Reading Challenge Updates

Completed
-A novel set during wartime.  I used Atonement by Ian McEwan for this one.  It had been on my to-read list for a while, and I'm glad that I finally got to it, but I honestly can't really see what all the fuss is about.  It's a very meta book, but it's incredibly slow for the first 50% and almost had me walking away from it multiple times.  The latter half of the book was good, but the first part was so meh that I can't really bring myself to like it as a whole...even though I know the importance of that first part to the overall setup of the story.

-A book from a nonhuman perspective.  This was a really hard category to find a title for, but I finally went with The Tale of Despereaux.  It's a middle-grade story but simply and beautifully elegant, with a lovely central message and well-developed characters who prove sympathetic, even the bad guys.  There's some very poignant writing here, which surprised me, and I really enjoyed this, far more than I thought I would.

-An audiobook.  I ultimately went with Anna and the French Kiss for this, for various reasons.  I didn't like it.  This is a book that I loved in book form but it did not agree with me in audiobook format.  On the other hand, listening to it did bring to light several flaws and some questionable content that I hadn't noticed when I last read it, so I guess it was a learning experience!  I still like the book as a whole, but basically everything that I thought I wouldn't like about audiobooks--someone doing all the voices instead of having a cast, the weird pauses and inflections, etc.--were exactly true here.

-A book with pictures.  I originally intended to read Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations for this category because some reviewers said it had amazing pictures.  But I couldn't get my hands on it from any of the library systems around me (I'm trying to cut down on buying books that I haven't read and liked, and trying to use the library more) so I decided to use Krakatoa for this one--though I did read another of Bourdain's books!  Krakatoa has a lot of illustrations, photographs, and maps, though some are more interesting and informative than others.

-A book that's been mentioned in another book.  While I originally intended to read Gulliver's Travels for this, as it was mentioned in Heartless as Gullible's Travels, when I was listening to Anna and the French Kiss, they talk a lot about books in translation.  One of those was Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which I already had on my shelf.  This was a simple story filled with a sense of nostalgia for the re-education period in China under Mao, which was a bit strange, but it was lovely.  I really enjoyed it, except for a trio of chapters that I felt didn't fit the book at all and really only muddled things up.

-A book by an author who uses a pseudonym.  For this, as planned, I read Seven Minutes in Heaven by Eloisa James, why is a pseudonym used by Mary Bly for her romance novels.  As with all of James' books, this one was delightful.  Despite a weak central miscommunication, I think James built the story well, even down to the use of child characters, who so often fall flat in books--which are, obviously, written by adults who most often don't remember what it's like to be a child by the time they get around to writing books including one.  This was so much better than Devil in Spring despite a central trope the two share: the woman with a career who doesn't want it ruined by marriage.  Seven Minutes in Heaven really was strong in all the places that Devil in Spring was weak.


Still to Come
-A book of letters.  The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

-A book with a family-member term in the title.  Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor

-A book that's becoming a movie in 2017. Beauty and the Beast, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont

-A book by a person of color.  The Stone Sky, N. K. Jemisin

-A book that is a story within a story.  Afterworlds, Scott Westerfeld

-A book with multiple authors.  Mutiny on the Bounty, Charles Nordhoff and James Hall

-A bestseller from a genre you don't normally read.  Carrie, Steven King

-A book by or about a person who has a disability.  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon

-A book involving travel.  SEAsoned, Victoria Allman

-A book that's published in 2017.  Given to the Sea, Mindy McGinnis

-A book involving a mythical creature.  Nice Dragons Finish Last, Rachel Aaron

-A book about food.  In the Devil's Garden, Stewart Lee Allen

-A book set in the wilderness.  Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

-A book by an author from a country you've never visited.  Mornings in Jenin, Susan Abulhawa (Palestine)

-A book with an unreliable narrator.  The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer, Michelle Hodkin

-A book where the main character is a different ethnicity than you.  A Disobedient Girl, Ru Freeman

-A book with a month or day of the week in the title.  A June of Ordinary Murders, Conor Brady

-A book written by someone you admire.  A Court of Wings and Ruin, S. J. Maas

-A book set around a holiday other than Christmas.  The Thanksgiving Target, Laura Scott

-The first book in a series you haven't read before.  Shadow and Bone, Leigh Bardugo

