Tag: fiction

Books Read October 2022

This month I made it to 52 books read. My goal for this year is 60 books, which I think is within reach. But also, I don’t want to just speed through a bunch of short books for the sake of hitting that goal. I’ve decided I want to spend the winter wrapped in a blanket, sipping tea, and reading very lengthy tomes. Preferably in hardback. Suggestions welcome!

The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray – A Jane Austen inspired murder mystery that features the characters from Austen’s novels gathering for a house party at the house of Emma and Mr. Knightly. Marianne and Colonel Brandon are among the guests, as well as Lizzie Bennett (now Mrs. Darcy) and Mr. Darcy and their son. This book is so cleverly put together. It was a light and fun read and I really enjoyed reading about life after “happily ever after” for each of the couples. Gray has clearly thought through how each couple’s marriage plays out and the relationships she portrays feel entirely in keeping with the characters that Austen created. It was kind of like reading really good fan fiction, and I mean that as a total compliment. I will say, I felt that the actual murder plot was not entirely convincing, but then again, I don’t know that that was entirely the point of the book.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas – 2017 YA novel about sixteen year old Starr, a black teenager who witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood friend by a police officer. Starr goes to a private prep school in the suburbs, worlds away from the gritty neighborhood she lives in, and has become adept at navigating two worlds. The novel deals with how she deals with the aftermath of the shooting, wanting to do the right thing but afraid of the fallout for her community and for her family and for her very own life. I thought this book was really riveting and I stayed up late to finish it. Clearly all the accolades it has received are well deserved. I think my one quibble was with Starr’s white boyfriend from her fancy prep school; he often comes off as the token good white guy who integrates seamlessly into Starr’s life in a White Savior kind of way.

Mother Trucker: Finding Joy On the Loneliest Road in America by Amy Butcher – Butcher, a writer and professor in an emotionally abusive relationship, seeks out Joy “Mothertrucker” Weibe after discovering her on Instagram. Weibe is the only female ice trucker in Alaska, and Butcher is drawn to her seemingly independent and bad ass life. So Butcher contacts Weibe and asks to come visit and ride along with her as she drives up Dalton Highway, a remote and dangerous dirt and gravel road in Alaska. To be honest, I thought this book was going to be a profile on Weibe, or some kind of adventure travelogue. In the end, though, the book was more about Butcher herself and her journey to turn her life around – kind of like Wild, but with Joy “Mothertrucker” standing in for the Pacific Crest Trail as the catalyst for self discovery. That aspect I found a little disappointing because I really wanted to get a deep dive into Joy and life as an ice trucker, and instead she comes across as some kind of mystical wise woman. Still, there are some great details about what it is like to drive the Dalton Highway and there is a lot of brutally honest writing in this book about relationships and abuse. (So warning on that)

The Self-Driven Child by William Stixrud, PhD, and Ned Johnson – I read Stixrud and Johnsons’ book “What Do You Say” earlier this year and found their scripts for parenting really helpful. The Self-Driven Child is their first book, and I would say it focusses less on scripts, but more on the science and strategies of how a parent fits into the life of their child, namely as a consultant and coach rather than as a dictator. Their book is based in a combination of brain science and real life experience through their work as a tutor/test prep instructor (Johnson) and a clinical psychologist (Stixrud). The book is well organized with tangible action steps at the end of each chapter, which I really liked. So often parenting books are all about theory and ideas but don’t give parents concrete steps they can do with their children I made so many highlights in this book that I feel as if I should just get my own copy. Some good things to remember:
– “If you act as if it’s your job to see that your child does his homework, practices the piano, or plays a sport, you reinforce the mistaken belief that somebody other than he is responsible for getting his work done. He doesn’t have to think about it because, on some level, he knows that eventually someone will “make” him do it.” Such a good reminder that being overly involved does not serve your child well.
– “Kids need responsibility more than they deserve it” – this one is a hard one for me, but makes sense upon reflection. I always thought that kids earned responsibility, but the book indicates that they have to grow into it and they can’t grow into it unless given the chance to do it.
– “He began to suggest to parents that they make enjoying their kids their top priority so that their kids would have the experience of being joy-producing organisms.” I forget this one a lot. I just don’t enjoy my kids a lot of the time… and that shouldn’t be their problem. I definitely need to work on this one. Kids need to know that their value is not in their quantifiable achievements.
– “But you’re in it with your kids for the long-haul, and part of being a parent is standing on the sidelines sometimes so that they can return to you for a hug and pep talk before going back out there. That’s where it’s most important for you to stand. So stand tall, don’t forget to cheer, and at the end of the day, remind them that you care much more about them than any stupid test score.”

