wrap up: October 2019

 

1. Divide Me By Zero by Lara Vapynar ★★★★★ | review to come for BookBrowse
2. The Whisper Man by Alex North ★★☆☆☆ | review
3. Find Me by André Aciman ★★★★★ | review to come for BookBrowse
4. Unbelievable by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong ★★★★☆ | review
5. All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews ★★★☆☆ | review

Favorite: Find Me by André Aciman
Least favorite: The Whisper Man by Alex North

OCTOBER TOTAL: 5
YEARLY TOTAL: 92

Other posts from this month:

• Nonfiction November 2019 recommendations
• Not a post, but I also did a Twitter thread with some recommendations for Novellas In November

This is one of the slowest reading months I’ve had in ages and I don’t even know why.  I mean, I think part of it is because a lot of the books I’m currently reading are 500+ page beasts, but still… I think 5 books is the fewest books I’ve read in a month since I started blogging.  And I haven’t even finished one of them, technically!  Work has been stressful and life has been stressful, but I’m really dissatisfied with how little I have been reading lately, so hopefully next month will be an improvement.

Life updates:

I just had to scroll through my Twitter to make sure there were no life updates I was forgetting about.  It’s true, nothing at all happened in the last month aside from the aforementioned stressful things.  I watched a lot of Love Island.

Currently reading:

 

Know My Name by Chanel Miller, Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb, Cassandra by Christa Wolf, The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater, Villette by Charlotte Bronte.  I will finish all of these books in November, so help me god.

What was the best book you read in September?  Comment and let me know!

P.S. Follow me!  @ Twitter | Goodreads | Instagram | Letterboxd | Ko-fi

Nonfiction November 2019 recommendations

One of the most joyous things to have come out of my book blogging journey is discovering how much I actually do love nonfiction; so much so that I’m excited for Nonfiction November even though I’m not sure I’ll be able to participate.  My reading has been a bit slow lately, and hasn’t exactly been thriving when I set myself a strict TBR, so I’m not committing myself to anything, but I did at least want to make a recommendation post for others who are planning on participating.  Affiliate links to Book Depository on each of these titles.

Nonfiction November is hosted by Olive on booktube, and for the blogging version you can read Ren’s announcement post here.  In Olive’s announcement she laid out 4 prompts, and I’m going to recommend two books for each one; one that I’ve read, and one that’s on my TBR (again, not necessarily to be read this November… but maybe!).  The prompts are as follows: design, sport, true, and voice.

DESIGN

Read: Walk Through Walls by Marina Abramović
TBR: Old In Art School by Nell Irvin Painter

All of these prompts were created to be as flexible as possible, so you are welcome to take any of them in a radically different direction than I am – but when I hear ‘design’ my first thought is ‘art’ and ‘art history.’  Hence my two recommendations: Walk Through Walls is a stunning and provocative memoir by performance artist Marina Abramović, that challenged my own perceptions about how much of a line there is (or should be) between life and art.  I would absolutely recommend this if you’re already a fan of Marina or familiar with her work, but I don’t think that’s a prerequisite if you’re at all curious about picking this up.

Old in Art School is, from what I gather, a memoir about the author’s experience attending art school at RISD (Rhode Island School of DESIGN, just saying) in her 60s, and the ageism, sexism, and racism she encounters during that experience.

SPORT

Read: Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer
TBR: Beautiful on the Outside by Adam Rippon

Rough Magic is Lara Prior-Palmer’s memoir in which she recalls entering the Mongolian Derby on a whim, which she went on to win at the age of 19, becoming the first woman to win and the youngest person to ever finish.  If it’s slightly uneven at times, this is only a testament to how passionately Lara Prior-Palmer tells her stranger-than-fiction story.  She’s an unforgettable narrator and this book is a breath of fresh air.  I gave this 4 stars after finishing, but a few months later I’d say it’s one of my favorite things I’ve read this year.