-A book recommended by an author you love.  The Lace Reader, Brunonia Barry (rec'd by Tamora Pierce)

-A bestseller from 2016.  Magic, Danielle Steel

-A book that takes place over a character's life span.  The Kitchen God's Wife, Amy Tan

-A book from a genre/subgenre you've never heard of.  The Six-Gun Tarot, R. S. Belcher (Weird West)

-A book that's more than 800 pages.  Voyager, Diana Galbadon

-A book about a difficult topic.  Rape is Rape, Jody Raphael

-A book based on mythology.  Olympos, Dan Simmons

Atonement - Ian McEwan

Atonement has been on my to-read list for a while, but I finally got around to it because I fit it into both my normal reading challenge and my romance reading challenge for 2016.  For my regular reading challenge, it fit the category of "A book set during wartime."  For the romance challenge, I slotted it in for "A literary romance."

Atonement is a weird sort of book.  It has a meta storyline, fitting the events of the book into their own book story.  The plot follows two sisters of the wealthy Tallis family, Cecilia and Briony, and the son of the family's charwoman, Robbie.  One day in 1935, there's a house party at the Tallis home for Cecilia and Briony's visiting brother and his friend.  Briony, an aspiring author and possibly playwright, sees a confrontation between Cecilia and Robbie, who both attended the same school and have spent the past few years in a sort of dance around each other, drawn to each other but unable to put a pin in their feelings.  Briony, ten years younger than Cecilia and Robbie and not within hearing distance, thinks Robbie is coercing Cecilia into some perverse act that involves taking her clothes off and getting into a fountain.  Later, when Robbie puts his feelings to paper in an apology to Cecilia, he gives Briony the note to deliver and she reads it--but Robbie has actually given her a draft that includes some passionate but rather vulgar phrasing, and it helps to cement in Briony's mind that Robbie is a dangerous deviant.  All of this sets off a chain of events that ends with Robbie being falsely accused of rape and imprisoned, and then joining the infantry just before the start of World War II to lessen his prison sentence.  All the while, he and Cecilia maintain a relationship via letters, and Cecilia severs her relationship with her family due to how easily they turned on Robbie.

The romance in here is definitely a secondary story, with the main story revolving around the devastation the rape allegations wreak on Robbie's life and, to a lesser degree, Cecilia's, and how Briony comes to the realization that she was wrong as she grows older and tries to atone for her actions, even though there's no way she can completely right the wrong she committed.  This is an interesting concept, and once the book moved into the second and third parts, it moved quickly and was pretty enjoyable.  However, the first part, which takes up the first half of the book, is very slow, and it almost had me quitting reading a couple of times.  The problem is that, despite the part taking place over only a day, it just drags.  Pretty much every scene has to be rehashed from at least two different viewpoints, and while I understand that the perspectives were necessary to introduce both the truth of the events and how Briony interprets them, but I can't help but wonder if there would have been a more streamlined way to do this that wouldn't have resulted in the beginning of the book being so incredibly slow and clunky.

Later in the book, Briony receives a rejection letter from a literary magazine to who she'd submitted a piece of writing based on the pivotal events of the book.  The letter contains a bunch of advice for Briony about the weak points of her work--and I couldn't help but feel like those weak points were still evident in the book itself, which is ultimately supposed to be Briony's final draft of the events, one that she's worked over again and again for decades.  But I found the same weaknesses and tedium in it that were pointed out in this fictional rejection letter, and it just highlighted to me that the beginning of the book was...not that good.

Overall, I can see why people like this--it's very meta, and the later parts of the book are enjoyable.  But the slow beginning and rehashing of any and every event in the first half of the book really impacted my enjoyment of it.

3 stars out of 5.

Stars Above - Marissa Meyer (Lunar Chronicles #4.5)

It's become popular in recent years to YA authors to write a slew of short stories that accompany their full-length works.  Marissa Meyer is no different in that, around the time she released Winter, she also released this volume, Stars Above, comprised of short stories set in the Lunar Chronicles universe.  Most of them deal directly with the main characters from the series.

I'm a firm believer that authors don't "owe" short stories like this to their readers, and that when they're written, they typically don't really add much to the series.  That's definitely the case here.  There are nine stories of varying lengths in this book, and eight of them, while enjoyable, are just fine.  They don't really add anything to the Lunar Chronicles experience that wasn't laid out in the main works.  Yes, the stories expound a bit more upon things that were just mentioned in the main works, but they don't resolve any plot holes or offer any big revelations.

