A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

Top Ten Tuesday: British Covers I Like Better

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week’s subject is cover redesigns that we love or hate, but the only cover redesigns I can think of besides the classics are movie covers, which I pretty much always hate. So I’m going to turn my eyes across the pond to show you ten lovely covers (for books I love!) that I like much better than the American versions!

 The Bear and the Nightingale
 

Memoirs of a Geisha

 

An American Marriage

A Brave New World
The Kite Runner
 
High Fidelity

Exit West

 

Daisy Jones And The Six

 
White Oleander

 
The Virgin Suicides


Book 192: The Hate U Give

“WebMD calls it a stage of grief—anger. But I doubt I’ll ever get to the other stages. This one slices me into millions of pieces. Every time I’m whole and back to normal, something happens to tear me apart, and I’m forced to start all over again.”

Dates read: November 26-29, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Growing up as a white girl in an overwhelmingly white small town, I was always taught that police were the good guys. The police are there to help you if something bad happens. They are trustworthy. And I continued to, for the most part, believe that through when I graduated from college. Sure, some police were corrupt or abused their power. But there are assholes in every line of work. I don’t think I really started to understand how systemically rotten policing can be, even if individual officers are often good people, until I took criminal law in law school and read about the wide variety of misbehavior they perpetrated from a position of trust. I don’t think all police are bad, or villains, but I think it’s a profession that can be very appealing to exactly the people who shouldn’t be in it: the type who want to have the ability to control the lives of others and enact state-sanctioned violence when that control is questioned.

Starr Turner, the teenage heroine of Angie Thomas’ debut novel The Hate U Give, has a pretty neutral perspective on cops when the book begins: her beloved uncle Carlos is a police officer, and she’s been taught by him and her parents to behave in a threat-neutralizing way if she interacts with them: be polite, follow orders, don’t make sudden movements. And she’s never had any trouble. But then one night, when she’s getting a ride home from a party from her long-time friend Khalil, they’re pulled over on a pretext by a white cop, and he’s shot to death, right there in front of Starr. It changes everything about her life and how she sees the world.

Starr’s already living a fairly unusual life…she lives with her family in the inner city, but goes to a private, overwhelmingly white high school in the suburbs, where she has mostly white friends and dates a white classmate. She’s always found herself living half in each world, but what happens that night really blows up her burgeoning racial consciousness. Her relationships with her friends and family shift and change as she tries to navigate the legal system and get justice for Khalil, and she discovers more and more who she is and who she wants to be.

This book had been hyped for months before I got to it…glowing reviews all over the internet, movie rights sold before it was even published. I always try to temper my expectations with any kind of media that’s been all the rage, but sometimes it doesn’t work. And honestly, I think it contributed towards the way I felt about this book: it’s very good, and I probably would have thought it was amazing if it hadn’t been sold as life-changing and mind-blowing, but it didn’t quite measure up to those enormous accolades for me. There’s a compelling story, solid writing with both emotion and humor, and great characterization. But as a reader, there just was never that moment where it really went into hyperdrive and became more than the sum of its parts.

Like I said, though, it does everything it’s trying to do very well: Starr practically jumps off the page and feels very real, and her family is also beautifully, warmly drawn. Even though Khalil is barely alive during the novel, the way that Starr thinks about him as she processes what happened to him is touchingly rendered and makes the reader really feel his loss. Thomas also does an excellent job of balancing the heavy topic at the center of her book with lightness…there were parts that literally made me laugh out loud, but she never either undercuts the seriousness of police violence or gets too ponderous. But the characters of Starr’s school friends, and especially her boyfriend, seem underdeveloped for the significance that the narrative places on them. And a decision Starr makes near the end of the book seems out of place, in a way that was jarring.

At the end of the day, I’d recommend it to just about everyone, honestly. It’s written as YA (and as a primarily non-YA reader, I’d say it doesn’t read as typical for the genre but does have some markings of it), so it’s appropriate for younger readers, but it didn’t feel dumbed-down to me, someone who loves a gigantic tome of literary fiction. Obviously the focus on police violence will be difficult for some, but it’s a well-crafted, enjoyable book that will likely inspire you to examine your own pre-existing opinions. I highly recommend it!

One year ago, I was reading: Shantaram (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Notes on a Scandal

Three years ago, I was reading: The White Tiger

A Month In The Life: July 2019

After a pretty chill June, we made our first big trip in a while this month! It had been over two years since I last visited my beloved home state of Michigan, and a week there was exactly what I needed after an intense winter and spring.

