Book Check In 4/26

This week I was doing a bit more work from home so I had less time to read. I only read 4 books. They were all 4 of the Protector of the Small quartet (First Test, Page, Squire, and Lady Knight) by Tamora Pierce. I read like 2 chapters of A Darker Shade of Magic, I got distracted by Kel. Like I mentioned in my last check in, the Protector of the Small quartet is my favorite.

I love Keladry of Mindelan. Her dedication, her commitment to helping people when she sees something wrong happening. She’s so good! I love the involvement of other cultures that expands in this book. The other series in Tortall sometimes involve other cultures, but I like that because Kel grew up in the Yamani Islands, she has a lot of the culture. I do think it would be nice instead of just being a white girl who was raised with the culture, it would have been nice if she were Yamani herself. But that opens up a whole thing of how she would be able to become a page in Tortall. Maybe if she were half Yamani, her father still a Tortallan Baron but her mother Yamani. I think that would’ve added an extra layer to the story, made it more interesting.

I’m now onto the next series of the Tortall stories: Trickster’s Choice (by Tamora Pierce). I am technically still reading A Darker Shade of Magic. I plan to get there sooner or later, but the first two chapters didn’t pull me in that much and I’ve been really seeking distractions from all the stress, so I put it aside for now. I’ll probably work on it some more this week.

As always, you can see all the books I’ve read on my reading list.

Book Check In 4/19/20

This week I read 7 books!!! Absolutely bonkers. It was kind of a bad week so I was definitely reading books to escape. My grandfather caught COVID-19 about a week ago and died this morning. We’ve all been very stressed about it so I was reading especially a lot. This week I finished The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, Lioness Rampant, Wild Magic, Wolf Speaker, Emperor Mage, and The Realm of the Gods, all by Tamora Pierce, as well as All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.

So I finished the Alanna series, and then the whole Immortals series! The Woman Who Rides Like a Man is easily my favorite of the Alanna series, I think it diverges the most and is the most unique, has the most character growth. Like I talked about last week in my check in, The Alanna series isn’t my favorite because it feels the most similar to other books. In this one, she’s in a different part of the nation which makes it a little more exciting, it’s your stereotypical fantasy desert set up, but it’s still a little more fun than typical fantasy Europe. Alanna spends time learning about herself and trying new things. The other books it feels like she’s more guided, but this one it seems like it’s more her choices guiding the story.

I always under-rate the Immortals series before I read it. I for some reason when I think about it, remember not loving it, but then I reread it and it’s so great! I think because I read in story-chronological order (Beka ➡ Alanna ➡ Daine ➡ Kel ➡ Aly) and I’m always so excited to get to Kel, the Immortals series (Daine) seems like it’s an obstacle I have to get to before I can get to my fave. But it’s actually a great series!!! I like this series more than Alanna because it feels a lot more unique in terms of fantasy, even though in broad strokes, it is pretty common ideas. I think it’s a really fun and exciting story, and I like that each book is a separate thread that come together for the plot of the final book.

Like I mentioned in my last check in, I mostly read All the Light We Cannot See because my dad kept nagging me about it. Everytime I told him about whichever book I was reading, he would ask me when I was gonna read All the Light We Cannot See. I was kind of hesitant for a while because my taste is pretty different from his, but I finally caved and borrowed it from the library. I was surprised at how much I liked it! It weaves the story of two different people in WWII (including the lead up to the war). One is an orphan from Germany who wants to get out and change his life and become an engineer. The other is a French girl who loses her sight when she’s pretty young. Their lives become intertwined in ways that you don’t fully realize until the end of the story. It’s a really lovely book.

I am currently reading First Test by Tamora Pierce, first in the Protector of the Small Quartet (my favorite!). I’ve also started A Darker Shade of Magic. This one was recommended to me by my sister in law.

As always, you can see all the books I’ve read on my reading list.

Book Check In 4/12/20

Since my last check in, I read 4 books! 2 were rereads, and the other 2 were new. I finished Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire, read The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, as well as Alanna the First Adventure and In the Hands of the Goddess by Tamora Pierce.

Come Tumbling Down is the most recent in the Wayward Children series and continues that adventure. I really liked it and was satisfied, but I’m sad that it’s the most recent (published this year!). The books in the series have been coming out 1 per year so I can’t expect another till next year at the earliest. I’ll be reading some of Seanan McGuire’s other series to satisfy me while I wait :) I hope the next Wayward Children book focuses more on Cora. I really like her.

