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lurkinmerkin · 9 years

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I’ve now read 100 books this year

Continuing with my list, here are my reviews of the last 50 books.

Highly Recommend

1. The Night Before Christmas by Nikolai Gogol. This is not the poem. This story is so funny and totally charming. When Vakula beats up the Devil and flies to St. Petersburg, I was hoooooked.

2. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Excellent story about injustice and morality and capitalism and corruption. The writing hooked me from the beginning and didn't let go once.

3. Dietland by Sarai Walker. I expected to like this book just from the summary. A depressed and shut-in woman who thinks bariatric surgery will change her life but instead ends up in a feminist commune while entangled with a feminist domestic terrorist group that drops rapists out of helicopters? Sign me the fuck up. What I never expected was that I would love this book. What got me was how relatable Plum Kettle's pain was. It wasn't just about being fat—it was about being beaten down and oppressed by society and by herself. She learns to love herself and she learns how to be angry. I may not have agreed with everything in the book (it's firmly based on second wave feminism) but I love Plum and I love reading about female rage.

Beloved by Toni Morrison. When I was in high school, Toni Morrison gave a free lecture at the local college on their lawn—the only space large enough to accommodate the expected crowds. Listening to her talk is incredible. She has a rhythm and a fervor that is also in her writing. It's much like the religious Calling many of her characters describe. Beloved is peak Morrison I think. A lot of critics say that the punishments and tortures described in the slave stories are too incredulous to believe but I think that's because they don't know shit about slavery. They need to shut up. Read Beloved. It's beautiful and painful.

Recommend

1. The Inspector General by Nikola Gogol. Great play and a wonderful satire on the corruption and social disorder in Russia in the 1830s—perhaps even into today.

2. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. A longform essay in the form of a letter to his son focused on the black body and how racism effects it. Very powerful if confusing at some points in regard to point of view.

3. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Eerie book made all the more disconcerting by the lack of supernatural or things that go bump in the night. Excellently written.

4. Heaven in Small by Emily Schultz. A man dies and doesn't notice but instead finds a new job at the Heaven Book Company proofreading romance novels. This is very much a send up of the writing process itself and very creative. There is some great writing in here and some luridly purple writing too. I enjoyed how it twisted and turned and the fully created universe she designed but the characters could have used some more detail.

5. Corregidora by Gayl Jones. A novel about a family twisted by slavery and sexual abuse/incest and the effect it has on Ursa, a blues singer in Kentucky and the last woman in the family. A lot of the reviews said the book was too explicit and while it is graphic, I didn't find it that bad at all. I think there's this expectation of gentility from female authors that shouldn't exist. I liked the book though but I didn't love it.

6. Dumb Luck by Vu Trong Phong. A book about a poor man in French-controlled Vietnam who inadvertently rises to the top through fate and other people's misplaced pride. What made it interesting was how the author seemed so torn between loving and hating colonial Vietnam's forced modernization. The conflict made the story seem more honest to me.

7. The Medical Detectives by Berton Roueche. I love science writing. I love learning about mysterious diseases and people's skin turning blue and doctor's being stumped as their patient crumbles before them. I love hearing about ticks killing dogs and blue jeans poisoning children. I just love it so much and Roueche was a master at telling these stories.

8. Love Creeps by Amanda Filipacchi. This book starts out weak which sounds weird to say when the book starts with a stalking triangle. But it really gains it's footing when the three stalkers reverse positions in the triangle and everyone's fucked up becomes just a little more fucked up. That's the beauty of Filipacchi's work, really.

9. 1776 by David McCullough. McCullough is so good at finding out everything there is to know about a topic and writing it down for everyone to understand. He really is. He also likes to go on tangents of information that I think really only he cares about. I liked 1776 though and its gentle treatment of George Washington who even he admits wasn't a great general for all he was great man—something the colonies needed more so than anything else in 1776. It's a good read.

10. Magnus Chase and the Sword of Summer by Rick Riordan. I love Riordan's humor and how is books read so quickly for how complicated and emotionally deep they can get. Magnus is an interesting character (but no one can beat Percy as narrator) and I want to read more about him and his interactions with the very complicated Norse Gods (although I admit that my education in Norse myth in Iceland makes go well... :/ sometimes, lol).

11. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I was on the fence until I reached the ending.

12. Carsick by John Waters. It's very John Waters and if you like him, you'll like the book. It's sweet and vulnerable and positive and funny and sick in a nice way. If you are a fan of travelogues, it's kind of boring.

13. Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones. A book of poetry about growing up a gay black man in the south. It was a builder with each poem escalating into the next until it punched you at the very end. There were some great verses and wonderful sound to these poems. A good read.

14. The Healing by Gayl Jones. Her style has matured so much since Corregidora; it's easy to see why she's considered a master writer. It's a stream-of-consciousness style of writing that I got swept away in and the story is so compelling. Worth reading even though it's quite dense.

15. Dirt from The New Yinzer. A collection of poems and short stories about secrets. Some of them went the way I expected them to but some surprised me.

16. Good Bones and Simple Murders by Margaret Atwood. A collection of prose poems and short stories (including the better ones from Murder in the Dark) that I enjoyed. It felt more current and updated.

17. Derby Girl/Whip It by Shauna Cross. The YA book that inspired the movie, Bliss Cavendar feels like an outsider in her podunk Texas town until she's able to get to Austin where she joins a roller derby league. It's a very fast read and sweet. I was entertained. Is it a perfect book? No, but I didn't care because roller derby is awesome.

18. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. I really enjoyed this book. It may one day migrate up to highly recommend, I need to think about it more. It's the story of Penelope from The Odyssey from her point of view; how she ended up married to a trickster, learned to run Ithaca on her own when he left her to go adventuring and slowly becomes a trickster herself. Very ambiguously written but in a good way.

19. Bear by Marian Engel. I didn't expect to actually enjoy reading this book, not gonna lie. It was more of a novelty choice but now that I've read it, I kind of love it? It is sure as heck about a woman who fucks a bear but it's not really about fucking a bear. It's more about...figuring shit out about yourself and your life. That weird point in your life as a woman where you have to detach yourself from what society expects of you as a woman and do your own thing. Even if that thing is apparently fucking a bear. It's interesting.

I Didn't Hate It

1. Yesterday's Son by AC Crispin. It was alright. I felt that for a Spock story it was a little too emotional and the plot moved too quickly. I wanted more time with Zar.

2. The Art of War, by Sun Tzu (trans. Ralph Sawyer and Mei Lee Sawyer). Decent translation with an extensive introduction and explanation of terms. The use of Wade-Giles instead of the now standard Pinyin system made it difficult for me to read though.

3. Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth by Naguib Mahfouz. A young man in Ancient Egypt interviews the contemporaries of the dead Pharaoh Akhenaten (including his wife Nefertiti) about his experiment in monotheism. It leaves a lot up to the reader and that's okay.

4. Negotiation by Harvard Business School Press. I had to read it for school and it was neither boring nor interesting.

5. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. I wanted to like this book more than I could. For science writing it's too pop and easy breezy with the facts and for history writing it's too simplified and theoretical to be interesting. More platform for the author's opinions on modern society than actually in-depth exploration of what makes humans human.

6. The House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia. A surreal trip to the ocean in a house unmoored from reality by three very unusual housemates. I wanted to like it more and I enjoyed Vimbai's struggle between her very American life and her very African parents and how she learns to close the gap between the two cultures but I found the treatment of self-harm and scarification in the story disagreeable.

7. Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell. Much better written than Unfamiliar Fishes. It's a quick read and I loved reading about the commercialization and crass marketing related to presidential assassination in the US, how its elevates boring presidents to figures of discussion even a hundred years later. Her information on the assassins themselves is interesting too.

8. The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff. I liked the movie, it was hella homoerotic. I figured, hey, the book should be too. This book was super hella homoerotic. It was a decent book but very solidly in the middle school reader level and never tries to excel beyond that level. A bit frustrating.

9. Power, Influence, and Persuasion: Sell Your Ideas and Make Things Happen by Richard Luecke. I had to read it for school and it was neither boring nor interesting.

10. Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris. I prefer his earlier work. The essays are still funny and the satire is still sharp I just think that he's not in sync with modern sensibilities anymore. Happens to the best of us.

11. Them Bones by Carolyn Haines. Murder mystery set in the Mississippi Delta area about a woman from a wealthy family who is now on the verge of foreclosure who accidentally becomes a private investigator. The story is OK, the characters are OK, but I found everything about it unrelatable. It's a little too obsessed with marriage and children for me to care. The word womb is said like a thousand times. It was gross.

12. Death Before Wicket by Kerry Greenwood. Another Phryne Fisher novel. The writing style continues to improve but this book had so much cricket in it, I was bored to tears. Between that and the Crowley-esque black magic, I was a bit bored.

13. Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris. Santaland Diaries is such a good story both written and aloud on NPR. So worth it and is about a third of this book. The rest of the book is reprints of holiday-ish essays from other books (really good) and fictional essays I didn't care for.

14. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making by Catherine M. Valennte. A very whimsical and sweet story about a girl who has adventures in Fairyland but I found the narrative grating at times.

15. Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector. That was an interesting read.

16. Murder in the Dark by Margaret Atwood. Interesting set of prose poems and short stories but the collection overall didn't excite me.

17. Twinkle Twinkle by Kaori Ekuni. I keep having issues with translations of Japanese novels. I think it might be a cultural issue much like when I watch Japanese movies or shows because they have different story structure and idea of where the climax needs to be. That said, it was an interesting story about an emotionally unstable alcoholic woman in an arranged marriage with a gay man who befriends his boyfriend.

18. Citizen: an American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. A set of prose poems and essays using experimental structure. I really liked Part II which is about Serena Williams and it is so true. It's so true.

19. I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth by Margaret Atwood. Short story about three older women tied together by their life experiences with the now-dead Zenia who appears in the ditziest lady's dreams. I liked it.

20. I'm Starved for You by Margaret Atwood. The first part of a serial digital novel she then revised and collated into a novel about a dystopia America and two couples living in a closed-prison city. It was okay but I can't say I'm really interested in finishing the story.

21. The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Management by Theodore Panagacos. I had to read this for a class and have no opinion on it.

It Could Have Been Worse

1. Don't Point that Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli. I kept forgetting it was set in the '70s and was getting very confused by how he kept bribing people with five dollar bills. Very odd book, a sort of Wodehouse meets Hardboiled. I can't recommend it.

2. The Up and Downs of Life by Edward Sellon. A Victorian erotic biography and I just. IDK. It exists.

Crush by Richard Siken. These poems could have used a lot of editing.

3. Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez. A collection of short stories about life in Havana in the 1990s. I did not love this book/trilogy. The third section/novella is stronger than the first two by far. Should mention that it covers the topic of machismo and male feeling/experience; a topic I have little interest in making me highly indifferent.

Dead Dove, Do Not Read

1. The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney. The basis for the bizarre 60s movie, The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, this slim book was written during the Depression and it's so flighty and racist and bizarre. I couldn't get into it. I know that it's a satire, I just wasn't impressed.

#2015 book recs #murdersanta

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lurkinmerkin · 9 years

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Tumblr has been giving me shit about replies but murdersanta asked for book recs so here. Also, thanks to everyone who saw my post!

I may have gone overboard with this but I don’t care.

Highly Recommend

1. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, by Gordon S. Wood. This book has a thesis and it sticks to it. That is so rare in a historical biography that it's like touching heaven. At a trim 250-ish pages, you learn enough about Benjamin Franklin to ace any trivia competition.

2. Doctor's Orders (Star Trek: TOS book #50), by Diane Duane. I love Diane Duane's writing and this book is no exception. A novel about Dr. McCoy where he's awesome and in charge while Spock snarks and Kirk fucks off to talk to a rock? That's some good shit, mhmm, sign me up.

3. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, by bell hooks. I agree with about 97% percent of what bell hooks has to say. I can see why the book was radical in the 80s but it really does align a lot with Millenial beliefs and goals. What a difference thirty years makes. The best part is that this is a book that is easy to read for even a beginner in feminist theory without condescending while still sharp and critical of feminism and itself. This is a fully conscious book.

4. The Poetry of Maya Angelou, by Maya Angelou. This is an omnibus book of Maya's first five books of poetry and it really changed my perception of her as a woman, a writer, and an activist. Her attention to sound and rhyme, her precise word choice, her imagery, and her sheer emotion and expression was masterful. Standouts for me include The Couple and Miss Scarlett, Mr. Rhett, and other Latter-Day Saints.

Recommend

1. Men Explain Things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit. A small set of essays of varying length and quality with the title essay being one of the strongest.

2. Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, by Dan Koeppel. At no point did I feel like I was learning more about bananas than I cared to know.

3. Urgent, Unheard Stories, by Roxane Gay. A small set of essays about publishing, writing, and reading. There are a lot of good recommendations in here for books I'd never hear of otherwise and I really enjoy Roxane Gay's writing style.

4. Percy Jackson's Greek Gods, by Rick Riordan. Good book if you love the Percy Jackson series, beautiful illustrations as well.

5. The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells. Yoooooo, the invisible man is fucked up. This was nothing like I expected and so much better than I could hope for. The main character is truly heinous and it's a thrill to read.

