the queen of the night

August 24, 2021

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about books we wish we could open for the first time all over again. I’m a big re-reader, but there is something magical about discovering where the narrative is going as you read along, so here are ten books that I’d love to experience for the first time again!

The Secret History: I first read this as a senior in high school and it was so completely unlike anything I’d ever read before, it just blew my mind.

The Bear and the Nightingale: I’d always been interested in Russia, but this book spurred it to a full-blown obsession and it was just so rich and magical and I love it!

The Queen of the Night: I read this as an advance review copy so I had NO idea where it was going and each twist and turn of the plot surprised me.

The Amber Spyglass: I remember how excited I was to read this book, to find out how the story that had been told through the first two books would be wrapped up…and I was not at all disappointed!

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: I really wish I could go back to the time before I knew that J.K. Rowling was a transphobe and just enjoy the magic of these books.

1984: I’m pretty sure I was 12 or 13 when I read this for the first time, launching a lifetime love of dystopian stories.

Gone Girl: I did NOT see that twist coming and it completely melted my brain.

Wicked: I read this at some point during high school and it introduced me to the concept of retellings for the first time ever, which has become a mini-genre of books that I really enjoy.

The Remains of the Day: I had no idea how much this book was going to emotionally wreck me until the end and going in blind made it hit that much harder.

A Wrinkle in Time: For me, this book was special because it was the first time I felt like I really saw myself in a work of fiction…as an angry, awkward, smart-but-underachieving middle schooler, Meg Murray was EVERYTHING.

July 27, 2021

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Want With Me While Stranded On a Deserted Island

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about the books we’d want with us if we were to find ourselves stranded on a deserted island. For me, a desert island book has two main requirements: being decently long so it’s not just something you can get through in a few hours, and having high re-read value. Here are the ten I came up with!

War and Peace: This book is super duper long and very layered, so every read-through will reveal more.

Lolita: One of my all-time favorites that I have read at least a half-dozen times and I never fail to find it an interesting reading experience. It’s so brilliant there’s always something new to appreciate.

A Suitable Boy: Another one that brings the pages. It’s on my list to re-read one of these days but the time investment required means that a deserted island would be perfect for it!

The Secret History: Another one I’ve gone back to several times since I first read it as a high-school senior. The characters and story get me every time!

Vanity Fair: This one would be particularly interesting to read right before (or after) War and Peace, as they’re both set during the Napoleonic Wars but in very different contexts. Also it’s very lengthy!

Sabriel: This is by FAR the shortest of the books on this list, but it makes it because the re-read value is so high. I’ve definitely re-read this one over and over and it still entertains me.

A Game of Thrones: If it wasn’t cheating to put the whole Song of Ice and Fire series up here I would, I love these books so much even if the last season of the show was a huge letdown.

The Queen of the Night: This book was so much fun to read that it would be a great diversion if I was just stuck alone on an island with my thoughts.

Americanah: This book is decently long and has a lot of depth to it so there’s a lot to get out of returning to it!

A Tale for the Time Being: This one is kind of a wild guess but this book has definitely stuck with me since I read it a few years ago and it’s different enough from everything else on this list to keep me from getting too bored!

December 1, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Want To Re-Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about re-reading. I LOVE re-reading, which means that my focus lately on reading things that are new to me means I have missed out on going back and revisiting the books I’ve loved for years. I do engage in some re-reading via audio, which has proven to be a fun way to experience familiar favorites in a new way, but here are ten books I haven’t had the chance to re-read yet but very much want to!

War and Peace: This one will be a commitment to re-read because it’s super long, but it was so good and so rich that I can’t wait to dive back into its world.

Possession: I found the way this story was told, with the parallel timelines, to be just enthralling and I really feel like it would reward a revisit!

Beloved: Obviously this book is a challenging one, but it is just phenomenal and important and worthy of being re-read often.

There There: This book was so dazzling that it feels like I need at least more run-through (and possibly more) to really catch everything it did.

