- The End We Start From by Megan Hunter ★★★ + review
- Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions by Amy Stewart ★★★ + review
- The Book Collector by Alice Thompson ★★★★ + mini review
- Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn ★★★ + review
- Sparkling Cyanide by Agatha Christie ★★★★★ + review
- Bird Box by Josh Malerman ★★★★★ + review
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy ★★ + review
Best: Bird Box by Josh Malerman
Runner up: Sparkling Cyanide by Agatha Christie
Worst: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
OCTOBER TOTAL: 7 books
YEARLY TOTAL SO FAR: 85 books (goal was 60)
I feel like these star ratings don’t accurately represent my reading month, which was Not Great….. continuing from September I had a long streak of 3 stars, and then most of my month was spent reading War and Peace, which clearly I did not end up loving. (Though I do feel a bit bad giving it the distinction of the worst of the month…. perhaps a more fair assessment would be The End We Start From which is one of the most unremarkable books I’ve ever read, but at least that held my attention – War and Peace was just a massive two month long struggle for me.)
In non-book news, it wasn’t a bad month! I went on a road trip to Hartford and Boston and got to see some theatre and got to hang out with Chelsea and Steph, which was a lot of fun. We saw the Les Miserables tour and then a sadly short-lived production of Merrily We Roll Along in Boston – review of that HERE.
Now the currently reading/TBR stuff… I’m in the middle of The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater (buddy read with Steph) and having a lot of fun with that! Also reading An Arrow’s Flight by Mark Merlis and The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin, and I haven’t touched The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride in weeks but now that I’ve finished War and Peace maybe I’ll have the mental energy to dive back into that. Or maybe I’ll put it off for another month. Anyway, November will also include a buddy read of Wuthering Heights with Hadeer, The Absolutist by John Boyne, The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor, A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzie Lee… and maybe other things! We shall see. I’m really excited about some of these.
Finally… follow me in various places on the internet if you want!
Twitter | Goodreads | Instagram | Letterboxd
What was the best book you read in October? Comment and let me know!
I’m only partway through this, but An Arrow’s Flight by Mark Merlis is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It’s a retelling of the Trojan War, but it goes a bit avant garde, with Pyrrhus working at a strip club… I’m not really sure how to explain this book BUT I’m really loving it. I’ve read so many Greek mythology and Homeric retellings that I’m loving how different this one is.
All We Shall Know by Donal Ryan… I don’t really know how to talk about this book without giving a lot of the plot away, but suffice to say that I found the ending very striking. I have a thing for novels where characters are punishing themselves for something that they did in their past, and Melody’s particular struggle really resonated with me for whatever reason. (I initially wanted to say Burial Rites but I’m also trying to limit myself to copying only one of Steph’s answers.)
Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo. I don’t read a lot of action-y books but this one definitely fits the bill. How Bardugo was able to pack so much adventure and so many twists and turns into this duology – Crooked Kingdom especially – I will never understand.
The Absolutist by John Boyne… After The Heart’s Invisible Furies absolutely destroyed me (aka rocked my world) this summer I’ve been wanting to give Boyne another try, and this is the other novel of his that appeals to me the most. Chelsea kindly gifted me a copy earlier this month so I am going to start it once I finish a couple of the four books I am currently reading, and I am very excited.
WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy
Marlena by Julie Buntin – I thought this entire book was a rather bland reading experience, but I was hoping for SOMETHING from its conclusion… instead I found the ending rather trite and uninspired. I really can’t figure out why this book exists.
Mia in Little Fires Everywhere. Celeste Ng is a brilliant writer who usually has the gift of making me sympathize with even the most unlikable characters, so I don’t know what it is about Mia that puts me off so much. Although she has plenty of positive qualities, I guess I’m just sort of tired of narratives that romanticize the ‘bohemian parent’ type – I feel really strongly that moving your child from place to place and school to school just because your current town no longer gives you artistic inspiration is a horribly selfish way to raise a child. (Still loved the book – just not the protagonist!)
I’m not a big series reader, so I have to choose one where I only read the first book, but I’m going to go with The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley. This book was such a mess. Even after reading all 500+ pages I could not tell you what this book was actually about. Some of the most amateur writing I’ve ever encountered in traditionally published fiction, far too many characters, and extremely messy world building. Hard pass on the sequel(s).
Eliza/Wallace from Eliza and Her Monsters. SPOILERS for the second half of this book: telling Eliza that she had to finish the comic so he could get his book deal was such blatant emotional manipulation, I’m sorry. I know Wallace has been through some Stuff, but so has Eliza, and him taking all his personal shit out on her and refusing to look at it from her perspective really ruined this pairing for me (which I hadn’t really been feeling up until this point). His half-baked ‘sorry I was an asshole’ explanation didn’t really do it for me either.
(In an effort to go one tag without mentioning A Little Life.) I’ll say Agnes in Burial Rites. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler that she dies because the premise of the book is that she’s been sentenced to death.) The way this death scene is written shook me very deeply.
I absolutely detested See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt, mostly because of the writing style, so I don’t see myself picking up anything else she writes in the future.
“A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face.”
“There was no signature, but instead a tag from the Iliad, in Greek. It was from the eleventh book, when Odysseus, cut off from his friends, finds himself alone and on enemy territory:
“So the immortals spun our lives that we, we wretched men
“All the rest they burn, unnumbered and unsung,
“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn’t understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.”
“Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener’s aunt is in the house.”
“Il dort. Quoique le sort fut pour lui bien étrange,
“I hold onto her and tell her I love her and tell her I’ll do anything she wants me to do but beyond my words and her weight in my arms there’s the knowing we fucked this up. There was something beautiful here once.”
“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”
“Now he got out of bed and wrapped his blanket around himself, yawning. That evening, he’d talk to Jude. He didn’t know where he was going, but he knew he would be safe; he would keep them both safe. He went to the kitchen to make himself coffee, and as he did, he whispered the lines back to himself, those lines he thought of whenever he was coming home, coming back to Greene Street after a long time away – “And tell me this: I must be absolutely sure. This place I’ve reached, is it truly Ithaca?”- as all around him, the apartment filled with light.”
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
“He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, ‘I am not afraid’.”
pace, amore, libri 