6. Identity, by Milan Kundera. I really connected with this book. The writing is almost wistful like the book itself is asking for you to help it out.

7. The Winter Queen, by Boris Akunin. A Great Russian murder mystery/spy thriller with a good balance of humor and tragedy.

8. The Prince and the Pauper, by Mark Twain. I really couldn't stand the odd attempt at Tudor speech. It was grating to read. However, the story is so good that I was hooked right away. It's good fun.

9. Electra and Other Plays, by Sophocles, trans. by E.F. Watling. The translation is so good for this book that it's really worth highlighting. It's respectful while updated enough to be readable and easily comprehensible.

10. Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto. The translation of these two novellas, however, was lacking. A lot of the cultural context was missing and the stories felt stark as a result. I still enjoyed them however, and what they had to say about grief and loneliness.

11. Soulless, by Gail Carriger. I am not interested in either the Victorian Era or Steampunk but I still really liked this story. It grew on me as I continued on. The sex scenes are really awkward and more embarrassing than erotic. I would read the sequels if I had them though and I probably will at some point in the future.

12. The Ice at the Bottom of the World, by Mark Richard. A book of short stories set in rural Virginia. There's something about the grit of the characters that I can relate to. I know these people; I went to high school with them.

13. Stuff Happens, by David Hare. A play about the Bush presidency leading up to the Iraq War. It's his imagining of the behind the scenes politics at work and it makes you look at Bush and his cabinet in a different way, not as bumblers but instead as people working intentionally towards an awful goal for unknown reasons or solely in order to remain in a position of power. There are no answers here, but it makes you think.

14. Herland, by Charlotte Gilman Perkins. Less story than manifesto this was an interesting book to read. The casual racism and eugenics theory is horrifying though.

15. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter. The first fifty pages of this book are devoted to explaining what the author means in the context of the book by “Intellectual” and “Anti-Intellectual.” I have never felt more stupid in my life. By then end of the book, the way the chapters flowed into each other and explained the cyclical nature of anti-intellectualism in the United States gave me a stronger understanding of the cultural underpinnings of American culture and why our education system is such a mess. A real light bulb moment.

I Didn't Hate It

1. The Martian, by Andy Weir. This book is more thought experiment than narrrative and the first five chapters drag as a result. It's a lot more math than I really want to know at this stage of my life. The characters are all so engaging and lovely though—even the ones who only get two paragraphs. It's a world I could read more about and I have high hopes for the movie.

2. Autobiography of a Fat Bride, by Laurie Notaro. Ten years ago, I would have unabashedly loved this book. Now, not so much. Some chapters are drop dead funny and Laurie Notaro's strength is her relatability, but the writing is more offensive and cruel than funny in parts.

3. Sphere, by Michael Crichton. So much better than the movie. Soooooo much better. And I liked the ending a lot.

4. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, by August Wilson. This is a play that builds in a devastating way. It cuts deep and I feel like I would much rather see it than read it. It would be amazing with the right cast.

5. Everyman and Other Miracle and Morality Plays, by Anonymous. A set of three plays of varying quality with Everyman as one of the better ones.

6. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. I just can't get into Steinbeck. The symbolism is so heavy-handed. I felt for the main character and the bunny dream sequence was great.

7. The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Emma Orczy. The action sequences are excellent and it's all very dashing and good fun but when characters get introspective the book drags and becomes melodramatic and dull.

8. This is How you Lose Her, by Junot Diaz. The stories really captured what it's like to be an immigrant, to be Jersey, and to be an asshole really well. My frustration stems from how this book highlighted and presented these misogynistic machismos and then had nothing to say about it really. No condemnation, no opportunity for learning or solution. No resolution really. Nothing.

9. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. Stunning book on imperialism and white oppression but it didn't fully click for me.

10. Summon the Keeper, by Tanya Huff. I have never wanted to hit a main character so much as Claire. What an asshole. The other characters and the story was charming and there's some good puns.

11. The Silent Speaker, by Rex Stout. I am a HUGE fan of the Nero Wolfe books. I am an absolute Archie Goodwin fan. This was a pretty decent post-WWII book in the series and the female characters were all unique and interesting.

12. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. I really enjoy Bradbury's writing, especially his short stories but sometimes he comes off like he crawled up his own butt a long time ago and stayed there. He's very smug, especially about his process. It's annoying. Skip the foreword if he wrote it.