The Blind Assassin: Such a delicately constructed story-within-a-story, and so wrenching.

Great Expectations: You can definitely tell Dickens got paid by the word, and of his works I’ve read, this is the only one that I think is going back to again because there’s a genuinely compelling story there (even if it’s too wordy).

The Lords of Discipline: This was a highly satisfying read and I’d just really like to explore it again.

The Queen of the Night: Reading this book the first time through was just fun as it took turn after turn. I want to read it again and really enjoy the characters and details knowing how the plot goes!

The Devil in the Grove: One of my most-recommended nonfiction books, this incredible true story about corruption and racism in Jim Crow-era Florida is depressing but so fascinating and very well-told.

Vanity Fair: This is another one that’s really long, but Becky Sharp was just such an interesting heroine that I want to read it again from the beginning knowing how it’ll end.

October 20, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Read That Were Recommended by Maris

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about books we read because other people recommended them! I’m focusing my list on one recommendation source: Maris Kreizman, who is pretty much just “Maris” in book world. Here are ten books I’ve read and that Maris has recommended (or rated 5 stars, which is basically the same thing as far as I’m concerned).

The Love Song of Jonny Valentine: This little coming-of-age story about a pre-teen pop star a la Justin Beiber trying to navigate his momager, fauxmances, and homeschooling during his tour wasn’t quite a five star for me, but it was certainly an interesting read that raised some good questions about child entertainers.

The Line of Beauty: This is a classic of LGBTQ lit, about a young British man who becomes attached to an upper-crust family and his life as a gay man during the Thatcher years as the AIDS crisis begins. It’s beautifully written and involving.

The Group: It can feel like the issues we face as women are all unique to our own time period, but this book, set in the 1950s and following a group of friends through their early post-college years shows that fitting in to the workplace, trash dudes, and trying to remain sane as a parent are timeless.

The Queen of the Night: I absolutely love this book. It is very, at times almost preposterously, dramatic but also feels rooted in emotional truth and its rich characters.

Boy Snow Bird: I still feel uncomfortable about the ending of this one, but the way Helen Oyeyemi builds her story and uses language is remarkable.

Valley of the Dolls: This is not a “great” book by a traditional understanding of such…the prose is solid at best, and the most prominent character is pretty boring, but it delightfully trashy and is SUCH fun to read.

Cat’s Eye: Female friendships are one of my favorite things to read about, and Margaret Atwood is one of my favorite authors, so it’s no surprise I thought this book was fantastic!

Gilead: I was concerned about this because I don’t tend to like faith-heavy fiction, but figured if Maris liked it, it was worth a try. It was a bit of a slow start but was one of those books I’m glad I stuck with, I found it deeply moving (and no, not too religious at all).

In The Woods: I don’t usually care for mystery/thrillers. I find them formulaic and too dependent on disguising their twists to create interest, but this one hooked me with its strong characters even though the ending wasn’t too hard to see coming.

The Song of Achilles: This retelling of the events of The Iliad from the perspective of Patroclus, including an explicitly homosexual relationship (explicit in the sent of outright, rather than in the sense of obscene) with his companion Achilles, is incredibly compelling.

April 14, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Enjoyed but Rarely Talk About

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about the books that we really like but don’t seem to make it onto the blog as often as you would think. Some books fit so easily into Top Ten Tuesday categories that I mention them again and again, but there are lots that I love but I’ve only touched on a handful of times over the years!

The Nine: As a recovering lawyer, I still have a soft spot for books about the legal system, particularly about the Supreme Court. This is a really interesting exploration of the late years of the Rehnquist court and the interpersonal dynamics are fascinating.

Chocolat: It’s a little on the cheesy side, but I fell in love with this book when I was a teenager. Vianne Rocher is one of my favorite characters of all time.

So Big: I was completely unexpectedly charmed by this story of a woman who moves to the countryside and falls in love with both it and a farmer. There’s a reason it won the Pulitzer y’all.

