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starfishstar) wrote2019-04-06 07:34 pm
starfishstar) wrote2019-04-06 07:34 pm
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Bookwormish, 1st quarter of 2019
My favorites books from the first quarter of this year...
VERY TOP BOOKS
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo – This book knocked me over. For the best of everything, listen to the audiobook. It’s a coming-of-age story told in poetry, about a girl who’s a slam poet, and the audiobook is read by the author herself, who is a slam poet, and it's amazing. This book has been sweeping the awards (National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, Printz Award and Pura Belpré Award, the audiobook is one of the Odyssey award’s honor audiobooks, and it just won the Walter Award in the teen category). All deserved!
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky – This was a reread, but yup, this book still goes right to my heart. I wasn’t even a teenager when I first read it, but it feels so necessary and true. One of those books I’ll never be able to be objective about, because it lives so deep inside me.
The Raven Boys; The Dream Thieves; Blue Lily, Lily Blue; and The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater – This would have been an unequivocal rave review, if not for the final book, which I found a letdown and not a worthy conclusion to an otherwise stellar series. (It left just about every plot thread dangling, and not in an intriguing, open-ended way. In a “then what was even the point of this book?” way.) But if I try to ignore that and recapture how I felt about the first three books, extraordinary. (And BTW I take back everything I said when I first read the first book last year, and didn't find it engaging. Turns out the problem was the audiobook; when I came back and read the books instead, I was hooked.) I’m honestly not sure if I’ve found myself this deeply immersed in a world since Harry Potter. Stiefvater is amazing, and the whole series is full of rich little details that reward rereading the earlier books once you know more from the later books. So I’d been looking forward to immediately rereading the whole series – until the final book killed my enthusiasm. But I belatedly realized that Stiefvater’s upcoming trilogy is set in the same world, so I’m cautiously willing to check it out and see if it provides a satisfying continuation.
MORE TOP BOOKS
Greensleeves by Eloise Jarvis McGraw – I picked this up knowing nothing about it beyond that a friend had recommended it, and I was so surprised! It’s a delightful coming-of-age story (sort of YA from before YA was really a thing), surprised me with how feminist it was despite being from 1968 (maybe my generational bias is showing there?), and really pleasingly surprised me by not allowing the plot to fall into the “romance fixes everything” trap, while nonetheless honoring the heroine’s romantic feelings.
Far from the Tree by Robin Benway – I sobbed while reading this, more than once. A beautiful story of three biological siblings, all adopted into different families, who find each other again as teens. Very sensitive in honoring both the longing to know about biological family, but also the importance and validity of adoptive family.
A Properly Unhaunted Place by William Alexander – Finally picked up one of William Alexander’s books, after hearing about him forever, and wow! This was basically a perfect example of everything a middle-grade novel should be. Great characters, great world-building, just the right size plot for middle-grade length. I was especially impressed by the world-building: it really felt like what I saw in the book was just a little sliver of an entire, fully formed world that the author knows all about.
EVEN MORE GOOD BOOKS
Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram – A story about friendship, family, love and loss, as the protagonist (half-Iranian, nerdy and awkward, feels out of place everywhere) travels to Iran for the first time to meet the rest of his family. The whole book was sweet and sensitively handled, but the final section was especially moving.
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo – Captain Awkward recently put it well: “the best recent one-stop shop I can think of for giving context to important political and cultural discussions while also getting specific about how to screw up less (and how to handle it when you inevitably do).”
The Raven and the Reindeer by T. Kingfisher – Yes, I never seem to stop reading Snow Queen retellings. This one has some fun twists on the protagonist, and especially on the reindeer!
Saints and Misfits by S. K. Ali – An engaging story about a devout Muslim teen dealing with harassment from a male member of her community. I appreciated it for its portrayal of a protagonist who's a relatable, typical teen, who also happens to be Muslim.
