Bookish Thoughts

Like most of Jo Walton's books, this was a slow burn that grew on me as I read it. It gained depth as it went, until it finished as an entirely different sort of story than when it started. Farthing  (and it's two sequels which I may or may not read at some point) takes place in an alternate version of 1949, just outside London. In this world, England has reached a truce with Hitler and let him have the continent. America never entered the war, becoming increasingly isolationist. And fascism is on the rise in all sorts of insidious little ways. Lucy and her husband are spending the weekend with her parents at the estate, something that has been increasingly rare since Lucy went against their wishes and married a Jewish man. When a man is murdered, it quickly becomes apparent that the real murderer is trying to frame Lucy's husband, David. And politics being what they are, there's not much anyone can do about it. This starts a cozy murder mystery, with the point of...

I'd been hoping that this book, the third in the series, would be narrated by Morwen, and I was so excited when that turned out to be the case. That alone might be enough to solidify this one as my favorite of The Enchanted Forest Chronicles . Morwen is as practical as Cimorene, but with more hands on experience. And tons of cats. These books are the tiniest bit forumlaic in that each plot basically hinges on the wizards finding a new way to steal magic and the heroes finding new ways to thwart them. But both the books and the series are so short that I wasn't really bothered by that. It was fun to see more of the Enchanted Forest, to meet some new characters and learn about new magic. I really liked that one of the main villains in this book was obsessed with tradition. It's not the the main characters are against all tradition. But they're practical, forward thinking people. Tradition for the sake of it isn't so great. And I was even more pleased when the book...

I've dabbled in a lot of Seanan McGuire's work over the years. She's incredibly prolific, and I read and enjoy her blog. I mostly like the books of hers that I've read, though I tend to get a bit nitpicky about them. But I think I've finally found something of hers that I'm going to fall in love with. Discount Armageddon  is the first book in her Incryptid series, which follows a family of cryptozoologists straddling the thin line between protecting humans from cryptids and cryptids from humans. They exist in a grey area in a world that insists these matters are black and white. The first book follows middle daughter, Verity Price, who is spending a year in Manhattan to study the locals and figure out what she actually wants to do with her life. Verity filled a Buffy -shaped hole in my heart that I hadn't even known was there. I didn't realize how much I missed that wit and snark, that endless training that leads to exhilarating fight scenes, that re...

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...