Lord of the Flies: A lot of people hated this when they read it in school, but I actually really got into it. I revisited it on audio recently and really think it holds up.

The Giver: I read this in middle school, but I’d actually already read it and still remember how excited I was to get to read it for class. I’ve never had the slightest interest in the sequels but I still adore this one.

The Blind Assassin: This book is one that I finished and immediately started looking forward to re-reading one day because it’s so layered and complex and amazing.

The Queen of the Night: To this day I cannot understand why this book wasn’t a huge smash hit. I recommend it constantly, it is completely bonkers in the best and most enjoyable way.

The Hours: I thought I knew what I was getting into because I’d seen the movie, which is of course very good but I didn’t really get into. The book, however, is infinitely more sensitive and delicately realized.

Stoner: Such a quiet book, about a quiet man, but it made a really profound impression on me.

The Last Picture Show: This portrait of small-town despair is just a wonderful book and I do actually keep meaning to read the sequels because I liked it that much.

May 28, 2019

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books Released In the Last Ten Years

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re taking a look back at the past ten years and choosing our favorite books for each one! Some of these ended up being pretty hard choices!

2018: Once Upon A River– I loved this book, which was consciously meta about the power of storytelling but without losing the magic.

2017: The Bear and the Nightingale– By far, my favorite series of the past decade. Each one of the books is fantastic, and the first one especially so…I got completely immersed in the world of Russian folklore it creates!

2016: The Queen of the Night– This book is completely bonkers. Sweeping, epic, entertaining, and with the most delightfully crazy plot twists.

2015: Dead Wake– I knew like nothing about the Lusitania (besides that it had sunk) and precious little about World War 1 and got SO into this.

2014: Station Eleven– This book isn’t just about a world-decimating flu and its immediate aftermath, but how humanity continues to survive even more than a decade later and even if you don’t think you like post-apocalyptic fiction, you should read this.

2013: Americanah– If someone hasn’t recommended that you read this book about an African couple whose immigration journeys take very different paths by now, let me be that person. If you just haven’t read it yet, let me encourage you to get to it. It’s amazing.

2012: Devil in the Grove– It’s one thing to read about Jim Crow and police brutality during that era in the abstract, but this account of young black men in Florida falsely accused of rape in the 1950s is searing and fascinating and eye-opening.

2011: The Song of Achilles– This retelling of the story of mighty Greek warrior Achilles, in which his loyal servant Patroclus is actually his partner, has a power that lingers long after reading.

2010: The Man Without A Face– Masha Gessen’s nonfiction look at Russia and its leader is relevant and completely enthralling.

2009: Wolf Hall– There are so many Tudor stories out there, it’s hard to think of a fresh angle on the drama of Henry VIII’s reign. But Hilary Mantel’s look at it from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell manages to do just that masterfully.

September 4, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Like To See As Miniseries

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! I’ve done a little twist on the topic this week…we’re supposed to be talking about TV shows we’re excited to see start new seasons now that it’s fall. Not to be one of those people, but I don’t actually watch a ton of TV lately. So instead, I’m talking about books that could be turned into prestige miniseries that I would watch the crap out of!

The Secret History: This would work well as a movie, too, but a miniseries would give it room to breathe and really get the atmospherics right. It starts off in medias res with a murder (like Big Little Lies!), so there’s your hook, and then into the dark and twisty story.

The Interestings: This lifetime-spanning story of a group of friends who meet at a summer camp for creative kids and continue to interact as they grow up and find themselves and settle down could really explore the shifts in their dynamics over time if it was given several hours in which to tell its tale.

Vanity Fair: This book ends up feeling rushed as a movie because there’s a lot of plot there (it’s long, y’all), but Becky Sharp is a rare compelling female antihero and her scheming and machinations deserve multiple episodes.

