Bookin' It Thru Life

My mom actually recommended this book to me ages ago.   I believe two of my sisters said they had enjoyed it too.   For whatever reason I had not sought it out.   Alas, one day, there I was at Half Price Books exchanging 10 boxes of old books for $22 and considering that quite a deal (the box contained a decade+ old tax treatises from my Arthur Andersen days, multiple baseball recruiting books from the late 90s/early 00s (what do you even do with   those things when they are new???), crappy novels that I bought for cents at various sales and probably only barely enjoyed (lots of “Eh” and “Don’t Bothers” in that batch-I kept all the good books),   a stack of baby name books, a bunch of no longer relevant self help books (nope, not mine, they just showed up … I HATE self help books would not cop to owning or reading one if you tortured me) so I was just happy to have them out of my basement).   In any case, while they were logging everything in I wandered a...

This was at the top of the list of books I was looking forward to this year.   Others include the next installment of Game of Thrones which apparently is never going to happen ( by the by, I think that’s fine…an author in my opinion doesn’t owe his readers anything.   In case you are not up on your GOT fandom, there is a whole contingent of fans who are furious with him.   He gave us a bunch of books, hours and hours of reading (years for some people...his books are crazy long), he worked with the GOT show runners at HBO to wrap it up…I mean, part of the process of writing is seeing what happens to and with the characters…if its all been mapped out ahead of time and you have to head in a certain direction, I can see why he is like no, that’s not for me.   I feel a little bad for those readers who scorn tv because the HBO version is FANTASTIC and they are missing out and I also kind of hope the books last centuries and our tv technology may be outdated before ...

I have wanted to read something by LeGuin for a while but just had not stumbled on the right book. Daniel picked up one by her (Wizard of Earthsea) and I asked him to pass it on to me when he is done but he is still making his way through it so its not hit my desk yet-should be a 2019 read.  This one I picked up in NYC at Strands when we were there for Hamilton; I wanted to buy a book to support the store and it was on a "recommended reads" shelf so I took the bait. First, I did not realize that her books were as old as they are.  This was published in the 80s.  Conversely, Le Guin is supposed to be one of the early female fantasy writers so if I had really thought about it I would have placed her writing in maybe the 50s or 60s.  Not so.  It apparently took a while for female fantasy authors to make it.  I am sure there are whole thesis devoted to this topic and since I am a tax accountant and not a literature post-doc, I'm not going to get into it. Th...

Got this recommendation off some list...its about a first generation youth growing up in the US and his immigrant parent's efforts to live and raise their child in a new country.  As coming of age books go its pretty standard fare; as an immigrant story its also nothing out of the ordinary.  But to be clear, this is not really my normal genre so there is probably a whole audience to whom this book was aimed who enjoyed it very much but I found it a fairly typical book about the life of a young man.  Yeah, sure, he was first generation and yeah, his experiences were influenced by that background, but I didn't find anything particularly standout about his life-I mean, we are all just getting through it the best was can, aren't we?  Rating:  #5 Good Enough

Little, Big by John Crowley Ugh, what a slog...can't get through it at all.  Can't even quite figure out what its supposed to be about.  Ostensibly about a family through the generations and their odd relationship with the strange place they call home but I can't quite figure out if its supposed to be historical fiction or a love story or fantasy or a fairy tale or a ghost story or all of that at once?  I'm maybe half way through and I just don't know that I'll ever get much farther.  Note that the writing is great but the story...just not grabbing me.  Would love to know someone else's opinion on this...is it worth keep going?  Does it ever really pick up the pace? Or would I just be wasting more time I don't have??? Rating:  DEFI  (didn't even finish it)

Not that great.  The first book in a trilogy, I started the second one and about half way through but don't know that I will finish...its a better than average fantasy novel but certainly not anything that stands out from the pack.  Characters are ok (Dug is sorta admirable/Lowa is sorta interesting/little Spring is sorta cool), story lines ok (but really, would it be that easy to become queen??), world building ok (Julius Ceasar's Rome is one setting and its both over and underdone), writing ok if your not too much of snob about it.  If you're a fantasy fan and are looking for your next fix its certainly worth checking out.  If you are a general reader who dabbles in fantasy, or a reader who doesn't generally like fantasy, don't waste your time. Rating:  #6 Bearable, Just Barely.

I read this book first in 3rd grade...or rather, my third grade teacher read this to me.  I still remember sitting in her classroom waiting for her to read the next chapter to our class.  Teacher friends, don't ever think you don't impact your students...you do, even 40 years later!  This year I read this book to Josh and we really enjoyed it.  Not going to describe the book except to say that I had forgotten Mrs. Frisby's youngest daughter was named Cynthia and I had also forgotten how desperate the escape from Nimh was and that only two mice made it out, the rest having been lost in the desperate attempt to flee.  There were whole other parts of the book I had forgotten which I was pleased to revisit as if for the first time.  Josh and I looked forward to bedtime every night so we could find out what happened next and I'll admit I was even a little miffed when Jason put him to bed one night and read a chapter without me so that I had to play catch up......