Bearshorty's musings

Catching up on books for July and August. It was mainly Bridgerton books and two books I got from my Dad on my birthday. I really needed some light summer reading and silly romance books was really perfect entertainment.

To Sir Phillip, With Love by Julia Quinn, 350pp [Bridgerton 5].

This was the first Bridgerton book I read that hasn't yet been adapted to the TV show.

Whenever I clink on any list picking between the best Bridgerton books, this one seems to be on the bottom. But I actually enjoyed it a lot. Many people have an issue with Phillip but he seemed fine for an introvert who ended up with a terrible first marriage out of obligation, had to walk on eggshells with regards to his depressed wife and tried to stop her suicide, and didn't know how to relate to his children at all. He only felt comfortable with his plants. So when Eloise shows up, who at age 28 decided that maybe she should marry, it really threw him off. All he wanted was a mother for his children but they ended up challenging each other and making each other better. And even when they had to marry in haste for reputation sake (as pretty much most of Bridgerton children end up doing - like seriously, that trope is silly after so many of the books using it), it was more of a plot device by that point.

I'm not a giant fan of Eloise in the TV show - she is very twitchy - but I liked her in the book. And I liked how she was with the children and how she won them over. And how she made Phillip be a better father.

When He Was Wicked by Julia Quinn, 379pp [Bridgerton 6].

I think the TV show made a mistake by making Francesca's first marriage seem only made for companionship when she couldn't remember her name upon meeting John's cousin, clearly indicating big love/infatuation for the cousin and not for John. But John and Francesca were lovely in the show and I agreed with her point that not all love has to be grand and dramatic; sometimes sitting together quietly is lovely. And then the show undermined it with "love at first sight" thing and I'm not a fan. I always preferred "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale as a kid because in that story the characters get to know each other and there isn't love at first sight. Anyway, in the books, it was very clear that she truly loves John and then she truly grew to love Michael and that makes a much better story. This is a story of moving on and letting yourself love again when your first marriage was wonderful and full of passion too. And it wasn't like she was in love with Michael while John was alive; Michael was a close friend. Not sure how the TV show will also address Francesca's wanting children so desperately and dealing with infertility. The book managed that well. Anyway, the book was good overall and we will see what the TV show will do.

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman, 279pp

One of the two books my Dad got me for my birthday. I heard about this book before. I have never seen the movie but I know it exists. I'm not sure what I was expecting. I think my expectations for the book were too high. It certainly kept my interest as I was reading it but I'm not sure if I liked the characters. My Dad, who read all of the books in the series, said that he liked another one more but thought I should start with this one. Not sure if I will read more but I'm not ruling it out. It was just strange.

The Duke and I by Julia Quinn, 317pp [Bridgerton 1].

I am not a big fan of Daphne or Simon but I think I liked them more in the book than in the TV version. TV version stayed with the plot a lot but just the way the characters come across, they are more likable in the book. Not much to say about this one.

The Viscount Who Loved Me by Julia Quinn, 313pp [Bridgerton 2].

I think the TV version of this was better and it also influenced my reading on that book since the casting of the show lent itself to this one. The book was a bit less dramatic in Anthony's courting of the younger sister but more dramatic in the bee scene and actual marriage part. But the book and the TV show sort of go together for me. I don't take any of it seriously. Entertaining book.

An Offer from a Gentleman by Julia Quinn, 321pp [Bridgerton 3].

This book is the next season of the show, being a Benedict book, so now that I've read it, I can follow the casting news and know who the characters are. The actress who played Cho Chang is playing the stepmother, which is making me feel old. This story is a Cinderella story, and I quite like Sophie, the main character. The book is mostly from her perspective and there isn't much characterization for Benedict. But Sophie definably gets a lot and I look forward to seeing this play out on screen.

North Woods by Daniel Mason, 369pp

The second of the books that my Dad gave me for my birthday. It is a story of one place, a place in the woods in Massachusetts, that we follow through the years from early settlers running away from home, to an apple orchard, to a runaway slave, to a painter who is in love with his best friend, to a family of business person. We see this one place change from year to year. The story is told in variety of mediums from regular narration to letters, from those who lived there and visitors. And at first it was just a book that was realistic fiction but then the fantastical elements start to creep in. And in the end there were ghosts and it just became a bit weird. That switch from realism to fantasy really threw me. I think the book was just ok overall. I did like various elements coming together in different eras like the escaped slave story with the old family bible that an amateur historian traces that had the info we read earlier as a letter. There are various pieces tying it together. But it felt like the book couldn't figure out what it wanted to be. I like an idea of one place and seeing it thought time but I'm not sure this book quite pulled it off.

I did enjoy all the biology of the woods that was woven throughout and the descriptions of nature - that was the strongest point of the book for me. Since nature also changes over time and trees and plants are not static.

I haven't been posting book reviews since March. It is not like I'm reading that much this year. About 4 books a month and many of them are novellas. But for some reason I just haven't been posting about them or getting the energy to post about them. I really want to catch up and since it is a very quiet day at work, right before a Labor Day weekend, I figure I should get started and maybe gain some momentum. Not even sure how much I will remember from these books already! But just for general idea, I do want to set some thoughts down. So here are the books I finished in March and April of this year:

The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch, 128pp (audiobook) [Rivers of London novella]

October Man is a Rivers of London novella that takes place in the same universe but in Germany. It doesn't have any of our familiar characters, except Peter and Abigail are referenced - German characters certainly heard of Peter and the chaos he causes, but this story is about the German way of dealing with magic and river spirits. This book was just available of audiobook for me, so I listened to it instead of read it, which was probably a good thing since it felt different to me. I usually have trouble paying attention to audiobooks so I had to concentrate more and probably go more details out of it.

