Bookish Thoughts

Lauren Redniss'  Radioactive  is a light biography of Marie Curie, focusing on her love life and scientific discoveries. When I say light, I mean that this book took me about three hours to read, total. It's more of a display book than anything else, with really cool art and nearly self-contained stories on each page. You could easily flip open to any page in this book and start reading without missing too much. Here are a few examples of pages from the book, which are really cool to look at: The science isn't very detailed. The author chooses to give a very basic overview of the concepts of radioactivity, nuclear fission, and half-lives. But that didn't really bother me, in part because I just liked looking at the art and in part because I already have a decent understanding of most of the science. Redniss intersperses the story of Marie Curie with a history of her work through science. She touches on some of the "miracle-cure" radium-based pr...

I remember Max Brooks' World War Z  being immensely popular at one point in college. Since one of the big battles in the book takes place at the college I went to (or rather, the college across the street), I just chalked it up to that. And since I wasn't much interested in zombies at that point in my life, I made no real effort to read the book myself. But then my book club chose it for the month of January, so I gave it a try. World War Z  isn't at all what I was expecting. The scope is massive, actually covering the entire world. There's a section devoted to the front in the United States, but there's also sections about how the plague started in China and the civil war it sparked there, Russia's attempts to maintain control of the military, Israel's decision to lock their borders, a nuclear war between Iran and Pakistan, the emergence of Cuba as a new economic superpower, the complete disappearance of North Korea, and the evacuation of Ja...

Lev Grossman's The Magicians is an interesting book. It's definitely good, and it explores some themes that I enjoyed. But I'm honestly not sure whether I liked it or not. I don't think I'll be able to fully form an opinion until after I've read the sequel. Like The Name of the Wind , The Magicians has been described to me as "Harry Potter for adults" and, as with Rothfuss' book, I have to disagree about that label being applied to this book. While it does feature a bunch of kids at a magical school The Magicians  is far from the happy, escapist fantasy that I think of when I think of Harry Potter . In fact, the book mostly serves as a subversion of that entire genre. The characters of The Magicians  are miserable over-achievers. They all ended up at Brakebills college for magicians because they were the top of the class at their very elite high schools. They're all also deeply unhappy; most of them have parents who range from di...

This was my second time through Marion Zimmer Bradley's epic retelling of the King Arthur legend. The first time was over a decade ago, when I was still in high school. I remember really liking the book and wanting to read it again. I also remember punching it at one point because of something Gwenhwyfer did. But mostly I remember a fun fantasy that was a cool twist on the Arthurian legends; the tale is told entirely through the point of view of the female characters. What I manage to forget, somehow, every single time I come back to King Arthur, is that this tale is a tragedy. I think this may be because I usually only listen to the first half of the Camelot soundtrack. The story is the Golden Age of Camelot and all the great, chivalrous deeds that the Knights of the Round Table perform. But it's ultimately about the destruction of that Golden Age. Arthur's rule was too good to last. People are not fundamentally good and desires and loyalties twist into si...

Lioness Rampant , the fourth book in Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness quartet is by far the best. It has a coherent plot that ties all of the chapters together. It ties up all the loose ends that have been left hanging in the rest of the series. It highlight's Alanna's growth and gives everyone a happy ending. It's actually impressive how much Pierce improved over the course of this series. I think part of that is that she was given more room to develop her characters and plots. The fourth book is nearly twice as long as the first one. It also helps that the main character has grown up a lot since the first book. The final book completes Alanna's journey to adulthood, which follows the classic hero's journey beat for beat. But Pierce manages to keep it fresh and interesting. I'm definitely keeping this series around for my hypothetical future daughter (who already has an entire shelf on my bookcase). I'll probably get around to the r...

Mira Grant's Countdown is a novella rather than a proper novel. It's really short. Short enough that I had no problem reading it on my phone. Grant wrote it as a prequel to Feed , and released it in the month leading up to Feed 's sequel, Deadline . Countdown is a prequel, detailing the events that led to the zombie apocalypse and setting the stage for Feed. Countdown relies pretty heavily on dramatic irony. If you've read Feed , you know exactly how and when the zombie rising happens. You're passingly familiar with many of these characters and already know their fates. I think Grant does a good job of using that to ramp up the tension in this book. If you enjoyed Feed (which you should definitely read), give Countdown a try. My only complaint is that it's only available as an e-book (hence my reading it on my phone). I can't put it on my shelf with the rest of the series.

This is my first attempt at Shakespeare in a non-classroom setting. I've read several plays before now ( Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Leer, and King John ), but they were all for assignments. And they were all really hard to get through. I have a tendency to get lost in the rhythm of Shakespeare's language. It flows so well that, without even realizing it, I'll have read two pages and retained nothing. I'll be so eager to finish a line that I won't even realize it's switched characters. I have difficulty keeping track of who's talking because that interrupts the flow of the language. To get around this, I used to go through and highlight each character in a different color before reading so I'd have a visual cue to keep me on track. But since I didn't want to do that to my fancy Complete Works (or carry that beast of a book around), I never got around to any plays that hadn't been assigned. Then Joss Whedon decided to make a fil...