In Books…

  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: I’d never read Japan’s master of magical realism before, and while I definitely wouldn’t say that I “got” this book about an ordinary man drawn into a shadowy world when first his cat and then his wife disappear, I found it compelling and interesting and I enjoyed reading it.
  • Washington Black: This made the Booker Prize shortlist last year and I’d seen positive reviews floating around the internet, but the descriptions I’d seen of it as an adventure story kept it off my list…until it was chosen for my book club. I liked it more than I’d expected, finding the self-development of the titular Wash compelling, but I thought it had pacing issues and it never really clicked for me.
  • Polite Society: I do quite enjoy Jane Austen’s Emma, so when I read that this book was a modern twist on it, set in India, I thought that sounded intriguing. I’m always prepared for this kind of book to be disappointing, so I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it! It’s darker than Austen’s work, and adding in the viewpoints of other characters made it more complex.  
  • Nickel and Dimed: One of those books I can’t believe I’ve never read! As it’s been over 20 years since its publication, a lot of the material from the undercover look at living on poverty wages has become a well-known part of popular discourse and has lost the power to shock. But it’s still interesting and worth reading.
  • The Man in the High Castle: I’ll admit that reading this in a disjointed way, on vacation, might not have shown it to its best effect. But it seemed more like Philip K Dick was conducting a thought experiment about what the world might have looked like if the Axis Powers had won the day than writing an actual novel. Flat characters, often silly plotting but interesting enough on the thought experiment side to have merit. 
  • How to be Good: Nick Hornby turns his trademark humor and insight on a marriage in crisis. Katie and David feel relatable (both have moments of sympathy and moments of being profoundly irritating, like most people), and Hornby’s prose always shines, but it felt like the plot kind of got away from him. 
  • Sashenka: Simon Sebag Montefiore primarily authors nonfiction books about Russian history, but this was his first novel. That inexperience with fiction shows in often clunky writing even as he weaves an interesting story about a woman (the titular Alexandra, called Sashenka) living during the Russian Revolution and then the Stalin era, and then another young woman living in the modern day who tries to track down what happened to her.

    In Life…

    • A week in Michigan: I should have known when I found out we were headed home during Art Fair that it was going to be a hot and muggy time! We spent a couple days out at my mom’s getting in some quality lake time, and then into Ann Arbor to visit with my sister and brother-in-law in their newly purchased home (which was lovely)! I scored some Art Fair finds and luckily our only experience of power loss was a very brief one.

    One Thing:

    A New York indie bookstore takes user submissions of their favorite books and roasts them in this delightful Twitter thread. My own submission (The Virgin Suicides) did get an enjoyable quip back!

    Gratuitous Pug Picture: 

    Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Retellings/Folklore-Inspired Tales

    Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a freebie, so I decided to highlight one of my favorite subgenres…retellings! There is so much potential in taking a look at stories we already know and changing the perspective on them.

    Wicked: Gregory Maguire has made a career of retellings, but his first was this take on the Wicked Witch that is so much deeper and richer than the musical (which is also fantastic in its own way). 

    The Bear and the Nightingale: There’s a kind of vague Cinderella aspect to this, but the real treat is the Russian folklore, alongside an incredible heroine and a wonderful story that continues over two sequels.

    Polite Society: I just recently read this take on Emma, transported to modern day India, and found it really enjoyable, striking a great balance between the broad strokes of the original while still telling its own story.

    Ella Enchanted: Teenage me loved this YA spin on Cinderella where she’s cursed to always be obedient.

    The Song of Achilles: I did not especially enjoy reading The Iliad. But I did enjoy reading this take on it that posits Achilles and Patroclus as a long-term, committed couple.

    Boy, Snow, Bird: I did not love one of the concluding “twists” of this book, inspired by Snow White, but until then had found it complicated and rich and interesting.

    The Red Tent: Dinah, only daughter of the biblical Jacob, is barely a footnote in the Bible, but this book takes her portrayal there and fleshes it out with life and love and sorrow and joy.

    Lamb: This is another retelling of a Bible story, but takes on a much more prominent character…Jesus himself, given a dumbass best friend called Biff, who narrates the “real” story of the Son of God. 

    Bridget Jones’s Diary: It’s a pretty loose take on Pride and Prejudice, but I love this book. So few “funny” books actually work for me and it’s hilarious.

    The King Must Die: I super loved Greek mythology growing up, and the religious aspects of this retelling of the story of Theseus made for a fascinating read.

    American Gods: Neil Gaiman’s vivid imagination brings together the spirits of mythological tradition from all over the world to face off with “the new gods” to which society has dedicated itself (media, technology, etc).

    Book 191: In The Woods


    “I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart’s desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.”