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin – Just as I’d hoped: I’ve had trouble finding any of Le Guin’s novels that I really love, but her nonfiction is great! An excellent mix of hard-hitting social/political stuff, musings on writing, and adorable stuff about her cat.
Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson (translated by Thomas Warburton) – Still catching up on the Scandinavian childhood I didn’t have. :-) More Moomin adventures! This time in the wonderful landscape of Finnish winter.
Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah – Funny and at times horrifying, a memoir of childhood under apartheid.
The Little Queen by Meia Geddes – A thoughtful parable about how to be, in the form of a young queen who travels the world and meets many intriguing people, as she grieves the loss of her parents and learns how to be her own person.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
The Lost Girl by Anne Ursu – For me this fell short of the great book it could have been (the ideas are great, but the actual action of the plot started late and then wrapped up almost immediately), but it’s still a sweet story about sisters.
We Are Okay by Nina LaCour – A quiet exploration of grief and learning to live again.
Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (translated by Stuart Gilbert) – Yeah, I read this specifically as background research, while writing a fic about Phryne Fisher flying from Australia to England during this era. :-)
Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens edited by Marieke Nijkamp – Like any collection of short stories by multiple authors, this is uneven, but I think the concept is important and great, and there were some good stories within it. Also: working in the library field, I read/think/talk a lot about how important representation is, how every kid should get to see characters like themselves in books. But it wasn’t until I read a story in this collection where the protagonist shared my own illness (chronic pain), and it’s not the main plot of the story, it’s just something that’s part of the character so it’s always there and it sucks but it’s also not the sum total of who they are – reading that, I went: Oh. Wow. So this is what it’s like, that thing I’m always talking about: to read a book and feel seen.
Also, I try to mention when I read particularly good short stories, since those can get lost in the avalanche of books… As mentioned above, I’ve had trouble finding novels by Ursula K. Le Guin that I really love (even though I want to love her!) but wow, I’ve found some amazing short stories. In this case, actually more of a “novelette”: “The Wild Girls.” An examination of colonialism, racism and treating women as property, that pulls no punches and refuses to offer easy answers.
And that has been your quarterly round-up of books I loved, from someone who reads entirely too much!
.
VERY TOP BOOKS
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo – This book knocked me over. For the best of everything, listen to the audiobook. It’s a coming-of-age story told in poetry, about a girl who’s a slam poet, and the audiobook is read by the author herself, who is a slam poet, and it's amazing. This book has been sweeping the awards (National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, Printz Award and Pura Belpré Award, the audiobook is one of the Odyssey award’s honor audiobooks, and it just won the Walter Award in the teen category). All deserved!
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky – This was a reread, but yup, this book still goes right to my heart. I wasn’t even a teenager when I first read it, but it feels so necessary and true. One of those books I’ll never be able to be objective about, because it lives so deep inside me.
The Raven Boys; The Dream Thieves; Blue Lily, Lily Blue; and The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater – This would have been an unequivocal rave review, if not for the final book, which I found a letdown and not a worthy conclusion to an otherwise stellar series. (It left just about every plot thread dangling, and not in an intriguing, open-ended way. In a “then what was even the point of this book?” way.) But if I try to ignore that and recapture how I felt about the first three books, extraordinary. (And BTW I take back everything I said when I first read the first book last year, and didn't find it engaging. Turns out the problem was the audiobook; when I came back and read the books instead, I was hooked.) I’m honestly not sure if I’ve found myself this deeply immersed in a world since Harry Potter. Stiefvater is amazing, and the whole series is full of rich little details that reward rereading the earlier books once you know more from the later books. So I’d been looking forward to immediately rereading the whole series – until the final book killed my enthusiasm. But I belatedly realized that Stiefvater’s upcoming trilogy is set in the same world, so I’m cautiously willing to check it out and see if it provides a satisfying continuation.