Tobias Winter is a very practical German policeman who works with magic and who is sent to investigate a situation in Trier involving a very dead man and a weird crime scene. The narrator of the audiobook was older so it was hard for me to see Tobias as young, but at least he did feel pretty German with all the procedure. He is assigned a local cop Vanessa Sommer (Winter and Summer, hah) who is very competent, helps with the investigation and is also interested to learn about magic. There are river gods including a little girl one who latches on to Vanessa and Tobias needs to make sure Vanessa doesn't get taken. Investigation itself was interesting. And I did like to see other countries' approach to magic.

Overall it was a nice novella and I didn't mind spending some time somewhere else in the universe. Rivers of London is the series I like and often like a lot, but I don't love it so as long as the book reads well, I'm good.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, 214pp [Booker Prize]

I have been reading the winners of the Booker Prize for a while now and most of the time the books are excellent and deserving. And this book was certainly excellent. It is not an easy book emotionally and not something one would want to reread but as a book it is excellent. It is the writing style. The way the book is written, it really conveys the slow buildup of terror that surrounds the family and their world. Something, which was never explained, happened that lead the government of Ireland to declare an emergency and become a totalitarian state. Slowly but surely freedoms are taken away; there is a war against the rebels and everything just falls apart. Normal democratic ideals and lives and expectations are stripped away. The writing makes you feel like you are a frog in a slowly warming water and before you know it is boiling. And how do you react to that. The writing style makes everything so unsettling. The main character is a mother with three children, three teenagers/pre-teens and a baby, and early on she could have left for Canada to her sister but by the time she realizes she should have rushed and left, it is too late. Things just deteriorate in this kind of government and political situation with tragic results.

I grew up in the late Soviet Union. I was eleven when it broke up so I had some awareness of the political situation. And even though I left for US at twelve years old and was just a child, living in the Soviet Union even as a child does impact the way you are and how you see the world and what you expect from it. It was like reading 1984 - a very familiar environment and less surprise of how things can go. Reading this book also reminded me of a non-fiction book I read in grad school that explored why some Jews left Nazi Germany in the late 1930s before it was too late, and why others stayed. What prompted people to leave, to move as things got worse and worse and what made others stay. The characters in the Prophet song started in a much more naive place, thinking these kinds of things can't happen in a civilized society to tragic consequences but with a bit of hopeful ending.

Excellent book, highly recommended but also hard emotionally. As the main character realizes by the end, the end of the world is always happening somewhere to someone, and this book is about that.

Нас украли. История преступлений.[Kidnapped: a story in crimes] by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, 344pp [in Russian].

My Dad gave me this book for New Year. Took me a while to figure out it was not a sci-fi book but a farce. Two boys go visit their father abroad and their mother is giving them warnings about their father, whom they don't really know. When they go board the plane, these two brothers have the exact same name on their passport, but they look very different from each other. What follows is the story of how that happened and then what happens when they go visit their father. It is a story of switched babies, and they are switched several times for variety of reasons, two mothers who meet in the hospital to give birth to them and their lives and various characters around these families. It is a soap opera plot with a lot of absurd things happenings but also with characters you want to succeed badly despite the circumstances. You really root for Alina, a college girl who has to deal with unplanned pregnancy from a boy who abandons her and you want things to work out for her. Nothing evil actually happens but there is a hanging possibility that adds to the tension.

Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold, 150pp [Penric and Desdemona 2].

The second book in the Penric and Desdemona series. Four years after Penric gets his demon (so he is 23 now), a locator Oswyl need a help of a sorcerer to locate a person accused of murdering someone. That person is Inglis, the shaman of the title, and we see his perspective as well. Penric is assigned to this duty and travels with Oswyl through mountain passes on Inglis' trail. Along the way he figures out another mystery and helps a former local shaman as well and starts to get interested in shamans. Since I read the Bujold World of Five Gods novels before these novellas, I encountered shamans before, so all this was familiar. Oswyl is a typical straightlaced dignified person and it takes a while for him and Penric to understand each other. But I liked that no one was really a bad guy here and they were also able to help Inglis once they find him. It was a very nice story overall and I enjoyed the interactions between all the characters.

Penric's Fox by Lois McMaster Bujold, 152pp [Penric and Desdemona 3]

I was pleasantly surprised that we see Oswyl and Inglis from the second book in this third book as well. I like them as a trio, a nice buddy set up and I like all three of them being besties basically, investigating a murder of a sorceress in the woods and trying to find her demon before someone else does. The mystery was well done and overall I was just enjoying the three of them investigating. In the end Penric wants to study shamans more and there seems to be a set up for something but I read the next book and it pivots so I'm not sure what happened with that plot.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel, 219pp

I read this book in March and did like it as I was reading it, as I generally do of all Mandel books, but I am already blanking on the plot and had to look it up to remind myself. There are several main characters who live in different times and places from past to future, who come together for a few seconds in an anomaly that points to simulation hypothesis (I read a book last year that also deals with the simulation hypothesis, so I guess this type of sci-fi is going around. That and multi-universe seem to be very popular lately). There are time travel shenanigans too with a loop kind where it all makes sense at the end. One of the characters is Olive, an author who lives on a Moon colony in 2203 who wrote a bestseller book about a pandemic and is on Earth touring with a book while her husband and young daughter wait at home. As she is touring an actual pandemic breaks out on Earth. Olive is so clearly Mandel and her experience writing Station Eleven and then living though Covid-19 lockdown. Very thin layer of separation there. It was interesting to get her thoughts on both having a popular book and her experience with the actual pandemic. And there was also a character whom we meet in "Glass hotel" book - her books all seem to be connected in some ways.

The only thing that bothered me is that the anomaly seems so minor, just a few seconds of feeling transported to somewhere that is seems silly that people in the future put it together - the evidence is very tentative and can be easily dismissed as something else. As always, this book is about the characters and Mandel's easy writing style. Her books are interesting, but it always feels like it could be more. (I watched Station Eleven TV series this year and I feel the TV show made the story better even though they changed the Prophet and the ending in some way).

