It’s a summer reading post! I think I skipped doing one last year, and this may be shorter than past editions (time will tell) but I do have some recommendations.
- The Night Tiger (Yangsze Choo): This is the second book I’ve read by Choo, and I really enjoyed both! The Night Tiger is set in 1930s Malaysia, and it follows two characters: an 11-year-old orphan on a mission to find the severed, preserved finger of a recently deceased doctor who employed and looked after him, and a young woman who finds herself in possession of the severed finger. Both characters are on a deadline to deal with this finger, because until it’s buried with its previous owner, a supernatural tiger will stalk and kill people throughout the town. This was a really interesting book that kept me engaged both as a historical novel and as a mythological/folklore novel. Minor content warning/spoiler- there’s a pseudo-incest storyline running through the whole thing, which I know would be a total turnoff for some people. It was weird and certainly didn’t add to the book for me, but it wasn’t a dealbreaker personally.
- The Sword in the Stone (T.H. White): I went back and read/reread all five of the books in the Once and Future King series, and while I was mixed on them as whole, I really like the first one! It’s a charming adventure story for when you’re looking for something classic that isn’t stuffy or hard to understand.
- Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? (Séamas O’Reilly): I already spoke about this one at length but I wanted to make sure it was documented here, too! I loved his book SO much; it’s one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read.
- After the Hurricane (Leah Franqui): I’ve recommended Franqui’s books before, because I’ve read all three of them and really liked them all. They’re all very tied to her own background and identity in ways that give them the specificity that turns into relateability. After the Hurricane follows its main character to Puerto Rico on a quest to find her father, who she has a strained relationship with due to the fact that he’s both bipolar and an alcoholic, when he goes missing after Hurricane Maria. The chapters flip back and forth between her journey as she learns more about her father, and her father’s past and the family history as a whole. This book isn’t rated very well on Goodreads, and it’s definitely emotional, but I got a lot out of it and ultimately found it satisfying.
- A Hat Full of Sky (Terry Pratchett): I always need at least one Discworld recommendation! This one is pretty far along in the overall series, and the second in the Tiffany Aching sub-series, but I still think it would work as a stand-alone. It’s one of the YA novels within Discworld, but Pratchett didn’t write his YA novels “for children”- they’re written for anyone who’s interested in navigating the world and finding their place in it and deciding what kind of person they want to be. I REALLY loved this book.
- A House with Good Bones (T. Kingfisher): This book is SO strange and creepy and unsettling and wonderful. If you like gothic horror mixed with some monster horror/body horror, this is your book. The main character returns for a temporary stay in her childhood home- previously her grandmother’s, now her mother’s- only to find that things aren’t quite… right. This is the type of story that rarely manages to stick the landing for me, but I loved this one all the way through!
- All The Young Men (Ruth Coker Burks, Kevin Carr O’Leary): I’m not sure how well-known Ruth Coker Burks is, in terms of the general public- she was a single mother in 1980s Arkansas who began caring for men dying from AIDS, many of whom where abandoned by their families and left to suffer in hospitals where even the medical staff didn’t want to treat them. Obviously, that’s incredible heavy material, but this book manages to be so full of joy and hope and strength that it’s not a totally bleak sob-fest. There’s been some controversy over some of Coker Burks’ claims (she says her family owned a cemetery where she buried ashes, which doesn’t seem to be true; she may have inflated the number of people she helped), but she really did have a tremendous positive impact on the lives of many, many men in her community, so I wasn’t bothered by some exaggeration- especially since ALL memoirs have some level of tall-tale-telling, and very few people have done the kind of things that she’s done with her life. One thing I really liked in particular was that while she shone a light on a lot of vicious hate in her community, she also repeatedly talks about how she wasn’t a lone hero against the entire world, even if other people only helped in small ways- like the driver of a dairy truck, who would leave the door unlocked and look the other way so she could take non-expired but non-sellable food to give out to the men she was helping. It’s just a really, really good book.
And, on that note, here are some recent NON-recommendations (spoilers ahead):
- The Plot (Jean Hanff Korelitz): This book sounded really promising but it did NOT work for me. The set-up is this: the main character, Jake, had a very successful first novel published and then failed to repeat his success. He’s working at an MFA program when one of his students announces that he- Evan- has come up with an incredible idea for a novel that’s going to be a bestseller, and critically acclaimed, and a book club book, and adapted into a movie, etc. Jake gets Evan to reveal the whole story, and agrees that it’s the most mindbogglingly incredible plot he’s ever encountered… but then he never sees it published, and learns that Evan died suddenly before actually writing and selling the manuscript. So Jake writes it, and it absolutely blows up- all of Evan’s predictions come true. But then Jake starts getting anonymous emails accusing him of stealing the idea, and that’s when the real drama starts. I disliked this book for a lot of reasons! The characters were all arrogant and unlikeable- there was a lot of snippy, judgemental discussions of REAL authors and REAL writing, which just came across as silly when this book wasn’t particularly well-written, and the big twist was obvious. Snippets of Evan’s story were included throughout the novel, and you eventually learn what made it so absurdly popular… it’s a story about a girl whose education and dreams are ruined when her parents force her to carry a pregnancy to term and raise the baby, and she grows to resent her daughter for being able to go to college, so she kills the daughter and takes her place. The book explains that this in-story novel is so popular because it’s SHOCKING and UNHEARD OF that a mother would kill their child, which… isn’t true. People DO kill their children, all the time. It’s horrific, of course, but it happens. You then learn that Evan had also stolen this story… from his sister, because this was her real life, and she actually did kill her daughter and take her place at college. So even in the universe of the book, people kill their children, which goes against the entire conceit that the author wants the reader to believe. Jake finds all this out but learns too late that his WIFE was the sister all along! So she kills him! The end! Not a good book.
- A Court of Thorns and Roses (Sarah J. Maas): I hate YA fantasy in general, so I knew I was not going to like this book, but even as a representative of its genre, I wouldn’t recommend it. I know these books are popular, and maybe the other ones are better (I’ve heard they are), but this one is bad. It’s a Beauty and the Beast retelling of the kind that’s least interesting to me- it just seems like a vehicle for the author’s fantasy of being desired by a wild, animalistic, “dangerous, but I can fix him” man who can only be saved by her. Which is fine. But it’s not compelling. The characters are annoying, the magic doesn’t make a lot of sense, the romance is incredibly bland and then laughably “passionate”… there are actually some good set pieces at the end, once the main character is finally allowed to learn what’s really going on in this bizarre land of fae that she’s been spirited away to, but they’re not enough to make up for everything else. At the end, Beast forces Beauty to go back to her family, but she loves him too much so she goes back to rescue him from the evil queen fairy, who says that she’ll set Beast free if Beauty can complete three impossible challenges OR… solve a riddle. And the answer to the riddle is so obvious that I solved it immediately, and I’m not even a riddle person! Yet somehow Beauty can’t figure it out until the literal last minute, after weeks have passed and she’s already almost done with the challenges (one of which was actually very cool and felt unique and engaging). Overall it was just a very silly book that took itself far too seriously.
Dinosaur Zealot 