More Books!
Honestly, Time (yes, with a capital T) just got away from me, and I forgot to put up my September and October lists. As a consequence, here's yet another big post with three months of books.
Enjoy!
1. Night and Silence, Seanan McGuire - I still can't quite believe I only recently picked up McGuire's books. For someone so prolific, she's quite a good writer. I quite frankly don't know how she's able to put out so much quantity without sacrificing quality. Night and Silence is the newest October Daye book, and I love the fact that the character is still changing and growing 12 books in. (I am getting nervous, though. In my experience when a series gets this lengthy the quality starts to go rapidly downhill at some point....fingers crossed.) I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I am considering a series reread soon. I just adore these characters so much!
2. Suffer a Sea-Change (novella), Seanan McGuire - And a bonus at the end of the book! This is what happens when you have just a little more you want to say about a character!
3. Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor - Taylor is, hands down, my favorite Christian writer. This is the story of how she came to leave her job as a pastor, and what she found afterwords. It spoke to me deeply, and in many ways I find my own journey reflected in hers.
4. Cross Talk, Connie Willis - I adored it. Then I read some criticism of it. Then I thought about it. Then I kind of changed my mind, while still having enjoyed the book. Yep, I agree with a lot of the things that people have pointed out are wrong about this book. At the very least, it is not up to Willis's usual standards, and I completely understand why people are annoyed with the story. Her female lead, after all, needs rescuing quite a bit. Having said that, I still thought it was a fun and engrossing read...and sometimes we just need a book to be fun!
5. The Black Tides of Heaven (novella), Jy Yang - Jy Yang's novellas are getting a lot of attention. I think that there's some interesting things in here about gender, the writing is delicious, and goodness knows I love to read fantasy that isn't based on the old Tolkein-esque Europeanish mythology. But I have the sequel, and I've not read it yet (still not, as of Dec...) and that makes me wonder why. I'll get to it at some point, but it just doesn't call to me.
6. She Would Be King, Wayetu Moore - A recommendation from my friend Carrie, who's the manager of our new Skylark Bookshop! (It's a gorgeous bookstore - and anyone in the area simply must go, and buy lots of books!) Carrie actually had to dig a copy out of her boxes of new inventory and check it in so that I could take it home with me that day. It's beautifully written - gorgeous prose, amazing characters. There's a whiff of magic, and a whole lot to think about.
7. The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery, Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile - Enneagrams kept popping up in my podcasts, so I thought I would learn more from this basic primer. The enneagram is an ancient personality typing system built on 9 basic archetypal personality types. I found the book to be fascinating - and I appreciated the fact that this isn't a 'take a test, find your type' sort of thing. (Still not sure what type I am!) I've dug a little bit deeper, and have found some of the information in the book to actually be quite helpful in navigating relationships.
8. The Hazel Wood, Melissa Albert - Yes, please, I'll take a well-written fairy tale!
9. Arabella and the Battle of Venus and 10. Arabella the Traitor of Mars, David D. Levine - These books are jolly good fun, and I still love the idea of skyships.
Giving Up On:
1. The Dark Dark, Samantha Hunt - This pains me, because I absolutely adored Hunt's debut novel, but I just can't get in to this short story collection. And I've tried...multiple times.
1. The Quick, Lauren Owen (reread!) - I had a friend ask me about some of my favorite Halloween themed books, and in reviewing my old October book blog posts I was reminded of this gem. It's right up there in my top 5 vampire books, and I really enjoyed revisiting it!
2. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton (UK publication) - One of my very dearest friends partnered with a local author to open a fabulous new indie bookstore. She told me about this book months ago, and I was intrigued by the reviews which called it a bit of a Quantum Leap/Agatha Christie mash up. Ahem, I ordered a copy from amazon...which turned out to be not fully ok as it hasn't been released in the US quite yet. (Where it will be published under the title, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.) The book itself is quite clever, and I enjoyed it a great deal. BUT, it took me a few months to read (I kept being distracted by other books) and this is not a book that it's easy to set down for a while and pick up at a later date. I struggled to figure out at times where I was and what was going on, and I think the reading experience would have been a lot better had I just powered through.
Movies:
Only two books? What's up with that?!
