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Top Ten Tuesday: Covers That Made Want to Read/Buy the Book

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a pretty covers week…we’re talking about books we decided to read because we liked the cover! I don’t know that the cover has ever actually been the deciding factor for me, but I won’t lie that the good ones catch my eye and make me curious about what they might be about…which sometimes results in a purchase/read!

A Tale For The Time Being 

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The Interestings

Sabriel

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging

The Fountainhead

Stardust

The Luminaries

Shantaram

 

Book 252: Shantaram

 
 “Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them.”

Dates read: July 27- August 6, 2018

Rating: 5/10

If you had asked me where I’d be at 35 at virtually any point in my life, I 100% would not have said living in Reno, Nevada and working as a lobbyist. When I was in high school, I would have said probably in a major city practicing law, preparing for a career as a judge. In college, I would have waffled about maybe becoming a psychologist or academic, but probably still would have come down on the side of being a lawyer-looking-towards-the-judiciary. I wanted to be a prosecutor and then move onto the bench pretty much until the bottom fell out of the economy when I was in law school. With shrinking firm openings, even the kinds of public-sector jobs I’d had my eye on got super competitive, and for the first time I had to shift my dreams. That shift continued all the way until I got to where I am, and while it’s worked out pretty damn well, it’s nowhere near where I thought I’d be.

Of course, this is a pretty fortunate variant of the curveballs life can throw. The man who calls himself Lindsay “Lin” Ford (this is an alias, but we never get his real name) in Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram had a real switch-up. At one point, he was a typical suburban husband and father in Australia. Then he got into heroin, and then bank robbery, and then there was divorce and custody loss and prison. Facing a decades-long sentence in a high-security prison, he manages to escape and goes on the run, landing almost by chance in Mumbai with his forged passport and a chance decision to trust a street guide with a big smile changes his life all over again.

Lin’s adventures in India are truly epic, from six months in his street-guide-turned-friend Prabakar’s rural village, to living and working as a medic in one of the city’s enormous slums, to Lin’s passionate love for Karla, a beautiful and mysterious Swiss ex-pat, back to prison (in India this time), then into organized crime and even to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen. Along the way there’s a shadowy, malevolent madam, a traintop marriage proposal, and Bollywood movies, among other things. It’s sprawling, with countless side characters who appear and re-appear throughout. Lin’s ability to proceed with cautious optimism keeps him generally lucky in both friendship and opportunity, but even that can’t keep him safe from tragedy.

The book is based heavily on Roberts’ own experiences…like his protagonist, he was an Australian addict-turned-robber who escaped from prison and lived for several years in India. While some characters are, in fact, entirely created, several (including Prabakar and his family) are actual people who Roberts did know in India but whose stories he may have rendered somewhat less than faithfully. It walks a fine line between obvious invention/fantasy (the scene in which Lin and Karla finally sleep together has them running into each other’s arms while a thunderstorm rages around them and I literally laughed at how ridiculous it was though it was not at all meant to be funny) and things it seems like we’re meant to believe even though they are clearly ludicrous (like the idea that Lin has apparently has an extraordinary ability to know instantly if someone is a decent person and is almost immediately accepted and tightly bonded into every community he finds himself in).

If you’re looking for a plot-driven adventure story and have a high tolerance for flowery language, this will likely be something you really enjoy! It can honestly be hard to focus on how silly some of the events in the book are because he generally keeps things moving quickly enough that you don’t linger on them before Roberts takes you in a new direction. I’m not kidding about the prose style, though…I’m generally fairly tolerant and sometimes even enjoy work that tends towards the overwritten, but only about 100 pages into the nearly 950 of this book I was already rolling my eyes and it didn’t get better from there. There’s a very good 500-600 page book in here, but it would have taken some serious editing down of the often-trite philosophical patter Roberts constantly inserts, and honestly more development of Lin as a character. He’s our protagonist and we spend all our time with him, but we actually know vanishingly little of his life before he was imprisoned in his home country. We get full backstories for several less important characters, which made it extra frustrating for Lin to be so unrooted. As I think is probably obvious by now, I didn’t especially like this book, finding it only mediocre-to-average in quality and completely unworthy of its enormous length. But honestly I think if I had read it in my early-to-mid-20s, when my tolerance for “poignant” pronouncements about life was higher, I’d have liked it more. As is, though, I can’t recommend it.

One year ago, I was reading: Soon The Light Will Be Perfect

Two years ago, I was reading: Ready Player One

Three years ago, I was reading: The Bonfire of the Vanities

Four years ago, I was reading: A History of the World in 6 Glasses

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Should Have Abandoned

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! I’m doing a twist on this week’s topic, which was supposed to be the last ten books we abandoned. While I judge no one else for not wasting their reading time on something they’re not enjoying, I am a never-DNF type. Even I, though, will admit that sometimes I probably would have been better off throwing in the towel. Here are ten books that I found so bad I should have just put them down forever.

The Perfect Son: I did not know it was possible to have so many cliches in one book.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: Turns out I just really don’t like reading about people having feelings about nature/the outdoors.

