Bookish Thoughts

In which a seventeen year old Miles Vorkosigan accidentally acquires a full mercenary fleet. The Warrior's Apprentice is the first book in the Vorkosigan series to feature Miles as a protagonist. It begins with him breaking both of his legs during the entrance exam for the military academy he hopes to attend. With no clear course for the future, he decides to visit his grandmother for a few weeks. But while on Beta Colony his compassion compels him to save first the pilot of an obsolete ship and then a deserter. One thing leads to another and before you know it Miles finds himself involved in a Civil War as the admiral of a Mercenary Fleet that's been hired by one side. It's amazing how much luck is actually involved in this, though Miles also has an interesting mix of compassion, honor, and audacity that makes it impossible for him to give up once he's gotten started. Instead he keeps moving forward, amassing more loyal followers as he goes. I was a ...

I had the hardest time getting into The Lies of Locke Lamora . It was frustrating because everyone around me was absolutely raving about it. And given the premise - a group of thieves pull cons on rich people - I was sure I'd like it, too, if I could just give it a chance. But giving it that chance proved difficult. This was partly due to timing. I started it on a beach weekend, then continued while we had a house guest. For the first week I was reading in dribs and drabs of 10 minutes at a time. When I finally had 3 hours to devote to reading, I wanted a book I could just finish in that time. This was compounded by the format of the book. Scott Lynch plays fast and loose with linear time. He jumps between two main timelines - Locke's childhood and the present-day heist. Within those timelines, he continues to jump around, or abandon plot altogether for 3-4 pages of exposition. More than usual I was re-reading earlier passages trying to figure out if I'd mis...

Sometimes you accidentally buy too many books. The fact that there are over 15 books sitting on your shelf, waiting to be read, begins to stress you out. So you have to take a break from the epic you're currently reading to knock out one of the shorter books. One of the ones that only takes a few hours to get through. And sometimes that backfires, because that short, easy book ends up being really complicated and it takes over your life in a way that leaves you unable to engage with any other literature for a while. On Friday, I reached a section break in The Lies of Locke Lamora and decided that it was a good place to step back from that book for a bit. I've been enjoying it, but I've also been reading in fits and starts due to a lack of both attention span and time. I figured a quick palate cleanser would help me refocus. And maybe it will. In the meantime, we need to talk about Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime . I reme...

The third book in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is a huge leap forward in terms of quality. Equal Rites is basically a precursor to the Tiffany Aching books that Pratchett wrote more recently. It focuses on young Eskarina Smith, an eight-year-old girl (based on Pratchett's daughter) on a journey to become a wizard. Around this time, Pratchett had noticed an interesting trend in fantasy literature: men get to be wizards while women have to be witches. Wizards get cool, flashy magic. They get to save the world and be important. Witches are old and ugly and evil and usually get burned at the stake. So we get a book that tries to fight that dichotomy, while at the same time elevating witch magic and arguing that maybe wizard magic isn't all it's cracked up to be. There are some great puns in this book, side with side with some truly cutting commentary about the differences between the sexes. The plot is far more cohesive than in any of the previous t...

The second volume of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye run contains the much lauded Pizza Dog story, an issue told entirely from the point of view of Clint Barton's dog. But that episode comes last, and it's so much sadder than I expected it to be. The thing is, Barton is kind of a fuckup. He tries to do the right thing. He tries really hard. He's an avenger after all. But he has a tendency to get in over his head. And in this volume, some of his mistakes from the previous volume come back to haunt him. There's the gang he forcefully bought the apartment building from, to save the tenants' homes and the girl who he probably shouldn't have gotten involved with. Both show up again, bringing more trouble and leaving Barton with even more danger hanging over his head. Even worse is the slow disintegration of his relationship with Kate Bishop, the other Hawkeye. Their relationship seemed rock solid in the first volume, but in this one cracks start to app...

Song of the Wanderer is the much anticipated (by me, anyway) sequel to Brian Coville's Into the Land of the Unicorns . It follows Cara's journey to reunite with her grandmother, last seen in the first chapter of the first book, and bring her back to Luster. She sets out from the Queen's court with a decent-sized group that keeps growing larger over the course of her journey, until she eventually finds her grandmother, has a tense confrontation with Beloved, hater and hunter of the Unicorns, and makes it safely back to the Queen's court. The group Cara travels with is a bit unwieldy, and some of the characters end up getting the shaft. Two of the unicorns are just barely sketched out, more caricatures than actual characters. I was beyond excited when the Dimblethum returned, as he was by far my favorite character in the first book. I was less enthralled by the gryphon, who does the too-cute I'm not actually cussing because this is a children's book...

Brandon Sanderson's first publish novel, Elantris , starts out a little slow. It was enjoyable, it just took me a while to really get into it and become invested in the characters. But it picks up speed admirably. I hit a point where I didn't want to continue reading so much as instantly ingest the final 150 pages so I wouldn't have to live in suspense anymore. I started carrying the book with me everywhere, sneaking extra paragraphs on my way to the kitchen or while I was waiting for data to load.  Elantris was the city of the gods until suddenly it wasn't. Ten years before the book starts, the city becomes cursed and the god-like beings who inhabit it go from all-powerful to destitute essentially overnight. The city used to provide food, clothing, medicine, etc for all the people in the country of Arelon, and once the power disappears, the country is forced to figure out how to support and defend itself. The book focuses on three characters. Raoden i...