Picking “a book with magical realism” was somewhat of a challenge, in part because of the difficulty of defining what that means. I think this is a pretty good explanation of it. I finally settled on Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett, and I think it fits as “a work of fiction where fantasy slips into everyday life.” It’s narrated by people who are buried in the town cemetery, but a large part of the story is quite realistic. I mostly enjoyed the quirkiness of it, but sometimes it just felt odd.
The library book club selection for May was Happiness for Beginners by Katherine Center. Since it was the library’s assistant director who chose the book for us, I think I can fairly say that it counts as “a book recommended by a librarian.” Some of the recent book club selections had dealt with darker themes (I skipped the month they read a horror novel), people had requested some lighter reading for the summer, and this book certainly fit. It did have some good lessons along with the story, however, about finding happiness by appreciating what you have instead of trying to have what you think will make you happy.
I would have read The Women by Kristin Hannah even if it hadn’t been “a book that came out in a year that ends with 24” (it just came out in February), because Hannah is a good writer and this book had good reviews. I haven’t enjoyed some of her books as much as others (this is the seventh of her books that I have read), but this one was good. I like historical fiction in general, but it is particularly interesting to read historical fiction set within my own lifetime. I was barely aware of the Vietnam War when I was growing up in the 1960’s, and even as I got older I had no idea about the American women who served there as nurses, or how difficult it was for them when they came home and had to cope with not only the negative views people had of Vietnam veterans in general but also the lack of support from the VA because they thought of “veterans” as combat veterans.
I had no idea how I was going to find “a book with an unreliable narrator.” I could have looked in the discussions at Goodreads, but if you know ahead of time that the narrator is unreliable, I think you lose some of the effect the author intended. But I had no idea until I was halfway through The Headmaster’s Wife by Thomas Christopher Green that the narrator was very unreliable. In the second half I finally understood why it has the title it does, but I can’t say I really liked it any better. It’s supposed to be an exploration of relationships and love and loss, which it is, but I think there are books that do a much better job of exploring these themes. Of course, love and loss are very personal and people are very different, so it’s not surprising that some readers appreciate this book much more than I did.
I did use a suggestion from another person doing the PopSugar Reading Challenge for the category “a fiction book by a trans or nonbinary author.” As it happens, I’m also doing the reading challenge at the library at the college where I work, and one of their category’s is “a children’s book.” I don’t use one book to check off more than one category in a reading challenge, but I’m happy to use one book to check of categories in two different reading challenges. So I decided to read Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson, after I saw it compared to Calvin and Hobbes. I don’t know how good that comparison is, but I definitely enjoyed reading the book, enough that I promptly checked out the second volume, Unicorn on a Roll, and enjoyed it at least as much as the first volume. I’m not sure how to describe exactly what I find so appealing in this comic, but there’s just something about it that I really like.
I spent quite a bit of time considering what to do with the prompt “a book set in a travel destination on your bucket list,” since I don’t really have much of a bucket list. The one thing I really wanted to do was see a total solar eclipse, which I did in April – sort of (cloud cover made it far less impressive than it would have been with clear skies). But it occurred to me that the other celestial phenomenon I wanted to see was the Aurora Borealis, which most likely would require travel to somewhere a good deal further north. (There was that weekend in May that lots of people in these latitudes and even further south got to see them, and apparently if I had driven far enough out of town I might have seen a little.) There plenty of places to see them if you go far enough north, but when I came across the book Northern Lights by Nora Roberts, I decided that was the book to read. I certainly would not want to live there in Alaska, nor visit in the middle of winter, but I did enjoy reading the book, and not just for the descriptions of the Aurora Borealis.
There are lots of books I could have read for “a book with the word ‘leap’ in the title,” but the first one I found that actually interested me was One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon, by Charles Fishman. As with the Vietnam War, the push to get to the moon by the end of the 1960’s was something that I was pretty much oblivious to as a young child. I remember watching the Moon landing in 1969, but mostly what I remember is how boring it was that it took so very long before the astronauts were allowed to exit the lunar module and step onto the surface of the Moon. Even as I got older, I never realized, before reading this book, how much the Apollo program had to do with the Cold War. I also found it very interesting how much the development of modern digital computers owes to the Apollo program.
