A Month In The Life: December 2016

Today is the last day of the year! 2016 has been a crazy year: I started out the year in January with a trip back to Michigan for my best friend's baby shower (she had the baby in March and he's the cutest!), I got married, went to Chicago on our honeymoon, I made my first (hopefully not last!) trip to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, and read, well, a lot (101 books at final count)! This month in particular hasn't been especially hectic, but here's what I've been up to:

In books: I spent most of this month doing my annual holiday re-read of a book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series...this year, I re-read A Storm of Swords. Maybe by the time I catch up, The Winds of Winter will finally be out, eh? Anyways, it slowed my pace a little as I went back through it while I was reading my new books, too!

• Freakonomics: How much you buy into a lot of these statistical quirks depends on how much you buy into the idea of behavioral economics as a whole. It's all about the hidden incentives that act upon our decision-making, and while the theories are interesting (his linking of abortion access to crime rates was something I found myself nodding along to), I regarded much of it with skepticism. 
• Seating Arrangements: The writing quality was wonderful, and I enjoyed it overall, but I wished this story of New England rich people behaving badly over a wedding weekend had focused less on the father character. I found him mostly irritating and wished the story would get back to virtually anyone else when it centered on him (which was, sadly, most of the time). 
• The Wonder (ARC): This was our book club read for the month, and while I had high hopes for it, I didn't end up liking it much at all. I found that it had pacing issues that significantly undermined characterization and plot development, by my standards anyways. I know other people liked it, but it wasn't for me.
• The Red Queen: I wasn't super hot on the first entry in Philippa Gregory's series on the Wars of the Roses, The White Queen, because I found Elizabeth Woodville's characterization completely boring. But this book, focusing on Margaret Beaufort, did a much better job creating an interesting-if-not-really-likeable character, and I enjoyed it much more.
• The Moonlight Palace: This book is pretty light and fluffy, about a young royal descendent living in a decrepit palace in Singapore in the 1920s. It was short and while it wasn't good, per se, it was pleasant enough.
• The Guineveres (ARC): So many books get compared to one of my all-time favorites: Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides. This time, though, I thought the praise was legitimate. A delicate yet powerful story about four young women, all improbably named Guinevere, who end up in a convent in their teens for wildly different reasons is sensitive and well-told. An auspicious debut.  

In life:

• Went rock climbing for the first time: The indoor kind, of course. One of my work friends and I have been trying to get together to do lunch and activities every so often, and after I took her to a pole class, she took me rock climbing! I've never done it before and wasn't quite sure what to expect. It was HARD! But I liked it and think I want to try it again.
• Holiday parties: 'Tis the season, after all. Drew's work had their holiday party, and then of course we had our holiday parties with my in-laws. Lots of togetherness and happy feelings and wine (and missing my own side of the family on the other side of the country).

One Thing:

• After having been a longtime audiobook resister (I just don't think it's reading, for better or worse), I found my niche: nonfiction! So this month I've been really getting into Overdrive through my local library system, and have listened to some really interesting stuff, like the official biography of the Queen Mother and a chronicle of Basque history. 

 

Gratuitous Pug Picture:

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A Month In The Life: December 2016

Book 57: The Winged Histories

"I don't think writing is sorcery, something forbidden. I think it's more like a comb, it separates your hair more easily than you could with your fingers. It's like riding a horse to go somewhere instead of walking. You go to the same place, but you can carry more. I think writing is a horse. Or it might be a knife. An axe."

Dates read: May 29-June 1, 2016

Rating: 8/10

I am nothing if I am not a creature of habit, and one of those habits is that I refuse to jump into a series from anywhere but the beginning. Books, TV, movies...I don't care if everyone says the first one is bad, boring, or even just not necessary to understand what follows, I read/watch it. Which makes Netflix dangerous for me...so many TV shows to watch right from the beginning! Usually that just means I get choice paralysis and decide to read instead.

Why this particular quirk of mine matters at all is that Sofia Samatar's The Winged Histories is technically a sequel, though more in a "take place in the same world as" and less "follows directly the characters from", as I understand. I wanted to read A Stranger In Olondria, but my local library system didn't have a copy and so I figured that from what I'd read about the book, I'd probably be okay this once not following my own rule and just picking it up. Which I'm kicking myself for now, because I think I would have gotten more out of The Winged Histories if I'd had some background in that world going in.

