A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Series I’ve Been Meaning To Start But Haven’t

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week, we’re looking at series…more specifically, ones we’ve been thinking about starting to read but haven’t quite gotten to yet. I don’t tend to be much of a series reader, but there are definitely some beginning volumes of series on my bookshelf that I just haven’t read yet. 



In The Woods: I’ve been told that these are only loosely connected and that this first one is actually one of the weaker entries. But I’m a sucker for reading books in order because I feel like that’s the “right” way to read them, and this one is actually up to be read fairly soon.

Red Rising: This YA (I think?) sci-fi series has gotten great reviews everywhere I’ve seen them, and sci-fi is a genre I’ve enjoyed, so I need to start reading them.

The Passage: This is a post-pandemic and vampire story kind of blend, or so I’ve been told, and since both of those are stories I’m usually interested in and this trilogy is supposed to be great, I’ve snagged the first on for my Kindle.

Throne of Glass: This series is always super buzzy around the YA blogosphere, which has made me curious enough that I want to see what all the fuss is about.

Oryx and Crake: Margaret Atwood is a must-read.

The Cuckoo’s Calling: Same for J.K. Rowling.

Annihiliation: This is the first in a trilogy about a team of scientists who venture into a strange area that has wreaked havoc on previous explorers. It’s supposed to be mysterious and twisty and really really good.

Queen of the Tearling: My sister actually really likes this series, so I’m taking her word for it that I should read these ones.

The Grace of Kings: I think I originally heard this series described as Game of Thrones based in the Eastern rather than Western world, and that’s a high bar (I love ASOIF), but this has won prizes so color me intrigued.

The Magicians: This series has been described as Harry Potter for grown-ups, which I am here for.

Book 81: The Last One


“The production team tries to get everyone out, but they’re on Solo Challenges and widespread. There were contingency plans in place, but not for this. It’s a spiral like that child’s toy: a pen on paper, guided by plastic. A pattern, then something slips and- madness. Incompetency and panic collide. Good intentions give way to self-preservation. No one knows for sure what happened, small scale or large. No one knows precisely what went wrong. But before he dies, the producer will know this much: Something went wrong.” 

Dates Read: August 22-23, 2016

Rating: 9/10

Someone I went to high school with was on Survivor while I was in law school. Watching it to watch him was the first time I’d seen the show, which has been on since I was in high school. I didn’t know the guy in question very well…I’d been in the advanced math class with his brother, but the contestant himself was a year or two behind me. Before watching it, I couldn’t understand what drew people to it…a hotel without TV is about as close to wilderness survival as I want to find myself. But as I watched it until the guy I knew got voted off (which was quite late in the process), I started to get it a little. Proving yourself against physical and mental odds has driven human achievements like climbing mountains and running marathons and exploring new worlds from time immemorial.

The reality show at the center of Alexandra Oliva’s The Last One promises to make Survivor look like child’s play. The producers have a summer-blockbuster-sized budget and are planning to get three episodes per week on the air. There’s no set end point…once all contestants but one utter a quit phrase to be taken out of play, it will be over, with the final person standing winning $1 million. Since it’s the first season, no one knows what to expect. After a series of intense group challenges complete with expensive props and head games to thin the heard a little, the contestants are broken up and sent on solo challenges. They’ve been told to expect to not see even camera people (the production has drones and hidden cameras), so when one of the contestants, known as Zoo, finds herself wandering alone for a long while, she’s not too disturbed. What she and the other contestants don’t know is that as they’re out there, a global pandemic is decimating the population of the country and the world.

In an interesting and perceptive technique, in the chapters that are presented in the third person, the contestants on the show are referred to by nicknames, like Engineer and Air Force and Asian Chick. Our protagonist, Zoo, is so called because she works at a wildlife center. We come into her story in media res, as she discovers an abandoned supermarket and scavenges for supplies. She steps over what she assumes are very well-made prop bodies. The reader knows that people are dying in large numbers and those bodies are almost certainly real, but out of touch with the outside world, what can Zoo think but to assume that it’s all part of the game? Which is exactly what she does think, in the chapters that are told from her perspective. Knowing that the point of the show is to push her to her limits and drive her to quit, she pushes through a bout of severe illness and an attack by a wild coyote, among other things, by rationalizing them as just tricks by the producers.

