Bookish Thoughts

I'm not entirely sure what I expected from this book, but it's not what I got. I'd only read one other story by Sarah Gailey - a dystopian Western - and this was so far removed from that it left my head spinning. Which doesn't make this bad. If anything it speaks to Gailey's versatility. And I'll have a better sense of what to expect (or not expect) from her future books. This is billed as a murder mystery at a magical school. A sort of fantasy noir, with this emphasis on the noir. So where I was expecting a somewhat light romp, I got a much darker and cynical story about lies and secrets and the limits of family. I did end up liking it, once I realized what I was in for. And I'll probably pick up more of Gailey's work in the future. I'll just need to do a bit more research so I know what I'm in for before starting the next one.

I really wish I could have made Kevin read this book. I would have liked to talk to him about it. I think it helped me understand a bit better what he went through at the end, all the things he lost during his months in the hospital. This book is about a privileged man losing a little bit of that privilege and learning that the world is a lot darker than he always thought. At the beginning of the book, he gets beat up by a couple of robbers and lands in the hospital. The experience shakes him to his core, and he has a really hard time figuring out how to move forward. Then a body is discovered at his family's house, and he ends up getting sucked into a mess as he tries to solve the mystery before the detectives. Like all of French's books, this one was dark and twisty and occasionally hard to read. The protagonist is insufferable and never quite gets his comeuppance. Although he does seem to learn his lesson in the end.

This is my second Agatha Christie book, and I definitely understand why she was such a popular author. She was really a master of her craft, and surprisingly prolific to boot. And Then There Were None  was expertly constructed and very thrilling. I actually have to pat myself on the back for guessing the murderer correctly fairly early on. But then I fell for a masterful red herring, so by the end of the book I was doubting myself. Right up until all was revealed and I was kicking myself for falling for it. Still, Christie always manages to zig where I expect her to zag and ends up thoroughly surprising me with the end of the book. While I'm not as big a fan of mysteries as I am other genres, Christie's books are so short and exciting that I may have to seek out more of them. At the very least I should read a Miss Marple book.

Tana French isn't one to shy away from morally messy people. She likes taking complicated people, finding their buttons, and turning up the pressure to see whether they break or rise to the equation. I've liked a few of her protagonists, but most of them leaving me feeling off balance and a bit queasy. So it should be no surprise that Antoinette, narrator of The Tresspasser , is a difficutl character. She's angry and paranoid. The world has been hostile to her, and she responds by being hostile right back. Often proactively. It was hard to be in her head for an entire book. Honestly, her level of anger and defensiveness just exhausts me. She tries so hard to prove that she doesn't care that she ends up spending all of her time caring what people are thinking of her every minute. It's no surprise to the audience to learn that most of her squad doesn't think about her as much as she believes, and I had a particularly hard time believing that O'Neill was in o...

I haven't embraced mysteries with quite the fervor that I did romance earlier this year. I've been dabbling with the genre for years, but I'm picky. I need something that will entertain me and keep me engaged. I need the ending to be neither obvious nor out of nowhere. I want to be on pace with the detective. If I figure things out too quickly I get mad at the book. If I can't figure anything out, I get frustrated and the book isn't any fun. It's a delicate balance. But recently, I've found a few authors I really like (Tana French, Gillian Flynn), and that's helped me start to embrace more mysteries and thrillers. I'm coming to appreciate the craft of the genre and how these stories are constructed. Between that and the recent movie version of Murder on the Orient Express , I finally had the push I needed to try out one of the classics. I ended up liking this book a lot more than I expected to. Sure, Poirot is pompous and Christie withholds infor...

This book is almost too bright. Which is maybe an odd way to describe a book. It's so bright that it gives me a headache, the kind I got when I was in Alaska in June and the sun was always in my eyes. Which, again, is an odd way to describe a book that I love deeply. But it's true. The first time I read it, I had a stomach bug, so I figured that was why I felt a little off. This time through I felt fine, and I still got a headache, right at the exact same spot. This book glitters and shimmers, and it's sometimes hard to look at. But it's even harder to look away. So. Headache. My second time through this book, I got a chance to marvel at how French constructed her mystery. I was actually surprised to realize that she tells you who the author is right on the third page. Then again, much like The Secret History , this mystery is more about why than who. What did Lexie do that fractured the group? I love books that hold up well on a re-read, and I think it can be espec...

