Bookish Thoughts

I didn't like this book as much as Three Parts Dead . I don't know how much of that is sophomore slump and how much of it was just Gladstone changing things up a bit. Ultimately I did enjoy this book and found it just as interesting and thought-provoking as the first one. But it took me a lot longer to get there. At least part of that is because Caleb is a difficult protagonist. And he's the only point of view we get in this book, aside from a few brief interludes. So we have a much narrower scope and a lot of time spent with a character that I took a long time to warm up to. I suppose it's no surprise that I wasn't as immediately or intensely excited about this book. The thing about Caleb is that he's content. And that's just not that interesting. He likes his work. He likes his life. He's not hugely passionate about anything, but neither is he deeply dissatisfied. His biggest problem is his relationship with his father, who was a priest of the fall...

Towards the end of Born a Crime , Trevor Noah talks about the time he was arrested under suspicion of stealing a car. He pauses to explain how this all works in South Africa - the difference between jail and prison, what a bail hearing is, what happens if you can't make bail. It's a shitty, rigged system. Then he points out that it's basically the same system we have in America. Noah's memoir of growing up in South Africa during and immediately after Apartheid is full of stuff like this. The racism there is formalized and explicit. His very existence is against the law, and he spends his childhood never quite fitting in anywhere because no one quite knows how to classify him. But he reminds the audience again and again, sometimes subtly and other times less so, that this is hardly unique to South Africa. They studied things that worked and didn't work around the world, and the US was one of their primary sources of inspiration. The book itself is really interest...

The Tempest  may just win an award for the thing I've been intending to read for the longest time. Back in 6th grade, my drama teacher gave me a copy and told me that I'd like it because of the magical elements. And it's one of Shakespeare's shorter plays - an excellent entry point for a precocious tween. But I never got around to it. I know enough to recognize the references I see all around me. Prospero in Night Circus  and his disappointment when his daughter rejects the name Miranda. "Hell is empty and all the devils are here" quoted or misquoted every time we as a nation take another step backwards. Caliban's War  in the Expanse  series and Full Fathom Five  in the Craft Sequence . I finally decided that enough was enough. Surely I was missing even more references than I was recognizing. As my teacher recognized all those years ago, this is one of those foundational works that ought to be required for anyone with a healthy interest in SFF. So I pi...

Kevin got me this book for Christmas, and I really tried to read it. It's a collection of Hawaiin myths, most of them about five pages long. It seemed like perfect bedtime reading. But it was awful. Disorganized and poorly translated to the point of being almost unreadable. As short as these stories were, I often got bored and lost the thread halfway through, which left me wondering what had just happened and what the point was more often than not. About three-quarters of the way through, I finally gave up. I wanted to like this. I wanted to learn more about Hawaiin myth, because they have a huge pantheon of gods that I know very little about. I at least have some of the basics now: Maui to trickster, Pele the quick-tempered and jealous god of lava, and so on. But any entertainment was drowned out by confusion. Information is never introduced in a natural way to build tension, instead slipped in right before it's needed. It didn't help that I picked up on one or two mis...

Like the first Science of the Discworld  book, this one alternates between non-fiction chapters and a story about the Discworld wizards exploring our world. The author's classify the non-fiction chapters as extended footnotes for the "story" chapters, and I guess that makes sense of the organization. Though those so-called footnotes are twice as long as the non-footnote material. Where the first book followed a linear time progression from big bang to the creation of life on earth, this one jumps around a bit more in time. As do the wizards. And while it coalesces around certain themes, this book ended up feeling a bit all over the place to me. It's much more thought experiment, being a history of civilization and philosophy and something of an extended argument against religion and for science. Which is all well and good, but it isn't entirely what I was expecting. There were, as always, a few fun tidbits. But this book ended up feeling a little all over the ...

I finally made it to the end of LM Montgomery's series about Anne Shirley Blythe, and man was it worth it to get to this gem of a book. Rilla of Ingleside  is easily the best book of the series, throwing Anne's idyllic world into turmoil during the first world war. The rest of the series may have gotten repetitive and boring, but it makes the hardship and tragedy in this one stand out that much more. This book follow's Anne's youngest daughter. At the outset, she's eager to grow up, go to parties, get a boyfriend or two, and generally enjoy her youth. Unlike her brothers and sisters, she has no real ambition beyond enjoying her late teens. But all that gets thrown out the window by world events. One by one, Rilla's brothers sign up and travel to the front. Instead of parties and dates, Rilla finds herself organizing Red Cross fundraisers and raising a baby whose mother died and whose father left for the war and hasn't been heard of since. She has to grow...

On some level, whatever I read after Three Parts Dead  was going to suffer by comparison. That book was so perfect for me that it was unlikely I would like the next one as much. But I don't think that's the only reason that I was lukewarm on this book. This book, the second in King's The Dark Tower  series was fine. Parts of it were exciting. Parts were interesting. But overall I feel like I just didn't get it. I spent a lot of it wondering what the point was, and I never really warmed up to any of the characters. I bought the next two books in the series, and I'll probably get around to reading them. But I'm not particularly excited about them, and I don't really see myself finishing this series at this point. A lot of people love it, and I expected to have stronger feelings after two book. I think maybe this one just isn't for me.