The big exception to this, as other reviewers have noted, is a wonderful gem of a story called "The Little Android."  It deals with none of the characters from the main books, though just as each main heroine's story was patterned after a fairy tale, so is this.  The story here is, of course, "The Little Mermaid," except the mermaid is an android who'd developing a personality and emotions of her own.  It's a beautiful, heart-wrenching story that fits into the world and helps expand on it without feeling the need to pander to fans.  If the stories in the collection had all been like this, I think I would have had a much higher opinion of the book as a whole than I actually ended up with.

The other stories are just okay.  There's one about Michelle Benoit getting Cinder and Scarlet, one about Cinder going to live with the Linh family, one about Wolf becoming a recruit in the Lunar army, one about Thorne while he was in school, one about Cress going to live in the satellite, another with background on Winter and Jacin, Cinder and Kai's meeting from Kai's perspective, and finally one that takes place after the end of the main Lunar Chronicles which details Scarlet and Wolf's wedding.  That was a cute one, but again, nothing that I absolutely couldn't live without and that I hadn't figured would happen anyway.

Overall, this is a cute addition to the series and it looks nice on the shelf, but there's only one real gem here.  Writing short stories is an art that requires a completely different set of skills than writing full-length novels, and if it hadn't been for "The Little Android," I would think that Meyer hadn't quite honed those skills yet.  "The Little Android" absolutely glowed, though, and I wish Meyer had taken the time to expand her universe rather than just her already-established stories, because that universe expansion is definitely what worked best here.

3 stars out of 5 for the whole.

Envy - Anna Godbersen (The Luxe #3)

I read the first two books in this series, The Luxe and Rumors, about a year ago, and intended to read this one (and the last one!) but they just got it into the digital collections for the library recently.  It's a long gap to follow up on a book that consists primarily of costume porn and petty drama, but I dove right back in anyway.

This series continues to be teenage drama trash, and I continue to love it anyway.  Penelope Hayes, the young socialite queen of New York City, has recently married the guy she always wanted, Henry Schoonmaker.  She doesn't love Henry, but rather wants to possess him like some expensive bauble or trinket, and in that she is successful.  Of course, this comes at the expense of Diana Holland, the younger sister of Henry's former fiancee, Elizabeth; Henry and Diana were romantically involved in the second book, and Diana doesn't know why Henry abandoned her to marry Penelope, because she keeps burning all the letters that Henry sent trying to explain things--namely, that Penelope knows about Henry and Diana and threatened to ruin Diana if Henry didn't marry her.

Pause.  Why would that be such a bad thing, to have Diana "ruined" by Henry?  Because there would be a scandal?  Everything these kids does causes a scandal, and if Henry had ruined Diana, the honorable thing for him to do would be to marry her, which is what everyone except Penelope wanted anyway, so I'm not sure why things proceeded in this manner.

Penelope is of course a prime bitch, but she's kind of an evil genius in her petty, mean-girl way.  She goes after what she wants, ruthlessly, while all the other characters kind of just flit about letting her do whatever she desires to them.  You gotta give it to her, she knows how to trample over people, and they just make it so easy.  I don't want to admire Penelope, or like her, but everyone else is basically spineless, even Diana, who used to possess a bit more attitude and a backbone, so I guess I can't really blame Penelope, even though she's, you know, terrible.

But the truly despicable character in this book is Lina.  Still masquerading as an heiress, she goes about on the arm of her wealthy benefactor, then abandons him when he's clearly dying and only want her completely innocent company so that she can instead go to Florida and strut about in palm trees.  And then she acts all affronted when he dies and the people managing his estate try to push her out--the people who saw her taking advantage of him the entire time!  Granted, Lina has an ax to grind with the Holland family, for whom she was a maid--though they never actually appear to have treated her badly--but the way she tosses aside people when they no longer suit her needs is awful.  How is this different than Penelope, you ask?  It's simple.  Penelope only wants one thing: Henry.  If she can have Henry, she will be perfectly content.  But Lina?  What Lina wants is more.  Always more.  She will never be satisfied, and will just continue on forever.  Out of all the people in these books, Lina is the one who I most hope gets her just deserts.