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 broke my heart. After Broken Harbor , I'd been expecting another terrifying read from Tana French. Instead I got a deeply sad tale about friendship and the things young girls will do to protect (or destroy) each other. The murder victim in this book is a teenaged boy, found on the campus of a girl's boarding school. A year after his death, the case has gone cold, until a new clue narrows the suspect pool to eight teenaged girls, and the detectives find themselves caught in a web of high school drama and endless lies, trying to tease apart exactly what happened. Reading this book, I kept thinking back to my college experience. For a few brief, shining months, I had what these girls have. A group of girl friends that you are impossibly close with. You live together and share everything. You're ride or die for each other, and it seems like it will stay that way forever. And then something goes wrong. And because everything is so heightened, it goes really wrong, an...

It's always interesting when a story gets as much hype as Big Little Lies  has over the past year. There's always a chance that it won't live up to it. Then again, these things are often receiving all that attention for a reason, and they're usually worth checking out. The trick is to time it so that you're expectations match up with reality. This time, it worked. I loved this book. I read it so much faster than I expected to, partly because I couldn't put it down and partly because it was just that easy to read. The story opens as a murder mystery, but the mystery is doubled. Not only do you not know who the killer is, you don't know who the victim is. The book then rewinds six months to plot out all the events leading up to the murder. Full disclosure: I went into this book knowing who would die. I had a pretty good idea who the killer was (I ended up being wrong, actually). But that didn't detract from the experience at all. On the contrary, the a...

Tana French has a way of getting in my head and under my skin. I love her books, but they consume me. When I'm reading one, it's difficult for me to engage fully with the rest of my life. I come up for air as needed, because I do have a life outside of books. But French's books make me struggle with that. I want to linger over them, make them last as long as possible. I also find myself racing to the end, hoping that when I finally close the book I'll get myself back. That I'll be able to return to the rest of my life. Broken Harbor  was no exception. In fact, it got to me even more than usual. This book terrified me. It actually gave me nightmares. These books are not fantastical. There's nothing supernatural here, not even a whiff of magical realism. But the way French plays with your perception makes you doubt that. Just as I called The Likeness  a ghost story, on some level this is a book about a haunted house. A house haunted by all the crumbling hopes an...

The Likeness  is a deliciously claustrophobic mystery that skirts up against being a ghost story. It's haunting and lyrical. It got under my skin such that I couldn't think about anything else when I wasn't reading it, and then I couldn't sleep for thinking about it. It's rare that a novel leaks into the rest of my life the way this one did, and I absolutely loved it for it. The premise requires a significant suspension of disbelief. Detective Cassie Maddox, lately of the Murder Squard but currently working Domestic Violence began her career as an undercover agent. During that time she created the persona of Lexie Madison to infiltrate a drug ring on a college campus. When she was stabbed, she got pulled out, but the identity was left live in case they needed her again. So imagine her surprise when, several years later, Lexie Madison turns up dead. With no leads, Cassie agrees to go undercover again, under very different circumstances this time. So yeah, that in...

This is only the second of Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad  series that I've read, but I really like it for the way it deviates from some classic detective series. By keeping the setting the same but jumping to a new detective in each novel, French is able to write psychological thrillers that don't come across as cheap. Each case is deeply personal to the detective working it, managing to unleash all manner of ghosts and questionable behaviors. They're once-in-a-lifetime cases, and the affect the detectives in different ways. They're also incredibly disturbing, in a way that sneaks up on you and leaves you wanting more. This particular book (the third in the series, and the other thing I like about this series is that you can read it in any order, which makes it a lot easier given my tendency to shop used book sales) focuses on Detective Francis Mackey and the girl who got away. The girl who was, in fact, murdered some twenty years previously. It takes a lot fo...

I really like Gillian Flynn's books. They're twisty and turny and they don't shy away from the darker aspects of human nature, making for some great psychological thrillers. But I am glad that they tend to be shorter and that she's not all that prolific. Because these books can be hard to read. Reading about horrible people doing horrible things and all the damage they leave in their wake is emotionally draining. But it's so interesting that I can't stop. Sharp Objects is actually Flynn's first book, meaning I've worked my way through her books in reverse. But it's just as dark and compelling as her other books, at least in my opinion. The narrator is a journalist who was abused by her mother and driven to self harm. Fresh out of a stint in a psychiatric hospital, she's sent back to her hometown to report on the disappearances and subsequent murders of two local girls. Which would be bad enough even if she weren't staying in her mother...

I feel like Career of Evil needs to be reviewed two separate books. The first is the mystery, which is very good and had me guessing until the end (mostly because I missed something pretty obvious). The second is the interpersonal drama Robin and Cormoran are dealing with, which was a mixed bag. The mystery centers on someone who is out to get Cormoran. He starts by mailing the leg of a dead girl to the office. Cormoran immediately comes up with four suspects, because that's the line of work he's in, and most of the book is devoted to eliminating them, one by one, until the last one left is the guilty party. I became convinced early on that the true culprit was none of the men Cormoran identified. Somehow I landed on the theory that it was the son of one of them, even though the text really doesn't support this. Regardless, I got so wrapped up in it that I didn't even come close to actually solving the mystery. But that's okay. I liked that we got a bunch of sc...