You Can’t Be Serious by Kal Penn (audiobook read by Kal Penn) – Kal Penn is known for many things, but for me he will first and foremost be Kumar from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. I thought his memoir really fantastic, full of anecdotes from his time both as an actor and as an Obama staffer. He comes across as a really intelligent and thoughtful person. Because I myself went into a career that isn’t the most traditional one for Asian Americans, I always like hearing of other Asian Americans who went into non-traditional careers. What really struck me, though, was not just the anecdotes, but the really honest way he talks about being an Indian American in Hollywood. He does not shy away from calling out the racism that he encountered over and over again. From constantly being told that something would be funnier if he could do it with and accent (“What kind of accent? Scottish? Irish? Southern?” he would slyly ask.), to going up for an audition for an Indian character and the other person reading for the role being a white person in brown face, and many many more. And then, amazingly, he gets involved in politics and works in the White House for two years. The stories of his time on the campaign trail and in the Obama White House are really inspiring – full of such great details, but also a reminder of what a hopeful and decent time the Obama administration was. All in all I really enjoyed this book – it made me laugh out out, gasp with outrage, and warmed my heart.

Books Read July – September 2022

I feel like I got a lot of good reading in this summer, though September itself was not a big reading month because of work. I’m now filling my book queue with some books that I hope will be page turners, so I’ll be encouraged to read even when I’m having long days at work. But these past few months:

The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes, read by Daveed Diggs. This sci-fi novella centers around a group of water-breathing people who were descended from pregnant African slaves thrown overboard from slave ships as they crossed the Atlantic. It’s inspired by a song produced by the group Clipping for an episode of This American Life called We are the Future, which in the aftermath of George Floyd explored the concept of Afrofuturism. The Deep is a beautiful, raw, and evocative story which centers on Yetu whose role in her community is to hold the collective memory of her people since it is too painful for them all to remember themselves. She eventually leaves her people in order not to carry this burden. The way the novel’s water dwellers have created a world that is very different from the world we inhabit on land, I thought was a really thought provoking lens through which to think about things like race, gender, and collective history. Also Daveed Diggs of Hamilton! Apparently I will listen to any audiobook narrated by Hamilton cast members

Paperback Crush by Gabrielle Moss – This is a non-fiction book about the YA fiction genre of the 80s and 90s -Sweet Valley High, Babysitter’s Club, The Sunfire Series – pretty much the books I grew up reading. This book was a pure nostalgia trip! There were also some great interviews and details with the people who wrote these books and also an interview with an artist who did some of the cover art. That inside peek at how formulaic these books were was fascinating to me. The book does end somewhat abruptly, but before then it brought back so many memories of some of my formative reading years. Also, I definitely made notes of some books that seemed really interesting that I never read when I was a tween and which I might be interested in picking up now.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell – Novel that imagines the life of Shakespeare’s wife and children during the plague of 1596. I loved so much about this book – the elegant precision of the writing, the details of life in the 1600s, the way the characters were so fully drawn, the relationships, the Shakespeare references (even though he is never mentioned by name and indeed was a somewhat shadowing figure on the sidelines throughout), the exquisite sadness of the book. The ending – the beautiful, cathartic ending. I’m not a book crier, but this book brought a lump to my throat.

The Love of My Life by Rosie Walsh, read by Imogen Church and Theo Soloman – Domestic suspense novel of the “Woman in Peril” genre. This book was not what I expected, and in a good way. Without giving away anything, I’ll just say that I really liked how this book explored how love can be so complicated and so simple at the same time.

The Splendid and the Vile by Eric Larson – Larson recounts the first year of Winston Churchill’s term as Prime Minister of Great Britain and the beginning of WWII. This book looks at that time not only through the political and military lens, but also through the domestic and personal one. The book reminds me of the Virginia Woolf quote, “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.” Larson shows that war and drawing room feelings are both equally important – even against the backdrop of war, people still continued to live their lives, fall in love, have affairs, worry about their children. Even as history is being made, lives continued to be lived. I also felt there was a certain similarity between Londoners living through the Blitz and us living through COVID – the unrelenting tension of living life in a constant state of caution.

The Great Green Room by Amy Cary – I heard this biography recommended on the podcast What Should I Read Next. This is a book about Margaret Wise Brown, who wrote, among other things, the classic Good Night, Moon. I thought the book itself rather methodical and workman like in its prose, but the details of Brown’s life were interesting, particularly her ideas of what would appeal to children – insights that were I think notable given that she didn’t have children. Or maybe it’s because she didn’t have children that she was able to have such a unique perspective on what would interest them in a book.

Well Met by Jen DeLuca – This past summer, I read this blog post that broke down Goodread’s list of most popular romance novels of the past three years. Anyhow, I thought it was a hilarious analysis of the titles included in the list – most of which I haven’t read because I tend to read historical romance, and most of the titles were contemporary romances. But only three titles on the Goodread list made her “Loved” list. One of them was Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore, which I also loved, so I figured the other two books would be worth checking out. This was one of them. It did not disappoint. Well Met is set against the backdrop of a Renaissance Festival – so already it is sprinkled with my catnip. Anyhow this is a charming and sweet and funny book. I don’t always love first person narrative – which is probably why I don’t read a whole lot of contemporary romance – but the heroine in this book had such a hilarious personality that I didn’t mind much.

