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through March 3
books I finished:
Alex, Approximately by Jenn Barnett (YA California romance-adjacent)
Misktik Lake by Martha Brooks (YA Canada romance)
The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce (UK austerity romance-adjacent)
Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar (Middle Eastern coming of age)
The Library of Lost and Found by Phaedfra Patrick (UK womens lit)
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (UK womens lit)
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (Korean-Japanese family saga)
My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Nigerian ...I don't know what to call it genre-wise)
The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich (Midwest family saga)
The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich (Midwest-Native magical realism)
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (UK austerity community mystery?)
Saints and Misfits by S. K. Ali (YA US Muslim coming of age, kind of)
_____
Books I got some ways into before giving up, for various reasons:
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (YA? Nigerian secondary world magical war)
Anatomy of Deception byLawrence Goldstone (US historical medical murder mystery)
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson (UK intercultural elder romance)
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow (US not quite dystopian science fiction)
Alex Approximately features a girl moving to a California city where her online friend lives. Misunderstandings ensue because she wants to scope him out in secret before meeting him properly, out of a sense of self-preservation. Both kids have experienced dramatic traumas and commence to have outrageous adventures.I thought the outrageous adventures were unnecessary to the story, and the book was at its best just following these traiumatized kids around the fictional Central Coast town. It's really fictional too, not a thinly disguised Santa Cruz. (though Santa Cruz is the strongest influence in its inspiration) I did find a ridiculous geography moment, but it's more of a continuity lapse. In the beginning, the protagonist is driven 45 minutes from the San Jose airport to her new home. Then later, her boyfriend drives her an hour to Monterey "the nearest city." Forget which city is which, a city that is an hour away is not closer than a city that is forty-five minutes away (those distances, however, place Coronado Cove right on top of Santa Cruz). I think this book would work best for people who have visited California but not lived in the Central Coast, because it does get so much right but if you're from here you're going to be distracted by trying to decide what's meant to be a match and what's not.
Mistik Lake is not a misspelling, it's an Ojibway word for wood. I don't know how I feel about this. It feels like the author set out to write a full-on fantasy or magical realism novel, and then decided to give up and write a more or less realistic novella instead. There's a bunch of prophetic dreams that seem to come to nothing, and a big buildup about family secrets that I'm probably being unfair about feeling they don't have enough consequence because they seemed to have had a big consequence at the beginning of the story but resolving them feels anticlimactic. And yet, I did enjoy this book.
The Music Shop was another book where I was unsure whether the author originally intended for there to be a fantastic element. The owner of the music shop is pretty well fey, and has a talent of being able to direct a person to a piece of music that will solve their personal problems, a skill that is apparently learnable, but about halfway or two thirds of the way through the book this stops being central to the story for some reason. The last third of the book made me mad actually. There's a thread about a scammy development company, which could have used a better integration into the tragic denouement, the tragic denouement has a dissatisfying proximal cause, the cautiously upbeat ending feels contrived, the deep dark secret as to why the music shop owner is so damaged is almost offensively stupid. And yet... I did enjoy most of the book. Set in a working-class suburb of London hit hard by Thatcherism.
Anatomy of a Disappearance was just lost on me. Elite Arab exile from an unnamed country (I thought from internal evidence, Iran, but the author is Libyan) with connections to the deposed king and a complex double or triple life, and we're dealing mostly with the story of his kind of unpleasant only child.
The Library of Lost and Found is another entry in the genre of "damaged/feral young woman finds solace and purpose through service to the community of book lovers" which I keep running into. Variations exist where the community is clients of a florist: and The Music Shop is kind of an inverse of it. I liked it. Set in a fictional Northern coastal town.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is another one, though there's no community of book lovers, just a workplace and a fellow, and also an old guy she helps to rescue when he has a cardiac event of some kind. It's set in Glasgow, so there's some local color.
Pachinko follows a small family of Koreans in Japan from just before World War 2 to the early 80s. I thought this was really interesting and compelling. I did get mad at one character who created his own tragedy by his reaction to learning about his father.
My Sister, The Serial Killer is one of those stories where someone gets a moral test and fails it, with terrible effects. Not my kind of book, but it's very very good.
The Master Butchers Singing Club is partly the life story of a post-WW1 German immigrant in the Midwest and partly the uncovering of the slightly mysterious life of his second wife. It's really rich, detailed, chewy, and kind, and I can't think of anything wrong with it. It's also, you know, weighted with its share of tragedy. I didn't go looking for more Erdrich after this one because I have learned that reading too much of one author too quickly sensitizes me to their quirks and I didn't want to experience that.
The Painted Drum travels in both directions in time from a stealthy repatriation of a ritual drum made in grief after a terrible tragedy, and I should not use the word reconciliation here because of its political meaning with respect to Native Americans, but the drum does appear to magically save lives and heal family wounds, but only because the people involved work very hard for it. This is a beautiful, beautiful book. Erdrich does this thing where she takes absolute destruction grows fine human lives out of it.
