Bookish Thoughts

I can't remember the last time I was this conflicted about a book. I'm currently re-watching the second season of The Witcher. When it first came out, I assumed it was based on Blood of Elves, so I read that book. I then learned it was based on both that book and this book. So I decided to read this book with the rewatch to see what I missed. It started off great. I recognized an early scene in the book from the TV show, and I was so excited to spend more time with those characters. But then the book delved into politics with so many characters I had trouble keeping them straight. It turned into a a bit of a slog - though at least part of that was because my life got so busy I had a hard time finding time to read the book. By the end, I actively disliked the book and was kicking myself for having already bought the next one in the series. I should have waited. Then that night I watched the next episode, and a lot of backstory from the book clicked into place. I'm more excit...

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 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.

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 ...

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...

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...

It took me a while to get in to this book, but that was more an issue of timing than the book itself. I shouldn't start epic tomes when I know I'm going to be too busy to read for a week. When I did manage to sink into the story, I got a fun, swashbuckling adventure about an idealistic young man. Which is exactly what I wanted. I particularly enjoyed the narrator of this book. The mystery of her identity (which I figured out long before she revealed herself, as the book expected me to) was a fun hook dragging me through some of the more tedious sections. And her occasional snarky asides added some fun flavor to the book. I loved when the narrator is a character, and Allende did an excellent job of that here. The only thing this book is really lacking is a sequel. Just when it was really getting good, when Diego de la Vega had fully embraced his identity as Zorro and completed his first mission, the book ended. This was more of an origin tale than a series of adventures. And...

This is such a short book, made shorter by the fact that it's poetry rather than prose and each poem is presented in both Spanish and English. I still barely finished it. I keep wanting to read more poetry, and sometimes I do come across poems that speak to me. But these weren't them. I really tried to give this collection a shot, to linger over the poems rather than speeding through them. But Neruda's work just isn't for me.

I saw The Reason I Jump  on The Daily Show back when I still watched The Daily Show (back when Jon Stewart still hosted it), so it's been years that this book has been floating around in the back of my head as something I should read. And then I found it at the library's used book sale and snapped it up. My impulsive book purchases are rarely quite as impulsive as they seem. This book was written by a thirteen-year-old, nonverbal, autistic boy in Japan. He explains his day-to-day life to a neurotypical audience, in a effort to make himself and people like him better understood. All he really wants is understanding and patience and the opportunity to have a fulfilling life where he isn't constantly pitied and made to feel like a burden. This was more of an interview than a story. Actually, it was more of a questionnaire, with Higashida briefly given answers to a bunch of questions. These are interspersed with a handful of short stories. The book was interesting and insig...

Another of the translated books Amazon was giving away, this one is a contemporary Japanese novel about finding your passion. The book follows a group of rather awkward people working to make a new dictionary. It's a lifelong dream of two older men, who are nearing retirement and take a young man under their wings. They mentor him and help him learn to interact better with the world around him. He, in turn, helps usher their dream project (which quickly becomes his dream project) to fruition. There wasn't a ton of conflict in this tale, which is mostly about good-natured and well-intentioned people becoming friends and helping each other out. It can be a nice change of pace to read stories like that. The biggest drama is whether or not they'll meet their deadline. It's something I can relate to, but it's also not like the stakes are all that high. At worst they'll have to push the release back. It was interesting to learn about the process of making a dictio...

The Question of Red  is another of Amazon's translated works that I picked up for free on world book day. This one was actually translated by the author herself, who is bilingual, and I think that helped retain a lot of the poetry of the original story. Pamuntjak has an incredible gift for language. It was easy to get caught up that language, which made the rest of the story go down easier. Because this tale is deeply tragic. It centers on Amba, a woman named for a character in the Mahabharata who was twice scorned and doomed to a life of bitterness and vengeance. The modern Amba doesn't really believe that her fate is so tied up with that of her namesake. But when she finds herself engaged to a man named Salwa and in love with a man named Bhisma, just like the Amba of the stories, she begins to have her doubts. And to self-sabotage. In attempting to escape her fate, she might just bring it down upon herself. This is a book about stories and how they shape our lives. We tel...

Ten Woman  was another of the free books Amazon offered for World Book Day. This one is a Chilean work of fiction translated from Spanish. It follows the lives of nine women who have nothing in common but their therapist. The frame story - which is pretty thin - has them all meeting for the first time and sharing their life stories and the reasons they've been attending therapy. The tenth woman is the therapist herself, who also has a story to share. These stories were interesting, and they painted a diverse picture of womanhood. There was something in each story that I was able to relate to, though some of the women were more similar to me than others. One of them had a startling amount in common with my mom. Others had experiences that were completely foreign, though they were valuable to read about. While I enjoyed reading the individual stories, I struggled with understanding the book as a whole. The women barely interact with each other - each chapter is just a different on...

