Bookish Thoughts

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.

Sometimes you're at a used book sale and you see a different edition of a book you already own. But you love the book so much that you have to buy this new edition. And then you have to read it to justify the purchase. This is probably the best method for revisiting an old favorite. I first read this book nearly a decade ago. I then proceeded to work through everything else Bujold had written in the next few years. She's still writing some - releasing a novella or two a year. But it was so nice to dive into a full-length adventure from her again, and to remember why I fell in love with her writing in the first place. This story focuses on Cazaril. He has just escaped from several years of slavery and is hoping to spend the rest of his life quietly and anonymously with some small, easy employment. But when he is assigned to be the secretary-tutor for the princess, he finds himself thrust into politics. And when he finds himself the chosen vessel of one of the gods, politics and ...

 I still love this book. I was a little worried, honestly. It's been a few years since I read it. My life has changed a lot. I think about this book a lot, and I wasn't sure if the version in my mind still resembled the actual book. It was possible that in interpreting and reinterpreting this book over the years, I'd built it up so much in my mind that re-reading it would be an exercise in disappointment. But that didn't happen. I loved this book, and I still love it. Everything I remembered was still there. And there were new things as well. References and details I didn't catch the first time through that just added even more layers. I was also surprised by the subtle ways my perspective changed. I remember not really liking the gothic section the last time I read it. It felt overdone and a little too much. This time I understood it better, and therefore I like it better. But the noir section rubbed me a little wrong. The thing about this book that has me the most...

I first read this book years ago, and I remembered it as a light, feel-good novel. I sold it to my book club as "basically Pixar's Up without the fantastical elements". It's about a curmudgeonly old man who recently lost his wife and sense of purpose. Over the course of the novel he gets pulled into a community, almost against his will, and discovers that life goes on and there's more than one way to be happy. So I was a little surprised by how hard this book hit me this time. I cried. A lot. This book hit differently when you're grieving. All the little things that bring Ove down, all the small lonely moments that I skated right by the first time, loomed a lot larger now.    The book is still uplifting. It ends on a happy note, and Ove is in a much better place. It's a lovely story about neighbors coming together to take care of each other, even when decades of history complicate their relationships. It was just a lot sadder than I remembered. I wonder if...

Instead of reading The Goldfinch in December like I was supposed to, I found myself revisiting Saga. I read the first nine volumes more or less as they came out over the years, which really spread the story out. While I enjoyed the later volumes, I was occasionally confused by who a character was or why they were doing something. Then the ending of the ninth volume left me hurt and angry and then the whole story went on hiatus for what was supposed to be a year, but which the pandemic dragged out to closer to three years. In those three years, a lot happened. And I came to appreciate the ending. I found myself growing more and more curious about where the story would go next. I wanted to know what would happen to Hazel in the wake of her most recent losses. So I went back and re-read the whole story over the course of about two weeks. The compressed schedule worked really well for this story. Everything flowed much better than the first time through. I was able to hold all the charact...

On January 4th, I realized that there were over two months of winter left. With the holidays behind me and heaps of cold, dreary weather to look forward to, I found myself breathing a sigh of relief. "Always winter, never Christmas" doesn't sound so bad, I thought to myself. And I immediately became curious if it were possible to ascribe a grief narrative to the White Witch. She is, after all, the last surviving person of her entire world. Before I knew it, I had re-read the entirety of The Magician's Nephew . Which, no, isn't the first book in the series according to most. But it has Jadis' backstory, which is what I was interested in. It turns out that there isn't a lot of nuance to Jadis, which isn't the most surprising thing in the world. Narnia is both a children's book and a religious allegory. Sympathetic, nuanced villains don't really fit. Jadis destroyed her world because she was evil. She killed her own sister with the magical equival...