Which isn't to say that I didn't get anything, or even much, out of The Winged Histories without that background. On the contrary, I found the book beautifully written, and once I got myself grounded in its world, incredibly compelling. It follows four women: the warrior Tavis, Tialon, the daughter of a priest, Seren, a singer and Tavis's lover, and Tavis's sister Siski, a noblewoman, as the Olodrian empire is engulfed in war and rebellion, both internal and external. They're besieged by a neighboring civilization, one of their conquered territories is trying to break away, and a new religion is fighting for dominance with the traditional one...with rumors of people transforming into vampiric monsters growing in the countryside.

I don't usually read war stories, which tend to be men's stories. Endless descriptions of battles and tactical maneuvers make me lose interest quickly (they slowed down my reading of War and Peace significantly when I tackled that one in the summer of 2015). But this one was different: besides Tavis's necessarily martial perspective, the rest of the story dug into how the battles resonate far beyond the fields on which they are fought. The lives of each of these women is thrown into turmoil by the unsettled situation of their world: Tavis flees to the army to escape being used as a political pawn in marriage, Tialon suffers at the hands of her religious fanatic father, who ushers in the new religion and converts the emperor, Seren is a member of the people on whose behalf the civil portion of the war is being fought but who suffer for their "victory" as much or more than anyone, and Siski drowns her sorrow at being parted from the sweetheart of her youth in a hard partying lifestyle. These are technically spoilers, but if I hadn't read a similar summary as I was getting started I would have gotten completely lost in who meant what to whom and what was going on.

It does take a while to get into it and adjust to the setting and situations of the story. Until then, fortunately, the writing sustains interest. The writing is just gorgeous...lush, poetic, and emotionally evocative. There's very little "this happened, and then that happened" going on here, each of the four segments is written in loose clusters of interconnected plot points, full of flashbacks and questions raised that don't get answered until a later part of the story. By the end I could barely put it down. The book is a rich reward for a patient reader.

Tell me. blog friends...do you like war stories?

One year ago, I was reading: Hood

**I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, Small Beer Press, through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and honest review**

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Book 57: The Winged Histories

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Best Books of 2016

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: the ten best books of 2016! I don't read a bunch of new releases, but I read enough this year that I was able to pull together a list of my ten favorites. Many of these aren't up yet and won't be for quite a while yet, but they are all books I've read this calendar year that were published this calendar year!

The Last One: This story of a woman who doesn't know that there's been a massive pandemic while she's struggling to make it on a big-budget wilderness survival show is well-written and totally unputdownable. One of those books where you promise yourself just a few more pages before bed and then it's 3 in the morning.

Enchanted Islands: I loved the lifelong female friendship that formed the emotional core of this novel, and that it focused mostly on a woman's life after 40 and the adventure she had then. It's not a compulsive page-turner, but it's subtle and wonderful.

The Serpent King: I don't tend to read extensively in the YA space, but this novel about three outcasts going through their senior year in small-town Tennessee sucked me in and broke my heart.

The Guineveres: I'm still working on this debut novel, about four young women named Guinevere all being raised in a Catholic convent for different reasons, but I can already tell that it's magnificent. Such fantastic writing and well-developed characters.

And After Many Days: The deterioration of a Nigerian family when their oldest son disappears is paralled with the destruction that Western corporations wreak in Africa in this well realized,

Mr. Splitfoot: I didn't actually rate this book that highly when I first read it very early this year, but it's stuck with me in ways I didn't anticipate. It's weird but beautifully written and haunting.

The Big Rewind: I've plugged this book a million times this year, but I loved it so I'll plug it again! A female-centered High Fidelity-esque novel (with a little mystery story nestled in there too) for the millennial set, it's a really fun, charming read.

Private Citizens: This dark, biting satire of the Silicon Valley tech boom scene features brilliant young people totally ruining their lives in a way that's half hilarious, half horrifying.

