Kristin-Leigh's Thread: Year 5 - this time I'll make it!

Happy 2015, fellow readers! I'm Kristin-Leigh (two first names - not just Kristin, and not just Leigh!), I'm a Seattle native in her mid-20s who works in mobile app software.

I like literary fiction and over the past year have specifically been trying to read more fiction by women and more works featuring disabled and non-neurotypical protagonists. I also really enjoy novels featuring haunted houses/buildings that are practically characters in their own right. I'm also also also a total sucker for "large-scale competition/game" tropes, particularly if the stakes are life or death, and stories that take old fairy tales/mythologies and give them a different spin.

I'm a list maker at heart, so here are some lists to kick off the year:

2015 Challenge Goals:
1. to update my thread more consistently this year - I'm going to aim for weekly status posts.
2. to read more works by female authors. I started doing this last autumn and have been discovering a lot of really beautiful works!
3. to get my to-read shelf (47 books at time of posting) down under 25 before I return to actively acquiring books.

My Favorite Fiction Reads of 2014:
Ordinary People - Judith Guest
The Lady Astronaut of Mars - Mary Kowal
Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones

My Favorite Nonfiction Reads of 2014:
Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident - Donnie Eichar
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America - Jill Leovy

My Least Favorite Reads of 2014:
Netsuke - Rikki Ducornet
Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show - Frank Delaney
The Maze Runner - James Dashner
The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell

My Challenge Threads from Previous Years:
2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2014

Happy reading!

My To-Read Shelf as of March 2015: Goodreads page

My 2015 List of Books Read:

January
01. Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
02. Boy, Snow, Bird - Helen Oyeyemi
03. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling
04. God'll Cut You Down : The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, a Murder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi - John Safran
05. Bel Canto - Ann Patchett
06. Night Film - Marisha Pessl
07. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
08. The House Girl -Tara Conklin
09. The Bird's Nest - Shirley Jackson
10. The First Bad Man - Miranda July
11. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
12. Villette - Charlotte Bronte

February
13. Flying Shoes - Lisa Howorth
14. Watership Down - Richard Adams (abandoned at chapter 40/50)
15. Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
16. Divergent - Veronica Roth
17. The Shipping News - Annie Proulx
18. Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own - Kate Bolick
19. Yes Please - Amy Poehler
20. Hausfrau - Jill Alexander Essbaum
21. The Lost Hero - Rick Riordan
22. Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans - Gary Krist
23. A Trace of Smoke - Rebecca Cantrell
24. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

March
25. The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy - Joan Quigley
26. Girl Walks into a Bar...: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle - Rachel Dratch
27. Will Grayson, Will Grayson - John Green and David Levithan
28. Clock Without Hands - Carson McCullers
29. The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee - Sarah Silverman
30. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
31. The Martian - Andy Weir
32. 9 1/2 Narrow: My Life in Shoes - Patricia Morrisroe
33. True Grit - Charles Portis

April
34. Her Fearful Symmetry - Audrey Niffenegger
35. Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men - Lundy Bancroft
36. The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro
37. Nothing - Janne Teller
38. Kallocain - Karin Boye
39. Hangsaman - Shirley Jackson

May
40. The Sundial - Shirley Jackson
41. My Cousin Rachel - Daphne du Maurier
42. The Beautiful Bureaucrat - Helen Phillips
43. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler - EL Konigsburg
44. And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie

Current Ratio: 32 books by women, 12 books by men

As of this week I'm reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline! This was published in 2011 but only just showed up on my radar about 6 months ago - I keep seeing it on "favorite recent reads" and "most overrated books" lists, so it seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it type book for a lot of people.

I'm enjoying it so far! I'm a sucker for the "large scale game show/competition" type premise in books (the only way it can be better is if the stakes are life and death) so I'm enjoying that element. The writing is a little clunky in places and some of the characters/ideas presented are pretty simplistic, but the plot is reeling me along so I'm enjoying the ride.

After I finish this I think I'm most highly prioritizing Boy, Snow, Bird and maybe The Awakening.

