Since a number of prompts for this year’s PopSugar Reading Challenge are particularly challenging, I’ve been thinking about allowing myself to “double-dip” this year, counting a single book for more than one prompt, which I have chosen not to do in previous years. But so far this year, I seem to be finding more than one book for the same prompt as much as one book for more than one prompt.
The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz, the February selection for our library book club, clearly was a book with a title that is a complete sentence, but I quickly saw that it also would work for a book where someone dies in the first chapter, so I chose to use it for that prompt. As for the story itself, I was not overly impressed. It was an OK mystery, but I didn’t find it appealing enough to want to read anything else by Horowitz. I don’t mind that he made himself a character in the book, but I didn’t think it added to the book all that much either.
I suppose Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin could also count as a book with a title that is a complete sentence (in the imperative mood), but I selected it specifically as a book written by an incarcerated or formerly incarcerated person. It also is a book with at least three POVs – enough that I had trouble keeping track of how each was related to the others, and as with a lot of books with multiple POVs, I found it hard to really get interested in any one character because it kept changing. I certainly learned about life for people in a very different time and place and culture, particularly with religious experiences and mindsets very different from mine. But as with the book by Horowitz, I didn’t feel inclined to go read more by the author.
The Fragile Threads of Power, on the other hand, was one I picked in part because it was by V.E. Schwab, whose book The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was one I had enjoyed so much. But I also picked it because it conveniently turned out to be a book with 24 letters in the title. Unfortunately it also turned out to be a book with at least three POVs – if anything, even more POVs than Baldwin’s book, and it took me nearly the entire book to get a fairly good sense of which characters were in which “London,” as this also deals with parallel worlds. From reading reviews afterward, I realized that it follows her Shades of Magic trilogy, which I have not read, and if I had perhaps I’d have been better able to make sense of the world(s) and characters in this novel. I might go back and read them. Or not. I think it was the new characters in this book that I liked most.
I definitely picked Paladin’s Faith by T. Kingfisher because it was the fourth in a series I have been reading by this author. I still think the first book in the series was the best, but this was, like the next two, enjoyable reading. And near the end I realized that it would also fit for “a book in which a character sleeps for more than 24 hours.” It’s hardly a major feature of the book, but there’s nothing in the prompt that suggests it needs to be.
I didn’t pick Africa Is Not a Country by Dipo Faloyin because it is a book with a title that is a complete sentence, but that turned out to be an extra benefit. I chose it because it has excellent reviews and could fill in some of the very large gaps in my knowledge about the African continent. It’s a mix of history, critique of Western stereotypes about Africa and Africans, information about African culture (including one essay just about Jollof Rice), and evidence of a promising future. I may end up counting it as a non-fiction book about Indigenous people – it depends what else I end up reading over the next ten months.
Other books I read simply did not fit any of the prompts for this year. Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships by Nina Totenberg would have worked great last year for a celebrity memoir, and in fact I chose it in large part because I had read Ari Shapiro’s memoir last year and he talked about working as an intern with Nina Totenberg. I had expected, based on the title, that it would be primarily about Totenberg’s relationship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but it turned out to be primarily Totenberg’s memoir with a focus on a number of friendships, including that with RBG. So I learned more about Totenberg and less about Ginsburg than I had expected, but it was still fascinating in all the stories it told.
Another fascinating non-fiction book was Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way by Roma Agrawal. I really enjoy books that tell how things work, and I liked how Agrawal expanded on the story of each invention to show how the same principle was adapted into new inventions. I had never thought of rivets as adaptations of nails, or gears as adaptations of wheels. And I certainly had not realized how many different kinds of devices can be called pumps. Agrawal makes a point of including stories of minoritized people who invented these things or improved how they worked, so I learned about a number of people I had never heard of before.
I really don’t remember why I put Murder in Old Bombay by Nev March on my TBR list, but I know it was within the past couple of months, so I tried to find a prompt it would fit in the reading challenge. I couldn’t find one, so I must have just read a good review and thought I would like it. And I did – it’s both historical fiction and a murder mystery (and a bit of a romance), set in India during a period of its history I was not familiar with and in places I knew almost nothing of. It’s a relatively slow-paced book for a murder mystery, which was fine with me because I also enjoyed the main character (a former military man discharged due to medical issues, always trying to do the right thing though it risks his happiness and sometimes his life) and the setting.
Perennial Student 