sophia_sol | Entries tagged with anent: book thoughts 1

Here comes my annual list of all the books I read in the past year! Italics means a reread. Stars are out of 5.

( The list, with links to my reviews )

( The stats! )

Yay more squirrel girl! This one featuring SKRULLS and the incredible notion that not everyone of a specific species is in fact naturally evil! This one's less funny than some but continues to be A+ content.

Ever since I heard about the new Little Women movie that was coming out I was very excited about it, because it looked like it was going to do interesting things with the adaptation.

So I decided I needed to reread the book in preparation for going to see it, since it's been a few years since I've read it. I grew up on Little Women and its sequels and love them all dearly (in full recognition of their various imperfections), but my memory is not good and I wanted to be sure that I would be able to catch what the movie was doing with respect with its choices about what to maintain/alter/remove in its adaptation.

Little Women the book is a challenging one to make a movie of, because it's so long and so many things happen in it, without there really being a single overarching plot that it can be distilled down to because it's so episodic, and I think the movie made a lot of great choices in how to make that jump from page to screen.

The thing is. The thing is! I grew up with this book, right, so of course there are very specific things that I imprinted hard on emotionally, and a movie that interprets those things differently from me is never going to work 100% for me as a viewer.

Which honestly kind of disappoints me? Because like, a) a lot of ways the movie adapts the book are SO GOOD and I was delighted by these things, and b) the thing I'm maddest about is one that, in isolation, is a narrative choice that would very much make me happy if it was about different characters than the ones I grew up with.

OKAY let's get to the spoilers!

( Read more... )

Oooh dang, this is really good. I finished it nearly a week ago though, and I didn't write down my thoughts right away and I am regretting that! Let's see what I can pull out of my memory.

Featuring: A woman who created a popular dating app, and an ex-football player who once ghosted her! I loved both of the lead characters, and I really believed in both their interest in each other and in the issues that keep their relationship from being smooth sailing from the start.

I also really liked the way that major issues within both of their fields of work are integrated into the story - sexual harassment issues and the significant long-term effects of repeated concussions. Both of these issues are ones I care about deeply too and the book did a great job at its depiction of both, and I really appreciated the spotlight.

And, as I've also appreciated about past Alisha Rai novels I've read, the lead characters are each well-integrated into a larger community of people they care about, instead of existing in a vacuum with only each other. I cared a lot about all the various people in each of the leads' lives! (yes I am avoiding using any character names in this entire review, you think I can manage to hold onto names for an entire week without forgetting them??)

Basically: WHAT A GOOD. Lives up to everything I was hoping for from it, and more!

WHY do I keep reading Alyssa Cole when her books never work for me??? Sigh. I guess it's because they just keep coming so close and hope springs eternal. I'm letting go for real this time though! (And will keep dreaming of what could have been with A Hope Divided, because that one came SO CLOSE.)

This one is a romance set in the era of the civil rights movement, between a Jewish man and a black woman. I liked both lead characters, I liked their backstory together, I liked the activism that is the focus of the action in the book.

But the way the interest between the leads was described just always felt uncomfortably awkward to read for me, which meant that any scene that was about their relationship rather than their commitment to their cause or their relationships with their families or their personal growth just didn't really work for me. (Possibly this is another "me being asexual" thing. Sexual interest between characters in some other romance novels does work for me, for a given value of "work" where I merely find it boring and unrelatable, but it's possible that the way Cole writes it just hits those notes in a different way where it's a little too obviously alien to my experience, or something? idk!).

And, more disappointingly, it felt like at a certain point in the book the story rather abruptly went from having a narrative shape to just skipping from scene to scene. The first half or so of the book felt well framed and well balanced to me. But after Sofie joins the bus rides, the rest of the book felt like a series of snapshot epilogues instead of actually telling the whole story, which was disappointing and made me feel like I never got a satisfying ending to the story and the characters. Up to that point I was thinking that maybe I'd finally found an Alyssa Cole book that I actually liked!

SIGH.

Squirrel Girl continues to be the actual best!

The first issue in this volume is a self-contained story about time travel and I ADORED EVERYTHING ABOUT IT. Also this is the second time now that The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl has told a time travel story involving Doreen and Nancy's elderly selves being each other's Most Important Person and I am so here for it.