One thing that I’ve learned in 2019 is that I actually don’t hate celebrity memoirs as much as I always assumed I would.  One of the most enjoyable memoirs I’ve read all year is Busy Philipps’ This Will Only Hurt a Little; I think I’m expecting something similar in tone from Adam Rippon’s memoir about figure skating.  I don’t really watch figure skating – I don’t watch any sports aside from tennis – but I enjoy Adam Rippon on social media so I’ll probably pick this up on audio at some point in the next few months.

TRUE

Read: The War that Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander
TBR: Homesick by Jennifer Croft

I’m cheating a little here as I haven’t read The War that Killed Achilles in its entirety; I read half of it a couple of years ago, and I’m planning on starting it over from the beginning when I have more time because it’s excellent.  The subtitle is The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War, so I decided to go for something a little less obvious for this prompt than true crime, in choosing a book that excavates the true story behind one of the world’s oldest classics.  I also met Caroline Alexander a few years ago after listening to her give a talk about translating the Iliad, and she’s brilliant.

For Homesick, I’m employing a bit of irony with my use of ‘true’; though this is a memoir, it is written in the third person, with Croft blending the line between fact and fiction.  Apparently this memoir about sisterhood reads like a novel at times, and I’m so curious to see how Croft pulls this off.  I’ve heard so many fantastic things about it.

VOICE

Read: Know My Name by Chanel Miller
TBR: Voices from the Grave by Ed Moloney

I’m currently reading Know My Name and it’s exceptional; the memoir’s conceit is that Chanel Miller is giving herself the voice that the media storm denied to her throughout the Brock Turner case.  It’s candid and heartfelt and bold and beautifully written.

Voices from the Grave is a book that’s heavily referenced by Patrick Radden Keefe in his book about the Troubles, Say Nothing (my favorite book of the year so far).  The research in this book was gathered through extensive interviews with Brendan Hughes and David Ervine, two members of paramilitary organizations involved in the Troubles.  This is the longest TBR book on this list – over 500 pages – but I think it’s also the one that I’m most likely to pick up for Nonfiction November, as I’d love to read it before the details from Say Nothing start to fade in my mind.

Are you guys participating in Nonfiction November?  What books would you recommend for these prompts?

book review: Unbelievable by T. Christian Miller & Ken Armstrong

 

UNBELIEVABLE by T. Christian Miller & Ken Armstrong
★★★★☆
Broadway Books, 2019

 

Harrowing and eye-opening, Unbelievable (originally published as A False Report) strings together the stories of victims of a serial rapist, focusing on one young woman, Marie, whose rape allegation was dismissed after she was more or less forced to recant her accusation.  When she went back to the police station to insist that she had in fact been raped, she was charged with false reporting.  Years later, the rapist was caught and Marie’s record was expunged – Unbelievable then ties together Marie’s story, and the stories of the officers investigating this crime, with a larger commentary on the alarming way sexual assault allegations are often handled in the U.S.

I decided to pick this up after a conversation with the editor of a piece I wrote recently on the rarity of false sexual assault allegations; this book echoed a lot of the research that I had uncovered while writing that, so it was ultimately every bit as infuriating as I had expected it to be. Seeing the startlingly unprofessional behavior of the officers investigating Marie was painful; they would take minor inconsistencies in Marie’s story and blow them out of proportion, having never been trained to recognize that assault victims often have scattered recollections.  But if there’s one thing that saves this book from being a total downer, it’s that T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong emphasize the department-wide changes that were instigated in the way officers are trained to deal with assault victims, that came about as a result of this incident.  I think this should be required reading for anyone in law enforcement handling a sexual assault case.

I will say, one thing I would have liked from this book is more of a focus on the historical precedent of disbelieving women – Miller and Armstrong put the effort in here, but their research is essentially relegated to a footnote in Marie’s story, whereas I felt like there was room for more interrogation into the socio- and psychological factors that underscored the particular narrative that they chose to highlight.

