Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman | Review

Since the paperback recently came out, it seemed appropriate to finally get to my review of Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman. This is a short story collection focusing on the lives of the 13 eponymous women. There is a wide breadth of time and age, with the youngest woman being the toddler Allegra Byron (that  Byron) to painter Romaine Brooks.

I bought this book thinking I would read it slowly, one story at a time. Instead, I read the whole thing in one afternoon. The stories are riveting and haunting, and will leave you scouring Wikipedia to learn more.

Mayhew Bergman varies her form a lot throughout the book. There are a wide variety of narrators, in the first- versus third-person sense but also in relation to the subject. Allegra’s story is told through the eyes of her nurse whose own child died of Typhus, while other stories are told through the eyes of thieves and lovers.

This was one of my favorite books of the summer, if not of the year. I highly recommend reading on the patio with a glass of rosé before the summer ends.

Ruth Galloway | Series Review

I absolutely love the mystery/thriller genre and every summer I can’t get enough of them.  This summer’s addiction has been Elly Griffith’s Ruth Galloway series. Since this is a series review, I will try to keep spoilers to a minimum but there are some spoilers.

Ruth is an archeology professor in Norfolk, England who is asked to consult on a murder investigation by Detective Chief Inspector Nelson. The rest of the series sees her continuing to consult with the local police force, as well as her shenanigans with the cast of characters around her.

This is a really fun series. It is suspenseful with so many twists and turns — very classic mystery. What sets this series apart for me are the characters. Ruth is ambitious, she is fat and doesn’t really care, and she [SPOILERS] becomes a mother who continues to be ambitious and driven.

The cast of characters in this book is great. There’s her friend the Druid, the bumbling policeman Clough and the very capable detective Judy Johnson, her flakey friend Shauna and other assorted background characters. The characters are well-developed as the series goes on, with their own baggage and ambitions.

Ruth Galloway’s stories also have an amazing atmospheric setting. Ruth lives out on the Saltmarsh, a potentially sacred pagan place, but a definitely atmospheric one. It would be easy for that kind of setting to be really cheesy, but Griffiths uses it sparingly and to great effect.

There are currently seven Ruth Galloway novels, with a couple of companions too. I highly recommend if you enjoy good characters, fast plots, and staying up late.

The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Madman’s Daughter | A classic and a retelling

Two of the items on the Book Riot Reading Challenge are to read a classic and a retelling of a classic. After hearing about The Madman’s Daughter from BooksandQuills, I decided to read it and its classic equivalent, The Island of Doctor Moreau.

I really enjoy sci-fi/horror novels from the 19th century. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I am here for this. The Island of Doctor Moreau follows in a similar vein. A man is afloat on a dinghy and is rescued by a man named Montgomery  who is going back to this mysterious island. When they get back to the island, Prendrick realizes it is the island of Dr. Moreau, a scientist who was driven out of England after experimenting with vivisection.

The book explores many of the same themes as Frankenstein — humans playing God, ethics, and what lines science should not cross. Objectively, this book is a fascinating study of these subjects particularly considering the amount of scientific study still conducting on animals who are unable to consent. From a subjective standpoint, this book was a little too grotesque and a little repetitive for me.

The Madman’s Daughter is sort of a retelling of the classic, but from the point of view of Dr. Moreau’s daughter Juliet. She has been living in London under the shadow of the scandal her father caused. She decides to find him, and finds Montgomery in a London inn. He agrees to take her to the Island with him. When she gets to the Island, she is horrified to find out that the scandal was true, and her father is rather cruel.

The Madman’s Daughter has a really great gothic atmosphere. Without even being told, you can see the fog in London as she’s running through the night and the dark corners of the Island. There’s also a feminism in this retelling, where Juliet picked up medical knowledge from having a doctor father and working in the hospital, but repeatedly being told she is good only for marriage and needlepoint. There’s also a really badass moment with a would-be rapist that shows what happened to women who were lower-class and spurned the advances of men.

This book was a bit of a let down, though, because of how much time and focus is spent on a poorly-written love triangle. The rest of the book is well written and plotted, so it almost feels like an editor made the author add the love triangle after the fact.

