Bookish Thoughts

Thanks to a bunch of used book sales in the area, I've been going back and revisiting a bunch of books I first read in high school. The latest one is Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird , which I read in 9th grade. I was surprised both by how little of the plot I remembered and how vividly I remembered some smaller scenes. There are bits in this book, probably parts that my teacher decided had important symbolic value, that I can still picture in full surround sound. The inside of Mrs. Dubose's bedroom where Jem spends afternoon's reading to her while she weans herself off morphine. The courtroom, packed and silent waiting for the jury to return a verdict. And, strangely, the Finch's neighbor peeing out the second story window. At the same time, I'd managed to completely forget the contents of Tom Robinson's day in court, or Bob Ewell's reaction to it. And Boo Radley's part in everything remained as mysterious to me as the first time ...

Good God, this book took a long time to read. It's not that it was particularly bad; it's just that Candy Crush was usually more interesting. This book is silly and riddled with plot holes, but entertaining in its own way I'd been vaguely aware of this trilogy for most of my life. Around the time the prequel trilogy was announced, one of my parents told me the basic plot of what happened after the original movies, at least according to these books. Well, they told me that Leia and Han got married, Leia gave birth to twins, and Luke started a new school for Jedis. Since the new movies were starting to come out, I assumed I wouldn't have to wait long for this trilogy to come out as a movie either. How young and foolish I was. Now that we've been promised new movies, I have very little faith that they will either cover this material or be very good. So when Kevin picked up the first two books of The Thrawn Trilogy at a used book sale, I figure...

I'm not sure why I expected anything different from a book that opens with a death, but I was surprised by how deeply sad and painful JK Rowling's first adult novel was. It wasn't sad in a way that makes you cry - I didn't shed a single tear while reading this book. It goes deeper than that, getting a vice-like grip on your heart and making you wonder if anyone can ever actually be happy. The scope of The Casual Vacancy is incredibly small, focusing on the inhabitants of a single town in England.The lives of the townsfolk are incredibly intertwined, such that all of their actions and decisions seem to affect each other. The death of Barry Fairbrother, beloved town Councillor, creates ripples and triggers a slow unraveling of the fabric of life in this small town. Fairbrother was fighting to keep a rehabilitation clinic open to serve the needs of the low-income addicts in the town. Once he dies, the group that wants to see the clinic closed jumps on the...

I really like following up long epics with shorter books. And since I've been meaning to re-read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 for several years now, it seemed like the perfect book to dive into after the Mistborn trilogy. It actually did end up being perfect, sine the Book People at the end reminded me more than a little of Sanderson's Keepers of Knowledge, and I love finding little literary connections like that. I first read Fahrenheit 451 in high school as part of our unit on dystopia (which also included 1984 and Brave New World ). I remembered the basic plot and themes, since you tend to when you've spent a long time with a single book, but a lot of the details had escaped me. There is one scene, though, that has stuck with me through the years. One that became so vivid in my mind, I'd nearly forgotten which book is came from. When Montag is on the run from the cops, he has to cross a wide street. This is at a time when the speed limit, even ...

The third Mistborn novel, The Hero of Ages , is a mostly fantastic book with one glaring error that I can't really get over. I'll start with my complaint so I can end this on a positive note. The world in Mistborn is ruled by two opposing god-like forces, Preservation and Ruin. The choices of these two gods makes thematic sense in the first two books. The evil emperor, the Lord Ruler, took his power from Preservation and then ruled over a society that was largely stagnant for a millenium. There were virtually no advancements made in technology, architecture, government, even fashion. And this was done largely to quench though and allow the Lord Ruler to maintain control. All in all, it makes sense that his power is a product of Preservation. But in the third book Sanderson digs into these gods a bit more and things start to fall apart. Mostly because, at least as far as I'm concerned, Ruin and Preservation don't actually balance each other out. If you ...

I probably should have written this before I finished the third book. At this point, the trilogy is all kind of blurring together, and the second book was definitely upstaged by the third one. It's a little hard to talk about The Well of Ascension without leaking into The Hero of Ages , but I'll try. The Well of Ascension definitely started out a lot slower than the first book. It took nearly 150 pages for me to really become engaged with the story. Sanderson has spent a lot of time fleshing out his world at this point, so mostly we're meeting new characters. But since everyone spends the majority of the book besieged inside a city while I was (mistakenly) waiting for them to escape and head north, it was hard for me to keep going. It certainly didn't help that the cover depicts a scene from the third book. Mostly this book suffers from the same things as almost every second installment in a trilogy. The pacing is a bit off and most of the book exist...

All of those people who were telling me to check out The Name of the Wind a few years ago spent the last year telling me I needed to pick up Mistborn . I knew I'd get around to this series eventually, especially after the last novel won a Hugo. What I didn't realize was how entirely the book would manage to take over my life. I accidentally stayed up until one in the morning reading, which is something I very rarely do. Mistborn is excellently paced with a lot of really cool action scenes and some interesting characters. But the best part is the system of magic, which is unlike anything I've ever seen. The main character, Vin, is an allomancer, someone who can extract special powers by swallowing and "burning" different metals. I really like how much thought Sanderson put into allomancy, from pairing pure metals with alloys to create similar powers to placing realistic restrictions on those powers. The book also operates a bit like a puzzle. The ...