Bookish Thoughts

I mean this in the best possible way: this book is like is Twilight  grew up. By which I mean that the vampire in this book finds himself besotted with an actual adult: a tenured professor of history with a particular interest in alchemy. They're somewhat more mature about their whirlwind romance, and Diana starts off with the backbone that Bella didn't find until halfway through the last book. But this is still a whirlwind romance between an over-protective and possessive vampire and a naive and somewhat ignorant woman who's only too happy to be swept off her feet. I loved every minute of it. It's not a perfect book. The exposition can get a bit clumsy. The romance is possibly too dark for some tastes and there's some questionable things about it. But this is fantasy, not real life. Sometimes you just want to get lost in a chilly story about a girl and the over-protective vampire who has fallen head over heels for her and, oh yeah, they have to save the world. ...

The Tempest  may just win an award for the thing I've been intending to read for the longest time. Back in 6th grade, my drama teacher gave me a copy and told me that I'd like it because of the magical elements. And it's one of Shakespeare's shorter plays - an excellent entry point for a precocious tween. But I never got around to it. I know enough to recognize the references I see all around me. Prospero in Night Circus  and his disappointment when his daughter rejects the name Miranda. "Hell is empty and all the devils are here" quoted or misquoted every time we as a nation take another step backwards. Caliban's War  in the Expanse  series and Full Fathom Five  in the Craft Sequence . I finally decided that enough was enough. Surely I was missing even more references than I was recognizing. As my teacher recognized all those years ago, this is one of those foundational works that ought to be required for anyone with a healthy interest in SFF. So I pi...

I enjoyed The Rules of Magic  much more than Practical Magic . At least part of that is that I didn't bring a bunch of preconceived notions and expectations to my reading. There's no movie version of The Rules of Magic  that I've watched more times than I can count. But a bigger part is that The Rules of Magic  did the things I was expecting Practical Magic  to do. It almost seems to have more in common with the movie than the book it was actually based on. In Practical Magic  the movie, the girls have different opinions about love, but they embrace magic. They make wishes and cast spells and brew potions. In Practical Magic  the book, Sally and Gillian both reject magic, and with it their family. In  The Rules of Magic , the aunts and their brother embrace magic, against the counsel of their mother. They defy their fates to varying degrees of success, suffering victories and defeats throughout their lives. But they all learn that it ultimately does ...

Probably the best thing about this book is that I now have Warren Zevon's Werewolves in London stuck in my head. I won this book in the Worldbuilder's Lottery this past year. Every year, Patrick Rothfuss does a big fundraiser to raise money for Heifer International. There are auctions of donated items, and there's also a pile of stuff that goes in the lottery. Ever $10 donated earns you one drawing for the lottery. There's a lot of good stuff in there. There are also a few duds. This isn't a book I ever would have picked up on my own. And even after I won it, the main selling point was that it was short. I could read it in a couple of days. Which I did. I was half-distracted the entire time, because this book never quite captured my attention. But it relies so heavily on well-worn tropes, that even that half of my attention span followed along with the plot pretty easily. Technically this is the first book in a trilogy, which appears to be part of a larger wo...

I'm not sure how to begin talking about this book, which is strange and haunting and loose almost to the point of unraveling. I finished it wondering what I had just read, what had happened, what it all meant. But it was definitely very spooky, which is mostly of what I wanted from it. The story unfolds as the journal of Sarah Crowe. In the wake of her ex-lover's death and in an attempt to complete a new novel, she takes up residence in an old farmhouse in Rhode Island. There's an enormous tree on the property with an unsettling history, and strange things begin happening. Except that it's not clear at all whether or not they're really happening. It quickly becomes apparent that Sarah is not a reliable narrator at all. The question really becomes: how unreliable is she? She admits to making up some things. She has gaps in her memory. It's not at all clear whether she's actually being haunted or whether she's suffering a psychotic break i...

My book club decided on Helen Oyeyemi's  White is for Witching  this month, and I was excited to have an excuse to revisit it. This is a difficult book that I was confounded by when I first read it. I figured going in knowing more or less what happened would make it easier to digest. It did and it didn't. I think I understood a lot more of this book by virtue of knowing what was coming. But I still feel like I missed a whole lot. Part of this is probably because Oyeyemi packs so much into a really short book. At less than 230 pages, there isn't room for a lot to happen. And really, not much does. Miranda's pica is exacerbated by her mother's untimely death. She spends some time recovering in a psychiatric hospital, finishes high school, and spends a semester at college before her health forces her to drop out again. It's barely a plot at all, more like a slice of life. Around the edges, Oyeyemi explores a number of themes, many of which at least overlap. The...

Toni Morrison's Beloved  was a difficult book to read. Not only does it deal with the painful and uncomfortable subject of slavery (always interesting to find yourself cast as the ultimate evil), this is non-linear story-telling taken to an extreme. This book wanders. The narrative is slippery. It slides from person to person. From present to past to deeper past and back. Keeping track of whose point of view your in takes work. Piecing together the timeline takes more. It's the sort of book where you find yourself flipping back to make sure you didn't miss a page, re-reading a passage to check if that really just happened. The language flows and, like a poem, you get caught up in it, half-forgetting that there's a plot and characters driving this story because the prose is so beautiful. It tricks you into reading and then stabs you in the heart. Because I had to keep backtracking and pausing, this book took me a lot longer to read than the 275 pages wo...

