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books

Kimberly’s First Quarter of 2020

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The first quarter of 2020 ended yesterday, despite how many years it feels like it’s actually been. I’m in my third week of working exclusively from home, and my household seems to be holding up OK. I’m thankful I live with a person I love and enjoy spending time with; being alone without another human or a pet in the house would be a lot tougher (though that time with him is still limited as he is keeping his normal long hours – just closed up in the home office now).

I’ve seen an uptick in my reading these past few weeks, in part to escape from the news and in part because I’m not doing much else outside of work. Here’s a brief rundown of my Q1 reading in order, a total of 16 books.

Weather by Jenny Offill

Offill’s writing is spare in this story about a woman named Lizzie who answers fan mail for a friend’s podcast called Hell and High Water. This is certainly not a plot-driven book, though; I feel like giving any sort of plot synopsis is misleading. It’s more about Lizzie’s family, her day to day work as a librarian, and her musings on the state of America in the 21st century. This is a much-lauded book that wasn’t quite to my taste, though it was an interesting way to kick off the year.

 

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

I re-read this for probably the tenth time after watching the BBC/HBO tv series (which I liked but didn’t love). I still love the book just as much.

 

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

This modern classic of nonfiction writing is just the kind of nonfiction I love, a mix of history and science that’s fascinating from beginning to end. It tracks the rise of human civilizations all over the world, elegantly and convincingly arguing that geographical and environmental factors shaped humanity (and all its differences) much more than did any innate qualities of race or DNA, which were racist arguments being made by others at the time the book was published.

 

Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses by Jen Diamond

I purchased this book at the Texas Book Festival and picked it up again in January when I decided I’d actually read the books I purchased this time. To my delight, I loved it. These are bizarre, creative, profound and often funny stories that all have a tinge of science fiction, fantasy, or the weird. The one that most people who have read the collection talk about is the angler fish romance, possibly the weirdest of all the stories (and great because of its weirdness). My favorite is a tie between the story about old women and sex dolls and the story about social media accounts of dead people being co-opted by A.I. (something we are seeing the beginnings of in the here and now).

 

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

This is another book I purchased at the book festival, and it was another hit. Good job, me! It’s about a woman who dreams that she’s a woman in Elizabethan England when she’s sleeping – only she doesn’t think they’re dreams. They feel real, and as time goes on, they feel realer than her waking life in present day. Newman manages this concept really well, showing shifts in the world we thought was ours over time and how such a condition (or reality) would genuinely affect a person and her relationships. It’s fascinating to try to put the pieces together. While this is definitely a literary novel, it balances its literary aspects with the science fiction plot well. This is a great readalike for Version Control by Dexter Palmer, which I also loved.

 

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

This is a huge bestseller recommended by Stephen King, and I think my expectations were too high as a result. It’s about Yale secret societies, their use of black magic, and a young woman named Alex Stern who can see ghosts. I was enjoying it well enough until a certain scene involving a child, a ghost, and an act that the book had established ghosts could not do – yet the ghost did it in this scene. It was effectively written, but this type of scene is hard for me to read, and since I was listening to it on audio, it was all the more jarring and upsetting. Still, it was an enjoyable read overall, one I’d recommend to fans of supernatural stories with a hint of horror.

 

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

I checked out this book because it was recommended as a readalike for Recursion by Blake Crouch. I’m trying to recall it now and it’s difficult for me to remember the plot without looking it up, so I suppose it didn’t make much of an impact. Like Recursion, it’s about time travel and trying to change things in the past, only to mess things up even more as a result. I enjoyed it well enough while I was reading it, but it’s no Recursion. (Sadly, nothing is!)

 

Vessel by Lisa Nichols

I really wanted to read a great space book and this seemed like it might fit the bill. It’s about an astronaut, Catherine, who was on a years-long mission to another planet. But something goes wrong, the whole crew – except Catherine – dies, and Catherine makes it back to Earth years behind schedule with no memory of what happened to the rest of the crew or how she got back home. She had been assumed dead for years. The mystery of what happened in deep space is teased out over the course of the book, making way for a big reveal that I unfortunately saw coming from page 1. I finished the book hoping that my initial assumption was wrong, thinking it was too obvious and too overdone – but no. Too familiar for my tastes, but may suit others who only occasionally dip into sci fi.