I have both Ready Player One and Boy, Snow, Bird on my to-read list (ha, and I also have The Awakening, actually).
I've starred this thread so that I can come back later for the discussion.

Welcome back!

Thank you, drneutron!

What a coincidence, kaystj! I'll look forward to potentially discussing with you later. :)

Hi, Kristin! What a great stack of books you have lined up! I need to get round to Ready Player One soon...

Hi Kristin! Following along.

>1 KLmesoftly: Great favorites list! I loved Ancillary Justice and I'm very curious about the Mary Kowal.

Ready Player One was one of my two favorite reads of 2013, so I'm glad you are enjoying it. Ancillary Justice was one of my top 5 last year as well and Ancillary Sword is here in my tbr pile. I'm also a huge Diana Wynne Jones fan and love Howl's Moving Castle--I reread all three books in that series this last year as well. I've also really enjoyed Kowal's Glamourist Histories book but haven't heard of this one.

I just started Ready Player One, and I too am looking forward to discussing it :)

I finished Ready Player One this week! For me it was basically a fun popcorn flick in novel form - light, entertaining, super fast-paced, but also not very deep and with a lot of elements that made me roll my eyes after I thought about them a bit (I can expand on those, but won't in this particular comment since I don't want to overshadow what was essentially a good reading experience!). The plot was familiar, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing - it was comfortable, in the sense that the whole time I was reading I "knew" what was going to happen and all that was really in question was how exactly the author intended to get me there in the end. I've already recommended it to a couple people, and I'll be interested to see if (when) the movie adaptation is made - I think this story will be really well suited to that format.

I'm reading Boy, Snow, Bird right now and will probably finish it all too soon! It's one of those rare books that I find myself both trying to read faster so I can find out what happens...and trying to read as slowly as possible so I can savor the writing and characters. The book is very loosely inspired by Snow White, which I can say without giving any hints at all as to how the novel plays out. I'm riveted, it was actually difficult to put it down long enough to eat dinner and come over here to make an update! The comparisons I've heard between Oyeyemi and Shirley Jackson are dead on, this is exactly how I would imagine she would write a fairy tale inspired novel, and Oyeyemi's prose is every bit as beautiful as Jackson's.

@DorsVenabili and @ronincats -

The Lady Astronaut of Mars can be read for free on Tor.com (follow the hyperlink)! It won the Hugo award this past year for best novelette.

Don't let the first sentence throw you off - it was originally written for an anthology where writers were instructed to take the first sentence of a famous novel and go off in a different direction with it. The story isn't actually Wizard of Oz related, aside from a couple small cameos a grown-up Dorothy makes; it's about an aging semi-retired astronaut caring for her terminally ill husband, as she is offered the chance to go into space one more time. It's really poignant and has some great imagery, specifically as it relates to human memory and the specific bits and pieces we learn to associate with the people we care about. I would recommend it, it's a quick read!

Hi Kristin! I love your display of books up there! Shadow of the Wind and Mountains Beyond Mountains are books that I particularly liked. Happy New Year and good luck with your goals.

I resolved to reread When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro for the British Author thread, so I might start that next.

However, these are all of the books I've promised people feedback on at some point and should probably prioritize:

Villette - Charlotte Bronte
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
God'll Cut You Down - John Safran
The Double Life of Alfred Buber - David Scmahmann
The Last Man - Mary Shelley
November 1916 - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I have a feeling I will either love or hate most of these, so I should probably pick one up and figure out whether it's for me so at least I'll either have read it or knocked it off my list!

Just discovered your post & I already have a book bullet. I feel that you're going to add to my TBR pile in a big way!

Hi kristin-Leigh (I read your introduction on the intro page!),
I have heard a lot about Ancillary Justice so am looking forward to getting to that one day, in the near or distant future :)
Welcome to the group!

>16 Deedledee:
Mwahaha, my evil plan exactly! Everyone should read the same things as me (and then come tell me their thoughts!)~

>17 LovingLit:
Ancillary Justice is great, I don't read a lot of straight genre fiction these days and I'm really glad I made an exception for it - it took me a little while to get into it but once it hooked me it didn't let go! I think I spent a couple days on the first 50 pages, and then just sprinted through the last 2/3 of the book in an evening, I couldn't put it down.

