Bookish Thoughts

This book was basically perfect, and not just because I managed to read the entire thing during one of Gavin's naps. It's been a long time since I inhaled an entire book in one sitting, and it was a good feeling. Men Explain Things to Me  was expertly constructed, allowing the essays to build off of and inform each other. Each essay is preceded by an oil painting by Ana Teresa Fernandez. In the middle of the book, Solnit includes an essay about one of these paintings and the series that it's from. It helps clarify why she chose to include this artist's work, which speaks to the goal of the book. Perhaps it's a bit on the nose for Solnit to spell out her intentions like that. But essays, unlike fiction, need to be crystal clear. I hadn't read the titular essay in total before picking up this book, though I had read a later spin on it,  Men Explain Lolita to Me , which was published after this book. Despite this, I remember when the original essay was publishe...

I discovered Isabel Allende about a year ago, and I've really liked her books so far. I was prepared to fall head over heels in love with this one, which is the one everyone always references when they talk about her. Unfortunately that didn't quite happen. But I think it had more to do with mismatched expectations than the book itself. This is Allende's first novel, and I had to remind myself of that while I was reading it. It's not quite as polished as some of her later works. I particularly had trouble with the shifting narrators. The book shifts between two first person narratives. But the identity of the second narrator is revealed so late in the book (and looking back, refers to herself in the third person more often than not) that there might as well have been three narrators. Except that the epilogue makes it pretty clear there were only two. When I wasn't struggling with who was telling the story, I mostly enjoyed it. It's an epic family saga, set a...

The Prisoner of Limnos  is pretty much the definition of a feel-good story. Lois McMaster Bujold is incapable of not giving her characters the happiest possible ending. So there are no real surprises here. There's excitement but not much tension. And everyone ends up right where you hope and know they will. There's a lot to be said for comfort reads like this. Where characters clearly state what they want, value open, frank communication, and find their way to the same page. It's nice to watch characters do what they're good at and do it well. It's nice to know that two people who are so clearly meant for each other will end up together. It's not that there aren't obstacles. But they're met head-on by mature adults, and it turns out that they aren't so hard to overcome after all. The only downfall of a story like this is that there isn't a ton to be said. I love Bujold. I'm so glad she's continuing to publish novellas. I wish there we...

This book felt like something of a bait and switch. It purports to be about Anne's children. In fact, it's mostly about the neighboring children, who recently moved in with their widowed father, the new minister in Ingleside. It makes sense. Anne and Gilbert have been established as basically perfect, so there would be very little conflict in a book about their children, who are also likely to be perfect. Or at least perfectly supported and encouraged. The book would be unbearably saccharine and preachy, much like Anne of Windy Poplars  was. Still, it would have been nice to get some indication of that in the cover art or book blurb or something. Rainbow Valley  was fun. A bit of a return to the first book in the series, with the younger characters. At this point, it's all feeling a bit formulaic. I'm picking up on the smallest hints, and I know exactly what's going to happen all the way through. There's one book left. A lot of people have said that it's...

I forget how I heard about this book, but as soon as I did, I became obsessed with reading it. It's an experimental sort of book, a collaboration between JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst. It's definitely a different sort of reading experience that any other I've had before. This is a book of many layers, and it requires the reader to keep track of a bunch of stuff at once. The foundation is the "fictional" book, Book of Theseus . Fictional is in quotes because that book does, obviously, exist. You read it as part of reading this book. But all the other information about it, the author and his life and the 19 books he wrote before it, do not actually exist except in the world of this book. Book of Theseus  is presented as the final book this author, Straka, ever wrote. And he actually died before he finished it. So his longtime friend and translator finished it for him and had it published posthumously. Footnotes throughout the book comment on their relationship, as we...

Going into this book, I had a lot of meta information. The author released the entire trilogy in one year. There's a movie coming out next month. It has an all-female cast. Weird shit happens. But I didn't know a ton about the book itself. That ended up being a good thing. I'm not entirely sure I would have picked this book up on it's own, or at least been as eager as I was to read it. I would have had all these preconceived notions about what it was and I would have shied away, always reaching for something else. As it is, I ended up enjoying this book a lot. It wasn't until I was almost done with it that I made the connection to Lovecraft. When the biologist finally confronts the Crawler, I was very strongly reminded of the handful of Lovecraft stories I read several years ago. The eldritch horror that the mind cannot even comprehend was a signature of his, and I was excited to see it pop up again in modern literature. It turns out that there's some of a...

Like any good female millenial, I loved this movie in high school. I can't even count the number of times I tried to watch it with my friends. I even have a vague memory of trying to watch it while I was in labor, but things were honestly pretty blurry by then. I hadn't realized it was based on a book until a few months ago when I heard the prequel was coming out. But I was immediately anxious to read it and see all the things the movie left out. Here's the thing, though. The movie significantly changed the book. I barely even recognized it as the same story. Sure, Sally falls in love and her husband dies young, leaving her depressed and bitter. Sure, Gillian accidentally kills her abusive boyfriend and runs to her sister for help. But other than that, the similarities are merely superficial. In the book, the aunts border on neglectful, rather than fun. They never wanted kids, and they only keep Sally and Gillian around out of a sense of duty. But they do nothing at all...