What's up is that I happen to absolutely love scary movies, and for some reason had the hairbrained idea of challenging myself to one scary movie/day through the month of October. Why? Who knows. My month of scary books had grown, quite frankly, stale, and it was time to shake things up a bit I challenged myself to as many new movies as I could find, indulged in a bit of a period ghost phase in the middle of the month, saw some really great movies (and a few really bad movies...), and had a lot of fun. It ended up being rather more than 31 movies, though, as I ended up including three Netflix tv series in the mix.
Which leads me to this: The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix is honest to God the best adaptation I've ever seen in my entire life. While I have always appreciated the original Shirley Jackson novel, it's always been more of an academic understanding of why it's a great book because I've never particularly loved or enjoyed it. Taking that book and smashing it up against the idea of a family drama? Brilliant. The resulting 10 episodes of television are quite frankly the best exploration of family trauma and grief that I've ever seen. I'm super cranky about book adaptations....this one is a complete win.
Side note: I actually love good writing about pop culture, and there's a lot of really good stuff out there about The Haunting of Hill House. It's encouraged me to go back and start to rewatch already.
1. Melmoth, Sarah Perry - Truth? A bit of a disappointment. I just loved The Essex Serpent so, so much, and was really hoping that Perry would be a new favorite writer. Melmoth was a bit of a dreary slog that I had to push myself to get through. I had trouble actually connecting with the characters, and thought it was all pretty dull. (Note: I did part of the book in audio and part in print. The audio was a tad hard to follow, which may have contributed to part of my issue with the book. It jumped around a bit and I got lost.) It's telling that just a few weeks later I can't remember the big reveal.... I did like the ending, though.
2. Muse of Nightmares, Laini Taylor - Anther bit of a disappointment. Taylor's Strange the Dreamer was so very unusual in the fantasy world, and I had high hopes for this follow-up. Took forever to get going, though, and I actually put it aside and forgot about it for a while. (Never a good sign.) Once it got going, I was totally back on board...but it definitely lacked the special magic of the first book.
3. Running on Empty, Janice Webbs - A recommendation from my therapist. Very needed, validating, and helpful.
4. The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O, Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland - Oh. My. Goodness. This book was so much fun! I've never read any Stephenson before, and now I kind of want to run out and read all of his other books. I actually picked this book up on the iBooks sale table - thought the synopsis sounded fun - but I had no idea I would love it as much as I did. Time travel, witches, awesome characters, a plot complicated but fun....yep, it checked every box for me!
5. Vox, Christina Dalcher (audio) - I'm annoyed by this book. On the one hand, it sucked me in and I felt compelled to follow along. On the other hand, the writing is pretty awful, and the reviews are all very accurate in their complaints. (Yeah, I checked.) I confess....I stopped listening half way through, checked out the print version, and skimmed the second half to find out what happened. The author has clearly jumped on board with the current trend in feminist dystopias, and she had a fairly terrifying and fascinating concept...but the execution of the whole thing is just bad.
6. The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker - Now this, on the other hand, was a brilliant, brilliant book. It's the Trojan War told through the point of view of one of the women, Breisis. I devoured this entire book in two days, and it has haunted me every since. (For anyone who doesn't know - my minor is in Classic Greek language, I adore mythology, and I have a soft spot for anyone who does a good modern interpretation.) In a year that also brought us Madeline Miller's Circe....wow. Top 5 or 10 books for the year, for sure.
7. Sleepyhead: The Neuroscience of a Good Night's Sleep, Henry Nicholls - This book was literally just published, and it's freaking amazing. (I preordered it shortly after my diagnosis this summer.) Nicholls does an amazing job of connecting science with storytelling in order to convey a lot of really important information about Narcolepsy. Important to note, Nicholls suffers from this condition - it's partially a memoir of his own story - which makes his research deeply personal and urgent. I picked up some very helpful advice from this book, some of which is already making a difference in my life, and I was deeply comforted. Even if you don't have a sleep disorder, this is a good read.
Unfinished:
1. The Last Days of Magic, Mark Tompkins - A sale table book that wasn't so great.
2, The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafron - This was recommended years ago by someone I trust, and I've tried - lord knows I've tried. I've started it probably a half dozen times. This time I made it past the first chapter. In fact, I made it probably half way through...and then I flipped and read the last chapter and decided life was too short.
3. See What I Have Done, Sarah Schmidt - It's actually quite well-written, and is beautifully told. I just don't care about Lizzie Borden enough to have finished. Actually, that's not true. I feel that Borden's story has so saturated our culture that there's not a lot new that can be said about it and so it's quite dull to read yet another variation.