My first time through the Discworld series, I didn't fully appreciate the City Watch books. Sure, they were fun and funny. But I always enjoyed the books about Death or the Witches more. This time through, however, I'm finding new depths in the City Watch that has me falling even deeper in love with this series than I was before. Whether that's because I've matured as a reader or a person, or if I'm just catching more the second time around is hard to say. But these books more than any others have me glad that I'm revisiting this series. I think I've mentioned before that Discworld is a good series to grow with. Not grow from childhood to adulthood, like Harry Potter . They're good for your twenties, when you're figuring out what kind of adult you want to be. Pratchett's growth as a writer mirrored and informed my growth as a socially-conscious human. But I think I reached this book slightly before I had the context and vocabulary to deal wit...

Ever since I read Gone Girl , I've been wanting to read the rest of Gillian Flynn's work. She's amazing at creating dark, creepy scenarios that keep you guessing. It's not the sort of thing I want to read all the time. But every now and then they're a lot of fun, a nice break from what I usually read. This one follows Libby Day decades after the massacre of her family when she was seven years old. At the time she testified against her brother, who has been in jail ever since. But new evidence suggests that he may have been innocent, and Libby is finally convinced to begin investigating and coming to terms with the discrepancies between her own memories and what she was subtly coached to say. The narrative flips back and forth between Libby's quest in the present and the actions of her mother and brother on the day of the murder. The structure kept the tension high as it seemed to reveal and then deny both motive and opportunity for various characters. And th...

I should read more mysteries. I was very resistant to the idea of mysteries a few years ago, but I think that's because my experience with the genre began and ended with Dan Brown. As lauded as he is (or was), he doesn't write very good mysteries. I always figured out the answer before the characters, and then felt like the characters were stupid for not seeing the answer. But it turns out that there's a lot of really good mysteries out there that do keep me guessing until the end. The latest of these is Tana French's In the Woods , which kicks off the Dublin Murder Squad series. Although I get the impression that each novel in the series centers on a different protagonist, making the location rather than the detective the connective tissue. It's an idea that intrigues me, and I liked the first one enough to track down then next, if only to read more of French's writing. She crafts a great mystery here, that delves into psychological thriller territory. The ...

This is a book I've been hearing about for a while. Not in the "you should read this" sense; more in the "you haven't read this?" sense. From the title, I knew it took place in a strange bookstore, and I assumed there would be an element of magical realism. Used bookstores seem ripe for magical realism. Except that there isn't a fantasy element to this story at all. It could be considered science fiction by some, except for the fact that I am intimately familiar with all of the technology mentioned in this book. So what we have is a plot that seems ripped from a modern science fiction book (it reminded me of Ready Player One , had that book been well-written), but firmly rooted in the current world. The story is a bit of an adventure and a bit of a mystery. There's a code to be discovered and cracked, and an entire secret society that's been built up around this code. Add in a fantastic love interest (who also walks away and is allowed to wal...

Before I read this book, I was warned that there was a cannibalism aspect to the murder mystery. Fearing the absolute worst, I braced myself. But it turned out that the cannibalism was mostly metaphorical, part of the book within a book that the murder is based on. So my first thought upon finishing was that it was much milder than I expected. And my second thought was that that was the strangest reaction I've had to a book in a long time. I love JK Rowling's Cormoran Strike series. Only two books in, but he and Robin are fun, smart people to hang out with. I like the way Rowling doles out clues, which leaves me feeling like I'm constantly on the verge of figuring things out. And I certainly could if I paid closer attention or flipped back to re-read passages. But as it stands I haven't been able to solve the mystery before the big reveal in either of her books. Which is a nice change of pace for someone who often sees the ending coming a mile away. If I have a comp...

I don't read a lot of crime novels. I've picked up the occasional mystery, and I did get into the Girl With a Dragon Tattoo books (also known as the Millenium Trilogy, but apparently no one else knows that) when they were popular. I usually find them enjoyable, but they aren't the bread and butter of my reading. But when I found out JK Rowling had penned a book (soon to be series) in this genre, I had to check it out. Not urgently, obviously, but it's been floating on my to-read list, and I finally found a paperback copy. Not being an expert in the genre, I guess I can't really talk about how it stacks up against other crime and mystery novels. But I found it very enjoyable. The mystery was well-paced, and the clues scattered throughout. There were plenty of reasonable suspects, which kept me on my toes. And I came very close to figuring it out, but hadn't quite put all of the pieces together before Strike's big monologue reveal. (I may have ...