Bookish Thoughts

This was a really sweet coming of age tale about finding your way and finding your family. Aprils' mother walked out when she was little and her father wasn't much more present. By the time she's sixteen, April is basically on her own, stuck in a small town where everyone looks down on her and even her father mostly pretends that she doesn't exist. And then she realizes that she can leave, too. So April heads out for life on the road, working odd jobs, writing and singing songs, making friends and fleeing before anyone can get too close. And through it all her music sustains her. My favorite part of this book, hands-down, was the soundtrack. April's love of music, and the way the author uses it to set the scene and drill right into her emotional state was fantastic. I kept having to put the book down so I could bring up songs on youtube and listen to them while I read certain passages. This was just an overall enjoyable book. I had a lot of sympathy for April being ...

I read this one for book club, which is another nod to book club pulling me out of my comfort zone. I'm not sure I ever would have picked this one up if not for book club. It follows two woman and the New York Public Library, flipping back and forth between the 1910s and the 1990s. It's about a decades-spanning mystery of missing books. But it's also about the feminist movement and generational trauma and loneliness.  Most interesting to me was the question at the heart of artists choosing to destroy their unpublished works upon death versus historians' desire to preserve them for posterity. It's easy to see how the perspective can shift over generations, as prominent people begin to fade into the past, becoming more symbols or icons than actual people. I do think some of the plots went a bit too far in order to tie the ending up with a neat bow. Henry's story, in particular, took me out of the book a little with how contrived it felt. But overall I enjoyed the ...

Here's the thing. When I was reading Radiance or The Curse of Chalion earlier this month, all I wanted to do was read. I was neglecting other areas of my life so that I could read just one more page. And while I enjoyed Fleishman is in Trouble, I didn't feel that same urgency with it. I wasn't compelled to keep on reading at the expense of the rest of my life. It was enjoyable, but if I wasn't reading this for book club I probably would have abandoned it pretty quickly. Ultimately, I'm glad I stuck with it. Once I got to the last section of the book, where Fleishman's wife finally gets to tell her side of the story, I did become engrossed and ended up staying up way too late to finish the book. But it was a bit of slog to get there. This book tells the story of a divorce, mostly from Toby Fleishman's point of view. He and his ex-wife share custody, but then one day she leaves the kids at his house and disappears. It sets Toby up as the sympathetic party, as ...

It's always a little rough when the best thing I can think to say about a book is that it was short. I hear a lot about Elizabeth Strout, and she's got a bunch of award-winning books. But it seems like every time I hear about someone raving about one of her books, it's the third or fourth in a series. Most recently, this happened with Oh, William. My book club nearly decided to read it. My mother-in-law's book club did decide to read it. And she liked it enough to go back and read the first two books. She waxed rhapsodic about this story that changes as the protagonist matures and gains new perspective on her childhood and comes to understand that trauma. And that may all be true. But the first book is (obviously) at the very beginning of that journey, and I had a hard time connecting with it. It was very melancholy, which I found off-putting. It felt like there was a wall between me and Lucy Barton. Every time she approached something interesting, she shied away from ...

I first read this book years ago, and I remembered it as a light, feel-good novel. I sold it to my book club as "basically Pixar's Up without the fantastical elements". It's about a curmudgeonly old man who recently lost his wife and sense of purpose. Over the course of the novel he gets pulled into a community, almost against his will, and discovers that life goes on and there's more than one way to be happy. So I was a little surprised by how hard this book hit me this time. I cried. A lot. This book hit differently when you're grieving. All the little things that bring Ove down, all the small lonely moments that I skated right by the first time, loomed a lot larger now.    The book is still uplifting. It ends on a happy note, and Ove is in a much better place. It's a lovely story about neighbors coming together to take care of each other, even when decades of history complicate their relationships. It was just a lot sadder than I remembered. I wonder if...

 I loved reading this book. The prose bordered on poetry, and it flowed so beautifully. The style lent itself really well to expression different idioms and slang and dipping into vernaculars that gave each character her own voice while tying the overall narrative together. I'm a little in awe of it. And of how easy it was to read. Of how much I just wanted to keep reading it. Beyond the style of the book, I loved the structure. The books tells the life stories of twelve different women. They're all different. Different ages, different backgrounds, different beliefs and goals, different struggles and triumphs. But they're also all loosely connected. The connections are obvious in the beginning, but they become more obscure as the book goes on and more characters are introduced. Part of the fun is seeing the ways the stories interact, and what the various women think of each other. Evaristo does such a good job of making these women interesting. Of making them imperfect in d...

