Bookwormish, 2nd quarter of 2016
Jul. 2nd, 2016 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starfishstarHi from Berlin! ....or actually, at the moment, from Ghent, Belgium.
(I'm based in Berlin for a month, on a long visit just hanging out and seeing old friends – it's WONDERFUL – but this weekend I decided to spontaneously hop over to Belgium for a few days to see some other friends. I'm also going to meet up with a fandom friend IRL for what I think is only the second time, ever, for me? Yes, I've been shy and slow at making fandom friendships, but I treasure them once I do make them!)
Meanwhile, books! Recommendations and thoughts from my second-quarter-of-the-year reading. Luckily I was clever and drafted most of this post ahead of time, before I set out traveling. :-)
VERY TOP BOOK:
I read a lot of books, and I love a whole lot of what I read, but sometimes this bit where I look back over the last three months to think about what really stood out still takes me by surprise. Out of the 20+ books I read this quarter, it turns out I’m naming this as my favorite:
A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro
My reaction to word of a new Sherlock Holmes adaptation tends to be equal parts “ooh, exciting!” and “…but does the world really need yet another take on Holmes and Watson”?
In the case of Brittany Cavallaro’s “A Study in Charlotte,” emphatically yes.
Teenagers Watson (Jamie, a boy) and Holmes (Charlotte, a girl) are the great-great-something descendants of the famous Holmes and Watson, and are both more than aware of the legacy they carry. They meet at boarding school, first repel each other but then quickly bond, and soon (of course) find themselves solving a murder. This book has everything a YA book should have and more – smart dialogue, engaging characters, a dash of romance, a dash of danger, a very relatable POV character in Jamie, and a very intriguing, brilliant, prickly and entirely feminist Charlotte Holmes. I agree with the reviewer who said, this is the Holmes you didn’t know you were desperately waiting for!
OTHER TOP BOOKS:
• The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit
Although the focal point of the book is, nominally, Solnit’s trip to Iceland to live in a museum called the Library of Water, the book is much more about family and memory and her mother’s descent into illness and her own coping, as well as literature, and folk tales, and the far north and stories and light and dark and mirrors and…oh, it’s impossible to describe Rebecca Solnit. But I like her, and she leaves me with so much to think about.
• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson is masterful. A friend (the one who first introduced me to Jackson’s novels; like most people, I’d known only the ever-anthologized story “The Lottery”) said, you can very occasionally find a sentence in Jackson’s work that’s not entirely perfect, and it comes as a shock – like, Shirley Jackson was capable of crafting a sentence that was less than perfectly controlled precision??
• To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
A personalized recommendation from the amazing librarians at the Brooklyn BookMatch. (Did I talk about Brooklyn BookMatch yet? I should, it’s fantastic!) I don’t know how to describe this book; it’s about time travel, but much more than that…kind of Douglas Adams meets Jasper Fforde meets the Victorian era meets…I don’t know, really complex, clever plotting and funny characters? It’s one of those books that’s grown on me over time; when I first finished it I thought it was good, but the more I think back on it, I think, wow, that was a really fun book.
EVEN MORE GREAT BOOKS:
• The Girl Who Circumnagivated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente – just as charming as the title, and I think actually even more appealing for adults than kids
• The Chronicles of Harris Burdick: Fourteen Amazing Authors Tell the Tales by Chris Van Allsburg (et al) – various excellent authors create stories inspired by Chris Van Allsburg’s strange, intriguing drawings.
• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez – told in reverse chronology, the struggles and triumphs and scars of four sisters relocating from privileged life in the Dominican Republic under the terrifying shadow of the dictator, to immigrant life in the US. (I’d previously read her Before We Were Free, which follows the other branch of the family that stayed behind in the DR.)
• From Bad to Cursed and As Dead As It Gets by Katie Alender – completing my reading of this delightful YA horror/romance/friendship trilogy. Oh man, worth it alone for the bit in book #2 where she straight-up rebuts the Twilight-type idea that a clingy, stalker-ish boyfriend is in any way romantic.
• Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo – lovely Kate DiCamillo with her lovely, touching stories of girls navigating the world and family and friendship and hopes and disappointments, with perhaps just a slight touch of magic.
• I Love Him to Pieces by Evonne Tsang – suuuuper adorable short graphic novel about two teens falling in love and fighting off the zombie apocalypse, just tongue-in-cheek enough to have me willing to go along with a zombie scenario, which I would normally hate. :-) Part of the delightfully-named series “My Boyfriend Is a Monster.”
