I understand that this nearly 1,000 page book is revered as brilliant and that the author has received the Nobel Prize for Literature for another novel.  I know that many intelligent people think the book is amazing. I, however, feel like it was pretty much lost on me.  I found it a slog, pedantic, male-centric, and frankly boring.  Yes, some of the historical pieces were mildly interesting, but I have decided that I do not find 18th century Poland particularly enthralling.  Sometimes, it felt like the descriptions would never end and that the plot was a very long ways away from the words I was reading.  Other times, some of the narrative would pull me in, particularly the portions that compared the Jewish protagonist's exploration of other communities. But, those parts were short lived and almost as soon as I realized I was engaged, the moment would be gone and I would return to feeling that this book was just too heady for me.


Do not recommend.

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This is a fabulous murder mystery that I can't stop thinking about.  It is so well written, the characters are so richly developed, and the plot is delightfully complicated that I am seriously contemplating reading it a second time.  Set across time from 1961 to 1975 as they investigate an old murder and a new disappearance, the complexity of interpersonal dynamics and histories just pulled me in, all the time being filled with red herrings and twists, as the investigation proceeds. The standout character is the young woman detective no one takes seriously and the ending just reinforced how much I loved her.  I found the portrayal of sexism and elitism to be well portrayed, ever present, without having it be the sole focus of the story--reminding me of how even during my younger years it was so pervasive we often accepted it without noticing at all. Did I mention the ending of this book was so good? So often these complex stories have predictable, unrealistic, or just stupid endings that don't hold together, but this one was right on point.
Highly recommend.

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I am so enthralled with the very concept of this book in which the author uses her obsession with sea creatures as the basis of these fabulous life stories that use the sea creatures as complex allegories for her life. Even the title, referring to the point in an ocean where the light can no longer penetrate, relates to moments in her life.  As a memoir, it is insightful and tells the story of a unique life of Queerness and mixed-race identity.

I particularly appreciated how the author's experience of trauma and sexual assault were presented in such an unusual and poignant way.  All of this was done in the midst of providing rich details about marine ecosystems and creatures, some of which (like the octopus), we often hear about in other contexts, but some  of which I knew nothing about and found fascinating.  This is just such an unusual set-up and read. 

I highly recommend it.

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I somehow missed that there was not just one, but two new Hunger Games books and a new movie since I last visited this series.  What a treat it is to read a series where the books hold up on their own and don't invite a cliffhanger so you have to get the next book to feel a sense of closure.  Both of these books, which are prequels to the original trilogy, were really well down and worth reading.  I love that we aren't spoon fed the analogies to modern politics, but the complexity of the relevance is nevertheless there.  

Highly recommend both of these.

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I was a little nervous to start reading a Stephen King book. I am not a fan of horror, so have always shied away from his books, despite Delores Clayborn being one of my all-time favorite reads and having liked Eyes of The Dragon a few years ago.  I was therefore pleasantly surprised by the first part of this book, which is the set up for the actual adventure that comes fairly deep into the book.  This set-up portion of the book is exquisitely written, developing characters with depth, describing their friendships and interactions with so much detail and nuance that I was really sucked into the story before any of the fantasy part even started.

Unfortunately, once the actual adventure story starts, the narration lost me.  This was in large part because of the way in which the narrator describes the many people he encounters who have disabilities or disfigurements.  From blind and Deafness, to Dwarfism, to many others, the ableism and stereotypes that he employs in his descriptions of these characters shows such a lack of understanding of what it is to live with a disability that I could not suspend my disbelief and judgment.  He spends an exorbitant amount of time comparing and ranking their conditions, while at the same time saying things like: "Dissing disabled people is crap behavior even if they are an asshole."  As if having a a disability means that you should be coddled and pitied and given a pass for being a terrible human being.    As if that attitude is respectful of people with disabilities instead of a reflect of their dehumanization and othering.  

​Not recommended.

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An elaborate modernization of Animal Farm, this book creates a world of sentient, talking animals in a fictionized African country as it flows from being colonized to an oppressive regime to complete chaos after the dictator is driven out. I think it is technically supposed to be an allegory, but it just feel too obvious, with the parallels too similar to the current world.  With situations and even language that clearly is lifted from real life current oppressive regimes, fascist leaders, and bigoted politicians from around the world, I thought it lacked nuance and was just force feeding us the analysis instead of letting the reader do any independent thinking or analogizing.  This, plus it used a literary tool in which the same words or short phrase was repeated over and over again--so much so that it became an irritant. This may not have been so aggravating in a paper book where your eyes could skip over the 2 minutes of repetition, but in an audio book, it was just distracting and it was so many times. It felt gimmicky, even if it was obviously being done to make a point.  The point was just too obvious.
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Not recommended.

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Another post-apocalyptic novel, which really seems to be disproportionately recommended in recent times, this one was extremely graphic in depicting gratuitous violence. This was oddly juxtaposed against explicit descriptions of sexual encounters.  I was disappointed that I did not like it more since the premise of the futuristic world felt well thought out and plausible, though incredibly depressing. 

Set in the dessert of the American southwest, the complicated backstory includes litigation over water rights, complicated interpersonal dynamics, lots of characters with compelling and believable backstories, and  a nuanced world created with attention to details that I really liked.  Ultimately, while there was a lot to like in the story, I really disliked the violence, which I did not think was needed to advance the story and which reflected a deterioration of human decency at a level that was just too dark for me.  I found that I couldn't listen to this unless I was in the right frame of mind and definitely not before bed.  

