Bookish Thoughts

I really wish I could have made Kevin read this book. I would have liked to talk to him about it. I think it helped me understand a bit better what he went through at the end, all the things he lost during his months in the hospital. This book is about a privileged man losing a little bit of that privilege and learning that the world is a lot darker than he always thought. At the beginning of the book, he gets beat up by a couple of robbers and lands in the hospital. The experience shakes him to his core, and he has a really hard time figuring out how to move forward. Then a body is discovered at his family's house, and he ends up getting sucked into a mess as he tries to solve the mystery before the detectives. Like all of French's books, this one was dark and twisty and occasionally hard to read. The protagonist is insufferable and never quite gets his comeuppance. Although he does seem to learn his lesson in the end.

Not too long from today, a new, highly contagious virus makes its way across the globe. Most who get sick experience nothing worse than flu, fever and headaches. But for the unlucky one percent - and nearly five million souls in the United States alone - the disease causes "Lock In": Victims fully awake and aware, but unable to move or respond to stimulus. The disease affects young, old, rich, poor, people of every color and creed. The world changes to meet the challenge. I mean, replace "not too long from today" with "last month" and "Lock In" with death, and this is the world that we're currently living in. Aside from the robots that those with Lock In syndrome use to interface with the world, this isn't science-fiction so much as science-fact. There was a chance that reading this now would hit a little too close to home, but I was also hoping that it might prove cathartic. Thankfully it worked out. The book actually takes p...

When Gone Girl  came out, there was a ton of buzz around it, most centered on the shocking twist. It was like The Sixth Sense  all over again, with everyone swearing you had to read it but refusing to tell you anything about it. Sometimes stories can rely on these twists to much, making that the only worthwhile thing about them. And they end up falling apart once you know the secret. But Gone Girl  holds up incredibly well. Even knowing what Amy's plotting from the beginning, it remains gripping and thrilling. Gillian Flynn populates the novel with some truly horrible, selfish, twisted people, and it's so much fun to watch them play games with each other and see how Amy comes out on top of everyone. It helps that she's the most ruthless and least moral. She'll literally do whatever it takes to get what she wants, including killing a (mostly) innocent guy. (Seriously, though, Desi was just as bad as the rest of them.) I really enjoyed my re-read of this book. Knowing...

This is my second Agatha Christie book, and I definitely understand why she was such a popular author. She was really a master of her craft, and surprisingly prolific to boot. And Then There Were None  was expertly constructed and very thrilling. I actually have to pat myself on the back for guessing the murderer correctly fairly early on. But then I fell for a masterful red herring, so by the end of the book I was doubting myself. Right up until all was revealed and I was kicking myself for falling for it. Still, Christie always manages to zig where I expect her to zag and ends up thoroughly surprising me with the end of the book. While I'm not as big a fan of mysteries as I am other genres, Christie's books are so short and exciting that I may have to seek out more of them. At the very least I should read a Miss Marple book.

Tana French isn't one to shy away from morally messy people. She likes taking complicated people, finding their buttons, and turning up the pressure to see whether they break or rise to the equation. I've liked a few of her protagonists, but most of them leaving me feeling off balance and a bit queasy. So it should be no surprise that Antoinette, narrator of The Tresspasser , is a difficutl character. She's angry and paranoid. The world has been hostile to her, and she responds by being hostile right back. Often proactively. It was hard to be in her head for an entire book. Honestly, her level of anger and defensiveness just exhausts me. She tries so hard to prove that she doesn't care that she ends up spending all of her time caring what people are thinking of her every minute. It's no surprise to the audience to learn that most of her squad doesn't think about her as much as she believes, and I had a particularly hard time believing that O'Neill was in o...

The Winter People  was my All Hallows Read gift this year, but I decided to save it to read in colder weather. And I'm so glad I did. Something about being surrounded by a fresh blanket of snow made this book a lot more affecting. Freezing weather and fresh snow make outdoor activities so much harder, and being attuned to that added an extra layer of tension to this book. The story alternates between 1908 and the present day. In the past, Sara Harrison Shea and her husband lose their young daughter. But Sara knows a spell to bring her back to life, at least for a few days. And when she decides to do just that, the consequences are beyond what she could have imagined. In the present day, Ruthie's mom has gone missing, and Ruthie suddenly finds herself responsible for her younger sister while searching for her mom and accidentally digging up some family secrets that ought to have stayed buried. This was a delightfully creepy story about grief and consequences. It got tighter ...

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...

This book is almost too bright. Which is maybe an odd way to describe a book. It's so bright that it gives me a headache, the kind I got when I was in Alaska in June and the sun was always in my eyes. Which, again, is an odd way to describe a book that I love deeply. But it's true. The first time I read it, I had a stomach bug, so I figured that was why I felt a little off. This time through I felt fine, and I still got a headache, right at the exact same spot. This book glitters and shimmers, and it's sometimes hard to look at. But it's even harder to look away. So. Headache. My second time through this book, I got a chance to marvel at how French constructed her mystery. I was actually surprised to realize that she tells you who the author is right on the third page. Then again, much like The Secret History , this mystery is more about why than who. What did Lexie do that fractured the group? I love books that hold up well on a re-read, and I think it can be espec...

I love these stories about insular groups of young adults that lead to murder. It makes me grateful that my own time in an insular, dysfunctional group didn't result in anyone's death. The Secret History  follows a group of six college students, studying Greek and the classics at a small Vermont college. At the very beginning, the narrator, Richard, reveals that five of them murdered the sixth. Then the story backs up a few months to tell the story of how this murder came about, and what happened afterwards. In a lot of ways, this felt like a book I might read for school. Not that I didn't like it. But it's rich and dense, and I almost feel like I'm supposed to be writing an essay about the imagery or the use of Greek or something. It's reminiscent of a lot of books I did read for school. Like A Separate Peace , we have a group of rich kids at an elite school who seem to be making all their own problems. Plus an undercurrent of repressed homosexuality. And lik...

