Bookish Thoughts

Between the craziness of Thanksgiving, physical therapy, and the impending holiday season, it took me nearly a month to read this book, which it really shouldn't have. But when I'm not commuting by train, I have a hard time finding time to just sit and read. Especially with everything else going on. Because of that I ended up reading Angela's Ashes in fits and starts and never really got as absorbed into it as I might have otherwise. Back when I started it, I noted that for a tragedy, the book has a lot of humor in it. Not necessarily laugh out loud humor, but the sort of wry humor that seems to me to be typical of Irish literature. It's an attitude that acknowledges that life is shitty so you have to find your silver linings where you can. For example, this book is full of the death of children. They drop like flies, and Frank himself loses 3 siblings to various sicknesses. One of his classmates loses nearly all of his siblings, but he's okay with ...

Helen Oyeyemi's novel White is for Witching is one of those books that get better the more I think about it. This could be because I struggled a bit while reading it. The book is a mystery, and I didn't have a firm grasp of the plot until 150 pages in to this 200 page book. But once I figured out what was going on, a lot of other stuff fell into place. Given that, it's really hard to talk about this book without spoiling anything, except to say that it's beautiful and different. It deals with a wealth of issues, from eating disorders to immigration, racism to sexual identity, family legacies to obsession. These themes are mostly subtle, but once the truth of the mystery is revealed, they become a lot more powerful. Like I said, the more I think about this book, the more layers I see. One of the most interesting things about this book is that I cannot tell you, with any confidence, how many narrators there are. Miranda is the central character. Both he...

I can't very well be expected to resist a title like that, can I? September, like so many other heroines in so many other stories, finds herself traveling to a magical land where she makes friends with interesting creatures and has wonderful adventures. She learns a lot along the way, and I love the way the lessons pop up throughout the text. The narrator is incredibly self-aware. This is one of those books that I had to fight not to read out loud. The language is just so much fun. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making has elements of all the childhood stories I loved growing up. September receives a pair of special shoes. She falls down a hole and travels by boat to an island full of one-legged creatures. She meets a girl who arrived via a wardrobe in an attic. She is warned to stay away from fairy food, but munches on pomegranate seeds anyway. But it has it's own charms too, setting itself apart from the other books by not forcing...

I continue my recently renewed interest in non-fiction works with Rosalind Miles' Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World . I'd seen a few excerpts floating around the internet and, honestly, who can resist that title? This wasn't the greatest book I ever read. There's a lot of anger in these pages, and an uncomfortable amount of flipping some Freudian theories to accuse men of womb envy and natural inferiority to account for their oppression of women over the millenia. Additionally, while individual women are referenced a great deal, their struggles tend to be painted with a single brush. Intersections of gender with race or class are largely ignored and glossed over. There is a chapter about imperialism that touches on some of these issues, but Miles also misinterprets Sojourner Truth's famous "And Ain't I A Woman?" speech as being about the virgin/whore dichotomy rather than race relations. Despite that, ther...

You already know whether or not you'll enjoy this book. If you've been reading Allie Brosh's blog for the past several years like I have, then buying her new book is really a no-brainer. And if you've never heard of Allie Brosh or Hyperbole and a Half, then you need to fix that right now. Go read about The Alot , which I believe was my introduction to her genius. The book is nearly 300 pages of stories in Brosh's unique style. It's color-coded, so you can easily flip to a particular story and it looks really cool on your shelf. I may actually have to display it with the binding towards the wall. Assuming it ever makes it off my coffee table, that it. While there are a few classics included in this compilation (like The God of Cake and This is Why I'll Never Be an Adult ), it's mostly new material. Material that you will speed through and then return to over and over again. This is one of those books that I may have to buy and electronic ...

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...