When I really love a book, you can tell not just by how many times I've read it, but by how many copies I've bought. Space Opera was just elevated to a book I've bought more than once, simply because I needed both a physical and a digital copy of it. The thing that makes this one of my favorite books it the simple, recurring line: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. It resonates with me, especially since my husband was diagnosed with cancer while I was pregnant with twins. 2019 was a fantastic, terrible year, and 2020 even more so. My husband's death is the worst thing that's ever happened to me, but my kids are the best thing that's ever happened to me, and to have them both happening at the same time has resulted in an extreme roller coaster. This book reminds me that it's okay to be happy, to feel joy. Not just in that main theme, but because it's a hilarious book with a whole lot of heart. I keep coming back to it, as I do with most of Cat Valente...

I was absolutely shocked when my book club chose this for our November meeting. It's a huge departure from the mainstream books we usually read. So I guess it wasn't all that surprising when no one in the club actually managed to finish it. But I enjoyed getting a chance to read it again. I followed it a lot better my second time through, and I understood way more of the jokes. The sequel is still sitting on my shelf, and I can't wait to read it, and the rest of the series.

This was my second time through Jane Eyre, and I liked it a whole lot better this time. Part of that is because I've grown as a person, and I understand the context of this book more now. But part of it is because I read The Eyre Affair , and it changed my mind about the ending. When I first read this book, I was upset that Eyre went back to Mr Rochester after everything. But then Fforde argues pretty effectively that any other ending would be unsatisfactory and anti-climactic. He made me appreciate Mr Rochester a bit more. So this time through I was rooting for them. And I was happy that they ended up together. I suppose my changing reaction is part of what makes this book such a classic.

This book is like a warm hug. It's about vampires, yes. But it's also about healing from trauma. And baking cinnamon rolls. It's a very, very slow book, and the narrator tends to babble. The plot doesn't really exist. It's just a cozy way to spend some time with a bunch of people who love each other a lot and don't want anything more than their quiet little life. I've read this book several times now. I'll probably read it several more. Every now and then, it's exactly what I need.

This was my second time reading The Bluest Eye , and I definitely got a lot more out of it this time through. It's a difficult book with a complicated structure. It's all about how envy and jealousy can turn into hatred and self-hatred. It's about generational trauma and how it propagates. It's about innocence and the loss of innocence and what happens when the people who are supposed to love you don't. Or when that love gets twisted. It's a really important book, and I'm glad that I read it with my book club because the conversation that followed gave me a lot of hope. When I started my neighborhood book club, we began with Tayari Jones' An American Marriage . It's about a black man who's been imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. But roughly half the club was sure that he'd committed the crime. There's this naive trust in our justice system that privileged white people grow up with, and it's hard to start to question that. Bl...

I regard the Discworld the way other people regard the bible. That might be blasphemous, but there it is. When I need comfort, when I need to laugh, when I need to think deeply, when I need to be reminded of all the beauty of humanity, I turn to the Discworld. These books soothe me. They empower me. They provide surety that it will all be okay, but that I have to do my part to make it okay. Reaper Man is about Death. It has some incredible quotes that, in the wake of my husband's death, I needed to come back to. And in coming back to them I ended up re-reading the entire book.  Anyway, here are a few of my favorite bits of this particular book: Alone of all the creatures in the world, trolls believe that all living things go through Time backward. If the past is visible and the future is hidden, they say, then it means that you must be facing the wrong way. People get exactly the wrong idea about belief. They think it works back to front. They think the sequence is, first object, t...

I picked this one up again because I needed something light and quick and happy. It is still all of those things while also being wonderful and fun. This could easily become one of those go-to books whenever I need a bit of a pick-me-up

Lately I've been seeking out books that don't require too much mental energy from me. I finally picked up the rest of this trilogy at a used book sale, so it seemed like the perfect time to revisit this fun, frothy book about people with more money than sense. Really this book is just fun. I love seeing the ridiculous things the super rich choose to spend their money on, the ways they determine how they're better than everyone else, and the ever-practical every-girl Rachel navigate everything. It was also great to go back and see the things they had changed for the movie. I'm excited to get to the rest of this trilogy now and live vicariously through people who spend freely on absurd things.