 

 

Conviction by Denise Mina

This is a Reese Witherspoon book club pick and seemed like a great, trashy psychological mystery/thriller from the synopsis: a woman outrunning her past investigates a true crime from a podcast she’d been listening to, learning how her own past intersects with it. Unfortunately, the execution was subpar. She’s running from place to place with a friend (ish) of hers, and they mostly make decisions that are not only just stupid but make no sense. For a lot of the book, the plot doesn’t really go anywhere, even though the mystery really should be quite interesting. I got tired of it and skipped to the end.

 

Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang

Oh my goodness, I loved this book. Every single story was a knockout. I didn’t realize I could love short stories until 2020, and now I don’t think I can get enough of them. Chiang really thinks through his ideas, carefully creating worlds and characters that follow the set of fictional rules he’s established for his SF premises. My favorite story is the first one, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, about a man who finds a gate that allows him to travel back in time 20 years. It’s reminiscent of One Thousand and One Nights in that it involves a storyteller telling a series of interconnected stories that also connect to the frame story about the storyteller himself. It’s so fascinating and well-executed. Runners up are Omphalos, about a world that really was created by a Creator a few thousand years ago (and what that would look like when it comes to scientific research, including “primordial” trees without rings) and the novella Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, a very fresh take on parallel worlds that I’ll be thinking about for months. Be sure to read Chiang’s notes on each of the stories at the end of the book.

 

You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

Do you want to read a trashy psychological thriller, something like Gone Girl or Girl on a Train, but with even more pathological behavior and guaranteed unbelievable twists? Here you go. Not quite as good as The Wife Between Us but better than An Anonymous Girl, Greer and Pekkanen know how to entertain.

 

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

A bookstore owner specializing in mysteries finds himself caught up in the hunt for a serial killer that’s using one of his old blog posts – about eight perfect murders from classic crime novels – as a blueprint for murder. It’s a clever idea, and the execution is terrific. Malcolm, the protagonist, is an unreliable narrator, something the reader learns slowly over the course of the book. Teasing out what’s true and what’s not is great fun, as is trying to piece together various facts (or lies) to figure out the identity of the serial killer. Incorporating such classic reads as Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and Agatha Christie’s ABC Murders, this is a great book for mystery fans, both an homage to old favorites and a modern crime novel.

 

The Red Lotus by Chris Bohjalian

I checked this one out because I wanted something popular, mystery-like, and available. It was fine; nothing really special. The main plotline involved the threat of the release of a biological agent that would cause a pandemic, so perhaps a bit too close to home right now.

 

One of Us is Next by Karen M. McManus

McManus is writing fantastic mysteries for teens, and this one might be my favorite of hers. Like this book’s predecessor, One of Us is Lying, I thought the book trafficked too much in teen stereotypes at first, but the characters quickly deepened, and the plot took satisfying twists that kept me guessing until the end. Never one to let the last few pages go to waste with unnecessary resolution, McManus throws one final twist at us that is perhaps too implausible, but great fun nonetheless.

 

Be Not Far From Me by Mindy McGinnis

I like McGinnis’ books, but they never quite rise to the level of love. Her latest is a solid YA survival story, gripping, well-written, with a complicated protagonist that I appreciated reading about in a teen novel. The descriptions of how Ashley survives in the woods after getting lost on a camping trip were visceral and not for the faint of heart (and I mean this in a good way), interspersed with tidbits from Ashley’s past that give us insight into why she is the way she is. I liked it well enough; I wasn’t blown away.

 

The Other Mrs. by Mary Kubica

Mary Kubica is known for writing well-received psychological thrillers, a genre I can’t get enough of right now. This one is about a woman, Sadie, who moves to a new town on an island off the coast of Maine with her family. She’s hiding at least one secret from her own past, and when a woman on the island is murdered, Sadie finds herself connected and suspected. I’ve only read one other book by Mary Kubica, her first, The Good Girl, which I thought was just OK. I liked this one a lot more, despite the fact that it used a tired trope as one of its major twists, something I picked up on almost from the get-go. But then she got me with another big twist after that, and my mind was blown. Well done, Mary Kubica.

