New Year, new books - January 2024 bookthread

[scrubb]

Jan 22, 2024 6:05:15 GMT -5 Liiisa said:

Oh I love love LOVE Kate Beaton!

I've been wondering about this one. I have a copy of her "Hark! A Vagrant!" which is one of the funniest things, and wondered about this one since it can't possibly be funny (per descriptions I've read). However, part of what makes that so funny is what a good observer of life she is.

This one is not funny, no. I saw some reviews by fans of "Hark" who were disappointed in this one, although overall it seems to be well liked.

I'm not 100% convinced that the graphic novel aspect adds to it as most of the panels are just heads talking, and honestly a lot of them look so alike it's hard to remember who is who, but there are some full page spreads of things like northern lights, the site, the landscape, etc. Not colour, though. But I think that having 100% of the information communicated by what people say, no other narrator, does work well.

ETA: also, I've read a few critical reviews (on Goodreads) and I think most of them miss the fact that she's writing about her 22 year old self, in 2005. Like, she only brings up the environmental damage of the oil sands projects, and the First Nations opposition, briefly, near the end. Lots of criticism about that. I read it as she was gradually becoming more mature and worldly and opening her eyes to the situation, and I understand why none of that crossed her mind when she first left home to go there. And she doesn't stand up to a lot of the men and the garbage talk - well, she was 22! And introverted! And she made it pretty clear she wasn't saying that her way of dealing everything was positive!

[tinaja]

I finally finished The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. It was over 500 dense pages. Interesting but I was glad to finish. Reading something much lighter, Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner. Oddly it has similar themes to some other book that I recently read.

[Liiisa]

I finished this one several days ago, but forgot to write about it:

3) Trevor Herriot, Grass, Sky, Song
Nonfiction: a lovely book by a naturalist about birds and habitats in prairie Saskatchewan. Sad because so many things have disappeared as prairie has been converted to agriculture, but also some positive notes here and there.

[lillielangtry]

3) Haji Jabir, Black Foam, translated by Sawad Hussain and Marcia Lynx Qualey
I'd never read a novel from Eritrea before, so I picked up this book about Ethiopian and other African immigrants to Israel - another topic I'd only vaguely heard of. The main character, who goes by different names depending on the circumstances, has struggled and reinvented himself to escape Eritrea and, ultimately, to arrive in Israel. But of course it doesn't turn out to be the promised land for him. It's a really interesting topic and a brisk, sometimes tough, novel to read. I didn't love it but I'd glad I read it.

[scrubb]

Jan 25, 2024 6:39:32 GMT -5 Liiisa said:

I finished this one several days ago, but forgot to write about it:

3) Trevor Herriot, Grass, Sky, Song
Nonfiction: a lovely book by a naturalist about birds and habitats in prairie Saskatchewan. Sad because so many things have disappeared as prairie has been converted to agriculture, but also some positive notes here and there.

I should really read that. The local CBC station has a "bird line" with him a few times every year and he's sometimes a radio show guest for some other naturalist type reason. I did know he'd written a book but haven't picked it up.

[ozziegiraffe]

5. Chili, Chili, Bang, Bang, Denise Swanson. Cozy mystery set during a chili cooking contest.

[Webs]

"What you're looking for is in the library" - Michiko Aoyama

A sweet set of interwoven stories with a bit of a mystical.

[scrubb]

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Story about a transgender woman and the trans community and some of the issues of being trans, but mostly about motherhood from a trans perspective.

The first few pages are very abrupt and shocking. I almost didn't keep going, as it was written in a style I don't like as well as being kind of horrifying. But the rest of it isn't that style, and it gets inside the heads of some of the characters so well that I found myself learning a lot, while also being entertained. The book had great answers for some of the questions that keep coming up (mostly from bigots, but also just from general society) such as "why do drag queens want to be around children?". I think it did lapse into teaching sometimes, but it was well enough done and interesting enough that I didn't mind.

I haven't decided if the first few pages are a good idea - throwing the reader into the deep end of a dark part of he trans world - or if it will turn off a lot of people so completely that they can't be bothered to read the rest, and won't be able to develop sympathy for the character. The whole book does establish that trans women are almost inevitably damaged people - damaged by having been so unhappily misgendered, very often damaged by lack of familial acceptance, damaged by how society sees them, damaged by the difficulty of finding people interested in having relationships with them, damaged by the lack of supports, etc. It's not all doom and gloom, at all - some of it is funny, lots of it is touching, and all of it is interesting.

