My life! I have one again! This month saw the end of legislative session and while it was a good one for me, with lots of professional growth, hot damn was it a struggle near the end. But now it is over until 2021! I’m hoping my reading pace picks up, I’m behind where I was even two years ago, the last time I went through session!
In Books…
- Delirium: Reading this at the end of session, when my brain was exhausted, was the best possible time to do so. If I was ever going to be receptive to a young adult dystopia about a world where love is considered a deadly disease, this was it. I didn’t think it was especially good, it indulged in a lot of cliches, but it held my attention and interest reasonably well.
- Good Riddance: While the previous book was fun fluff, this was just offensively dumb fluff. The potential was there in the concept, of a woman who tosses her mother’s annotated yearbook in the trash only to find a neighbor has rescued it and wants to make it into a documentary, but the execution was awful. The plot was silly, the characters were flat…a waste of time.
- There There: I’d heard rave reviews of this book, so I was super happy when it was selected for my book club. And while Tommy Orange’s writing is often breathtakingly good and he sketches vivid characters through short vignettes, I found myself frustrated with the structure. It’s basically interconnected short chapters from many points of view and I wanted a more cohesive narrative for what could have been an amazing novel but was ultimately a very good one instead.
- The Coming Plague: This book, about the impact of human behavior on the diseases that we experience, was fascinating! It also was a little too long…at over 600 pages of text in relatively small type, there was a point at which even the well-told and interesting stories about the emergence of “new” diseases like Ebola, AIDs, and Legionnaire’s Disease (among many others) gets old.
- American Psycho: The satire of the soullessness of 80s consumer culture/Wall Street bankers is devastatingly, perfectly sharp. But this is beyond a doubt one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read. Even just skimming the sex/violence I still read things that it’s going to take me quite a while to get out of my head.
- Amsterdam: I picked this up because it had won the Booker Prize, and now that I’ve read it, I have no idea why it did. It’s cleverly written, and amusing in the way it skewers the delusions of grandeur of two old friends who reconnect at the funeral of a woman they both once dated. But it didn’t make much impact on me, and I doubt I’ll remember it for more than a couple months.
In Life…
- Session is over: My fourth time through legislative session wrapped up early in the month and it wasn’t a minute too soon! I’m very much enjoying having an 8-minute walk to work instead of a 40-minute drive, going home at lunch to hang out with my husband and dog, and being home at a reasonable hour every night. Also the enormous lessening of the stress burden. And we’ve started playing pub trivia!
One Thing:
Like many people recently, I was sucked into and fascinated by HBO’s excellent docudrama Chernobyl. If you haven’t seen it, I highly, highly recommend it. And either way, I’d recommend this fascinating article about women who have moved back into the Exclusion Zone. The piece is several years old now but I find this dilemma really interesting: if you’re older, and you’ve spent your whole life living in one place and don’t want to leave it, accepting the risks of staying…should anyone be able to make you go?