Saturday, February 29, 2020

A Month In The Life: February 2020



Happy Leap Day! It's March tomorrow, but the weather lately seems to be convinced that it's proper springtime...for the past few weeks we've been seeing highs in the 50s and even 60s! Flowers are starting to bloom! Of course it's this winter, when I'm not commuting to Carson City five days a week, that we're having this mild weather. It seems inevitable that there's more snow and cold in our future but I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

In Books...
  • Perfume: This book was...strange, more than anything. It's about an amoral young man born in France in the Middle Ages without a personal scent but an extraordinarily powerful sense of smell and his quest to make the most beautiful perfume in the world. This requires the murders of young women. It's very odd and sometimes repellent but strangely compelling.
  • Whores of the Devil: This is a non-fiction book chronicling witch-hunts (and witch-hunters) throughout history, and the title should have been my tip-off that it was going to go in a highly sensationalized direction. There was a LOT of editorializing going on as well, with little in terms of overarching structure to tie things together. It's not good.
  • Funny Girl: I really loved About A Boy and High Fidelity, but I was starting to wonder if I'd ever read a Hornby that was actually good instead of just alright again. This one, which tells the story of actress Sophie Straw and the people she works with on the opposites-attract sitcom Barbara (and Jim), is not quite a full return to form but comes very close: sweet, funny, and with sparkling dialogue. 
  • The (Hidden) Lives of Tudor Women: I am a real sucker for nonfiction about the Tudor period, especially anything about royalty. This book tries to marry a chronological look at the period with Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man in a way that isn't always successful, but it's interesting information and engaging...at least, if you're into this sort of thing.  
  • The Year of Reading Dangerously: As someone who was a voracious reader as a child, went through a period of reading very little, and then got back into books myself, this memoir by Andy Miller recounting a very similar experience was something I was predisposed to like. It's not anything memorable, but it's pleasant enough to read.
  • The Holdout: I've always been fascinated by juries, so this legal thriller about a sequestered jury which renders a controversial verdict and then is reunited a decade later only for murder to ensue seemed right up my alley. It's one of those where you have to turn your brain off a little, the main character behaves in ways that are so dumb for a person in her position that it's not believable. It's entertaining enough, though, until an ending twist that landed with a thud.
  • A Visit From the Goon Squad: I am going to go ahead and officially acknowledge that the "interconnected short stories" genre of literature is not one I enjoy. This book does it about as well as it can be done...Jennifer Egan is super talented and engages in some interesting experiments with form. But some segments are weaker than others (the last story fell pretty flat for me) and I really wish it was just an actual novel.



In Life...
  • My mom came to visit: For her birthday (which was yesterday!), my mom made a trip out west to visit the people who are important to her...which obviously includes me and her son-in-law. She was only in town for a few days but we had a nice dinner and a fun brunch and (of course!) a trip to the bookstore. We also saw the new Little Women, which I loved so much.

One Thing:

I work in the political sphere, but I am not at all inclined to run for office myself. But I absolutely understand the obstacles in the way of women who do...one of which is the sheer cost of looking professional all the time. Which is why this move from M.M. LaFleur (a retailer which I have never purchased from, mostly because my job doesn't require business formal attire outside of 4 months every other year during session) is so great: they will help outfit ladies running for office with the kind of clothes they need to be taken seriously. This is an awesome move!

Gratuitous Pug Picture:

 

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Book 222: Outline



"It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because they are usually advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes. Perhaps, he said, we all are like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost." 

Dates read: April 6-8, 2018

Rating: 6/10

Every so often, I wake up and am confused about where I am. Why is the sun coming through the windows in that way? Why am I not in my childhood room, in the bed I slept in until I graduated high school? Or the one from my third year of law school, to this day my favorite apartment I've ever lived in? It doesn't happen regularly, but on the occasions it does I have to remind myself that I'm not 17 and needing to get into the shower so I won't be late for school, or that I'm not in Tuscaloosa anymore, that was literally a decade ago now. That I'm me, the me that exists right now, and I'm exactly where I was when I went to sleep last night.

That feeling of poignant unreality permeates Rachel Cusk's Outline, which follows Faye, a British woman recently divorced and in Greece to teach a week-long writing course over the summer. The book consists of ten conversations that she has with other people, starting with her seat neighbor on the flight over (with whom she continues to interact during the week) and ending with the next person staying in the apartment she's been put up in. In between, she talks to old friends, new friends, and her class about subjects ranging from animals to marriage and divorce. Well, more like gets talked at rather than talks to. Faye is not a big participant in these conversations, and so what we get about her is...wait for it...mostly an outline, defined more by what's going on around her than anything we see of her interiority.