Not recommended.
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I am less and less a fan of this newly popular genre in which an author selects a person in history about which there is a small amount of historical data and then builds an entirely fictional world around the their life to tell a story.  I really started to notice this trend with The Personal Librarian, which I quite enjoyed.  However, in that case, I knew absolutely nothing about Bella de Costa Greene, who was JP Morgan's personal librarian.  In this case, though, the author writes an entirely fictitous account of Martha Ballard's life.  Ballard was an 18th century American midwife who recorded her life in a personal journal that was published in the 1990s, called A Midwife's Tale.  I read the book in college and it certainly stuck with me all these many years later. 
When I read a 50 Bookish Friends recommendation, I do no research ahead of time. I don't read the book jacket or a summary of the story  I love that when I start the book, I have no idea what I am getting into.  It could be a self-help book, a political memoir, science fiction, or truly anything.  I don't even check to see if it is fiction or non-fiction, although sometimes once I am into it a ways, I do check this much.  In this case, though, as I was reading along, I thought the story sounded really familiar and when her name was used, I was certain that I had read the book before, even though it came out in 2023 and there was no way I had read it that recently. 

Turned out, though, that I did remember Martha Ballard by name and her story, but this book was not her story. I found the fictionalize version completely unbelievable.  I'm not an expert on that era by any stretch of the imagination, but I found the storyline completely implausible.  In many of these highly fictionalized accounts of historical events, I think there has been too much insertion of modern ideas that are more a reflection of our current thinking than of anything that could be consistent with the historical record.  I found this a huge distraction and I just could not get into the story at all~~ in large part because I knew that none of the story was in the diary and that we don’t have any other information about Ballard. The rest of the story was just too convenient, too much like how we wished things could have been for a spirited, intelligent woman.  I probably would have liked it more if she had changed the names and just said that she based it on historical records, including A Midwife's Tale.

Do not recommend.

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I feel pretty terrible about this review. In a time when I think it is particularly important for us to reflect on the Holocaust, the violence of othering, and the horrors of ghettos and "camps" and determining human survival based on the official papers you carry, I am very sorry to report that this WWII book about all these topics is not to be recommended by me.  WWII historical fiction is usually a pretty easy sell for me, so this is almost certainly not why I didn't like it.

It started weird. This is because the story takes place in two time periods, while also telling a fictional vampire horror story that one of the characters wrote.  But you do not discover that is what is happening until really far into the book and it makes for a very confusing read.  And it felt almost like the author was deliberately trying to make it confusing.  Maybe she thought it would build up like a mystery and, to a large extent, I would call it a mystery, but it felt forced and unnecessary.  Yet, if you ignore the bizarre allegory vampire storyline distraction at the beginning, I found the book interesting enough at first and quite enjoyed the early character development that was mired in intrigue.

But even setting aside that problem, it just became more and more complicated as it jumped back and forth between narrators and time periods and between the actual story and the story-within-the-story.  I love a complex plot that makes me pay attention, but I kept thinking that this was a plot strategy meant to hide the ball.  And indeed, there were pieces of the story that were obviously being withheld--huge pieces of the story, like why one of the main characters has facial disfigurement from some type of trauma that most everyone in the story seems to know about and is alluded to over and over, but isn't spelled out for the reader until way past the point that I still cared.  It ended up just not being this big deal after all the hype to get to it. And again, I just felt like it was deliberately being done that way despite it not making any sense not to tell the reader.

Perhaps the most prominent reason for my not liking it was the gratuitous, graphic details of the violence that felt added for shock value.  Not that the Holocaust wasn't shocking and I don't disagree that some level of description of the details is appropriate and I don't want to discount that for survivors the horrors went on and on and on, each more horrific than the last.  There was just something about the way it was written that left me feeling like it was another game the author was playing with me as the reader.  I don't know how we learn about the time period without hearing about the details of the violence, but here it was done in a way that as I was reading I was aware that I was reading this book about this horrible thing that was designed to convey to me how horrible it was instead of letting the story unfold naturally.  In the context of the other unusual plotting choices, I just could not get into it.  So much so, that I had to take several breaks from it to read other things before coming back to finish it.

Not recommended.

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It is sometimes hard not to romanticize groups of people I have little contact with.  Seeing Rastafarians while I travel or from a distance and reading some of the more popular writings, the combination of political and spiritual philosophy is alluring in what might helpful an inappropriate exoticism.  This book, though, is a reminder that dysfunctional fanaticism exists everywhere.  Here, amidst a philosophical framework that is essentially pacifist and equalitarian, the rigid sexist code of the author's father leads to abuse and control that mirrors what is found in so many other religious communities.  

This memoir of childhood abuse, multigenerational abuse and neglect, and isolation is a powerful reminder that there isn't a single path to healing.  Reminiscent of  Educated, I loved the arc here, at once critical of the abuse and showing compassion for the pain of the abuser's abuse as a child and young adult.  With such a different setting, though, this book had something new to offer and I appreciated the reminder that extremism in all its forms is problematic.

Moreover, this is a lyrical book, written by a true writer.  Every word seems carefully selected, every thought part of bouquet of thoughts, placed together is just the right way to convey the complexity of a life.  I am often turned off by this highly curated type of poetic writing, but not this one.  The wording was just joyfully crafted, even at the most heartbreaking moments of narration.  

​Recommend.

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