The Queen of the Night: This book, about the life of a European opera singer, is totally insane and totally awesome and I've been recommending it to everyone lately.

The Girls: Less of a novel about the Manson cult as it's often billed and more of one about the painful experience of being a 14 year-old girl, it's full of passages that resonate with anyone who's ever lived through that particular hell.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Best Books of 2016

Book 56: Shylock Is My Name

 "I the Jew, they the Christians- no two ways about it, no weasel words. Was it better like that, he wondered. A naked antagonism. No pretending that fences could be mended. An unending, ill-mannered, insoluble contrariety. Did it mean that all parties at least knew where they stood? That at least you knew your enemy. And would go on knowing him until the end of time."

Dates read: May 27-29, 2016

Rating: 2/10

When something is written about 400 years ago, it's likely that however good it is, it's also problematic. So even though Shakespeare's classics have endured over time, there are some portions of them that take your breath away a little reading it in modern times. Like in one of my favorites, Much Ado About Nothing, a couple we're supposed to be rooting for as endgame has a man who publicly humiliates his fiancee on their wedding day because he has been misled into believing she's no longer a virgin. After she's been dumped at the altar, her own father believes the man over her and tries to do violence to her and to himself for the shame of it all. These two do marry at the end of the play and we're meant to be pleased by this reunion. Um, what? And then there's The Merchant of Venice, which contains both one of the most poignant speeches on our shared humanity I've ever come across as well as an astonishing amount of anti-Semitism. But in England in the 1600s, anti-Semitism was par for the course.

Howard Jacobson's Shylock Is My Name is another entry in the Hogarth Shakespeare series (like Vinegar Girl), updating the just-mentioned The Merchant of Venice. This presents a definite adaptation challenge...while open hatred of Jews was common in Elizabethan England and Italy, where the play is actually set, and anti-Semitism is definitely still alive and well today, it's not really the same world we live in anymore after the Holocaust. There's some interesting ways you could go with the sentiments underlying The Merchant of Venice, probably most obviously anti-Muslim sentiment in a post-9/11 world, or any country with ethnic disputes over a contested border. But Jacobson chooses to set his work in modern-day England and keep the play's original dynamic in place. Not only that, he wholesale imports the original character of Shylock the moneylender himself.

During most of the book, it's unclear whether Shylock is a hallucination seen only by Simon, our protagonist, but eventually other characters interact with him as well. How exactly this works is never explained, which is confusing because Shylock is a pretty major character. Why Jacobson chose to gloss over this detail while including an entire section about Simon's failed first marriage to a Gentile woman is a choice I found confusing and kind of off-putting. What I found far more off-putting though, was Simon's relationship with his daughter Beatrice, which is at the center of the plot. He spends an awful lot of time thinking about his daughter's sexuality, whether it's the boys she's sleeping with (and whether or not they have a foreskin) or thinking about his daughter's body in ways that seem way too close to the line of impropriety for a father. I'm a reader who really looks for character-driven dramas, and none of the characters, including Simon, Shylock, and Beatrice were particularly well-developed or interesting.

Ultimately, I just felt like this book wasn't for me. And by that I mean that besides my own quibbles with the writing choices, it was very concerned with Jewish male identity, particularly as it relates to fatherhood. As a childless Gentile female, the long discussions between Shylock and Simon about their shared religion/culture and their struggles as fathers to young Jewish women were just things I have no frame of reference to appreciate or understand. Since that was a central conceit of the novel, I never connected with it and unless those are issues that are relevant or appealing to you, I can't imagine that many people would enjoy reading it. I pushed myself to read it as quickly as I could so I could move on to the next thing.

Tell me, blog friends...do you need to connect with the characters somehow to enjoy a novel?

One year ago, I was reading: Still Occidental Mythology

**I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review**

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Book 56: Shylock Is My Name

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wouldn't Mind Santa Leaving Under My Tree

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: books we wouldn't mind seeing under the tree! While my house is filled to bursting with books as it is and I'm really trying to slow the progress of more books into the house, there are always books that I'm looking to get my hands on a physical copy of. Here are ten books that I'd figure out a way to make room for.

