Book #99 of the year was Now and Not Yet, by Ruth Chou Simons. I read and discussed this with my Bible study group. We enjoyed it and found a lot to talk about.
Book #100 was House Hushing by Myquillyn Smith. This would probably be better read as a paper book rather than on my Kindle that only shows pictures in black and white. But it was interesting and gave me some new ideas.
Book #101 was Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy. I read it because of the bird theme and because it was written by the same person who wrote Wild Dark Shore. This one had a very similar vibe: climate fiction, extinctions, all is lost.
Book #102 was Under Story, by Chloe Benjamin. I really enjoyed the first half of the book, with the Antarctica setting, and then the second half got weirder and weirder and weirder. It was a really cool concept, though. I thought I'd read another book by this author, but it turns out I was thinking about Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers. Not sure how I made that mistake.
Book #103 was a book club pick, Jodi Picoult's Hollow Bones. It was not at all what we were expecting, or even mostly about what we thought, but as always we enjoyed talking about it.
Book #104 was The Shampoo Effect, by Jenny Jackson. The title refers to people's ability to get drunk quickly after just recovering from being drunk (?!), and by extension how it is in a friend group, that there are no events that happen in isolation; everything is layered with years of history, aka previous shampoos. This seemed at first as though it was fluff, but there's more to it than that. An author's note informed readers that the writer referred to all through the book is based on John Updike, which added yet another level. And it has a very optimistic view of the world, suggesting that even the most intractable issues can be resolved. Lots of heavy drinking, substance abuse, and other inappropriate behavior.
Book #105 was a reread, Brother, I'm Dying, by Edwidge Danticat. I read it in 2008 the year after it first came out. Danticat is one of my favorite writers, and Haiti is one of my favorite topics, however sorrowful. Sadly, the immigration bits are still very relevant today.
Book #106 was The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout. All of Strout's books that I've read have been mostly about loneliness, and this one is even more so. It was very sad and depressing, and whew, I need to read something happy now.
Book #107 was Enormous Wings, by Laurie Frankel. This starts out as a sweet, lighthearted novel and takes a major turn early on. It becomes a novel about abortion, with the good guys and bad guys clearly delineated. And it's set in Texas, so you can imagine how that goes. The premise is quite ludicrous but it's not magical realism as I originally thought; there's actually an explanation for the geriatric pregnancy, and it's intended to be taken seriously. I've read a couple of Frankel's books before and enjoyed them, but this one seemed pretty uneven to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment