Started: 3/3/21
Finished: 3/6/21
I wasn’t sure, using the title as my only clue, if this was going to be about actual killing or not, and I’m not going to tell you. But I will tell you that this was really good. I have plenty of sympathy for the main character (not total, for reasons), and I both hate and understand her sister. Sort of understand. Enough to understand the main character’s actions. Anyway, it’s good. You should read it.
Started: 2/12/21
Gave up: 2/14/21
Ugh. Retired military, super-capable, gentlemanly know-it-all has to save his town after an EMP takes out all modern amenities. I have read this book before. I have read better versions of this book. This one feels like a non-writer decided to fictionalize his What To Do In Case Of An EMP report, hoping it would get his point across better. It’s all tell, no show, and Mr. Only I Am Making The Right Decisions is going to be proven right. AND it’s the beginning of a series, so he’s probably going to end up saving the world. I’m sitting this one out.
Started: 1/22/21
Finished: 1/30/21
Book 2 of the Maisie Dobbs series. She’s still mostly perfect, but her detective work has a woo-woo element that I’m not sure I’ll like long-term. I was expecting pure investigation and deductive reasoning, with maybe some insight, but she practically has visions and gets feelings about things. I’m interested, but I’ll have to see where this goes.
Started: 1/23/21
Finished: 1/26/21
I’ve been meaning to read this for years, but I guess better late than never. This book is so good. Young adult can be hard to read. If it’s bad, it’s cringe-y bad, and I’ll usually put it down. This is good. And it’s hard. I cried, I got angry, I felt helpless, I cried some more, and I got angry some more. And then I cried again. I was so emotional, nearly the whole book, that I stopped reading it in bed. I switched to a friendly murder mystery before going to sleep because I’d be more able to wind down and fall asleep. I’m not going to tell you the plot, even the beginning – it’s easy enough for you to find that. And as awful as it is to know what prompted this book to be written, it’s so much worse knowing how much worse things have gotten since this book was published not even four years ago.
Started: 1/19/21
Finished: 1/22/21
I’d heard of this series, but I didn’t start it until Jess recommended it. I LOVED this book by the time I was only 30 pages in, and I raced through it (as much as I can during the work week these days). I’m thrilled there are 15 more books so far. She’s a private investigator of sorts in England in the period between the world wars.
The only thing I’m hoping gets addressed later on is that she’s kind of perfect. Like, she has no flaws, she has lots of useful skills, and everyone loves her. I mean, I love her, but she needs to have SOMEthing to improve on, right? She did one not great thing, but a) we only find out about it at the end of the book, and b) we find out about it as she’s doing something to correct it.
Started: 12/26/20
Finished: 12/27/20
I can’t remember where I heard about this book, but it starts out HARD. A twenty-something black woman babysits for a white family, and one night, the mother calls her unexpectedly to take the toddler out for a little bit so they can deal with an emergency at home. The babysitter tells her she’s not dressed like she normally is (she was out with friends), and the mother says that’s fine, so she takes the toddler down the street to a local expensive grocery store to just kill time. A shopper calls security on her, implying that she kidnapped the little girl, and it’s a REALLY tense scene. It turns out fine, and the rest of the book talks about the aftermath, but in a very anticlimactic way. Well, until the climax. Anyway, it’s about how all these characters see each other and how they react and think about themselves, and it’s pretty funny and enjoyable, which I did NOT expect after that scary beginning.
Started: 12/15/20
Finished: 12/19/20
I’ve been a little off Ann Patchett for a few years. I’m afraid to re-read Bel Canto, which I read several times years ago and LOVED and gave as gifts to many many people. What if I have changed enough that I don’t love it anymore? Anyway, I picked up The Dutch House. First, it’s good. When I couldn’t read it, I wanted to read it. Second, turns out that in order for me to LOVE a book, I need it to have a plot. It’s not that nothing happens – it’s a family saga, plenty happens – but it’s a family saga, so there’s no mystery to solve, no murder to avenge, no THING to DO. And I have learned that I prefer books that have a THING the characters need to DO.
Started: 8/22/20
Finished: 8/24/20
This was a good book, YA, and a hard read. The teenagers all feel very real, even though I was nothing like them in high school, and neither were most (if not all) if the kids I knew, but hey, times are different. It’s emotional and disturbing, and I couldn’t put it down.