[Liiisa]

Thank you for that, scrubb -- I knew of that book but was kinda scared of it (i.e., would it make me too angry).

[sophie]

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov. Translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. 2023 international Booker winner. This is not your typical novel.. it’s a bit of a cautionary tale about the dangers of becoming too fond of the past and a story of European politics being taken to the absurd level. I can’t even begin to describe the plot other than a geriatric psychiatrist has found a way to treat his Alzheimer’s patients by having them live in the decade they liked the best.. his methods catch on and family start to move in with the patient.. then it catches on in European countries… and each country has a referendum to determine what decade in the past they want to be in. I couldn’t read more than a page or two without encountering phrases, paragraphs or ideas which needed to be mulled over. Quite philosophical. I liked it but it’s not a light read and probably not everyone’s idea of a good read.

[Liiisa]

I loved that book, sophie!

[scrubb]

Question: Kuang's Babel is on sale for $2, but I wasn't a big fan of the Poppy Wars (as in, only read the 1st one, no desire to carry on). Are they very similar, or is it different enough that I should try it?

[sophie]

I found it different..more emphasis on the language/ culture end of things.. I liked it but it’s still ‘alternative history’

[scrubb]

I'm ok with alternative histories. I think I'll try it. If I like it enough, maybe I'll feel encouraged to finish the Poppy War series. Maybe.

[sophie]

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. A gentle book, well written. It’s during the pandemic on a cherry farm in Michigan. The main character, Lara, has her three daughters home from their various schools and they are helping with the cherry harvest. As the harvest progresses, the daughters want Lara to tell them about her life before marriage when she was an actress and her then boyfriend would become a famous actor. The story unfolds in a gentle way, the rhythm of the farm continues and the family dynamics are revealed slowly and gently. It’s not a novel with much action yet lots happens. I enjoyed it.

[HalcyonDaze]

Jan 26, 2024 16:59:25 GMT -5 sophie said:

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov. Translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. 2023 international Booker winner. This is not your typical novel.. it’s a bit of a cautionary tale about the dangers of becoming too fond of the past and a story of European politics being taken to the absurd level. I can’t even begin to describe the plot other than a geriatric psychiatrist has found a way to treat his Alzheimer’s patients by having them live in the decade they liked the best.. his methods catch on and family start to move in with the patient.. then it catches on in European countries… and each country has a referendum to determine what decade in the past they want to be in. I couldn’t read more than a page or two without encountering phrases, paragraphs or ideas which needed to be mulled over. Quite philosophical. I liked it but it’s not a light read and probably not everyone’s idea of a good read.

Currently in the pile by my bed, might move it up a bit

[sprite]

Jan 28, 2024 10:59:05 GMT -5 scrubb said:

Question: Kuang's Babel is on sale for $2, but I wasn't a big fan of the Poppy Wars (as in, only read the 1st one, no desire to carry on). Are they very similar, or is it different enough that I should try it?

I enjoyed it. It doesn't have the violence and trauma of the Poppy Wars, but does an interesting job of presenting an alternative history. At times the villains are a bit too much villains, but it's a novel, not a political party.

[sprite]

In Ascension, Martin MacInness

If you like stories where you never actually know what's going on, you'll love this book.
Also, unless one is writing the history of the word 'lacuna', there's no need to use it, or one of it's variations, 5 times in 380 pages. That's just posturing.

I didn't really like this book. I felt that the author's main purpose was to show us how clever he was, how much research he'd done. If you're interested in undersea exploration, space travel, or sustainable food sources, you'll like this book a lot.

A few things didn't ring true. The narrator is Dutch, and spends most of the book outside of the Netherlands, yet there's never a reference to being a foreigner/outsider or living/working in one's second language.
She suffers horrific abuse as a child, yet this never affects her adult relationships. The organisation she works for employs hundreds of people in three continents, and yet maintains complete secrecy.

I ended up skim-reading quite a lot, because I was running out of time on this and another library e-book, and I can't get extensions because of the waiting list (like, I'd have to wait 2 months before I could get it back). A lot of things are alluded to, or never resolved.