The rest of the volume covers Squirrel Girl's part in some title-spanning Marvel Comics event, and like, whatever about the event, but the Squirrel Girl story was charming. I loved the stuff about Ratatoskr and Doreen's team-up, and Loki's presence is always a delight. And the whales' reactions to Rachel!! Amazing.

Some time ago a kind soul (

heckofabecca) gave me a brief run-down of the events of chapter 9's dinner party, in preparation for the day when I'd finally get to this book in my read-through of the Vorkosigan Saga. And I am so very grateful, because it means I could just skip that entire chapter to miss all the embarrassment-squick, while still being able to understand the fall-out.

Other than that one chapter (and, okay, a couple pages' worth of misunderstanding in an earlier chapter...and watching Miles make terrible choices in his plans to secretly court Ekaterin), this book is a delight!

( I guess these things are spoilers? )

But also: Byerly! Ivan! The Koudelka sisters! Gregor and Nikki! More Ekaterin! Lots of great stuff in this book.

I've been following Jackson Bird on youtube for years, since the days when his channel was mostly Will It Waffle, a series about putting weird things in waffle irons to see what happens. These days his channel is mostly about being trans. This book is his memoir!

This is the second time now I've read a nonfiction book by a youtuber I've watched a lot of (previously: Caitlin Doughty) and I think what I've learned is that the audience for books like these is actually NOT the people who are big fans of the author's online presence. Because once again I was familiar enough with the broad strokes of the story, from having watched almost every Jackson Bird youtube video, that the book was kind of...boring? (I'm sorry!) And it didn't help that this book is also giving a bunch of earnest educational Trans 101 content. Which I'm sure many people would find useful, but seriously, I know that stuff already.

And like, yeah, there were new details about Jackson's story in the book, for sure, including some great stuff -- but not actually enough new content overall to really grab me. Which means I'm no use in judging whether other people might like this book! I think so? But like. *vague shrug*

Anyway I hope the book does very well for Jackson's sake regardless of whether it was the right book for me. Because I'm definitely a fan of his youtube work! Even if I do miss the days of Will It Waffle. And some of his videos these days are also a little too LGBTQ 101 education for me. Ah well. I know the Will It Waffle content wasn't as popular as what he's doing now. The heart wants what it wants, but I recognise I am not actually the sole audience for his videos.

Sometimes I forget that I haven't actually read all of the Vorkosigan Saga. I've been immersed in the fandom so long, have read so much fic, that I have managed to infer a lot of what happens in the books without actually reading them all.

But I do genuinely like the canon for this series! So I finally made a bit more progress on my read-through. Komarr has been read!

This is the one that introduces Ekaterin, and I'm so pleased to finally meet her properly. I don't know. What is there to say? Another good instalment in a good series. I liked Ekaterin and Miles a lot.

A number of years ago Naomi Kritzer wrote a short story called Cat Pictures, Please about a baby AI trying to figure out morality and how to interact with humans. It was very popular and won awards. I liked it a lot too!

This book is something of a sequel to that story. It's a near-future YA novel about a teen girl named Steph whose mom is constantly on the run from her abusive ex-husband but won't tell Steph hardly anything about the situation. Steph, because of all the moving, gets most of her social interaction online on a site called CatNet where she has a group of good friends. One of whom is secretly the slightly-less-baby AI from the short story!

A quick, easy read. I don't have a lot to say about it but it was an enjoyable way to spend an evening. Also: lots of queer characters, for those for whom that's a draw.

My one complaint is that the ending is more of a set-up for a sequel than a satisfactory ending on its own. Dangit, don't end books with brand-new game-changing information that you're not going to address in that book!

So this is a trilogy that I have been seeing around for what feels like forever, having been popular when I was in approximately the right age bracket to be its intended audience, but I never actually read it when I was of that age because it didn't really seem like my thing for some reason. I've finally gotten round to it though and....it wasn't what I was expecting? Basically all I knew was that there was magic and undead beings, so when the main character of the first book turned out to be a teenager in her last year of boarding school in a context remarkably reminiscent of early 20th century Earth, I was surprised.

Anyway, the trilogy might not have been exactly what I was expecting, but I did enjoy it! I think I was right that it's not exactly my kind of thing, but I definitely do understand why it was so popular.

I liked the three books to varying degrees. I feel like the first one (Sabriel) was overall the most successful for me, although my one major complaint would be that I feel the end needs a LITTLE more breathing space after the day is won, as the end feels a bit abrupt.