There was also a certain discomfort in the back of my mind whenever I thought too long and hard about the fact that this book’s two authors are both male – a bit of unpleasant irony given that the book’s core conceit is advocating for the voices of women.  But to my pleasant surprise, this was actually addressed in the author’s note; the discomfort has been assuaged a bit knowing that this book’s editorial team was entirely female, a number of female experts were consulted, and Marie herself was able to weigh in on the manuscript before it was published.

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You can pick up a copy of Unbelievable here on Book Depository.

book review: The Whisper Man by Alex North

 

THE WHISPER MAN by Alex North
★★☆☆☆
Celadon Books, 2019

 

All I really look for when picking out a thriller is an intriguing premise, and The Whisper Man absolutely had that covered: 20 years ago in a small English town, a series of murders occurred where a man would lure little boys outside by whispering at their windows, hold them captive for a brief period, and then kill them. The culprit was caught with damning evidence, but now, 20 years later, a series of murders is starting up that bear a startling resemblance to those committed by ‘The Whisper Man,’ who is still incarcerated.

I think there are two types of successful thrillers: one where the delight comes from the reader feeling involved in the whodunnit, where there are so many potential suspects you’re bound to be wrong no matter who you guess; and one where guessing the identity of the murderer isn’t really the point, but there are still so many twists and turns that you enjoy the ride anyway. The Whisper Man manages to fall in neither category. This neither had a thrilling murderer reveal, nor much momentum on the way there. Instead it hinges on family dynamics and the theme of fatherhood, which I suppose is done well, though it appears to have been at the detriment of… literally everything else.

I’ve seen others describe this book as creepy, scary, etc., and I have to wonder if I just missed something. Aside from a few moments that hinted at the possibility of something paranormal at play, I just found the atmosphere in this book conspicuously absent. In fact, the whole book felt muted, like it was being held back from achieving the real dread or terror that it was obviously striving for. The plot was likewise uninspired and straightforward; I’m just not sure what this book’s hook was supposed to be, once the promising exposition is out of the way. We just sort of amble through a rather aimless narrative about serial killers and creepy children – it’s like Alex North put a bunch of horror tropes into a blender and mixed them until they lost their flavor. There was just nothing unique or potent or memorable about this book.

Contrary to everything I’ve just written, I might recommend this to readers who are new-ish to thrillers (I will concede that a few of my ‘that was so obvious’ moments come from too much familiarity with the genre) but my overwhelming feeling about this book is one of anticlimax. If you’re looking for a safe, tame option in the genre, give it a shot; if you need something a bit more dark and twisted, definitely keep looking.

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You can pick up a copy of The Whisper Man here on Book Depository.

book review: The Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen | BookBrowse

 

THE LIAR by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston
★★★★☆
Little, Brown and Co., 2019

 

The Liar is a book that will make its readers uncomfortable by design; set in modern-day Israel, it follows a 17-year-old girl, Nofar, who is unremarkable in every way until one day she decides to tell a terrible lie, with far-reaching consequences. At her summer job at an ice cream parlor she has an unpleasant encounter with a local celebrity who yells at her and insults her appearance—things then escalate when Nofar falsely accuses him of attempted rape.

It’s a deeply unsettling premise, and a difficult one to pull off. How does an author tell a story about a false accusation without trivializing the reality of sexual assault? Ayelet Gundar-Goshen rises to the challenge.

You can read the rest of my review HERE on BookBrowse, and you can read a piece I wrote about the rarity of false sexual assault allegations HERE.

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You can pick up a copy of The Liar (published as Liar in the UK) here on Book Depository.

book review: Lanny by Max Porter

 

LANNY by Max Porter
★★★☆☆
Graywolf Press, 2019

 

This pretty much did nothing for me, but I am inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt as I recognize that I’m in the minority here.  I think I may not quite ‘get’ Max Porter, because I felt similarly about Grief is the Thing with Feathers: I appreciated it from a technical standpoint, but I found it utterly devoid of emotionality, which seems a silly thing to say about a pair of books that are about such heavy topics, and which have touched so many other readers, but I just find his writing technically brilliant and at the same time, curiously unaffecting.