This isn't an easy book to write about, because there's not a lot of "there" there. Virtually nothing happens, and since Faye is such a cipher and only her airplane seat neighbor makes more than one appearance, there's nothing to speak of in terms of character building or development. Instead, we're left with admittedly lovely writing and a lot of meditation on themes. Dislocation/unreality, processing trauma, illusions, and an unexpectedly heavy emphasis on marital relationships are explored throughout the book, and at the end, Faye heads home and back to her life in the UK without any sense that this week in her life has meant anything.

I can appreciate a book with an unconventional narrative structure, but this one never quite came together for me. Cusk uses language beautifully, you can feel while you read it that each word, each phrase was chosen with care. But the way she sacrificed plot and character development to focus exclusively on theme makes this feel like a writing exercise more than a book. There's not a story here, really. There are just words.

This isn't to say there's nothing of value here. The first section of the book, the first conversation, in which Faye and her seat neighbor discuss his personal life and children and divorces, is by itself a masterful short story. And there are moments of brilliance in her descriptions...Faye finding herself thrown off-balance at the acceleration of a motor boat captured a sensation I've personally experienced many times before in a way that resonated powerfully. And some of the people in my book club, for which I read this one, really connected with it. But all I can offer here are my personal reactions and review, and for me, this didn't work. I can't recommend it, but if it's something that intrigues you, I won't warn you away from it either.

One year ago, I was reading: Going Clear

Two years ago, I was reading: Henry and Cato

Three years ago, I was reading: A Leg To Stand On

Four years ago, I was reading: The Guest Room

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I’d Follow On Social Media

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week's topic is characters that we would follow on social media. But of course, social media comes in different flavors, so I've divided my list into those I'd follow on Instagram and ones I'd follow on Twitter instead.



Instagram

Emma Woodhouse (Emma): I am sort-of cheating here, because the Emma retelling I read (and liked!) last year, Polite Society, wrote its central character as a social media influencer...which is perfect because it's exactly what she'd be doing!

Francis Abernathy (The Secret History): Francis would be the type to post mostly (amazing) outfit-of-the-day photos, with occasional picture of the exclusive things and places his wealth allows him access to.

Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones's Diary): Bridget seems like the kind of messy friend that it can be fun to keep up with through social media. She would post lots of pictures of drinks with captions that probably overshared in an entertaining way.

Daisy Buchanan (The Great Gatsby): A socialite who married rich, Daisy would be all about showing off the glittering exteriors to hide the hollowness of it all.

Lily Bart (The House of Mirth): She's basically trying to sell herself in marriage, and what better way to do that than to be the classiest kind of insta-model she could be?

Twitter

Lizzy Bennett (Pride and Prejudice): I'll be honest, I am not a super Lizzy fangirl. But she is definitely witty and could be very entertaining in 280 character bursts.

Ifemelu (Americanah): She would be the queen of those long strings of tweets that manage to somehow blow up the things you think you know and give you an entirely new perspective.

Catherine/Birdy (Catherine, Called Birdy): Quality teen snark.

Yunior (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao): The high-energy, pop culture reference-heavy way that Yunior tells the story would make for very entertaining tweeting.

Amy Dunne (Gone Girl): Anyone who could produce the Cool Girl speech could kill it on Twitter. I feel like she would mostly scroll and judge to herself, but every once in a while would give a truly inspired rant.

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Book 221: Sophia of Silicon Valley



"Minutes later, my phone rang. I knew it was Scott calling about the Time cover, so I hesitated to answer—one ring, two rings, three. I knew if I didn’t pick up the phone, though, forcing Scott to hold in his anger, he would really blow an epic gasket when the inevitable happened. Better to let him yell now. As I slowly brought the cell phone up to my ear, I could already hear him screaming." 

Dates read: April 3-6

Rating: 2/10

I'm always a little skeptical when a book (or movie, or whatever) tries to sell itself as the next [insert popular title here]. I understand why they do it...if you compare your work to a super hit, you'll catch the eye of people who loved that thing. But it so often sets the consumer up for disappointment. It usually winds up that the thing that people loved about the initial product wasn't its subject, themes, or plot, but something about the voice, or its unexpectedness, or the style. Even though I've been burned, though, I often can't help myself from picking up something that's described as an "if you loved" for one of my favorites.