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman – one of the few Gaiman novels I hadn’t read yet, and I love that I read this specifically on the recommendation of one of my students! Perhaps not my favorite Gaiman, but only because I love so many of his books even more. As always with Gaiman, the supporting characters were the most interesting here, and I loved how he turned some of the usual clichés on their heads, for example making a werewolf and a vampire (? never specified what this character is, but signs say vampire) as protector figures rather than threats.
• I’ve also been reading some short stories; it’s such a hard form to do well, but when they’re done well, they’re brilliant. For example, everything by the brilliant, creepy, keep-you-just-slightly-off-kilter Shirley Jackson (e.g., “The Summer People” or “The Bus”). Or “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin – I finally read this classic, recommended to me ages ago. Need to read more James Baldwin! He’s got a quiet style with phrases that at the time seem to slip by, but in retrospect really stuck with me.
“HAD BEEN ON MY TO-READ LIST FOREVER” BOOKS:
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley – read it so I could serve as a “jury” member for the English class putting Victor Frankenstein on trial!
• The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers – the sole Sayers mystery I’d skipped back in the day, because I wanted to get on to the later books that introduce Harriet Vane and see what all the fuss was about there. The later Wimsey/Vane are indeed brilliant, but these early mysteries with just Lord Peter are lots of fun, too!
• Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney and read aloud by him – yup, Heaney is great, and I especially enjoyed reading his thoughts about how he made his translation more accessible by imagining his own family members and how they would tell the story.
• Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith – I still haven’t managed to read a novel by Zadie Smith, though she’s been near the top of my list forever, but now that I’ve read this book of her essays I know that, good lord, she’s brilliant. Okay, she just jumped even higher on the to-read list.
LOOKING AHEAD:
I’m traveling, so I’m somewhat limited by what I was able to pack in my luggage for these 2.5 months abroad…though even so, in typical fashion right now I’m simultaneously reading a German book, an English book, and listening to an audiobook. I know I’m going to read “Beloved” by Toni Morrison for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
online_bookclub, and I want to finally read “Independent People” by Halldór Laxness before I go to Iceland this time. (That’s the book an Icelandic friend said you have to read to understand Icelandic people!) Also, my brick-space book club read the first third of the massive 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami last month, with plans to continue the next sections in the next months. I’ll be away when the group next meets, but I still want to finish the book at some point…ca. 300 pages down, ca. 600 to go!
.
(I'm based in Berlin for a month, on a long visit just hanging out and seeing old friends – it's WONDERFUL – but this weekend I decided to spontaneously hop over to Belgium for a few days to see some other friends. I'm also going to meet up with a fandom friend IRL for what I think is only the second time, ever, for me? Yes, I've been shy and slow at making fandom friendships, but I treasure them once I do make them!)
Meanwhile, books! Recommendations and thoughts from my second-quarter-of-the-year reading. Luckily I was clever and drafted most of this post ahead of time, before I set out traveling. :-)
VERY TOP BOOK:
I read a lot of books, and I love a whole lot of what I read, but sometimes this bit where I look back over the last three months to think about what really stood out still takes me by surprise. Out of the 20+ books I read this quarter, it turns out I’m naming this as my favorite:
A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro
My reaction to word of a new Sherlock Holmes adaptation tends to be equal parts “ooh, exciting!” and “…but does the world really need yet another take on Holmes and Watson”?
In the case of Brittany Cavallaro’s “A Study in Charlotte,” emphatically yes.
Teenagers Watson (Jamie, a boy) and Holmes (Charlotte, a girl) are the great-great-something descendants of the famous Holmes and Watson, and are both more than aware of the legacy they carry. They meet at boarding school, first repel each other but then quickly bond, and soon (of course) find themselves solving a murder. This book has everything a YA book should have and more – smart dialogue, engaging characters, a dash of romance, a dash of danger, a very relatable POV character in Jamie, and a very intriguing, brilliant, prickly and entirely feminist Charlotte Holmes. I agree with the reviewer who said, this is the Holmes you didn’t know you were desperately waiting for!
OTHER TOP BOOKS:
• The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit
Although the focal point of the book is, nominally, Solnit’s trip to Iceland to live in a museum called the Library of Water, the book is much more about family and memory and her mother’s descent into illness and her own coping, as well as literature, and folk tales, and the far north and stories and light and dark and mirrors and…oh, it’s impossible to describe Rebecca Solnit. But I like her, and she leaves me with so much to think about.
• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson is masterful. A friend (the one who first introduced me to Jackson’s novels; like most people, I’d known only the ever-anthologized story “The Lottery”) said, you can very occasionally find a sentence in Jackson’s work that’s not entirely perfect, and it comes as a shock – like, Shirley Jackson was capable of crafting a sentence that was less than perfectly controlled precision??
