Taylor Reid Jenkins

While I try my best to save money and get the majority of my books these days from the library, I still do derive a great deal of pleasure from visiting local bookstores.  I justify my visits by still buying way too many books, and convincing myself that it's good to support small businesses.  One of my favorite local bookstores is A Great Good Place for Books, where the owner always has a few excellent recommendations up her sleeve.  She introduced me to Taylor Reid Jenkins a couple months back.  I really enjoyed these two, and look forward to reading her other novels soon!

I picked up Daisy Jones & the Six several times in bookstores and just wasn't moved by the subject - sounds like a fictional version of Fleetwood Mac - a charismatic singer in the 70s caught up in drugs and relationships with band members.  I'm just not really a music person and didn't think I'd find it very interesting.  But, then Katheleen from GGP told me I should give it a try, so I went on faith - and I'm glad I did.  The book is told in vignettes of recorded interviews from the various bandmates, producers, and other people involved in the Band, The Six, and revolves around their lead singer - Daisy Jones.  While at times I found myself getting exhausted with the hedonistic lifestyles of the various characters, and their poor decisions, I really enjoyed the way the story was told, and did find myself invested in the characters and caring about how they all turned out in the end. 

Evelyn Hugo is one of the biggest stars Hollywood has ever made, so when she finds herself at the end of her life wanting to tell her story, and she calls a young no-name journalist to write it up, questions and intrigue abound.  As Evelyn's life story unfolds, she reveals the true nature of her seven marriages, and the true love of her life.  I enjoyed the way this book was written - with Evelyn telling her story through each chapter, and then various breaks in between as the journalist's own backstory (not as interesting) came through.  The mystery of the relationship between Evelyn and the journalist was a bit heavy-handed, with Reid trying too hard with cliffhangers and creating a bit of melodrama about what might be revealed, but all in all, I found this to be a very entertaining read, with a lot to think about in terms of who makes it in Hollywood and the price people are willing to pay for fame.

YA/Middle Reader Books

As my children get older, I find that there are more of these titles on my TBR list - because I'm reading to them, I'm trying to get ahead of what they might be reading soon, and because I just generally enjoy books aimed to the 8-14 range (though some YA tend to be more in the 14-17 range it seems, or maybe I have really forgotten what it's like to be a kid!)

Piecing Me Together - Renee Watson: Jade has a bright future ahead - she's one of the few students from her neighborhood attending a fancy private school.  She's been given the opportunity to participate in a youth mentorship program, and she is a talented artist.  But not everything seemingly being given to her seems worth having.  As a young black woman, she feels torn between a world that tells her she should be working hard to leave the place she came from, and feeling proud of her family and her upbringing.  She is caught among many worlds - thinking things are often black and white, but learning as time passes, that there is so much gray in the middle.  She struggles with relative privilege, the intersectionality of race, gender, and class, and learning to find her voice even in a world that wants her to just appreciate what she's been given.  Every chapter of this book had a story in it worthy of discussion.  I'd love to read this book in a book group, but more importantly to believe that young readers are reading it as a part of their curriculum or among their group of friends.

Book Scavenger - Jennifer Chambliss Bertman:  I read this one to my 8-year-old son.  In the vein of Mr. Lemoncello's Library, Book Scavenger centers around the legendary book publisher Garrison Griswold, who is known for his quirky scavenger hunts and games.  Twelve-year-old Emily is his number one fan, and when she discovered a strange book in a San Francisco train station, she is convinced that it has something to do with Mr. Griswold's recent disappearance.  New to town, she befriends her neighbor, James - also a lover of clues and ciphers, to figure out the clues, and avoid the dangerous men who will do anything to prevent them from solving the mystery!  The first in a series, we're looking forward to reading the next installment!

Darius the Great is Not Okay - Adib Khorram:  Teenage Darius struggles with clinical depression.  Instead of being supportive and compassionate, his father shames him constantly and derides him for seemingly not trying to just be better and act "normal."  When his grandfather in Iran falls ill, the family travels to with them.  While Darius finds himself trying to come to terms, not just with his depression, but now with being even more different in another country, he meets Sohrab.  The two play soccer together, and Sohrab allows him to just be.  So much of this book was awkward and painful to read - but in that way, it was so much like coming of age.  As Darius tries to figure out how to trust and lean on a true friend, he also figures out that he has a lot more to offer - himself and the world - than he'd ever believed possible.

