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Post by Liiisa on Sept 4, 2023 17:54:11 GMT -5
Thread title because I was all about to post the following in the August thread: derp. Anyway,
65) Chuck Wendig, Wanderers
Yikes: a fungal pandemic, fascist militia types, and a creative use of a supersentient AI. Tensely plotted, well researched medical stuff, great characters; sat home all afternoon to read the last 400 pages. Loved
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Sept 5, 2023 8:38:01 GMT -5
Thank you Liiisa. Bookmarking.
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Post by Webs on Sept 5, 2023 13:52:49 GMT -5
I'm listening to "The Heaven and Earth Grocery." by James McBride. It takes place between the wars in a town in Pennsylvania called Pottstown and focuses on the interrelations of the outcast Jewish and Black communities that live on the edge of the main society and how these people interact and share their lives and try to protect a vulnerable boy from being put in an institution by the White Christian (KKK) leaders of the town.
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Post by Liiisa on Sept 5, 2023 14:06:26 GMT -5
I saw something about that in the NYT and pondered reading it — looking forward to your opinion, Webs!
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Post by Q-pee on Sept 7, 2023 8:02:40 GMT -5
Chai Time at the Cinnamon Gardens
Shankari Chandran
No wonder it won an award!
It's about a family from Sri Lanka who move to Australia, set up an old people's home - which legit sounds like a place I'd retire to. But there's a conflict arising out of their immigrant status and the backlash of some unsavoury right wing nutjobs.
The very very clever thing she's done is create a sympathetic small "r" racist who is the catalyst for a lot of shit.
The ending felt unresolved to me... and I don't need all the lose ends tied up in nice neat bow but this sort of drifted to an unresolved end.
It's hitting all sorts of highly relevant themes - colonisation, history, who gets to write history, identity, divided politics, gender politics, trauma and intergenerational trauma, ... the character leads are both fantastically good people but also damaged. I definitely was a little bit in love with at least two of them.
She's woke af and I'd read more by her.
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Post by lillielangtry on Sept 7, 2023 8:29:30 GMT -5
Elizabeth Day, Friendaholic
Sent to me by a friend. Day is a witty writer who goes into the themes of friendship - can you have too many friends? What makes a friend? Why don't we give friendships the same value as we do romantic relationships? Why would you break up with a friend? Really nice, and moving in some places; Day suffered several miscarriages and writes about the difficulty of being a supportive friend to pregnant friends while going through IVF.
I really liked this and will be buying it for some of my own friends.
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Post by Webs on Sept 7, 2023 9:13:25 GMT -5
HIGHLY RECOMMEND -
"The Heaven and Earth Grocery." by James McBride
This book took me down so many roads of emotion and nostalgia. McBride's understanding of communities and his turn of phrase are captivating.
I was ready to have my hear wrenched out of my chest at the ending but it was lovely and poetic.
Please read this book. It will enrich your life.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 7, 2023 14:46:12 GMT -5
Kate Atkinson, Case Histories.
Started rereading the Jackson Brodie mysteries. Really liked the first one all over again.
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Post by sophie on Sept 7, 2023 22:08:58 GMT -5
Like Every Form of Love by Padma Viswanathan. An interesting book, not really a novel but as she describes it, a memoir of friendship and true crime. The author writes about her friend, whose background story was rather eventful. She writes about the process of writing his story while studying true to the friendship and her own writing vision. I enjoyed this book but it may not be for everyone.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Sept 7, 2023 22:34:25 GMT -5
63. A Murderous Yarn, Monica Ferris
One of a favourite cozy mystery series set around a needlework supply shop in Minnesota. This one is about a vintage car club. I’m having fun reading ones I’ve found free on Audible, that I missed before, because I could only get them here at a second hand bookshop that recently closed.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Sept 8, 2023 18:45:47 GMT -5
64. Sweet Deal Sealed, Judith A Barrett, a cozy looking mystery, with a less than cozy start. I enjoyed it, as it dealt with some serious themes, including child abuse and domestic violence, but as in this type of mystery, the good people were OK in the end, and the bad weren’t.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 10, 2023 15:42:50 GMT -5
Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?
Third Jackson Brodie mystery. Excellent.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Sept 10, 2023 19:10:33 GMT -5
In the last week, I’ve also listened to Audible interviews with Donna Leon and Louise Penny, two of my favourite authors.
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Post by sophie on Sept 10, 2023 23:33:55 GMT -5
Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh. The third book in the series about the beginning of the opium wars in China. I liked the story and characters. I especially liked the historical backdrop. Some heavy duty research must have gone into this series.
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Post by Liiisa on Sept 11, 2023 5:28:34 GMT -5
66) Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
A series of stories about the interdependence of humans and the ecosystems they live in, informed by the traditional indigenous traditions that the author grew up with as a member of a Native family in upstate New York. I will be thinking about these ideas of what humans' role is in care for the environment for a long while.
Now on to the sequel to the creepy Chuck Wendig fungus book!
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Post by sophie on Sept 11, 2023 9:50:16 GMT -5
Liisa, I loved that book!
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Post by Liiisa on Sept 11, 2023 10:20:52 GMT -5
Isn’t it marvelous? I’d been intending to read it for several years, and glad I finally got around to it.
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Post by lillielangtry on Sept 12, 2023 1:34:27 GMT -5
Agatha Christie, Evil under the Sun
Another Poirot on audiobook; this is one of the better ones, I think. Set on an island with a small cast of suspects - classic!
And then, sigh...