...sounds like the kind of book I want to read, what with the sprinting and all :)

Agh! I tried picking up A Division of the Spoils (The Raj Quartet book 2) today and realized that The Raj Quartet just isn't for me. It's kind of a relief to give them up, they've been on my to-read shelf for several years now and while I'm glad I finally got around to reading the first one and giving them a chance, I'm even more glad to move them off my shelf.

Right now I'm reading Bel Canto (Ann Patchett, literary fiction about a hostage situation) and God'll Cut You Down (John Safran, nonfiction - true crime and also meta-writing about the process of writing a true crime book). I'm enjoying both!

>13 KLmesoftly: Very cool! Thanks for letting me know - I've bookmarked it. I'm sort of interested in her novel Shades of Milk and Honey too.

I read a lot of incredible books this past week! Just to revisit:

• Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi - This was one of those rare books that I found myself both trying to read faster so I could find out what happens...and trying to read as slowly as possible so I could savor the writing and characters. The critics who've compared Oyeyemi's writing to Shirley Jackson's are dead on, her prose has the same appeal. I'm excited to get to read more of her work soon!

• Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling - I listened to this as an audiobook and really enjoyed it! I laughed aloud more than 2 times, which is really all I ask of a comedian's memoir.

• God'll Cut You Down : The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, a Murder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi by John Safran - This was great, both a true crime book and a memoir about the writing process and about true crime as a genre. I would recommend it to anyone interested in true crime, or just a nerd about the writing/research process.

• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett - I actually bought this book last autumn knowing nothing at all about it, except that I wanted to read some of Ann Patchett's writing. For having no expectations though it more than delivered! The basic premise involves an extended hostage situation in a South American government mansion, and the relationships and dynamics that form between the hostages and their captives. It was at turns poignant and ironic and darkly humorous - I would recommend it, and I'm looking forward to reading more Patchett soon!

This week I'm reading The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson and will soon be starting The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I started listening to Night Film by Marisha Pessl but I'm debating whether to stop and try to find a text version instead. If anyone who has read it has feedback on whether it will "ruin" the book for me to listen to it as audio, I would be grateful for it!

>21 DorsVenabili:
Shades of Milk and Honey does look interesting! I'm a bit unfamiliar with most paranormal historical fiction but I've been trying to stretch myself and read more outside of my usual genres.

>22 KLmesoftly:: I looked up your thread because I remembered you were reading Boy, Snow, Bird too and wondered what you'd made of it. I've just finished it, lots to think about. I like your necessarily cryptic review and that you were also very impressed by the book (anyone else thinking of reading this, beware, some reviews do give too much away).

Hi, Kristin-Leigh; I think we're going to have a lot of books in common either in recent or upcoming months/years! As soon as I saw that you're into "large scale game show/competition" books, I wondered if you'd read Ready Player One. I thought it fell apart a bit at the end, but the hunt was a ton of fun, and Wil Wheaton's narration of the audiobook was spot on. Happy reading!

Hi, Kristin-Leigh! I'm glad to see that you enjoyed Mindy Kaling's book - I felt the same way (and laughed aloud, too)!

>24 elkiedee:
Yes! The ending left me feeling ambivalent, but thoughtful-ambivalent, if that makes sense. It's one I know will stay with me for a while, something I've found myself turning over mentally at random moments during the day. I'd really like to read more of her writing, I loved the way she explored all of those different female relationships. I have Mr. Fox on hold at the library and White is for Witching at the top of my Powell's wishlist!

>25 kgriffith:
Ooh, Wil Wheaton read the audiobook? Now I'm disappointed I read it on paper! I agree with your assessment of the book - I think there were some pacing issues; around the time the author basically threw in the "romance is happening here, try to be emotionally invested" literary-equivalent-of-a-montage I lost some patience, then got really interested again, then was lost again at the ending, haha.

>26 scaifea:
Hello! :D Mindy Kaling is great, the book definitely reaffirmed me in my lifelong goal to share a pizza with her, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler.