The Queen of the Night: The framing device of this book is that an opera singer is offered the opportunity to be the first to sing a new role…only to find out that the opera is based on her truly insane life story (there’s too much there for just a movie). Only a handful of people could have done so, and cutting between her attempts to find the source and the actual events would work perfectly onscreen!

Helter Skelter: I know there’s allegedly a Tarantino movie on the Manson murders coming, but I’d like to see Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story series take on this case using this book, written by the prosecutor who put Manson away, as the source material.

The Corrections: This has been bandied about for a series adaptation before, if I recall correctly, and I’m not sure why it never went anywhere, but I think the high drama of this family dysfunction story would work well given the room to sprawl out over several episodes.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: This book about cousins who create a best-selling comic-book hero series in World War II era New York has a lot of flashbacks and a lot of intricate storytelling and cutting any of it would be a travesty so a miniseries is the way to go.

Possession: They did make a movie out of this (which I haven’t seen), but it’s so textually rich that I can’t imagine it did justice to it in less than 2 hours. The dual storylines of a modern-day set of academics studying fairly obscure Victorian-era poets who discover a hidden bond between them really needs several hours to do justice to both of them.

Middlesex: A truly epic family saga stretching from the conflicts between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s to modern-day Detroit and an intersex person’s journey of self-discovery has a lot of story to tell, and would be an engrossing show.

The Lords of Discipline: Pat Conroy’s military school drama could probably be squished down into a movie, but why do that when you can go full Southern Gothic and let the story sink in slowly?

March 27, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Take Place In Other Countries

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! While I read mostly books set in the country in which I was born and live (which I imagine many of us do), my reading goes all over the world! And that’s something I love about reading, how I can travel anywhere I want from my chair/bed/reading locale of the moment. Here are ten mostly recent-ish reads that take place outside of the US that I really enjoyed!

The Bear and the Nightingale (Russia): I’ve written about this Slavic folklored-based young adult book before to tell you how much I loved it but I LOVED it! The first two books in this series are both great, honestly, and I can’t wait for the third to come this summer!

Stay With Me (Nigeria): You think you know where this book might be headed when a couple’s interfering, traditional in-laws get the husband a second wife because his first one hasn’t gotten pregnant yet…but you have no idea. And the plot continues to twist on and on in ways that are completely unexpected.

Rebecca (England): This Gothic suspense novel has lots of repression, largely takes place on a countryside estate, and features a head housekeeper as the main antagonist, so it’s very English indeed.

The Blind Assassin (Canada): Margaret Atwood is Canadian after all, so it’s only reasonable that she sets this incredible, rich story in her homeland.

The Book Thief (Germany): Bring all the tissues for this World War 2 story about a young orphaned girl who loves to read.

Big Little Lies (Australia): I still haven’t managed to sit down and watch the TV show (which was set in California), but the book was super entertaining and it just goes to show that rich lady competitive mommy-ing is not a uniquely American phenomenon.

The Queen of the Night (France): There’s a little bit at the beginning that’s in America, and another bit in Germany, but this is mostly in Napoleonic France and it has the best kind of truly insane plot and I love it so much.

The God of Small Things (India): This is one of my two “cheats”, because I first read this book quite some time ago, but it’s so good and basically anything I know about Kerala at all comes from this book.

In The Woods (Ireland): I don’t read a lot of mystery, because I find it gets formulaic and often is plot-over-character when I prefer the other way around. But this book has inspired me to collect the rest of the Dublin Murder Squad series because it was so well-told and I want to read mooooore.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Sweden): My second cheat, because I read these books during the summer of my first year in law school, but I did really love this trilogy, the first book especially. I’ve got no interest in the continuing series with a new author, though.

November 2, 2017

Book 101: The Queen of the Night

“I wanted to eat and so I learned to sing. I am the same as the woman who on a winter afternoon roasts chestnuts from the Bois de Boulogne and sells them so she can buy her dinner. It took more than a witch to make a singer out of me. And if it was a gift from God that made me this way, it was the gift He gave us all, called hunger.”