 

 

What I’m Reading Now

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Let’s Go Swimming on Doomsday by Natalie C. Anderson

A few years ago, Somalian teenager Abdi was kidnapped and forced by the CIA to go undercover in the jihadi group Al Shabaab. His brother was taken by Al Shabaab a few years earlier and has now bought into the group’s mission, becoming a leader himself. Abdi must ingratiate himself with the leaders of Al Shabaab, starting with his brother, and feed information back to the CIA agent, who holds the rest of his family hostage.

This story is interspersed with Abdi’s story in the present day, where he’s in the care of the UN in fictional Sangui City, Kenya, going to school as they try to find his family and some sort of permanent home for him. How Abdi got from the Al Shabaab camp in Somalia to Kenya unravels slowly, as does what exactly Abdi had to do to save himself and his family (and if he saved them at all) while there.

A child soldier’s life is a challenging topic to write about, but Anderson has a deft touch and writes Abdi well. His family is everything, and he’s scared of losing them, but also terrified of being brainwashed by Al Shabaab as his brother, someone he looked up to and admired, was. Groups like the real-life Al Shabaab use pieces of truth to tell lies, making them all the more alluring to young minds who are fed a diet of the same propaganda day after day. Even more terrifying, he’s unsure how far he’ll have to go within Al Shabaab – murder, suicide bombing, and more – in order to get the information the CIA agent demands in order to save his family. It’s easy to feel empathy for Abdi, even as he’s wracked with guilt in the present-day sections over his as-yet-unknown actions. I look forward to a lengthy author’s note at the end.

 

You Owe Me a Murder by Eileen Cook

I love a good high concept thriller, and Cook’s latest has a great one. Borrowing from Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, she reimagines it as Strangers on a Plane with two teenage girls. Kim is traveling to London on a school trip with a number of other students, including her newly-ex-boyfriend Connor, when she meets Nicki, a confident English girl on her gap year between high school and college. Nicki encourages Kim to act a little more brashly in the little time they have on the plane, and they both get drunk on some stolen liquor. In the midst of Kim’s drunkenness, she confides in Nicki about her antipathy toward Connor, and Nicki shares her disdain for her alcoholic mother. Wouldn’t it be great, Nicki says, if they each took care of the other’s problem? Kim, of course, thinks this idea of swapping murders is a joke, but when Connor is run over by a train soon into the trip, Nicki tells Kim that it was no accident, and she intends to hold Kim to her side of the bargain.

This is a fun thriller with twists and turns that don’t end at Nicki’s reappearance. Kim herself is hiding some secrets, and even seasoned thriller readers may be caught by surprise. Nicki uses coercion, blackmail, and threats to convince Kim to murder her mom, and I’ve found myself wondering why Nicki doesn’t just do it herself; she seems to have gotten away with Connor’s murder pretty neatly. But I try not to think too hard on that aspect and just enjoy the ride.

 

 

California by Edan Lepucki

This is the next in the line of Station Eleven readalikes I’ve been making my way through for the past few years. When I first saw this book in 2014, the year of its publication, I assumed it was your standard literary fiction about a miserable family and how their misery somehow defines what California is like, or something along those lines. Imagine my delight when I learned it was actually about the end of the world! Everyone is still miserable, but there’s a much more exciting backdrop.

In all seriousness, though, “miserable” is a bit of an exaggeration. The story opens several years after the sketchily-defined apocalypse (which I assume will grow more defined as the book progresses), and the two leads – married couple Frida and Cal – have managed to create a sustainable life in the wilderness outside the bounds of what used to be Los Angeles. They’re not happy, per se, but they seem relatively content, though greater challenges (running out of the soap they’ve carefully rationed, the dwindling opportunities for hunting) loom on the horizon. And then Frida finds herself pregnant, a surprise – the couple hadn’t been using protection for years, and Frida just assumed she was unable to bear children. But suddenly, the far-off problems become much more immediate, and the two decide to travel to the nearest settlement, believing it’s the only way their child will survive.

This definitely has a Station Eleven vibe, and I’m enjoying it a lot so far. Lepucki is good at introducing characters and plot elements and tweaking their interactions just slightly so that readers sense that something might be a little off – but they’re not quite sure what or why. It makes for an intriguing story that I’ve found myself sucked into pretty quickly.