(Also: there's more than one YA novel from the late 20th century featuring a flamboyant undead evil sorcerer named approximately Roger? Okay!)

In the second book, Lirael, I really loved the main character Lirael and her efforts to try to make a place for herself and discover herself while being something of an outsider among her own people. Lirael's feelings about family and identity were very compelling to me. And I found the Clayr fascinating! I was kind of bored by Sam's parts of the book though, which are not insignificant. Also, by this point I was wondering more about what's with the generally evil nature of the dead? What's the motivation of the bad guys beyond just Being Evil?

The third book, Abhorsen, I got kind of bogged down in. Instead of the focus being on a particular character's growth arc, the focus was much more about Saving The World From Ultimate Evil. Also, there was more Sam. Sorry, Sam, but you're boring. And so's Nick. I got through Abhorsen in the end, because I wanted to know how it would end, but I was never particularly engaged by it.

This was a book that seemed going in like I was going to adore it (a book set IN SPACE with inspiration from fairy tale tropes!), so I was really disappointed to discover that I mostly found it....fine. The kind of book where I'm sure that there are people out there for whom this is the perfect book, and I only wish I were one of them.

I think my biggest problem with it is this: each chapter begins with some very deliberate infodumping. And although I can see that it was a deliberate choice and even see what the author was going for and appreciate it, the end result is that the narrative keeps on deflating its own tension over and over and over again. Which means I never felt truly drawn into the story.

Also! Spoiler! ( Read more... )

This is a book which is in large part about the development of a romantic relationship, with the HEA and all, and yet it is somehow very clear to me that it is not a part of the Romance Genre, it's the Literary Fiction Genre. I don't know what it is about the book that is shouting this at me so clearly but there we are.

Anyway. I enjoyed the book? And I thought it was good. But I didn't particularly love it, idk.

Evvie is trying to figure out her life after her husband died on the day she was planning to leave him. Dean is a baseball player who's lost his ability to pitch (he's got the yips). He rents an apartment from her that's attached to her house, and they try not to talk about the things that are weighing heavily upon them but inevitably talk about these things nonetheless.

I liked the effort to show the importance of other relationships in Evvie's life, like how great her dad is, and her best-friendship with Andy, and her development of a friendship with Monica. But I did not like how Heterosexual this book was about friendships - after she and Andy both develop new romantic relationships, the book presents it as obvious and inevitable that their close friendship will pull back from what it was before. Which like. :( I was invested in their friendship! I was worried throughout most of the book that this was what would happen! I'm really annoyed that I was right!

The romantic relationship was....fine. I have a bit of trouble believing in it as a long-term thing, because I don't feel like the reader really gets to see why Evvie and Dean are into each other as individual people, instead of their relationship just being a side-effect of the inevitable intimacy of living together at a time when they're both emotionally vulnerable. But they seem happy with each other so that's very nice for them.

One final thing--content note for depictions of an abusive relationship. ( spoilers )

Sequel to Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer, and if you loved the first book, this one is more of all the things that were so delightful about the first one. And as the author says in the end note: "sometimes funny things and sad things and magic and science are all mixed up together." EXACTLY and it is all done so well! I loved it.

Roller Girl, by Victoria Jamieson

A charming middle-grade graphic novel about the travails of managing friendships as a preteen, as the main character Astrid discovers the joys of roller derby. I loved the way all Astrid's various relationships were portrayed in the book - her friendships, her mom, her mentor/role model Rainbow Bite, the coaches of the roller derby summer camp, etc. A fun short read.

Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer, by Kelly Jones, illustrations by Katie Kath

A lovely, engaging novel for kids, about the difficulties in starting life afresh when your family moves to a new place, the excitement of discovering things to love about farm life, the sadness of missing family members who have passed on, the importance of community, and of course, chickens with superpowers. There are also illustrations throughout which add a lot to experience of the story. I don't have a lot to say about this book, but it's good stuff. Thanks to

rachelmanija's review of this book for letting me know of its existence!

People who've been following me for a long time may or may not remember that years ago I was working on making my way through the whole Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. For those unfamiliar: this is a series of 20ish* books following the adventures of a naval captain named Jack Aubrey and his close friend Stephen Maturin, a naturalist and physician who travels with him as ship's surgeon, during the Napoleonic Wars.

