Bookish Thoughts

I started reading the Expanse books when I couldn't figure out how to watch the TV show that began airing last year. They're fun, exciting books that deal with a time period science fiction tends to skip over. Humanity has colonized the moon and Mars and established mining operations on various asteroids and moons of the outer planets. But we're still traveling at sub-light speeds, which keeps us confined to the solar system. And all the same old prejudices and politics are with us. In the second novel, the alien threat begins to take shape. New characters are added and bring exciting points of view. Once again, the action is centered on the search for a young girl, though this one is much younger. Humanity remains on the brink of war as everyone vies to get ahead before the alien threat on Venus makes its next move. What I appreciated about this book was the additional characters. There are four viewpoint characters instead of two, and their stories come together much ...

Terry Pratchett wrote this book when he was 17. Then, when he was 40, he did a massive edit and re-released it. That second version is the one I read (and probably the only one you can find these days). It was interesting to see his younger and older selves coming together in one book. Having read the entire Discworld and seeing him grow as an author made it easier to pick out the bits that he added later. The story itself is fairly straightforward fantasy, with a fun twist. The entire civilization exists inside a carpet, and it was fun to pick out the things from our world. The people collect ash and wood from fallen matches, varnish from a chair leg, and mine bronze from a penny. They're impossibly small and live on a contracted scale. The occasional (and unpredictable) vacuuming throws everything into chaos, and becomes the main crisis that the current characters have to get through. Unfortunately there are almost no women until the very end, where Pratchett tacks on a bunc...

Jingo was a good book to be reading during the election debacle. It may not make anything better, but it's a nice reminder that we've had these problems for a long time and we've been fighting them for a long time. I may be disappointed that we seem to be falling back on old habits rather than moving forward into a bright future. But things are better than they were, and things will continue to get better, because there are and always have been and always will be people who disagree with what apparently remains the status quo. Jingo is about war and the futility of war and patriotism and when it goes too far. It's about fighting people just because they're from a different place or look a little different and how completely stupid that is. It's about all the assumptions we make about "them" and how unfounded and false those assumptions tend to be. In short, this is a wonderful book about a lot of deeper themes that seem especially relevant in toda...

Sarah gave me this book for Halloween, with the thought that short stories would be better for my postpartum brain. Which both did and didn't work out. It might have gone better if I'd found the stories more captivating. Or shorter. As it was, it took me a really long time to get through this book, and that wasn't all due to my sleep deprivation and lack of attention. Kelly Link's stories are all somewhat meandering. And they don't really ever conclude. Just when things start to get interesting they end, often on a cliffhanger. Sometimes this works out. But more often than not I was confused, lost, and just plain uninterested. There were a couple of stories I found interesting. But for the most part this collection fell a little flat for me. It's possible that I would have liked this better if I'd read it at a different time. But with a newborn, I needed something easy to read. And it turns out that short doesn't really equate with easy. A lot of the...

I had wanted to get this review written before I went into labor. But that didn't quite happen. So now I'm here, over a month later, trying to remember what I did and didn't like about this book so I can write about it. At least I managed to finish reading it before I had my kid. Words of Radiance is the second in Sanderson's epic Stormlight Archive, which is supposed to be ten books long. As such, it's a bit hard to judge on it's own. More stuff happens than in the first book, and in some ways the plot advances a lot farther than I expected it to. But it's still mostly about setting things up. This book focuses on Shallan for it's flashbacks, which made me really happy. She's probably my favorite character, at least of the main characters, and her flashbacks do a lot to make her more complex and to explain why she is that way. Although Sanderson holds back his big reveal, which is actually the very beginning of her arc, forever, which had me wo...

I really like Gillian Flynn's books. They're twisty and turny and they don't shy away from the darker aspects of human nature, making for some great psychological thrillers. But I am glad that they tend to be shorter and that she's not all that prolific. Because these books can be hard to read. Reading about horrible people doing horrible things and all the damage they leave in their wake is emotionally draining. But it's so interesting that I can't stop. Sharp Objects is actually Flynn's first book, meaning I've worked my way through her books in reverse. But it's just as dark and compelling as her other books, at least in my opinion. The narrator is a journalist who was abused by her mother and driven to self harm. Fresh out of a stint in a psychiatric hospital, she's sent back to her hometown to report on the disappearances and subsequent murders of two local girls. Which would be bad enough even if she weren't staying in her mother...

I should start this review by saying that I'm not really a fan of this trend of publishing supplemental material in e-book format only. I suppose it makes it easier to fill out background in long series, by not worrying about the printing costs of the short stories and novellas used to flesh out the minor characters. But it makes me feel like my bookshelves are missing something. And I still don't entirely trust that e-publications are really mine to keep forever. With that out of the way, I did download and read The Butcher of Anderson Station , the first novella of The Expanse series, published between the first and second books. At 9000 words, it's really more of a short story, and it didn't take long to read at all. But it fills in some important background. Both how Fred Johnson earned the moniker of butcher and how he joined up with the OPA. The story cuts back and forth between Johnson's memories of Anderson Station and his interrogation by Anderson Dawes...