Category: book reviews (Page 1 of 2)

Thank goodness for my book club and our Tuesday meetings! I wasn’t quite finished with the reading section for this week, so today was pretty easy to get my two hours in. Having the deadline put the pressure on (and having to be accountable to the book club gang helped too).

It also helped that I picked up the book first thing in the morning and read for about thirty minutes before I did anything else. I know it has become a cliche to talk about the “miracle morning” or whatever the productivity gurus call it, but there’s a lot of truth to getting things done first thing in the morning. Even if I only read for ten minutes, or work on my fiction for a minute or two, or edit a page for a client, if I do it first thing in the morning, the rest of the day goes so much better. No matter what happens in the afternoon or evening, if I work a little bit on all my projects and challenges in the morning, the day feels successful. I also end up working more throughout the day because I’ve already jumped started everything in the morning.

The book club book this time around is Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. Highly recommended. It’s historical literary fiction, which is a genre I don’t read often, but whenever I do, I end up enjoying it. Historical fiction is great for fantasy and science fiction writers to read and study because the attention to detail and world-building often demonstrate the same skills a speculative fiction author needs to have. 1930s Korea and Japan are as unfamiliar to me as a secondary world in a fantasy novel might be. I love how Min Jin Lee is able to make the world come alive in my imagination. Very vivid writing, and the plot and characters are highly engaging. I’m about 200 pages into it so far, and frankly, I didn’t want to stop reading earlier this evening when I finished the section we were assigned for book club.

Basically, I know what I’ll be doing first thing tomorrow morning. Gotta find out what happens to Sunja, Yoseb, and Kyunghee!

This one was rockier than I expected. Two hours is a long time, yo! I made it — eventually — by reading while the kids and husband watched our Family Movie Night movie (The Aristocats, in case any are wondering).

Finished Labyrinth, and while the last chapter made me a little wistful, as Sarah returns home, puts away some of the childish things she was clinging to, and sees Ludo, Sir Didymus, and Hoggle in the mirror, I still stand by what I said earlier: The book needed to be less faithful to the movie. Yes, I know this is not the point at all of doing a movie tie-in novelization, but still. The movie’s magic is the movie’s magic; the book didn’t quite get there for me. I’m glad I read it, though, if for no other reason than it makes me want to re-watch the film and go play the role-playing game.

Now I need to finish the reading assignment for my book club before Tuesday night. That should give me good motivation to read as much as I can during work breaks.

I managed it. Read books for two hours today. Finished one book (A Writer Prepares by Lawrence Block), and continued another (the novelization of the movie Labyrinth).

Even though I love the movie, the novelization is slow going. I guess there’s a reason critics complained about the film’s plot. It is rather episodic, and while it works perfectly well in the movie — where we get to experience all the visual wonder of Jim Henson’s creatures and puppetry — it works less well on the page where the wonderful imagery is somewhat lost. It’s not that the author doesn’t describe things almost exactly as they appear in the film, but that kind of description doesn’t capture the magic of the visual effects. The book needed to be much less a rendering of the movie into words and much more an attempt to capture the tone and spirit of the movie (but perhaps with slightly different characterization, imagery, and plot). Sarah is also much less engaging on the page than she is in the movie. Credit to Jennifer Connelly for making that character somewhat interesting and relatable because the book version is not. This just goes to show (again) that books and movies are two different media and what works in one medium doesn’t always work in another.

Also read some Dungeons and Dragons source books and my book club book, Pachinko. Might even sneak in some reading of Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers comics later tonight.

All in all, the first day was a success. But it was also Saturday. Tomorrow should be another easier day to get some reading done, but Monday and the rest of the work week will be the real test. Can I manage two hours of book reading each day while also freelancing? I kinda thought my lunch breaks and morning coffee and such would provide me with plenty of time (or hour or more), but it turns out, I don’t actually have that much time in those moments. Morning coffee is interrupted by kids and household duties; lunch is probably 30 minutes max. I had to sneak time for myself this Saturday to get my two hours. Not sure how easy this will be starting Monday.

But man, does it feel good to read books and not be scrolling the endless wasteland of the internet.