Thanks. I have been reading a lot longer than you -- I will be 85 this year. Tastes do change. At your age I loved historical fiction...still do but it is harder to find something superlative. Rebecca ... didn't know anyone still read that but, of course, I read it years and years ago. The movie, in 1940 with Joan Fontaine must have been shown for a number of years because I remember it vividly. And I was only 10 then. Ordinary People was another one to remember.

I have copied the other 3 titles and will try them. Another female author I like is Penelope Lively...quiet stories but the people are very real.

>28 Cyss:
I was just thinking I should read some Penelope Lively! Do you have any specific recommendations of which work(s) of hers to start with?

>26 scaifea: Yes! Can I come to the pizza party, too?

>30 scaifea:
You and Aziz Ansari can be guests of honor :P

So...I got up my courage and asked for my first ever raise at work! I've never actually gone through the process of ASKING for a raise in an official out-of-the-blue sense and I was super awkward and clumsy about it but I DID IT!

Anyway, given that this time of year I always get a bit down, I decided to treat myself to a vacation and am taking a 4-night cruise down the California coast to Mexico in 12 days! :D I'm super excited to spend time being warm and reading books and eating food someone who isn't me prepared and sleeping in a bed someone else has to make up.

NOW I HAVE TO COME UP WITH A GOOD READING LIST! I'd like to finish at least 5 books while I'm away, but should probably bring my Nook with at least 10 in mind just in case of contingencies or "I'm not in the mood for that!" emergencies...

So I'm thinking we open this up to the group to make lists for you!

Here's my latest set of recommendations (not in priority):
1. Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie. Easy to read, plus the fact that it's Russian biography means you can revel in the warmth while reading about the cold! :)

2. The Quick - good, nonsparkly vampire book

3. Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World - mmmm, ok, maybe not while on a cruise... :)

4 or 5. The River of Doubt or The Lost City of Z - Amazonian exploration!

Yes please, I love recommendations! Catherine the Great and The River of Doubt are definitely appealing to me right now - not that I need any more biographies or nonfiction on my to-read list, but still! I've especially heard great things about The River of Doubt.

To make it even easier to give recommendations, here are some things I like in books, off the top of my head:

• female authors
• Russian lit/books about Russia
• prison memoirs
• art theft, rare item and currency forgery, fraud
• haunted houses/large, imposing buildings featured prominently
• unique twists on fairy tales/fairy tale-inspired works
• mazes and large-scale competitions (especially if they're life or death)

In the interests of making it as easy for myself as possible to be "good" and get more of my to-read stack knocked out, I went ahead and checked digital copies of a bunch of the to-read books I have on my shelf out from my library - so now I'll definitely be bringing the following with me:

Fiction:
The Shipping News - Annie Proulx
Flying Shoes - Lisa Howorth
A Trace of Smoke - Rebecca Cantrell
Her Fearful Symmetry - Audrey Niffenegger
Ahab's Wife - Sena Jeter Naslund
True Grit - Charles Portis
The Futurological Congress - Stanislaw Lem

Classic Fiction:
Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
The Last Man - Mary Shelley
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

Nonfiction:
Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 - Catherine Merridale

If that doesn't keep me busy, I don't know what will! That's a lot of classics relatively, mainly because classics are almost always available to immediately check out from the library, but I'll be happy if I read one of them - I'm thinking maybe Northanger Abbey or Villette.

It feels kind of weird to be grabbing digital copies of books I own physically, but I don't want to lug books around in my suitcase if I can help it...

Good for you, both on asking for the raise and taking a mini-vacation! If you're an audiobook listener at all, I cannot recommend Code Name Verity enough. I intend to purchase the physical book as well, but the narration is just enchanting, and the book itself, the story of two best friends during WWI where one is captured and interrogated as a spy and is recounting her experiences - cheeky one she is, too - oh it is just too good.

>36 kgriffith:
I am an audiobook listener, and that sounds awesome! I went and added it to my library to-borrow list, thanks.

Wow a raise and a cruise!! Good for you!

