Bookish Thoughts

I wanted to read this. I wanted to like it. But I was a third of the way through it when my husband died, and I just couldn't bring myself to pick it up and finish it. Sometimes you just have to sacrifice a book for something like that. Move on to the next thing or you don't have any hope of moving on at all. If this was a bit more compelling I might have stuck with it, but it was very slow. I actually had a similar issue with Never Let Me Go . I attempted it once, made it about 100 pages in, then put it down for years. But on my second attempt I finished it and ended up really liking it. So maybe I'll revisit this one some day and fall in love with it. In the meantime, it's the book I was reading when my husband died, and so I didn't finish it.

The movie adaptation of this book came out in high school, at a time when my friends and I were all obsessed with Keira Knightley. (Or at least one friend in particular was, and the rest of us got dragged into the obsession.) Naturally, we watched it, and then several friends read the book (possibly as an AP English assignment). Their consensus was that it left them feeling like they'd never be happy again. I was pretty entrenched in fantasy and fan-fiction at the time, so I never sought it out. Fast forward to last year when someone in my book club nominated it. We didn't end up choosing it, but it reminded me that I'd always half meant to read it. I liked the movie, and it seemed worth picking up the book. So even though my book club ultimately chose not to read it, I bought it at the next used book sale I went to. So maybe it's just that my expectations were too high. Or maybe I'm too stressed out at the moment to find enjoyment in what promises to be a deepl...

Ugh. Okay. It may be unfair of me to "review" this book, since I didn't make it very far. But I've talked about other books I've abandoned, so I'm talking about this one, too. Middlemarch  is one of those beloved classics that everyone is supposed to have read. It's a staple of literature, telling the story of a small, English town in the early 1800s. A sprawling tale, encompassing a wealth of people and years. And it is so goddamned boring. I couldn't bring myself to care about any of these characters. Whether that's because there were too many, meaning that as soon as I might care about someone they disappeared, or whether they were actually just caricatures (the prissy maiden, the uptight doctor, the foolish eldest son), or whether I just couldn't penetrate the language I have no idea. I would read a page or two, realize I hadn't absorbed any of it, and just not care to try and re-read it. What it comes down to is that I was bo...

It's always disappointing to dive into a classic, beloved book and discover that it is just not meant for you. I really wanted to like this book. I enjoy magical realism as a genre, and I remember liking what I read of Marquez in AP Spanish in high school. But this book was such a slog that I gave up after about 150 pages. There were a couple of cool things. At one point the entire town is struck by insomnia and slowly begins losing their memories. I enjoyed reading about that, but I wish it had gone on longer. Because the book covers seven generations (100 years), no one episode gets more than a few pages. Anything that was interesting was quickly over and I was left with characters that I didn't care much about. The characters were the biggest problem I had with this book. They were constantly getting in their own way. Creating misery for themselves like they were all suffering from the same stupid martyr complex. One woman falls deeply in love with a man. He eventually f...

My mom gave me Robert Heinlein's Time Enough for Love for Christmas a year and a half ago. Yeah, it took me a while to work up to this one. See, I'd read Stranger in a Strange Land at that point, and I really struggled with that book. I'm deeply, deeply ambivalent about Heinlein, and I was sure this book would be a similar roller coaster of emotion. It's not something you can just jump into lightly. But my stack of books was dwindling, and I couldn't start Treasure Island until June, so I figured it was finally time to give this one a shot. The book has a good frame, the sort of thing that draws me right in. Laxarus Long is the oldest living person with more than 2000 years under his belt. He's finally ready to die but one of his great^n grandchildren convinces him to live long enough to pass on his wisdom. So Long agrees to tell stories of his life so long as he has a willing audience. This results in a bunch of short stories, strung together b...

One of the things that's become easier for me in recent years is putting down a book before finishing it. When I was younger, I truly believed that you had to finish every book you started, that you owed it to the universe or the author or yourself or something. Occasionally I'd put a book down and simply get distracted by other things, always with the intention to return later. This happened with both Lolita and Treasure Island . Then I would feel guilty about never getting back to the book. But with the expansion of my to-read list, I've become more willing to simply put down books I don't enjoy. The easiest of all to put down was John le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy . And while part of that was due to my evolving attitude, it was mostly due to my utter confusion at this book. After the movie came out last year, I started hearing good things about the book. I haven't read much in the spy genre, so I kept this book in mind as a possibl...

I tried to read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe . I really did. But I just could not get in to it. Defoe's style didn't really help matters. He's a big fan of run-on sentences. Here's a sample of a single sentence from this book. And now, in the managing of my household affairs, I found myself wanting in many things, which I thought at first it was impossible for me to make, as indeed as to some of them it was; for instance, I could never made a cask to be hooped; I had a small runlet or two, as I observed before, but I could never arrive to the capacity of making one by them, though I spend many weeks at it; I could neither put in the heads, or joint the staves so true to one another, as to make them hold water, so I gave that over also. There are, like, four sentences in there trying to get out. And the entire book is like this. As soon as I started to get into a flow, I'd start stumbling across commas again. The sentences are so unwieldy that ...

Spoiler Alert: Don't read this book Serpent's Storm is the third book in Amber Benson's series about Calliope Reaper-Jones, also known as Death's Daughter.  Callie just wants to be a normal girl, living in NYC, working and shopping and going about her life.  She even put a forgetting spell on herself so she would think she was normal (and basically abandoned her family in the process).  But when her dad (Death) gets kidnapped, she has to step up as a member of her family.  The forgetting spell is broken and she gets thrust back into the supernatural world she tried so hard to leave behind. Honestly, I barely know why I read these books.  I grabbed the first two solely because Amber Benson wrote them.  The first one ( Death's Daughter ) was fun, and I think I liked the second one ( Cat's Claw ) more.  The world is actually really great.  Amber Benson draws on a lot of different mythologies and her characterizations of the old gods ...