News of the World by Paulette Jiles – Spare yet perfectly pitched novella about Captain Jefferson Kydd, an elderly widower who makes a living going from town to town reading the news to people in the American Frontier in post Civil War America. He takes on the task of bringing a girl, Johanna, back to her relatives. Johanna’s parents had been killed by Kiowa raiders and she has been living with the Kiowa for the past four years and life with them was the only thing she has known. The journey Kydd and Johanna take is dangerous and without comfort, but along the way Kydd and Johanna, form a special bond even as they struggle to understand each other. Jile’s prose is so very good. The end left me a little teary eyed. One of my favorite passages:
“No, my dear, he said. He put his hand over hers, once again placed the fork correctly, and once again lifted it to her mouth. Then he sat on his own side of the wagon and saw her struggling with the fork, the knife, the stupidity of it, the unknown reasons that human being would approach food in this manner, reasons incomprehensible, inexplicable, for which they had not common language. She tried again, and then turned and threw the fork into a box stall.”

How to Keep House while Drowning by K.C. Davis – My house feels like a constant state of mess, so of course this book was appealing. Davis, who is a licensed profession therapist, approaches keeping house from a mental health standpoint and there were so may wise and gentle ideas in her book. My two main takeaways:
– “Care tasks are morally neutral.” I really needed to hear this because often I think of my inability to keep things clean and tidy as a failure of some sort. And, I admit, I feel like I pass that feeling on to my kids. We are raised on the “Cleanliness next to Godliness” adage, but Davis reminds us:
“You can be a fully functioning, fully successful, happy, kind, generous adult and never be good at cleaning.” Taking away the feeling of guilt and shame associated with keeping a clean house helps me focus on the why I want to keep my house clean and how to achieve that goal, rather than wallowing in the parts of cleaning I find hard.
-Think about what it takes to make things functional, and start with that as your baseline. She also re-frames cleaning as “re-setting”. In thinking about how to reset my space every evening so that future me can function in the morning proves a really helpful framework for when things are overwhelming. So, for example, the dining room floor might not get swept, but the kitchen counter is clean so that I can make breakfast in the morning.
“Cleaning is endless. Resetting space has a goal.”
Even aside from the deep thoughts about cleaning and how to organize your life, Davis also has some really practical tips and strategies that I like. I found this book really helpful.

Broken Horses by Brandi Carlile, read by Brandi Carlile – When the Husband and I were first dating, he would listen to Brandi Carlile’s self titled debut album every single morning. We called it breakfast music. I thought Carlile’s memoir was a really great read/listen- she has a straightforward easy style of writing as one would expect from her music, and I really enjoyed hearing about her life. I was also really struck by how humble and hard-working she was. She doesn’t hide the hustle nor her good luck. An added bonus of the audiobook is that between chapters, she performs songs that she talks about in the previous chapter – it adds so much depths to hear Carlile sing a song after finding out what it meant to her.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro – I usually really like Ishiguro, but this book took me a while to get into and I still don’t think I fully understand it. Ishiguro’s rather detached and naive prose style is probably quite suited for a story told through the eyes of an Klara, an Artificial Friend – an AI creation who goes to live with Josie, a very sick girl. Like most Ishiguro novels, the narrator doesn’t quite understand the whole picture and I actually found it frustrating in parts. I understand the narrative device as a means of exploring the idea of humanity, but the book just didn’t mesh for me like a lot of Ishiguro’s other books.

When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill – I picked up this book because it is set in Montreal and I like to read books set in my destination city when I’m travelling. This book was certainly well written – smart and satirical with characters all slightly off kilter. Set in late 19th century Montreal, it tells the story of two girls, Marie Antoinette and Sadie, who come from different backgrounds but both live in a wealthy section of Montreal. They become friends but then are separated after a tragic incident. They both grow up to tackle ideas of feminism in very different ways. This book really skewers men and the way they take women for granted and underestimate them. I thought the book very clever, but overall the style was a little heavy handed and stilted and I didn’t love it. A notable quote, though:
“The truth was, she had always liked being alone. Women never got to be alone. That was too much of a luxury. Women always had someone to take care of. She had o one to take care of. She got to really do what she pleased. She left her clothes on the side of the bed. There was no one who would yell at her for leaving them.”

Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall – This was the other book on NGS’s list of “loved” romance novels from the Goodreads list. I, too, loved this book. It was funny and swoony and heartfelt. It tells the story of screw up tangentially famous Luc O’Donnell who needs a fake boyfriend to save his career so his friend sets him up with the unimpeachable and slightly uptight barrister Oliver Blackwood. Slightly uptight and unimpeachable heroes are kind of my romance novel catnip so I enjoyed that aspect very much. But even aside from that this book balanced humour and sincere emotion perfectly. Such a good read.

Lovely War by Julie Berry narrated by Jayne Entwistle, Allan Corduner, Julie Berry, Dion Graham, Fiona Hardingham, John Lee, Nathanial Parker, Steve West – This novel had quite a clever framework – two intertwined love stories set against the back drop of WWI, told by Aphrodite. Yes, that Aphrodite. The Goddess of Love has been caught in an affair with the God of War and she must argue her case. Other also gods drop in to help tell the stories of love in time of war. The premise of the novel is quite clever, but the heart of the story lies in the journeys of hope and resilience the pair of lovers take – I thought it a really touching and engaging story. The audio version had different actors voice the different gods’ contribution, and I really enjoyed how each person brought a unique voice to each god.