I've kept up a brisk reading pace so far this month - I know my new year's enthusiasm will fade sometime but I'm enjoying it while it lasts! This past week I read:

Night Film by Marisha Pessl - This one was interesting, a suspense/thriller novel I would shelve near House of Leaves, both for its horror/large-place-unknowable-dimensions elements but also for the "found documents" gimmick it also employed (there were a lot of supplementary notes/photos/press clips interspersed through the text). I enjoyed it quite a bit and am looking for a copy of Pessl's other novel!

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot - A few people had been recommending this to me for a while, and I was glad to finally read it! This book is powerful - not only in the sense that the story told is alternately heartbreaking and infuriating, but also in that the writing is engrossing and the author does her best to advocate for the victims while also being fair and addressing the intention behind the actions of every "player" while also addressing the ultimate consequences of those actions.

The House Girl by Tara Conklin - Don't be fooled by the title; this book is more about a white 21st century lawyer than about a slave woman. I would definitely file this next to The Help under "nice white lady learns Valuable Life Lessons from hearing about the suffering of black people." It was pretty forgettable: not really offensive, not really badly written, but not memorable or particularly valuable.

The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson - I'm a big Jackson fan but had previously only read her easier-to-find later works, so it's exciting to have gotten my hands finally on a couple of the recent Penguin reprints of her early novels! Anyone who has read The Haunting of Hill House can speak to Jackson's love for picking up genre tropes and doing something subtle and twisted with them, and The Bird's Nest deals with a woman who has multiple personality disorder and her pompous, self-absorbed therapist. It has a lot of Shirley Jackson's favorite elements - the twisted familial backstories drawn out slowly page by page via insinuation and sideways reference, the upstanding members of society shown to be just as neurotic and bankrupt from a certain angle as the derelict...it's ultimately a bit pulpier than her enduring classics but was still well worth the read, and surprisingly hilarious at points in ways I don't expect from her!

This week I'm reading The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and The First Bad Man by Miranda July.

^glad to see you liked the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I have this one but have not been prodded to pick it up yet.

I loved reading The God of Small Things when I did (in the year it was published). It is reading for the journey, not the destination I thought. I do (forebodingly for you perhaps) see a lot of second hand copies of it about though, probably the most out of any Booker Prize winner I see.

The God of Small Things is one a few friends of mine have read - they seem to either love-love-love it or hate it! I have a couple other friends reading it right now, too, so I'm looking forward to discussing it with them.

Oh, that latest batch has some good books in it!

Well, my grandma died on Tuesday. :( I'm going to miss that lady, she meant a lot to me.

I'll be heading to Iowa for the funeral next week instead of Mexico, but at least I have plenty of books to read in transit!

Oh, I'm so sorry, Kisten-Leigh. I'll be thinking of you and yours.

Thank you, Amber!

Weekly update:

I've been distracted from reading by funeral and mourning related stuff this week; this is the first close family member I've lost as an adult, I'd never before realized just how much paperwork and planning and just busywork there is to get done!

I did read one book - and a new release at that, The First Bad Man by Miranda July. I liked it a lot, it reminded me at times of A Confederacy of Dunces and of various Chuck Palahniuk novels. Despite the bizarre transgressive elements there was a lot of emotional depth to the characters; I'll definitely be interested to see what she writes in the future.

Right now I'm partway into both The God of Small Things and Watership Down .

Oh, Watership Down is wonderful - I hope you enjoy it!

Okay, weekly update: Yay, intriguing free books! I received my review copy of Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick in the mail today, so I'll be reading that soon. I also was notified this past week that I won Hausfrau: A Novel by Jill Alexander Essbaum from January's ER batch.

This past week I wound up getting 3 books read:

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy - I think I liked what this book represented and what it implied more than what it actually was, if that makes any sense. I loved the descriptions, the setting, most of the characters, and the way the backstory gradually unfolded piece by piece, and I would read another novel by this writer in a heartbeat, but the journey was a lot more compelling than the final destination in this case. The full story just isn't nearly as nuanced or interesting as the process of discovering it, and it ended on a bit of a flat note.

Villette by Charlotte Bronte - I'm a big fan of Jane Eyre, so this had been on my to-read list for a while. I'm glad I finally picked it up! I liked that the novel dwelled so much on friendships; ultimately the romantic elements feel a bit like an afterthought or obligation, which is fairly unique for a novel from this time period!