When I read the modern literature books, they are often apocalyptic it feels like. One of the points of the Prophet Song book was that the end of the world is always happening to someone. In the Sea of Tranquility, the end of the world has been happening for a long time. It is always headed there.

Dark Waters by Katherine Arden, 198pp

This is a second book of the middle school horror book series. Three kids who survived some kind of horror supernatural event in the first book are still haunted by it and know that Smiling Man from the first book is still coming for them. They end up on a boat trip on a lake in Vermont and get attacked by a Lake Monster and stranded on a weird island with no way out (with another kid and their parents but those parents are hurt and not aware of the supernatural nature of it).

Olivia picked this book up in the library because of the seas monster on the cover and I was reading it to her for a while, until we got to the part in the middle of the book where the kids discover a cabin in woods the middle of an island and there was a skeleton of an old captain on the bed. And that actually freaked her out and she didn't want me to read anymore. Sea monsters were fine, being stranded on a spooky island was fine, creepy atmosphere didn't bother her but this did. Since I was more than half way through the book, I just finished it to see what happens.

I'm not a big fan of horror generally so this is not what I like to read. And this is certainly a middle book in the series since it does depend on reading the previous one and the next one. You can work out what happens but still. it was an ok book. I probably would have liked it more if I was younger. I do like that the kids didn't just shrug off what happened in the previous book - they started reading up on ghosts and other library materials. And I liked how supernatural was treated. And there was real danger. But this is not the sort of book I would choose to spend time on.

Unruly: the ridiculous history of England's Kings and Queens by David Mitchell, 405pp

Recommended by christinafairy, a funny look at English rulers from Anglo-Saxon kings to Elizabeth I, by a comedian with a very modern lens and a lot of humor at the very ridiculous ways these kings and queens lived. I have a masters in Medieval English history (ABD - all but dissertation - really as I never finished my PhD), as I studied it in grad school, so for me it was more of a review of very familiar subjects (except Anglo-Saxon kings whom I don't know as much in detail). That made this book funnier really as I already have preconceived notions about these kings and queens, their lives and their motivations. And I did laugh a lot reading this book. It was great. I do think at the end, Mitchell is judging them too much with modern values, but it was still very entertaining.

The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith [J.K. Rowling], 946pp (300 pages read in 2023).[Cormoran Strike book 7]

The seventh book in Cormoran Strike series. A father comes to the detective agency for help since he lost contract with a son who joined a "church" and was eager to get him out. Robin ends up going undercover and they investigate a deeper mystery as well. I'm not a big fan of cults so I wasn't sure I would enjoy this. And I did like it a bit less than some other mysteries, mostly because many people at the cult were appalling and unpleasant and pretty yuk. But the psychological exploration of cults was pretty good as was the tension in the story. I really did end up enjoying the resolution to the murder mystery though; that was well done, with excellent red herrings and clues. This book also ends on an emotional cliff hanger, which was such a nice punch. I don't particularly care about the series' main romantic plot but it is really time to move it along. And as usual, this book is almost 1000 pages but it doesn't feel long and one just wants to keep reading.

Penric's Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold, 121p [Penric and Desdemona 1]

I really enjoyed the novels in the World of Five Gods book, so this year I'm starting on the novellas. I knew nothing about them, other than that they are set in this universe (which I have a good handle on because of the novel, so that actually helps a lot). I knew the name Desdemona but not who she was, but I did figure it out pretty quickly in the conversation between Penric and the dying woman on the road. I like Penric - he is young and a bit naive, but I like his attitude toward Desdemona and learning from everything he sees. Even the fact that he names her. When his roommate was leading him to have dinner with the roommate's brother, I knew this wasn't right and wanted to yell at Penric to think a little and like actually tell someone where he was going before leaving but at least it was a life experience for him. And I also really liked his approach of honesty in telling his story and his expectation that he would be believed. He is very ernest and it does serve him well by the end. I'm looking forward to really more novellas and seeing Penric gain some experience. The novella felt very low key, and I was enjoying that.

Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, 239pp
Sirius, the star, was convicted in star court for allegedly killing another luminary and sentenced to live on Earth in the body of a dog, until at least he finds the McGuffin. He is reborn as a puppy, almost drowned, ends up with a girl named Kathleen and her uncle and aunt's family, and grows not just a dog but as he gets some memories bag from being a star. There are clever plot twists but a lot of the book is seeing the world through the eyes of a dog. It was a fun novel, even if I don't care much for dogs. As typical of children's books some adults are just too mean but at least Kathleen's cousins are more three dimensional. There is also references to Welsh deities and underworld that I did have to look up as I didn't know the reference to one of the characters. Overall it was a very good book. I liked some of the other Diana Wynne Jones' books more but I can see why a lot of people enjoy this one, especially if they like dogs.

The only thing that it was hard for me to take the name "Sirius" seriously since I strongly associate it with Sirius Black. So I had to make myself not conflate to two characters. But this is a minor thing and I'm sure just my hang-up.

Translation State by Anne Leckie, 421pp
I felt like a much less complicated book than the others in the same universe. Maybe because the plot was a bit more straight forward, maybe because I already had some knowledge of the universe. But that didn't take away from the enjoyment of the book. The book alternates between three individuals: Enae, Reet and Qven. Enae is a middle aged person who lived a very small type of life - in the same house as her Grand-Maman, taking care of everything with constant put downs from others. When her Grand-Maman dies, they are offered a change to be a diplomat and travel. It was supposed to be for just a perfunctory job but Enae turns out to be very good at it. Reet was adopted as a baby and is now almost 30 and he wants to know where he comes from. He is close to his foster family but it doesn't feel enough and he always had strange implulses. Qven is a young Presger translator who is very scared of matching, which is how Presger translators become adults and is thrown in a traumatic and terrifying situation. All three meet and influence each other.

