Bookish Thoughts

The seventh volume of Saga deals with love and loss, mostly loss. Hazel and her family find themselves stranded on the comet Phang while their ship refuels. Phang, the book reminds us, is where The Will found Sophie. It's a poor, exploited, downtrodden war zone. But Hazel and her family end up enjoying some of the best months of their lives their. Right up until it all turns to shit. Hazel's older now, and it's fun to see her as a bratty six-year-old. She's dealing with conflicting feelings about her mom's pregnancy, lashing out at her baby-sitter, making new friends with the locals. It's all very sweet and heartwarming, but the impending doom adds a lot of tension. Things go belly-up pretty spectacularly. A new assassin has been sent after the family, but the two warring nations are also conspiring to just get rid of Phang once and for all. Why continue to expend resources when you can just cut your losses? It's always sad to lose characters, but if I...

Homo Deus  is by turns horrific, terrifying, and rage-inducing. It balances this with moments of awe and wonder at all humanity has accomplished and the things we continue to do. Reading this book is like balancing on the knife's edge of despair and optimism. But Harris never quite lets you fall wholly into either emotion. Which means that the book ultimately left me with a weird, unsettled feeling and a whole lot to think about. Harris paints with broad-strokes. He takes the macro view of history, and boy is it macro. Because of that view he makes a lot of sweeping statements and ignores almost all nuance and detail. Sure, he holds up any number of examples, but he never really digs down into the weeds to examine things on a more human level or timescale. A lot of the book is a condensed re-hash of Sapiens , necessary because he's using past trends to inform his predictions about the future. And some of his conclusions didn't sit right with me. Not that I know quite en...

Bujold recently released a new Vorkosigan novella, and the truth is that there just isn't that much to say about it. The Flowers of Vashnoi  takes place shortly after Captain Vorpatril's Alliance  and is told from Ekaterine's point of view. It sees her and Enrique testing out a new batch of butter bugs that the hope will consume the radiation in the Vashnoi district and make it habitable sooner. In the course of this project, they discover people living in the irradiated zone, and they have to figure out what to do about it. This is a pretty short story, and for good reason. You have competent, compassionate, and above all privileged people encountering a problem and immediately doing everything within their power to solve it to everyone's benefit. It's an exercise in wish-fulfillment. What if the people in charge genuinely cared about their people and could quickly bring about meaningful change to better their lives? What if knowing about a problem was nearly t...

Ten Woman  was another of the free books Amazon offered for World Book Day. This one is a Chilean work of fiction translated from Spanish. It follows the lives of nine women who have nothing in common but their therapist. The frame story - which is pretty thin - has them all meeting for the first time and sharing their life stories and the reasons they've been attending therapy. The tenth woman is the therapist herself, who also has a story to share. These stories were interesting, and they painted a diverse picture of womanhood. There was something in each story that I was able to relate to, though some of the women were more similar to me than others. One of them had a startling amount in common with my mom. Others had experiences that were completely foreign, though they were valuable to read about. While I enjoyed reading the individual stories, I struggled with understanding the book as a whole. The women barely interact with each other - each chapter is just a different on...

It's been about fifteen years since I first read this book back in high school, but it turns out that I'm still a little bit in love with Lestat. I guess that first love never really goes away. Reckless, blonde, devil-may-care vampires who fall in love at the drop of a hat do it for me every time. The Vampire Lestat  is a much better book than Interview With a Vampire , mostly because Lestat is a much more interesting character than Louis. He's curious without descending into brooding. He tries to be moral without getting self-righteous about it. He makes mistakes, but he's mostly able to learn from them and move on. And he's just so in love with the world around him that you can't help but fall a bit in love with him, too. This book is epic and romantic. It dragged a bit at times, especially in the middle. But the payoff is so rewarding. I love the deep dive into vampiric lore and how their culture has changed over the centuries. I love the way answers are ...

Some of my favorite quotes come from the third Fairyland  book, which sees September traveling to the moon as a criminal and professional revolutionary (she has overthrown two monarchies at this point). There are a lot of lovely passages about what it means to grow up and how to navigate relationships that seem to be constantly changing. Unfortunately, all this great lyrical prose comes at the expense of the plot which is only barely there. It takes nearly half the book to get the gang back together and introduce the main conflict. And then it's resolved almost immediately, which is a bit of a letdown. This book is short, and September herself is angry about how little time she got in Fairyland this time around. But it might be my favorite for all the wisdom the narrator dispenses. There's a lot in here about the power of naming and perceiving and how you become what other people call you but it also matters what you call yourself. Saying no comes up again and again, as som...

It was a lot of fun to re-read The Wee Free Men  at the same time as the Fairyland  books. Tiffany Aching and September have a lot in common, and if they were ever to meet I think they'd be friends. Except that Tiffany may have been able to warn September about the fairies. But I'm getting ahead of myself. In this book, nine-year-old Tiffany starts to discover her destiny. Which isn't written in the stars so much as it's written in her bones. Tiffany is the second-youngest child in a large farm family. She was the baby until her younger brother, Wentworth, the long-awaited son, came along and stole all the attention from her. So now she watches him and does her chores and misses her grandmother. But the the fairy queen shows up and kidnaps Wentworth. And Tiffany, practical, angry Tiffany, who kind of resents her brother for being born, doesn't hesitate to set out looking for him. With the help of the Nac Mac Feegle, the titular Wee Free Men, she begins to learn ...