The obstacles she faces and the turns her journey takes are best left to discovery by the reader. If you’re anything like me, you’ll get to them quickly. This is the first book I’ve read in a long time (even of ones I’ve really enjoyed) that’s honest-to-goodness kept me up at night to read more. Most of the time, books I blow through really fast have a lower rating, because when I don’t like I book I’m more inclined to push through it as rapidly as I can so I can move on to something I might like better. This book I raced through because I genuinely didn’t want to put it down. I read it at lunch, while I got my oil changed on my car, while I was waiting for a meeting to start. The power of the human mind to convince itself of whatever it wants to is not to be underestimated, and the suspense of waiting to see when it would be that Zoo would finally see that the world around her was in real trouble keeps the narrative tension low but constant (her inability to see is literal as well as figurative…early in the book, her glasses are damaged and that helps the suspension of disbelief that the actual magnitude of events doesn’t impress itself upon her sooner). I absolutely loved it and highly recommend it!

Tell me, blog friends…have you ever known anyone on a reality show?

One year ago, I was reading: Zodiac

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Interesting Father-Child Relationships In Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Much like a month back when we looked at mother relationships for Mother’s Day, now we’re looking at father relationships for Father’s Day. I broadened it out to general father-child relationships for this one because I immediately thought of books I wanted to include that had relationships with both genders as children. Some of these are good relationships, some bad, but all of them compelling (to me anyways). 


To Kill A Mockingbird: Can you make a list on this subject without highlighting Atticus and Scout? I haven’t read Go Set a Watchman so I’m pretending it doesn’t exist and that Atticus can go on being the A+ human I learned about in sophomore English.

The Descendants: I enjoyed the movie and decided to pick up the book, which I enjoyed even more. When his estranged wife ends up comatose after an accident, Matthew finds himself suddenly solely responsible for the two daughters he’s been only partially involved with during their childhoods and the way the three begin to actually bond, with wariness and scars but also hope, is really lovely.

The Shining: The movie, while a favorite of mine, skimps on the complicated father-son dynamic between Jack and Danny. Raised by a brutal man, Jack struggles to bring up Danny with more tenderness without really knowing how to go about doing that, and his feelings about his alcoholism are much more explicitly tied to the injury he inflicted on his toddler in a drunken rage than they are in the movie.

The Cider House Rules: This is a surrogate rather than biological relationship, but the bond between Wilbur and Homer is beautifully drawn, and Homer’s struggle to define himself against his paternal figure is one of the central narrative threads.

The Namesake: When an Indian immigrant to America names his son Gogol after his favorite author, it comes to symbolize all the conflicts and tension between a father and son who love each other but don’t really understand each other.

The Other Boleyn Girl: A very different look at parenthood, Thomas Boleyn sees his daughters Mary and Anne as pawns in his power games rather than people with thoughts and feelings. Of the two, Anne takes most after his ruthlessness and we all know how things ended up for her.

Sabriel: The first book in this series focuses on the love between a father and his daughter, the titular heroine, whose search for him drives the action and leads her to her destiny.

A Feast For Crows: Tywin Lannister is a pretty awful parent to all of his children, really: marrying off Cersei to Drunken Lout Robert Baratheon despite her pleas to not, trying to manipulate son Jaime into giving up his chosen profession so he can come be the heir, and refusing to see that second son Tyrion is the smartest of all of his children. I picked this particular entry because the way Tywin goes out is AMAZING.

The Return of the King: Even though it’s only a side story, Faramir’s desire to prove himself to his father, and his father’s idolization of the fallen Boromir and refusal to see the better man that Faramir is, is heartbreaking.

The Little House on the Prairie: Here’s the thing about this whole series, really. Laura hero-worships the shit out of her dad, and so when you’re reading them as a kid you just buy into that, but when you think about it as an adult, Pa was the WORST. Ma does like 1000% of the work and Pa gets all the glory and that is definitely a very real parental dynamic.