There is also a diplomatic treaty to consider and a Radch Ambassador and other aliens. But this is a personal story as well: are you human if you claim you are. How much are you your genes and how much how you are raised. I did like finding out more about the Presger translators although they still remain very strange with their powers.

I didn't love this book as much as the Justice trilogy or Provenance but I liked it a lot and it was nice to read something in this universe again.


Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon), 240pp [Hugo book].
Since it just won a Hugo, I figured I should read it. Plus I really enjoyed Vernon's series for kids like Hamster Princess and Dragonbreath so I thought I would like her style. And I really did. This is a fairytale but a fairy tale where most people act like people and react to event like normal people would.

Marra is the third daughter of a King, raised in a convent, because the Prince of the neighboring kingdom, who married first one and then the next of her sisters didn't want any competition for heirs. Marra realizes the Prince had a hand in death of her eldest sister and is abusing the next one and it will be her turn if the second sister dies. So she sets out on a quest to kill the Prince and help her sister with the help of an elderly dust wife (a witch person who talks with the dead and takes care of cemetaries). She also acquires a dog made of bones, and a former knight they get at the goblin market and her Fairy Godmother to go on the quest with her.

I loved that in the story it was a 30 year old woman, a middle aged warrior and two elderly women on a quest. And a demon chicken and a bone dog. It was a fairy tale but with my kind of humor and people behaving in a interesting way.

The only weird thing for me was the use of the word "christening". There are Fairy Godmothers in this world who bestow gifts on the babies and there are "christenings" but why couldn't it have been "a naming ceremony" or something. It was emphasized that different countries had different gods and certainly not Christian beliefs so why would this ceremony for children still be called a christening? Just because it was a word automatically associated with that in our culture? It was just weird to me.

Anyway, I enjoyed this book and I'm happy it won the Hugo.

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, 500pp [Hugo book].
For my goal of five Hugo winning books a year I needed one more Hugo book, so I picked this one, which was published in the mid 90s and is about a word with nanotechnology. In Jo Walson's book "Informal History of the Hugos" she mentioned that she like 3/4 of the book and then the ending sort of went downhill, and she is pretty much right.

This book is set mostly in Shanghai, and the world is divided into basically clans, including Victorians, who emulate the 19th century Victorian as a reaction to much looser ancestors. In this world, everything is based with nanotechnology and a lot of possible. A girl growing up in the slums ends up with a very fancy technological book, a Primer, that basically raises her with the help of an actress. There are all kinds of political things too and a lot of weirdness.

What this book does really well was worldbuilding. It really did feel like a future world where technology changed a lot how the world worked. The little details of the world felt very thought out. But the overall plot was weird and it really didn't go anywhere interesting in the end, even with Nell. And some plot points like the Drummers were just really really weird.

This book was just OK for me. I understand why it won a Hugo but overall it is not a book one would reread. In some ways it reminded me of when I was reading Virge - interesting ideas but I was not eager to get back into it.

I spent most of August reading "The First Man in Rome" by Colleen McCullough, which is a giant historical fiction book and which I was supposed to finish at the end of August but alas family illness and lack of commute intervened, so it will be in the September book post. Since it was such a big book, I did break it up with some novellas and children's books so those are mostly the books for this post.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, 138pp
Ever since I finally read "The Grapes of Wrath" a few years ago and loved it, I was trying to read more Steinbeck, and this was on my list for this year. It is short and good overall, but I do think his books have very similar themes so it sort of loses its luster. "Grapes of Wrath" is still my favorite of his but I liked this one more than "East of Eden". This book is set on Monterey California, and I did really like his descriptions of various sea creatures. He certainly does evoke a feeling of living on that street. His people feel like real people in all their sophistication, which I also liked. I think he is very good at capturing the mood which matters a bit more than the plot. It was good but I'm also done with Steinbeck for now.

Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith, 183pp
This book is a graphic novel of the first third of Beowulf but for children. Set in the modern world, an uptight grown up Grindle is threatening a bunch of roudy kids in their Treehouse led by a kid king who is bountiful in providing toys and sugar to his followers. Grindle can turn the kids into teenagers and grown up with his finger, so treehouse is devastated by his invasion. (To be fair, the Treehouse hangs over his property and is full of kids being loud and obnoxious, so one does feel sympathy there). Bea Wolf comes from the neighboring kid king to fight Grindle and to save Treeheart treehouse. This version has wonderful illustrations that both my kids were fascinated with and a lot of alliteration and it really just sounds like Beowulf. Plus it has an afterword that explains the original story and its provenance in kid friendly language that my 9 year old appreciated. This was a big hit in my house. Very very clever book and I hope there will be a sequel with Grindle's mother, who does appear at the end of the book. Highly recommend.

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh, 105pp
A novella recommended to me by a friend. There is a sequel as well but I haven't read that one yet. This is set in the 19th century, it feels. It is a story of a Wild Man who lives in the woods called the Greenhallow, who lived there for centuries and who tries to protect the woods and people. He lives in a cottage than not all can find with a cat and dryads. One day Henry Silver, a new owner of a Hall nearby, stumbles upon the wood and things change. There are hunters in the novel of many evil things, fae, and wood magic. What stands out to me is the writing - it makes you feel like you are in the wood. The writer also slowly builds on the history and slowly divulges information. There is no rush but there is feelings. And there is also an underlying romance although that wasn't as front and center. It is a fairytale with some monster hunting and it is just a lovely way to spend your time.

Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo, 182pp
I came across it at a library sale before summer started and grabbed it for my oldest since it was a $1. I knew about the book but I never read it. Tanya read it for her summer reading and really liked it so she wanted me to read it too. There is also a movie that they enjoyed watching, even though the movie didn't always follow the plot apparently. The book protagonist is a 10 year old girl Opal, who just moved to a new town with her dad, who is a preacher. Her Mom abandoned the family long ago due to her alcoholism so Opal is still dealing with that as well as leaving all familiar things behind. She finds a stray dog and claims him, calling him Winn-Dixie after a grocery story where she finds him, and through the dog meets various people and bring them together and gains friends. And also a better understanding of her father and other people in general. I thought it was a nice kid's book - it is certainly for kids but I did enjoy reading it and seeing her discover people. The perspective felt like a kid perspective, which is not easy to pull off. I'm sure I got a lot more subtlety than my kid did, there is a lot of complicated things in the story but she did say she really liked the book. I do feel like I'm catching up on essential kid books that most people know.

A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djeli Clark, 43pp
This was the first novella, I believe, and I sort of read this series backward. I read the novel, then the second novella and finally this one. I knew some of this plot since it was referenced in the novel and I was very familiar with world building, which I think helped a lot. Fatma and Siti first meet in this book, and that was most interesting part for me, since I already knew these characters and where they were going. The plot itself is a bit simple since it is not a long book, so it is solved pretty quickly. But I can see where the set up here led to the novel. Plotting is not exactly Clark's strength - my favorite thing is world building here.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel, 273pp

I wanted to read more by this author since I did like "Station Eleven". And this book takes place in a sort of parallel universe where the pandemic never happened. Two characters recur in this book - Leon and Miranda, so that link is there but this is not a sci-fi world, it is like our world. This book is about a woman named Vincent and a Ponzi scheme and how it affects several characters. A terrible message is grafitied on the front window of a fancy hotel and lots of things stem from that. I actually didn't understand why all the characters were shocked by the message, I didn't find it that threatening. And most people would just dismiss that kind of thing, but in the story people were shocked.

I think Mandel is good at developing her characters and their story but not many characters in the story were that interesting. I didn't find Vincent and all she was going through that interesting or the mystery about how she came to be in the ocean, which starts the story. There are sad parts, especially for people who invested their money and were left with nothing, and some good passages from perspective of people perpetuating the scheme as they know they are about to get arrested. But overall, this book was just ok. I found "Station Eleven" better. I still want to read the next book, as I heard good things but this one is not sticking much in my head.

Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren, 98pp [translated from Swedish].
I read this as a kid but barely remembered it. My friend got Tanya a big 3 book volume and beautiful pictures for the her birthday a few years ago, but Tanya wasn't interested at the time. She tried it out this year and decided to read it and then liked it enough to read all three Pippi books in this volume. I decided to reread the first one since it has been quite a long time.

I think it does read better for a kid but it was still amusing. It feels like very separate short stories without too big of an overarching plot but a lot of kid stories are like that.

Pippi lives all alone in her giant house with her horse and her monkey and makes friends with next door neighbors Annika and Tommy. She is also super strong and doesn't go for any conventions. The school episode, the one with the burglars and the circus were probably the funniest. But now as an adult, I can't read this book the same way. I feel bad for her being all alone with no parents and no one to care for her - She is a fantasy all kids want to be but as a grown-up it is a bit sad. I'm glad Tanya finally read it though and enjoyed it as it is certainly a classic.

Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer by Megan McDonald, 186pp
I got Tanya a couple of Judy Moody books in the library in May and June since she read pieces of one in school and she wanted me to get this one. Turns out this is also a movie that is available on for free on YouTube, which the girls eagerly watched. Tanya insisted that I had to read it, so I did during my commute. It didn't take too long.

For a kid book, it is pretty good. Judy just finished 3rd grade (which is why Tanya's class also watched this movie at the end of June at the end of their 3rd grade) and she wants to have a great summer so she develops a chart for excitement points. The problem is that two of her friend leave town for the summer, her parents leave for California and her aunt comes to watch her and her brother and the summer looks like it would stink. There are Bigfoot chases, a hunt for her teacher who is working a summer job somewhere, some circus stuff, a poop picnic, and a gross roller coaster ride. It was amusing and Tanya had fun reading it so win win.

The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier, 391pp [translated from French].
My Dad gave me this book for my birthday, and I read it pretty quickly since I really liked the premise. Four months after a Paris-New York plane lands in New York after experiencing severe turbulence, another identical plane appears in the sky with identical people. So now there are two of the same people, except those who died in the meantime, but the first ones have four more months of memories, went through breakups or other things. The US government detains the plane, and the scientists posit that the whole thing proves the world is a simulation, that it is a test from some very advanced AI, or at least that is the most plausible theory. Which is really weird. Anyway, a lot of the book are people coming to terms with this and several characters either learn from what ones before did or have to learn to share a kid who wasn't on the plane and doubled or learn how to split a life. One guy is an author who wrote a bestselling book after he got off the first plane and then killed himself so now his counterpart in the second plane have to live with that. And they have to contend with the reaction of the world.

This book is definitely French since it has a certain view of the US, that US is full of religious fanatics, which is not exactly wrong, but certainly mocking. And the ending is also very French I think.

Overall it is a good take on the turbulence doing a weird thing to a plane (a bit more interesting than Manifest to me since there are not really weird callings here) but the premise is also a bit weird in its explanation of what caused this. I liked the book overall, even if some things didn't exactly work for me. But I like the writing style.

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh, 369pp
A quick read since these are collected comic strips from Brosh's blog of the same name. I read it because of an online rec but it was just ok. Some of the stories about her childhood were funny like the one about the cake or getting lost in the woods or the goose. Some stuff about depression is an interesting perspective - she is certainly very honest and has a way of explaining. There are a lot of stuff about her dogs - I don't really care about dogs so that wasn't compelling. But mostly is was just ok, sort of amusing.

Most books disappointed me this April. I have been reading a book in Russian that my Dad gave me for my birthday "Fox Fords" - it is 1,000 pages and I needed to break it up. I suspect it would take me awhile. So I would pick books that are either quick read or short for a distraction and most books I have been picking have mostly been frustrating. Except BFG - that was a cute kid's book. So this post is mostly about how these books fell flat for me.