Dates read: November 1-6, 2016

Rating: 9/10

As an older millennial (I was born in 1985), I didn’t grow up immersed in the digital world, but I also don’t remember much of a world before computers. All my papers were written in Word, I’ve been doing research on the internet since high school, and I’ve had Facebook since it was rolled out to the first round of non-Ivies, the second semester of my freshman year of college. Sometimes I wonder what it must have been like to live in a world where our lives weren’t so tied to the internet. Where you could move to a new place and be a new person because there wasn’t a trail of easily accessible information following you wherever you went. It’s kind of mind-boggling, honestly.

An ever-changing identity is the centerpiece of Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night. We’re introduced to Lilliet Berne at the height of her fame as an operatic soprano in Paris in the 1870s. She’s approached by a man who says he can give her the one honor that she hasn’t attained so far: a role she can originate. The only snag is that the new opera is based on a novel that’s clearly based on her own past, a past she thought she’d managed to escape from. There are only a handful of people who know her real life, and she determines to find out which one of them has betrayed her.

The book is a recounting of the story of her life, with one incredible circumstance leading directly into another: she grows up in frontier America and sets out to get to Switzerland, where she has relatives, once her entire family dies. In order to make it overseas, she joins a circus, from which she escapes to become a hippodrome rider, and then becomes a prostitute, and then a handmaid to the Empress of France, and finally an opera singer in training. She becomes an figure of obsession to a professional tenor and he dogs her steps, determined to possess her entirely, even while she tries to elude him and falls in love with another man. She does eventually find out who is behind the mysterious new opera and it seems for a while that she might even get a happy ending…but this is a story about opera, and operas don’t usually have one of those.

If you read that plot outline and thought it sounds insane, you’re right. IT’S BONKERS. But it’s really good! I tend to be irritated by plots that require too many convenient contrivances, but with this book it’s best to put logic aside and just enjoy the ride, because it is a fantastic, soapy trip that Chee takes us on. It’s a bit on the long side, but it doesn’t get bogged down anywhere…you might think that with the list of twists and turns that Lilliet’s life takes, that it would feel cluttered or get hard to keep track of what was going on, but Chee is in control of his story and characters, and creates a vivid, lively world that was hard to tear myself away from.

This is one of those books that I kept promising myself I would stop at the end of the chapter to go to sleep, and was hard pressed to resist just one more after that before turning out the light. My one quibble would be that in a book full of evocative characters, Lilliet herself is a bit of a cipher. But, given the many shifts in her circumstances and role she is meant to play, too big of a personality wouldn’t feel quite right either. Her most defining feature is her determination to survive…no matter what comes around the bend, she always manages to figure out a way to adapt and keep going. That’s a powerful statement in and of itself. Overall, though, this is a very enjoyable read and I would heartily recommend it!

Tell me, blog friends…have you ever wished you could start fresh someplace new?

One year ago, I was reading: this book!

Two years ago, I was reading: Primitive Mythology

March 21, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Kept Me Up Late To Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s theme is “one sitting books”. Now I read a lot (obviously), but I almost never read a book in one sitting. That’s just not the way I do things. So rather, in the spirit of the theme, I’ve made my list out of books that kept me up late to read. I’m usually pretty good about putting my book down at bedtime, because I’m one of those people who doesn’t function well after a bad night of sleep. But sometimes, I’m just too into it and I can’t make myself do the smart thing and get back to it tomorrow. So here are ten books that kept me up late at night to read them!

The Queen of the Night: Even though I’m usually a character-over-plot reader, I could not get enough of this plot-heavy historical fiction mystery. I kept promising myself just one more chapter until I went to sleep, and then one more, and one more…

The Last One: This book’s story, about a woman on a reality TV survival show when a deadly pandemic strikes, deconstructs the way we respond to these kinds of shows and the action is hard to tear yourself away from. I loved this book.

Green Girl: This was a very recent read, and even though I didn’t actually like it that much, I found it very difficult to turn away from the tale of a lost young American woman in London trying to figure out the world.