    Dates read: November 22-26, 2017

    Rating: 8/10

    I feel like my childhood wasn’t that long ago, but it also feels like the world is so different than it was then that I can’t imagine my own future hypothetical children having the same kind of experience. There weren’t cell phones yet, so when we went outside to play there wasn’t any real way to get ahold of us. I grew up on a bay on an inland lake, so the neighbor’s houses where we went to play were usually within sight distance, but it’s not like my mom just sat there and stared out the window until we came home. There was a freedom, an untethered-ness, that I just don’t know would even be possible for a kid today. That doesn’t mean that it’s worse now, it just means it’s different.

    After all, there are always bad things that can happen when kids are playing outside. In Tana French’s In The Woods, our protagonist, Adam Robert Ryan, is playing with his two best friends in their Dublin suburb when something goes wrong. The children vanish. After a few hours of searching, Adam is found, but the other two are gone. And Adam is covered in blood and has been rendered completely mute by whatever it was he’d experienced. He recovers after a few weeks in the hospital, but has no memory of what might have transpired that day. He’s pulled out of his old school and put in a boarding school in England, where he starts going by his middle name and grows up more or less like any other kid. He goes back to Ireland, becomes a cop, and manages to work his way into his dream job working on a murder unit in Dublin, where’s he’s partnered with Cassie Maddox, the only other person as young as he is. Although they’re not dating, they have become intensely emotionally intertwined.

    For the first time since he left it as a child, Ryan is pulled back to his hometown when a teenage girl is found murdered on an archaeological dig site. As he and Maddox try to figure out why someone might have killed the aspiring ballerina, he can’t help but also start to try to dig around inside his own past for any clues it may offer. They chase down leads and become even closer as the stress mounts, creating a combustible situation as Ryan becomes less and less able to separate the crime at hand from whatever might have happened to him that long-ago summer day.

    I very much enjoyed this book…while mystery doesn’t tend to be my genre of choice (I find it too often dependent on hiding information from the reader and/or ridiculous plotting to build suspense), French also creates excellent, compelling characters and allows their development to be just as crucial to the story as the twists and turns of the investigation. I was emotionally invested in both Ryan and Maddox and wanted to know more about them and the ways their personal lives impacted their police work. And I thought the central mystery was also very well-done and nicely walked the line between dropping clues that fed into the ending without just spelling it out and laying it out there on a plate for you. Then again, “figuring it out” too early doesn’t usually detract from my ability to enjoy the work…I’ve long maintained that if your story doesn’t work unless the reader is surprised, it’s not a good story, it’s just a good twist.

    And while the central mystery is wrapped up, I will warn you away from this book if you hate books that have significant ambiguity to the ending: Ryan is never quite able to piece together what happened that day in the woods. I personally didn’t mind it and thought French did a good job with keeping that part of the story relevant even if it never came together, if only for the way it impacted Ryan and his mental/emotional state. This is the first in a series, and I’ve actually heard quite often that it’s the weakest of them, so if this is as bad as it gets (and I thought it was really good), I’m excited to read the rest of them. I’d recommend it to everyone, even if you don’t usually like mysteries.

    One year ago, I was reading: The Pleasing Hour

    Two years ago, I was reading: Station Eleven

    Three years ago, I was reading: Behave

    Top Ten Tuesday: Settings I’d Like to See More Of

    Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about settings we don’t see enough of in our reading. Often, not seeing settings you like means that you should broaden your reading outlook, because there are books written about any kind of people living in any kind of place if you’re willing to search. But these settings (both literal places and kind of general milieus) are ones that I don’t encounter as much and would like to read more from!

    South America: Unless it’s non-fiction about the Colombian drug trade, I’ve hardly read anything set in South America. Brazil alone is the fifth most populous country in the world, and I’d love more opportunities to look at what life feels like there or elsewhere in South America.

    Eastern Europe: There are lots of books (both fiction and non) about the Holocaust, but relatively few about life before it, or even after it. What is the modern experience or even just pre-WWII experience of Poland, or the Balkans, or Slovakia?

    New Zealand: There’s Australian-set literature out there that’s not hard to find, but I don’t think the Kiwis have gotten as much press as their much larger neighbors, even after Lord of the Rings!

    Southeast Asia: Vietnam has obviously loomed large in America’s cultural imagination for quite a while now, but what about Laos? Burma? The non-Bangkok areas of Thailand?

    Northern Africa: Egypt tends to dominate here, but the rest of Northern Africa seems to get forgotten. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything set in Tunisia or Libya or even seen anything set there while browsing at a bookshop.

    Medium-sized cities: I feel like small towns where everyone knows everyone make for ample writing fodder, as do exciting big cities, but what about places that are neither small enough where you see your neighbors every time you go grocery shopping or big enough to let you start over with new friends if something goes wrong?

    The Dark Ages: It’s not as dynamic (or well-documented) of a time as the Renaissance, but people still lived back then and I’m curious about what it might have been like.

