Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic is books that ended up on the TBR pile based on recommendations from others. This is a tricky one…for most of my life, I’ve tended to chose to my own reading for my own reasons, only very infrequently seeking or taking recommendations. But since I started to get involved with book blogs (a while before I started my own), I read about the great things you all are reading and I want in! So here are books that have gotten added to the long and growing list because they’ve been recommended to me. 
You Will Know Me: I’d never read Abbott before, but I’ve heard great things about her work around the bookish internet. And I’ve long been interested in women’s gymnastics, so when I started hearing good things from people who had the ARC, I picked up a copy of my own when it went on Kindle sale recently!
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: I remember seeing this on a list somewhere (Buzzfeed? Book Riot? Pajiba?) of best books and having generally heard good things about Michael Chabon, it ended up on my TBR.
Boy, Snow, Bird: The bookternet definitely was how I got introduced to Helen Oyeymi and when I found this at my local SPCA thrift store (where paperbacks are 50 cents and hardcovers a dollar…can’t beat those prices) I definitely yanked it off the shelf and now it’s at home.
Station Eleven: I’ve always had a fondness for post-apocalyptic literature and it seems like everyone ever on the internet loved this, so it’s on my Kindle until I get to it!
Over-Dressed: This was a recommendation from Adina at Blue Collar Red Lipstick, whose blog is totally worth reading for its primary style content alone, but she’s also a reader (and author!) who does the odd post about what she enjoys. I read Deluxe based on her rec and got a lot of food for thought out of it, so I picked up this one she recommended as well.
Fangirl: Probably not a surprise that lots of book bloggers enjoy a book about a young woman who spends a lot of time writing for the internet, but Rainbow Rowell’s books are generally well-liked and so I’ve added them to my TBR!
The Sense of an Ending: This was one of the personal recs…my good friend Kailey recommended it quite some time ago and when I saw a secondhand copy, I remembered her talking about how much she liked it and picked it up.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Another Kailey recommendation…she’s a genetic counselor, so the subject area is particularly compelling to her, but she made it clear that it’s broader than just a book for science nerds (not that a book for science nerds is a bad thing!) and I’ve got it on my Kindle.
Ghost Wars: Another personal rec! This was actually a favorite of my college boyfriend and as I’ve gotten more interested in global political affairs over the years, I decided to snag it!
The Lace Reader: My coworker is a writer and editor, and when she mentioned this was her favorite book, it got added to my list! It went on Kindle sale not long after she mentioned it to me so it’s safely on my e-reader and waiting to be read.
Year 1: An Update (and Giveaway!)
I turned 31 yesterday, so it’s time to check in! I started “counting” my reading for the blog on my 30th birthday last year even if I didn’t actually start blogging until December. Without further ago, during the past twelve months:
In Reading
- Books read (this year): 95! Which is way above my usual pace and consisted of a lot of stress-reading, but is also great because this means that I have a nice little cushion for any times coming up when my reading slows. Obviously, not all of these are on the blog yet, but they’re nearly all written and ready to go.
- Books read: (total): 95. Since this is the first year, these numbers are the same.
- Male/Female Authors: I like to keep track of the proportion of male v female authors I’ve read. I’m not inclined to go on a only-women authors spree, but I do like to be cognizant of it. And as it so happens, this year I’ve read 48 books written by men and 47 written by women, so close to a 50-50 split.
- Most Read Genres: I read 63 fiction books (most read sub-genre: contemporary fiction) and 32 non-fiction (most-read subgenre: history).
- Kindle/Hard Copy: I definitely read more on my Kindle this year: 58 ebooks and only 37 hard copy. My general pattern to make sure I’m making progress through both my backlist and my ARCs is to read 3 ARCs for every 5 backlist books. The ARCs are almost entirely ebook, and for the backlist, I generally alternate ebook v physical book, so that’s how those numbers got so sideways.
In Life
I thought it would be neat to keep track of what major-ish events were going on in my life as I read each year. I’m actually getting ready to launch a new feature here on the blog: at the end of each month, there will be a Life Notes or something like that kind of post, where I’ll talk about what I read and share some highlights from my actual life. I’ve noticed similar posts around the book blog community and I think I’d like to get in on the fun!