 There's something freeing about starting out the year with a complete and abject failure. Nowhere to go from here but up. Hopefully. Last year I read every book my book club picked. This was actually the first year I accomplished this feat, despite being the founder and default leader of the book club. But for one reason or another (new babies, my husband's death) I always ended up missing a few meetings. I even missed one meeting in 2021, because my family was under a covid quarantine. But I read every book! It was actually fairly easy. For our first book of 2022, we picked The Goldfinch. It's massive, a real door stopper of a book. But the length didn't frighten me. I routinely read big books (500+ pages) and usually get in at least one 1000+ page book a year. So I dove in with excellent intentions. And then I had a completely novel experience. Any time I was actively reading The Goldfinch I enjoyed it. It was entertaining, if a bit overly descriptive. But then I...

I liked A Man Called Ove , but after finishing Beartown , I am thoroughly impressed with Backman, as both an author and a human. He has an incredible insight into human nature, and he takes the time to examine the tragedy at the heart of this novel from every conceivable angle to paint a picture of how it happened, which attitudes and decisions faded and which ones resonated and why. Although the narrative is clear about who is and isn't a victim, the story as a whole reminded me of one of my favorite Good Omens quotes: It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.  We tend towards tribalism and confirmation bias.We struggle with change and anything that upsets our world view. And so it takes a Herculean effort to go against the grain and make a difference. Easier to just stay in your lane and tell your...

I enjoyed this series, but it's also been one of diminishing returns. Kwan can't really mess with Nick and Rachel, so they've gotten a bit boring. Astrid has fun drama, but the attempts to keep her likable result in her seeming mostly passive in her own life. And Kitty is just exhausting. I don't even know whether I should be rooting for her or not. Still, this book is filled with ridiculous drama and extravagant parties and luxurious clothes. It's fun to watch these lives, knowing I'll never have them. And by the end of the book I didn't even want them. I guess this series was the perfect length. I got exactly what I wanted out of it. It was fun while it lasted, but I'm ready to move on to something else.

Six months ago, Ove's wife died. Yesterday he was let go from his job. So today he has decided to kill himself. But first he has to deal with the new neighbors, who just backed their trailer into his mailbox. As Ove's various attempts to kill himself are thwarted by his neighbors, he slowly discovers that maybe he does have something left to live for after all. This was a very sad book about a grumpy, old man who has outlived his purpose. Ove is a man of strong opinions. He knows the right way to do things and he'll be damned if he lets anyone do it the wrong way. Because of this, he often finds himself butting heads with all the people he comes into contact with. But beneath his grouchiness is a heart of gold. See, there's a right way to do things. And Ove isn't going to let a cat die of the elements, even though he hates cats. He isn't going to ignore his neighbor's request to fix the radiator, even though they've been feuding for most of their lives...

China Rich Girlfriend  was pretty much exactly what you'd expect the sequel to Crazy Rich Asians  to be: an almost successful attempt to recreate the magic of the first one. It had all the entitled, big spenders, their manufactured problems, and their constant attempts to one-up each other. It was somewhat clunkier, almost like they skipped the last editing pass to get it to the presses on time. Throughout the book I kept thinking to myself that this or that scene could have been tighter, shinier, more polished. The first book glittered so brightly, maybe this one couldn't help but look a bit dull by comparison. There are three main storylines: Rachel and Nick's return to Asia after their wedding to get to know her father, Astrid's crumbling marriage, and Kitty Pong's attempts to win the respect of high society. The three storylines never quite come together, so the book ends up feeling a bit schizophrenic. Maybe that will be resolved in the third book. (Though I...

Lately I've been seeking out books that don't require too much mental energy from me. I finally picked up the rest of this trilogy at a used book sale, so it seemed like the perfect time to revisit this fun, frothy book about people with more money than sense. Really this book is just fun. I love seeing the ridiculous things the super rich choose to spend their money on, the ways they determine how they're better than everyone else, and the ever-practical every-girl Rachel navigate everything. It was also great to go back and see the things they had changed for the movie. I'm excited to get to the rest of this trilogy now and live vicariously through people who spend freely on absurd things.

I loved this book so much. I'd been intrigued by it since I first heard of it and every new thing I learned just made me want to read it more. So I convinced my book club to give it a go, and I'm so glad I did. I read it in two days, because I just couldn't put it down. Evelyn is a wonderful character. She's ruthless and manipulative and mostly unapologetic about it. After all, she got everything she ever wanted, didn't she? Why change a thing when she was met with so much success? And if that success was swathed in scandal? Well that just makes it more fun. I was surprised by the variation in her many marriages. She married for all sorts of reasons: to get to Hollywood, for love, for family, to further her career, to distract from an entirely different scandal. Some of her marriages were complete shams, but others had a surprising amount of honesty and affection at their core. I think Evelyn experienced just about every kind of love there is over the course of ...

I'm two for two in books being a lot more intense than I was expecting. Not that I was expecting this book, a series of interconnected short stories about several Native Americans attending a Powwow in Oakland, to be lighthearted or anything like that. The subject material meant that it was definitely going to be heavy. But it was so much heavier than I was expecting. Almost every character is dealing with alcoholism, or at least with an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. Some of them are alcoholics themselves, either resigned to an early death by liver failure or attempting to get sober for the umpteenth time. Others are dealing with family members who are absent or violent due to alcohol, and they're mostly trying and failing to break those patterns in their own lives. There's a wide array of characters, but this constant struggle is a theme in all of their lives. It also quickly becomes apparent that the event at the powwow that will tie everyone together is an arm...