What I’m Reading Now

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Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

I had been waiting for this book for many months, ever since I finished Galbraith’s (J. K. Rowling’s) third novel in the Cormoran Strike series last year. I’ve listened to all of them on audio, and I was really looking forward to diving into this one in the same format. Unfortunately, it’s not gripping me as much as the other three. It’s slow to start, with a mystery that goes nowhere for nearly half the novel. Galbraith focuses a lot on Robin and Cormoran’s romantic lives, and I find that topic to be both irritating and uninteresting. Robin’s now-husband Matthew is still around being the most awful person in the world. Cormoran tries for nearly a year for a no-strings-attached casual relationship with a woman named Lorelei, a relationship neither Strike nor I as a reader care much about at all. To compound my annoyance, Galbraith brings back Charlotte for a cameo (or perhaps more, I’ve still got nine hours of the book left). Robert Glenister is a talented reader as always, I just find most of the book lacking. I’ve got a little less than half the book to finish in the two days remaining of my loan; I’m not sure I’m going to make it.

 

Heart of Iron by Ashley Poston

This is a retelling of the legend of Anastasia Romanov set in space. Because readers will know this going in, one of the biggest “surprises” of the story, which is revealed about a third of the way in, is not a surprise at all. Other parts of the story feel familiar, too, particularly for readers who read a lot of space opera. Ana (the lost princess who remembers none of her past) is part of a ragtag crew of space pirates, which includes a Metal (android) named D09 whom she’s in love with, despite the fact that he claims he cannot feel human emotions. The lost princess in space reminds me strongly of Empress of a Thousand Skies by Rhoda Belleza, and the android who may or may not be “human” enough for its life to matter is reminiscent of Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray, both of which I liked a bit better. (These tropes were not new when Belleza and Gray wrote about them, either.) Still, Poston infuses her story with her own ideas, too: a humanoid alien race derogatorily referred to as “star kissers,” a bit of interesting political intrigue, the idea of “ironblood” and an iron artifact that rusts when it’s touched. It’s clear she’s put a lot of thought into the world she’s created, including its complicated history, and readers who enjoy SF world-building will be rewarded. The book is also casually LGBTQ, and its characters don’t fit neatly into our own established gender roles (the captain of the ship is a woman and many other leaders within the world are as well).

 

What I’m Reading Now

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Fire and Heist by Sarah Beth Durst

This is a heist novel about humans who can shapeshift into dragons (wyverns), so it’s basically everything I ever wanted in a book. Durst borrows from and builds upon traditional dragon lore by giving her wyvern characters hoards: their goal is to accumulate treasure, and they steal from other wyverns to do so. Stealing isn’t punished; only getting caught is. Sky, determined to prove herself as she approaches adulthood, embarks upon a daring and ambitious heist alongside an interesting crew of sidekicks with their own motivations for helping out.

I’m not yet finished with this one, but it takes an interesting and unexpected turn about halfway through, deepening the dragon lore and expanding the story in scope. Durst’s books are hit or miss for me. I really love some of her work (Vessel), but have found others pretty mediocre. This is shaping up to be one that really resonates with me. It’s a lot of fun and I’m excited to share it with other readers when it publishes in December.

 

Gilded Cage by Vic James

This was originally published on Wattpad and is geared for the adult market, though two of its main characters are teenagers. There’s strong crossover into YA readership here, and it’s got a great hook: in modern England, common people (those without magic) must spend ten years of their lives serving the aristocratic Equals (those with magic). But this is not your everyday servitude that you might think of from Downton Abbey. These ten years are officially referred to as “Slave Days,” and once the ten year term begins, the slaves are the property of the state, no longer considered people. The Hadleys – mom, dad, brother Luke, sister Abi, and youngest sister Daisy – apply for a term at the Kyneston estate in order to complete their years of required service together, but at the last moment, Luke is reassigned to Millmoor, a slave town in Manchester that is widely regarded as the worst place to complete your slave days. From there, the story follows the separated family as Luke learns to live within Millmoor and the other Hadleys get caught up in the machinations of the wealthy Kynestons.

I’m reading this one on audio, and the narrator does a fantastic job with the accents: Manchester for the Hadleys and the stereotypical upper-crust for the Equals. Even though I’m not very far in, I I have a good feel for the world James has created and my heart has already broken once for Luke. I’m curious to see how the premise holds up and where James takes it, since it has so many possibilities.

