Bookish Thoughts

NK Jemisin's debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms  is different from the majority of fantasy I've read lately. There's no grand adventure or epic battle.At it's heart, this book has more to do with family politics than anything else. Some millenia before this book begins, the three main gods got into a fight that escalated into a war. Ultimately one was killed, one was enslaved in human form, and the third took it upon himself to be the grand ruler of all. The world has been a little off-balance ever since, as exemplified by the cruel and twisted ruling family, the Arameri. But this story focuses on Yeine, newly named heir of the current ruler, Dekarta, despite the fact that her mother was disowned for marrying her father. She finds herself summoned to the capital city, where she must navigate not only her own family politics, but those of the gods who are kept as slaves. The story isn't entirely linear, which I usually love. It mostly works...

But how could she gain the road? Roads were made for young men, not middle-aged women. The poor orphan-boy packed his sack and started off down the road to seek his heart's hope...a thousand tales began that way. She was not poor, she was not a boy, and her heart was surely as stripped of all hope as life and death could render it. As Ista herself points out in the first few pages of the book, this should not be her story. At least not traditionally. According to all the tales, Ista is done. She was raised a princess and married a king. She lived to see her husband and son die and her daughter ascend to the throne. She has recently celebrated the birth of her first grandchild and is now mourning the death of her mother, making her officially a member of the older generation. Now it is time for her to sit quietly in her castle and live out her days, content with the life she has left. But that's not what Ista wants, and it's not what the gods have planned f...

And so we come to the ninth Dresden book. It's a different color than the preceding books, white instead of black, so I was expecting something epic and game-changing to happen. And I suppose it did, with the virtual obliteration of an entire court of vampires (the ones who, in this universe, most resemble succubi and incubi). But the leaders still have power and ultimately, things still feel largely the same. This is possibly because there is just so much happening at this point. Butcher has left enough dangling plot threads over the past several books that they're starting to blur together. On some level this should happen. Things should start to get cleaned up and long-standing enemies should start to die off. The problem is that I can barely remember who anyone is anymore. There were two villains in this book who had appeared previously that I had to look up on Wikipedia. Then I had to read a plot synopsis of an earlier book to figure out what happened with o...

I picked up The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul expecting something light and silly that I wouldn't have to pay too much attention to. And while this book was light and pretty easy to read, it had far more of a plot that I was expecting. There was a mystery to be solved and connections to be made and everything. Apart from the surprise of the plot, I was most struck by how familiar this book felt. Which is to say that I could clearly see the influence Adams has had on some of my favorite authors. Gently reminded me more than a little of Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell from Good Omens . And I have to wonder if the dying Norse Gods in this book had any influence on Gaiman's American Gods . It took me a little while to get into this book, mostly because I hadn't expected to pay as much attention to it as I ended up needing to. But by the time Kate was investigating the nursing home, I was on board. Things came together a little abruptly at the end, but it was sti...

It's been a while since I read a non-fiction book. I sort of go through phases where I read them a little more often. But as this blog clearly documents, it's been at least 2 and a half years (probably more) since I last picked one up. It really just depends on something actually catching my attention. And when I started to see references to Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender it definitely caught my attention. This book is essentially an extended literature review. Fine looks at countless studies the claim to get at the differences between men and women and makes quick work eviscerating all of the supposedly proven biological differences. She talks about how soon in life we are bombarded with gendered information, really from the moment we're born. Or even before. She points out the over-reliance on correlation used to imply causation For example, testosterone levels in the womb are thought to be responsible for fundamental differences in male and femal...

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...