Having recently enjoyed a book written in verse by Margarita Engle, I decided to also read Singing with Elephants. I was attracted by its intriguing title, and seeing that one character is the poet Gabriela Mistral (some of whose poetry I read as a Spanish major in college). I did enjoy reading it, for the most part. Some parts particularly impressed me with their freshness of expression and how they conveyed a young girl’s emotions. But I didn’t enjoy it as much as the book about the poet Juan Francisco Manzano. Perhaps part of it was discovering that this was fiction, while the book about Manzano had been biography. It’s not that I prefer biography to fiction, but with biography I’m mostly interested in learning about the person, and how the book is written is secondary, as long as it’s not too dry. If something really happened, there can be no objection that it’s too improbable, or that it is not exciting. That’s just how life is. With fiction, the writer can make up all the characters and action, so I tend to expect more in terms of character development and plot.
I continued – and finished – Marie Brennan’s The Memoirs of Lady Trent series. There are a lot of series that are great at the beginning then seem to run out of good ideas, but In the Labyrinth of Drakes and Within the Sanctuary of Wings were every bit as good as the first three volumes. It seems likely that Brennan planned it to be a multiple volume series from the start, so the later volumes would not have been an attempt to duplicate the success of the first book, but rather a continuation of what made the first book so enjoyable. All the books in the series have some aspect of cross-cultural communication but it was especially so in this book, which also included a good deal about learning a new language (a particular interest of mine). But as always, it was Lady Trent’s particular outlook on life and her way of telling her story that made the book so fun to read.
Having appreciated OCDaniel so much when I read it last year, I was particularly interested in seeing how Aisha Bushby portrayed OCD in a child in A Flash of Fireflies. I was disappointed, however, as I was never quite sure how literally to take the protagonist’s interactions with the “fireflies.” OCDaniel gave me a better understanding of what someone with OCD experiences. This book gave me some idea of the emotions that go with it but that’s about it.
One of the categories for the college library reading challenge was “an ebook,” so I picked Percy Jackson and the Singer of Apollo. I like everything I’ve read by Rick Riordan, and this was no exception. It’s really just a short story, however (one of the advantages of ebooks is that they can be any length, unlike printed books), so while I enjoyed it, there just wasn’t that much to it.
The first time I picked up Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara at the library, it was the word “djinn” that caught my attention and I thought of The Golem and the Jinni, which I had enjoyed so much when I read it several years ago. When I saw that it was about children in India, I put it back on the shelf. But recently I came across it again and decided to give it a try. It is at the same time about a very serious subject – the disappearance of large numbers of children every day – and told from the point of view of a child, so that it is not weighed down with grief and despair. The children are concerned about their friends and family and feel sadness and sometimes fear, but they also feel hope, and find humor in their daily lives.
I decided to try reading Your Utopia by Bora Chung despite several reader reviews on Goodreads saying that it was not as good as her previous book Cursed Bunny. Your Utopia was available as an audiobook from the library, and Cursed Bunny was not. I thought that futuristic short stories sounded interesting, and I didn’t think I’d read much if anything by a Korean. There were a couple of stories I did like – the ones told from the perspective of an intelligent machine rather than a human being. The others were so-so, sort of interesting but not emotionally engaging.
I had read and enjoyed a few books by Kate DiCamillo, and I saw some good reviews of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, but for me it fell kind of flat. Edward Tulane is a rabbit made of china, with wires so that his limbs can be arranged for him to sit or stand, and he is told he needs to learn to love. He ends up being taken from one place to another, taken by a series of people who want him for one reason or another, and over many years and experiences does learn to love. But as he is unable to speak or move, he cannot actually do anything, so in my mind the “love” he develops is entirely passive, and I would call it sentimentality rather than love.
Perennial Student 