I confess, I haven't been reading as much as I did last year. (I blame the all-consuming buzz of a new relationship. And moving. And giant retrogrades that have truly knocked me on my ass.) It doesn't help, too, that the first handful of reads of the year weren't really my favorites...but, let's get into it!
A love letter to reading
This quick, bright collection of 53 vignettes investigates reading. How we do it, why, where, when, etc. Hwang has such a refreshing breadth of literary references at her disposal and she uses them liberally here—practically every two chapters, I was writing down the name of an author or a work I'd never encountered before!
I picked this book up primarily because I wanted to get to know the woman behind Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop, which was so clearly written by a bibliophile. Her earnest voice shines through all of her writing—fiction and non—and I am solidly a fan.
A (second) trip to the underworld
In this sequel to Ninth House, we actually follow Alex to Hell in her increasingly desperate attempts to rescue Darlington. I read this whole thing in 24 hours, absolutely ravenous for the story after how much I loved the first one! I have no idea what I'm going to do until the third one comes out in the fall.
This book doesn't pack as powerful a punch as the original—true of most sequels—but Leigh's signature class commentary and tremendous character growth are all present here, too! I found Alex's core wound (about Hellie) extremely repetitive and a tad heavy-handed. Of course, this could be due to the truncated timeline I read this in...Of course, the evil character reveals were apparent to me before they happened, but like in Book I. Didn't hinder my enjoyment, though!
A journey to the afterlife (sort of)
Sandra is a working mom with a teenage son, Trip, who has autism, problems with authority, and a penchant for stargazing. Sandra decides to put Trip in an assisted living/special needs camp while she goes on a 7-week work trip to Nepal for a conference about death. Unfortunately, on week #1 of her trip, Sandra dies, around the same time that Trip escapes camp and is picked up by a weirdo driving directly into a hurricane. The rest of the story includes Trip and Weirdo stranding themselves on a stolen boat in the middle of the Atlantic and Sandra possessing a fellow conference attendee (landing him in Swedish jail, in the process) in her attempt to save her son.
I picked this up because the flap copy promised Amie's attempt to materialize Buddhist philosophy and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There were certainly several attempts made to that end, but the overall effect was SO annoying, it was palpable. (I felt like Madeline Kahn in Clue, IYKYK.) The disjointed nature of the story and its utter absurdity are attempts to serve a Larger Purpose, I know, but.....damn! My kingdom for a sequitur.
The Kirkus review of this novel pointed out, "There are few topics more emotionally rousing than the endurance of love beyond the grave, which makes the novel's flatness here...in her attempt to render complex Buddhist abstract philosophies, I fear Amie sapped her characters of agency.
Getting stuck in a time loop that's also a mental hospital
This is a really cool premise for a book! Our protagonist wakes up on a bus in 1953 heading to a mental hospital with no memory and a strong conviction that she doesn't belong here. Dorothy (if that's even her name) keeps having flashes to the future (or does she?) where she learns that she's on a secret mission to travel back in time to prevent the outbreak of a major virus.
The notion is that we are meant to be just as confused as Dorothy about her perspective and the "truth." Really, though, it's clear which truth Melissa wants us to root for. The scenes inside the mental institution are the most effective, everything else really pales in comparison. Melissa uses overly explanatory dialogue to move the plot forward often, which made me feel like I was watching a Netflix show talking down to me. There's also an incredibly underbaked relationship that becomes highly consequential at the end? Sadly cooler in premise than in delivery.
Moving in sync with your cycle
In all honesty, I skimmed this. I was looking for some very specific guidance about training and eating in accordance with my cycle and I didn't feel the need to read the anecdotes. I liked that Alisa incorporated learnings from traditional Chinese medicine. I did not love that big chunks of every section were plugs for her company, but that's to be expected. I'll never know what critical information was hidden behind a paywall, considering I refuse to participate in Big Tech's monitoring of my body as much as I can.
Getting stuck in a liminal space that's also a mental hospital
This is what I'm talking about when I say I've been reading some stinkers lately. I had such high hopes for this one! It's kind of a mix of the premises of The Once and Future Me and Trip, both of which I had very mixed feelings about. And somehow....
I'll be honest, I DNF'd this one. I know, I know! I NEVER do that. But....damn! This story is about women who are imprisoned for "dangerous dreams" that the technostate can see (bc ofc) that "makes them dangerous" to the men in their lives. Sounds like my kinda sh*t, right?!
Sadly....it was a slog, TBH. I was not invested in any of the main characters enough and I kept getting narratively confused. I also found Laila's guiding, authorial hand to be far too obvious for my taste. Less than a full third of the way through the book, I flipped to the final few pages (I knoW! I'm committing countless reader sins) and let's just say....I'm incredibly grateful I didn't stick it out.
A guide to establishing better habits
The tidbit that remained with me the most after finishing this book was the fact that Gretchen Rubin—a self-professed Upholder—doesn't eat fruit. The entirety of her strategies are lost to me, only a few months after finishing it.
One of my favorite reads of the whole year, I can already tell. Holy shit, this book is amazing. Recommended by my friend, Caroline, who has yet to steer me wrong with a book rec, for the record.