Book 80: Lights Out In The Reptile House

“He turned from the sill, and his father sighed and eased up and down in his chair. He had a hernia, which had been aggravated when he’d been taken into custody. He refused to say how. He had disappeared for three days and then had been returned. He refused to talk about any of it. One of the policemen had jingled coins in his trouser pockets while waiting for him to get dressed. It occurred to Karel, standing there, that his father was always intentionally and unintentionally creating absences or leaving them behind him.”

Rating: 4/10

Dates Read: August 20-22, 2016

Growing up, I loved dystopian stories. Nowadays, with the YA boom and the runaway popularity of The Hunger Games, you can’t swing a stick without hitting a dystopian story written for teenagers. Back when I was that age, though, I lost myself in books like 1984 and A Brave New World. I still to this day reference 1984 what feels like at least once a month.

For the most part, though, the books I read focused on adults, even if they were on the younger end of adulthood. Childhood in a dystopian-esque environment wasn’t really touched on in these classics of the genre, but Jim Shepard’s Lights Out In The Reptile House puts young teenagers front and center. Set in an unnamed country, it’s less of an active dystopia than a totalitarian state, but there are definite parallels with the world of 1984. There’s a single Party that controls everything, there’s a love story, there are sudden disappearances, there’s a close relationship that springs up between the protagonist and a Party official. The protagonist in question is Karel Roeder, a shy loner who’s about 14 or 15 years old. His mother has long since been gone, so he’s being raised by his perpetually unemployed father. He works at the local zoo, at the reptile house, and nurses a desperate crush on his neighbor and classmate, Lina.

Karel wants nothing more than to be left alone, outside of politics and the machinations of the real world, to work with lizards and long for Lina. But the world won’t let him be: his father disappears, he’s there when a neighbor is dragged away by the secret police, both his crush and his boss at the reptile house are involved in the resistance, and then suddenly a mysterious party official, Kehr, takes over Karel’s home. From there, it’s a battle for Karel’s metaphorical soul between Kehr and the resistance forces, and a destructive fire at the zoo pushes Karel towards his fate.

As difficult as I imagine it would be to exist as an adult in a highly-surveilled police state, I don’t know that I’d ever thought of what it might be like to grow up like that. To know no other normal but the one where your neighbors or even your own family members vanish and don’t return, where you’re afraid almost in equal measure to inform or to not inform, knowing that if it were to be known that you didn’t inform when you should have, there could be consequences for you and your loved ones. It’s not hard to imagine that it would create teenagers like Karel, who keep their heads down and try to escape unnoticed. But it’s also understandable that it would create teenagers like Lina, whose natural rebellious instinct and high spirits draw her inexorably towards the resistance movement. And who is right? Is it better to keep to yourself and try to stay safe or to fight back, potentially risking the lives of your loved ones as well as your own?

Despite the interesting thoughts and questions the book raises, though, it ultimately just wasn’t anything special in and of itself. The prose and characterizations were adequate but nothing more than that, and the plot moved in fits and starts, with long periods of time waiting for something to happen, and then it would pick up, and then slow back down. This may apply especially for the squeamish, like me, but the graphic depiction of torture, especially at the end, was just stomach-turning. I didn’t particularly enjoy the experience of reading it, and although I think it’s supposed to be pitched to the YA market, I wouldn’t recommend it to a teenager, either. Just not worth the time. Read 1984 instead.

Tell me, blog friends…what’s your most-referenced book?

One year ago, I was reading: The Name of the Rose

Top Ten Tuesday: 10 Non-Fiction Books That I’ve Recently Added To My TBR List

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week, we’re looking at books in a particular genre we’ve recently added to our TBR. Since I read fairly widely across genres, the best one I could think of to highlight is non-fiction, which I love. 




Prince Charles: The first of many “British royalty” titles in my list. I’ve actually gotten more and more interested in Charles, who will have to be one of the oldest guys ever to inherit the throne when he does, right? He’s spent his whole life in waiting to be king.

