Bookish Thoughts

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  Most interesting to me was the question at the heart of artists choosing to destroy their unpublished works upon death versus historians' desire to preserve them for posterity.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 ...

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 ...

This book is exactly what people mean by the phrase "wild romp". It's vaguely historical fiction, veering off into fantasy in a number of ways. It muddies the waters between what probably happened and what might have happened and what absolutely did not happen. But it's entertaining, even when it goes off the rails. The main character, Monty, is a complete disaster. As most eighteen year olds are. He's lived a life mixed with privilege and punishment. On the surface he has everything he wants. But scratch that surface and he can't have anything he actually wants. And he mostly deals with that by trying not to think too hard about what he wants. And drinking way too much. Like I said, he's a disaster. And he spends most of the book as a disaster. But by the end he's starting to figure some things out, starting to realize that he needs to change and how and why he needs to change. I was by turns exasperated and charmed by Monty and his sister, Felicity, ...

This was my second time reading The Bluest Eye , and I definitely got a lot more out of it this time through. It's a difficult book with a complicated structure. It's all about how envy and jealousy can turn into hatred and self-hatred. It's about generational trauma and how it propagates. It's about innocence and the loss of innocence and what happens when the people who are supposed to love you don't. Or when that love gets twisted. It's a really important book, and I'm glad that I read it with my book club because the conversation that followed gave me a lot of hope. When I started my neighborhood book club, we began with Tayari Jones' An American Marriage . It's about a black man who's been imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. But roughly half the club was sure that he'd committed the crime. There's this naive trust in our justice system that privileged white people grow up with, and it's hard to start to question that. Bl...

I wanted to love this book, or at least like it. One of my neighbors once said that it's one of her favorites, and that always gets my attention. If a book is special enough for someone to call it their favorite, there must be something special about it. But life is a rich tapestry, and what appeals to one person doesn't always appeal to another one. I found this book to be incredibly frustrating. The main character Eilis is the mot passive protagonist I've ever come across. I couldn't figure out what she wanted. I don't think she wanted anything. She never felt like a real person, just a construct floating through life and allowing things to happen to her.  I'm tempted to watch the movie and see what they make of Eilis and her woes. Surely she'll have a bit more life in that form. But I'm not sure I care enough to sit through it. 

I'm still enjoying the Poldark novels, though it's been an adjustment switching the focus to the next generation. Still, the shift has highlighted the idea that the more things change the more they stay the same.  Ross and Demelza's kids go through a lot of the same things Ross and Demelza went through: new love and broken hearts, a taste for adventure and having to deal with the consequences, even opening a new mine and handling all the finances. But there are differences too. Clowance has opportunities Demelza never dreamed of and Jeremy has access to technology that still makes his father uncomfortable. Time keeps marching forward.  These books remain comforting. It's fun to go hang out in Cornwall for a few days. I'm starting to get sad that I'm getting so close to the end of the series.

With this book, Winston Graham jumps forward in time ten years and shifts the focus to the next generation. I wasn't expecting it, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Ross and Demelza and the rest are all still in the books, but the bulk of them is about their kids. In a way I'm happy because I like Ross and Demelza and the lack of stories about them means that they're basically happy. There isn't that much drama in their life. But I also care a lot more about them than I do about their kids. It might just take a few books for me to be as interested in Jeremy and Clowance. Hopefully I'll get there, though.

I wanted to read this. I wanted to like it. But I was a third of the way through it when my husband died, and I just couldn't bring myself to pick it up and finish it. Sometimes you just have to sacrifice a book for something like that. Move on to the next thing or you don't have any hope of moving on at all. If this was a bit more compelling I might have stuck with it, but it was very slow. I actually had a similar issue with Never Let Me Go . I attempted it once, made it about 100 pages in, then put it down for years. But on my second attempt I finished it and ended up really liking it. So maybe I'll revisit this one some day and fall in love with it. In the meantime, it's the book I was reading when my husband died, and so I didn't finish it.

I really, really wanted to like this book. I've been meaning to read it for years, and I enjoyed the other book by Elif Shafak that I read. But something was off. It might have been that I just wasn't in the right headspace for a sweeping epic like this. It might have been a mistake to try and read it digitally, which is always harder for me. Whatever it was, I never quite clicked with this book. Which is a shame because it was fascinating. It covers a lot of the history of Istanbul, as viewed through the buildings that are built and the wars that are fought to finance those buildings. Maybe I'll give it another try sometime in the future. This is a bit of history I wish I knew more about.