R. F. Kuang, Yellowface
Unfortunately I think I've had it with R. F. Kuang. After not enjoying Babel, I probably wouldn't have picked her work up again but we're reading Yellowface for book club. I know many people love this. I was partly bored - yeah, we get it, she understands how the publishing industry works and she needs to explain it to all of us. Both the main characters are unlikeable and of course, that is absolutely deliberate - that's the point of the book. But I just didn't like it, although I think it does make some good points about whipping up controversy on social media.
Irenosen Okojie, Butterfly Fish
I should probably have abandoned this but the story was kind of promising and I took it on a beach day with no alternative...
It's about a young woman in London who is left an ornamental bronze head (one of the "Benin bronzes") by her mother and starts to find out more about her history in Nigeria. The story then swaps between her, her grandfather and her ancestors in Africa. But the language is SO FLOWERY at times I just found it almost meaningless, or poorly edited, and started skimming. Not at all a style I like. Plus there's a shocking reveal at the end which I thought hadn't really been foreshadowed properly.
This was the author's debut novel and she has gone on to win several awards, so maybe she was just finding her feet with this one.
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Post by Webs on Sept 12, 2023 10:30:50 GMT -5
Lille - I loved the Peter Ustinov movie version of that book.
"Year of Wonder" was so engrossing and well done. I did think that the narrator of the audio version had strange ways of phrasing and speech, almost as if she was high at times. And then I found out it was the author reading it. But I still found the book wonder and I highly recommend it. I want to read some of her others but I'm hesitant if they're read by her.
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Post by tucano on Sept 13, 2023 6:44:09 GMT -5
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Sept 14, 2023 4:44:22 GMT -5
65. Hanging by a Thread, Monica Ferris. Another cozy mystery set in a Needlecraft shop. This one solves a cold case. I wasn’t impressed with the Halloween/paranormal emphasis at the beginning, but it improved.
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Post by Liiisa on Sept 16, 2023 12:23:13 GMT -5
67) Chuck Wendig, Wayward
The sequel to "Wanderers," which as you recall, was a book about AI and a pandemic. He leads one chapter with a quote from Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built in Hell" (!!); its spirit is the heart of the book: in a disaster, community comes together to repair things. So good: made me cry
(Warning that there's a lot of violence and gross stuff, as with the first volume)
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Post by sophie on Sept 16, 2023 22:00:41 GMT -5
Valerie Perrin, Three. Translated from the French by Hildegard Serle. Fantastic novel about friendship and growing up and how life and its curves change friendships. The three main characters meet at school when they are all 10. The novel takes the reader from that event in 1986 to 2018 and the changes in their relationships. Loved it.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 17, 2023 14:50:56 GMT -5
Have finished "Started Esrly, Took my Dog" and "One Good Turn", books 4 and 2 in the Jackson Brodie series. Enjoyed both very much.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 20, 2023 5:51:01 GMT -5
The House of Fortune by Jessie Burton. Q already mentioned it- sequel to The Miniaturist. I really liked The Miniaturist, but reading this sequel made me realize that i remember nothing about it at all. Almost all the events this one discussed were unfamiliar.
Anyway, this one was also good but not perfect at all. It felt a bit like the author made the characters serve the plot. Motivations weren't always convincing.
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Post by Webs on Sept 20, 2023 10:23:11 GMT -5
I'm reading "Lessons in Chemistry" finally. I'm finding the main character compelling but I'm hating all the sexism of the 50s and 60s.
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Post by Liiisa on Sept 21, 2023 5:50:35 GMT -5
68) Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist
The author wants to find meaning and order in the chaos of life, and latches onto the story of David Starr Jordan, a 19th-century fish taxonomist. However, in her research she learns that Jordan used his fame to promote practices of eugenics. She also learns that "fish" isn't even recognized as a valid taxonomic category anymore (hence the title). Categorizing things is a useful tool, but keep in mind that it can be harmful and not a reflection of the actual world.
Did I like it? Pretty much. At first I was thinking "oh boy, another book about how Nature taught me wisdom or whatever," but it was more interesting than that. I think her conclusion was that there is no larger "Meaning" to life except in community - meaning is about relationships.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Sept 21, 2023 6:44:36 GMT -5
66. A Death in the Parish, Richard Coles. A murder mystery set in a small English village with a clergyman sleuth. I’m enjoying these because they address issues in the church in the recent past (it is set in 1989). A well constructed mystery by an author who knows what he is talking about. He is the narrator for the audiobook.
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Post by lillielangtry on Sept 24, 2023 13:08:07 GMT -5
Well, travelling with a partner rather than travelling alone really changes the amount I read...! Just two books in the past two weeks, and one of them a reread.
C. J. Sansom, Sovereign
Continuing my reread of the Shardlake series, this was number three and I think my favourite, because it's set in my hometown of York. So well researched and set up. (It does deal with torture at one point, I had to skim a little)
Bagila Bukharbayeva, The Vanishing Generation: Faith and Uprising in Modern Uzbekistan
Yes, this is my book for Uzbekistan - the choice was not large. The author is a journalist and this is about the persecution of supposed Islamic extremists (often they were not really extreme at all) in Uzbekistan after the fall of the Soviet Union. It's pretty good if you're interested in that subject.
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Post by Liiisa on Sept 24, 2023 19:11:50 GMT -5
69) Premee Mohammed, No One Will Come Back for You and other stories
A group of incredibly inventive short stories - dark and a little Lovecraftian with the old gods and tentacles and such, but generally with some aspect of hope glimmering in the background - rather than the sense of inevitable decay that you get from Lovecraft. My favorite was the story about the revolutionary cadre and Death.
I'm going to donate this to the library with a note on it "PUT THIS ON THE SHELF PLEASE" because there's none of her work in the system, and that's sad.
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