Hitler Ascent: WWII, on the other hand, is not one of my preferred reading topics. It’s just never especially drawn me in. But in an age of creeping authoritarianism, the life of one of the most ruthless dictators to ever come to power is something I find myself wanting to explore.

The King Who Had To Go: I wrote about this one last week because it’s both a recent addition and coming out later this year! It’s about the British abdication crisis in the early 20th century.

Too Fat Too Slutty Too Loud: Ann Helen Peterson’s work for Buzzfeed is amazing (as is her TinyLetter), so I can’t wait to read her book about being a woman.

The Hospital Always Wins: This is a memoir from a man who developed mental illness and was committed to a mental institution, and then tried to get out. The way civil commitment works (and just as often, doesn’t work) is totally fascinating as an intersection of law and psychology.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes: As a native Michigander, I love the Great Lakes with my whole heart. It’s 1/5th of the fresh water in the entire world, so we should ALL love the Great Lakes. They’re a delicate and vital ecosystem and need to be protected.

A Magnificent Obsession: More British royalty! This about the love affair between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and how she and the country were impacted by his death.

Word By Word: I’m an avowed word nerd…I love language, and dictionaries are fascinating. We treat them as gatekeepers and guardians of purity, but they’re not really meant to be that at all. They’re meant to be reflections of language as it is used, so this look inside how a dictionary functions looks amazing.

Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve: Analyzing data is a powerful tool, but I think sometimes gets treated too much like it’s infallible. Data can be and often is manipulated to support predetermined conclusions (pay attention to the research methods portion of any study you read!). That being said, it can do some neat tricks, so this analytics take on literature sounds super interesting.

White Trash: Back into the Serious category, America prides itself on being a country of easy social movement (as opposed to the hereditary aristocracy of the Old World). But social class has a great deal of power and resonance here as well, even if we’d rather it didn’t, and this book looks at how it’s played out since the US started to exist.

Book 79: Will Bill Donovan

 “Colorful stories about ‘Wild Bill’ became chitchat fare at Washington parties. To show off what his unit could do, he had agents steal secret documents from the office of an admiral he was having drinks with at one social event, then bring the papers to him to give them to the astounded officer before the party broke up.”

Dates read: August 15-20, 2016

Rating: 3/10

One TV show I keep meaning to watch (but haven’t gotten to yet) is The Americans. The story of Russian spies living undercover in the US during the days of the Cold War, it’s supposed to be amazing. Spy stories have a natural appeal: the constant tension of trying to discover without being discovered is inherently compelling. Gadgets, cloak-and-dagger mechanations, disguises and false identities, double and triple crosses…it’s ready made drama for screens big and small.

Reality, of course, is always less glamorous, and Douglas C. Waller’s Wild Bill Donovan tells the story of America’s first real spymaster. Bill Donovan headed up the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor body for the Central Intelligence Agency. The book bills itself as a biography, but that’s not strictly true…it’s as much a story about the OSS as it is about Donovan himself. A Medal of Honor and Purple Heart winner for his military service in World War I, the Republican Donovan was tapped by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the Coordinator Of Information in the buildup to World War II to make sure that the various military intelligence services and the FBI were sharing information. Eventually Donovan expanded that role into his own agency, the OSS, that engaged in espionage and spy missions across Europe and Asia during the war years. It was briefly shuttered after the war, but a proposal Donovan had made beforehand to keep it running afterwards as the Cold War loomed eventually resulted in the CIA, which Donovan (much to his displeasure) was not chosen to run.

As you can tell by the low rating, I had significant issues with the book. I’m not all that into spy stories on the page (although I do enjoy them on the screen), and a large portion of the book deals with the spy missions that made up the early days of the OSS. It recounts these missions in what I found to be tedious detail, including agents and their code names and intricate ins-and-outs of how specific missions played out without there ever being much payoff for that kind of information dump. What I was interested in reading was a biography of a person, which only showed up at the beginning and the end. We get through Donovan’s first 50 or so years (including a pretty scandalous social life that saw him marry a socialite above his class only to be relentlessly unfaithful…so much so he was accused of having an affair with his own daughter in law!) in about 60 pages. There are some intriguing tidbits about his longtime feud with J. Edgar Hoover, but it’s never developed. Then there’s the endless boring espionage stuff, and finally we get more insight into Donovan’s actual life after the OSS is disbanded, which focused mainly on a final diplomatic posting and then decline into dementia. Through it all, I never got a sense of an actual person. He’s constantly described as charismatic and dashing, and while there’s definitely a sense of a dynamic person created, I don’t feel like I know anything about who Bill Donovan was as a human being. If you have any interest in an actual biography of the man, this is a pass. If you’re interested in espionage during World War II, though, you will probably enjoy this book more than I did.