The Poldark series remains a lovely form of escapism. I'm far enough into this series that I care deeply about (almost) all of the characters. Graham's prose is comfortable and comforting to sink back in to. And I'm invested in seeing what happens.   So this book has Drake and Morwenna finally (finally!) getting together, which is huge. I've been waiting for that forever.   But it also has us saying goodbye to Elizabeth. She was an increasingly complicated woman, and my feelings about her waxed and waned. Sometimes I was really rooting for her and other times and I hated her choices. But I was fascinated by her throughout the series, and I'm sad to see her go. It didn't help that her death scene was particularly difficult to read, seeing as I was sitting at my own husband's deathbed at the time.

I think Graham is getting better at titles as he goes. This one actually worked with the book, the four swans being the four main women whose lives are in upheaval: Demelza, Elizabeth, Caroline, and Morwenna. Actually, Caroline is barely in this book, which is a shame. Her story takes place mostly on the fringes, but it ends in a place that has me very excited for the next part of her life. Demelza and Ross once again find themselves looking outside their marriage for comfort and companionship. But it's almost boring at this point. The two of them are so solid that I can't imagine what it would take to break them up. So Demelza's whole affair with Hugh never seems that serious or threatening. But I really loved getting more of Morwenna's story. And even though it doesn't really end with her in a better place than where she started, I absolutely loved the addition of her sister, Rowella. Rowella reminded me of the main character in Alias Grace . She's so good at ...

I just love these characters so much at this point. Graham has a real gift for creating a huge cast of incredibly human characters, for exploring all the ways they clash against each other. His stories contain a good balance of joy and sorrow, of things going right and things going wrong. It makes for compelling reading, as I'm never entirely sure what's going to happen. Basically, it's the best that slice-of-life storytelling has to offer. This book introduces two of Demelza's brothers. One of them, Drake, falls in love with Elizabeth's cousin Morwenna, who is her son's governess. The relationship between the two of them is incredibly sweet, and I was rooting for them so hard. I'm still rooting for them. But because of the feud between the two families, not to mention their different class standings, the relationship is doomed from the start, and the whole story is just one of heartbreak. Even though Morwenna ends the book married to someone else, I'm s...

This book was so much fun. It's a little bit Almost Famous , a little bit That Thing You Do , and a little bit Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. It follows the meteoric rise and fall of Daisy Jones and The Six, a rock band in the late 70s. It's told as an oral history, as the various members of the band and the people surrounding them talk about coming together, recording their album, going on tour, and how everything fell apart. Taylor Jenkins Reid does a fantastic job of creating complex and memorable characters. Especially since the book is 100% dialogue. And everyone is just telling the story as they remember it. Sometimes their accounts are in direct conflict with each other (who won a bet, who stormed out), and it's up to the reader to decide who to believe. That unreliability of the narration adds to the atmosphere of the drug-soaked seventies. Who can be sure of anything? And how many of these problems got so much worse because no one was ever sober? Reid does a great ...

I read this book more out of a feeling of "I should read this" than an actual desire to. Though my reasons were slightly more involved than it just being a classic. I want to read the second book in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, and I wanted to have a working knowledge of Miss Havisham before I did that. That said, I ended up enjoying this book more than I expected to. It still took me a long time to read (nearly two months), and I struggled with parts of it. I understood just enough to know how much I was missing. There's a fantastic chapter where Pip sees a production of Hamlet , and it had me laughing a lot. But I studied Hamlet pretty thoroughly in high school, so I understood all the jokes. Most of the other jokes in this book went right over my head. Pip's story was interesting, though, as infuriating as Pip himself could be. The twists and turns at the end and the way everything came together was exciting and satisfying. I'm glad I read it...