What Was Lost is probably classed as a procedural somewhere, and probably also somebody somewhere sees it as a complaint against modernity, but it's so much more. A little girl disappeared in a shopping mall 20 years ago, and this has had reverberating effects on her community (though the ones who should be most affected aren't). I should hate a book with this description, but this one is deeply beautiful, a number of linked character studies--including the mall itself, which is personified in a surprising way. It's set in the Midlands, too, which gives me a wee shock of recognition here and there though I've spent but 5 weeks total there so far.
Saints and Misfits was actually the last book I read in January but I'd already written January up. It's a delightful, bubbly story about a middle-school Muslim girl in a richly multicultural community. She's a hijabi and also kind of a punk, wrestling with her first crush on a non-Muslim boy, conflicting loyalties, sexual harassment from a well-respected boy in the mosque, her desires to be very very good and very very religious and very very independent... I do recommend this book!
So the books I did not finish, and why:
Children of Blood and Bone is a very good book but it exhausted me. At 80% I realized the pace was only going to keep up, the grinding through battles and the horror of the enemy were only going to accelerate, and there were at least two more books of it, and I just couldn't. The fact that the author seemed to be creating characters for the express purpose of messily killing them off was also a turn-off. I did want to know if my hunch that the king was actually secretly a magi himself was true, but since I couldn't keep reading to find out, it's not a spoiler for me to say so. The alternate-world of Orisha, loosely based on Nigeria, is wondrous and shiny, and the stories behind the magi, the gods, the sky mother, and the magic, were almost enough to keep me going.
Anatomy of Deception almost kept me going, but 1)the author does that thing where "I'm only reporting historical facts and attitudes of the times" becomes a smokescreen for actual racism and misogyny. The central character is really unappealing too and I found that I didn't care enough about who really killed these people to keep on slogging. If this had been a genre book I'd have heard a lot of complaints about infodumps and "as you know, Bob" but historicals apparently get a pass on this? I think much of the explanations were unnecessary, much could have been folded into the story better, and the rest is actually what kept me in the book so long. Oh, right--it's late 19th century, and Philadelphia real-life medical pioneers are bumping up against a botched abortion and some murders among upper class bohemians. Should have been wonderful.
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is maybe too English for me, because something about it didn't grab me. Conservative old Little-English guy who's fundamentally decent falls in love with the Pakistani-English convenience store owner widow. I lost patience and I don't know why.
I don't know why I got tired of Walkaway. The premise is pretty great.
Notice I've listed very little sff. That's because the Northern California Digital Library doesn't have much.
books I finished:
Alex, Approximately by Jenn Barnett (YA California romance-adjacent)
Misktik Lake by Martha Brooks (YA Canada romance)
The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce (UK austerity romance-adjacent)
Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar (Middle Eastern coming of age)
The Library of Lost and Found by Phaedfra Patrick (UK womens lit)
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (UK womens lit)
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (Korean-Japanese family saga)
My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Nigerian ...I don't know what to call it genre-wise)
The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich (Midwest family saga)
The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich (Midwest-Native magical realism)
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (UK austerity community mystery?)
Saints and Misfits by S. K. Ali (YA US Muslim coming of age, kind of)
_____
Books I got some ways into before giving up, for various reasons:
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (YA? Nigerian secondary world magical war)
Anatomy of Deception byLawrence Goldstone (US historical medical murder mystery)
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson (UK intercultural elder romance)
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow (US not quite dystopian science fiction)
Alex Approximately features a girl moving to a California city where her online friend lives. Misunderstandings ensue because she wants to scope him out in secret before meeting him properly, out of a sense of self-preservation. Both kids have experienced dramatic traumas and commence to have outrageous adventures.I thought the outrageous adventures were unnecessary to the story, and the book was at its best just following these traiumatized kids around the fictional Central Coast town. It's really fictional too, not a thinly disguised Santa Cruz. (though Santa Cruz is the strongest influence in its inspiration) I did find a ridiculous geography moment, but it's more of a continuity lapse. In the beginning, the protagonist is driven 45 minutes from the San Jose airport to her new home. Then later, her boyfriend drives her an hour to Monterey "the nearest city." Forget which city is which, a city that is an hour away is not closer than a city that is forty-five minutes away (those distances, however, place Coronado Cove right on top of Santa Cruz). I think this book would work best for people who have visited California but not lived in the Central Coast, because it does get so much right but if you're from here you're going to be distracted by trying to decide what's meant to be a match and what's not.
Mistik Lake is not a misspelling, it's an Ojibway word for wood. I don't know how I feel about this. It feels like the author set out to write a full-on fantasy or magical realism novel, and then decided to give up and write a more or less realistic novella instead. There's a bunch of prophetic dreams that seem to come to nothing, and a big buildup about family secrets that I'm probably being unfair about feeling they don't have enough consequence because they seemed to have had a big consequence at the beginning of the story but resolving them feels anticlimactic. And yet, I did enjoy this book.