The Memory Police was totally different in tone than all the other books I read this week. It was described in the blurb as “Orwellian” and I think that’s fair. It also reminded me somewhat of the Giver (by Lois Lowry). On this island, things disappear, but not just that things get lost, they are taken away in its entirety, and people forget what meaning those objects once had to them. Some people are able to remember these objects, and if they are found to have the ability to remember, they are taken away by the Memory Police. It was kind of creepy and really good. I couldn’t put it down. It was originally published in Japanese and just last year was translated to English, which is kind of a bummer because there’s not much info out there about it. It had a kind of weird ending and didn’t totally satisfy me, and when I went looking for more info I couldn’t find any. Even with that, I still would recommend this book, it’s very different from other things I’ve read.

And as I mentioned in my last check in, I started the Alanna series. When I do my Tortall reread (when I’m feeling stressed or nostalgic or both) I start with the Beka Cooper series and it launches you right into the Alanna quartet. I’ll be honest, the Alanna books aren’t my favorite of the Tortall books, I think they’re the most similar to other books, girl dresses as boy to become a knight story, and it doesn’t feel as unique. But they are also the first written chronologically, so I give them a pass. The later books have more varied stories and characters that are really fun, but Alanna is present through those later books so I like to include her in my rereads.

I’m currently reading The Woman Who Rides Like a Man by Tamora Pierce, which is one of my favorites out of the Alanna saga, as well as All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which my dad has been recommending to me for literally a year. So far I’m liking it more than expected

Book Check In 4/4/20

Since last week, I read 5 books. I got excited, and I’m under quarantine.

I finished Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, read In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire, and also read Terrier, Bloodhound, and Mastiff by Tamora Pierce (all 3 books of the Beka Cooper series).

Sabrina & Corina is a collection of short stories and I’m really into it. It was part of my library’s “Our Voices” collection that I’ve been making my way through. The collection is books about marginalized people written by people from those same groups. She focuses on Latinx and Indigenous characters and her stories are really good. I kept staying up too later reading because I can’t put it down. I really liked these short stories, and I liked how as you read more of them, you learned more about the author, based on the details that kept popping up in every story. I don’t read enough short stories, which is a bummer cause I really enjoy them.

In an Absent Dream may be my current favorite of the Every Heart a Doorway series. I really really liked this one. I’ve loved all of them, but this one in particular caught my fancy. A girl who keeps going back and forth between a magic realm and our world, trying to make a fair deal with people from both sides. I could hardly put it down, I whipped through it.

I love all of Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books, and when I’m feeling particularly stressed or nostalgic, I reread them all. With all this coronavirus stress and quarantine craziness, I needed something soothing like that. Of all the Tortall books, Beka Cooper is tied for my favorite (with the Protector of the Small quartet). I love Beka and I love these books, they never fail to make me tear up or laugh out loud.

I’m currently reading Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire, which is the next in the Every Heart a Doorway series. So far this one also promises to be awesome.

I’ll also probably start the Alanna series soon, it’s next in my Tortall reread, but I have literally 15 ebooks borrowed from the library that I need to get reading, so we’ll see what happens.

As always, my full book list can be found here.

My favorite books of 2019

So this past year I read 105 books, here are some of my favorites!

Circe by Madeline Miller. An exploration of the myth of Circe from her point of view. Very fun. I personally learned a lot about her story that I had never known and besides, she was always somebody I kind of liked - I always thought turning men into pigs was fun.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. A lot of people have recommended this, it’s a great queer scifi book with found family and it’s very soft. I loved reading it. I also loved both sequels (A Closed and Common Orbit and Record of a Spaceborn Few) even though they’re very different and a lot of people don’t like them as much as the original. A Closed and Common Orbit is focused on two characters and the struggles of their lives (I cried so much reading it). Record of a Spaceborn Few is a really interesting look into a human society in space and how it functions, it travels between the viewpoint of several interconnected characters.

Becoming by Michelle Obama. I only read a little non-fiction, but I really loved this book. She really captured the emotions of her life, and I’m glad it focused on her life outside of being an Obama, and on her roots. She’s a remarkable woman.

The Mermaid’s Daughter by Ann Claycomb. This book was so good. Holy fuck. I love fairy tales, and this is a very unique retelling of The Little Mermaid, and I loved it so much. I made my mom read it, even though she doesn’t like fairy tales, and she loved it. It’s a lesbian romance and it’s really beautiful.

Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand. This one also had a queer romance, but I really liked it because the focus was the strength of girls, and how they were the ones who could make a change. On the island of Sawkill, girls go missing, but the island is sick of it and chooses 3 champions out of the remaining girls to try and defeat the evil that plagues the island. It’s a little bit of a mystery and a little bit of a thriller and it’s a lot of fun. I really whipped through it.

All Out - The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages collected by Saundra Mitchell. This is a collection of short stories by queer authors, and they’re historical fiction. Exactly what it says on the tin, bringing queer people throughout history. It was very soft, most of them had happy endings (I can only recall one that ended unhappily, but it mostly ended in drama, not necessarily in sadness).