    Minor wars: The World Wars, Vietnam, the Civil War, the Napoleonic wars…these conflicts are at least in the background of many great books. But regional wars can have just as much of an impact on the people caught up on them, and give some context to under-reported incidents.

    Non-Christian religious social groups: There have been some great books set inside convents and abbeys…now what about a lamasery? Or a madrasa or yeshiva?

    Olympic sports: There are books with characters who play the major sports, and plenty of books about ballet, but what about bobsledders? Javelin throwers? Those worlds are surely fascinating in their own right!

    Book 190: The House of Mirth

    “She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce—the mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his droning voice—but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honor of boring her for life.”

    Dates read: November 17-22, 2017

    Rating: 7/10

    Lists/awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012)

    This is going to sound stuck up, but I’ve been told I’m pretty since I was a little girl. Now that I’m an adult, I don’t think I’m devastatingly good-looking, but I’m generally pretty secure that I’m more attractive than not. It’s interesting, the way women are trained to think that our looks are one of the most important things about us, but then we’re supposed to wait for men to notice and acknowledge it, and we’re ridiculed for the things we do to maintain it in the face of time and aging. My husband worries about putting on moisturizer because his skin feels dry and gets flaky in the winter. I worry about putting on all of the steps in my Asian skincare routine so that I combat wrinkles. Don’t get me wrong, I love my k-beauty. But I’m aware that social pressure plays a disproportionate role in how I engage with my face, my skin, my body…not just for my own comfort, but for everyone else’s too.

    And that’s in today’s world! The farther back you go, the more a woman’s looks were central to her prospects in life. When we meet Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, she’s 29 and worried that her celebrated loveliness is beginning to fade before she’s managed to marry herself off to someone who can support her. Lily was raised in wealth, taught to abhor anything “dingy”…and then her father lost their fortune and died and her mother followed him shortly thereafter, leaving Lily poor and alone. She was begrudgingly picked up by her aunt Julia, who gives her the right address and some pocket money, but not nearly enough to keep herself afloat on the glittering social circuit, where she needs this season’s stylish hats and gloves and dresses and is expected to gamble regularly at cards. It seems hopeful, though: she’s on her way to her friend Judy’s house, where she expects to meet and charm  and become engaged to Percy, a very eligible bachelor.

    Instead, she feels no chemistry with Percy and earns the ire of married socialite Bertha when Bertha’s ex-paramour Lawrence Selden turns up to see Lily. Bertha splits up the budding romance between Lily and Percy, leaving Lily in a position to have to ask Judy’s husband, Gus, to make some investments for her to help keep her afloat. Gus views this as an investment in earning Lily’s…favors, and though she manages to keep her head above water and even rise briefly, it all comes crashing down when Bertha invites Lily on a trip to keep her husband George distracted while Bertha carries on with her latest conquest. When George discovers the truth, though, Bertha spreads lies painting Lily as a temptress instead, which begins Lily’s descent through the social classes.

    This book plays with the same kind of themes Wharton would return to in her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence, which I read a few years before I read this: the artificiality of the upper-class New York “society” in which Wharton herself was born and raised and the way it constrains and even punishes real feeling primary among them. Lily herself is a great heroine: it’s so easy to identify with her simultaneous longing to do the “right” thing and make it easy on herself by just finding someone rich to marry her and keep her in comfort and to be true to herself and wait for the kind of real connection she feels with Lawrence. Even though women are by and large much less dependent on men for material support today, I think there still exists the temptation, especially as one approaches 30, to just settle for someone good enough and check “marriage” off the list of things you constantly get asked about as a woman. And the power of the rumor mill, and its ability to ruin reputations, remains potent.

    It’s thematically similar enough to The Age of Innocence that comparison is inevitable, and for my money, Innocence is the better-developed and more rewarding work. But Mirth was also written 15 years beforehand, so it’s not surprising that it’s less mature. It does bring the added context of a female perspective, and it’s partly refreshing to see how far we’ve come and at the same time how many things are still largely the same in terms of the constraints that society as a whole places on women. I will say one of the things that didn’t quite work for me was the novel’s central romance: it’s never really developed, we’re just meant to sort of assume that they’ve fallen for each other. It’s necessary to have established for a late character moment to work, but it’s done so superfluously that it doesn’t quite have the power it could have. All in all, if you like a sharp social critique and old-society novels, or just like Wharton, it’s definitely worth reading. Otherwise, pick up The Age of Innocence instead.   

    One year ago, I was reading: Olive Kitteridge

    Two years ago, I was reading: Valley of the Moon

    Three years ago, I was reading: The Last Picture Show

    On the Blog

    Join the Listt

    [instagram-feed]

    Copyright © 2025 A Portable Magic · Theme by 17th Avenue