I hated this book. If it hadn't been chosen for my book club, I would have given up after thirty pages. But seeing as I'm organizing and hosting the book club, I couldn't just not read the book. So I powered through (frequently swapping to a different book for a break), and ended up with nice long list of grievances. The broadest of those is that this book is lazy. The author relies overmuch on cliches and stereotypes. Worse, it seems obviously padded to hit a respectable 300 pages. But there were more than a few completely blank pages between chapters. I got the impression that he struggled to hit a minimum page count, which is a shame. There were plenty of places that the characters could have been better fleshed out. The narrator, Joe, and his interview subject, Carl, are the only two characters who even come close to feeling like actual people. Which makes sense, since the book is basically about them. But even here there were some pretty big missteps. The author el...

This book broke my heart. After Broken Harbor , I'd been expecting another terrifying read from Tana French. Instead I got a deeply sad tale about friendship and the things young girls will do to protect (or destroy) each other. The murder victim in this book is a teenaged boy, found on the campus of a girl's boarding school. A year after his death, the case has gone cold, until a new clue narrows the suspect pool to eight teenaged girls, and the detectives find themselves caught in a web of high school drama and endless lies, trying to tease apart exactly what happened. Reading this book, I kept thinking back to my college experience. For a few brief, shining months, I had what these girls have. A group of girl friends that you are impossibly close with. You live together and share everything. You're ride or die for each other, and it seems like it will stay that way forever. And then something goes wrong. And because everything is so heightened, it goes really wrong, an...

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...

The Likeness  is a deliciously claustrophobic mystery that skirts up against being a ghost story. It's haunting and lyrical. It got under my skin such that I couldn't think about anything else when I wasn't reading it, and then I couldn't sleep for thinking about it. It's rare that a novel leaks into the rest of my life the way this one did, and I absolutely loved it for it. The premise requires a significant suspension of disbelief. Detective Cassie Maddox, lately of the Murder Squard but currently working Domestic Violence began her career as an undercover agent. During that time she created the persona of Lexie Madison to infiltrate a drug ring on a college campus. When she was stabbed, she got pulled out, but the identity was left live in case they needed her again. So imagine her surprise when, several years later, Lexie Madison turns up dead. With no leads, Cassie agrees to go undercover again, under very different circumstances this time. So yeah, that in...

This is only the second of Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad  series that I've read, but I really like it for the way it deviates from some classic detective series. By keeping the setting the same but jumping to a new detective in each novel, French is able to write psychological thrillers that don't come across as cheap. Each case is deeply personal to the detective working it, managing to unleash all manner of ghosts and questionable behaviors. They're once-in-a-lifetime cases, and the affect the detectives in different ways. They're also incredibly disturbing, in a way that sneaks up on you and leaves you wanting more. This particular book (the third in the series, and the other thing I like about this series is that you can read it in any order, which makes it a lot easier given my tendency to shop used book sales) focuses on Detective Francis Mackey and the girl who got away. The girl who was, in fact, murdered some twenty years previously. It takes a lot fo...

This isn't usually my kind of book. I've read a handful of thrillers over the years, and I've never particularly enjoyed them. But I thought it would be fun to read the source material for a movie I love. To see what they changed and why. It turns out they changed quite a bit. Though all of it made sense to me. Then again, that could be because I know the movie so well, love it so much, that I was primed to see all the changes they made as improvements on the story. Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy the book. But part of that enjoyment came from replaying the movie in my head while I was reading it and reveling in all the little differences. The biggest thing I liked about the movie is that it switched the ages of the grandkids and gave Lex more to do. In the book, Tim is interested in computers and dinosaurs and Lex likes baseball and mostly exists to be an annoying kid. She has a couple of good moments, but the movie did well to give her the interest in c...

I really like Gillian Flynn's books. They're twisty and turny and they don't shy away from the darker aspects of human nature, making for some great psychological thrillers. But I am glad that they tend to be shorter and that she's not all that prolific. Because these books can be hard to read. Reading about horrible people doing horrible things and all the damage they leave in their wake is emotionally draining. But it's so interesting that I can't stop. Sharp Objects is actually Flynn's first book, meaning I've worked my way through her books in reverse. But it's just as dark and compelling as her other books, at least in my opinion. The narrator is a journalist who was abused by her mother and driven to self harm. Fresh out of a stint in a psychiatric hospital, she's sent back to her hometown to report on the disappearances and subsequent murders of two local girls. Which would be bad enough even if she weren't staying in her mother...

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...

Holy shit. This book is the perfect example of how (and maybe why) I tend to be so behind the times in the book world. It came out three years ago, and there was a ton of hype. Everyone was talking about it. They read it in on sitting! The twist was so incredible! No one saw it coming and no one could put it down. I was skeptical (I had somewhat recently been burned by the Twilight hype). I found out what that twist was (Amy did it!) and decided I didn't want to read it. My mother-in-law even lent it to me and it sat on the side table for months while I studiously ignored it, refusing to be pulled into the hype. And then it got turned into a movie so the hype continued. But then an interesting thing happened. I continued to see people talking about  Gone Girl . About Gillian Flynn's other books. I read one of her short stories and was intrigued. It seemed like there might be something more here than an unexpected twist midway through the book. So when I saw it at the used...