- Girl’s trip to Denver: This actually predates the blog but postdates the 30th birthday on which I started tracking my reading, so it counts. Two of my best friends and I do a long weekend together every year, and so last November, we spent three days in Denver, which was a really cool city, but not as cool as getting to see my best friends again! They still live in the town we all grew up in, which is in Michigan, so I don’t get to see them often and it’s always a special occasion when I do! I was reading: Oriental Mythology
- Got a dog: Lord Stanley joined our household right after I started this blog! He’s almost five now, and he’s the cutest and the sweetest and he’s definitely a pain in the tuchus, but he’s worth every second of it. I was reading: Occidental Mythlogy
- Went to San Francisco: We do a work retreat every year, and this year’s destination was San Francisco! Which I’ve been to before, obviously (Reno is only about a 5 hour drive, so it’s an easy trip over the hill (read: Sierra Nevada mountains), particularly in the summer. This was the winter, but it was still super fun. I was reading: Creative Mythology
- Went to my best friend’s baby shower: Remember how I barely get to see my friends? Well, when it’s best friendship, you go to Michigan at the end of January for a baby shower. My “nephew” was born in March and he’s just the best. I was reading: Still Creative Mythology. This was only a week after the SF trip, so it’s not bad, but you guys that book took me so long to read and I hated it so much.
- Got married: My now-husband and I have been together for four years at this point and he’s my favorite guy and now he’s mine forever with a ring and everything! I was reading: Zodiac
- Honeymooned in Chicago: I’d been to Chicago, but not in quite some time, and Husband had never been. He’s not a laze-on-the-beach type, so we thought Chicago would be a good time…there’s so much to do and see and eat! And we did and saw and ate and it was fantastic. I was reading: Song of Achilles
- Weekend in Lake Tahoe: This was only a vacation to me, my husband unfortunately spent most of it working (his workplace holds an annual event at the lake). But I got to go to fancy dinners and on a nice boat cruise, so I had a lovely time! I was read: The Other Side of the River
And, in honor of my first year of reading and blogging, I’m giving away a copy my favorite book that I reviewed on the blog this year! I read a lot of great books, but my favorite was Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men. So here’s how it’s going to work: if you’d like to be entered to win a copy of this book, please leave a comment below sometime in the next week (through October 16). I’ll use a random number generator to pick a winner and then reach out to you for your contact info, which I’ll only use to send you your book from Amazon (either paperback or Kindle, depending on your preference). Thanks for reading along this year!
Book 45: The Crack In Space
“The mind of man was uncommonly stubborn and slow to change. Reformers, including himself, were always prone to forget that. Victory always seemed just around the corner. But generally it was not, after all.”
Dates read: April 23-25, 2016
Rating: 7/10
So remember how I was literally just telling you last week that science fiction isn’t my genre of choice? Here’s another science fiction book! It’s a very different kind of science fiction, though. The Crack In Space mostly falls under the sci-fi label by virtue of its author (Philip K. Dick) and the fact that it’s set in a future world with some advanced technology. It throws out one of those historical what-ifs that I’m so fond of, except way further back then I’d think to go: what if homo sapiens were not the kind of humans that won out evolutionarily?
The Crack in Space posits our world about 2080 (which, at the time it was published, would have been over 100 years in the future): there is severe overpopulation, to the extent that many young people are choosing to be cryogenically frozen until the labor market is better. It’s an election year, and there’s a black presidential nominee for the first time ever. That nominee, Jim Briskin, is struggling in his campaign until he’s tipped off about some major news: there’s been a rift discovered to a whole new world…one that looks like it will support human life. Briskin seizes on this development to announce that it will be his platform to thaw out the frozen and give them this world to settle, and his opponent jockeys to match his promises, when it’s revealed that the new world is populated after all, but not by people as we know them. Instead it’s Peking man that survived. So now what?
That’s maybe half the plot of this slim volume (it’s about 200 pages long), but it’s the main one. First of all, let me say that I’m glad that we beat out Dick’s predictions and had our first black president 75 years ahead of schedule. Moving on from that, though, what I really enjoy about reading Dick’s work is that he poses interesting, thoughtful questions rooted in an understanding of human nature. As much as we might think that if we discovered a parallel Earth we’d learn from our past and thoughtfully go about exploration and potential colonization, the reality is that in an election year, politicians would be falling all over each other to posture and secure an important position for themselves. If the world’s population was so huge that abortion wasn’t just widespread but encouraged, that people were freezing themselves in hopes of a better life someday, it would absolutely end up with people getting sent through the door/portal/whatever without much in the way of an actual plan while news cameras flashed and the powers that be congratulated themselves on a job well done. Maybe I’m a little cynical (I was a litigator and now I’m a lobbyist, so that probably comes with the territory), but I feel like Dick gets how people would actually behave instead of how they’d prefer to imagine they would. I found it a quick and enjoyable read which had me pondering alternate realities.