The Music Shop was another book where I was unsure whether the author originally intended for there to be a fantastic element. The owner of the music shop is pretty well fey, and has a talent of being able to direct a person to a piece of music that will solve their personal problems, a skill that is apparently learnable, but about halfway or two thirds of the way through the book this stops being central to the story for some reason. The last third of the book made me mad actually. There's a thread about a scammy development company, which could have used a better integration into the tragic denouement, the tragic denouement has a dissatisfying proximal cause, the cautiously upbeat ending feels contrived, the deep dark secret as to why the music shop owner is so damaged is almost offensively stupid. And yet... I did enjoy most of the book. Set in a working-class suburb of London hit hard by Thatcherism.
Anatomy of a Disappearance was just lost on me. Elite Arab exile from an unnamed country (I thought from internal evidence, Iran, but the author is Libyan) with connections to the deposed king and a complex double or triple life, and we're dealing mostly with the story of his kind of unpleasant only child.
The Library of Lost and Found is another entry in the genre of "damaged/feral young woman finds solace and purpose through service to the community of book lovers" which I keep running into. Variations exist where the community is clients of a florist: and The Music Shop is kind of an inverse of it. I liked it. Set in a fictional Northern coastal town.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is another one, though there's no community of book lovers, just a workplace and a fellow, and also an old guy she helps to rescue when he has a cardiac event of some kind. It's set in Glasgow, so there's some local color.
Pachinko follows a small family of Koreans in Japan from just before World War 2 to the early 80s. I thought this was really interesting and compelling. I did get mad at one character who created his own tragedy by his reaction to learning about his father.
My Sister, The Serial Killer is one of those stories where someone gets a moral test and fails it, with terrible effects. Not my kind of book, but it's very very good.
The Master Butchers Singing Club is partly the life story of a post-WW1 German immigrant in the Midwest and partly the uncovering of the slightly mysterious life of his second wife. It's really rich, detailed, chewy, and kind, and I can't think of anything wrong with it. It's also, you know, weighted with its share of tragedy. I didn't go looking for more Erdrich after this one because I have learned that reading too much of one author too quickly sensitizes me to their quirks and I didn't want to experience that.
The Painted Drum travels in both directions in time from a stealthy repatriation of a ritual drum made in grief after a terrible tragedy, and I should not use the word reconciliation here because of its political meaning with respect to Native Americans, but the drum does appear to magically save lives and heal family wounds, but only because the people involved work very hard for it. This is a beautiful, beautiful book. Erdrich does this thing where she takes absolute destruction grows fine human lives out of it.
What Was Lost is probably classed as a procedural somewhere, and probably also somebody somewhere sees it as a complaint against modernity, but it's so much more. A little girl disappeared in a shopping mall 20 years ago, and this has had reverberating effects on her community (though the ones who should be most affected aren't). I should hate a book with this description, but this one is deeply beautiful, a number of linked character studies--including the mall itself, which is personified in a surprising way. It's set in the Midlands, too, which gives me a wee shock of recognition here and there though I've spent but 5 weeks total there so far.
Saints and Misfits was actually the last book I read in January but I'd already written January up. It's a delightful, bubbly story about a middle-school Muslim girl in a richly multicultural community. She's a hijabi and also kind of a punk, wrestling with her first crush on a non-Muslim boy, conflicting loyalties, sexual harassment from a well-respected boy in the mosque, her desires to be very very good and very very religious and very very independent... I do recommend this book!
So the books I did not finish, and why:
Children of Blood and Bone is a very good book but it exhausted me. At 80% I realized the pace was only going to keep up, the grinding through battles and the horror of the enemy were only going to accelerate, and there were at least two more books of it, and I just couldn't. The fact that the author seemed to be creating characters for the express purpose of messily killing them off was also a turn-off. I did want to know if my hunch that the king was actually secretly a magi himself was true, but since I couldn't keep reading to find out, it's not a spoiler for me to say so. The alternate-world of Orisha, loosely based on Nigeria, is wondrous and shiny, and the stories behind the magi, the gods, the sky mother, and the magic, were almost enough to keep me going.
Anatomy of Deception almost kept me going, but 1)the author does that thing where "I'm only reporting historical facts and attitudes of the times" becomes a smokescreen for actual racism and misogyny. The central character is really unappealing too and I found that I didn't care enough about who really killed these people to keep on slogging. If this had been a genre book I'd have heard a lot of complaints about infodumps and "as you know, Bob" but historicals apparently get a pass on this? I think much of the explanations were unnecessary, much could have been folded into the story better, and the rest is actually what kept me in the book so long. Oh, right--it's late 19th century, and Philadelphia real-life medical pioneers are bumping up against a botched abortion and some murders among upper class bohemians. Should have been wonderful.
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is maybe too English for me, because something about it didn't grab me. Conservative old Little-English guy who's fundamentally decent falls in love with the Pakistani-English convenience store owner widow. I lost patience and I don't know why.
I don't know why I got tired of Walkaway. The premise is pretty great.
Notice I've listed very little sff. That's because the Northern California Digital Library doesn't have much.
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