The Flynn family is f*cked up. Mom & Dad just opened up their marriage, only because Mom wanted to, though, and she tries to hook up with the hot neighbor Dad, which goes very quickly south in an unexpectedly hilarious way. Dad starts sleeping in the family minivan in a sort-of protest, before he finds himself unexpectedly attracted to a "church-y" woman at the Lost Lambs support group his therapist makes him attend.
Their daughters are not faring much better. The eldest Flynn daughter (a senior in high school) is dating a 20-something colloquially known as "War Crimes Wes," who works private security for the elusively sinister local billionaire. The middle Flynn girl is being radicalized by her ISIS e-boyfriend online, and the youngest of the group is far too smart for her own good and sent to a camp for special children in the woods as a kind of last resort for the sanity of the nuns at her school.
This novel has the best ending I've come across for a dysfunctional family novel thus far (and my affinity for the genre is....well documented, to say the least.) One of my friends described this as "Little Women for the 21st century," which feels apt.
Getting stuck in Germany when it's also a time loop
I accidentally picked up the third volume in a seven-title series, but boy did it capture me anyway! Protagonist Tara is stuck in the 18th of November. And over the course of the (apparently) seven books of this series, she confronts the existential issues spurred by this time loop in a very Scandinavian way. Namely, she doesn't particularly do anything.
By that I mean, this is not a thriller. Tara is not starring in an action movie or trying to crack open the mystery of this time loop to save the world. Instead, Tara is adapting to live, more or less, "normally" in these incredibly NOT normal circumstances. Solvej manages to create something wholly unique here, IMO. As Tara goes along, she notices that the natural world is also, like her, unstuck from the loop, so though the same people go to the same grocery stores to purchase the same things every single November 18th, the food is slowly diminishing. The rules of this loop are still opaque, to us and to Tara, and the pattern-recognition part of my brain was very soothed by Solvej's writing style. Highly recommend.
Turns out, my butter fanaticism could be taken up a notch. Who knew? Loosely based on a real crime (I think), Butter tells the story of Rika, a mousy reporter at a local magazine who strikes up an unlikely relationship with Manako Kajii, a famous woman in prison for (allegedly) causing the deaths of several of her older, rich boyfriends. Kajii is famously reclusive and doesn't tend to talk to reporters, but Rika catches her attention by asking about—what turns out to be—Kajii's one true passion: food.
This book is also the ideal audiobook experience, IMO. Not a widely achievable standard (hi, Tom Lake.) Also, if you've never eaten fresh, steaming rice with a big dollop of cold, good quality butter, stop reading this and go make it. Seriously.
Coming back to life and getting stuck inside a woolly mammoth
A lightning-fast read with an interesting premise and questionable execution. Dr. Damira is a passionate expert who risks—and, ultimately, loses—her life defending the last of the wild elephants from violent poachers. Then, her consciousness—it would be too far, I think, to say her soul—is reanimated, many years later, as a digital file uploaded into the mind of a recreated woolly mammoth. The scientist in charge of the mammoths want her to teach the herd how to exist in the wild, a feat never before accomplished for animals born & bred in captivity. It isn't long before Damira, as the mammoth, discovers she's been tricked—and the stakes couldn't be higher.
Interesting, right? I wanted more time to luxuriate in each of the moments of Damira's life. Instead, this book reads like a Netflix limited-series, where details that could benefit from glorious time to develop are rushed and overly-explained, as if fearful of losing the reader's attention. I can't remember off the top of my head who said or wrote it, but the adage "challenge and complexity are an author's sign of respect for the reader" comes to mind here.
A therapist's peek behind the curtain
I find therapist's memoirs fascinating, perhaps because I can relate to how they tend to interact with the people around them. I grew up an only child and—for the first 13 years anyway—an only grandchild. A tremendous amount of my time was spent buried in books. And my reading abilities soared early, which meant I was reading more mature books at an earlier age than my peers.
I think that's why my mind is so adept at emotional pattern recognition. I can often guess the plot of movies, TV shows, and unimaginative books long before the reveal is meant to be apparent to the audience. In real life, I find my mental schemas start working without waiting for my cue, connecting invisible dots and providing context I don't quite have the evidence to support, because being a good reader offered me a blueprint to navigate what we'd consider the basic human motivations, emotions, and reactions. To this day, I still feel oddly stupefied when I encounter someone who says or does something completely out of the left field; tolerating—even seeking and celebrating!—surprise is a very recent personal development.
Anyway, this book was lovely. Lori certainly knows how to grab and hold your attention, and her stories weave multiple narratives together, a narrative structure I tend to enjoy. The pacing felt tight, and I appreciated that she didn't shy away from laying her own story bare on the page.
Wandering through the labyrinth
Whoa...
This book achieved indescribable levels of wonderful, surprising and wholly unique in all the best ways. I almost don't want to describe it at all—I could never adequately capture Susanna's pure gift for language, nor the musical lilt of Chiwetel's narration! Suffice to say: Piranesi, the title character, lives in a house that is the entire world. I don't mean this in the agoraphobic way; The House is a Narnian fantasy world, where the lower floors are awash in living ocean and the upper floors alive with clouds and birds. Piranesi keeps meticulous records, theming the years with titles such as "The Year the Albatross Came to the Northwestern Halls." Please, read and/or listen to this one.
And indeed, Tessa, upon my recommendation, enjoyed this book as much as I did, and surprised me with the sweetest housewarming present—a hand-stitched quote from Piranesi to bless the walls of my own comforting labyrinth!