Exhalation by Ted Chiang, 340pp

First disappointing book that I finished in April was Ted Chiang's more recent collection of short stories. I enjoyed the first one, even if I didn't like all the stories there but I had a lot less tolerance for this one. I did like maybe half the stories but I also found his writing style very choppy - he is not terribly good at dialogue and voice - all the characters in a story sound very similar. He is a person of ideas. He develops a story around the idea and then beats it over the head. Some ideas are pretty interesting and it works but some ideas didn't work for me and the dissonance of the writing style just stood out.

I actually took notes on the stories so if you are interested take a look. It is mostly for me to remember.
( Stories )

BFG by Roald Dahl, 208pp

This was a pretty cute book. It all takes place in like two days. Sophie, an orphan, see the giant out of her window, who basically kidnaps her so she doesn't tell about giants, but he is a good giant, unlike the other nine nasty giant. BFG also catches dreams and gives it to people. So after one day Sophie comes up with the plan to stop the other 9 nasty giants from eating people and they do that. Pretty straightforward with nice dream imagery. Tanya really liked it and wanted me to read it, so I did. I'm catching up on Dahl this year apparently, since I never read him as a kid.

The Road Trip by Beth O'Leary, 381pp

I liked O'Leary's last two books, especially the characters in the "Switch" so I was looking forward to some light romance book of two exes getting back together through a road trip. And ended up hating pretty much all the characters. Dylan and Addie meet in France - he is on holiday, she is a caretaker of the estate for the summer, they both know the same friend whose family owns the estate. They immediately are attracted to each other and begin sleeping together right away but they also fall in love after those few holiday weeks and it is all super serious. Which already makes me roll my eyes because they don't really know each other. Then he goes travelling for a while and is basically a shitty boyfriend but then he comes back right when she was going to give up. And continues to be a shitty boyfriend though his codependence with his best friend, who is the worst. Dylan is incapable of making up his mind or making his own decisions and is easily led - which at least the book does acknowledge. Addie should have dumped him then.

Instead they break up because of a disturbing misunderstanding and after a year and a half end up in the same car for a day going to their mutual friend's wedding with the shitty best friend, Addie's sister and a random dude, going through silly contrived things that make their trip longer and ending up back together. I didn't like them together in the first place so I didn't care if they ended up together. I didn't like their friends who all just drink a lot and party with drinking and consider that a great time. There are also class issues as Dylan and his shitty friend Marcus are very rich. And Dylan has a cliche terrible Dad who disowns Dylan's older brother for being gay and is a general dick although he has a point of Dylan getting his life together and making some sort of decision. The older brother's only characteristic is being gay, with his fiancee, and even running some gay clubs in US or something - it just felt tacked on. I don't know - lots of things in this book just irritated me. Mostly I couldn't understand what Addie sees in Dylan or why she loves him.

The Big Time by Fritz Leiber, 118pp [Hugo book]
This book won a Hugo in the 50s, and the style is a bit weird. There is a time war going on and people are taken through various times to fight it. There are places where the soldiers fighting in the time war can rest and recuparate and Entertainers (basically escort services) to help them relax. There bunch of people from various times end up stuck in a locked room with a ticking nuclear bomb and they need to figure out who basically took the remote that can open the door to chuck that bomb into the void or disarm it. It is a locked room mystery. it was hard for me to keep track of all the characters, and I usually can keep track really well. It was fine but everything felt just really crammed together and sort of weird.

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad, 345pp

I read an article that recommended this book so I took it up, not knowing anything about the author or her popular column in the New York Times. All I knew this was a story of a young person in their early 20s who gets diagnosed with cancer and then deals with that and subsequent recovery.

Suleika graduates college, meets a boy, moves to Paris for a job, gets into the relationship with the new guy and when things are looking up get diagnosed with leukemia. This book is split in half - her illness and treatment in all the gory details of what that entails and how it affects her body and her mind and her relationship. She started writing her New York Times column at this time as well. She describes her stem cell transplant and what that entails as well. And the friends she meets who are also young people with cancer and what happens to them. And the second part is her recovery and the trip around the US to meet people who have written to her while she was sick and as a way to find who she was after the illness.

This is a very honest book, and not always an easy book but also a hopeful one. And for some reason, reading
about people who deal with long term illness has been fascinating to me lately, maybe because I'm getting older and there is more awareness of the fragility of the body.

Leg to Stand On by Oliver Sacks, 207pp

When Sacks was about my age, he went on a hike in Norway, and while escaping from a bull on his path, he fell and shattered his left leg. It took him seven hours to crawl down to where he was found by other people and could be rescued - if night had set in he would have died and he found other people just as night was settling - very dramatic movie type rescue that actually happened to him. He got surgery on his leg in London but in the process he lost the feeling that the leg belonged to him. It felt alien. At the time, there wasn't much in medical literature describing these sensations or how to restore the movement, so Sacks wrote up his own case history. His hike, his crawl down, his surgery time, his recovery time and restoring sensation. This book is about how we perceive ourselves and what happens if we lose the knowledge, the proprioception sense of any of our parts. And how to regain it. As usual, Sacks has a way with words. He does get a bit too philosophical at the end of the book, which he himself acknowledges in the Afterward was too much. But other than that bit, this was an enjoyable case study as usual with Sacks.

I was reading this book at the same time as the Jaouad book, so I was reading two different narratives of illness and psychological impacts of illness and recovery, which felt complimentary at times. One less dire although at some point Sacks' life was on the line. It is interesting to see two different people grappling with what happened to them, where they had no control.