Enjoy!
SEPTEMBER
1. Night and Silence, Seanan McGuire - I still can't quite believe I only recently picked up McGuire's books. For someone so prolific, she's quite a good writer. I quite frankly don't know how she's able to put out so much quantity without sacrificing quality. Night and Silence is the newest October Daye book, and I love the fact that the character is still changing and growing 12 books in. (I am getting nervous, though. In my experience when a series gets this lengthy the quality starts to go rapidly downhill at some point....fingers crossed.) I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I am considering a series reread soon. I just adore these characters so much!
2. Suffer a Sea-Change (novella), Seanan McGuire - And a bonus at the end of the book! This is what happens when you have just a little more you want to say about a character!
3. Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor - Taylor is, hands down, my favorite Christian writer. This is the story of how she came to leave her job as a pastor, and what she found afterwords. It spoke to me deeply, and in many ways I find my own journey reflected in hers.
4. Cross Talk, Connie Willis - I adored it. Then I read some criticism of it. Then I thought about it. Then I kind of changed my mind, while still having enjoyed the book. Yep, I agree with a lot of the things that people have pointed out are wrong about this book. At the very least, it is not up to Willis's usual standards, and I completely understand why people are annoyed with the story. Her female lead, after all, needs rescuing quite a bit. Having said that, I still thought it was a fun and engrossing read...and sometimes we just need a book to be fun!
5. The Black Tides of Heaven (novella), Jy Yang - Jy Yang's novellas are getting a lot of attention. I think that there's some interesting things in here about gender, the writing is delicious, and goodness knows I love to read fantasy that isn't based on the old Tolkein-esque Europeanish mythology. But I have the sequel, and I've not read it yet (still not, as of Dec...) and that makes me wonder why. I'll get to it at some point, but it just doesn't call to me.
6. She Would Be King, Wayetu Moore - A recommendation from my friend Carrie, who's the manager of our new Skylark Bookshop! (It's a gorgeous bookstore - and anyone in the area simply must go, and buy lots of books!) Carrie actually had to dig a copy out of her boxes of new inventory and check it in so that I could take it home with me that day. It's beautifully written - gorgeous prose, amazing characters. There's a whiff of magic, and a whole lot to think about.
7. The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery, Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile - Enneagrams kept popping up in my podcasts, so I thought I would learn more from this basic primer. The enneagram is an ancient personality typing system built on 9 basic archetypal personality types. I found the book to be fascinating - and I appreciated the fact that this isn't a 'take a test, find your type' sort of thing. (Still not sure what type I am!) I've dug a little bit deeper, and have found some of the information in the book to actually be quite helpful in navigating relationships.
8. The Hazel Wood, Melissa Albert - Yes, please, I'll take a well-written fairy tale!
9. Arabella and the Battle of Venus and 10. Arabella the Traitor of Mars, David D. Levine - These books are jolly good fun, and I still love the idea of skyships.
Giving Up On:
1. The Dark Dark, Samantha Hunt - This pains me, because I absolutely adored Hunt's debut novel, but I just can't get in to this short story collection. And I've tried...multiple times.
OCTOBER
1. The Quick, Lauren Owen (reread!) - I had a friend ask me about some of my favorite Halloween themed books, and in reviewing my old October book blog posts I was reminded of this gem. It's right up there in my top 5 vampire books, and I really enjoyed revisiting it!
2. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton (UK publication) - One of my very dearest friends partnered with a local author to open a fabulous new indie bookstore. She told me about this book months ago, and I was intrigued by the reviews which called it a bit of a Quantum Leap/Agatha Christie mash up. Ahem, I ordered a copy from amazon...which turned out to be not fully ok as it hasn't been released in the US quite yet. (Where it will be published under the title, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.) The book itself is quite clever, and I enjoyed it a great deal. BUT, it took me a few months to read (I kept being distracted by other books) and this is not a book that it's easy to set down for a while and pick up at a later date. I struggled to figure out at times where I was and what was going on, and I think the reading experience would have been a lot better had I just powered through.
Movies:
Only two books? What's up with that?!
What's up is that I happen to absolutely love scary movies, and for some reason had the hairbrained idea of challenging myself to one scary movie/day through the month of October. Why? Who knows. My month of scary books had grown, quite frankly, stale, and it was time to shake things up a bit I challenged myself to as many new movies as I could find, indulged in a bit of a period ghost phase in the middle of the month, saw some really great movies (and a few really bad movies...), and had a lot of fun. It ended up being rather more than 31 movies, though, as I ended up including three Netflix tv series in the mix.
