![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Books finished or dropped in January
Finished January 4 This side of Married Rachel Pastan
Dropped January 5 Rooms Lauren Oliver
Finished January 6 The Look of Love Sarah Jio
Dropped January 6 Social Crimes Jane Stanton Hitchcock
Dropped January 8 The Cruelest Month Laurie Penny
Dropped January 10 The Merry WIves of Maggody Joan Hess
Finished January 13 A Tale for the Time Being Ruth Ozeki
Finished January 16 Ahab's Wife Sena Jeter Naslund
FInished January 18 My Year of Meats Ruth Ozeki
Dropped January 19 The Keeper of Lost Causes, aka Mercy Jussi Adler-Olsson
Finished January 20 Sourdough Robin Sloan
Dropped January 21 I, Coriander Sally Gardner
Finished January 23 The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender Leslye Walton
Will finish before February Kraken China Mieville
Dropped: 6 books, mostly because I'm not the right reader.
Rooms turned out to be a thirllery thing with nastiness frontloaded, not my cup of tea (see Kraken review for more about that)
The Cruelest Month, was because I realized I had read it before and didn't like it well enough to re-read it.
Social Crimes I read two-thirds of before I came to the conclusion that the protagonist was not on a redemption arc and that the humiliation and antisociality was just going to go on and on. The hook is that very rich man's second wife is done out of her inheritance by her husband's evil lawyer and a pyschopathic probably serial-killer girlfriend and our widow is trying to claw her way back into society...come to think of it I don't know why I thought I might like this? I get a little desperate looking for books on Libby sometimes.
The Merry Wives of Maggody, a comic novel about a small town putting on a golf tournament and somehow Shakespeare is involved. Dropped it because the people were thin cardboard and I decided I had no patience for it.
The Keeper of Lost Causes, a police procedural thriller which I thought might be fun but I was bored and repelled immediately.
I, Coriander, a YA witch child historical which I might like another time but just couldn't get into.
Finished! 8 books. Reviews:
This Side of Married. The three thirtyish daughters of a high-achieving, long-married perfectionist Jewish doctor all in their own ways fail to have the perfect wedding and marriage. The protagonist has quit being a zoo vet and boy is that ever a good idea because she totally misses the philosophy of a zoo. However, she's leaning towards gardening, and her herpetology interests are going to serve her well in unexpected ways. I'd classify this as "women's lit:" it's not quite like a category romance. If you're a romance fan and you're wondering if you'd like it, call it "romance adjacent" and ask yourself how you feel about the romantic-adjacent relationships not quite resolving satisfactorily, though the characters do have some satisfactory growth.
The Look of Love. The premise is: if you're a certain person born at a certain time a woman will pass on to you w little gift--whenever you are in the presence of love, you'll have visual disturbances. If you are this person, you must write in a book that will be given to you six stories about people you see during the year before you turn thirty, each of them part of a couple that represents a certain type of love (named by their Greek names). Also you will be a florist because this all started with a florist in 18th or 19th century France, I forget exactly. If you don't do this writing task you'll miss out on the great love of your life unless, after you pass the gift and task on to the next woman, you go out to meet your love on a rainy full moon night. Yes, that's spoilers. I feel free to tell you this because this book is so dumb that you won't be reading it. I did persist for some reason. i had an okay time of it though I also kept saying "no, hospitals don't work that way," and "medical insurance doesn't work that way," and so on. Also I was irked by the fact that the richer a person was in this book, the more likely they were to be virtuous and lovable and honest and kind.
A Tale for the Time Being This might be my favorite Ruth Ozeki book. I think she's written three and I love them all though some are harder to read (My Year of Meats can be pretty hard, emotionally) Why doesn't anybody ever list Ozeki as sff or sff-adjacent? All three of the books I've read (including All Over Creation) have speculative aspects and this one is heavily rooted in ideas about time and space, as well as being about cruelty, kindness, life and death, aging and youth, and lots and lots of loss. I am really glad I read this and I wish there were more of these. It has another thing that's precious to me, and that is culture clash. Oh my the culture clash. It helps to know that Ruth Ozeki, like her protagonist her and in My Year of Meats, had a Japanese mother and spent time as a student in Japan. The story revolves around a Japanese schoolgirl's journal as she recounts the terrible things in her life and begins to plan her own suicide, which is picked up on a Canadian beach ten years later. I am going to withhold information beyond that even though I don't believe in the spoiler theory of reviewism, because in this one case the things that happen are amazing enough that you ought to experience them for new, once. It gets distressing for a while, in case you're having issues with that.