Elizabeth's Women: I'm 100% here for all things Tudor, and this book, examining the various women who played a role in the life of Queen Elizabeth I, seems pretty much right up my alley.

My Own Words: Ruth Bader Ginsberg is my HERO. I love her. This book collects many of her writings and speeches and I want to read all of them.

Thug Kitchen 101: Fast as F*ck: I've got a handful of cookbooks, but I find as much of my cooking inspiration online as in pages these days. I know there's a whole backlash with these people since we found out they're actually white, but their recipes are tasty and totally vegan...even if I'm not and sometimes have to reverse-engineer flax out of recipes because I'm allergic, I'm always down for a quick meal!

Version Control: I actually read much more non-fiction than fiction in hard copy, but this is one of those relatively few novels I actually want to own on paper. I actually don't know too much about the plot, just that it's about time travel and living in the age of the internet and it's gotten great reviews from sources I trust and I want it.

Strangers In Their Own Land: I grew up in small-town, quasi-rural Michigan and spent three years of my life in college-town Alabama, so I've been surrounded by Republicans for most of my life. Like most Democrats, most Republicans are decent people, and this book taking a coastal elite liberal sociologist to Louisiana to meet and understand the people on the other side seems like something I'd get a lot out of.

White Trash: America likes to pretend like it doesn't have a class system, and while it might not be as rigid as the one in the U.K., we definitely do. I'm really interested in reading this book that looks at white American history and really examines the way society has been organized, and who ends up at the bottom of the ladder.

Pit Bull: The Battle Over An American Icon: I've known pit bulls who leave me wary, and I've known pit bulls like the one my pole studio owner has that think they're a lap dog. There's a lot of fear out there about this breed, and as a long-time dog nerd, I'm really curious to learn more about them.

Goldenhand: I've written about how much I love the Sabriel series more than once, and this is the fifth book in that series, so obviously I need to own it like I do all the others.

The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: My fondness for books about royalty should make it pretty obvious that I've got a soft spot for books about out-of-touch rich people. This look at Huguette Clark, who inherited a massive fortune and died alone, seems totally fascinating.

Bad English: One of the great things about English, in my opinion, is its rapaciousness...the way it grows, absorbing parts of other languages and changing with the times. People like to get fussy about using "proper" English, completely ignoring the way that the English they speak would have been regarded with abject horror only a few generations back. A book about the way people try to keep English from evolving is something I think I'd just love.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wouldn't Mind Santa Leaving Under My Tree

Book 55: The Devil In The White City

 "Every day he saw them stepping from trains and grip-cars and hansom cabs, inevitably frowning at some piece of paper that was supposed to tell them where they belonged. The city's madams understood this and were known to meet inbound trains with promises of warmth and friendship, saving the important news for later. Holmes adored Chicago, adored in particular how the smoke and din could envelop a woman and leave no hint that she had ever existed, save perhaps a blade-thin track of perfume amid the stench of dung, anthracite, and putrefaction."
 
Dates read: May 20-26, 2016

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: NY Times Bestseller

Even growing up in so-called "flyover country", I still lived just a 5 hour drive away from the third largest city in the country: Chicago. I'd been there a handful of times, but never for more than a weekend and not for quite a while (I actually had plans to visit with one of my good friends before I impulsively decided to move to Reno in 2012). I've always wanted to go there with more time to explore, and so when Drew and I were trying to figure out where to spend our honeymoon (he's not into the lazing-on-the-beach scene, I'm not into the sleeping-in-a-tent-in-the-woods scene), we finally settled on Chicago as a place with lots to see and do and eat. It was a wonderful time and it's a great city and I can't wait to go back and see even more of it someday!

Well over a hundred years before our trip, though, Chicago hosted an event of arguably more importance: the 1893 World's Fair. The Fair brought to America for the first time things that we still use today: alternating current, the moving walkway, and the Ferris Wheel (which was actually created to rival the prize jewel of the Paris World's Fair four years before: the Eiffel Tower). Almost 30 million visitors passed through its gates to see its wonders. It was also home to H. H. Holmes, a serial killer who preyed on young single women. Erik Larson's Devil In The White City takes the stories of how the Fair came to be and Holmes' activities and winds them together to create a book that looks at the at the Fair but also outside of it.