The logic in this book is lacking, the drama is over the top, and much of the story is devoted to lavish descriptions of the wealth surrounding the characters, as if there's no life that isn't upper class in New York in 1901, but it's all strangely intriguing.  I don't think the library has the fourth book in its digital collections yet, but I'll still read it when they get it.  It's kind of like a train wreck--it's absolutely terrible, and I know that, but I can't seem to bring myself to look away.

3 stars out of 5, because it's awful but I still like it.

Stealing Buddha's Dinner - Bich Minh Nguyen

Stealing Buddha's Dinner has been on my "to read" list for a while, and when I needed a book written by or about an immigrant for my 2017 reading challenge, it seemed like the perfect time to finally get to it.

Nguyen, her father, sister, grandmother, two uncles, and an uncle's friend all fled Vietnam when she was eight months old in 1975, when the American were clearing out their embassy and Saigon was being bombed.  Arriving as refugees in the United States, they settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Nugyen grew up as essentially American, not really being able to speak Vietnamese and wanting more than anything to be one of the "real" people she saw in commercials and TV shows and in books.  But as one of few Vietnamese or other minority people in "a sea of blond," things weren't as easy as she wanted them to be.  Nguyen wanted to assimilate, deeply, but still cherished the Vietnamese parts of her life.  Sitting with her grandmother in meditation, having fruit from the shrine in her house, the foods that her grandmother would make--Nguyen might have craved Tollhouse cookies and Otter Pops and 7UP and all manner of other "American" foods, but there was still a big Vietnamese part of her life, and she struggled with balancing it with her desperate need to fit in.

Nguyen has a way of making the most junky of all junk foods sound absolutely tantalizing, and she's easy to empathize with.  I didn't grow up an immigrant, but Nguyen manages to draw on the ostracism that most kids face at some point or another.  I was also the kid with glasses who wanted to read more than anything else, who didn't really have a lot of friends and felt like the parents of the friends I did have were always looking down on me.  By drawing on these experiences, Nguyen manages to build a bridge so that even those of us who don't share her exact background can understand her isolation and longing to belong.

The book is written in a non-linear style, which I don't mind, but it does seem a bit scattered in the beginning.  After the first few chapters, the parts of the book become more thematic, but the first few seem to flit from topic to topic with little cohesion.  Things come up and are dropped, never to be seen again or only to be seen at the very end of the book--a mention that her stepmother (who she really does view as her mother, not remembering her mother from Vietnam and not meeting her until she's in college) drew away and left the family, when in fact she didn't, and then the mention of her biological mother being left in Vietnam, which only comes up again much, much later.  It feels like these things were brought up for no reason at the time they were first mentioned, and could easily have been better woven in later, near where the actual exposition regarding them ended up.

Overall, this was a very enjoyable and poignant memoir about wanting to belong and not quite managing to do so.  Despite being born a quarter of a century after Nugyen, I could see a lot of parallels in our childhoods, and that really helped draw me into the narrative.  I've never had to balance two halves of myself like she did, but by evoking those parallels, she made the understanding easier, and that is a real accomplishment.

4 stars out of 5.

A Conjuring of Light - V. E. Schwab (Shades of Magic #3)

The final Shades of Magic book arrived on my doorstep two days early, courtesy of Amazon.  If you have Prime shipping, the book has release-day delivery, and you live in the right area--namely, near a distribution center--that happens sometimes.  Unfortunately, I didn't get to it right away.  But upon reading A Conjuring of Light, I didn't find myself wishing I'd read it sooner.

As an offering, ACoL falls somewhere between A Darker Shade of Magic (book one) and A Gathering of Shadows (book two).  The plot deals with the descent of the "shadow king" Osaron upon Red London and the plight of that London's inhabitants, plus White London Antari Holland and Grey London Antari Lila, as they try to oust Osaron from his new position of power.  The central plot is solid, and involves several "tried and failed" schemes to defeat Osaron, from trapping him in a body and then killing the body to hacking him apart with weapons spelled to dispel magic.  It even involves a sea journey to what was a very cool floating marketplace full of magical artifacts.  Holland plays a larger role in this book, as do Prince Rhy and Alucard Emery.  We even get some of Holland's back story, which has largely been missing until this point.  But despite all that, I found myself wanting more.