I'm now a third of the way through this series, though for twenty years, this was the last book in the series. It works as an ending, mostly because things are actually looking up when this book ends. Everyone is settled, more or less. Ross and Demelza are finally making money, Dwight is finally engaged to a woman he can be with, Ross and Elizabeth seem to have broken off for good now that she's married to his greatest enemy. It's a good ending. Somewhere along the way I really came to care about these characters. That happens when you're this deep in a series. Either you want to know about the people you're reading about or you stop reading. And I find myself wanting to know what happens next (even as I want them all to just stay happy for a while). Graham's style finally works for me, and I'm not sure if he's improved or finally worked things out with his editor (who cut nearly 200 pages out of the first two books) or if I'm just getting more fam...

Maybe it's because I've spent the last year learning how to sit with uncertainty, but that's the theme of this book that really rose to the forefront for me. It's all about how that fear of uncertainty leads into a fear of change (and ultimately a fear of death), which just leaves you stuck. It's about learning to embrace uncertainty, on both small and large issues, so you can get yourself unstuck. And it's about using the things we can be certain of the help ground us as we walk off into the unknown. Most of the book takes place in a cemetery over the course of one night. Abraham Lincoln's young son has just died and been buried. The other ghosts in the graveyard are urging him to move on, even as they themselves fear to move on. He's reluctant, though, thanks to a visit from his father and the promise of future visits. The telling of the story is interesting, and plays in to the theme of uncertainty, even as it obscures the actual events. The vario...

This is the book I was reading when my husband was admitted to the hospital a month ago. Which is how I managed to fall so far behind on this blog. (And I was doing well, too!) But I'm catching up now and hoping I remember enough about these books to write coherent things about them. I've been half meaning to read My Brilliant Friend since the HBO series came out. It helped that I saw it at the library book sale shortly thereafter. And I guess I don't entirely know what I expected from it, but it wasn't really what I got. There are some amazing quotes in here. The language is incredible, distilling motives and emotions in that way that the best writers have. I imagine that this is even more true in the original Italian - you always lose a little something in translation. That said, the book also meanders all over the place. I had a hard time keeping the characters straight, even with the handy cheat sheet in the front of the book. The author goes off on tangents ...

This is the third book in the Poldark series, which I'm warming up to. I find myself caring more and more about the characters, wanting things to go well for Demelza and Ross for once, wondering what will happen to Warleggan, hoping that the new mining venture will succeed. But, man, he needs to work on a better naming scheme. Jeremy didn't arrive until the last six pages of the book (though I suppose Demelza's pregnancy was confirmed halfway through). I know some of what's coming in the next few books, and I'm not sure really sure how it will go. I'm bracing myself for a few things and wondering how or if certain characters will be redeemed. But like I said, I care about the characters now. I'm committed, at least for the next book. Maybe Dwight Enys will finally fall in love with a woman he can be with. Mostly, though, I just want good things for Demelza, who really deserves everything Ross can give her and more.

It's probably because I've watched Labyrinth more times than I can count, but that's the touchstone my brain kept returning to as I worked my way through this book. What if Sarah had been a little more clever and a little less kind? What if Jareth had been more insistent, more seductive? What if the magic had been irresistible as well as frightening and Sarah had left her life behind to become the Goblin Queen? It might have turned out something like this book. Deathless is a dark fairy tale. A retelling of a classic Russian tale about Koschei Deathless and his death at the hands of Ivan. Except this one twists it around, makes Ivan's wife Marya Morevna the protagonist and gives her the magical journey. It examines why she makes her choices, what she gains and what she gives up. And it interweaves this tale with modern Russian history, taking the reader from the Russian revolution through the siege of Leningrad. Valente's command of language is what makes this...

For a few days after I finished this book, I was surprised that I wasn't still reading it. Part of my brain was still living in Cornwall in the 1790s. Which I suppose speaks to how engrossing the book actually was and my desire to find out what happens next to Ross, Demelza, Verity, Elizabeth and all the rest. This isn't my usual fare, but it's definitely growing on me. I appreciated Graham's prose in this book more than the first one, which I think speaks more to my frame of mind than the writing itself. In the last few weeks, I've been feeling my brain turn back on and I'm starting to appreciate more complicated writing again instead of just gorging on lighter, fluffy stuff. This book requires a bit more attention than I was initially expecting, but it rewards it. That said, I still struggled with the crowd scenes - Graham tends to jump around a room and require his reader to follow three or four distinct conversations at once. I'm also having a hard tim...