What I admired: Again – Porter’s writing is lyrical and assured.  I think his descriptive imagery is gorgeous and evocative, and his portrait of small town England was beautifully rendered.  And the part of Lanny that did really work for me was the second section, where Lanny goes missing and his search is narrated by a chorus of characters in the town – it’s frantic, tense, and kept me turning pages in a way that I didn’t get from the first or third sections.

What I didn’t: Dead Papa Toothwort dragged this down for me, as I knew he would.  I’ve said it so many times I know you all must be getting tired of it, but I don’t like magical realism; I just find that it obfuscates more often than it augments a text.  I ultimately just didn’t see the point of this book.  I think Porter ruminates on a lot of interesting themes while never really driving any of them home – instead opting for this sort of half-baked mythical angle.

There was a point toward the end where I thought this book was going to ultimately go in a much more sinister direction, which I would have found more thought-provoking and hard-hitting, but the cloyingly sentimental resolution unfortunately made this a rather forgettable read for me.  I didn’t hate it, and there were times I was gripped by it, but this was just not my kind of book. A solid 2.5.

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You can pick up a copy of Lanny here on Book Depository.

book review: A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore

 

A SPELL OF WINTER by Helen Dunmore
★★★★★
Penguin, 2007
originally published in 1995

 

I had such a strange reaction to this book: I loved this more than anything I have read in a long time, but when I started thinking about writing this review, I had the hardest time putting my finger on why.  Its structure is a bit messy and tonally inconsistent; it doesn’t really deliver anything promised on the blurb (not a fault in the book itself – but I think it’s bound to frustrate a lot of readers who go into expecting a mystery or a Shirley Jackson-esque haunted mansion tale); but it really came together for me and gave me one of the most enthralling reading experiences I have had in a while.

A Spell of Winter is a difficult book to categorize and difficult to explain without giving too much away – but it follows siblings Cathy and Rob who have spent their lives in a quasi-abandoned manor in the English countryside which belonged to their parents; their father is now dead and their mother ran off when they were young.  As adults, Cathy and Rob’s relationship begins to develop into something forbidden, and it sets off a tragic chain of events that spread into the years of the First World War.

This was my first Helen Dunmore, which I decided to pick up as it won the inaugural Women’s Prize for Fiction back when it was known as the Orange Prize, and the first thing that struck me about it was how enchanting I found her prose.  Even when you get past the arresting first sentence (‘“I saw an arm fall off a man once,” said Kate‘) the writing itself continued to beguile – her prose is descriptive and evocative without being overly flowery; there was something distinctly reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier there, and indeed the book’s setting and atmosphere called to mind Rebecca (though the comparisons really do stop there).

The other reason this book came alive for me is that Cathy was such a fascinating, sympathetic, well-developed character, and the depth of emotional complexity that Dunmore was able to excavate with this book was staggering.  This book is about sexuality, societal restraints, and female agency, all examined through the lens of one woman’s fraught relationship with her own family inheritance. It all sounds like a rather standard female-centric historical fiction novel, but Cathy’s journey and Dunmore’s psychological insights took on a hard edge that subverted all of my expectations and then some.

I don’t think this is the kind of book that people intensely hate – I think it’s more of a ‘it was fine, nothing special’ for a lot of readers. So again, it’s hard to recommend this enthusiastically knowing that it’s bound to fall flat for a lot of people who find themselves disappointed by the (anticlimactic?) direction it takes. But I was so utterly enchanted and riveted by this book, and I cannot wait to see what else Dunmore has to offer.

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You can pick up a copy of A Spell of Winter here on Book Depository.