It was really interesting to read these back-to-back, since one was written during the original gothic era and one is in the gothic-style, but written in modern day. The way that Juliet rebelled against the strictures of Victorian womanhood is much more explicit than it would have been, had it been written a hundred years ago, and added an extra element into the moral questions of the original text.

There are two more books in the Madman’s Daughter trilogy. I haven’t decided whether I will finish the trilogy, but reading these companion novels was definitely an interesting literary exercise.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt | Review

Real talk: I did not like this book and this is definitely the most negative review I’ve ever posted. It may be the most negative I ever post. That is how much I hated this book.

For the first third or so, I was intrigued. I thought the main character was a pompous ass, but I enjoy books with unlikable characters and unreliable narrators so it seemed like it was going well. You spend a lot of the beginning on Richard’s life story – parents who hate him, everyone in his school is stupid, he starts college and it’s stupid. He stares longingly at the pamphlet from an extremely expensive, idyllic northeast liberal arts school. Why this Californian is so drawn to the northeast, it is never quite made clear.

He moves to Hampden, his new school, and gets into this very strange major that seems to be classics but is really five rich kids (plus Richard) hero-worshipping this super pretentious old man. The classes are super exclusive, with only five people in the entire major and the professor basically setting the schedule for his student’s four years. Why the university allows this is never quite clear. The kids in his class are so pretentious about ancient Greek (both the language and its ideals) that I assumed the book was set in the early 20th century, until a passing remark about an ATM. I literally had to look up the copyright date to see when this book was supposed to be.

At this point, I was starting to be skeptical of the book but I pushed on. Boarding school novels are fun! Sad rich kids are interesting – look at Catcher in the Rye!

You find out very early in the book that one of the students was killed by the rest, but it takes half of the book to find out why. When you do find out, it is incredibly confusing why Richard would stick around this crazy group of mind-bogglingly privileged assholes. He doesn’t seem to admire them, envy them, or even like them. He basically allows himself to fall into this murder and then he’s stuck with these psychos.

The book really deteriorated from there for me. There’s will-they-won’t-they get caught, more forays to the fancy cottage, occasionally some guilt over the fact that they killed their friend but mostly drinking and knocking on doors at 2 am being dramatic. Good God the amount of late-night door knocking it’s amazing none of the other students murdered these five.

Another issue I had with this book: none of the main characters act like anyone resembling a 1980s college student. Henry is planting flowers in flower beds at his house, using a wheelbarrow. Do you know how many college students have wheelbarrows just lying around so they can plant flower beds? None. They’re always wearing suits for no apparent reason and sitting around drinking scotch in their “rich kid plays poor” apartments, calling each other “Old boy!” like they’re Jay Gatsby.

Even as someone who loves a good anti-hero/unlikable character, I could barely stomach these kids. They weren’t even unlikable in an interesting way, they were just boring. The end came out of no where, either a deux ex machina as an allusion to all the Greek they studied or the author just wanted to end this longass book and put us out of our misery.

I think the book was supposed to be all ~literary~ and dark and twisty, but I just couldn’t get on board. It didn’t seem like we were supposed to dislike these characters, it seemed like we were supposed to dislike the other students. The characterization was so weak that I couldn’t keep Henry and Francis straight for the first two-thirds of the book. It wasn’t until their characters were fleshed out as France = Gay, Henry = Evil that I could actually tell them apart. This book was just a long slog that started out as a compelling narrative.

The Diviners by Libba Bray | Review

The Diviners by Libba Bray was one of those stay-up-all-night reads. It has fleshed-out characters, fascinating plot, and melds supernatural and real history together fantastically. Watch for more of my thoughts, and hopefully I’ll have a review to the sequel in a few weeks.

Review | The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith

Even though I read every Harry Potter book ten times and loved The Casual Vacancy, I never got around to reading the “Robert Galbraith” mysteries, until now. I think I kind of eye-rolled at the need for secrecy, the use of a second male pen-name, and I just wasn’t interested. Recently, though, I’ve been tearing through mysteries and suspense (as I mentioned here) and decided it was finally time to give The Cuckoo’s Calling a go.