Tell me, blog friends…if mankind found a new world, would you want to be one of the colonists?
Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Villains
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s subject is villains, which is an interesting stretch for me because I don’t read a lot of book with clear-cut “bad guys”. The kind of literary fiction (which makes me feel so pretentious to say) to which I am drawn tends to find its drama in the conflicts of people who don’t fall super neatly into “hero” or “villain” categories. But here are the ten I chose!
Elphaba (Wicked): I know, this is cheating. The villain in the book is the Wizard, Elphaba is our protagonist. But the Wicked Witch of the West is one of pop culture’s great villains, and Gregory Maguire’s book examining the story from her side is a classic in its own right that spawned several sequels (none of which I’ve read).
Amy Dunne (Gone Girl): Also mostly not a villain, she’s much more accurately an anti-hero. But also, she’s a lady who faked her own death and framed her husband for her murder, which is pretty damn villainous. But damn if ladies don’t understand her rage at a world that tried to shove her neatly into a box she had no desire to fit into and broke out of to forge her own deranged path.
Miranda Priestly (The Devil Wears Prada): Most of us have had a bad boss or two. But Miranda Priestly (allegedly based on Anna “Nuclear” Wintour) takes the cake: she’s demanding, demeaning, virtually impossible to please. Or is she just a woman who’s had to become that person in order to get to the top of her profession?
Mrs. Coulter (The Golden Compass): Much like our protagonist Lyra is, we’re both drawn to and repulsed by the beautiful woman with her shiny hair and the golden monkey who accompanies her everywhere. She may be ultimately redeemed by her love for her daughter, but she’s still a hateful and fearful person and a worthy adversary.
Cersei Lannister (A Song of Ice and Fire): She’s such an asshole (you know, cheating on her husband with her own twin brother, giving birth to several of her brother’s children and passing them off as her husband’s, the way she treats the Starks, etc). But when Martin starts giving you her POV chapters, she’s still terrible but much more understandably so. A ruthless and ambitious person who is neither given the opportunities she wants because of her gender nor nearly as smart as she thinks she is, she’s very rootable-against.
President Snow (The Hunger Games): The detail that Collins includes about the smell of him, his heavy rose perfume not quite able to mask his oral bleeding, is the kind of thing that lodges in your mind even if you have no real frame of reference for bloody roses. His ruthless rule over Panem is just the icing on the cake.
Humbert Humbert (Lolita): Probably the best example of a sympathetic villain in modern literature, Humbert’s sophisticated excuses for his own behavior and passion for Lolita can overwhelm, on first read, the fact that he’s a child rapist who preys on and attempts to dominate a vulnerable youngster who has no one else to turn to.
The Volturi (New Moon): A powerful Old World ruling court of vampires with superpowers is sort of cheesy but also sort of awesome. Once they start getting more developed in later books they lose a lot of their mystique, but when they’re a shadowy force in the second book, they’re a compelling adversary for Bella and Edward.
The Overlook Hotel (The Shining): I love both the book and the Kubrick movie of this story, but they’re definitely different. The hotel is a far more malevolent force in King’s original work, slowly poisoning Jack Torrance’s mind.
Grandma (Flowers In The Attic): Saved the cheesiest for last, because this lady is totally over the top and awful and just the most ridiculous villain. Will any of us ever forget about arsenic-laced powdered donuts? Or when she poured TAR in Cathy’s HAIR?
Book 44: Dune
“Somewhere this night he had passed a decision-nexus into the deep unknown. He knew the time-area surrounding them, but the here-and-now existed as a place of mystery. It was as though he had seen himself from a distance go out of sight down into a valley. Of the countless paths up out of that valley, some might carry a Paul Atrides back into sight, but many would not.”