Helen Oyeyemi's novel White is for Witching is one of those books that get better the more I think about it. This could be because I struggled a bit while reading it. The book is a mystery, and I didn't have a firm grasp of the plot until 150 pages in to this 200 page book. But once I figured out what was going on, a lot of other stuff fell into place. Given that, it's really hard to talk about this book without spoiling anything, except to say that it's beautiful and different. It deals with a wealth of issues, from eating disorders to immigration, racism to sexual identity, family legacies to obsession. These themes are mostly subtle, but once the truth of the mystery is revealed, they become a lot more powerful. Like I said, the more I think about this book, the more layers I see. One of the most interesting things about this book is that I cannot tell you, with any confidence, how many narrators there are. Miranda is the central character. Both he...

It's not often that I rush out to buy a book the day it's released. For the most part I'm content to wait until the paperback to comes out. But I've been eagerly awaiting Neil Gaiman's new book since I heard him read the first chapter at the Fall for the Book Festival last year. So I ran out to pick it up on my lunch hour the day it came out, and read the entire thing that evening when I got home from work. My only real complaint about The Ocean at the End of the Lane  is that it wasn't long enough. Not that the story felt rushed or anything. The book was exactly the right length for the story within. But after waiting so long for a new novel from Gaiman, I was a little disappointed to have finished it in a single evening. That said, the book was fantastic. One of the scarier stories I can remember reading for a while. Unlike Coraline , which deals with the fear of your parents being replaced, this book's main character sees his parents betray ...

The Graveyard Book is cute. It's a children's book written by Nail Gaiman, and it's definitely a children's book. The plot is barely there and doesn't matter nearly as much as the story of Bod, told in a series of vignettes. Nobody "Bod" Owens' family was murdered when he was a year old. Somehow he escaped and toddled up to the graveyard where the ghosts adopted him and kept him safe from this man who was still trying to kill him. From there we meet the first living friend Bod makes, watch him get kidnapped by ghouls, see him befriend the ghost of a witch and obtain a headstone for her unmarked grave. Bod participates in the Danse Macabre. He attends school for a short time, but eventually has to drop out because he's drawing too much attention to himself and the man who killed his family is still out there trying to finish the job. In the final chapter, all of these stories feed into the climactic battle between Bod and the man ...

I was so excited to start this book. I love Eric after he loses all his memories, not to mention the fact that he and Sookie finally get together. Charlaine Harris successfully weaves two separate plots together in a non-jarring way, by using Jason's disappearance as a red herring. Unfortunately, the cracks are starting to show. Though Harris is really good at coming up with an interesting story, she's not so great at remembering what she's already written. The reviews I've read about her new book complain that it's full of inconsistencies with the rest of the series and that she seems to flat out ignore her own previous writing. Or maybe it's just a really shabby attempt to retcon the series so she can take it where she wants it to go. Even this early in the series, it seems that she can't be bothered to maintain the details of the world she's created. Here's a nit-picky list of the facts that Charlaine Harris can't keep straight. ...

In which... Eric cuddles with Sookie We meet Alcide Sookie and Alcide have breakfast and play scrabble. There's sexual tension, but no sex Sookie and Alcide dispose of a corpse together Alcide's ex-girlfriend tries to kill Sookie Sookie gets staked Eric is hot Sookie and Eric have friendship and sexual tension. They almost have sex but Elvis Bubba interrupts them Seriously, why isn't Bubba in True Blood ? He's awesome Sookie stakes her first vampire Sookie rescues Bill from torture and imprisonment In return, Bill rapes and nearly kills Sookie Eric saves Sookie (again) Sookie and Bill break up! Eric pays to have Sookie's driveway re-graveled, because he's thoughtful like that Man I am so glad that relationship is over. I know I'm biased, but this is my blog. I can be whatever I want. Once again, this book is a lot of fun. True Blood takes this story to the extremes of ridiculous. But it basically boils down to a bunch of hot guys who w...

Living Dead in Dallas has an interesting structure. There are two basic plots, an A plot and a B plot. But instead of being interwoven, they get chopped up. The first two chapters deal with the first half of the B plot. This is then completely forgotten as the A plot takes over most of the book. After the A plot wraps up, we get a few chapters to segue back into the B plot and tie off some loose ends. I guess it works? It feels a little disjointed, though. In the main plot, Sookie is off to Dallas to try and discover the whereabouts of a missing vampire named Farrel. It turns out he has been kidnapped by the Fellowship of the Sun church who want to sacrifice him in order to show their congregation the power of Jesus. Another vampire, Godfrey, is in cahoots with the church. He wants to die, to atone for his sins. Apparently he believes that God will even forgive 1000 years of child molestation and murder if he just asks Him to. I guess, technically, that is how it works...

This is my second time through the Sookie Stackhouse books. I'm hoping to get through the first four before the 4th season of True Blood premieres. Given that the premiere is still several weeks away and it only takes a couple of days to read each of these books, that shouldn't be a problem. I got into these books because of the HBO series. I've been obsessed with vampires since I started watching Buffy in 6th grade. My mom fed this obsession with Anne Rice novels and old movies. The first silent film I ever saw was Nosferatu, which we rented because Eddie Izzard was in the modern spoof of it. Also classic vampires. So when True Blood premiered the summer after college when I was unemployed, I had to start watching. And when I found a box set of the first nine books on sale for $27 I couldn't not buy it. The first season of the show stays much closer to the books than any of the other seasons. I maintain that the books are far better. To be fair, I al...