a visit from the goon squad

October 9, 2020

Year 5: An Update (And Giveaway!)

I am 35 years old today, marking my halfway point through this decade of my life. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be closer to 40 than 30. It’s also the halfway point of my challenge to myself to read 500 books, the genesis of this blog. When I turned 30, I set some goals for myself for the next decade. One of those goals was to read at least 50 books per year, or 500 total, so I started the blog a couple months later to hold myself accountable and have a place to talk about all those books! Since my reading years begin and end on my birthday, I like to do a check-in post every year to look back on the year that was, both in books and life. Without further ado:

In Reading

Books read (this year): 76. While very comfortably north of my 50 book goal, this is actually my lowest yearly book total since I started the blog. I’ve generally trended downward every year, with a very small bump up between years two and three. I think this is mostly a function, this year, of the struggle I had to read during the first few months of a pandemic.
Books read (total): 421. I am now far, far beyond my goal number for this point, which would have been 250, and I could realistically finish out the 500 within the next year (though I suspect I won’t).
Male/Female Authors: This year I read 41 books by male authors and 35 books by female authors. This is fairly close to an even split, and a recent stretch of mostly-male authors knocked it a little off-kilter.
Most Read Genres: This year’s split between fiction and nonfiction is almost identical to last year’s: I read 53 fiction books and 23 nonfiction books, which puts my ratio below 3:1, where I aim for it to be, but above 4:1 at least. My most-read subgenres for fiction were contemporary and historical (which is normal for me) and for nonfiction were history and memoir. I’m a bit surprised at the latter, as I wouldn’t describe memoir as an especially favorite genre of mine.
Kindle/Hard Copy: This year I read 54 books in hard copy (either paperback or hardcover), and 22 books on my Kindle. I aim to be fairly even, but I really do just prefer hard copy books. I shop overwhelmingly secondhand, and the ones that I finish that I don’t love end up in Little Free Libraries, so it doesn’t feel wasteful or anything. I would probably read even more hard copies if I had the space to store them!

In Life

I went to Skate America: I LOVE figure skating, but had never seen a live competition before. Well, they had the 2019 edition of this first event on the Grand Prix calendar in Las Vegas, so my best friend Crystal joined me! I was reading: Revolutionary Road (review to come)
I went to New York City with my mom: My mom has always liked to take a special trip during the holidays, and this year she asked me to join her in New York City for a long weekend! I hadn’t been for a few years, so I made the cross-country journey and we had a lovely time exploring the city and seeing Moulin Rouge on Broadway! I was reading: Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling (review to come)
I went to Newport Beach, California: My work retreat was to Orange County, California, and it was lovely to have a weekend away where I got to put my feet into the ocean. I had one more plane trip to come, at the very of January for meetings in Las Vegas, but this was my last normal trip. I was reading: Perfume (review to come)
My mom came to Reno to visit: My mom’s birthday is at the end of February, and her present to herself was a trip out West to visit people she loves. Obviously that includes me so she stayed in Reno for a few days, and I’m glad she did because otherwise it would have been even longer since I’d gotten to see my mom after things shut down. I was reading: A Visit From the Goon Squad (review to come)
The country shut down: I’m dating this from the day after the NBA postponed the Utah-Oklahoma City game because of COVID-19. Obviously the Seattle and San Francisco outbreaks had started before this, and I think the news that Tom Hanks had contracted the virus came shortly before, but when it stopped sports it felt REAL. I was reading: Lost Children Archive (review to come)
My sister’s baby shower: The first time I stepped foot on a plane since January was in late September, which was a bizarre experience, because I usually travel every few months and usually go to Michigan at least once per year. This marked 14 months between trips, but I definitely had to make this one happen, as my little sister is pregnant and I wouldn’t have missed her baby shower for the world. I was reading: Naked (review to come)

The Giveaway

Every year, I give away a copy of the book I loved the most out of the ones I’ve reviewed on the blog over the past 12 months. I reviewed some wonderful books this year, but the one that captured my heart most of all was the lyrical, lovely Exit West. If you haven’t read it, and would like to, here’s your chance! Just enter via the Rafflecopter below during the next week and this book could be yours! Apologies to my international friends, but this giveaway is US-only.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

August 18, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Which Should be Adapted Into Shows

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about adaptations! Books have of course always been popular as a source material for movies, but more and more books are getting made into shows, which really allows for longer books to shine. I did a similar list a couple years back so am going to try not to repeat anything here!

The Luminaries: This book is a doorstopper, and its story of a small mining community in New Zealand would be fascinating to play out on the big screen!

Americanah: This one actually is being made into a miniseries (by HBO!), which I think will be better than a movie…it’ll give this sprawling, gorgeous story some space to relax and really explore its themes!

A Visit From The Goon Squad: The book, marketed as a novel, is more a set of interconnected short stories so it’s already in convenient episodic format.

White Teeth: Multiple settings, multiple generations of characters, complex subject matter about the legacy of colonialism…it should definitely be a series and I would love to watch it.

Daughter of Fortune: There’s a lot of story in this book…a young woman growing up and falling in love in the the British community in Chile, a poor rural Chinese boy who grows up to become a doctor and then finds himself sailing the seas, and California Gold Rush. It could be a really fascinating series!

The Line of Beauty: I love a “fancy British people” series, and this book is about a young British gay man coming of age among the fancy set near the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. They actually already did a miniseries of this in the UK, but it was almost 15 years ago and only three episodes and I’d like to see a proper series.

The Age of Miracles: I don’t know what the appetite would be right now for a post-apocalyptic show, but I’d never seen this kind of “end of the world” scenario (a slowing of the Earth’s rotation) before and I think there would be enough to explore to make a series out of it.