Tell me, blog friends…what’s your favorite spy show or movie?

One year ago, I was reading: Spinster

A Month In The Life: May 2017

I had a good run there in the early part of session, but with the lengthening work days, my reading is starting to slow down (the first book listed below I mostly read last month but didn’t finish until the first day of this one). I know most of the rest of y’all just enjoyed a nice Memorial Day long weekend, but with less than a week to go to wrap up the state’s business for the next 18 months, there was no holiday here in Nevada’s Legislative Building. Otherwise, we’re in full glorious spring in northern Nevada and I’m looking forward to actually being able to enjoy being outdoors very soon.

In Books…

  • A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: It’s hard to evaluate this on its own merits because it’s so deeply rooted in Dave Eggers’ personal style of writing. If you’re not into this ADHD-panic-attack kind of thing, you’ll hate it. If you love it, you’ll love it. For me, I’m okay with it in small doses but 400 pages was A LOT. 
  • The Highest Tide: This coming-of-age story about an undersized 13 year-old boy, obsessed with the ocean, whose small seaside town starts seeing a lot of unusual marine life the summer before he goes to high school, was the book club pick for the month. It didn’t do much for me, unfortunately. I got where it was trying to go, but I thought it tried to pack too many plotlines into 250 pages and ended up underdeveloping all of them.
  • Friday Night Lights: I loved the TV show, but hadn’t ever read the book. It wasn’t the same, obviously, but it was a well-told tale of not just a football season, but the context around it in a hardscrabble oil town in the late 80s. 
  • The Skies Belong To Us: I’d had no idea at all that during the 60s and early 70s, there were a TON of airplane hijackings, nearly all of which were resolved with no harm to the occupants of the planes in questions. This book talks about the broader trend, as well as a specific hijacking by an American couple who took the plane to Algeria, and it’s incredibly interesting.
  • If We Were Villains: This book is good, but suffers for being clearly inspired heavily by The Secret History. If you’re going to go into extremely similar territory to a beloved novel, you better make sure you’re doing it as well or better. And while it’s enjoyable, it’s not as good, so the inevitable comparison isn’t especially flattering to this new release. 
  • Migraine: I’ve had migraines since I started taking birth control in college, and have struggled to control them ever since (I’ve gotten a pretty good method down for now). So of course I’d read a book by one of my favorite authors focused solely on migraines! This text is definitely science-heavy, but if you’re interested in this malady that’s plagued people for thousands of years and which we still don’t completely understand, it’s fascinating reading. 
  • The Panopticon: Not all books focused on a teenager protagonist are YA books, and this one illustrates that perfectly. The young protagonist of Jenni Fagan’s debut fights, steals, screws, and does a ton of drugs. But over the course of the book, you come to feel for the life that made Anais that way and there’s a hopeful ending even though the rest of the book is pretty bleak. 

In Life…

  • Still in session, but in the home stretch! We’re due to adjourn sine die on June 5, so less than a week and it will be none too soon. I can’t even tell you how much I am looking forward to sleeping in later and walking to work and seeing my dog at lunchtime and getting off at 5 at night. Oh my god it’s going to be amazing.


One Thing:

  • Bryan Fuller, with his sense of visual storytelling, was the perfect person to take on Neil Gaiman’s American Gods as a television show. Combine that rich symbolism with some incredible casting (Ian McShane as Mr. Wednesday alone is fantastic) and it’s something I’m eagerly looking forward to every Sunday!

Gratuitous Pug Picture: 

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