When I saw the pitch for Anna Yen's Sophia of Silicon Valley as a "The Devil Wears Prada meets the tech industry", I was intrigued. Silicon Valley, with its constant promises of disruption and reinvention and outsized personalities, is ripe for satire. Yen, like ex-Vogue-assistant Lauren Weisberger before her, has insider bona fides: she came through stints at Pixar and Tesla, and continues to work in the field. Maybe it's the latter that keeps the book from reaching the heights of Prada, or indeed, any heights at all. This book isn't just not great, it's actively bad.

Sophia Young, our extremely-thinly-veiled author insert, is the younger daughter of wealthy Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco. She has type 1 diabetes, which she mentions more often than Stacy does in The Babysitters Club, and is therefore babied by the parents she's returned to live with after college. She starts work in finance, but when it turns out the glamour she'd hoped for in this field doesn't materialize, her interest flags and she's fired shortly thereafter. With the help of a friend, she gets a job as a paralegal at a prestigious law firm for a demanding partner (despite having no training for the role) and finds that she enjoys and is good at the work. Even with long hours, she meets a guy she likes and they find time to build a relationship, and Sophia starts dreaming about their future. Then she meets Scott Kraft, one of the firm's clients, who's starting up an animated film studio called Treehouse with a first feature about toys who come alive, and her world turns upside down.

Scott hires Sophia to come on to Treehouse to do investor relations and assist with the launching of the company's initial public offering. Scott, always in his trademark black turtleneck, is demanding and often unreasonable but a genius at what he does and not without a sense of humor, and Sophia learns from him as she spends a couple years with the company. The first boyfriend dumps her after their relationship deteriorates, but she meets another one not too long after, a handsome doctor who understands her crazy schedule and devotion to her career. The industry moves too quickly for Sophia to settle down in either her personal or professional lives, though, and after two years she makes a jump to an up-and-coming company called Ion, which makes cars and has a side line working on a space launch. Can she develop a relationship with CEO Andre Stark like the one she had with Scott? Will her relationship survive the tumult? Will she ever be like her sister and have a family of her own?

In a book like this, the protagonist needs to be relatable. The reader needs to feel like she's seeing this strange world through outsider eyes, needs to like and root for the heroine to prevail. And in this, it was an abysmal failure for me. Sophia starts out from a position of enormous privilege: her parents are rich, willing to support her, and their home is literally featured in magazines. She can afford to fail, so there's nothing really riding on her success except for her own sense of self-worth, which isn't nothing but also isn't very high stakes. On top of that, she's kind of awful. She calls her friends in the middle of their workdays to brag about the opulent hotels she stays at for work and sulks when none of them want to coo over it. Her opposing desires to find a husband and have kids and to professionally achieve at the highest level are understandable and something many women in their 20s and 30s go through, but she doesn't seem to want both at the same time as much as she wants one and then the other and punishes the men she dates for either not committing or trying to hold her back depending on how she feels that day. I found her deeply irritating.

On top of that, the promised "satire" and "humor" never develops. She doesn't take the piss out of the Steve Jobs or Elon Musk stand-ins, she hero-worships them (particularly the former) and excuses their bad behavior as a side product of their intelligence and innovation. There's never a sense that she finds them or the industry as a whole ridiculous. She plays nothing for laughs, nor does she puncture any bubbles. That Yen continues to be a player in the field almost certainly plays into her unwillingness to poke at its uncomfortable spots...she doesn't want to upset her own apple cart. And while keeping your eye on your own bottom line is understandable, don't try to sell your uninspired writing as a hilarious send-up if you're not willing to spill a little tea. I hated this book and do not recommend it to anyone.

One year ago, I was reading: The Silkworm

Two years ago, I was reading: The Selfish Gene

Three years ago, I was reading: Nefertiti

Four years ago, I was reading: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Recent Books I Really Enjoyed

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're actually meant to be talking about books that gave us "hangovers"...you know, the kind where you finish it and it's so good that you have a hard time getting into your next read because you can't get it out of your head. As a devoted schedule reader (rather than mood reader), I don't really get book hangovers, so I'm twisting this just a bit to be the last books that I really got into.



Columbine: This is a hard book to say one "enjoyed" per se, but it's an incredible piece of journalism about an event that is misunderstood in important ways that have a continuing effect on our culture.

