Bookish Thoughts

In the far future (and also the distant past and also right now) two groups are fighting for control. They send operatives back and forth through time to ensure certain outcomes, open up possibilities, make sure something does or does not happen. Two of those operatives (Red and Blue) make contact, begin writing letters, and ultimately fall in love. It's a classic story, made fresh. By fresh, I mean utterly delightful. It's a high concept version of a tale as old as time. The settings are delightfully bizarre, but the emotions are completely recognizable. The language elevates this, making the whole book a wondrous puzzle to be solved. (Shortly after Red referred to Blue as "Da-Ba-Dee" I played the song for my son, and I've been singing it to myself ever since.) It feels like a fun game you're playing with yourself (or the characters/authors are playing with each other) right until the heartbreak shows up and you discover just how invested you are in Red and...

This isn't quite my favorite Discworld  book, but I'd argue that it's the best Discworld  book. This is Pratchett at his peak - tackling a timely and timeless issue with compassion and humor and forcing the reader to reckon with their own point of view. Pratchett makes excellent use of a time-travel paradox to send Vimes back to the past thirty years to mentor his own, younger self. This happens to coincide with a brutal regime change in Ankh-Morpork. No peaceful transition of power here - there are assassinations and revolutions, blood and fire, and Vimes just trying to prevent as much death as possible. On my first time through the series, this is the book where I finally fell in love with Vimes, where I finally saw what everyone else was seeing. He lays a foundation of morality for his younger self, one that will stick with him through the ups and downs (mostly downs) to come. It's a neat little origin story, one that acknowledges how much growth is still to come...

I was hoping for something a little lighter after All the Light We Cannot See , so I picked up this book about a woman who keeps living her life over and over, trying to get it right. Little did I know that I was diving into another depressing WWII novel, One that proved to be even more frustrating. The frustration comes from the fact that it's not clear how much Ursula remembers from her previous lives, or how much control she really has. Sometimes the changes that allow her to live a little longer are entirely out of her control - a man rescues her from drowning or the power comes back on before she freezes. Other times she seems to be architect of her own destiny, trying over and over to avoid catching influenza until she finally hits upon a solution. As her lives go on, she seems to remember more and that helps her make better decisions. But it can also be frustrating how much she doesn't remember, how little she learns from life to life. She always makes new mistakes, ...

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August  is that rare book that I finished and immediately handed to Kevin so he could read it. It's a fun twist on the time travel narrative and pokes at some interesting questions about the end of the world and our duty to future generations. Harry August, and others like him, keeps reliving his life over and over. When he dies, he goes back to the beginning to be born again. But this isn't a Billy Pilgrim situation where he's just come unstuck from time. While the circumstances of his birth and early life are always the same, Harry retains all knowledge from his previous lives. This initially leads to some time in mental institutions and various houses of various gods as he tries to figure out what's happening. But before long he's gaming the system to make his life easier. The story is very jumbled, at least in the beginning. His first several lives are relayed in bits and pieces, grouped thematically more than chronologically...

Night Watch is the 29th novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. It centers around a really fun time paradox that involves the commander of the city watch traveling back in time thirty years where he acts as his own mentor. I think the time paradox is handled really well. The book follows the idea that even if you change a bunch of little things, most of the bigger things are going to happen anyway. Once some things have been set in motion, there's nothing that can stop it. Even though Vimes changes some details -e.g., anticipating where an attack will come from - the larger events happen as he remembers them. This book wasn't as laugh out loud funny as a lot of other Discworld novels. It was certainly amusing. But it had a different feel. This book seemed deeper and more serious than the ones that came before it. It was still really gripping throughout, though. Almost moreso, since the stakes seemed a bit higher. Night Watch also gave me a much de...

About fifty pages into The Restaurant at the End of the Universe , Douglas Adam's sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , I began to have the feeling that I'd read it before. The scene of Zaphod climbing down the building which stuck in the ground at a 45 degree angle was eerily familiar. I already knew that the end of the universe was a temporal reference, not a spatial one, but I chalked that up to probably being a Futurama episode I'd half-forgotten. By the time Arthur and Ford arrived on Earth 20,000 years before it will have been blown up, I knew I'd already read this book. But it had taken me the entire book to reach that conclusion. Even though I just finished this book, those are still the only three details that are sticking in my mind. It's not that this book is bad. It was entertaining. But it was like a mediocre episode of Futurama. Something I'm bound to forget the details of because I'm simply not paying close enough...

I first read Slaughterhouse Five for an assignment in high school. Afterwards, the only parts that stuck with me were the time travel and the aliens. I was actually confused the first time I saw it referred to as an anti-war book, because I honestly didn't remember there being anything about war in it at all. The fact that I read it as part of a literature on war assignment didn't quite register with me. Most of the other kids read  Catch-22  or  The Things They Carried  or  A Farewell to Arms . My teacher actually recommended that I read  Slaughterhouse Five ; I don't think it was on the approved reading list. So I read it, and I do remember liking it. Some of the philosophical musings about time and free will stuck with me, even if the war bits didn't. The only part of the book that I really remembered was this passage describing Billy's limited perspective of time: The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were lookin...