Bookish Thoughts

The whole point of a book club is to read books that you wouldn't otherwise pick up. And I can say with certainty that I never would have read That Kind of Mother  if my book club hadn't picked it. It's got an interesting premise - a white woman adopts a black son and comes face to face with racism in America at the end of the twentieth century. But it's written by a man, and I'm a little wary of a man trying to write about motherhood. Ultimately this book seemed to be lacking...something. It was unfocused, and I think that had to do with the main character's lack of focus. Rebecca has a hard time understanding that the people around her are actually people. Her marriage is barely a marriage at all (I would have divorced him long before Rebecca did). Her most meaningful relationship seems to be with Princess Diana - a celebrity that she's never even met. Towards the end of the book Cheryl accuses Rebecca as seeing her as nothing more than a side characte...

I have to admit that I was a little wary coming into this book. Sure, everyone loved it. It's been recommended to me countless times. But I'm used to family sagas being a lot longer than this. I'm used to authors spending at least 500 pages with three, maybe four generations of a single family. To follow a family for eight generations? And to do it in 300 pages? I worried that the book would jump too much, that I'd be bitter about not spending more time with some of the characters. I shouldn't have worried, really. It took a couple of chapters to adjust my expectations. This isn't a typical family saga so much as it is a series of short stories, or even vignettes, connected because they're all about people who share blood. By the end of the book, the individual chapters have built up something much greater than the sum of it's parts: a sweeping family epic that illuminates how British colonialism and the slave trade continue to have ripple effects toda...

The final volume of Y: The Last Man delivers a mostly satisfying, somewhat tragic ending that wraps up Yorick's epic quest to find his lost love. Everyone converges on Paris for final confrontations, epic reunions, and a few surprising revelations. And then life goes on, as it must. I'm going to have to re-read this whole series again at some point. It took me far too long to pick up on the slow burn romance between Yorick and 355, maybe because it was such an incredibly well done slow burn. But, like Yorick, I was blinded by the quest for Beth. I couldn't see what was right in front of me.  His resolution with Beth (and even Beth 2 and Beth Jr) was fantastic. It hit all the right beats of joy and awkwardness and betrayal and despair. Things were broken between them, and she was ultimately more of a fantasy than a real girl. I'm glad he was able to let her go in the end. I'm mad, though, about 355's death. It was shocking and jaw-dropping and ultimately fr...

The Penelopiad  is Margaret Atwood's exploration of Penelope, wife of Odysseus in The Odyssey . What was she up to while he was gone for twenty years? How did she raise her son and manage her household and fend off all those suitors? And what of the twelve maids who seemed to alternate between loyalty and betrayal and were ultimately hanged? Atwood alternates between prose sections from Penelope's point of view and a Greek Chorus of the hanged maids told in a variety of styles, most of them verse. They offer a counterpoint, sometimes directly contradicting what Penelope claims and allowing Atwood to maintain ambiguity about a story that cannot, ultimately, be known. This book was fine. Or at least it was short. I've been hankering to re-read The Odyssey , particularly the new translation by Emily Wilson, and I thought this might help get me in the mood. But perhaps I should have waited to read it afterwards, with the original material fresher in my mind. Ultimately I di...

Sometimes Octavia Butler's books feel more like outlines than novels. She's all about big ideas, and she gets them across in a really succinct way. Her books are brief, but they haunt me for years afterward, as I continue to turn over the ideas in my head. But sometimes it feels like this comes at the expense of the characters and their relationships with one another. Butler tends to focus in on the major turning points in her characters' lives, filling in the intervening years with a few brief sentences, letting a single scene capture a decade of character growth. She does it well, but I came out of this book wanting more. There are so many characters that we meet so briefly. I wanted more from Jan and Ada, I wanted to know more about what happened to Clay (holy crap, is he the Clay in Clay's Ark?). But this book is about Doro and his protege, Mary. And it's really only about them. Even Emma, née Anwanyu, has been relegated to Doro's sounding board and cons...

The second Incryptid book delivers another exciting adventure. Verity is still torn between her desire to be a professional dancer and her duty to protect the Cryptid population from over-eager monster hunters. But when Dominic tells her that the Covenant's threatened purge of Manhattan is imminent, it's not much of a choice at all. Like Verity's parents, I thought it was obvious from early on that dance was never going to be her future. So while I liked the push and pull of her two lives in the first book, I appreciated that she quickly came to the same conclusion here. When the chips are down, she's going to help her friends, because that's the kind of person she is. Which doesn't mean that she can't or won't grieve that dance career, or that she didn't need her year in NYC to come to that decision. But it was nice to see her life come into focus for her. It was also fun to see a bunch of the cast from the previous book. Though now those friend...

I love this book. It's one of my favorites. I've read it several times, and it's just as good each time. There are so many layers here, so many hints and mysteries, that each re-read rewards me with a little more understanding, a few more answers to my questions. When Pat Rothfuss announced the 10th Anniversary Edition, I had to get it. And while it sat on my shelf for a while before I got around to reading it, the anticipation just makes it that much sweeter. I've talked about this book, at length, on this blog. So I'm just going to talk about the fancy new edition now. There's a new (equally opaque) map. There are discussions of the calendar and the money. Most of this information can be gleaned from the text, but it's nice to have it all laid out in an easy-to-reference place. There's even a pronunciation guide. But best of all, there are illustrations. A bunch of them, showing key scenes in the book. The illustrations were the whole reason I wa...