What a week! I hate how it’s not Christmas or New Year’s or even summer. I guess I can’t complain about cold weather since it’s in the 40s and 50s here. I hear it’s been a little chilly elsewhere.
The Windfall was such a great end to a great year of reading! I loved this delightful charmer of a book. I am always drawn to stories about rich people, and new-money stories are my favorite money stories. I loved these characters, and some of the scenes had me laughing out loud. Now that the kids are back in school I will get around to doing a best of 2017 list, and this is definitely going on it.
Sadly, things went down from there. The Daughters seemed like it would also be right up my alley. I love magical realism, I love stories of motherhood, generational sagas…it had a lot of elements to entice me. But this just did not do it for me at all. Mostly the problem was the writing style; it felt very labored, very much a ‘trying to sound beautiful’ kind of style. The main character had a lot of intrigue happening in her life, but her story was told in such a murky way, it was hard to get invested. Usually when magical realism fails for me, it’s the magical part that loses, but here the realism was what didn’t work. I was very disappointed in this one.
Next I read So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Hooooo boy did I hate this book. I wish I could read an insightful piece about the ups and downs of social media justice. That topic would be fascinating in the hands of someone like, say, Roxane Gay. This was not insightful, other than giving insight into what a garbage person Jon Ronson is. So many things to hate about this, my favorite being when he said the notion that men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them was “overblown.” Someone call Margaret Atwood, stat! I’m pretty mad about this book, which in a nutshell comes across as some middle aged guy ranting about how PC culture makes it hard to tell racist jokes in public anymore. Such a shame.
Things are looking up for now. I’m three stories into The Dark Dark, and I love it so far. When I read Mr Splitfoot, I was frustrated because I loved her writing style, but that novel’s plot really didn’t interest me. The very first story here is about a woman who’s been trying to get pregnant for a long time and is kind of losing her mind over it. Very relevant to my interests and I love it! I’m pretty confident that it’s going to maintain this momentum. Fingers crossed!