There There: Again, this is written as a series of interconnected point-of-view chapters that are almost more like stories than a single narrative, so it would be straightforward to adapt into episodes and we should have more media representation of modern Native American experiences.

Daisy Jones and the Six: This one is also sort-of cheating because it was announced it was becoming a series not long after it was published, but I am super looking forward to this one!

A Tale for the Time Being: The way this book plays with metanarrative might make it difficult to adapt well, and some of the themes are heavy, but it was such an interesting book and I’d like to see it be tried, anyways.

March 24, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Collections

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a genre freebie, so we get to chose our own topics! As I’ve written about before around here, essay and short story collections don’t tend to be my favorites…but that doesn’t mean they all need to go in the trash bin. There are some great ones out there, and in a time when you might find yourself more easily distractable than ever, they make good books to pick up and put down.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?: Mindy Kaling’s writing style is breezy and relatable, and these essays about her life and the kinds of things that preoccupy 20somethign women are amusing and enjoyable.

Me Talk Pretty One Day: It’s hard to go wrong with a David Sedaris collection…he’s so witty and manages to be laugh-out-loud funny a way that’s rare for me reading something in print.

Bossypants: I love Tina Fey’s sense of humor, and while not every essay in this collection is a total winner, overall it’s one of the funnier books by comedians I’ve read!

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: I love pop culture, and refuse to apologize for loving it, and if you’re the same way, Chuck Klosterman may be for you.

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: This collection by Buzzfeed’s Anne Helen Petersen explores the way society punishes women for stepping outside of the social boundaries it otherwise sets.

Battleborn: I have to admit that I’m biased towards a story collection set in and figured in the state where I live (Nevada), but this is truly an amazing piece of work.

A Visit From the Goon Squad: This is billed as a novel, but it’s much more a collection of short stories so that’s what I’m calling it. Anyways, it’s very very good.

The Things They Carried: I’m not usually very into war narratives, but this collection about a group of soldiers during the Vietnam War is a classic for a reason.

There There: This is another one that calls itself a novel but is actually interlinked stories from various perspectives and features some absolutely incredible writing.

Olive Kitteridge: I am from small-town America, so this collection about a little town in Maine and a difficult woman who lives there really resonated with me.

February 29, 2020

A Month In The Life: February 2020

Happy Leap Day! It’s March tomorrow, but the weather lately seems to be convinced that it’s proper springtime…for the past few weeks we’ve been seeing highs in the 50s and even 60s! Flowers are starting to bloom! Of course it’s this winter, when I’m not commuting to Carson City five days a week, that we’re having this mild weather. It seems inevitable that there’s more snow and cold in our future but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.

In Books…

Perfume: This book was…strange, more than anything. It’s about an amoral young man born in France in the Middle Ages without a personal scent but an extraordinarily powerful sense of smell and his quest to make the most beautiful perfume in the world. This requires the murders of young women. It’s very odd and sometimes repellent but strangely compelling.
Whores of the Devil: This is a non-fiction book chronicling witch-hunts (and witch-hunters) throughout history, and the title should have been my tip-off that it was going to go in a highly sensationalized direction. There was a LOT of editorializing going on as well, with little in terms of overarching structure to tie things together. It’s not good.
Funny Girl: I really loved About A Boy and High Fidelity, but I was starting to wonder if I’d ever read a Hornby that was actually good instead of just alright again. This one, which tells the story of actress Sophie Straw and the people she works with on the opposites-attract sitcom Barbara (and Jim), is not quite a full return to form but comes very close: sweet, funny, and with sparkling dialogue.
The (Hidden) Lives of Tudor Women: I am a real sucker for nonfiction about the Tudor period, especially anything about royalty. This book tries to marry a chronological look at the period with Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man in a way that isn’t always successful, but it’s interesting information and engaging…at least, if you’re into this sort of thing.
The Year of Reading Dangerously: As someone who was a voracious reader as a child, went through a period of reading very little, and then got back into books myself, this memoir by Andy Miller recounting a very similar experience was something I was predisposed to like. It’s not anything memorable, but it’s pleasant enough to read.
The Holdout: I’ve always been fascinated by juries, so this legal thriller about a sequestered jury which renders a controversial verdict and then is reunited a decade later only for murder to ensue seemed right up my alley. It’s one of those where you have to turn your brain off a little, the main character behaves in ways that are so dumb for a person in her position that it’s not believable. It’s entertaining enough, though, until an ending twist that landed with a thud.
A Visit From the Goon Squad: I am going to go ahead and officially acknowledge that the “interconnected short stories” genre of literature is not one I enjoy. This book does it about as well as it can be done…Jennifer Egan is super talented and engages in some interesting experiments with form. But some segments are weaker than others (the last story fell pretty flat for me) and I really wish it was just an actual novel.

In Life…

My mom came to visit: For her birthday (which was yesterday!), my mom made a trip out west to visit the people who are important to her…which obviously includes me and her son-in-law. She was only in town for a few days but we had a nice dinner and a fun brunch and (of course!) a trip to the bookstore. We also saw the new Little Women, which I loved so much.

One Thing:

I work in the political sphere, but I am not at all inclined to run for office myself. But I absolutely understand the obstacles in the way of women who do…one of which is the sheer cost of looking professional all the time. Which is why this move from M.M. LaFleur (a retailer which I have never purchased from, mostly because my job doesn’t require business formal attire outside of 4 months every other year during session) is so great: they will help outfit ladies running for office with the kind of clothes they need to be taken seriously. This is an awesome move!

Gratuitous Pug Picture:

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