Whores of the Devil: This survey of accused witches and heretics throughout history seemed like the kind of thing that I would enjoy but the author wrote in such a lurid fashion based on sketchy details and it was incredibly off-putting.

Catch-22: I often don’t care for satires, and this was no exception. It has one joke (war is ridiculous!) and doesn’t go anywhere for hundreds and hundreds of pages.

Soon the Light Will be Perfect: This book is pretty short but tries to balance way too many plots and feels like a draft that needed real work.

Empire Falls: I had high hopes for this Pultizer-winning family drama but it was just awful. Misogyny and lots of feelings about “real America” and a sensationalized school shooting subplot…just a mess.

The Man in the High Castle: I wanted a story and got mostly a thought experiment. It wasn’t completely without interest, but I did not care about any of the characters or what happened to them.

Good Riddance: This was supposed to be a light-hearted comedy but was just offensivelydumb.

Ready Player One: This book had such hype, and was so mediocre and boring.

Shantaram: I hated this book almost immediately, and unfortunately it’s pretty lengthy. I eventually got into a kind of hate-reading groove that let me finish it, but I wish I had just stopped reading it.

Top Ten Tuesday: Covers I Liked Better Than The Book

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a covers freebie. Despite the old yarn about not judging books by them, I think we’ve all fallen prey to a pretty or interesting cover. Sometimes those books turn out to be great! Other times, less so. Here are ten books where the cover grabbed me but the insides didn’t.

The Overstory: This book started out incredible and then kind of fell apart for me. But the cover remains gorgeous.

On Trails: Such a striking, simple cover for a book about the making and use of trails. This book club selection ended up being a dud for me (but I don’t care for outdoors-y books).

Patron Saints of Nothing: I love the way this cover evokes prayer candles, and I thought the book was going to touch more on religious faith. Though it was clunky writing, not a lack of Catholicism, that tanked the book for me.

The Catcher in the Rye: This cover is just so visually appealing, I wish I liked the book more. Or at all. Alas.

The Buried Giant: The weakest Ishiguro I’ve read, but every version of the cover I’ve seen does something interesting with trees.

A Million Little Pieces: Even though I know this book is made of lies, I can’t get over how much I love the image of this cover.

The Fountainhead: The Art Deco-ness of this cover is amazing. The book itself is…better than Atlas Shrugged, at least?

Friday Night Lights: The show is much more compelling than the book, but the image of the players strolling onto the field holding hands is perfect.

Shantaram: There’s an actual golden sheen to this cover that totally drew me in and then the book is both gigantic and quite bad.

A Great And Terrible Beauty: I was really ready for this to be a kind of dishy romance because of this cover and it was very much not (nor was it good).

Top Ten Tuesday: Longest Books I’ve Ever Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about the longest books we’ve ever read. I know a lot of readers find gigantic books kind of unwieldy, but I actually quite like doorstops! Some of them have been amazing, some less so, but here are ten of the longest ones I’ve made it through (if one author has multiple entries, I’m going with the longest one for that author)!

A Suitable Boy: This will almost certainly be the longest book I ever read because it’s looooong, y’all. I spent weeks reading it during a summer in college. It was really good and I want to read it again but that is a COMMITMENT.

Les Miserables: I know a lot of people complain about the extended digressions into things like the history of the sewer system in Paris, but I actually really liked the whole thing!

War and Peace: It’s so long but it’s soooo good! The size can be intimidating but once you get started it really draws you in.

A Storm of Swords: The longest of the A Song of Ice and Fire series! All of these books are super long, and this one is actually my favorite but it took me until my second try to actually get all the way through it.

Gone With The Wind: In the ultimate bookish heresy, the movie is better. The subplots that got cut were worth excising for a still-sprawling but more focused narrative.

The Executioner’s Song: I still maintain that there’s a very good 600 page book inside this 1000+ pager about the first person executed after the death penalty was re-instituted in the United States but as is it’s just too bloated to really recommend

Don Quixote: I hated this book so much.

The Cider House Rules: The movie inspired me to pick this one up, and though I haven’t read it again in ages I want to someday because it’s really good.

The Memoirs of Cleopatra: I read this (and quite a bit of other Margaret George) in high school, and I feel like I liked it? My memories of it are vaguely positive anyways.

Shantaram: I read this fairly recently, and after about page 200 it was hate-reading. For the next 700+ pages.

A Month In The Life: August 2018

The end of August always makes me think about back-to-school time. Growing up in Michigan, I never went back before Labor Day…but here in Reno, they’ve already been back for nearly a month! And anyways, it still feels like summer since August temperatures were mostly stuck in the 90s. A record-setting 56 days in a row this summer above 90, actually, which honestly was pretty gross. But it’s finally trending downward a bit and I am READY for sweater-and-boots season.