Which leads me to this: The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix is honest to God the best adaptation I've ever seen in my entire life. While I have always appreciated the original Shirley Jackson novel, it's always been more of an academic understanding of why it's a great book because I've never particularly loved or enjoyed it. Taking that book and smashing it up against the idea of a family drama? Brilliant. The resulting 10 episodes of television are quite frankly the best exploration of family trauma and grief that I've ever seen. I'm super cranky about book adaptations....this one is a complete win.
Side note: I actually love good writing about pop culture, and there's a lot of really good stuff out there about The Haunting of Hill House. It's encouraged me to go back and start to rewatch already.
NOVEMBER
1. Melmoth, Sarah Perry - Truth? A bit of a disappointment. I just loved The Essex Serpent so, so much, and was really hoping that Perry would be a new favorite writer. Melmoth was a bit of a dreary slog that I had to push myself to get through. I had trouble actually connecting with the characters, and thought it was all pretty dull. (Note: I did part of the book in audio and part in print. The audio was a tad hard to follow, which may have contributed to part of my issue with the book. It jumped around a bit and I got lost.) It's telling that just a few weeks later I can't remember the big reveal.... I did like the ending, though.
2. Muse of Nightmares, Laini Taylor - Anther bit of a disappointment. Taylor's Strange the Dreamer was so very unusual in the fantasy world, and I had high hopes for this follow-up. Took forever to get going, though, and I actually put it aside and forgot about it for a while. (Never a good sign.) Once it got going, I was totally back on board...but it definitely lacked the special magic of the first book.
3. Running on Empty, Janice Webbs - A recommendation from my therapist. Very needed, validating, and helpful.
4. The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O, Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland - Oh. My. Goodness. This book was so much fun! I've never read any Stephenson before, and now I kind of want to run out and read all of his other books. I actually picked this book up on the iBooks sale table - thought the synopsis sounded fun - but I had no idea I would love it as much as I did. Time travel, witches, awesome characters, a plot complicated but fun....yep, it checked every box for me!
5. Vox, Christina Dalcher (audio) - I'm annoyed by this book. On the one hand, it sucked me in and I felt compelled to follow along. On the other hand, the writing is pretty awful, and the reviews are all very accurate in their complaints. (Yeah, I checked.) I confess....I stopped listening half way through, checked out the print version, and skimmed the second half to find out what happened. The author has clearly jumped on board with the current trend in feminist dystopias, and she had a fairly terrifying and fascinating concept...but the execution of the whole thing is just bad.
6. The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker - Now this, on the other hand, was a brilliant, brilliant book. It's the Trojan War told through the point of view of one of the women, Breisis. I devoured this entire book in two days, and it has haunted me every since. (For anyone who doesn't know - my minor is in Classic Greek language, I adore mythology, and I have a soft spot for anyone who does a good modern interpretation.) In a year that also brought us Madeline Miller's Circe....wow. Top 5 or 10 books for the year, for sure.
7. Sleepyhead: The Neuroscience of a Good Night's Sleep, Henry Nicholls - This book was literally just published, and it's freaking amazing. (I preordered it shortly after my diagnosis this summer.) Nicholls does an amazing job of connecting science with storytelling in order to convey a lot of really important information about Narcolepsy. Important to note, Nicholls suffers from this condition - it's partially a memoir of his own story - which makes his research deeply personal and urgent. I picked up some very helpful advice from this book, some of which is already making a difference in my life, and I was deeply comforted. Even if you don't have a sleep disorder, this is a good read.
Unfinished:
1. The Last Days of Magic, Mark Tompkins - A sale table book that wasn't so great.
2, The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafron - This was recommended years ago by someone I trust, and I've tried - lord knows I've tried. I've started it probably a half dozen times. This time I made it past the first chapter. In fact, I made it probably half way through...and then I flipped and read the last chapter and decided life was too short.
3. See What I Have Done, Sarah Schmidt - It's actually quite well-written, and is beautifully told. I just don't care about Lizzie Borden enough to have finished. Actually, that's not true. I feel that Borden's story has so saturated our culture that there's not a lot new that can be said about it and so it's quite dull to read yet another variation.
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