The Years by Annie Ernaux, c. 240pp

When I was watching a brief interview with Erneax after she just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, an interviewer asked her what book out of all she'd written represents her the best and what she wants to readers to read. Ernaux pointed to this book as the one that shows the most her approach and what she wants to accomplish. I read her "Woman's Story" last year, which was about her mother. This book is about her own life but told from someone who is observing the memories as the indications of history and times she lives in. You can't separate memories and who the person is from the context of their life and the history and events in the time and place where they live. So it is a sort of autobiography but with more what that life says about the world and about the person and how they both influence each other. So there are some very intimate thoughts at the same time as there is a bit of a remove from the whole person, maybe because this was not in the first person. And you are never quite sure how much is a real recollection and what is fiction at times. But certainly, a glimpse of what it was like to grow up in France after the war and to live up to almost present day. When outside politics influence memory and how memories are formed and how we change. I don't know if I liked this book - I though "Woman's Story" was a little more effective, but this book really does make you think of what makes a person and a life. I do see why she is a popular French writer. The book feels very French.

What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch, 154pp [Rivers of London novella].

Rivers of London novella that takes place while Peter was in the country, trying to find the missing girls. This novella is from Abigail's point of view with a small appearance from Nightingale. It was cute enough. It was interesting to see Abigail's world and what interests her, and her family situation with the tragedy that befallen her brother. She doesn't always make the smartest decisions, but she is a teenager and of course she feels she can solve it herself. But like tell an actual magician is a good rule to actually follow! At least she does make a plan before going into the haunted house. I wasn't too invested in the story though; it was ok. I feel this novella was two different stories - one up to the part in the house and the other in the house itself and the memories, and it was tonally just different. And there were talking foxes, which is still very weird - I find the River goddesses less weird than talking foxes for some reason. Overall an interesting side trip into this universe but just ok as a book.

Dragonbreath: The Case of the Toxic Mutants by Ursula Vernon, 201pp [Dragonbreath 9]
The 9th book of the series. Danny, Wendell and Christiana visit Danny's paternal grandfather at his retirement community and investigate missing dentures, retainers and a lawn goose with all his little clothes missing. With the trip to the library, they figure out the culprits and follow them to an abandoned hospital full of toxic sludge. It was an entertaining book. Vernon puts in a lot of jokes and references that flow over kid's heads but certainly makes adults chuckle. Still enjoying the series - reading them on my own now once Tanya is done (she just finished book 11 last night, so I should finish the series soon).

In Love: a memoir of love and loss by Amy Bloom, 222pp
Bloom chronicles her husband's journey to go to Switzerland to end his life after his diagnosis of early-onset of Alzheimer's in his early 60s. And she recounts their life together as well. He was her second marriage and he started getting symptoms three years or so before his diagnosis. When he finally got the diagnosis, he knew early that he wanted to die while he still could make that decision and asked her to help him and she found Dignitas, a company in Switzerland after researching a lot of options locally. This is the chronicle of their trip there and also what led to it and some of her life and emotions as well. It is a very moving book. This year I watched two movies about people with early-onset Alzheimer's - the one with Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci, and "Still Alice" with Julianne Moore - in both, the characters planned their death, not always successfully. It is a very bleak disease, and it is heartbreaking. It is a very good book, very matter of fact in a lot of ways, but also is about love and death and those left behind.


The City and the city by China Mieville, 316pp [Hugo book]
This book won a Hugo and a lot of other prizes. The main character is a detective investigating a murder but he happens to live in a city that overlaps with another city, and all the people work very hard not to see the streets, buildings or people in the other city even if that building or street happens to be on the other side of your street. If the people accidentally or on purpose stop unseeing, for example crash their car into the building that is in the other place, a mysterious power called Breach would come for them. The two cities are located in Eastern Europe - one is more communism prone and the other is trying to open up. There are culture crashes too and big rules. It is a very clever bit of worldbuilding. The murder mystery itself grows better as the story progresses. I didn't love this book but I did grow to like it and got a bit invested as the book went on and I can see why this very original worldbuilding shared a Hugo with the "Windup Girl."


Dragonbreath: Knight-Napped! by Ursula Vernon, 203pp [Dragonbreath 10].
The 10th and penultimate Dragonbreath book. After Danny get a message from his cousin Spencer, via a pigeon who likes to sit on his head, he, Wendell and Christiana go to a castle to rescue him from knights who want to slay dragons. Loved the Danny's Mom "Have fun storming the castle" reference and Christiana knightly family tree. I really enjoyed this one since I love castles and I also found the whole dragon fighting knights or at least pretending to fight, really funny.

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson, 280pp
I read this book after seeing it on Jo Walton's book recs and it was a really fun look at the everyday objects we take for granted and the history of our utensils and the stove and the fridge and just our kitchen in general. We don't think about it, but I can't look at the fork or a frying pan in the same way again. The fuel available dictated the kinds of knives we need and how the difference between say French and Chinese cuisine developed. And even our overbite mouths. And it made me really appreciate everything in my kitchen. An excellent and entertaining book.

Yendi by Stephen Brust, 142pp
I'm not a big fan of mafia stories or any sort of organized crime. So the first half of this book with the territorial war was mostly boring to me. The dialogue seemed choppy and I didn't see what the point was. I didn't care about any of moves by any of the players at all. Thankfully, the book picked up once it became clear that the territorial war was largely a ploy and there was a bigger plan at work, which gave a lot more insight into the worldbuilding and the society of this universe and some of its rules. And it was also a love story although I don't really care about that part. It did give a better understanding of Cawti; she seemed very different in the previous book. And by the end I do want to learn more about this world so I will continue with the next book next year.

War for the Oaks by Emma Bull, 319pp
This was on my list for years and I finally ordered a copy from the library and read it in physical form. I don't know if I was in the right mood for it though. The premise is interesting, a regular woman, a musician gets drawn in a Fairie war between seelie and unseelie courts, but it felt like mostly the characters were just hanging around. And of course, Edie, the main character is special and can also weave magic with music. I'm not a musician and have very little understanding of intricacies of music or how musicians rehearse and build a song, and there were many descriptions of that. Unlike Edie, I could recognize a lot sooner which characters she met where from fairie. I did like the slow build up of her romance in the book and several false starts. And the plots twists and characters were interesting on an intellectual level. It was a good book and I can see why so many people love it, but it was mostly just ok for me.

Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr, 202pp
In 2004-2005, Doerr got a free apartment and a stipend to come live in Rome for a year and write what he wanted, quite unexpectedly. So he moved to Rome with his wife and 6 months old twins from the Boise, Idaho. This book is a journal but also impressions of a young father, a writer, dropped into a big ancient city filled with history and wonder and also realizing how everyday things like shopping become extraordinary in a new place where he could barely speak the language. A lot of it is impressions and Doerr is quite good at describing things - I loved the two fiction book I read by him. John Paul II died in the spring 2005, so he was also a witness to this event and described it. A lot of the book is also about parenting, and parenting twins and figuring that out as well. It wasn't a long book but it was pleasant to spend some time in 2004-2005 Rome with him.

A Woman's Story by Annie Erneux, 96pp [translated from French]
I picked this us after Annie Erneux won a Nobel Prize for Literature this year and read it since the online hold came fairly quickly. It is also a short book. I do like her style. I liked a brief interview with her where she said that the main thing about writing to her is to get at the truth. And I think she is trying to get at the core of human beings with all their complexities and all the impositions of society. This book is the story of the mother's life, written just after her mother has died. Her mother lived an ordinary life but also was not a one-faceted person. There was a lot to her from determination to anger. And the love for her was also complicated. And I can relate to that. This book is also a book of grief with the author dealing with her grief after her mother died and some guilt by the end of it so it feels a bit like peaking in her head. She writes very straightforwardly, which is partly translation from French, but I think this helps her narrative. I do want to read more by Erneux.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djeli Clark, 65pp
A novella in the Dead Djinn universe series. It takes place before Master of Djinn, which I read, and it was nice to see more of this universe. I liked the investigation and getting to know Hamed and Onsi more - I did like them in the novel but the novella certainly shows their personalities more. A cute story but with a fully realized universe. Good fun.

The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith, 1452pp [Strike 6]
Book 6 in the Cormoran Strike series. I still think Book 5 is my favorite because of all the emotional beats there but this book was quite interesting up until the end and it certainly worthy of this series. I don't know if the resolution quite earns it, since the final confrontation scene seemed a bit too much and slightly out of place for who the actual killer is, but I did enjoy it greatly overall. In print, this book is over 1000 pages, and I have seen how hefty it looks in the bookstore. For this library Kindle version, the publishers thankfully added a typed up, bigger font version of all the chats, since a lot of dialogue did take place withing private chats of a game which is in the book was in double and triple columns and in small font, so it came out to 1452 pages, but because a lot of dialogue was chats it read quickly. The book itself flowed really well and you never want to stop reading since you want to see what happened next. There is quite a lot of characters, but I had no issues keeping them straight, including their online handle. We are privy to more info that Robin and Strike are because of those chats so that was interesting. Especially by the second half of the book I just couldn't put it down and kept reading it at every free moment. Rowling does know how to write a good mystery.

I was really annoyed at some of the reviews of the book since they completely misrepresented the plot. This shouldn't have surprised me actually because it happened for the fifth book as well since the reviewers really want to tie the books with Rowling's personal beliefs and exaggerate things to tremendous extent. The main murder victim, Edie, was a co-creator of an online cartoon that then had mainstream success, but the fans didn't suddenly turn on her randomly once she was famous for it because they questioned her approach to a worm and her problematic characterizations, as one reviewer said trying to make parallels (that reviewer obviously didn't read the book properly). In her early interviews, before Edie's cartoon got famous, she sort of offhandedly criticized a game that was made from her cartoon by two fans. And one fan, Anomie, got really offended at that and started the online hate campaign. This was a personal vendetta. There is a lot of criticism of far-right in the book, and incel, and also far-left that take it a bit too far, but also there is really a fairly realistic portrayal of online culture and why people flock to that on top of criticism of people who take it too seriously and take it too far. But these books are about really good and slightly unusual mysteries but also about the personal growth of both Robin and Cormoran and the slow build of their romantic feelings and their friendship. I think people should be able to separate the author from the story.


Dragonbreath: When Fairies Go Bad by Ursula Vernon, 201pp [Dragonbreath 7].
The seventh book of the Dragonbreath series and the hardest one to track down. We own the first 6 books but we are relying on the library to get the next five. And while Brooklyn Public library had books 8 to 11, it didn't have 7. But the New York Public library did and my Dad is a member since that library includes Staten Island. So I ordered it from his account and Tanya was able to read it. It seems more menacing in its threat that the other books. I really liked Danny's determination to get his Mom back. And I loved the fact that coffee was untouched was a clue she really was kidnapped by fairies. Tanya's favorite part was Christiana's rhyming. And it was pretty fun as is her skepticism about the whole experience. The brief hint that the bus could also take them to Oz was kind of funny, even though I had to point out the reference to Tanya. I certainly enjoyed it more than the last book and it continues to be a good series. Four more books to go.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling, 272pp [reread]
I finally finished reading it out loud to Tanya after starting this summer since we didn't always had time. Or she would rather play but would let me read a bit but then would want me to keep reading. She said the beginning of the book was a bit boring to her but once Hagrid shows up and especially the magic school were much more interesting. Her favorite part remains Ron's spell to turn Scabbers yellow and also when Norbert ribbed the teddy bear's head off. She also enjoyed making up new names for the characters, mainly to drive me crazy. Dumbledore was Stumbledoor or Bumbledoor, Snape became Snake and Quirell Squirrel. The twist at the end did really surprise her, so that was fun. We are now watching the movie. Olivia listened to some parts but wasn't paying attention nmost of the time, she might be too young to follow the plot. It is the first time I read this book outloud and I was able to see some language pattens in it - the characters stopped dead in the middle of something quite a lot, which Tanya found hilarious since she wanted to take it literally.