Beanstalk by E. Jade Lomax (and sequels Echoes of a Giantkiller and Remember the Dust). I’ll be honest. These are some of my favorite books and I reread them every year. They’re fantasy adventure with a diverse crew and a heavy helping of found family. This group of youths is training to be heroes, and start doing some extracurriculars of fighting monsters in the nearby town because they want to make a difference now, rather than only when they’re finished school. The characters are so rich and the story so good, which is why I keep going back year after year. Also, these books can be read for free as ebooks from the author’s website.

Infected by Scott Sigler. I’ll be honest. This book (and its sequels) were a little ridiculous. I still liked them. Aliens come to earth as spores that infect people to grow the spores and makes them violent and afraid of other people. Our main character gets infected and you can see his descent into paranoia from his perspective which is really interesting, while the authorities are searching for the infection.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. This book is one of my top 2 for the year. An amazing story. Really well fleshed out characters. About a girl who’s raised in the marsh and ends up mostly raising herself, and how she’s viewed as an outsider in the town by most. This comes into play when the town’s golden boy is murdered, and she is suspected, and some immediately believe she’s done it solely due to her status as an outsider.

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai. This is a children’s book based on the author’s lived experiences of being a refugee of the Vietnam War. Very emotional.

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. This was a behemoth of a book, easily the longest I read all year. I took to explaining it to people while I was reading it as “Game of Thrones but actually good”. I say that because like Game of Thrones it’s spread across multiple nations and characters, and they are gearing up to fight a big bad. This book is so much better because there’s less senseless violence, characters do die and bonds are broken but it all is for the purpose to drive the plot forward. This story has it all. Magic, political intrigue, lesbians, dragons, different cultures and religions. What’s not to love?  That being said it is like 800 pages. It does have a satisfying ending though, so it’s worth it.

Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal. This is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in Pakistan. I’ll be honest, I haven’t read P&P, I’ve only watched the 2005 movie, but I loved this book. It was set in modern times, with family who won’t stop meddling and wants the girls to get married because in Pakistan women should still be wives. I think it’s a great adaptation and from what I could tell it sticks close to the original story.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. I liked Circe so much that I read Madeline Miller’s first book, and I really loved it as well. This one is the story of Achilles and Patroclus, from their childhood to the end of the Trojan war. It again brought the myth alive in a new way for me. I also learned that in the original myth, Achilles isn’t invulnerable, he’s just really fast and a great fighter. Who knew? It’s very gay.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See. This is also one of my top 2 for the year. The story of family united by tea. A girl grows up in a small village on a mountain in China where her family picks tea and still sticks with their ancient customs and hasn’t modernized at all. When she’s older, she has a child out of wedlock which is taboo, and according to her culture, the infant should be killed, but instead she abandons her daughter to an orphanage with only a tea cake to find her by. The story continues and splits between the daughter who is adopted to America wondering about her birth mother, and the mother who makes it out of her village to continue her life steeped (lol) in the world of tea, now as a seller rather than a picker. Very interesting culturally and great characters. Very satisfying ending.

Circe

My second book of the year (I'm aiming to read 104 this year so they probably won't all get blog posts) was Circe, by Madeline Miller. Let me preface this by saying I had heard a lot of great things, and I also love mythology, so I was primed to love this book. From the back of the book:

"In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child—not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power—the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.

Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love."

I really love retellings of Myths in unique ways, and this is probably my favorite retelling I've read. Circe in most other tales is a minor character, we mostly know her from the Odyssey, as one of the 'monsters' that Odysseus outwits. I personally liked Circe in the Odyssey, I thought it was fitting that she turned men into pigs. But this story I loved because it gives her perspective. From birth until the end of her story. We often don't see female characters in Greek Myths in a good light; there is some evidence that female centric myths were destroyed or lost to time. Circe in fact has 3 ancient plays about her which are lost. So to have a story which centers on a female character, who often is just the witch archetype, gives her depth and agency which I loved.

Starting at her birth and her childhood as a daughter of Helios, we see her grow and we see why she becomes who she does when we find her in the known myths. She has side action, interacting with other famous heroes and mythic characters and creatures. We see her complex motives and the way she forms her identity. We see how she is too often a pawn for the men around her and that when she is hurt, she increases her power and finds a way to protect herself, as well as those she loves.


I think that anybody who likes Greek Mythology, or Mythology from other pantheons, would like this book. It is beautifully written and very engaging. I finished it in just 3 days because I could hardly put it down. Circe is also very relatable. She isn't a goddess, she's a witch, an alchemist, a poisoner. She doesn't just wave her hands and the world changes as she wills it to, she spends time gathering and preparing herbs, working hard at her craft. She feels guilty for things she did that had hurt those she didn't intend to hurt. She tries to only turn dangerous or hurtful men into pigs, the rest she lets go free. She is truly a very human goddess, which makes her story all the more compelling.

