Bookish Thoughts

I have a lot of dedicated reading spots in my house. There's the papasan downstairs, where I can make a nest of pillows and blankets and curl up in the long winter months. There's the brown couch upstairs, where I have easy access to a glass of wine or cup of tea on the side table. The green couch is on the wrong side of the table for easy drink access, but it has the recliner. Upstairs there's a leather chair in my office, where I can be surrounded by books, and a second leather chair in the bedroom where I can put my feet up on the footstool. In shady summer afternoons I read out in the backyard, avoiding the sun as much as possible. Finally there's the bed, where I can drift off to sleep, sandwiched between the animals. This is, perhaps, overkill. Especially since I do the vast majority of reading on the train. But it's nice to have a different spot for each mood I'm in. And it ended up providing a nice parallel to this book, which I read while bouncing aro...

David Wong's  This Book is Full of Spiders  is technically a sequel to  John Dies at the End . I haven't read the first one, but I really don't think you need to. In fact, the first page of the spider book tells the reader to just ignore everything that happened in the first book. The only confusing bit was that John was in this book, alive and kicking and drinking way too much. So he probably didn't actually die, which makes that first title rather misleading. The second title, though, is not in any way misleading. This book is all about spiders. Many-legged, alien parasites that zombify their victims while they breed and search for new victims. The book plays out like a typical zombie narrative in three acts. The first act counts down to the outbreak, the second to a massacre, and the third to a last-ditch effort to contain the threat by bombing an entire town off the map. Like you do. Our heroes, David, John, David's girlfriend Amy, and her dog Molly try thei...

In some ways,  Chamber of Secrets  is a retread of  Sorcerer's Stone . It follows the same basic mystery plot, with the same red herrings and clues. This is probably why it's most people's least favorite Harry Potter book. That's not to say it's a bad book, though. Rowling is pretty good at setting up a mystery and peppering the clues throughout for the attentive reader to put together. Of course, most people fly through this book too quickly to solve the mystery on their own. Like the rest of the books in this series, it's a compulsive page-turner. It's the first book I ever stayed up way too late to finish after all (good thing it was summer). But it has a structure that rewards re-reads, that stands up to further scrutiny (unlike so many other page-turners I could mention). There's also a lot in this book that becomes hugely important later in the series. We get some of Voldemort's past, come across the first Horcrux, and learn more about the ...

I'll admit, I bought this $30, 800+ page tome in order to read one single short story. Because that short story was written by Patrick Rothfuss about Bast, and I am desperate for new material in that world. Of course, this collection also contains plenty of other stories by plenty of other authors I love, so it felt worth that price tag. Let's go through it story by story, shall we? The Lightning Tree  by Patrick Rothfuss - This story basically chronicles a day in the life of Bast an indeterminate amount of time before the first book starts, but after Kvothe has established himself as Kote, owner of the Waystone Inn. Bast trades secrets and favors with children, gets into some mischief, does some highly questionable and uncomfortable things, but also does some tough and honorable things. He's a tough guy to pin down, because his moral code is skewed by his Fae heritage. This story left me more confused about him than before, but it was a nice little slice of life, none...

I can hardly believe I haven't revisited  Harry Potter  since I started this blog. The last time I read the series was just over four years ago. I actually marked my calendar to figure out how long it took me to read all seven books (just under five weeks), so I know exactly when I last read these books. I also, like so many others, remember the first time I read this book - though the countless re-reads in between have blurred together. It was the summer I turned 13, the first summer we were living in the house where my mom still lives. I was an avid reader, but getting my brother interested was a struggle.  Harry Potter  was the latest in a series of attempts to get him interested in the written word. Every night he and my mom would read a chapter together. When they were about halfway through, he asked me to catch up so we could all read it together. I agreed, even though I was just old enough that it seemed beneath me. But then I screwed up and read the entire ...

I got really excited about this book from the second I heard about it. Big Data is everywhere these days, and it's something I've been working on, adjacently or directly, for years. The data I'm working with now isn't included in the scope of Christian Rudder's work, which focuses on applications in the fields of sociology and psychology. But there was a time when I almost broke into this world. There are even some projects he talks about in this book that I was involved in or hearing really cool talks about. Alas, I never quite broke into it in the way I wanted to. I've remained interested in this field, though. We're experiencing what will be the beginning of an absolute golden age for sociology and psychology. Data is available in unprecedented amounts and ways. It's not only that you can finally look at the behaviors of literally millions of people, but free from a lab those behaviors are far more natural than in any hitherto performed...

The first I ever heard of Scott Lynch was him vehemently defending one of the characters in this book. The character in question is one Zamira Drakasha. She's a pirate captain. She's middle-aged. She's black. And she's a mom, who brings her toddlers on the high seas with her. Some fans were upset, claiming that this was unrealistic wish fulfillment. To which Lynch replied that he's writing speculative fiction, not history. Wish fulfillment is the name of the game. Seriously though, you should go read his whole response. It's pretty amazing. I filed that bit away until one friend and then another began gushing about Lynch's books, and I had no choice but to pick them up. Zamira wasn't in the first book, though it was still a very good novel. If a bit uneven. But I knew she featured in the second one, and I was excited to meet her. Imagine my disappointment when it took her over half of the 760 page book to show up. Actually it wasn'...