Ahab's Wife starts lout with a horrible childbirth in a snowed-in cabin in the early 1800s. It is narrated mostly first person by a young woman who, among many other things, marries Captain Ahab from Moby-Dick. There's a little tendency to have her meet almost everyone of consequence of her era, but you kind if have to expect that from a book like this. It's a terribly adventurous book, and much that is terrifying happens. There's a dizzying amount of detail and action. And there's only one passage I remember that seems to be lifted directly from Moby-Dick. I had moments when this book was too much of a muchness, but overall I really liked it. If you've ever been enchanted by whaler's sea shanties, this book will tap that vein and then also cure you of it.
Speaking of difficult books, My Year of Meats gets very very difficult by the end. But there's a ramp up to it, and the characters are all interesting and some of them are sympathetic.The protagonist is a documentary filmmaker who gets hired by a Japanese ad agency to make TV shows about American families and how they eat beef. Hijinks ensue, but also things keep getting real.It's Ruth Ozeki, therefore it's great!
Sourdough was a kind of betrayal. Premise: San Francisco techie woman is gifted a sourdough starter by her soup and sandwihich delivery guys who
are being deported. There's something magic about the sourdough starter. Also, she begins to meet modern foodies and ...it all goes sort of satirical for a while, and then it goes haywire.
And the conclusion feels fucking racist to me. So while I enjoyed certain parts of the book, my ultimate feeling towards this book is anger. The presentation of this book is not helped by the fact that nobody saw fit to take the time to teach the reader how to pronounce San Francisco place names.
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender also feels like a betrayal. It also reads like someone who read through a pile of books labeled "Magical Realism" and decided to program an AI to write it. The deepseated emotional dream logic was just kind of off by a beat? & the ending felt forced and like a slap in the face for many of the best characters and also for the reader. Again, I liked moments of it, but not the story as a whole.
Kraken has the China Mieville Problem. The man is a sadist. He will call time in the middle of the action to put you through a half hour of meticulously detailed gory fatal torture and as far as I can tell it's because he loves writing this stuff. You can tell me this is truthtelling at its unflinchingest. He just gets off on it.
That being said, there's as usual a lot of great writing, worldbuilding, character development, etc. I'm close enough to the end to recemmend it but I'm not sure what this story is for exactly. It sort of feels like an improvised shadow puppet play made from those graphics Monty Python used to use. I can recommend the book, definitely, and there's a couple ideas I wish I'd had, but it's not a book I wish I'd written, that's for sure.
Dropped January 5 Rooms Lauren Oliver
Finished January 6 The Look of Love Sarah Jio
Dropped January 6 Social Crimes Jane Stanton Hitchcock
Dropped January 8 The Cruelest Month Laurie Penny
Dropped January 10 The Merry WIves of Maggody Joan Hess
Finished January 13 A Tale for the Time Being Ruth Ozeki
Finished January 16 Ahab's Wife Sena Jeter Naslund
FInished January 18 My Year of Meats Ruth Ozeki
Dropped January 19 The Keeper of Lost Causes, aka Mercy Jussi Adler-Olsson
Finished January 20 Sourdough Robin Sloan
Dropped January 21 I, Coriander Sally Gardner
Finished January 23 The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender Leslye Walton
Will finish before February Kraken China Mieville
Dropped: 6 books, mostly because I'm not the right reader.
Rooms turned out to be a thirllery thing with nastiness frontloaded, not my cup of tea (see Kraken review for more about that)
The Cruelest Month, was because I realized I had read it before and didn't like it well enough to re-read it.
Social Crimes I read two-thirds of before I came to the conclusion that the protagonist was not on a redemption arc and that the humiliation and antisociality was just going to go on and on. The hook is that very rich man's second wife is done out of her inheritance by her husband's evil lawyer and a pyschopathic probably serial-killer girlfriend and our widow is trying to claw her way back into society...come to think of it I don't know why I thought I might like this? I get a little desperate looking for books on Libby sometimes.
The Merry Wives of Maggody, a comic novel about a small town putting on a golf tournament and somehow Shakespeare is involved. Dropped it because the people were thin cardboard and I decided I had no patience for it.
The Keeper of Lost Causes, a police procedural thriller which I thought might be fun but I was bored and repelled immediately.
I, Coriander, a YA witch child historical which I might like another time but just couldn't get into.
Finished! 8 books. Reviews:
This Side of Married. The three thirtyish daughters of a high-achieving, long-married perfectionist Jewish doctor all in their own ways fail to have the perfect wedding and marriage. The protagonist has quit being a zoo vet and boy is that ever a good idea because she totally misses the philosophy of a zoo. However, she's leaning towards gardening, and her herpetology interests are going to serve her well in unexpected ways. I'd classify this as "women's lit:" it's not quite like a category romance. If you're a romance fan and you're wondering if you'd like it, call it "romance adjacent" and ask yourself how you feel about the romantic-adjacent relationships not quite resolving satisfactorily, though the characters do have some satisfactory growth.