This is one of those stories that imprinted on me. I was slowly becoming obsessed with Neil Gaiman when I first read it, and I hadn't quite realized that you could do stuff like this, yet. Remix fairy tales, mix and match genres, change the perspective and the story so completely and yet leave it wholly recognizable. It helps that I've always loved vampires. But really, Snow White as a vampire just makes so much sense. When I first read this story, I couldn't believe that I hadn't thought of it first. And I loved and hated Neil Gaiman a bit in equal measure giving me this beautiful, horrifying tale. This is about the recent graphic novel version of this story, though. It's gorgeous. The art is amazing and the perfect complement to this lovely story about a demon and the woman who tried and failed to save her kingdom. It's always haunted me, and now it can haunt me in technicolor.

This book is brutal, even moreso than the first one. But it has more hope, too. It's the book that made me fall in love with Octavia Butler, the book I think everyone should read, the book I want to get tattooed on my body. Does that make it my favorite book? I suppose it's a strong contender. Although it isn't a comfort read the way so many of my favorites can be classified, so I can't re-read it quite as often. But it's a book that I know I'll continue to come back to and get more out of each time. I really appreciate that this book is told in more than Lauren's voice. Her daughter offers a strong counterpoint to her and really elevates everything. The tension between them hurts so much, especially as more of their history is revealed. I actually wish the book had a little bit more of Asha Vere, especially after she met her mother. I suppose that would have gone in the next book, though. The one Butler didn't have time to write.

This is still one of my favorite books. I still wish I could live inside of it. Re-reading it every year has become a tradition, and there's not that much more to say. If you haven't read it yet, you should.

This is my second time through Station Eleven.  The first time I read it, I inhaled the entire book in a day. This time I made an effort to stretch it out (by juggling a few other books at the same time) so I could absorb it a little more slowly. This is the sort of book that rewards deeper thought, and it definitely gave me a lot to think about. Station Eleven  is very concerned with home and with interrogating the idea that you can't go home again. It opens with a flu that kills over 99% of the world's population in a few days, leaving the remaining few to find a way to live in a vastly changed world. Small settlements pop up here and there, but the post-apocalypse story focuses on a traveling theater troupe. In a very real sense, these people can't go home again. There's no home to go to, and the main characters have chosen to make their home on the road. Even the pre-apocalypse characters, Arthur and Miranda, have left behind their hometown in favor of making a ...

When Gone Girl  came out, there was a ton of buzz around it, most centered on the shocking twist. It was like The Sixth Sense  all over again, with everyone swearing you had to read it but refusing to tell you anything about it. Sometimes stories can rely on these twists to much, making that the only worthwhile thing about them. And they end up falling apart once you know the secret. But Gone Girl  holds up incredibly well. Even knowing what Amy's plotting from the beginning, it remains gripping and thrilling. Gillian Flynn populates the novel with some truly horrible, selfish, twisted people, and it's so much fun to watch them play games with each other and see how Amy comes out on top of everyone. It helps that she's the most ruthless and least moral. She'll literally do whatever it takes to get what she wants, including killing a (mostly) innocent guy. (Seriously, though, Desi was just as bad as the rest of them.) I really enjoyed my re-read of this book. Knowing...

I first read this book three or four years ago, and it has really stuck with me. My thoughts return to it again and again, especially with the current political climate, not to mention the actual climate. I've recommended it to more people than I can remember and loaned my copies out enough times that I have no idea what happened to them. So when they announced a re-issue with a new introduction by NK Jemisin, it was all the excuse I needed to buy new copies and re-read them. Having now re-read the first book, I'm seeing how much the two blurred together in my mind. And I think it was actually the second one that impacted me the most. This one started out a lot more slowly than I remembered. They weren't on the road for nearly as much of the book as I thought they were, and a lot of things that I thought were in this book weren't. But I think I actually liked it more this time around. I've lived and learned a lot in the past few years, and I have a greater appre...