Dates read: April 18-23, 2016
Rating: 6/10
Lists/awards: Hugo Award, NY Times Bestseller
For some reason, I’ve always preferred fantasy to science fiction. They’re similar genres, it’s not for nothing that they’re usually shelved together: new worlds, usually some sort of hero quest narrative, human stories peppered with imaginative twists that let you see them in a new light. If I’m being honest, usually the most significant different on a fundamental level I notice is that if the story is set in space or has robots, it’s science fiction. If there are elves and dragons, it’s fantasy. But even though I know intellectually that the differences between them are as much cosmetic as anything, I’d chose fantasy over sci-fi any day. That being said, one of my all-time favorite books, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?, is science fiction, and Battlestar Galactica is one of my favorite TV shows. Frank Herbert’s Dune is the best-selling science fiction novel of all time, so I figured I owed it a try.
Dune drops you right into the story without easing you in with world-building before the plot picks up, which I personally found alienating and made it hard for me to get into it from the beginning. It’s the story of a young nobleman, Paul Atrides, whose family is entangled in interplanetary intrigue. The Atrides family is given control of a planet called Dune, notable for being the sole source of a precious substance, the spice melange, which allows people to tap into enhanced mental abilities. When the Atrides are betrayed by their enemies, the Harkonnens, the Duke Leto dies but his consort Jessica and son Paul escape into the desert planet, where Paul (the result of a breeding program by a religious/philosphical/political sect) taps into extraordinary abilities and becomes a religious icon among the native population. Of course, he has vengeance to bring upon the Harokkens and a final battle for power between the families looms.
Having read Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces, it was pretty easy to recognize Paul’s story as the Hero’s Journey. There’s a reason this particular narrative is so popular across time and cultures: when done well, it’s really compelling. Was this done well? Not especially, but it wasn’t bad or even mediocre. It just didn’t do a lot for me, personally. Like I said, it took me a while to get into it and it’s kind of a space opera…it starts at like a 7 in intensity and waxes and wanes from there, but it’s high drama throughout. I’d have liked a chance to warm up to and get emotionally invested in the characters before they started being put in peril. And on a shallow note about the characters, it bothered me that some of them had fairly standard-issue names: Jessica, Paul, Duncan, even Leto. Then there are some named Thufir, Gurney, and Irulan. I tend to feel like an author should either “go there” with mostly unusual naming patterns or not, but the in-between doesn’t really work.
Once I got about a quarter of the way into it, I got a feel for the world and the novel as a whole and I enjoyed it more, but at the end of the day it wasn’t really for me. Assuming for the sake of argument a continuum from entirely character-driven stories to entirely plot-driven stories, I tend to prefer things on the character side and I’d slot Dune on the plot side. I’m a big movie-watcher when I’m not reading, and there are plenty of movies that I’ve seen that I recognize are high quality, but that I don’t really like. This is the same kind of deal…I can understand why it’s been so popular and sold so well, but I don’t know that I’d read it again or recommend it to anyone.
Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My Fall TBR
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! I’m fairly certain that this post is meant to highlight books coming out this fall that are on our TBRs, but I’m going to take it super literally and talk about the books that are up next on my TBR list! Since I actually did a fairly similar topic recently, there’s actually a little crossover: the first two books are the same but if you missed that one, here they are again with eight more alongside!
The Circle: I’ve never read David Eggers, and this book about an internet company that grows to emcompass more and more parts of the lives of its users feels super relevant to today. This was a bit of a flop, and I’m curious whether I think that’s fair.
Sophie’s Choice: I’ve seen the movie so I’m spoiled on the “twist”, but I’m interested to read the source material. The book isn’t always better than the movie, so we’ll see how this one actually works.
The Mothers: This (and the following two) are ARCs…advance reader copies, for which I am owing a review. This one is an inter-generational story about mothers during three different periods of Australian history. I don’t read much Aussie lit and I’m curious to see how I like it.
The Life Of The World To Come: When your story is about a high-strung law student/lawyer, I tend to be game because that has been my actual life. This about the aforementioned lawyer-type, who feels like his life is over when his girlfriend leaves him and his work on a death penalty case that throws him even further off-balance.
Border Child: Some of the rhetoric surrounding immigration today makes my blood boil, but I do think that the underlying issue we’re wrestling with is an important and complex one. What gets left out all too often, though, is the remembrance that these are people we’re talking about. This is a story about a family that attempts to leave Mexico for the United States, but along the way the small daughter is lost and the parents return home…but years later, information about their missing child is revealed and they won’t stop at anything to find out the truth.