I really, really liked this book but I’m not actually sure why. Bear with me, y’all. For the first two-thirds, nothing actually happens. We are introduced to Cormoran Strike and Robin, we are introduced to the case and many of its players, and that’s kind of it. And yet, I was so incredibly engrossed in this book. I couldn’t put it down, and when I needed to, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It is a much more traditional crime novel, in that the detective spends his time going over the case, instead of having a bunch of action.

In many ways this book is a character study of Strike. He has a backstory that gets peeled back slowly throughout the book, including tumultuous childhood, connections to fame, the military, and disability. He’s also given more flaws than many characters I’ve seen in detective novels, but in a much more human way than someone like Sherlock Holmes. His temp turned assistant Robin is super smart, unraveling pieces of the case and being very sneaky to get him in meetings with witnesses while he just spends time eying her “figure” and worrying whether her fiancee would mind her working with him. He’s basically an archetype of the very nice man who is totally sexist and doesn’t realize it. He isn’t a boor walking around discounting women’s work, he just does it without even noticing or meaning to. I really hope that the relationship with him and Robin is explored more in the second book – she is so smart and I want him to train her to be a full-on badass detective and I want her to stand up and demand that he value her work.

This book is also interesting in the way that it employs an unreliable third person narrator. At first, I though the third-person narrator was more or less omniscient. The only characters whose heads we get into are Robin and Strike, but we DO get into their minds and see what they’re doing and thinking. However, it becomes abundantly clear at the end of the book that there are things that Strike thinks that the narrator does not divulge to the readers. It’s interesting but also gives the ending an air of deux-ex machina.

After being so obsessed with The Cuckoo’s Calling, I am really looking forward to reading The Silkworm and seeing how these characters progress.

Staying Up All Night

My winter reading slump can officially be considered over, thanks to The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon and The Crossing Places (Ruth Galloway #1) by Elly Griffiths. Both of these books kept me up well past my bedtime.

This book was incredibly creepy and suspenseful. McMahon created an atmosphere where you spend your entire reading experience tensed up, expecting something to jump out of the closet, even though nothing ever does.

The story alternates between three viewpoints: the diary of Sara Harrison Shea living in the late-19th century, Ruthie in the modern day, and Kathleen also in the modern day. Sara grew up hearing about “sleepers” and when her daughter dies, she becomes obsessed with creating one. At first, it is really unclear how these three women are related, but as the book progresses the net slowly closes around them. There are so many twists and turns as the story hurtles toward the end. There were a few twists I saw coming, but the end was really shocking to me. Highly recommend reading, do not recommend reading in bed.

This book is the first in the Ruth Galloway series. Galloway is a professor of paleontology in the UK who the police ask to consult on a missing child’s case. Originally just brought in to identify the bones, she of course becomes ensnared in the mystery. Ruth is a kickass professory who embraces her fat identity and takes no prisoners, while simultaneously not being afraid to cry when the situation gets really f-ing terrifying.

I loved how mythology and anthropology are used in this story. Griffiths really commits to Galloway being a paleontologist by giving her tons of niche knowledge. What I didn’t love was how convenient aspects of the mystery were. There were a lot of connections to Ruth that caused me to struggle with my suspension of disbelief. Overall, though, this book was engrossing and I will definitely be continuing with this series.

Now, continuing with mysteries, I’ve moved onto The Cuckoo’s Calling, J.K. Rowling’s first book under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

Empress Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

China is a country that I know embarrassingly little about. Considering I can name all of Henry VIII’s wives and their demises (Catherine – divorced, Anne – beheaded, Jane – childbirth, Anne – annulled, Catherine 2 – beheaded, Catherine 3 – widowed) it’s pretty pathetic how little I know about a major world power.

Enter Jung Chang, author of Empress Cixi. She wrote this lengthy, in-depth look at a woman who was never legally empress in her own right yet affected major change over almost five decades. According to the book and some internet research, Empress Cixi has been maligned by history and Chang sought to change the story. Though at times ruthless and imperfect, Cixi changed the face of China, becoming more open to trading with Western countries and dismantling age-old hierarchies.

I learned so much about China and so much about what I need to learn. I had no idea that China was ruled by the Manchu minority and the ethnic majority were Huns. I didn’t know about the conflicts with Japan, or Japan’s conflicts with Korea. I had heard of the Boxer rebellion but knew little about it. Reading this gave some structure to what types of topics I want to read about next.