The Look of Love. The premise is: if you're a certain person born at a certain time a woman will pass on to you w little gift--whenever you are in the presence of love, you'll have visual disturbances. If you are this person, you must write in a book that will be given to you six stories about people you see during the year before you turn thirty, each of them part of a couple that represents a certain type of love (named by their Greek names). Also you will be a florist because this all started with a florist in 18th or 19th century France, I forget exactly. If you don't do this writing task you'll miss out on the great love of your life unless, after you pass the gift and task on to the next woman, you go out to meet your love on a rainy full moon night. Yes, that's spoilers. I feel free to tell you this because this book is so dumb that you won't be reading it. I did persist for some reason. i had an okay time of it though I also kept saying "no, hospitals don't work that way," and "medical insurance doesn't work that way," and so on. Also I was irked by the fact that the richer a person was in this book, the more likely they were to be virtuous and lovable and honest and kind.
A Tale for the Time Being This might be my favorite Ruth Ozeki book. I think she's written three and I love them all though some are harder to read (My Year of Meats can be pretty hard, emotionally) Why doesn't anybody ever list Ozeki as sff or sff-adjacent? All three of the books I've read (including All Over Creation) have speculative aspects and this one is heavily rooted in ideas about time and space, as well as being about cruelty, kindness, life and death, aging and youth, and lots and lots of loss. I am really glad I read this and I wish there were more of these. It has another thing that's precious to me, and that is culture clash. Oh my the culture clash. It helps to know that Ruth Ozeki, like her protagonist her and in My Year of Meats, had a Japanese mother and spent time as a student in Japan. The story revolves around a Japanese schoolgirl's journal as she recounts the terrible things in her life and begins to plan her own suicide, which is picked up on a Canadian beach ten years later. I am going to withhold information beyond that even though I don't believe in the spoiler theory of reviewism, because in this one case the things that happen are amazing enough that you ought to experience them for new, once. It gets distressing for a while, in case you're having issues with that.
Ahab's Wife starts lout with a horrible childbirth in a snowed-in cabin in the early 1800s. It is narrated mostly first person by a young woman who, among many other things, marries Captain Ahab from Moby-Dick. There's a little tendency to have her meet almost everyone of consequence of her era, but you kind if have to expect that from a book like this. It's a terribly adventurous book, and much that is terrifying happens. There's a dizzying amount of detail and action. And there's only one passage I remember that seems to be lifted directly from Moby-Dick. I had moments when this book was too much of a muchness, but overall I really liked it. If you've ever been enchanted by whaler's sea shanties, this book will tap that vein and then also cure you of it.
Speaking of difficult books, My Year of Meats gets very very difficult by the end. But there's a ramp up to it, and the characters are all interesting and some of them are sympathetic.The protagonist is a documentary filmmaker who gets hired by a Japanese ad agency to make TV shows about American families and how they eat beef. Hijinks ensue, but also things keep getting real.It's Ruth Ozeki, therefore it's great!
Sourdough was a kind of betrayal. Premise: San Francisco techie woman is gifted a sourdough starter by her soup and sandwihich delivery guys who
are being deported. There's something magic about the sourdough starter. Also, she begins to meet modern foodies and ...it all goes sort of satirical for a while, and then it goes haywire.
And the conclusion feels fucking racist to me. So while I enjoyed certain parts of the book, my ultimate feeling towards this book is anger. The presentation of this book is not helped by the fact that nobody saw fit to take the time to teach the reader how to pronounce San Francisco place names.
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender also feels like a betrayal. It also reads like someone who read through a pile of books labeled "Magical Realism" and decided to program an AI to write it. The deepseated emotional dream logic was just kind of off by a beat? & the ending felt forced and like a slap in the face for many of the best characters and also for the reader. Again, I liked moments of it, but not the story as a whole.
Kraken has the China Mieville Problem. The man is a sadist. He will call time in the middle of the action to put you through a half hour of meticulously detailed gory fatal torture and as far as I can tell it's because he loves writing this stuff. You can tell me this is truthtelling at its unflinchingest. He just gets off on it.
That being said, there's as usual a lot of great writing, worldbuilding, character development, etc. I'm close enough to the end to recemmend it but I'm not sure what this story is for exactly. It sort of feels like an improvised shadow puppet play made from those graphics Monty Python used to use. I can recommend the book, definitely, and there's a couple ideas I wish I'd had, but it's not a book I wish I'd written, that's for sure.
no subject
What an entirely excellent description in an admirably terse and focused series of reviews.
no subject