The main character is a research scientist looking at marine algae as a possible food source for humans, and is approached by a mysterious tech company looking for a way to feed astronaunts on long haul space missions. Also mysteriously, scientists working in different parts of the world have simultaneously discovered a way to move spaceships faster than previously thought possible, and an undiscovered ocean abyss has been found. When our heroine and other researchers do a research dive over it, they have mysterious, never explained symptoms.
Is it the algae? Is it aliens?
We never find out.

[scrubb]

Killers of the Flower Moon, by David Grann.

The story of "The Reign of Terror", a time in the 1920s when Osage Indians were being murdered to get at their wealth (which was from oil).

Overall, I ended up liking the book, but it got off to a rocky start. Maybe I just didn't like how the author organized the story, but the first 1/4 or so felt sort of random and jumpy and it seemed to focus on a character who actually didn't end up playing a very big role in anything. There was no big picture at all, until a good way through. And also, a major part of the story is kind of ignored until the final 1/4 or so, where it's presented as some kind of revelation, even though it was obvious to the reader from the start. (without giving a lot away, telling the reader that there were 21 murders, but then only talking about 5 or 6, and focusing almost entirely on 4, doesn't mean the reader has forgotten that there were 21.)

I LOVED the author's previous book, The Lost City of Z, so was disappointed that this one wasn't (IMO) as well written.

That said, the last 2/3 or so was pretty gripping. It's a horrible, terrible story and it's also clear that it was much more extensive and devastating than the official version. And maybe the story is known in the USA, but I sure hadn't heard about it before. It's a story that should be known.

I'm looking forward to seeing the movie.


ETA: I just realized I didn't read "The Lost City of Z" by this guy - it was The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston, that I liked so much!

[scrubb]

Jan 29, 2024 1:09:41 GMT -5 sophie said:

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. A gentle book, well written. It’s during the pandemic on a cherry farm in Michigan. The main character, Lara, has her three daughters home from their various schools and they are helping with the cherry harvest. As the harvest progresses, the daughters want Lara to tell them about her life before marriage when she was an actress and her then boyfriend would become a famous actor. The story unfolds in a gentle way, the rhythm of the farm continues and the family dynamics are revealed slowly and gently. It’s not a novel with much action yet lots happens. I enjoyed it.

That's another one on my hold list from the library.

[sprite]

I listened to a podcast series about the Flower Moon, back when the movie came out. Maybe I'll watch the movie rather than read.

[sophie]

Just before the end of the month! Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. Another ‘Canada Reads’ book which I decided to pick up and read. The main character, Mac, leaves her small First Nations community to live in Vancouver. Her sister dies but Mac doesn’t return for the funeral; the emotional fallout is the gist of the book. It includes some dream reality, some family dynamics, some cultural beliefs… interesting but not a book I enjoyed reading.

[sprite]

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

Finished that a couple of days ago. Much easier read than the previous Booker book I whipped through.
I enjoyed this book. The author was a little naughty a couple of times, leading us down a garden path and then veering off into the sea, but it worked.

A housewife tells her private and public life story, against the final days of the British Empire in what is now Malaysia. I felt that the story captured that sense of people born, living and dying overseas, yet always thinking of themselves as English. And the codes of conduct! I would have gone bonkers. But it does mean that all the little individual narratives could never work anywhere else.

I'm now quite keen to read more W Somerset Maugham, who is a main character in this story, but also something else I can't express. Like he's a sort of ghost, haunting everyone who meets him?

It also made me very hungry. There is a LOT of food in this book.

[sophie]

Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly. A good legal mystery with the two main characters from the author’s previous novels teaming up to clear a person wrongfully convicted of a serious crime. Good action, several plot twists and interesting legal information. I enjoyed it a bit too much.. stayed up late tonight to finish it rather than waiting until tomorrow to find out the end result.

[sprite]

oops.

[jimm]

Jan 9, 2024 22:53:45 GMT -5 ozziegiraffe said:

3. Winner Cake All, Denise Swanson, one of my favourite cozy mystery authors.

Ha! What a coincidence! I met Denise more than 25 years ago - maybe even before her 1st book was released. I might have a signed copy somewhere.

I had chatted with her husband in a travel 'newsgroup' (one of those things before forums and maybe even TT) and when they came to Oz for a vacation we met them and went to Ballarat together for the day. We (husband and I) corresponded for a few years after that.

[ozziegiraffe]

That is interesting, jimm. I loved her series featuring a school psychologist, which was her original profession.