Started: 8/6/20
Finished: 8/9/20
Molly recommended this book to me. She likes thrillers, I like thrillers, but I think she only recommends to me the ones she’s not sure she likes because she needs to talk about them. This is the second time I’ve read one from her that I felt I had to push through. It was interesting, and I don’t NOT recommend it, but it’s one of those where the narrator starts to make decisions that YOU know are wrong, that even HE knows are wrong, and it’s hard not to get frustrated.
Started: 8/2/20
Finished: 8/6/20
I thought about putting this down shortly after starting it. Not because it was bad, it’s very much not bad, but because it wasn’t grabbing me. I wasn’t positive I was in the right mood for it. But I kept reading, and I kept reading, and I kept reading, and I couldn’t stop reading, and I stayed up late two nights running because I couldn’t stop reading, and then it ended, and I’m a little sad. It’s about two women who meet in college and then separate and how their lives went on.
Started: 8/1/20
Finished: 8/2/20
Talk about a change in tone. I went from a whole bunch of weird SFF short stories (and then Riot Baby) to this charming little story about women who work in a department store in post-WWII Australia. Wish I could remember how I heard about it.
Started: 5/16/20
Finished: 5/19/20
It’s a book, not a movie, so while I would call it a rom-com, I suppose it’s more correctly chick lit. It’s totally a rom-com, and it name-checks every rom-com out there because part of the plot is that it steals the meet-cutes from them. And just like a rom-com, it was SO OBVIOUS who the love interest was that it was infuriating that no one else seemed to think so.
It was light, it was mostly cute, but it seemed to go a little longer than it had to. I’d watch the movie, but I wouldn’t re-read the book.
Started: 5/2/20
Finished: 5/6/20
This book started out really cute, turned absurd, got serious, took a dark turn, and ended on the cute side again without taking into account the darkness. The second half, especially the last little bit, felt like an exercise rather than a novel, so I can’t say I fully recommend it, at least not as an immersive novel. On the other hand, it was a really interesting exercise in use of language, and the made up months and days made me laugh, especially toward the end.
Started: 4/27/20
Finished: 5/2/20
Having just finished a couple of very pleasant adventure stories with likeable protagonists, I almost physically recoiled at the main character’s attitude in the first few pages. It’s an adjustment. It’s also about a murder, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Pretty much all of the male characters came across as arrogant chauvinists, including (especially) the good guys, so the book was a bit much to take. I enjoyed it, but I can’t say I liked it.
Started: 1/16/20
Finished: 1/20/20
Thriller/horror story. I gave up on another Ruth Ware book, but I gave this one a try on Molly’s recommendation. I was truly creeped out by it (I stopped reading it at night), but…I can’t really say more without giving stuff away. It was pretty good.
Started: 11/12/19
Finished: 11/19/19
Recommended by Jo Walton (an author I like and whose recommendations I trust), it’s a somewhat quiet story about a British family who goes to France for a vacation, immediately lose their mother to hospital convalescence, and hang out for the summer in this hotel pretty much on their own, over the objections of the women who run the hotel. The oldest is 16 and is sick for the first half of the book, so basically not a character until later, and the narrator is the next oldest, at 13. There are shenanigans going on the background that the narrator doesn’t understand completely. It’s good, it’s disturbing at times – I think I liked it. It definitely makes me want to go to France.
Started: 9/28/19
Gave up: 9/28/19
I’m sure this book is really funny, but I am not its audience: Part 2. Or I was not in the right mood: Part 2. The man climbs out the window right away, but I don’t know why. He leaves his own party and I don’t know why. He STEALS SOMEONE’S SUITCASE at a bus station on, like, the third page, and that just seems really cruel AND I STILL DON’T KNOW WHY, so I gave up.
Started: 9/23/19
Finished: 9/27/19
I almost put this book down several times out of, not boredom, but kind of a “this isn’t what I want to be reading right now” feeling. I kept convincing myself I wanted to see where it was going. It won the Pulitzer Prize by being about an author who dated a man who won the Pulitzer Prize and who was trying to get his third book published. It got rejected because no one wanted to read another book about a man wandering around his city coming to terms with his life. What was this book about? A man wandering the world coming to terms with his life. I suppose I appreciate the lampshading, but at the same time, it’s kind of disgusting.
So…it was good, but not for me. I finished it anyway.
Started: 7/28/19
Finished: 7/28/19
Super short, and very moving, but it’s mostly in the footnotes and the editing comments, so it takes a little maneuvering to get at it.
Started: 5/24/19
Gave up: 5/25/19
An Emily recommendation, and one that started out well, but then a baby died, very early on in the story, and I just couldn’t continue. I would like to read the book, but I think I might need a few years first.