I got stuck in my read-through FIVE YEARS AGO because the book I was halfway into (#11) was too stressful to read, and I just........kept on not being able to finish reading it. So finally I was like, you know what, I miss these books, I'm just gonna reread the first one instead.

And gosh, I'd forgotten JUST HOW MUCH I adore Patrick O'Brian's writing. This man is one of my absolute favourite authors and I don't know how he does it, he just writes in a way that is perfectly suited to my tastes: he's funny, and interesting, and has a deft hand for how to create (or defuse) tension, and can bring wonderful characters to life in moments, and is a master hand at implying things for the reader to infer (the whole business with getting that replacement spar in this book! amazing!), and has perfect pacing with which he subtly lays out his jokes, and so much more, I just love these books so much. And it's amazing to see how brilliant O'Brian already was in the very first book of this series.

It felt strange to be back at the beginning of the series again, with Jack Aubrey a young man just recently promoted to his first ever command of a ship, and once again seeing Aubrey and Maturin's hilarious opposite-of-a-meet-cute at the beginning. So much has happened between book 1 and book 11!

I can't say that reading this book was un-stressful though. Unlike when I first read it, I have a deep and longstanding love for the characters involved and so my concerns about what's going to happen to them over the course of the book are that much more intense. Even though I know things more or less work out for the characters in the long run, seeing them go through negative experiences (or anticipating seeing them go through such) is HARD! So I had to do a perhaps-unreasonable amount of pausing the reread for a few days here and there to gain the strength to continue. Not exactly the easy escape from being stuck halfway through #11 I was expecting, whoops. But I got through it in the end and I still adore this book and this series and these characters and everything. WHAT A GOOD.

*the "ish" is because the 21st book was unfinished at the time of the author's death but was published anyways in that incomplete state

I picked this book back up because I want to read the sequels but I felt that would go better if I reminded myself what happened in the first one.

So this was my second time reading this book, and both times I found myself stopping halfway through the book for a very long break (like, multi-month), long enough to mostly forget what happened in the first half, before finally finishing the book. Usually I only do this kind of thing if I'm finding a book unusually stressful (eg The Tenant of Wildfell Hall or The Reverse of the Medal), but I don't find The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms to be that stressful, so there's clearly something else going on...? I said the first time I read this book that I loved it, and I think that's true, but it seems that there's something about it that doesn't work for me, even if I'm not sure how to articulate what.

I'll be interested to find out what I think about the sequels.

Ahh, the quartet-long arc of Murderbot's complicated feelings about its relationships with other beings and about what it wants to do with itself is so good!

I've been hearing about the Murderbot novellas for a while, but kept on going back and forth on whether to pick them up based on different things I was hearing about them. But finally I decided to give them a try and I'm SO GLAD I DID! And also, actually, super glad I waited till now because it meant I could read all four of them together in one go. I feel like the series arc really benefits from treating it as a four-volume novel rather than as four separate books. Each book has its own story but they build together beautifully. And I think if I'd read the first one on its own I would have been a bit disappointed by it despite all the things that book does well, but because the end of the first book is not even close to the end of Murderbot's arc, I am instead delighted.

( spoilers of varying degrees for all four books )

Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor

A teenage girl from a tribe of people who never leave Earth or their homeland goes away to university on another planet. But her ship is attacked by aliens who have a longstanding pattern of violence with another group of humans.

I liked...everything about the book except the plot. ( Read more... )

Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor

Sequel to Binti. I liked this one much better than the first. It focuses on Binti's sense of who she is: her identity, and her home. Which can be hard questions! After a year away at university on another planet away from her insular tribe, Binti decides to return to her home for a visit with a purpose, but home is not the same as she left it, and neither is she.

( Read more... )

And overall I feel like this duology would be better served by not being sff, which is always weird when I find myself feeling this way! I think this is only the second time in my memory? Usually I feel the opposite!

Despite my complaints though I really did enjoy this book.

A novella in the Rivers of London series, outside the main books because it's not focused on Peter Grant. Instead it's set in Germany and the MC is Peter's equivalent there -- the sole apprentice to the country's sole magic practitioner.

I don't feel like the death that kicked off the plot was sufficiently addressed, after other aspects of the plot kept developing and receiving more attention. So that feels like a hanging thread that kind of bugs me. I also don't feel like I got a great sense of the personalities of the main characters of this book, which is too bad.

It was a fun quick read with some interesting details and I definitely enjoyed it, but in the end I don't love it as much as the main novels in the series.