Bookish Thoughts

Falling Free  is an early novel in the Vorkosigan series. It was written shortly after  Shards of Honor ,  The Warrior's Apprentice , and  Ethan of Athos , when Bujold hadn't quite decided on Miles as the protagonist. It takes place 200 years before any of the other books, back when space exploration was fairly young and Barrayar was in isolation. It tells the story of the quaddies, gentically engineered humans designed for zero-gee work before the invention of artificial gravity. This is not a favorite book in the series, being both an early work and disconnected from all of the main characters I went in with low expectations and was pleasantly surprised by home much I liked it. It's not the smoothest or most layered of Bujold's work, and she dives into technical stuff in a slightly distracting way. But the characters are amazing, and the plot, while straight-forward, is fun and interesting. My favorite part is that we get a few points of view from the chief ant...

Snicket continues to play with the formula, resulting in what is my favorite book of the series so far. It's nice when the Baudelaire's get some good mixed in with the bad. It makes the story more interesting. Never-ending misery is ultimately boring (try reading  The Two Towers ). A few bright spots keep the story fresh and interesting. More importantly, they keep hope alive. So the Baudelaires are sent to a married couple. And while the wife is greedy and treacherous, the husband is kind. Even if his good intentions come to nothing due to his weak will and distaste for arguments, at least he tries to treat the orphans well while they're under his care. Additionally, Count Olaf is barely in this book. He sneaks around the edges even more than usual, so the orphans have to be more proactive than usual. They uncover his plot and come close to thwarting it. They find the Quagmire triplets and come close to freeing them. Alas, it's only the sixth book, so nothing can q...

Back in high school, all of my friends took AP English and I didn't. At the time it made sense. Mudd really didn't care about AP English, and since my high school capped us at 3 AP courses, I filled that space with physics and calculus. I don't regret that decision, but I did miss out on some interesting books. So I'm going back to fill in these gaps, and the latest "missed" book is Tess. I can't even really remember how my friends reacted to this book. I'm not entirely sure how I would have reacted to it. Or how it was taught. I doubt I'd have been ready for it when I was 17. But now I shuddered almost immediately when Alec was introduced - ignoring Tess' boundaries from the start and then blaming her for his every transgression. Even Angel, presented as the perfect man, comes across as pretty awful. Really this is a book about how much it sucks to be a woman. Tess is raped. Her child dies before it can be baptized. She falls in love and l...

By this point in The Dresden Files, a lot has changed. The war with the Red Court has ended in their annihilation. Dresden discovered a daughter. He died, spent some time as a ghost, and has now come back to life in the guise of the Winter Knight working for Mab. The first 100 or so pages of the book serve to orient us in the new world, but I had some trouble getting through them. It wasn't until Harry started to reconnect with his old friends and make amends that I became really engaged. Alas, by then, another change had become apparent. Harry has always leered at women in a way that made me uncomfortable. I brushed it aside in favor of the excitement of his adventures. And he seemed to be getting better. As he gathered more female allies around him and forged all sorts of different relationships with women, I really thought he was becoming less misogynistic. But in this book he levels up in a way that has me wondering if Jim Butcher has ever actually interacted with a woman. ...

The tenth book in Jordan's epic  Wheel of Time  series is essentially a catch up book. At the end of the previous book, Rand and Nynaeve removed the taint from saidin. For the first half (or two-thirds, really) of this book, we look at what each of the other main characters was doing when that happened. Then there are some minor baby steps towards the next bits of those characters arcs. But for the most part, this is 820 pages without a plot. I can see giving up at this point in the series. It's frustrating when nothing happens for an entire book. But I had my expectations tempered. I knew this book was the low point of the series. I know the next book is much more action-packed. I know the most frustrating plot lines (well, Perrin's) are about to get tied off so the characters can rejoin the main story. I persevered through this book to get to the end. And that's all there really is to say about it. You always get that episode of television right shortly before the...

Snicket continues to tweak his formula just enough to keep me interested in the Baudelaire orphans. In the fifth book they are sent to a boarding school, rather than to live with another long lost family member. Although things don't really improve for them there (their lives have been getting steadily worse since poor Monty died), they do finally make some friends their own age. I also liked that Count Olaf's plan was a little subtler this time around. Although I could see what he was doing, the poor orphans were completely at a loss. And they still came close to defeating him. As close as they ever do anyway. With hostages to free, a solid clue about why all of this is happening, and a promise of more complicated plots, I'm excited to keep reading. The formula will change up eventually (I think in the seventh book - halfway through). In the meantime, it's fun to watch the orphans grow ever more resourceful.

It's not a stretch to call  Witches Abroad  one of my most influential books. It might very well be my most influential book. It changed the way I look at the world, especially at stories. This book points out tropes and then picks them apart and undermines them, all while playing by the rules of the narrative. After reading it, I started paying much closer attention to everything else I was reading. I developed a feel for stories and began to really understand how they work and why. On it's surface,  Witches Abroad  is a silly book that combines fairy tales and road trips. The witches travel to Genua to defeat an evil fairy godmother, and along the way they encounter any number of "rural myths", from Sleeping Beauty to Dracula to Little Red Riding Hood. It's those encounters, all leading up to the final encounter that add so much hilarity and richness to the book. Moreso than any other Discworld book, and this is a common theme in the series, this book is about...