The Executioner’s Song: The death penalty has been a long and abiding interest of mine. When I was in law school, I took a course on it, did research on it for the professor that taught that course, and was in a death penalty focused clinic. This enormous (1000+ pages in my mass-market edition) non-fiction novel deals with a death penalty case in Utah and even though I’m sure it’s going to bog down my reading pace I’m stoked to get to it.
The Confessions of Saint Augustine: I’ve always wanted to read this, and that hasn’t changed even though it’s been well over half my lifetime since I’ve been to Mass. It’ll be a definite change of pace for me!
Invisible Man: With the goings-on recently, racial issues have been top-of-mind for me. This is a classic story about prejudice and the way we divide ourselves from our fellow humans and I’m really interested to get into it.
Paper Magician: This was a Kindle sale pickup…I don’t know if I just saw the cover enough that it wore me down, but I definitely bought it inexpensively. I tend to be drawn to fiction about magical worlds, so I’m interested, but if I’m being honest the reviews are mixed so my expectations aren’t particularly high.
Eleanor of Aquitaine: I read Alison Weir’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII a while back (review upcoming…my book backlog is crazy right now, y’all!) and loved it…she presents well-researched history in a very readable and enjoyable way. So now I need to read the rest of her books, and luckily for me she writes a lot about royalty: one of my favorite nonfiction subjects! This one is about a royal I don’t actually know as much about, so I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth in!
Book 43: The Hangman’s Daughter
“Drums rumbled, cymbals clanged, and somewhere a fiddle was playing. The aroma of deep-fried doughnuts and roasted meat drifted down to the foul-smelling tanners’ quarter. Yes, it was going to be a lovely execution.”
Dates read: April 16-18, 2016
Rating: 3/10
Whether one agrees with it or not, there’s no denying that the death penalty has a long history. Modern day executioners push a vial of potassium chloride into an IV line and, if everything goes right, wait for the heart to stop. But once upon a time, a death sentence meant beheading or hanging (or worse, like drawing and quartering). The Hangman’s Daughter begins with a messy execution in 1600s Bavaria (in modern day Germany): young Jakob Kuisl is supposed to be helping his father, the hangman, with a beheading that ends up terribly botched. It’s a grim, moody scene that sets the stage for a dark story.
But after the opening prologue described above and the first scene of the story, in which a young boy is rescued from a raging river at great danger, only to be discovered to be already dying from a blow to the head, the plot stalls out considerably. The boy has a crude tattoo that the townspeople decide indicates witchcraft, so the local midwife is promptly accused and imprisoned awaiting torture and execution. Jakob, now himself the hangman (and torturer, and proto-pharmacist…he wears a lot of hats) is convinced of her innocence and joins forces with Simon, the town doctor’s son, to figure out who actually committed these crimes (the murder of the first child is followed by the murder of two other children and some property destruction to boot). They’re racing against time as hysteria and pressure to convict and burn the witch grow daily.
Where is the titular hangman’s daughter in all this, you might ask? Excellent question! Magdalena is very much a secondary part of the story, and the book could easily be rewritten without her character being missed for a second. She’s having a love affair with Simon, which we’re continually reminded cannot end in marriage because her father’s profession renders her unclean. In the scheme of things that don’t quite work about this book, though, the title is small change.
While Jakob Kuisl, as a hangman who studies science and works as a healer when he’s not torturing and executing, is an interesting character, no one else in the book has much depth. Simon and Magdalena are flat “young lovers”, and the various townspeople are even more one-note: officious, or anachronistically fair-minded, or superstitious, no one is a whole person. And speaking of anachronisms, holy smokes is the language in this historical novel completely out of whack. Obviously as a non-German-speaker I read it in translation and I hope the issue was poor translation, otherwise there’s just not even an attempt to make language the slightest bit accurate to the time. There’s also a ton of repetitious phrasing, of phrases that are unusual enough that it’s really noticeable. These writing/translation problems are so jarring that they take you straight out of the world of the novel. Other than that, there are about 100 more pages of the book than there is plot to fill it, so it drags on pretty badly. At the end of the day, it’s just not a very good book.
Tell me, blog friends…do you think a book’s title character should be a major part of the story?