At the start of 2017 I set a goal to read 40 books by the end of the year. In February I hit 20 so I increased my goal to 65 with hopes to reach 100 by the end of December. This a record of what I’m reading.
We Should All Be Feminists is the book/essay that grew out of Adichie’s TEDx talk of the same name.
The premise? We should all be feminists. It’s really that simple. Adichie argues a case for feminism with personal stories, using her own experiences as a lens to examine gender inequalities and sexual politics. It’s a breezy 30-minute read.
Oh, and have you read Adichie’s Americanah? Go read it. It’s GREAT.
This debut book of fiction by writer Emily Fridlund is a stunner.
It’s a classic coming-of-age story. High school student Linda doesn’t fit it. Like so many high school kids who feel like they’re the wrong age at the wrong time in the wrong place, she lives the life of an outsider. Her peers keep their distance at school, and she lives a long way from anything with her odd parents. When a family with a young boy, Paul, moves in across the lake, Linda starts to babysit, forging a relationship with the boy and his parents. From page one we know that something devastating has happened to Paul, a knowledge which drives this elegant, sad, austere story to the end.
I really love Fridlund’s writing, there were so many sentences and passages in History of Wolves that made me go “wow.” Some coming-of-age books feel like replicas of stories we’ve all read/heard before, but this one stands out. From the beginning, Fridlund constructs a narrative built on dramatic tension, with the reader constantly questioning “what the fuck happened to that kid?!” The snowy backwoods setting evokes isolation and loneliness, and the characters are unique, complex, totally flawed.
I can’t wait to read what Fridlund comes out with next.
This book was passed along to me by my husband. It won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for fiction, and the fact that Francisco Goldman calls Herrera “Mexico’s greatest novelist” would suggest that the book is something quite special, a memorable read. I finished it with a “meh” and a shrug. With all the praise this book received, I was left wondering “did I miss something?!”
If you read it and loved it, I’d love to hear your thoughts…
When looking for creative inspiration or a jump-start to your craft, look here.
Gilbert (yes, author of Eat, Pray, Love… also the author of the excellent The Last American Man) tackles the doubts and fears that stunt the creative impulse, talks about ideas that just want to be brought into the world and made real, champions doing the creative work because you love the work, and divulges the most fascinating story about how a book idea she was working on left her creative sphere and ended up in Ann Patchett’s.
This book continues to fuel interesting conversations and I find myself talking about the ideas in Big Magic with anyone who will listen.
After reading and loving Chaon’s Await Your Reply a few years ago, I was excited to pick up an ARC of Ill Will at my fave local bookstore (where I used to be a bookseller).
Sadly, I didn’t like this book. I found the characters unredeemingly grotesque, and because I disliked the characters so much, I couldn’t invest any emotional energy in actually caring about the plot or the outcome. Blah.
Looking for a great book to take on vacation? Or just a great read? Here you go.
This is the funny, poignant story of Ove, an old curmudgeon who trolls his neighborhood looking for miscreants, and lives to follow the rules and expects everyone else to as well. He’s unrelenting, grumpy, and inflexible. Much to his chagrin, when a young family moves in next door his life gets turned upside down, his routines are disrupted, his past is brought back to life, lessons are learned.
This is such a page-turner, and Ove is a character you won’t soon forget.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves sat on my bookshelf for a year, recommended by Doug, a friend who loved it. The reason I didn’t pick it up sooner? Book snobbery… It’s by the author of The Jane Austen Book Club. (Which, for the record, I haven’t read, but I think it was turned into a super cheesy movie, right?) Did I care that it was a finalist for the Booker Prize? Nope.
Well, I finally decided to give it a try and, surprise!, I really loved it too.
The story centers on the family of Rosemary Cooke, her older brother, Lowell, and her sister, Fern. Rosemary’s childhood is the same as most, she’s quirky, playful and talkative, she loves her siblings; her childhood is also so very different – her sister Fern is a chimpanzee. (This is not a big reveal. The back cover copy on the book will tell you as much.) Within this story of a complicated family, Fowler weaves in themes of animal cruelty, human nature, love and trust, memory, and the imperfectness of childhood.
A galley of News of the World sat on my shelves for almost a year and, for whatever reason, I just didn’t pick it up. But I’m glad I finally did, it’s a charming book.
The premise: “In the aftermath of the American Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this morally complex, multi-layered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.”
At first I was apprehensive that the young girl/older man narrative would veer into cringe-worthy sexual territory, but thankfully it never did. The aging news reader character, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, surprised and delighted me. Kidd’s view of the world is wider than the characters around him, he reads the news aloud to crowds, verbally presenting the world to those who cannot read and/or have no access to newspapers. Because of this world view, his lens positions the story within a bigger historical context and provides insight into that particular time in that part of the Southwest. We get a glimpse of the eradication of Native American tribes, the ramifications of slavery, the appropriation of Mexico, the violent grab for land, power, people, money, all at the complex intersection of new and old, of civilization and wilderness.
I really wanted to like Pond. It came highly recommended by a great local bookseller, the cover and overall book package is lovely, and the blurbs sang the book’s praises.
“A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut …” from The New York Times book review.
“Dazzling…” from O, the Oprah Magazine.
“Innovative, beguiling…meditative…” Los Angeles Times.
I just can’t get on the praise train with this book. While there were moments of really nice writing, short passages that made me pause and re-read, ultimately I was bored by the narrator’s interior voice, felt constrained by her solitude (I know this is the author’s intention, to make the reader share an intimate and intensely confined space with the narrator, but I didn’t enjoy it and failed to meditate on the blandness of the narrator’s life in that space) and couldn’t find the dazzling or the humor.
Brief Book Reviews 