A neighbor loaned this book to me back before Christmas, right before I received a huge influx of new books I wanted to read (alongside a big backlog of books I wanted to read). With fifty books waiting for me on my shelf, one that I'd never heard of wasn't really a priority. Even if it had won a fancy award. But in keeping with this month's theme, and because I was starting to feel really guilty about not reading it, I finally picked it up. Honestly, this was the most boring book I've slogged through in a really long time. Sure it's clever and meta, which I generally love. But there's no shortage of clever, meta books that are things I'm actually interested in. Less  is essentially about a man having a midlife crisis. And I just couldn't make myself care. The midlife crisis takes the form of a trip around the world. Less has just learned that his boyfriend of nine years is marrying the man he left him for. Not wanting to endure the pity of his frien...

I thought this was one of Moriarty's better books. Not quite at the level of Big Little Lies  or What Alice Forgot , but miles ahead of The Husband's Secret . At this point, she's pretty much cemented herself as one of my go-to authors. When I'm in the mood for a page-turner with complicated characters and a bit of a mystery, she's a fairly consistent choice. This book follows Ellen, a hypnotherapist who has just started dating someone new. When he tells her that his ex-girlfriend is stalking him, she finds herself more intrigued than off-put. She's fascinated by what would lead someone to that sort of behavior. Little does she know that the stalker is masquerading as one of her patients. This book definitely kept me interested. From the outset it was a little obvious how it would all turn out - Moriarty is a fan of the happy ending - but it was still a fun journey to go on. The ending was perhaps a bit too perfect. Every single detail worked out for the bes...

Rainbow Rowell is so good at writing these incredibly sweet, compulsively readable stories. Fangirl  was longer than most of her other books, but it wasn't long enough. I absolutely didn't want this to end, and part of me wants to follow Cath and Wren (and Levi and Reagan) all the way through college and beyond. The book follows Cath at her first year at college. Her twin sister, Wren, has decided that she wants to strike out on her own, leaving Cath with a stranger for a roommate and feeling adrift. She does fine in her classes. But instead of seeking out new friends, she retreats into the internet fandom of Simon Snow (this world's Harry Potter), and the fanfic she's hoping to finish before the last book comes out. I'll admit that I identify a bit more with Wren than Cath in this situation. But having read and written my fair share of fanfiction in high school, this was a fun trip down memory lane. It made me nostalgic for all the good parts of college. I love...

This book was bracing. Eleanor Oliphant is isolated. She works in the same office she's worked at ever since she finished college, managing accounts. It's not particularly exciting, nor does it pay all that well. But Eleanor is suited to it and doesn't seem to want for much. She's not looking for more, at any rate. Every day at lunch she eats the same thing while doing a crossword puzzle. After work she goes home and eats the same dinner. On Friday she treats herself to a pizza. Then she starts drinking vodka and doesn't stop until the weekend is over. She claims that she's fine. This is exactly how my depression manifests, and seeing it in print was both comforting and hard to read. Especially since I was somewhat recently in danger of falling back under. But I have something Eleanor doesn't have at the beginning of the book: a support system. I have people who notice when I'm starting to slip, people I listen to. And I now have a wealth of healthy ...

Before the Fall  was my first book club book of 2019. And I have to say that I had some trepidation at the beginning. The book centers on the crash of a private jet. A pair of wealthy, powerful couples are on board, along with one couple's children. And there's a down-on-his-luck artist that one of the wives befriended in the weeks before the crash. The artist and the young son are the only ones to survive the crash, and it sets off a whirlwind of media attention as everyone tries to figure out what happened. I was worried in the beginning, because the book seemed set to talk about fate and destiny. How did these lives lead to this moment, and was every step inevitable. And that's uncomfortable because when one kid survives and the other dies and you start talking about what's meant to be....well this is a big part of the reason that I don't truck with religion. But the book pulled through and ended up doing a really elegant job of making a point that I agree wi...

Liane Moriarty is great when I want a quick-plotted, entertaining read. She creates incredibly detailed, flawed characters who balance the line of "people I never want to meet" and "people I can unfortunately relate to somehow". She places them in difficult situations and watches everything unravel. And then she tries to tie everything up in the happiest ending possible. Sometimes this works, other times it comes across as trite or manipulative. This book focuses on three couples who attend a BBQ where Something Bad happens. The first half of the book is devoted to teasing out what that Something Bad is while everyone copes (or fails to cope) with the aftermath. The book alternates between the day of the BBQ (starting early in the morning, well before anything has happened), and the fallout a few months later. Moriarty does this to tease out her big reveal for as long as possible. The problem is that she goes on a bit too long. The first half of the book really ...