The Talented Mr. Ripley: I'd seen the movie, of course, so I thought this would be similar: kind of lightweight, enjoyable, not especially memorable. But in Tom Ripley, Highsmith created a fascinating villain and I really want to read the sequels!

Marie Antoinette: She's often held up as a symbol of the worst excesses of pre-French Revolution Europe, but this biography tears down the myths and reveals her as a woman whose own faults didn't help anything but was mostly caught up in forces beyond her control from the moment she came to France.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: One of those books you finish and immediately want to read again, telling a multigenerational Dominican (and then Dominican-American) story about a family curse with bright, vivid language.

Battleborn: I don't even particularly care for short stories, but this collection about Nevada was incredible.

Daisy Jones and the Six: I read this before the hype exploded and then became a participant in the hype, because the Behind The Music-style story of a band whose blood and tears created a classic album before it all came crashing down again was impossible to put down.

Bad Blood: We are living in a new era of fraudsters, and Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos were one of the highest-profile ones of all. A fascinating behind-the-scenes look of how the company got so big despite being based on total lies...and how it was all revealed.

Astonish Me: I am a sucker for ballet books, but was a little hesitant because I'd not enjoyed Shipstead's other novel. This one, though, was a treat: it beautifully balances a domestic story about a family against the drama of the exclusive world of ballet and totally captured my attention.

The Winter of the Witch: I loved the first two books and was so worried that the conclusion of the trilogy would falter, but I was wrong to doubt Arden. It was a perfect ending to an incredible story.

Once Upon A River: A historical fiction tale that celebrates storytelling, as a young girl is brought nearly dead into an English tavern and is claimed by several families, any or none of which might be her own.

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Book 220: Freedom



"This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to chose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones."

Dates read: March 30- April 3, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012 edition), The New York Times bestseller

Something that seems to come up fairly frequently in profiles of successful people is that they have a daily uniform. Like Steve Jobs' constant black turtleneck and jeans, many of them report that not having to think about what they're going to wear every day frees up their minds for "more important" things. It's a concept called decision fatigue...the more decisions you have to make, the worse (over time) you get at making them logically. For me, deciding what to wear is enjoyable, but I do eat almost the exact same thing every day because food isn't that interesting to me. Cutting unnecessary choices out of your life does make things a lot simpler.

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom isn't very subtle: he tells you the major theme of the book right there in the title. It's the story of a family, headed by Walter and Patty Berglund, and how it comes to be and how (of course) it begins to fray. It begins with a short, third-party history of their residence in a newly-gentrifying neighborhood in Saint Paul, which begins when they're young, energetic newlyweds, and continues through their raising of two children, Jennifer and Joey, the latter of whom causes quite a bit of grapevine drama when he takes sides against his own family in a growing border war with their neighbors. Just about as soon as the kids are out of high school and off to college, the parental Berglunds pick up and leave suddenly, and several years later in the newspaper their former neighbors read that Walter's gotten into a bit of a professional dust-up. So right from the beginning, we know that something is rotten in the state of Minnesota.

We then go back and time and get Patty's life story, in which she always feels like an outsider in her ambitious upstate New York family, culminating in her parents' refusal to do anything when she's raped by the son of a powerful neighbor. She flees on an athletic scholarship to Minnesota, where she develops a friendship with a disturbed classmate, through whom she meets musician Richard Katz and his roommate, Walter Berglund. Though Richard and Patty are interested in each other, Walter is also interested in Patty, and though he "gets" the girl, the attraction between his wife and his best friend lingers. We also move forward to Richard, Walter, and Joey's perspectives after their move out of Minnesota, and how each struggles with freedom as opposed to stablility, and the consequences of exercising choices that become available.

Jonathan Franzen as a human being is not my favorite. But as a writer, he is undeniably talented. Freedom wrestles with some weighty stuff: 9/11, environmentalism, corporate philanthropy, temptation, infidelity, the way family patterns repeat over generations, sexual assault, selling out, forgiveness. That's a lot for one book, even a long-ish one, to tackle. But for the most part, he pulls it off. Though I didn't necessarily always like the characters he created, I almost always found them compelling and interesting. Though some of the plot schemes he tangles them up veer towards the ridiculous, he mines them for emotional truth well enough that they stay on the good side of the line of believability.