The Night Diary - Veera Hiranandani: After her mother dies in childbirth, Nisha grows up with her twin brother, her quick-to-anger father, and her grandmother in India.  Her dead mother was Muslim, but her father is Hindu.  The year is 1947, and the country has just been separated into two- India and Pakistan.  With hundreds of thousands of people crossing borders to avoid the violent conflicts over religion, Nisha's family flees in the middle of the night for a safer home.  Nisha chronicles the confusing journey in her diary - which she addresses to her dead mother.  Through it she attempts to understanding the nature of the conflict between Muslims and Hindus, but also between her father and brother, herself and her lost mothers, and to make sense of the world around her where no one has the time to stop and explain anything.

A Few Quick Entries

With 50 books to update on this blog before the end of the year - I have to keep my summaries quick!  Here's a list of a bunch I read during the year that I enjoyed, but weren't particularly noteworthy (I rarely, if ever, finish a book I hate these days, so anything that makes its way here is usually not the worst!).

Gray Mountain - John Grisham: I'm always a sucker for the latest Grisham novel - I think I've come to have fairly low expectations and to expect them to be formulaic, but I still find myself more often than not quite pleasantly surprised.  In this one, Samantha, a big firm lawyer, is offered the chance to work pro bono for a legal aid clinic in lieu of being laid off.  She finds herself in the heart of Appalachia taking on Big Coal.  This is quintessential Grisham - David v. Goliath - what's a few death threats when you're on your way to exposing corporate greed?  As always, an enjoyable page-turner.

The Silent Wife - A.S.A. Harrison: In the vein of Gone Girl, this psychological thriller tells the story - from alternating viewpoints - of a husband and wife destined for disaster.  He's a cheater, she's vengeful.  Both are determined to have their way, even if it means the other loses their life.  Engaging and creepy - I left all the lights on while reading this one.

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel: For awhile I felt like I was surrounded by the end of the world - from The Road to The Passage, I admit I started to get a little tired of books about abhorrent illness and looters around every corner.  And, so I may have picked this one up already feeling a little exhausted.  Station Eleven focuses on the life of a Hollywood actor, going back and forth in time from his heyday on stage, to many years in the future when a mysterious illness appears to have decimated most of the population.  I enjoyed seeing how the lives of various survivors intertwined - from their pasts and into their futures, but the ominous subject matter left me a little worse for the wear.

Funny Girl - Nick Horby: I absolutely love Nick Hornby. I find him heartwarming and clever, and have enjoyed nearly all of his fiction and non-fiction.  Funny Girl is actress Sophie Straw's journey from latest "it" girl to television phenomenon - and all the quirky characters she comes across along the way.  I don't think I completely bought Hornby's attempt at a female main character, but it was predictably enjoyable.

Fiction Selections

Every once in awhile, I make a real push to read books that have just been sitting on my bookshelves at home for years.  Sometimes I'm left wondering why I ever bought the book in the first place - where was I in my life that this sounded at all interesting?  Other times I love the book so much I kick myself for letting it sit on the shelf unread for so long!  Here's a mix of the latest flurry from the bookshelves:

The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier: After The Girl with the Pearl Earring, I never pass up a Chevalier novel when I see it at a used bookstore.  But that's not to say it won't sit on my shelf for awhile.  This book alternates between the present day - telling the story of Ella Turner who upon moving to a small town in France, decides to research her own French history.  This leads to the story of Isabelle du Moulin who lived in the same area more than 400 years earlier.  Of course, the two women are linked in some way, but the detective story that emerges as Ella attempts to find herself through her research is a definite page turner.  I should read a bit more of those Chevalier books on my shelves..