Dead Until Dark: All of the books in the Southern Vampire Mysteries did this for me, honestly. They’re breezy and light and so easy to get sucked into and hard to put down.

Gone Girl: Didn’t we all get totally drawn into this book when we read it? The mystery of the first half, and the twist, and then wondering how it’ll all end up…how could you sleep before you find out how it resolves?

Anna Karenina: I found this gigantic Russian tome to be incredibly compelling. I finished it in about 5 days, which meant a few days of less-than-ideal resting but I couldn’t tear myself away from Anna’s tragic story.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: Before I finally picked the first of these Swedish mystery/thrillers, I thought they couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. But then I opened the first one, and found it really hard to close it again until it was over.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Ok, fellow nerds who were growing up in the Harry Potter midnight-release-party era, you gonna pretend like you didn’t get the book and then immediately stay up all night until you knew how the saga ended? Didn’t think so.

Child 44: I grab a lot of books that look mildly interesting off of Kindle sale pages, because for 2 or 3 dollars, why not? This was a bit hard to get into at the beginning, but once it took off, it really took off and I had a really hard time turning off the light to take a break and rest

We Need To Talk About Kevin: Even though you know from the beginning how it ends, the way it unfolds is what keeps your attention. I kept turning the pages to dive deeper long past I should have been getting some shut-eye

December 27, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Best Books of 2016

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: the ten best books of 2016! I don’t read a bunch of new releases, but I read enough this year that I was able to pull together a list of my ten favorites. Many of these aren’t up yet and won’t be for quite a while yet, but they are all books I’ve read this calendar year that were published this calendar year!

The Last One: This story of a woman who doesn’t know that there’s been a massive pandemic while she’s struggling to make it on a big-budget wilderness survival show is well-written and totally unputdownable. One of those books where you promise yourself just a few more pages before bed and then it’s 3 in the morning.

Enchanted Islands: I loved the lifelong female friendship that formed the emotional core of this novel, and that it focused mostly on a woman’s life after 40 and the adventure she had then. It’s not a compulsive page-turner, but it’s subtle and wonderful.

The Serpent King: I don’t tend to read extensively in the YA space, but this novel about three outcasts going through their senior year in small-town Tennessee sucked me in and broke my heart.

The Guineveres: I’m still working on this debut novel, about four young women named Guinevere all being raised in a Catholic convent for different reasons, but I can already tell that it’s magnificent. Such fantastic writing and well-developed characters.

And After Many Days: The deterioration of a Nigerian family when their oldest son disappears is paralled with the destruction that Western corporations wreak in Africa in this well realized,

Mr. Splitfoot: I didn’t actually rate this book that highly when I first read it very early this year, but it’s stuck with me in ways I didn’t anticipate. It’s weird but beautifully written and haunting.

The Big Rewind: I’ve plugged this book a million times this year, but I loved it so I’ll plug it again! A female-centered High Fidelity-esque novel (with a little mystery story nestled in there too) for the millennial set, it’s a really fun, charming read.

Private Citizens: This dark, biting satire of the Silicon Valley tech boom scene features brilliant young people totally ruining their lives in a way that’s half hilarious, half horrifying.

The Queen of the Night: This book, about the life of a European opera singer, is totally insane and totally awesome and I’ve been recommending it to everyone lately.

The Girls: Less of a novel about the Manson cult as it’s often billed and more of one about the painful experience of being a 14 year-old girl, it’s full of passages that resonate with anyone who’s ever lived through that particular hell.

November 30, 2016

A Month In The Life: November 2016

It’s the last day of November, so that means it’s time for my monthly wrap-up!

