Kareila's Bookshelf

This book is rumored to be an adaptation of "The Goose Girl" from Grimm's Fairy Tales, although the author herself makes no such claim, and apart from a horse named Falada and some rather incidental geese, I can hardly see the resemblance. That said, it is (of course) a good story, rather frightening in places, but with a warm heart.

This book spoke to me more than any other ADHD-related book I've read so far. In lieu of a review, I'm just going to paste out all the passages I highlighted, so that I'll have them to refer back to after my Kindle loan expires.

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So yeah, a lot of food for thought here, especially traits going back to my childhood that I thought were just part of my personality, that I didn't realize could also be associated with ADHD. But the stuff about ADHD symptoms being made more severe by the onset of menopause was the big "aha" moment for me.

( Owlflight, Owlsight, Owlknight )

Taken all together, these books partially answer the question of what came next after Storm Breaking, although limited to a remote corner of Valdemar and the barbarian lands to the north. They were published, along with Brightly Burning and Take a Thief, between the years of 1997-2001, when I was too busy hanging out on the internet to read much of anything at all. I'm glad to be finally caught up now, although I'm left scratching my head wondering why Lackey hasn't returned to post-Storms Valdemar until recently, preferring instead to churn out 11 books about the decades immediately following Vanyel's death.

This book covers much of the same ground as his autobiography Spaceman, but is organized instead as "life lessons learned" - I can't help but wonder if this is included as part of the curriculum he teaches as a professor at Columbia. Chock full of inspiration, humility, and hilarious anecdotes.

I don't have much to say about this one. There are foxes on the cover, so trickery is implied. Our normally resourceful protagonist is unusually placid here, caught up as a mere pawn in someone else's game, which ends up being even creepier than one would expect from the premise.

I'm working on giving myself permission to actively quit things once I've invested time in them, instead of just leaving them unfinished indefinitely.

This is the manga that was adapted into Studio Ghibli's first feature film. Although the art is great, the story is hard to follow, and by the halfway point, the plot had diverged so far from what was shown in the movie that I lost interest.

(On the other hand, the manga doesn't have the hints of fan service that show up in the film.)

It just clicked for me that the likely reason I don't usually care for short stories is that they generally provide too little payoff for the initial effort of decoding the characters and the parameters of the worlds in which they exist.

So with that in mind (as well as the fact that I borrowed the book from the library and won't be able to renew it), I skipped all of the unaffiliated stories in this collection except for the longest two, both of which are very good. I also enjoyed the three stories set in the Imperial Radch universe, despite not finding any obvious callbacks to the novels. The back half of the collection is devoted to the universe of The Raven Tower, which was not my jam, so I felt no desire to linger on these.

In other words, I liked the only 5 stories I took the time to read: "Lake of Souls", "Another Word for World", "Night's Slow Poison", "She Commands Me and I Obey", and "The Creation and Destruction of the World" - although that last one is a fable, and it isn't clear to me what the Imperial Radch connection is.

After throwing some shade on Doctorow in my previous review, I decided to read one of his more recent stories, and this one thankfully manages to be more entertaining than preachy. His Martin Hench is a high stakes freelance operative, kind of like James Bond if he were a computer-savvy financial whiz who came of age during the days of Lotus 1-2-3, and also a genuinely thoughtful and nice person. Far too much death and mayhem to be considered cozy, but it does have some really sweet moments.

I received this book as a gift from some of my college friends 30 years ago, but I never felt like reading it until I recently got interested in Dungeons & Dragons again. Honestly, although I can see the appeal of a grim Tolkienesque fantasy with recognizable D&D elements, it's still not for me.

This is a wide-ranging series of transcribed interviews from 2010-11, when Ozawa was taking time off from his busy conducting schedule to recover his health. It's mostly of interest to other classical music fans, and is best accompanied by access to the library of recordings mentioned in their discussions.