I was super looking forward to this when I started it: with the huge amount of praise it got, and how much I enjoyed Larson's most recent Dead Wake, it seemed like it was going to easily be a new favorite. But I just didn't get really into it the way I was hoping. Which doesn't mean it wasn't good! It was, quite good in fact. But Larson's threading together of the different stories wasn't quite as skilled as it was in Dead Wake. Since I was in the middle of being stressed out about planning my own event as I was reading it (less than a month before my wedding), the long recounting of the delays and problems of planning and building the Fair just gave me anxiety. But I think even without my personal baggage, I would have found this portion of the book a little overlong. I get what Larson's trying to do: you know it did come together and was successful in the end (he tells you that much right from the beginning), and as he recounts mishap after mishap, it's supposed to keep you hooked and wonder how in the world it got pulled off. But at a certain point I just wanted to the Fair to start already because I knew it was going to and I was tired of hearing about how it almost didn't.

The part of the story about the Fair is so dominant that the part about the serial killer (which was honestly the part I was most interested in) gets a little bit of the short shrift. Holmes and his story kind of lurk around the outside edges, which I suppose is appropriate since lurking around the edges of the Fair is exactly what Holmes did in real life. But every time the book turned back to the Fair from Holmes I groaned a little inside, because I found the latter so much more compelling. The book effectively ends by devoting itself to wrapping up Holmes' plotline, and it was the first time I felt reluctant to put the book down since I started it. On the whole the book is well-written, interesting, and definitely worth a read, but don't go in expecting it to be mostly about one of America's first serial killers or you might be a little disappointed.

Tell me, blog friends...have you ever been to Chicago?

One year ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

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Book 55: The Devil In The White City

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I'm Looking Forward To For The First Half Of 2017

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: books I'm looking forward to in the first half of the new year. I'm going to take this as most-anticipated books being released from now-end of June 2017...as I'm sure you've sussed out if you read here somewhat regularly, I'm not much of a new-release reader, so these are very unlikely to be books I personally read in the first half of 2017. But some are books I have an ARC for, and some are books I'm going to want to get around to one of these days!

Selection Day: I loved the brilliant dark wit of Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger when I read it earlier this year (review forthcoming), so I'm definitely excited for his follow-up!

Young and Damned and Fair: I love stories, both fiction and non, about Henry VIII and his wives. Anne Boleyn tends to be the one that gets the most attention, but they're all worthy of interest in their own right. This book examines Katherine Howard, his fifth wife, who is usually dismissed as very young and rather empty-headed, so I'm curious to see what the take is on her this time.

The Road to Jonestown: Cults- how they form and the personalities at the center of them- are fascinating to me. Jim Jones and the People's Temple are well-known enough, but I've never read a full book-length treatment about that situation and I'm desperately curious.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes: You can take the lady out of Michigan, but you can't take Michigan out of the lady. I'm a sucker for anything Great Lakes.

Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve: This is basically analytics applied to literature, so dorky interest one meets dorky interest two. Sold!

Four Princes: I've always enjoyed non-fiction about both royalty and general history. This one brings them together, focusing on the reigns of Henry VIII of England, Francis I of France, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and Ottoman ruler Suleiman, and how their actions and interactions have played out over time. 

Our Little Racket: When you hear about pyramid schemes and other kinds of white collar crime, you always wonder (or at least I do) about the families. Did they know? Did they just turn the other way? This novel explores the ramifications of the downfall of a finance world bigwig on the women in his family, so I'm intrigued. 

Different Class: I've always enjoyed a good boarding school novel, and Joanne Harris' Chocolate remains among my favorite books, so I'm looking forward to reading her take on it!

The Leavers: I've read a few articles fairly recently about Asian adoptees raised by white American parents and how they feel about their stories now that they're grown up. It's an interesting tension, and this novel promises to explore it.

In The Name of the Family: Medieval corrupt religious institutions are something I tend to like reading about, so the Borgias (who are the focus of this novel) are always compelling to me.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I'm Looking Forward To For The First Half Of 2017