This book was really fascinating but also flawed. One glaring flaw was the way that Chang continually made comments conflating western ways with modernity. The tone implied that it was not possible to be modern and also maintain Chinese culture, and that Empress Cixi was on the right path by trying to westernize the country in its cultural traditions. The book was also very long and dragged in places, though that is to be expected of biographies of world leaders.

Using this book as my guide, I have a much better idea of where to go next in my quest to learn about China. Right now, the graphic novels Boxers & Saints by Gene Luen Yang  are on my TBR, in addition to The Opium War by Julia Lovell, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom  by Stephen Platt and People’s Republic of Amnesia by Louisa Lim.

Let me know if there are any books you recommend – I’m eager to learn more!

 

Review: Ready Player One

I have kind of an unpopular opinion: I didn’t like this book. (Spoilers ahead)

The premise of this book was great. It’s kind of post-apocalyptic. Humans have polluted the earth so much that huge regions are wastelands. Everyone moves to cities and live in sort of futuristic shantytowns. They all go into the OASIS, a virtual reality, all day. The creator put in easter eggs,  granting the person who found them his fortune and ownership of the OASIS. Wade is chasing the easter eggs, along with some friends he made along the way.

The book is full of 80s pop culture references,which is a lot of fun and part of why it is so popular. There are video games and movies and books and I’m sure a million things I didn’t even pick up on. The premise of hunting for easter eggs throughout  is cool.

Unfortunately, I just can’t get on board with this one. The references were cool at first. Then came a chapter where Wade has to recreate Ferris Beuller’s Day Off to get an easter egg. The book then goes on to describe the movie in excruciating detail. There were some references that were just for the sake of references. Wade has a replica of the Delorean described in painstaking detail only to never be seen again.

The other problem I have with this book is Wade’s infallibility. Wade is living in a world where everyone and is a hacker and we’re supposed to believe that he is this amazing, ridiculous genius. There’s absolutely no backstory that explains his genius. At first I thought his arrogance was going to result in a comeuppance, but no. Instead, he spends a large chunk of this book hiding from corporate henchmen while selling wares on the black market and becoming world famous. He accomplishes all this without a single misstep. In fact, throughout the entire book, Wade never fails at anything. The one time we do think he fails, when he becomes an indentured servant, it turns out that he orchestrated the whole thing. Everything just works out so nice and neat. It defies belief.

I didn’t hate this book. It was fun, it was witty, it had a good premise. The beginning of the book sucked me in, and was what convinced me not to abandon it. Overall, though, I can’t recommend this book. It was just too neat and tidy.

Birthday Book Haul

My birthday was last week and several of my lovely family members got me books! This pile also counts as my current TBR.

Bad Feminist

Roxane Gay’s collection of essays about feminism and what it means to dance to sexist music and be a feminist. She talks about race and gender and class with a critical, sometimes humorous, eye. So far I’ve read a couple of the essays and I love how she balances serious critique with levity and her ability to engage in criticism without the baggage of dense academic language.

Yes Please!

I love so much of what Amy Poehler is and I am so excited to read her book. One thing I noticed when I first picked it up is that it is weirdly heavy because it is printed on thick, glossy paper. It’s worth it, though, because the design on the inside of the book is fantastic. Old family photos, bright 2-page section headers. One of my favorite things about Amy Poehler is that she acknowledges that she has worked really hard and put herself in positions to succeed, but also that she has benefitted from luck and goodwill of others as well.

100 Years of Solitude

After my post about tracking my reading, I’ve been looking more closely at who and what I read. One area I noticed I was woefully under-reading is anything by authors of color, and especially classics by authors of color. Where better to start that 100 Years of Solitude? I’ve heard amazing things and this particular edition is beautiful.

North and South

The Youtube curmudgeon BazPierce introduced me to this one. He described it as Pride and Prejudice for communists, which just sounds delightful. That’s really the extent of my knowledge about this book, but based on that I’m looking forward to picking it up.

Heading into finals, reading is slow going. But I’m definitely planning to finish these by the end of winter break, just in time to start my 2015 TBR.