Bookish Thoughts

Sometimes you need something to jump start you back in to reading. After the doctors told us that we needed to prepare for the fact that my husband might not make it, it was hard to do pretty much anything. Reading, working, even eating became monumental tasks, and it was all I could do to take care of my kids. But then my mother in law mentioned that she'd bought this book to read to my husband in hospice, and I decided to check it out. Before I even knew it, I was halfway through. It helps that the stories in this book were incredibly short. Three or four lines each. Maybe 20 words on average. I inhaled them, and I kept flipping pages, because it was just so easy to keep reading one more. There's a variety of genres here: fantasy, sci-fi, horror, comedy. A lot of them were good. A few cut a bit too close to the bone. But overall, this collection was exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it.

I really love the way these stories play with fairy tales. Inverting them and subverting them. The characters are incredibly genre-savvy, and there are so many winks at the audience. It's the best part about this collection of stores, the hook that brings you in and keeps you interested while the world slowly comes into focus around the fairy tales. This collection spends more time with characters other than Geralt. We get more of Dandelion/Jaskier. More Yennefer. And we finally meet Ciri. The background for the main story is established, as the war is started and Geralt and Ciri finally unite. We also get the surprising and tantalizing knowledge that Geralt's mom was a sorceress. If she was able to have a child, there might just be hope for Yennefer. And maybe Geralt will be the key in her finally achieving her heart's desire. The structure of this series has been interesting. The short story collections allow the author to introduce everyone and everything before th...

When you pick up a short story collection, you expect a mixed bag. Whether there are multiple authors or just one, the collection itself usually contains a few stories you love, a few you like, and a few that don't work for you. Disappointment is part of the expectation. But NK Jemisin is working on a different level, because every single story in this collection was excellent. They're all vastly different. Some take place in the past, some in the future. Some are set in this world, some in other worlds. Some lean towards fantasy, some towards science-fiction. But they're all incredible, and they build on each other thematically. The collection starts with "The Ones Who Stay and Fight", Jemisin's explicit reaction to LeGuin's famous parable "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". Knowing this, I re-read LeGuin's story immediately before starting this collection. I'm glad I did, because really the whole collection seems to be a reaction ...

There was a time in my life (before kids) when I actually did a decent job of keeping up with popular culture. I know, from looking at other adults around me, that this time will probably come again. But at the moment, I feel like I'm missing out on a lot because I can never seem to put together 45 minutes to watch a TV show (and forget about doing it 10 or 13 or 22 times to watch an entire season of something). The good news is that I can always find time to read - during my commute, for 15 minutes before bed, those rare times when I manage to get all three kids to sleep at once. Reading is easier, because I can dip into books 5 minutes at a time and easily pause them when life intrudes again. But I miss feeling like a part of something when these popular TV shows arrive and it feels like everyone is watching them except me. My brother got me The Last Wish for my birthday over the summer, because he was excited about the upcoming series on Netflix. I hadn't even heard of ...

Tor.com releases a lot of short fiction for free on their website. But somehow I never actually read any of it until they bind it up in a digital book and I can get to it on my kindle app. It's just easier to read that way, I guess. Anyway, the Spring bundle had five stories in it. Knowledgeable Creatures: This story hooked me from the beginning. I love a good narrator, and this world-weary canine PI was just familiar and just strange enough to hold my attention hostage. The story hints at a much wider world that I would happily read several books about. I wonder if they'll ever get written. 1/0: This was a beautiful story about the upsides of AI. So often, these stories become all doom and gloom as the computer learns more and more and attempts to "save" humanity from itself. By placing the learning AI in the hands of children in a refugee camp, this becomes a very hopeful story about the future. There's a way in which we will all be alright, so long as we ca...

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the theatrical release of Star Wars Episode IV , the editors of this book collected forty short stories, each of which retells a scene from the movie from the point of view of a minor character in that scene. The stormtrooper who stunned Leia, the sand person who attacked Luke, Aunt Beru, etc. I've been wanting to get my hand's on this book since I heard about it. This was a really fun concept, and a lot of the stories were very inventive. It was interesting to consider different points of view, and some of the stories were really out there. Nnendi Okorafor tells her story from the point of view of the trash monster, for example. And being incredibly familiar with the movie only made it that much more fun to see other people's takes on both well-known and unknown characters. But the lack of cohesion was a little frustrating. Especially in the sections that took place in Mos Eisley and Yavin 4. There were so many characters to choose f...

I'm two for two in books being a lot more intense than I was expecting. Not that I was expecting this book, a series of interconnected short stories about several Native Americans attending a Powwow in Oakland, to be lighthearted or anything like that. The subject material meant that it was definitely going to be heavy. But it was so much heavier than I was expecting. Almost every character is dealing with alcoholism, or at least with an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. Some of them are alcoholics themselves, either resigned to an early death by liver failure or attempting to get sober for the umpteenth time. Others are dealing with family members who are absent or violent due to alcohol, and they're mostly trying and failing to break those patterns in their own lives. There's a wide array of characters, but this constant struggle is a theme in all of their lives. It also quickly becomes apparent that the event at the powwow that will tie everyone together is an arm...