There are some missteps, though. I found some of his decisions regarding Patty's trajectory baffling. Her rape doesn't seem like a character-informing experience for her, serving rather as an explanation to write her parents out of the book until there can be a rapprochement at the end to bring things full circle. And her college friend Eliza's obsession with her also seemed underbaked...it never really went anywhere besides serving as her introduction to Richard. The balance of Patty's story rounded her out, but the way he wrote Connie (Joey's childhood sweetheart) never made sense to me. She's not a person, she's a symbol, as was Lalitha, a young colleague of Walter's who becomes besotted with him. Maybe our cultural moment just has me primed to see underlying misogyny better than I used to, but I can't deny that it's here and it was part of what kept me from being fully absorbed in the novel. It's good, very good even, and I would recommend it with the caveat that if you're looking for strong female characters, you won't find them here.

One year ago, I was reading: Forest Dark

Two years ago, I was reading: Wonder Boys

Three years ago, I was reading: Zealot

Four years ago, I was reading: Ahab's Wife

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Non-Romantic Relationships In Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! As usual for the week of Valentine's Day, this is a love freebie. I've written about couples for the past several years for this prompt, so this time I'm switching it up. Here are ten of my favorite deeply bonded pairs who certainly love each other, but not in that way.



Harry and Ron (Harry Potter): The relationship chronicled over the seven books of the series between our hero and his best friend is complicated and rich and more thoroughly developed than either of their romantic lives.

Meg and Charles Wallace (The Wind in the Door): The connection between these two siblings is beautifully rendered and significant in all the books in the series, but particularly in the second one, where Meg has to save his life.

Vasya and Solovey (The Bear and the Nightingale): We've all heard enough jokes about horse girls to recognize the strength of the bond between young women and their equines, but Solovey isn't just any horse and I really enjoyed the bickering and love between these two.

Joe and Sammy (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay): The artistic partnership between these two cousins has ups and down but is rooted in mutual admiration and care that pays off deeply in the end.

Francie and Johnny (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn): Johnny is a warm-hearted, charismatic addict, which makes him a terrible husband and a bad provider, but the easy, straightforward love he's able to show his sweet, bookish daughter is a lovely thing.

Becky and Amelia (Vanity Fair): Becky is a fascinating character, with her scheming and lack of morals. She's not a good friend in the conventional sense, but she does care about the docile Amelia in her own way, and their friendship is both interesting and of an uncommon sort.

Boris and Popper (The Goldfinch): One of the things I found most delightful about this book was the bond between protagonist Theo's crazy Eastern European best friend and the little dog he ends up liberating from his stepmother. These two were my favorite characters in the book, honestly.

Legolas and Gimli (The Lord of the Rings): The longstanding disdain between elves and dwarves means these two are often at each other's throats in the beginning, but the grudging respect and then genuine friendship that grows between them is often a more light-hearted highlight in an otherwise often serious series.

Annemarie and Helen (Number the Stars): I loved this book growing up, not in the least because of the warm, close friendship between gentile Annemarie and Jewish Helen and how it helps give both of them the strength for the former's family to help the latter's escape.

Lyra and Iorek (The Golden Compass): She's one of my favorite literary characters, and the way she earns the admiration and friendship of the king of the armored bears with her quick wits and bold lies is one of the reasons why.

Thursday, February 6, 2020

Book 219: Of Human Bondage



"He yearned above all things for experience and felt himself ridiculous because at his age he had not enjoyed that which all fiction taught him was the most important thing in life; but he had the unfortunate gift of seeing things as they were, and the reality which was offered him differed too terribly from the ideal of his dreams." 

Dates read: March 25-30, 2018

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012 edition)

Sometimes I think about my younger self and I want to shake that girl by the shoulders. I took myself so seriously, took the world so seriously. I was so sure of things, and while I do sometimes miss that clarity of certainty, I think I'm happier now. I tend towards the "control freak" side of things, and the more steps I take towards letting go of that need to be in charge of everything, to know where it's all heading, the more relief I feel and the better able I am to roll with the punches. I wish I could tell that girl that I was how to loosen up a little bit, how to think a little more broadly...but maybe all that can really teach those lessons is time.

Anyone who's ever taken themselves too seriously will recognize a kindred soul in Philip Carey of W. Somerset Maughum's Of Human Bondage. We meet him when he's still a child and very recently orphaned, going from a relatively privileged life with his mother to a much sparser one with his aunt and uncle, the latter of whom is a pastor in a small town in the British countryside. Scared a bit by his distant uncle, he escapes into books and becomes a voracious reader. The next year, he's sent to boarding school, where his disability (he has a clubfoot, which gives him a limp), combined with his shyness and senstitivity, makes for a generally unhappy experience. He becomes passionately religious and plans on a career in the clergy, but when his prayers for a cure for his foot are unanswered, he loses both his faith and his direction in life.