13. After Dark, by Haruki Murakami. I didn't hate it.

14. Raisins and Almonds, by Kerry Greenwood. The Phryne Fisher books suffer from bad writing. The characters are interesting and the research is great and learning about early 20th century Australia is a treat. However, the POV can switch multiple times in a paragraph and the plotholes can be glaring. That said, this is the 9th in the series and the books have steadily improved with each one. It would be hard to jump in in the middle though.

15. The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson. This book is like reading five books at once and not in a good way. Individually I love each one. Put together, it's exhausting. I imagine the only way he was going to get a book published about the world's fair or Chicago architects was to throw in a serial killer and it's a mess as a result.

It Could Have Been Worse

1. Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton. Worst book about sledding ever. However, I did like the writing and if you read it from the perspective that the wife is the true tragic hero in the book than it's more interesting.

2. Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton. Suffers because of a really flat kind of shit ending. It's a lump of an ending. Also, Crichton really hates women and it shows in this book like whoo boy. Boo.

3. The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston. AKA Andromeda Strain II: Strain Harder. This time, your testicles are going to swell and explode. If this book had lost about 100 pages of extraneous description of testicles exploding and intestines falling out of butts, it would have been a lot more readable. It's an article about medical science and US health protocols dressed up in a meat dress.

4. Of Love and Other Demons, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I liked the historical detail and the basic story of the female lead's life up to and including her imprisonment by the Catholic Church under the accusation of being posessed by a demon but then it morphs into a pedo fantasy and I was like, ???

5. Captains Courageous, by Rudyard Kipling. Everything I've read by Kipling is like some sort of dude's bro fantasy where he's King of the World and super awesome just because he's white. It's annoying.

6. Nevernever, by Will Shetterly. This book did not live up to my expectations. Instead, it stayed right below them at all times from the confusing storyline to the annoying main character to the super shit gotcha! ending. More boring than bad.

7. And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie. That was it? Oh.

8. The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations, by Ira Berlin. This read more like the transcript of four connected college lectures than an organized text about African America diaspora. It's loaded with facts and information and I appreciated that, but it otherwise falls extremely flat. There's better ways to get this information.

9. Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowell. What a disappointing read. I like Sarah Vowell and her conversational approach to history but it just didn't work here. Too much focus was given to the white oppressors' side of the colonialist and imperialist history of Hawaii and not enough to Hawaii and it's people itself. It also suffered from really dire opinions from Sarah Vowell herself that come off as liberal ignorance. She tried but she really missed the mark here. I would much rather read a book about Hawaii from a Hawaiian to be honest and at least she includes a good selection in the bibliography.

10. Triumff, Her Majesty's Hero, by Dan Abnett. I feel like I lacked a lot of information going into this book. Like it's a sequel to another book that I am unaware of. There are also way too many characters and storylines going on to keep track of. Though I came to enjoy the main character and his plotline a lot. Just too confusing.

11. Home, by Toni Morrison. This was a heavy and very heavy-handed book. It's like getting hit on the head with an anvil very slowly. But that might have been the point? I'm not sure. The prose is beautiful though.

Dead Dove, Do Not Read

1. Goose in the Pond, by Earlene Fowler. Slight little murder mystery that would have been okay if there had been ANY clue in the actual story as to who the murderer would turn out to be. The ending was literally slapped on and it showed. Also, the main character was beyond irritating. A southern transplant in California who spends the majority of the book talking about being southern and explains away her ticks and pisspoor attitude as “just southern things, y'all!” and talks about her husband (who is Mexican) like he's a spicy taco salad full of machismo. It was bad.

2. The Five Fists of Science, by Matt Fraction. What was this? Like what? I was expecting this book to have a plot and some decent jokes or at the very least some good art and I got none of that. It read like the middle of a short story where all the exposition and conclusion was removed for no reason whatsoever. And then the printing was dark and near unreadable.

3. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan. The sheer amount of man privilege in this book was exhausting and that was just from the writer himself. Like. Ugh. The ending is double ugh. Flat and boring and dumb.

4. The Professor and the Madmen, by Simon Winchester. Instead of an interesting book on a quirky moment in history during the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary I instead found out that this book was a lurid schlock piece by a hack who was only interested in speculating about whether a murderer banged his victim's wife afterward. Gross and insulting.

5. Spellsinger, by Alan Dean Foster. A pothead grad student in the 80s falls into proto-Furcadia and has to dodge yiff and furpiles at every turn. The book ends mid-scene and that's when I found out that there were SEVEN more books in the series. No.

#2015 book recs #murdersanta

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