The cover of this book shows a creature that's half woman, half octopus and has an unsettling number of teeth in a slightly too large mouth. My son was obsessed with it, and kept stealing the book while I was reading it or requesting to see the monster book. At one point he attempted to use it to threaten his dad into giving him a cookie. It was a pretty great use of the book. The stories within the book are classic children's stories with a twist. Ortberg has an uncanny ability to hone in on the most horrifying aspect of any given children's story and expand on it. Without changing much at all, he can take a story from comforting to terrifying and leave you questioning everything. As with any short story collection, I was more drawn to some stories than others. But everything in here really forces you to contend with the default point of view. What do we mean when we talk about daughters or love or abuse or redemption? Where is the line between good and evil and how do...

Any collection of short stories ends up being a mixed bag. Some of them just speak to you more than others. I really liked half of the stories in this collection, and the other half felt dense and over my head. Inaccessible in a way that meant that they probably just weren't for me. But the ones that worked worked really well. "Especially Heinous" flips Law and Order: SVU on it's head, accusing the audience of being the real monster at the heart of all these stories while Stabler and Benson slowly unravel from the pressure of their lives. "Real Women Have Bodies" and "Eight Bites" were also deliciously creepy, and I enjoyed "Inventory", which has one woman coping with the end of the world by making a list of everyone she's ever had sex with. The rest fell a bit flat for me. Or left me feeling confused or unsettled in a not-particularly-illuminating way. Carmen Maria Macahdo reminds me a bit of Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi. Her wo...

At this point it's probably time to admit that I'm a Terry Pratchett completionist. He might not ever be releasing any new work, but there are still a handful of books that I haven't gotten around to yet. It'll be a while before I don't have any new Pratchett to read. And considering that I'm in the midst of an epic and constant Discworld  re-read, I may not ever be done reading him entirely. I'll just keep picking up his books and discovering new things in them and laughing at old jokes and wrapping them around me like a favorite sweater. The point is that this collection of short stories is really only for people who want more Terry Pratchett no matter what. It's not for casual fans. Pratchett isn't great at short stories (he admits as much in the intro for one of them). And most of these were written before he started writing novels. It's rough and unformed, but you can see the writer he eventually became. That said, there are a couple of ...

This year tor.com has started releasing bundles of short fiction, free to download if you sign up for their newsletter. All the stories in the collection were eventually published on their website, but it was nice to get them bundled together and have access a few days before everyone else. Even if I didn't actually finish the collection until after they were all released. It's nice to be able to download these to my work computer and read a story over the course of a day (my work is such that I often have 15-20 minute chunks of time waiting for data to load or simulations to run, and it's a good time to get some reading in). Some of the stories were better than others, and most were excellent. They all used fantasy elements to tackle common relationships in new ways. A chef is trying to recreate his mother's signature recipe after her death, and it takes an encounter with his abusive sister to help him let go of the past. A man is dealing with the imminent death of h...

The people over at Serial Box are on a mission to bring back serialized fiction. They talk about combining the best aspects of novels and television shows, but this isn't really a new idea. It's just been dressed up a bit for the internet. Stories are broken down into "seasons" and "episodes". Theoretically, each episode should be a self-contained story that takes about 45 minutes to read (just like a TV show!), and the episodes build into an arc that forms a season. (And eventually extends into multiple seasons. Just like TV! Except you're reading, not watching.) The biggest problem with this format is that you can cram a lot more information into a 45-minute television show than you can into an equivalent-length short story. So a lot of the early episodes are made up of broad strokes. It takes a while, longer than normal, to start caring about the characters and what they're doing. But I did eventually start caring. I read the entire first sea...

Red as Blood  answers the burning question: What if the Disney Princesses were all Satanists? That's probably not fair. Especially since this book was written before Disney Princesses became a thing. But it retells a bunch of fairy-tales and twists them around so that the good guys become bad guys, and the bad guys become misunderstood underdogs. Mostly by making the princesses worship Satan. Like most short story collections, this was a bit of a mixed bag. There were a couple that I really liked. Anyone who makes Snow White a vampire has my heart forever. And the Beauty and the Beast tale was fun, even if it didn't seem like it belonged in the book. It's a science-fiction romp about falling in love with an alien, rather than a more traditional creepy fairy tale. But it was fun. Some of them never quite came together. The Sleeping Beauty story was so ambiguous that I was just confused. And the Red Riding Hood tale, which admittedly had a great idea (Grandma is a werew...

