I can’t run, and a bunch of my holds came up at once, so got lots of reading in this week.
The Most Dangerous Place on Earth. Boy, we will never get tired of whiny rich kid books, will we? This was pretty ordinary, and some of it was a bit heavy handed. I would give this author another chance though, there was decent writing here, and at least one very effective chapter.
The Futures. I have practically forgotten this already. It started out okay but fizzled out in a big way. There was not enough story here for a 300 page novel; could have been a lot better at half the length. I never want to spoil things, so I’ll just say the ending focused on something that you really could not care less about by that point. That felt very off. Decent writing though.
Fractured. This fell somewhere between domestic drama, which I love, and straight up thriller, which I’m always disappointed in. Ended up more on the disappointed side, unfortunately. It felt like a watered down Big Little Lies.
This downer of a week picked up big time with Children of the New World. I don’t know why I don’t read short story collections more often. I very often love them, and I really loved this one. As usual there are a couple misses here but the good ones are stellar. The feel of this is similar to Tenth of December and Black Mirror but I think this had a little more heart. I absolutely loved the title story.
Another Brooklyn was a very fast and lovely read. This is very slight, you could easily read it in an afternoon. Good things come in small packages! This was evocative and haunting and completely worthy of the hype surrounding it.
I’m kind of bouncing between two books right now. Since I can’t run I’ve been putting some time in on the stationary bike, which I really hate to do. To make the time go by faster I try to read something fairly light and easy so I picked up The Sun Is Also a Star. This is not really my kind of thing, but a lot of people are loving it; I’m about halfway through and it’s a nice enough read but mostly I’m reminded of why I don’t typically go for YA love stories.
When I got off the bike today I started The Vegetarian. I am very very eager to dive into this one. Everyone’s got pretty strong opinions about it, and I want to know which side I’m on. I just have to keep myself from rushing through it, because I have Difficult Women and Lincoln in the Bardo waiting in the wings. That’s what you get when you don’t manage your holds!