He goes to Germany briefly, comes back to England and tries being an accountant, which doesn't take, then to France to study art, then back to England again, where he decides to settle down and study medicine, which was his father's career. But all his indecision has driven down his available resources so he'll need to live very modestly until he's a doctor and can start earning a living...and then he meets Mildred. Despite Philip's self-pity, he's had a few relationships with women at this point, and is actually in a good one, when he meets the waitress his friend has a crush on. Philip becomes obsessed with her, despite her obvious disinterest in him and lack of social skills. His situation eventually becomes desperate, but with some kindness and a bit of luck, it resolves itself.

If you've been reading here for a while, you know I'm a die-hard never-DNF (did not finish). This has lead to my spending my time reading books that I hated or worse, bored me silly, and I very much understand why other people do put down books that aren't working for them. But even though it does backfire on me sometimes, other times it pays off to stick with a book, and this was one of those instances. About halfway through it, I was sick of Philip and his moping and the garbage way he treated women and his refusal to understand that as wonderful as self-discovery is, there's no money in it. The whole book is his story of growing up, and he was so grating that I wasn't at all invested in him or rooting for him to succeed. But then he starts to mature, puts his head down and works hard, uses his own hard-earned life lessons and experiences to be a good doctor to the people he sees. And by the end of it, when he does find some measure of happiness and chooses to do the harder, better thing, I couldn't have been happier for him if he were an actual person and a friend at that.

I've always been a character-over-plot type of reader, and this book is all the former...the only major outside event is the Boer War, which happens late in the book and while it does have an impact on Philip, it's pretty far removed from the central themes of the coming-of-age story. In some ways, it suffers for its fixation on Philip...like I said above, he can be a hard character to really sympathize with, particularly early on. But the payoff in the back half is real, and seeing him grow as a person is really rewarding. This is a good book, a very good one even, but it may not be the right book for every reader. If you're looking for a dynamic plot, or lack the patience for/interest in a long-term character study, this probably isn't going to be something you enjoy. If you've read what I've written and are intrigued, though, I highly suggest you get ahold of it...it'll be a rewarding experience!

One year ago, I was reading: The Buried Giant

Two years ago, I was reading: The Sellout

Three years ago, I was reading: Flowertown

Four years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My TBR I Predict Will Be 5-Star Reads

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're looking at books that we haven't read yet, but are pretty sure we're going to love. I actually rate very few books five stars because only ones I find really spectacular get that rating...something that's very good and I really like just as often only gets four stars because it just doesn't have that extra bit of magic. These ones, though, I think are going to hit that five-star rating...both fiction and non-fiction!



Know My Name: I've heard nothing but glowing reviews of this memoir from Chanel Miller, who was sexually assaulted by Brock Miller. I'm sure it'll be heavy, but it seems like the kind of thing I will really get a lot from.

Just Mercy: As a recovering lawyer, I have mixed feelings on legal books...my personal connection with the subject area can be a blessing or a curse. From what I've heard about how good this is, I'm thinking it'll be on the blessing side.

The Fire Next Time: I read Baldwin for the first time last year and just loved his fiction writing. This work of non-fiction is supposed to be incredible and I expect it'll be a highlight.

Trick Mirror: I love a good essay collection and have gotten raves about this from several different people I would not expect to agree with each other, so I've got really high hopes.

Matriarch: I love a good royal bio, and this one about Queen Mary (the current Queen's grandmother) is supposed to be fantastic.


A Gentleman in Moscow: I love books about Russia, and I love long, life-spanning novels, so this seems like it will be exactly my type of thing.

Homegoing: Tracing what happens to the descendants of two half-sisters from Ghana over the centuries...one of whom stays in Africa, the other of whom is enslaved and taken to America. This sounds amazing.

My Brilliant Friend: As someone who really loves reading about female friendship, there could not be a more "perfect for me" sounding series than the one that starts with this book.

Beartown: I'm not always here for a sports book, but this is supposed to be less about the actual hockey than the small town who get really into their hockey team, which I think will really be something special.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: I absolutely devoured the latest Taylor Jenkins Reid book, and this previous one has gotten similar kinds of praise, so I think I'll love it!