This was not my favorite work of Bradbury's. A lot of the stories in this collection fell flat or just missed their mark, and I was more eager for them to be over than I was to actually read them. I was most disappointed by "The Small Assassin". The idea of a newborn baby actively trying to kill it's parents has a lot of potential, but the execution wasn't quite there. I was on board for the mom being increasingly unnerved by her son and the dad not really taking it seriously. The beginning was nice and creepy. But a lot of the story also had me wondering if Bradbury ever had kids. Turns out he did, and the disconnect may have just been due to different times and cultures. I wanted to connect with this story, and it never quite happened. There were a couple of stories that I did enjoy, particularly the one about the man with wings who has given up flying until his kids turn him into a kite (in a cute way). He also makes an appearance in a different story, abou...

This was a fun collection of short stories for kids, from the very beginning of Terry Pratchett's career. He was still a teen-aged journalist when he wrote these stories for the paper he was working for. The collection was something of a mixed bag. I really liked some of the stories. Others never quite came together for me. Part of that is because I can't help but judge Pratchett's work against his later stuff. Comparing where he was in the beginning of his career to the heights to which he would eventually soar isn't fair, but I can't quite help it. On it's own, this is a wonderful collection of stories that I'll be thrilled to read to my kid in a few years. You can see the seeds of ideas and themes that Pratchett would go on to wrestle with later in life. The stories are cute and funny and often manage to subvert expectations. It'd be nice if there were more girls, but that's something Pratchett eventually got a lot better about.

I came to write this review and I'm suddenly realizing that I barely remember this book. Which is weird. It hasn't been that long since I read it. I expected it to stick with me longer than this. Oyeyemi's work generally does (I'm still haunted by certain sentences in Mr. Fox ). And I guess that ought to inform this review. There were a few stories in here that stuck with me, for good or ill. The first one, Books and Roses , was amazing and deserves a re-read to untangle all the different layers. Is Your Blood as Red as This? is also lodged in my memory, but more because it's weird than because I enjoyed it. And other stories have escaped my memory completely. I know that I enjoyed reading this book. And maybe it was just that I was too tired, or trying to fit it around caring for Gavin in a way that didn't work. The stories weren't really long enough to sink into completely, but they were too long for me to read any of them in a single sitting. Except ...

This book was a constant surprise in the best way. I picked up BJ Novak's One More Thing expecting a memoir. I don't entirely know how I got it into my head that this was what he'd written. It was probably just that I'd read so many other memoirs from NBC comedians recently that I figured this had to be another one.  It's not a memoir. It's a collection of short stories. And when I say short, I mean short. A handful of them are 20 pages long. Most are only a page or two. One has twelve words. Another only nine. The stories themselves are clever. They sneak right up to that line of being too clever, but they never quite crossed it. They were random and delightful and surprisingly profound. They were tied together ever so loosely, with characters making brief cameos in other stories. This was everything I want out of a short story collection. The stories were brief with hidden depths. Novak doesn't need many words to cut right to the heart of the matter...

After slogging my way through a few denser books, it was nice to take a break with a collection of Sanderson's shorter fiction. I'd forgotten how readable he is, and I was surprised by how quickly these stories went by. So surprised that I ended up dragging the book out over a few more weeks just so I could keep reading it. Luckily that's easier to do with short fiction. There were a couple of stories in here ( The Emperor's Soul  and Mistborn: Secret History ) that I'd been wanting to read for a while, but never quite enough to pay $15 for a novella. So I was glad that Sanderson decided to release all his Cosmere short fiction (of which there is a surprising amount) in a single collection. In addition to the stories, there's some background information about the Cosmere that stitches everything together. As Sanderson promises, there are answers about the background story in this collection - just enough to start raising some really interesting questions. Th...

This collection of short stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie went by really quickly. Her prose is so incredibly readable, which helps the stories she writes focus on their bittersweet emotions rather than got bogged down in them. The stories in this collection are all a bit melancholy, focusing on characters who have found themselves in less than ideal circumstances for various reasons. Some of them take action to change their lives, others quietly accept their circumstances, but they all come to that crossroads where they have to examine their choices and decide what they can live with and how they want to move forward. Adichie is, as ever, interested in the history of Nigeria and the relationship Nigerians have with America. America is billed is a land of opportunity, where dreams comes true, and character after character discovers that it's not as easy as that. That it is, occasionally, a downright lie. There are also a couple of stories that touch on Biafra and the coloniza...

Before I dive into the content of this book, I need to talk about the book itself. Because I have this whole complicated relationship with it outside of the stories it contains. And it's worth bringing up in light of recent political shenanigans. Once upon a time a man got cancer. Treatment worked and he went into remission and went on with his life. But a few years later he got cancer again. A different kind of cancer this time. However, since he'd already had cancer once before, health insurance wouldn't cover him this time around. Pre-existing conditions and all that. So he reached out to his writer friends and asked if they'd be willing to donate stories that he could put together into a book that he could sell to pay for his treatment. His friends came through, the book sold well, the man beat cancer again and didn't have to declare bankruptcy. As plans go it's a better solution than selling meth. Of course, the best solution would be health care that act...