focusing mostly on Wyatt Earp, Russell goes to great lengths to humanize everyone involved in the gun fight. As such, scenes are occasionally rewound to be shown from another perspective. Motives are occasionally given after the fact, but they're always given. Unless, of course, the historic record remained completely silent. Everyone had an opinion about this near-mythical gunfight and the fallout from it. There are countless contradictory accounts, and Russell did her best to sort through them all...

"Bein' born is craps...How we live is poker " At this point it should probably come as no surprise that Mary Doria Russell has quickly become one of my favorite authors. The only sad thing about Doc  is that now that I've read it, I actually have to wait for Russell's next book to be released. But the happy part is that her next book is a sequel to Doc , so I'll get to spend even more time in the Wild West with these characters. Doc  follows Doc Holliday for the summer he spent in Dodge City when he met the Earp brothers. But like most of Russell's books, it's about a lot more than that. Ostensibly, Doc  is a murder mystery. Except that the kid who died wasn't white, so no one really cares how he died. Then it comes to light that he was robbed of $2000 and suddenly people want to know where that money went. But it's also about Doc's struggle with tuberculosis, his new friendship with Wyatt and Morgan Earo, his contentious...

Dreamers of the Day is the fourth novel by Mary Doria Russell, who has already cemented herself as one of my favorite authors. I'd heard this book wasn't as good as her previous three and almost avoided it for this reason. I'm really glad I didn't. While it's true that it's not as good as The Sparrow, Children of God , or A Thread of Grace , it's still an incredibly good book. Dreamers of the Day is part romance, part historical fiction. The narrator,  a forty-year-old school teacher named Agnes Shanklin, inherits a large amount of money that allows her to take her dream vacation to Cairo. By a twist of narration, Agnes happens to meet T. E. Lawrence and Winston Churchill who are in the process of redrawing national boundaries in the Middle East following the Great War. Agnes finds herself on the outskirts of these talks as she spends some time with Lawrence, Churchill, and various other players. Although she doesn't participate them, ...

No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace A Thread of Grace is about Jewish refugees in Northern Italy during World War II. But like Mary Doria Russell's other books, it's about so much more than that. Tapestry is a good word to describe this book. There are a lot of characters, and their stories weave together to paint a picture of the last two years of WWII. The number of characters is a bit overwhelming at the beginning, but Russell is so good at creating distinct people that it doesn't take too long to begin sorting them out. There's also a list at the beginning of the book that outlines the characters, their aliases, and their basic relationships. The list is helpful, though I accidentally spoiled myself for a plot point via one of the descriptive aliases. The book tells the amazingly true story of many Italians' simple refusal to report on their Jewish friends, family, and neighbors. The book is d...

Children of God  is the sequel to Mary Doria Russell's debut novel, The Sparrow .  In The Sparrow  mankind discovered intelligent life on Rakhat, a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, and launched a mission to go and study the life there. Children of God  deals with the aftermath of that mission, which sparked a revolution on Rakhat. There are two sentient species living on Rakhat, one carnivorous (the Jana'ata) and one herbivorous (the Runa). The Jana'ata used the Runa for everything, from labor to food.  They controlled when they could breed and who they could breed with.  They also monitored they're own population quite closely, at roughly 4% of the Runa population. Of course, when the humans learned about these strict breeding policies, they were appalled.  And they incited the Runa to revolution. Children of God  follows the aftermath of this.  How the revolution plays out and what it's consequences are. Parallel to th...

The Sparrow  is about humanity's first encounter with extraterrestrial life. The Sparrow  is about the meeting, blending, and clashing of two cultures. The Sparrow  is about the frontier spirit that pushes us to always explore. The Sparrow  is about a group of people coming together to form a family. The Sparrow  is about one man's struggle to find God, and his despair at what he finds. The Sparrow  is about tragedies that result from miscommunication. The Sparrow  is about sacrifice and love. The Sparrow  is a rich, important book, and you should read it. In the year 2019, humanity discovers intelligent life on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. While the UN is arguing over whether it's worth sending people to a planet over 4 lightyears away, the Vatican quickly and privately pulls it's own mission together.  And so four Jesuit priests, a physician, an engineer, an astronomer, and a computer scientist embark on an a...