• To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
A personalized recommendation from the amazing librarians at the Brooklyn BookMatch. (Did I talk about Brooklyn BookMatch yet? I should, it’s fantastic!) I don’t know how to describe this book; it’s about time travel, but much more than that…kind of Douglas Adams meets Jasper Fforde meets the Victorian era meets…I don’t know, really complex, clever plotting and funny characters? It’s one of those books that’s grown on me over time; when I first finished it I thought it was good, but the more I think back on it, I think, wow, that was a really fun book.
EVEN MORE GREAT BOOKS:
• The Girl Who Circumnagivated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente – just as charming as the title, and I think actually even more appealing for adults than kids
• The Chronicles of Harris Burdick: Fourteen Amazing Authors Tell the Tales by Chris Van Allsburg (et al) – various excellent authors create stories inspired by Chris Van Allsburg’s strange, intriguing drawings.
• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez – told in reverse chronology, the struggles and triumphs and scars of four sisters relocating from privileged life in the Dominican Republic under the terrifying shadow of the dictator, to immigrant life in the US. (I’d previously read her Before We Were Free, which follows the other branch of the family that stayed behind in the DR.)
• From Bad to Cursed and As Dead As It Gets by Katie Alender – completing my reading of this delightful YA horror/romance/friendship trilogy. Oh man, worth it alone for the bit in book #2 where she straight-up rebuts the Twilight-type idea that a clingy, stalker-ish boyfriend is in any way romantic.
• Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo – lovely Kate DiCamillo with her lovely, touching stories of girls navigating the world and family and friendship and hopes and disappointments, with perhaps just a slight touch of magic.
• I Love Him to Pieces by Evonne Tsang – suuuuper adorable short graphic novel about two teens falling in love and fighting off the zombie apocalypse, just tongue-in-cheek enough to have me willing to go along with a zombie scenario, which I would normally hate. :-) Part of the delightfully-named series “My Boyfriend Is a Monster.”
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman – one of the few Gaiman novels I hadn’t read yet, and I love that I read this specifically on the recommendation of one of my students! Perhaps not my favorite Gaiman, but only because I love so many of his books even more. As always with Gaiman, the supporting characters were the most interesting here, and I loved how he turned some of the usual clichés on their heads, for example making a werewolf and a vampire (? never specified what this character is, but signs say vampire) as protector figures rather than threats.
• I’ve also been reading some short stories; it’s such a hard form to do well, but when they’re done well, they’re brilliant. For example, everything by the brilliant, creepy, keep-you-just-slightly-off-kilter Shirley Jackson (e.g., “The Summer People” or “The Bus”). Or “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin – I finally read this classic, recommended to me ages ago. Need to read more James Baldwin! He’s got a quiet style with phrases that at the time seem to slip by, but in retrospect really stuck with me.
“HAD BEEN ON MY TO-READ LIST FOREVER” BOOKS:
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley – read it so I could serve as a “jury” member for the English class putting Victor Frankenstein on trial!
• The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers – the sole Sayers mystery I’d skipped back in the day, because I wanted to get on to the later books that introduce Harriet Vane and see what all the fuss was about there. The later Wimsey/Vane are indeed brilliant, but these early mysteries with just Lord Peter are lots of fun, too!
• Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney and read aloud by him – yup, Heaney is great, and I especially enjoyed reading his thoughts about how he made his translation more accessible by imagining his own family members and how they would tell the story.
• Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith – I still haven’t managed to read a novel by Zadie Smith, though she’s been near the top of my list forever, but now that I’ve read this book of her essays I know that, good lord, she’s brilliant. Okay, she just jumped even higher on the to-read list.
LOOKING AHEAD:
I’m traveling, so I’m somewhat limited by what I was able to pack in my luggage for these 2.5 months abroad…though even so, in typical fashion right now I’m simultaneously reading a German book, an English book, and listening to an audiobook. I know I’m going to read “Beloved” by Toni Morrison for the
online_bookclub, and I want to finally read “Independent People” by Halldór Laxness before I go to Iceland this time. (That’s the book an Icelandic friend said you have to read to understand Icelandic people!) Also, my brick-space book club read the first third of the massive 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami last month, with plans to continue the next sections in the next months. I’ll be away when the group next meets, but I still want to finish the book at some point…ca. 300 pages down, ca. 600 to go!.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-02 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-03 12:31 pm (UTC)Ooh, yes, please do a book post! I love to see what others are reading. :-)
ETA: Oh, and no worries, your "slow reading months" are still probably more than most people manage to read. ;-)