Flying Shoes by Lisa Howorth - This was interesting, and not what I expected based on the back cover blurb ("woman gets a phone call about new leads in her brother's murder case, 30 years after the original investigation"). It's less crime novel than slice of life reflection on family dynamics, aging, class/race relations...all against the backdrop of rural Mississippi. I'm glad I picked it up, it was a nice surprise and really hard to put down, especially once Mary Byrd makes her trip to Virginia to sit down with the police officer regarding her brother's death.

I got about 3 hours into the 14-hour Watership Down audiobook and I'm not loving it; my library loan ends in 2 days so I'll keep listening to it till then and decide whether I'm invested enough to renew it at that point. I get the feeling it's one of those that takes some time to really become engaged in if you're over a certain age, so we'll see!

This week I'm reading The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. After that I'm leaning toward A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell or Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger, if I don't wind up diving into the Bolick book that was just delivered first!

I'm sorry that you're not liking Watership Down more. I wonder if it's the audio? I don't think I would have liked it nearly as much listening to it.

>48 scaifea:
It might be! The pace is pretty slow; I imagine if I was reading it on the page instead of listening I'd have moved through a lot faster.

I frequently have that issue with audio books - I want them to read faster! Ha!

This past week I read Watership Down by Richard Adams and hated it. I'm surprised, given that I was a huge fan of the Redwall novels growing up, but I just couldn't deal with this - the premise, the themes, the weird authorial choices to humanize certain aspects of the animals while leaving others...I think the one part of the novel I really enjoyed and looked forward to was the very involved bits of rabbit religious mythology.

Right now I'm reading The Shipping News by Annie Proulx and Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. I'm enjoying both, though I'm only about 90 pages into each!

I also have Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi and The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan (the first of his 5-book YA Percy Jackson sequel series) out from the library, and I received an ARC of Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum in the mail this week, all of which I'm excited to take a look at soon!

So sorry to read about your grandma.

>47 KLmesoftly: I loved The God of Small Things. I haven't kept up with her very closely, but I'm not sure she's written any other fiction (although I could be wrong and would love to be wrong!). Lots of politics and essay collections, some of which I've read and enjoyed though.

>47 KLmesoftly: Glad you liked God of Small Things. And I think The Shipping News was a wonderful read, I put off reading it for so long and loved it when I finally got to it.

I am really sorry to hear about your Grandmother too, Kristin-Leigh. What a tough time for you and the family. There is no replacing a grandparent, they are such special people in our young lives, and older lives too if we are lucky.

Thank you, both of you!

I'm really enjoying The Shipping News, though I've been taking my time with it. I think I'll try to finish it this weekend now that I'm done with the other novel I was working on, Black Swan Green.

I've also been enjoying a lighter read - I'm listening to Divergent on audio. :)

This past week I read three books -

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, the most straightforward Mitchell novel I've encountered so far - a coming of age story told in 13 chapters, each representing a month in the schoolboy protagonist's life. It's interesting to watch his relationships evolve and his impressions of the people around him change chapter to chapter. Full circle, January to January, some elements are radically different and others are much the same I'm the end, but Mitchell avoids the triteness I was worried would wrap things up.
I've heard this compared to Catcher in the Rye and I would say that's apt, though I found Jason far more likable than Holden.

Divergent by Veronica Roth, which was just "okay." The worldbuilding isn't particularly deep (even by YA standards) and most of the conflict is single-player, as it were, with the protagonist competing against virtual simulations in the most dramatic scenes so the stakes are fairly low - by the time real danger rolls around it was too late for me to really become invested.
tl;dr summary of the (actually kind of High School Musical-esque) premise: Mega-basic internet personality tests have REAL IMPLICATIONS and everybody gets assigned a clique based on their multiple choice quiz results at 15. Some people are ACTUALLY a combination of the traits "brave," "honest," "self-sacrificing," "loving," and "smart" which threatens the status quo and must be stamped out. Being "divergent" in this way somehow gives one the ability to lucid dream and immunity to mind control.

