Bookish Thoughts

Tana French has a way of getting in my head and under my skin. I love her books, but they consume me. When I'm reading one, it's difficult for me to engage fully with the rest of my life. I come up for air as needed, because I do have a life outside of books. But French's books make me struggle with that. I want to linger over them, make them last as long as possible. I also find myself racing to the end, hoping that when I finally close the book I'll get myself back. That I'll be able to return to the rest of my life. Broken Harbor  was no exception. In fact, it got to me even more than usual. This book terrified me. It actually gave me nightmares. These books are not fantastical. There's nothing supernatural here, not even a whiff of magical realism. But the way French plays with your perception makes you doubt that. Just as I called The Likeness  a ghost story, on some level this is a book about a haunted house. A house haunted by all the crumbling hopes an...

Ever since I read Gone Girl , I've been wanting to read the rest of Gillian Flynn's work. She's amazing at creating dark, creepy scenarios that keep you guessing. It's not the sort of thing I want to read all the time. But every now and then they're a lot of fun, a nice break from what I usually read. This one follows Libby Day decades after the massacre of her family when she was seven years old. At the time she testified against her brother, who has been in jail ever since. But new evidence suggests that he may have been innocent, and Libby is finally convinced to begin investigating and coming to terms with the discrepancies between her own memories and what she was subtly coached to say. The narrative flips back and forth between Libby's quest in the present and the actions of her mother and brother on the day of the murder. The structure kept the tension high as it seemed to reveal and then deny both motive and opportunity for various characters. And th...

Out is not a book I would have ever come across on my own. It's a crime novel out of Japan. It was published there in 1997, and it won several awards, leading to it being translated to English in 2003. It was the most recent pick for my book club, and I dutifully read it, even though it turns out I won't be able to attend this time around. I've read a handful of crime novels over the years, most notably Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, but it's not a genre I generally gravitate towards. When I want those kinds of stories it's a lot easier to flip on Law and Order or one of its descendants. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I am far from a connoisseur of this genre. And I'm not sure this book convinced me that I want to dive deeper into it. The story kicks off when a seemingly timid housewife kills her abusive husband and recruits her work friends to help her deal with the aftermath. They dismember and dispose of the body. But mistakes pile...