This was a brief but very affecting memoir written by a Turkish lawyer and activist about discovering her Grandmother's origins. It's only in recent years that the Armenian Genocide is coming to be recognized as the atrocity it was. Turkey has done it's best to erase this part of it's history. But as Fetihye Cetin and others like her come to learn about and embrace their heritage, that denial is slipping away. This book is as much about Cetin's journey to process her grandmother's story as it is about that story itself. As such, it jumps around a little in an attempt to lay all the groundwork for the story. This mostly worked, though it was occasionally jarring to jump between Cetin's present and her grandmother's childhood. By the end it all comes together, and it makes sense why she explains the things she does. Cetin doesn't linger over the horrors her grandmother experienced on the death march to Aleppo, but she doesn't shy away from them...

I'd been saving this book to read while I was in Mexico over New Year's. Then it was so short and so good that I ended up finishing it almost before we arrived. Like Water for Chocolate  is part cookbook, part romance, part family epic. It centers on Tita. As the youngest daughter, she's destined to remain single and care for her mother for her entire life. When she falls in love, her mother does everything in her power to prevent the two from getting together, leading to much strife and drama. But Tita is the family cook, and her emotions come spilling out in her food, like The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake  in reverse. Everything in this book was heightened, from the emotion to the conflicts. It was no surprise that this all occasionally erupted in magical displays. But it also all stayed grounded through the traditional recipes that Tita prepared for her family. Those recipes are woven in in a way that makes you think you just might be able to replicate them. But ...

Well I'm officially in love with Isabel Allende. She writes beautiful, lyrical, romantic historic fiction with incredibly real characters. It brings the history alive, and her tendency to branch out and explore the lives of secondary characters allows for a lot of sympathy as well as multiple reactions to the events she writes about. Island Beneath the Sea follows Zarité (aka Tété), a woman born into slavery on Saint-Domngue. She lives through the Haitian Revolution before moving with her master to New Orleans, where she eventually achieves freedom for herself and her children. Tété is a wonderful character, strong and fierce and intelligent. She makes incredible sacrifices for the sake of her children, doing everything in her power to keep her family together. Her resilience is astounding, as is the naivete of her master, who is sure that the two of them have a bond that goes deeper than owner and property (mostly because he's the owner and has the luxury of delusion). ...

This book was absolutely gorgeous. I picked it up without knowing anything about it because Isabelle Allende is Jane's favorite author on Jane the Virgin . I'd been wanting to wade into the romance genre and this seemed like as good a place as any to start. That said, I'm not sure this qualifies as a romance. Then again, I don't really know enough about the genre to make a claim like that. Regardless of whether it's a romance (and it does have true love and a happy ending, which is probably enough to qualify), it's also a wonderfully rich and beautiful coming-of-age tale set during the San Francisco gold rush. Eliza is a young Chilean girl, adopted and raised by Anglican parents to be a proper, upper-class Christian. But when she finds herself pregnant, she throws caution to the wind and follows her lover to San Francisco, certain that they're destined to be together. The language of this book is stunning, particularly when Allende describes young love. ...

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...

Aliens! Physics! Deep and difficult questions about whether humanity is inherently evil! I have to admit that I was wary going in to  The Three-Body Problem . It was a best-seller in China in 2009 and was just translated to English last year. I've heard a lot of people express difficulties about it. The language is stilted and the story seems to jump and focus on strange things. Some of that is cultural differences, others may be put down to translation. The point is that despite the great reputation of the book, I had some pretty low expectations. So I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Yes, it does jump around a lot. There's a game that seems to come out of nowhere and initially put me in mind of Neal Stephenson's  Snow Crash , which I found difficult. The aliens are weird and you have to seriously suspend your disbelief to accept them. But the science side of things was awesome, and I absolutely loved one of the main characters, Ye Wenjie. It's ...

It's always disappointing to dive into a classic, beloved book and discover that it is just not meant for you. I really wanted to like this book. I enjoy magical realism as a genre, and I remember liking what I read of Marquez in AP Spanish in high school. But this book was such a slog that I gave up after about 150 pages. There were a couple of cool things. At one point the entire town is struck by insomnia and slowly begins losing their memories. I enjoyed reading about that, but I wish it had gone on longer. Because the book covers seven generations (100 years), no one episode gets more than a few pages. Anything that was interesting was quickly over and I was left with characters that I didn't care much about. The characters were the biggest problem I had with this book. They were constantly getting in their own way. Creating misery for themselves like they were all suffering from the same stupid martyr complex. One woman falls deeply in love with a man. He eventually f...

I came across Roise Rua in a small bookshop in Donegal, Ireland. It was originally written in Gaelic by Padraig Ua Cnaimhsi and was later translated into English by JJ Keaveny. It tells the story of a woman, Roise, who was raised on the island of Arranmore, off the coast north of Donegal. Cnaimhsi spent many years interviewing Roise about her life on the island and used those interviews to put together the book, which is told from the first person perspective. The first two-thirds comprise an autobiography of Roise, and the last third is a collection of stories that either happened before her time or didn't fit into the main narrative. It was definitely an interesting read. Roise's life was so unlike anything I have any experience with. She spent most of her young life as a migrant worker, working as either a servant on farms in Ireland or picking potatoes in Scotland. The money was sent back home to her mother until she finally decided to settle down and get...