In Books…

  • Shantaram: There are two kinds of books that climb to 900+ pages: actual epics or overstuffed vanity projects. While this giant novel is not without merit, it’s definitely the latter rather than the former. Based on the author’s own experiences, this book is about an Australian man who escapes from prison and flees to India, where he gets involved with a wide variety of people, from a kind-hearted tourist guide to a prominent crime lord. It could have lost 300 pages through just editing out the purple prose and pseudo-philosophical rambling and would have been better for it. 
  • Less: Book club picks have been inconsistent for me, but this one I really enjoyed. I would not have thought that the concerns of an aging gay writer would particularly speak to me, but this tale about an only somewhat successful novelist staring down both his 50th birthday and his longtime sort-of-boyfriend’s impending wedding to another man who decides the only way to deal is to accept a bunch of ignored invitations to make a trip around the globe was funny and touching and sweet. 
  • The Informant: The so-strange-it-has-to-be-true story of a corporate executive who exposes an international, multimillion dollar price fixing scandal…all while embezzling millions of dollars from the company and pathologically lying every time nearly every time he opens his mouth. They made a movie out of this, a comedy even (which I haven’t seen), but on the page it’s very dry and flat and I never really got into it.
  • The Butcher’s Daughter: I’d grabbed a review copy of this on a whim and was so glad I did! This historical fiction tells the story of Agnes, a young woman in Tudor England who falls pregnant out of wedlock and is sent to an abbey, where she finds some real satisfaction in her place as a nun. But the religious turmoil of Henry VIII’s England is not a good time to be of a religious house, and so as the abbey is closed down, she needs to find a new place for herself. Agnes is a great character and I found her story very compelling indeed. 
  • Life After Life: I wish I’d read this without the hype that set sky-high expectations for me. It’s an imaginative, entertaining book that takes the unusual tack of presenting a female character for whom familial rather than romantic bonds are paramount, which was refreshing. As Ursula Todd’s life begins over and over again after she dies in a variety of ways, she’s always deeply connected to her older sister Pamela and younger brother Teddy, and Atkinson skillfully explores the bombing campaigns of World War 2 from many perspectives and with a poignant humanity. It’s a very good book, but I was expecting a great one and for me, it wasn’t quite there. 
  • Oryx and Crake: I love Margaret Atwood, and am generally interested in post-apocalyptic stories, so this was a natural fit for me. Though there are some things that make it really obvious this book was written over 15 years ago now (the emphasis on email and disc-based storage feel anachronistic), for the most part it feels frighteningly prescient. I wish the main female character had been better-developed, and I’m always annoyed at a book that ends in a clear cliffhanger for the next in the series, so it didn’t blow me away but I very much liked it and intend to continue the series! 

In Life…

  • Tried not to melt and/or die of smoke inhalation: It was hot, and it was smoky. The wildfires that raged in California sent their smoke right on over into northern Nevada, where it settled in the valleys and choked us all for weeks. Add in those long 90+ degree days and it was miserable. It’s been a smidge cooler lately thank goodness.
  • Veterinary drama: The gratuitous pug I like to show you every month has been a frequent flier at the vet lately! We started out with a significant number of tooth extractions, and no sooner was he on the mend from those than he gave himself a hot spot on his face from scratching and had to get dragged back to get antibiotic ointment and a week in the cone of shame. He’s totally fine now, but here’s hoping we can skip the vet’s office for the rest of the year.

One Thing:

One of my guilty pleasures (honestly I don’t feel that guilty about it) is reading about royal families, particularly the British one. What can I say? I’m basic. I’d heard about a failed attempt to kidnap Princess Anne in the 70s, but didn’t know that much about it until I read this truly delightful short piece from Oh No They Didn’t. Some of the dialogue is profoundly hilariously English and Anne is a BOSS.

Gratuitous Pug Picture:

Top Ten Tuesday: Summer TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! I’ve always maintained that I’m awful at compiling lists of beach reads, so I’m taking this week’s topic about summer books to literally share with you the books I’m planning on reading over the next few months!

The Completionist: It seems like dystopian stories with a feminist bent are pretty popular these days, but something about this one caught my eye and I’ve got a review copy to read!

The Feast of Love: I’m a sucker for stories set in places familiar to me, and Baxter’s supposed a great writer, so this Ann Arbor-based book about the love people share in various types of relationships seems like a good place to start with him.

Perfect Murder, Perfect Town: Jon Benet Ramsey’s murder seems unlikely to ever be solved, but I’m definitely interested in reading the foremost true crime account of what happened.

The Looming Tower: I’m a little worried this is going to be substantially similar to Ghost Wars, which I read in January, but I’m curious to read it anyways.

My Own Words: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a role model and a national treasure and my husband bought me this book quite a while ago so it’s time to actually read it.

Olive Kitteridge: I’m always here for prize winners, and this one got the Pulitzer in 2009. I’ve also never read Strout before, so here’s hoping I enjoy her work as much as others have!

The Romanov Empress: Ah, self-indulgence in the form of historical fiction about royalty. This book follows the mother of Nicholas II, which will be a new perspective for me to read from!

The Pleasing Hour: I’ve actually read some mixed reviews of this debut, but it’s short and it was cheap for the Kindle when I bought it so I’ll try it out.

Shantaram: I do love a gigantic sprawling novel.

The Informant: Another huge book, this one is about a federal investigation of price-fixing by a major worldwide corporation and the sometimes dicey control the FBI had over its prize witness and sounds fascinating.

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