Small Great Things

​So I just finished Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult. For the most part, I enjoyed this book. It was a good story, and I think a timely one (it was published in 2016, so I’m 3 years late). From the back of the book:
“Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than twenty years' experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she's been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don't want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders or does she intervene?

Ruth hesitates before performing CPR and, as a result, is charged with a serious crime. Kennedy McQuarrie, a white public defender, takes her case but gives unexpected advice: Kennedy insists that mentioning race in the courtroom is not a winning strategy. Conflicted by Kennedy's counsel, Ruth tries to keep life as normal as possible for her family—especially her teenage son—as the case becomes a media sensation. As the trial moves forward, Ruth and Kennedy must gain each other's trust, and come to see that what they've been taught their whole lives about others—and themselves—might be wrong.

With incredible empathy, intelligence, and candor, Jodi Picoult tackles race, privilege, prejudice, justice, and compassion—and doesn't offer easy answers. Small Great Things is a remarkable achievement from a writer at the top of her game.”

The death of the infant happens quite early in the story, and the majority of it is focused on the trial. 

I’ll be honest, I’m going to criticize this book a lot, but I really did enjoy it. One night I said I was only going to read for 20 minutes, but it was so gripping I read for 2 hours instead. The plot is very engaging, and the writing is good. There were a couple things I didn't like: that each chapter switched between perspectives of one of the main characters, and that it was a white woman writing about racism.

I thought it was an interesting choice, and one that I didn’t really like, that some of the chapters were told from the perspective of different characters besides Ruth. I’m usually not very impressed with perspective jumps, whether POV or time jumps. POV jumps I mind less, but I’m not crazy about them. This one I don’t think I would have minded, but it often told the same events from two or three different characters perspectives, which got a little repetitive. It felt unnecessary, and that we could have just understood the characters thoughts from their reactions, without having to repeat the entire scene with their thought process. 

But the biggest issue I had with the perspective switch was really the way it was done to humanize the character of the white supremacist. It showed his tragic backstory and the love he found through his beliefs. I personally was torn on this. In some ways I think it’s important to humanize people so that we can see they’re not monsters and to be careful if we see people turning into them. On the other hand, it felt a lot like giving them a voice, when they really shouldn’t have one. 

The book did clearly show that those beliefs were wrong. It also did a lot with general white people’s racism. The fact that as white people, we are all racist, and it’s something that although we might not like to talk, or even think, about it, it’s something we should confront. The author did a great job in asserting this, but at certain points in the novel I couldn’t help but think “wow this was written by a white lady.” It reminded me of the writing advice “it’s good to write books about marginalized people, even if you’re not, but if you’re not, don’t write about the marginalization.” At some points it did seem a little white savior-ish, but thankfully that was somewhat resolved and Kennedy, the white woman, stepped back. 

There was a lot of Kennedy stopping to consider how she interacted differently with the world than people of color do. She spent some time near the middle of the book where she didn’t listen to Ruth when she talked about racism, but towards the end of the book she began listening, which was both good and bad. She spend a good amount of time just depending on Ruth to teach her. However it was an improvement from believing she knew about racism, and it did force her to continue on and confront it in herself and learn apart from Ruth. 

There was a twist at the very end of the book that I absolutely did not like. I don’t want to reveal it and spoil you, however it felt very forced. It seemed like she didn’t want to leave with characters you disliked, so she tried to induce change and it felt very inorganic. Click below for spoilers.

So the 'twist' was that it turned out the white supremacist mother whose baby died was actually half black and her mother had run away and that was what caused her father to hate black people and teach that hate to his daughter. So when his daughter found out she was mixed, she had a breakdown and ended up killing herself. Her husband, the father of the baby who died, instead learned that his white supremacist ways were wrong, and went on to do guest lectures at prison to talk about how white supremacy was wrong. I think it's cool to show reformation and show that it is possible, but I thought this was a sloppy way to do it. That kind of change usually takes a lot of effort, which Picoult mostly skimmed over, and having the wife be white-passing mixed and kill herself just seemed sad.

That being said, I do think she did a fairly good job. She did a lot of research and it really shows. I do think this is an good book to read. But I think where it really excels is as a book for those white people who don’t think they are racist, as a way to ease into thinking about this. They can be spoon fed it by a white author, but still have get the knowledge. And who knows, maybe they’ll branch out from there. The author did leave a bibliography in the back of the book, maybe they can read more about racism today 😉