Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (1988) – There are several books on my shelves that I must reread every couple years because I miss them. The Lord of the Rings is one of them (along with Dune, Harry Potter, and the Modesty Blaise books). I guess I originally read it in the seventies and have reread it consistently through the years. Although I’ll try not to compare the book with the movie, after you’ve seen Viggo and Elijah as Aragorn and Frodo, it’s […]
Showing up late, hitting them all in one post
I’m just going to get this out of the way from the start – I read a lot of books this year. A lot. And I started a lot of reviews, because some of them were excellent, and some of them were horrible, and all of them were review worthy. But… between a completely not-user-friendly borrowed computer saga, the nonsense that is our entire world right now, and a year that would just not quit beating up on me and those I loved, well, not […]
Visiting the Land of Stories
On the recommendation of a friend, I bought The Wishing Spell for my 9 year old daughter last year for our family winter solstice book exchange. She devoured it and immediately began urging me to read it. “Mom, you’ll really like it. It’s so good!” So far in her life I’ve always been the one making recommendations of what to read. She was very excited to have a book she wanted to share with me. “It’s as good as Harry Potter!”, the highest praise she can […]
if you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back
I finally got around to finishing N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy. I read the first book, The Fifth Season, sometime in 2016 and was mostly waiting for the next two to be published before diving back in. They are phenomenal books, if extremely bleak. However, (and take note grimdark fans) Jemisin manages to create this bleakness without raping her female characters every other page. Bonkers, I know. Survival is paramount in the Stillness. If you cannot contribute to the survival of your people, community, or […]
Pan-dimensional Pandemonium
Thanks to the newly revived Powell’s Daily Dose, a huge grower of my “to-read” list, this novel came to my attention and I’m glad I took the time to “Interlibrary Loan” it (since I couldn’t find it at either of my local libraries). Don’t let its 662 pages intimidate you. American Elsewhere is a fun combination of noir, horror, and science fiction with a bit of the Truman Show thrown in for good measure (only there are no TV cameras). Robert Jackson Bennett not only […]
I had expected it to be bigger, and cleaner, and more colorful. But still, it is a jewel.
The trope of the opposite sex being alien is so old that’s it’s already so far gone that it’s on another planet all of its own. Nevertheless that’s the premise of this book. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Or rather, Enn is from Earth and all the girls at the party are from…somewhere? Spacy-thing. Doesn’t matter. His friend Vic drags him to a party with the advice “You just gotta talk to them.” It’s an old joke and it really is […]