Bookish Thoughts

I've been waffling about The Dark Tower  for years now. I've wanted to read it. But I didn't know if I wanted it to be my first Stephen King. But his other books are all so long, and the first of these was, at least, very short. Then the movie came out and I bought The Gunslinger . Then everyone hated the movie, so I let it sit on my shelf for a while. Then I picked up the second book at a used book sale on a whim and decided that it was finally time to just sit down and read this. I didn't entirely know what to expect, going in to it. I've heard that it's slow and boring, easily the worst book of the series. I've also heard that it's the best book of the series. Several people told me it was their favorite book, bar none. I had plenty of room to make up my own mind about this book. What happened, which I did not expect, was that I fell somewhere in the middle. This book was fine. It was slow, but I didn't mind that. It had a really interesting s...

It's not lying. It's telling a good story. Following her previous novel about Doc Holliday meeting Wyatt Earp in Dodge City, Mary Doria Russell decided to tackle the gun fight at the OK Corral. Epitaph isn't exactly a sequel to Doc . It has the same characters, sure, and reading the first one will give you a better understanding of Doc Holliday and his relationship with Wyatt Earp, as portrayed by Russell. But this is a separate story entirely. While the story ends up focusing mostly on Wyatt Earp, Russell goes to great lengths to humanize everyone involved in the gun fight. As such, scenes are occasionally rewound to be shown from another perspective. Motives are occasionally given after the fact, but they're always given. Unless, of course, the historic record remained completely silent. Everyone had an opinion about this near-mythical gunfight and the fallout from it. There are countless contradictory accounts, and Russell did her best to sort through them all...

Sanderson said that this book was a lot easier to write than Shadows of Self . He actually wrote it first, before backing up and writing the previous one. And it shows. Not that Shadows of Self  was bad, but this one was a lot more exciting. There was a lot more going on. It flowed better, and I read it faster, even though it was longer. It also helped that Sanderson refrained from killing off any more female characters, including Wax's sister, who I was really worried about up until the end. This book also started to connect more with the greater Cosmere than any of the other books I've read in that universe so far. To be fair, I wasn't aware of the Cosmere when I read the first Mistborn trilogy, so it's likely that I missed some hints in those books. But it was nice to start to see some of those wider connections. The downside of this is all the things I'm missing, or that I've already missed, or that I just forgot. I already feel like I need to go back a...

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...

It's been two years since I first read The Alloy of Law . With two new Mistborn  books out, I figured it was worth revisiting to refresh my memory. It helps that this is a pretty quick read. The Alloy of Law  is a mash-up of fantasy and conventional western tropes. There are fights on trains with masked bandits right alongside the magic and mythology of the first trilogy. It's fast-paced and a whole lot of fun ad did a good job of living up to my memory of it. The first few chapters are a bit rougher than I was expecting. But as soon as the action kicks in that doesn't matter at all. This book is just flat-out fun, and there's not much to detract from that. I do wish Lessie had survived beyond the prologue. The fridged girlfriend is a trope I'm beyond tired of. But Marasi and Ranette are fantastic, and even Steris is more interesting than I remember her being. I'm looking forward to the next two books in this series. I've been needing to dive back in t...

Brandon Sanderson is doing something special with his Mistborn universe. Something I didn't really grasp until I dove into this book and started looking at some of the reviews and supplemental material on line. There's this tendency in high fantasy to force the world into a medieval setting and then keep it there for thousands of years. One of my friends complained about this back in high school when we were all really in to the Sword of Truth series. Humanity just isn't that stagnant. We innovate. We revolt. We change the world. And we do it on increasingly shorter time scales, because we're able to stand on the shoulders of the people who came before. Sanderson wanted to do something different. He wanted to create a world with a unique magic system and then track that magic through the evolution of the society. Mistborn was conceived as a trilogy of trilogies, with one taking place in the medieval feudal society fantasy lovers all recognize, one tak...

"Bein' born is craps...How we live is poker " At this point it should probably come as no surprise that Mary Doria Russell has quickly become one of my favorite authors. The only sad thing about Doc  is that now that I've read it, I actually have to wait for Russell's next book to be released. But the happy part is that her next book is a sequel to Doc , so I'll get to spend even more time in the Wild West with these characters. Doc  follows Doc Holliday for the summer he spent in Dodge City when he met the Earp brothers. But like most of Russell's books, it's about a lot more than that. Ostensibly, Doc  is a murder mystery. Except that the kid who died wasn't white, so no one really cares how he died. Then it comes to light that he was robbed of $2000 and suddenly people want to know where that money went. But it's also about Doc's struggle with tuberculosis, his new friendship with Wyatt and Morgan Earo, his contentious...