Book #26 of 2016:
Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven Cycle #3)
I really enjoy this series, but this particular book felt less complete than the others somehow. (Perhaps because the next one to come out is going to be the last, so Blue Lily, Lily Blue had to do too much place-setting to tell its own story fully.) But the returning characters and their interactions made this novel worth it, even if the plot was a bit lacking. I’m excited to see how all of it concludes.
★★★☆☆
Movie #6 of 2016:
My Fellow Americans (1996)
This is one of those movies that my family watches ALL THE TIME. (Or at least, we did back when I was growing up. It’d been several years since the last time I saw it, though.) And as such, we quote it all the time. But my partner had never seen it before, and since she’s still intent on marrying into this family, we watched it together last week while she and I were staying at my dad’s house for a few days. Now she can get more of our references!
The movie itself is a really funny – and eminently quotable – comedy about two former American presidents who hate each other but have to team up to expose a scandal that the current president is involved in but trying to blame on them. The two old rivals end up traveling cross-country together on the run from the CIA or whatever, and the whole movie is basically them insulting one another and finding out how out of touch they are with regular Americans, over and over again. Great movie, especially if this current election cycle has you wanting something to laugh at.
★★★★☆
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Book #25 of 2016:
Adulthood Rites by Octavia E. Butler (Xenogenesis #2)
I feel like I still don’t really get this series, which is somewhat less than ideal given that I’m now two-thirds of the way through it. Butler does a good job of making her aliens, well, alien, but more often than not that ends up making them pretty inscrutable. That’s particularly a problem for this book, where the main character is a half-human half-alien who isn’t properly understood by either of his peoples. There’s some fascinating subtext in this novel about multiracial heritage, and I’ve read enough from this author by now to know that blended families are a recurring theme in Butler’s work. I’m just sort of at a loss as to the specific points she’s trying to make here, and I hope the final volume in the series helps clarify things for me.
★★★☆☆
Book #24 of 2016:
Pet Sematary by Stephen King
Pet Sematary is probably the quintessential example of a Stephen King novel with a great, moody build-up throughout the book and then a letdown of an ending. This makes sense, in a way: Pet Sematary is a loose retelling of the short story The Monkey’s Paw, and there’s a reason we never get to see what’s at the door in that story. The horror in your imagination is almost always worse than anything a storyteller could reveal, and that’s something that Stephen King seems to have forgotten here.
★★☆☆☆
Book #23 of 2016:
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
The Girl on the Train has been described by many reviewers as “the next Gone Girl,” and it honestly struggles to escape that novel’s shadow. In fact, without getting too spoilery for either, I would say that this book doesn’t truly get good until the moment it becomes clear that it will not be following Gone Girl’s biggest twist. I enjoyed the mystery aspect that comes from an alcoholic protagonist prone to blackouts, and the central hook of that protagonist thinking she sees evidence in a disappearance / presumed murder case from her train’s window is nice and Hitchcockian. The ending wasn’t too difficult to guess, but I appreciated how quickly the story moved once the final piece clicked into place for the main character.
★★★☆☆
Book #22 of 2016:
Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore (Graceling Realm #3)
Kristin Cashore has improved a lot as both a writer and a worldbuilder over the course of this series, and Bitterblue is easily her best novel yet. This is a work of fantasy from a strong feminist perspective, as a queen and her people grapple with the aftermath of years of mental, physical, and emotional abuse at the hands of her sadistic mind-controlling father. (And the author’s feminism extends beyond the thematic interrogation of abuse. Like its prequels, Bitterblue also contains relationships with explicit consent and same-gender couples presented as normal and healthy. Cashore even rehabilitates a plotting decision from an earlier book after realizing its potential offensiveness to disabled people.)
The closest parallel to this work that I’ve seen would probably be Netflix’s Jessica Jones series, and Bitterblue is easily its equal in how it addresses the abuse cycle and the intractable guilt of survivors within a heightened fantasy reality. The book is more cerebral, however, for it has the advantage of having dispatched its villain in a previous entry in the series. Instead of the mind-controller being an active antagonist concocting schemes and facing off against our hero at the novel’s climax, we follow Queen Bitterblue through a murky kingdom of people all struggling in their own way to come to terms with what he wrought before his death. It’s a welcome contribution to the genre, and I cannot wait to see where its author goes from here.
This book: ★★★★☆
Overall series: ★★★☆☆
Books ranked: 3 > 1 > 2
TV #13 of 2016:
Deadwood, season 1
I’m not sure what to make of this series so far. The production values are great, as is the cast and the acting, but I still feel like most of my enjoyment is coming from spotting all those familiar faces in Wild West getup. The characters themselves are all just really hard to root for, and the plot has been really meandering. Not really what I was expecting from a program that regularly gets mentioned in the same breath as Breaking Bad and The Wire (although I’ve heard that Deadwood gets better in its second two seasons). I’ll press on with the show at some point, but it might be some time before I get back to it.
★★★☆☆
Book #21 of 2016:
Rogues edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois
Rogues took me forever to read, partly because it’s a really long book and partly because I had to share custody of the library copy with two or three other people, so there were weeks at a time when I couldn’t read it at all. Mostly it was worth the wait, though. Like any collection of short fiction, some of the stories within this volume were better than others. But as a whole, I enjoyed it. And even though I picked up the book mainly for the Scott Lynch short story “A Year and a Day in Old Theradane” and the new entries from the Kingkiller Chronicles, Neverwhere, and A Song of Ice and Fire series, there were lots of fun stories that I really enjoyed that I never would have sought out on their own. “What Do You Do?” by Gillian Flynn in particular impressed me so much that I went out and read her novel Gone Girl, which ended up being one of the best books I read last year. There are several stories in this collection I would skip on a reread, but as a whole it was a solid venture.
★★★☆☆
Book #20 of 2016:
Made to Kill by Adam Christopher (Ray Electromatic Mysteries #1)
Made to Kill stars a robot private eye, but it’s nowhere near as good an execution as A. Lee Martinez’s novel The Automatic Detective, my first exposure to that concept. This book never clearly establishes the rules of its world, which makes it hard to fully invest in the schemes of the body-switching communists that its narrator gets caught up in.
The author also makes some narrative choices that seem promising at first but end up contributing little to the story. The most egregious of these is probably the fact that the detective’s memory banks can only last 24 hours, so that he starts each day as a blank slate, unsure of what he got up to the day before until he checks the logs. That could work great for a noir story like this one, allowing for Memento-style double-crosses from other characters or the robot himself. But as it actually plays out, there’s no payout for that setup. The robot checks the logs every day, and that’s that.
This is the first book of a planned trilogy, but I’d rather just reread The Automatic Detective than continue on with this series.
★★☆☆☆
Book #19 of 2016:
Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman
This Neil Gaiman short story collection is about what you would expect if you’ve read a Neil Gaiman short story collection before. I really liked the Sherlock Holmes story The Case of Death and Honey, and of course it’s always fun to check in on Shadow Moon again, but the other stories were hit or miss for me. The Sleeper and the Spindle is a particular gem, albeit one I had read before as a standalone publication, but there’s a lot of other stories included in this book that just feel like the author is spinning his wheels.
I’m also disgruntled at the title of the collection and its explanation in the book’s introduction – it feels both appropriative and mocking, as though Gaiman is claiming a phrase he clearly doesn’t see a need for but just finds fascinating when others use it. I don’t know — your mileage may vary, but I’ve definitely found myself growing out of Neil Gaiman the older I get, and his explanation of why he named this book Trigger Warning really rubbed me the wrong way.
★★★☆☆
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