In Books: I had a cross-country trip this month, so lots of airplane time (4.5 hours each way with a one hour connecting flight on each end!), which means lots of dedicated reading time. I read more than usual this month…

The Confessions of Saint Augustine: From what I knew of the man, he lived a pretty party-hearty life before finding religion, so I was interested in seeing what spurred his conversion. Turns out it was mostly his mom. I had an abridged version, which I was glad of because theological pondering is not my reading sweet spot.
The Queen of the Night (ARC): I finally gave myself permission to skip some of my e-galleys that I’m less excited about and read the ones that I’m actually really intrigued by. This book had gotten a lot of buzz early in the year and it was totally bonkers and I LOVED it.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours: I’ve been wanting to join a real-life book club for a while and now I have, at local indie bookstore Sundance Books. This was the first selection for the club, and immediately pushed me out of my comfort zone because I don’t read short stories almost ever. It was an interesting, if not really especially enjoyable, read: I don’t usually go for short stories because I like immersing myself in a book and I feel like I’d appreciate the intricate magical realism of Oyeyemi’s writing in a long form better.
Invisible Man: This I started reading almost immediately after the election, and the reports of racist activity that followed, and although it was coincidence this was a very timely read. Ellison’s chronicle of his nameless narrator realizing that he’s effectively invisible because of the color of his skin is searing and rich and powerful and a must-read.
The Paper Magician: This was a pleasant enough, fluffy little read. The characterizations were pretty thin, but the magic system at the heart of it is intriguing, and the central plot device of being a journey through a heart and what it holds was novel. It was neither great nor terrible, but after the previous book it was nice to read something less substantial.
Eleanor of Aquitaine: Alison Weir is a favorite historian of mine, and her account of the incredible life of Eleanor of Aquitaine is, as always, lively and interesting.
The Emigrants: This is really more a collection of four short stories on a similar theme than it is a novel. W. G. Sebald spins achingly poignant tales of four different emigrants and the loneliness and dislocation that results from their moves, whether or not they were voluntary in the first place.
The Girls (ARC): Emma Cline’s book was pretty buzzy this summer, but I didn’t get to it until now. Its inspiration in the Manson murders has tended to be what people mention about it the most, but I found that part of the story to really be secondary to the focus on what it means to be a young teenage girl and wanting desperately to be wanted.

In Life:

Election Day happened: Apart from my own feelings about politics on the national level (I’ve outed myself as a Democrat before, so you can assume my disappointment with the outcome), this also influences my professional life since my work concerns the state legislature. Nevada’s Assembly swung back to blue from red, and the state Senate did the same. We’ve got some new faces coming in, so I’m looking forward to meeting and working with them! No really, I like people and relationship-building, so I actually do like getting to know the new legislators.
BFF2K16: My annual girls trip with my best friends since the time I was a kid! This year’s destination was The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, so we took a long weekend down to the state where we saw more than one person drive in reverse on the highway. It was super fun, we did one day of theme park and one day on the beach (coming from the other side of the country, I had a full day of travel on each end) and mostly hung around and chatted and talked about our changing lives. This is the weekend I look forward to the most every year and I’m already excited for next year!
First book club meeting: For all that I’m a die-hard reader, I’ve never actually been in a real live book club. Like I mentioned above, this one is hosted by our local indie bookstore, Sundance Books, and has a facilitator and everything. It’s a good mix of people, and our discussion around What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours was interesting and brought new things to light. Can’t wait to discuss The Wonder next month!
Family Thanksgiving: As usual, we (me, the husband, and the pug) spent Thanksgiving with my in-laws and their usual holiday crew. Along with the usual things to be thankful for, I’m thankful that the group is mostly aligned along similar political lines, so the most controversial thing was how much food the dog got snuck under the table. No one can resist spoiling him!

One Thing:

What’s the one thing that I’ve been particularly into lately? It actually doesn’t show in my reading here (yet) as much as it does in my bookshelves, but I am a royalty junkie, and I am loving Netflix’s The Crown! Queen Elizabeth has been queen for the vast majority of her adult life, and the look at the human who wears that headpiece and has those duties is well-done and really fun to watch! I already can’t wait for next season!

Gratuitous Pug Picture:

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