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, one of those novels I'll need to process for a bit before I'm really certain what I think of it. It rides that familiar line between tongue-in-cheek strangeness (the protagonist's children named "Sunshine" and "Bunny;" the blue-eyed murderess with her Nazi-built yacht) and emotional poignancy, particularly in dealing with the novel's themes of loss and familial duty. Most of the momentum has to do with the characters' relationships to themselves and each other, rather than "plot stuff happening," but everyone ends the book on very different footing than they started, which is satisfying.

This week I'm reading Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick, which is finally getting interesting about 70 pages in. I'll also probably start Yes Please by Amy Poehler tomorrow since my coworker offered me access to it on his Audible account. :D

This week I read a couple things:

Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick - This one took a while to really get interesting; it's one of those combination memoir/histories, which can sometimes really work (see: God'll Cut You Down by John Safran) but in this case came off meandering and pointless. In a memoir I want to see either meaningful self-reflection or some really good stories, and this one was mediocre on both counts - it worked best when Bolick was focusing on the historical women she looked up to (famous female writers who could be categorized as "spinsters"), their life stories, and the reactions of their contemporaries to their single-dom.

Yes Please by Amy Poehler - I thought people were mainly making jokes when they commented that the overwhelming takeaway from this book is that Amy Poehler really didn't want to write a book. No, they aren't kidding - Amy Poehler really didn't want to write a book. This is yet another of those lackluster memoirs that avoids any deep self-reflection or interesting storytelling, and the big redeeming factor for me was my listening to it as an audiobook; Amy Poehler could make the phone book moderately amusing by reading it aloud.

Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum - I didn't think I was going to like this much, but it's actually wound up being one of my favorite books of the year so far! It features one of my least favorite tropes (middle-aged married woman who is bored and has an affair) so I was all set going in to slog through it, but the writing is engaging and the plot winds up being both a contemporary riff on Anna Karenina and an exploration of Swiss cultural dynamics and the lives of American expats. There's a lot going on here, all beautifully presented or implied, and I've caught myself returning to it mentally several times over the past few days since finishing it.

Currently I'm finishing up The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan (the first of his sequel series to the Percy Jackson novels, which I really enjoyed) and Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans by Gary Krist, which is way less compelling than the title implies. Both are just "okay," and I'm looking forward to finishing those up and digging into something I'm more excited about next. I have Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi out from the library and will be starting that soon.

note to self/interesting new release: A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara

This past week I read a few books -

The Lost Hero - Rick Riordan
This one was disappointing! I absolutely loved the first Percy Jackson series and was really hoping for more of those sorts of compelling characters and interesting modern-day twists on mythology. Instead I got awkward third-person narration (not Riordan's strong point at all) and a bunch of superspecial prodigy characters with superspecial megarare powers and gifts shoehorned awkwardly into the existing universe. To me it felt like Riordan fell into the trap of trying to go FASTER AND FURIOUSER in his sequel by dialing elements from the original series up to 11 without the heart or wit that had made it so compelling. I probably won't be reading any more of these books.

Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans - Gary Krist
This is one I picked up last November and read 150 pages of, and then abandoned until last week. The author was going for an Erik Larson-esque, reads-like-a-novel narrative history of New Orleans and wound up attempting to weave together a whole lot of elements over a pretty sizable time period - prostitution, Italian organized crime, anti-black violence, Jazz music, anti-vice legislation...but while all of these topics might share some commonalities, overall to me it was too much of an eclectic hodgepodge. There just wasn't enough cohesion to justify jumping forward and back in time, topic, and geography so frequently (it was basically "a chapter of this, a chapter of that, then a chapter of this again, rinse, repeat" through the whole thing). I really had to struggle to get through to the end, and there wasn't much payoff.

A Trace of Smoke - Rebecca Cantrell
This book is basically the literary equivalent of a delicious bowl of ice cream. It has alllll the tropes: intrepid lady reporter, NAZIS, murdered drag queen, secret gay politicians, sexy rich sensitive gentleman with a yacht, priceless artifacts, the sudden appearance of a precocious orphan child and his teddy bear... it could be so cheesy but is actually wonderful and fun and exciting in all the best ways, thanks to the author's execution of the concept. It was the definition of a page-turner, too! A+ all around.

