Bookish Thoughts

I love this book so much. Every time I read it, I get something new out of it. It's fantastic and dense and remains a glittering kaleidoscope of a story. This time through I recognized a lot more of the references to Greek mythology, having recently read The Odyssey , and I'm a little floored by how well Valente wove all those references into her story. And I still love the way she bounces between genres while somehow creating a cohesive whole. That said, I'm not as big a fan of the Gothic section, which gets a bit unwieldy at times. But I suspect that has more to do with my own unfamiliarity with that particular genre. The fairy tale and closed-room mysteries are delightful, balancing perfectly between homage and send-up of their respective genres, and if I read a bit more Gothic literature, I'm sure I'd find that section to be equally ingenious. Valente uses all those genre trappings and tropes to remind that reader that a life is not a story. A person can...

Every now and then you come across a perfect piece of literature. The Only Harmless Great Thing  was Tor's free download this month. Once I'd downloaded it, I cracked it open to peek at the first sentence (as I do nearly every time I receive a book). I then proceeded to inhale the entire thing in one long gulp. It's a good thing it's short. This story re-imagines history a bit to explore labor rights and animal rights and the power of a story. It jumps between two different timelines and at least four different perspectives, two of which belong to elephants. Each section is short, but they pack a punch. There isn't a single word wasted in this incredibly tight, affecting story. The Only Harmless Great Thing  is beautiful and sad and haunting. It's about the mistakes humans make that are so much bigger than a single life. And the attempts to rectify those mistakes that fall impossibly short. And the catharsis of grand gestures. And the way history gets re-wri...

Sorcerer to the Crown  has been bouncing on and off my to-read list since it came out in 2015. There was a whole lot of buzz initially, and then it never quite died away. I was excited to finally get my hands on it and find out what all the fuss was about. I have to admit that it wasn't quite what I expected. Both the title and the cover made me think this would be more action-packed. Somehow I thought it would be high fantasy. Despite the fact that I was so wrong about this book, I found it absolutely delightful. The story initially reminded me of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell . Magic in England is dying out, and it appears to be because of a falling out between fairies and humans. There's a lot of intrigue and politics - Napoleon even shows up on the edges of the story. But this book has so much more going for it. For one thing, it's not 1000 pages long with 200+ footnotes. (Okay, I loved those footnotes, but they do take a damn long time to read. Sometimes you wa...

Mary Robinette Kowal has a deep compassion for her characters that puts me in mind of Lois McMaster Bujold. It's not that nothing bad ever happens, and there are certainly forces outside of anyone's control making life harder. But she does a great job of humanizing every single character, of making you feel empathy for them and understand their choices. Of pulling happy endings out of a series of compromises and disappointments. Things don't turn out exactly the way you want them to, but they turn out well nonetheless. This is especially apparent in the character of Stetson Parker, who Elma has clashed with since the very beginning. His character arc is possibly the most satisfying one in the entire duology as Kowal deepens and softens him, expands on his back story while also finding ways for him to grow. He's not perfect - no one in these books is - but I ended up really liking him by the end. It's amazing, considering how much I hated him in the previous book. ...

If I know you in real life, there's a solid chance I'm buying you this book for Christmas. It's got elements of Contact , Hidden Figures , and The Right Stuff , all wrapped up in a fantastic story that had me crying in all the best ways. The story opens in 1951, with a meteorite landing on Washington D.C. and taking out most of the eastern seaboard. When it's realized that this is likely an extinction event - an extended winter followed by rising temperatures that will eventually make the planet uninhabitable - the space race kicks into high gear. But in this timeline, it's not about being the first to set foot on the moon. It's about figuring out how to establish colonies on the moon and possibly Mars so that humanity keeps going. At the center of all of this is Elma York, a brilliant mathematician and pilot who wants nothing more than to be an astronaut. But this is still America in the 1950s, and despite the stated goal of establishing a colony on the moo...

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...