Bookish Thoughts

The Tombs of Atuan  is the second book in the Earthsea cycle by Ursula LeGuin. This series is the first (and possibly only?) LeGuin tried her hand at YA. While the first book suffered from some pacing issues, the second book was orders of magnitude better. The second book shifts its focus away from Ged, protagonist of the first book. Instead it follows young Arha, nee Tenar, the head priestess of a dying religion. She's mostly in charge of making sure her gods are still being sacrificed to on a regular basis. But since so few people still worship, her life is pretty boring. This all changes when Ged breaks into her temple in an effort to steal an artifact. The two become friends and end up saving each other. The book is mostly interesting for being a feminist tale from the early 70s. Some themes are familiar, but others are strangely foreign. There are things that are basic facts of my life that LeGuin couldn't even imagine several decades ago. She talks ab...

I ended up liking Blackout , the third and final book in Mira Grant's Newsflesh  trilogy, much better than Deadline . But still not as much as Feed . I think this is going to end up being one of those trilogies where I just ignore the existence of the second and third books. Like His Dark Materials . I am so glad George was back for this book. I actually considered skipping all of Shaun's chapters and just reading George's. But I decided I'd probably miss too much of the story that way. George is ultimately what kept me going through this trilogy. The science is unbelievable to a point that I ended up writing it off as magic so I could accept the story on its own merits. I mean, clones of dead people being nearly exact matches of the people they're cloned from? Memories and everything? Also sexually transmitted immunities? (That is what Grant was getting at with Shaun, right?) Anyway, Grant did a decent job expanding the conspiracy beyond the first ...

I have to say that I enjoyed Lev Grossman's The Magcian King much more than it's prequel, The Magicians . It becomes clear pretty quickly that, once again, Quentin isn't satisfied with his happy ending. Being a king in Fillory has left him bored and restless. The book opens with him wanting something to change. When things do change, he's not terribly happy about the direction they go. But he's able to recognize that this is what he wished for and to make the best of it. Quentin is growing up, and that makes him far more likable than he was in the first book. Interlaced with Quentin's story, is Julia's, which is mostly far more interesting. I like Julia a lot better than Quentin. She's just as miserable, but she's trying to do something about it. And when she finally achieves contentment, she recognizes it, even if it is too late for her to hold on to. The end of the book seemed to be structured a bit strangely. The order of the c...

Wintersmith  is yet another of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. It's the third in Tiffany Aching's arc, the subseries aimed at a younger audience. I picked it up because it was snowing and I was in the mood for something wintry. The more I read about Tiffany Aching, the more I fall in love with her. She's incredibly smart and resourceful. She makes mistakes, because she's still growing and learning, and then she owns them. She does everything in her power to set things right, understanding the difference between something being her fault and it being her responsibility. In this book, inspired by the music, she decides to dance at a winter festival, despite the warnings of her elders. Doing so attracts the attention of the God of Winter, who accidentally falls in love with Tiffany instead of Summer. This happens at the same time as Tiffany is navigating the beginning of something more than friendship with a boy she's known for years. The pitfa...

A Wizard of Earthsea is the first of Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books. It's also the first YA book she ever wrote, according to a note at the end of the book, which may explain some of the issues I had with the pacing of the story. The book follows Ged, a boy who is born with a talent for magic. Over the course of the story he begins to study magic, heads off to a university for sorcerers, graduates, and faces some initial challenges. I think the rest of the series follows the remainder of his life, but the first book is really about him growing up. While the plot is a bit cliched at this point, I imagine it was fairly fresh when LeGuin wrote it back in the 60s. And I really enjoyed the world building. A country made of hundreds of islands isn't something I'm used to, and it was neat that sailing played such a large part in the story. Although there were parts when the sailing went on so long that I felt like I was playing Windwaker. I also really lik...

Deadline , the second book in Mira Grant's  Newsflesh  trilogy and sequel to  Feed , was a really difficult book to get through. I actually walked away from it for a couple of weeks because I had so many issues with the main character. But the plot eventually pulled me back and I actually read the last half of the book pretty quickly (and only partly because I have so much time on my hands right now). Shaun takes over the narration of this book after his sister dies at the end of  Feed . While I liked him fine in the first book, being inside his head destroyed most of my goodwill. It's quickly revealed that George's death has driven Shaun insane. He has vivid hallucinations that she's talking to him and he has violent tendencies, striking out at his employees and friends seemingly at random. I don't think these traits would bother me so much except that Shaun recognizes them both as negative things that are driving away his friends and proceeds to do absolutely ...

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...