The Secret History - Donna Tartt
I can't remember the last time I stayed up till the wee hours "just one more page"ing my way through a book I couldn't put down, but I did just that with this one! I love it when an author takes a beloved trope or well-worn literary cliche and examines it from a new angle - in this case, it's the Robin Williams-esque beloved-by-students-loathed-by-administration eccentric teacher with an emotional hold over a small group of students, viewed from a more sinister angle. It's about groupthink and herd mentality, it's about smalltown politics, it's about family politics and coming of age, and really, it's about a bunch of self-absorbed, affluent teenagers who kill someone and try to cover it up. It's appealing in that Gone Girl sense but also in that The Great Gatsby sense. I can't wait to read more of Tartt's writing!

Now I'm reading The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy by Joan Quigley and on audiobook, Rachel Dratch's memoir (A Girl Walks into a Bar).

Wow! What a lot of good reading you've done so far this year, Kristin-Leigh. Thanks for stopping by my thread. I will be following yours.

Time for another update! Last week I read:

The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy - Joan Quigley
A history of the Centralia, Pennsylvania mine fire (most famous as the location inspiration for the Silent Hill games). Underwhelming, unfortunately - the history was interesting and tragic, but the writeup was just "okay." One of my biggest complaints is that the book simply stopped once efforts to put out the fire were abandoned and the town was evacuated; I wanted some kind of epilogue at least - what's the town like now? How does this tragedy and massive fuckup influence policy-making today? Did the kids who grew up in carbon monoxide filled homes wind up with tons of freaky health issues, or are they more or less fine now that they're out of there? etc.

Girl Walks into a Bar...: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle - Rachel Dratch
This is one of the best comedy memoirs I've read in a while - I would rank it right behind Tina Fey's on my favorites tally! The audiobook is read by Dratch and really benefits from her delivery, but the writing itself is at turns hilarious, poignant, and surprisingly honest. I'm not into "baby stuff" at all and thought the latter half of the book (about Dratch's surprise pregnancy in her mid-40s and decision to become a mother) would turn me off, but I should have had more faith!

Will Grayson, Will Grayson - John Green and David Levithan
Another "just okay" read of the year. This is my first John Green novel, and I did enjoy his writing style - however, the plot just didn't deliver. From what I gather, this was a co-writing exercise he did with another YA author (David Levithan), each of them alternating chapters focusing on a different character named "Will Grayson" with the idea that they would cause these characters' lives to intersect and be forever changed. It's an interesting idea, but ultimately it's a "too many cooks" situation, and neither plotline really went anywhere interesting or meaningful.

And this week I'm reading Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers (about halfway in, this book is an absolute treasure) and I'm listening to The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón on audiobook, though my library loan expires in another day so I might need to revisit that one later.

Eep, I haven't been very good at keeping this list updated! In April/early May I took a trip to Scandinavia (Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden) and read a few books -

34. Her Fearful Symmetry - Audrey Niffenegger
35. Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men - Lundy Bancroft
36. The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro
37. Nothing - Janne Teller
38. Kallocain - Karin Boye
39. Hangsaman - Shirley Jackson
40. The Sundial - Shirley Jackson

The Shirley Jackson novels were wonderful (The Sundial is definitely my favorite of Jackson's lesser-known works now!) and I was happily surprised by the Swedish novel, Kallocain, I decided to read. It's a dystopian work from the 1940s in the vein of 1984 and Brave New World - really gripping!

The Buried Giant was a bit of a disappointment for me; I'm a huge Ishiguro fan and have read all of his other novels, and this was one of those books more interesting in its potential than in what actually made it onto the page. Janne Teller's Nothing (my Danish read) was also a disappointment in that regard - maybe if she'd set out to write an adult novel rather than a YA work it would have had more impact, or maybe the translation just wasn't any good. It was interesting but ultimately pretty insubstantial.

Her Fearful Symmetry I would wish I hadn't read at all, except I read it with a small book club of friends and we all unanimously hated it - worth it for the communal experience of picking it to pieces. :P