A Darker Shade of Magic had magic (duh) and wonder and the wide-eyed amazement of these three or four Londons stacked atop each other, and the movements between them.  That went away in the second book, and it was largely lacking here, too.  Ninety-five percent of this book takes place in Red London, and Osaron turns out to be a uniquely Red London problem.  Ultimately, the interplay of the various Londons isn't really brought onto the stage, nor is it acknowledged that, despite Osaron's defeat, Black London appears to still be infringing on White, and when White falls, isn't Red next?  And what of Grey after that?  I would have loved to see the worlds tied more closely together once again, especially since we officially had an Antari from each world on the stage.  And while Osaraon is eventually defeated (obviously) it doesn't seem like a permanent solution to me, and rather more seems like something Schwab might potentially be setting up for future books.  Something like "Osaron is released once again and Lila must make good on her promise of favor to Maris," which is another plot line that was never truly wrapped up.

The relationships here were satisfying, building up without taking away too much central plot time.  And while I was initially frustrated by so many chapters from so many different characters who had, until this point, been on the fringes at best--like the king and queen--I think their involvement ultimately paid off.  I would have liked to see more from Mr. Edward Tuttle, the wannabe magician of Grey London, but again, it seems like that might be something that Schwab is setting up for the future.  Possibly.  It's hard to say distinctively, but this book lacks a solid ending.  It feels like she's done with it, but also like she might want to come back later, and so she didn't wrap things up.  Which is fine if she does come back to it, but with no announced plans to do so, it comes across as sloppy.

Overall, I liked this book, but it didn't totally engross me.  A Darker Shade of Magic was breathtaking, A Gathering of Shadows was just okay and suffered from Second Book Syndrome, and this one was good, but nothing that absolutely blew me away or left me reeling and eager to read it again.  Consequently, I'll score it right between the first two.

4 stars out of 5.

Dark Matter - Blake Crouch

I'm not a huge sci-fi person, but Blake Crouch's Dark Matter caused quite a stir last year, being nominated for a Goodreads Choice award, selected as a book for Book of the Month (where I obtained it) and also being the April selection for The Deliberate Reader's virtual book club!  It's a book that's pretty impossible to talk about without spoilers, so beware.

The general story follows Jason, a physics professor in Chicago who's kidnapped one night on his way home and wakes up to find himself in a life where people know him, but isn't the life he's led, in a world that's his own, but not.  This is the premise the entire book revolves around: the alternate worlds theory, in which every choice a person makes splits off another, new reality parallel to our own but unreachable in which that person made a different choice at the same point.  The realities are, of course, infinite, because they continue branching off of each other to no end.  Jason's familiar with the theory, having worked on it before he quit research to have a family, and wants to return home to his own reality via the device that an alternate version of himself created, because he wants to get back to that family, particularly his wife Daniela.  On the way, he wanders though various other realities, inhabited by other Danielas, and ultimately inadvertently creates other versions of himself by his choices...all of whom also want to get back to "his" Daniela.

This is a really intriguing premise and overall the book was good, but I didn't find it to be great.  The writing is a little stilted and shaky, mostly consisting of a lot of one-line paragraphs.  And while the proliferation of Jasons and worlds and the possibilities of how different a reality only a few steps away from own could be were fascinating, I felt like, in the end, there were just too many questions left unanswered.  Is our Jason the real Jason, or does he just think he is?  What's going to happen in the new world?  What happens to all the Jasons left behind?  Why aren't the other Danielas good enough for the other Jasons, even though at least one of them was good enough for our Jason?  Crouch doesn't go into any of this, and while I can accept that some of it is probably meant to be left vague as "food for thought" upon the conclusion of the book, I think that there was just too much left up in the air.  It felt like Crouch knew there was too much he couldn't wrap up, so he left it all vague to add to the "mystique" of the book and hoped no one would really notice.

But I did like some of the stuff here.  The idea of the world-hopping was great, as was how the box was ultimately "steered."  I wish more books dealt with alternate-worlds theory; it's so intriguing, and I think it really can be handled well, though it would be difficult to do so.  And I have to say, while I think some of the loose ends don't really have logical conclusions, they do make for great book club discussion material!

3 stars out of 5.