 

The Salt Line by Holly Goddard Jones

In the near future, the United States has been nearly overrun by Shreve’s Disease, which is carried by ticks that burrow into the skin. Once bitten by a tick, you have thirty seconds to burn it off with a device called a Stamp. After those thirty seconds, they’ve laid their eggs inside your body, and you have about a 50% chance that they will be carriers of the disease, which is fatal. The country has coped by creating something called the Salt Line, which cuts off the majority of the landmass, leaving it to the ticks, while the rest of the country is divided into strictly-regulated zones that are tick-free. Wealthy daredevils who live in the Atlantic Zone will sometimes pay vast sums of money to go on special excursions past the Salt Line, and Jones’ book follows a group of these people. Each person in the group has their own motivations for taking such a risky journey, which takes a very fast turn into even greater danger soon after they cross the Salt Line. This book is a combination dystopia, survival story, and crime novel, and it mostly melds all three together well.

Ever since I read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, I’ve been on the hunt for a great literary sci-fi novel that matches it. While The Salt Line doesn’t quite measure up, it comes close. Jones is a master of the ensemble novel format. She gives multiple characters their own third-person points of view, engendering sympathy on the part of the reader even for those characters who are hard to like or commit detestable acts. She’s interested in the themes of parenthood or the lack thereof (motherhood most strongly, but fatherhood as well), as most of the characters’ motivations involve their children or their desire to not have children, as well as surrogate parent-child bonds. As someone who isn’t particularly interested in having children myself, I liked the focus Jones placed on one character’s decision to not have kids. This character’s reasons go beyond the stereotypical and dig into themes of sacrifice and how a person claims ownership of her life. It’s rare to find a book that treats lack of motherhood as an equally fulfilling avenue for its female characters.

 

 

What I’m Reading Now

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Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow

I read a lot of short pieces online about various political and governmental topics, but I generally stay away from the full-length books. I’m actively trying to change that by seeking out books on interesting topics written by people I already know and trust. Maddow’s central thesis is that over the years, the American military has transformed from a small force engaged in war only when absolutely necessary into a bloated, inefficient machine with a muddled mission and ineffective tactics, a military that is now perpetually at war. That’s no denigration of the soldiers; rather, she takes issue with the power of the executive to send soldiers into war without calling it such, with the increased privatization of military action, with the military’s obsession with nuclear weapons and its myopic focus on counterterrorism, with the CIA’s de facto status as a branch of the military unsupervised in any meaningful way, with the public’s apathy toward the fact that we’re always at war somewhere, and more. She documents just how far we’ve strayed from Thomas Jefferson’s proclamation to “never keep an unnecessary soldier,” from the idea that war is to be avoided at all costs and if the nation must enter into it, it must deeply affect the general populace of the United States – so that it hurts us at home just as much as it hurts the soldiers fighting it. It’s well-argued, clearly-written, and mostly non-partisan. Maddow reads the audiobook version, which is of course the perfect choice.

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

For almost a decade of my life, adult fantasy novels made up 90% of my reading diet. It’s been a long time since that was the case; now I read mostly YA science fiction and fantasy, adult romance, and adult mysteries and thrillers. But I haven’t forgotten my longtime love, and I’m hoping to rekindle our romance with this doorstopper of a novel that’s universally beloved by pretty much all my fantasy-loving friends. It’s got a traditional fantasy plotline – an oppressed people fights back against their evil overlords with the help of a magically gifted, inspiring revolutionary – with an interesting magic system and detailed, well-realized world-building. At 541 pages, I’m hoping I can finish it before it needs to be returned to the library.

When Light Left Us by Leah Thomas

This is a weird one (I’m hoping in a good way!). The three Vasquez siblings’ father left their family without an explanation, and soon after, a strange being named Luz joins them. Incorporeal Luz lives inside the kids for a brief time, experimenting with each of their most valued physical features in order to explore the world around it: Hank’s hands, Ana’s eyes, and Milo’s ears. In return, the siblings’ abilities with these particular features, already sharp (Hank plays basketball; Ana makes movies), are heightened. But Luz doesn’t stay long either, and when it leaves, it cripples the very things the kids valued most. Written a certain way, this premise might come across as silly, but Thomas’ writing is dense and dreamlike, layered with emotion, and so far, it’s working.