MORE TOP BOOKS
Greensleeves by Eloise Jarvis McGraw – I picked this up knowing nothing about it beyond that a friend had recommended it, and I was so surprised! It’s a delightful coming-of-age story (sort of YA from before YA was really a thing), surprised me with how feminist it was despite being from 1968 (maybe my generational bias is showing there?), and really pleasingly surprised me by not allowing the plot to fall into the “romance fixes everything” trap, while nonetheless honoring the heroine’s romantic feelings.
Far from the Tree by Robin Benway – I sobbed while reading this, more than once. A beautiful story of three biological siblings, all adopted into different families, who find each other again as teens. Very sensitive in honoring both the longing to know about biological family, but also the importance and validity of adoptive family.
A Properly Unhaunted Place by William Alexander – Finally picked up one of William Alexander’s books, after hearing about him forever, and wow! This was basically a perfect example of everything a middle-grade novel should be. Great characters, great world-building, just the right size plot for middle-grade length. I was especially impressed by the world-building: it really felt like what I saw in the book was just a little sliver of an entire, fully formed world that the author knows all about.
EVEN MORE GOOD BOOKS
Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram – A story about friendship, family, love and loss, as the protagonist (half-Iranian, nerdy and awkward, feels out of place everywhere) travels to Iran for the first time to meet the rest of his family. The whole book was sweet and sensitively handled, but the final section was especially moving.
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo – Captain Awkward recently put it well: “the best recent one-stop shop I can think of for giving context to important political and cultural discussions while also getting specific about how to screw up less (and how to handle it when you inevitably do).”
The Raven and the Reindeer by T. Kingfisher – Yes, I never seem to stop reading Snow Queen retellings. This one has some fun twists on the protagonist, and especially on the reindeer!
Saints and Misfits by S. K. Ali – An engaging story about a devout Muslim teen dealing with harassment from a male member of her community. I appreciated it for its portrayal of a protagonist who's a relatable, typical teen, who also happens to be Muslim.
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin – Just as I’d hoped: I’ve had trouble finding any of Le Guin’s novels that I really love, but her nonfiction is great! An excellent mix of hard-hitting social/political stuff, musings on writing, and adorable stuff about her cat.
Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson (translated by Thomas Warburton) – Still catching up on the Scandinavian childhood I didn’t have. :-) More Moomin adventures! This time in the wonderful landscape of Finnish winter.
Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah – Funny and at times horrifying, a memoir of childhood under apartheid.
The Little Queen by Meia Geddes – A thoughtful parable about how to be, in the form of a young queen who travels the world and meets many intriguing people, as she grieves the loss of her parents and learns how to be her own person.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
The Lost Girl by Anne Ursu – For me this fell short of the great book it could have been (the ideas are great, but the actual action of the plot started late and then wrapped up almost immediately), but it’s still a sweet story about sisters.
We Are Okay by Nina LaCour – A quiet exploration of grief and learning to live again.
Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (translated by Stuart Gilbert) – Yeah, I read this specifically as background research, while writing a fic about Phryne Fisher flying from Australia to England during this era. :-)
Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens edited by Marieke Nijkamp – Like any collection of short stories by multiple authors, this is uneven, but I think the concept is important and great, and there were some good stories within it. Also: working in the library field, I read/think/talk a lot about how important representation is, how every kid should get to see characters like themselves in books. But it wasn’t until I read a story in this collection where the protagonist shared my own illness (chronic pain), and it’s not the main plot of the story, it’s just something that’s part of the character so it’s always there and it sucks but it’s also not the sum total of who they are – reading that, I went: Oh. Wow. So this is what it’s like, that thing I’m always talking about: to read a book and feel seen.
Also, I try to mention when I read particularly good short stories, since those can get lost in the avalanche of books… As mentioned above, I’ve had trouble finding novels by Ursula K. Le Guin that I really love (even though I want to love her!) but wow, I’ve found some amazing short stories. In this case, actually more of a “novelette”: “The Wild Girls.” An examination of colonialism, racism and treating women as property, that pulls no punches and refuses to offer easy answers.
And that has been your quarterly round-up of books I loved, from someone who reads entirely too much!
.
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