Bookish Thoughts

The second Y: The Last Man  book chronicles a series of adventures Yorick, Ampersand, 355, and Dr. Mann have as they continue their journey to California. Some were a lot of fun. Others were weird and off-putting. But it was all entertaining, and I'm still very excited to see what comes next. The first arc deals with three astronauts on the ISS who are returning to Earth. The trio includes two men, and Yorick is excited by the prospect of not being the last man on Earth anymore. This arc helps tie off a few loose threads, particularly the Israelis and their weird conspiracy with Yorick's mom (not the president - I was mistaken). Once all that business is taken care of, we get to follow the main group for a while and the background characters are largely relegated to the back-burner. We see a traveling theater company trying to keep art alive in a small, conservative town. We meet one of 355's oldest friends. And then they encounter a scary militant group in Arizona...

I have to admit, I was never really a fan of the choose your own adventure books that everyone seemed to love when we were kids. I was to cautious to properly appreciate them. So many of the branches led to horrific deaths, and I didn't like those endings. I'd quickly find the single happy (safe, boring) ending and then sit there smugly while my friends recounted the various horribly consequences of their choices. I completely missed the point. Or maybe those books just weren't for me. But a chose-your-own romance? Where every ending is a guaranteed happily ever after? That's something I can get behind. My Lady's Choosing  is a loving parody or romance novels and the women who read them. Everything is heightened. The protagonist/reader falls in love at the drop of a hat and switches her affections to the next potential love interest just as easily. It was a lot of fun to read, and to zoom through all the different romance tropes and backtracking from each new ha...

In the second book of The Enchanted Forest Chronicles , Kazul, king of the dragons, has been kidnapped by the evil wizards who have a new scheme to steal magic. It's up to Cimorene, Morwen, and a few new friends to rescue her and thwart the wizards' latest plan. For some reason I was expecting this whole series to about Cimorene, but this one's told from the point of view of Mendenbar, who she eventually marries. In the beginning I was a little sad about this perspective switch. But it doesn't take long for Mendenbar to seek out Morwen who sends him to Cimorene. This is a fairly short children's book, after all. There isn't that much time to waste. Mandenbar and Cimorene become fast friends. They're both practical and curious, and I was glad that the book made a note of all the long, wandering conversations they had on their quest. Especially because it was obvious pretty early on that these two were going to fall in love and get married. And if that fal...

To celebrate their tenth anniversary, Tor.com released an e-book collection of selected essays from the past ten years. I like tor.com, and the book was free, and I needed something new for my phone, so I downloaded it. I'd already read about half of these essays, but I was happy to read them again. They celebrate science fiction and fantasy. Most of them celebrate specific things about specific works. For the most part, the essays were fun and quick to read, and a lot of them gave me a new perspective on something I don't think about all the time. I did skip two of the essays. There was a long one about Galadriel that just didn't interest me. If I cared that much about Tolkien's elves, I would have managed to read The Silmarillion  by now. And I skipped one about The Raven Cycle . It was basically a love letter to the series, and it looked like it was going to be spoiler-heavy. Since I'm hoping to read that series sooner rather than later (although let's be...

I hated this book. If it hadn't been chosen for my book club, I would have given up after thirty pages. But seeing as I'm organizing and hosting the book club, I couldn't just not read the book. So I powered through (frequently swapping to a different book for a break), and ended up with nice long list of grievances. The broadest of those is that this book is lazy. The author relies overmuch on cliches and stereotypes. Worse, it seems obviously padded to hit a respectable 300 pages. But there were more than a few completely blank pages between chapters. I got the impression that he struggled to hit a minimum page count, which is a shame. There were plenty of places that the characters could have been better fleshed out. The narrator, Joe, and his interview subject, Carl, are the only two characters who even come close to feeling like actual people. Which makes sense, since the book is basically about them. But even here there were some pretty big missteps. The author el...

I've been meaning to read Y: The Last Man for a while now. It's written by Brian K Vaughan, the same guy responsible for Saga . But unlike Saga , this story is actually complete. I finally managed to get my hands on the first (of five) deluxe books, which collects the first ten issues. And now I'm going to be spending my birthday money on the remaining books. Because I am hooked. The story mostly follows Yorick. He and his pet monkey, Ampersand, are the only males left in the world after some unknown cataclysmic event caused the immediate death of everyone with a Y chromosome. All Yorick wants to do is find his girlfriend, but everyone else has their own plans for him. Yorick's mom is a congresswoman, doing her best to help hold the government together in DC after most of the government officials have died. The Secretary of Agriculture has been rapidly promoted to president, reminding me of Battlestar Galactica . Though I think this women is less qualified, and som...

Dealing with Dragons  is the first book in The Enchanted Forest Chronicles , though not the first book written. Patricia Wrede wrote the last book first, then came back to write a prequel, and eventually it turned into a series of four books. I never encountered it as a child, though now I wish I had. Cimorene is a princess who'd rather not be. She's the seventh daughter, and she'd much rather do practical things like cooking and fencing than learn about etiquette and dancing. When her parents arrange her engagement to an arrogant and boring prince, she runs away from home. Cimorene lives in a world that is very aware of fairy tale tropes. People expect stories and know how to spot the sign posts. It's not unheard of for a dragon to kidnap a princess and a prince or knight to then rescue her, winning her hand in marriage along the way. Indeed, Cimorene meets three other princesses living in the dragon caves with her. But she's the first to volunteer for this lif...