Dreaming Water by Gail Tsukiyama: I've enjoyed a number of books by Tsukiyama, including The Samurai's Garden, The Street of a Thousand Blossoms, and The Language of Threads.  I always find her stories engaging and her writing beautiful and straight-forward.  In Dreaming Water, Cate steel grieving the loss of her husband, has to face the fact that her adult daughter, Hana, is dying from a rare disease.  As Cate and Hana come to terms with their pasts and the future they don't want to face, one of Hana's old friends comes back into the picture - and the book explores their friendships and how each one deals with the end in their own way.

In The Language of Miracles by Rajia Hassib:  This story asks the question of how accepted into an "American" community a family of immigrants can be - what happens when a tragedy occurs?  Who will take the blame?  How will each member of a family deal with their loss, grief, and isolation?  The Al-Menshawy family immigrated to a NewJersey suburb from Egypt - they appear to be living the American Dream - their own home, stable jobs, and seemingly true friends in their school and neighborhood.  This book explores the painful reality of how much more it takes, both physically, mentally, and emotionally, to find one's place - especially in a place hell-bent on exclusion.

More Jasmine Guillory

Earlier in the year, I read Jasmine Guillory's The Wedding Proposal as part of a reading challenge that called for a Romance by a Person of Color.  I don't read much romance in general, but I found Guillory's writing fun, and I enjoyed getting to know her characters.  Then I found out she's from the area where I live, and it seemed only right to keep supporting her novels.  So, I picked up The Proposal.  In the sequel to The Wedding Date, Nik finds herself in a rebound relationship with Carlos - neither of whom are looking for anything serious.  So, you know where this is going - lots of late-night meet-ups and casual dates that eventually lead to someone falling in love, but no one wanting to admit it.  In many ways these types of books are so frustrating - if people would just say what they're thinking and stop being idiots, a lot less time would be wasted.  But, then there wouldn't be a book.  So, every time I found myself aggravated and wanting to throw the book against the wall, I just told myself to breathe and enjoy it.  And I did.  The Proposal is also fun - nothing earth-shattering here - except maybe an appreciation that people of color can be desirable and human and full of flaws but also loved and beautiful and worthy.  And that's definitely a message worth picking up.

And so, I picked up the third in the trilogy - The Wedding Party - with Alexa (from The Wedding Date) planning her wedding in the background, her best friends Maddie and Theo find their mutual hatred of each other developing into a *surprise* full-fledged romance.  But, of course, it starts out as a casual fling for both of them, and as they're hiding their meet-ups from Alexa, they're hiding their true feelings for each other from themselves.  Same basic formula successfully used as a vehicle for romance.  It was fun to see this story line through, but I still wouldn't say that I'm sold on romance as a genre.  Again, I haven't read many, and my guess is that Guillory probably does it better than most.  I'm a fan and will keep reading her books as the come out (I know Royal Holiday is waiting for me at the library at this moment).

Diversity Book Club: African-American Authors/Experiences

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones: This beautiful book has been on display at so many bookstores I've visited over the past year, and I finally made time to read it.  Newlyweds Celestial and Roy believe they have it all - a home, jobs, love...but when Roy is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, their loyalties and strength are tested in ways they never imagined.  As the years pass, the nature of the love between Celestial and Roy necessarily changes - what he needs in terms of support and belief exist separate and apart from what Celestial needs on the outside for her life.  This book is clearly about racism, but also highlights the heartbreaking realities of mass incarceration - and what separation does to families.  I read this book close in time to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow which is a non-fiction education on how the United States' current system of criminal justice is the functional equivalent of modern-day racism, and how systemic and institutional racism have fundamentally decimated African-American communities.  An American Marriage also reminded me in many ways of Jesmyn Ward's haunting novel Sing, Unburied, Sing in which a young boy is raised by his black grandparents. His white father is in prison and his black mother is so consumed by her love for him, and unable to function in a world without him, that she remains ill-equipped to take care of her own child.  All of these books together really painted for me this painful world in which our ideas of retribution are so tangled up in our racism and blindness toward the next generations.  They books aren't full of much hope - though they are a testament to what families endure, and perhaps an illustration of the huge price we pay when we turn a blind eye to our so-called justice system.

Fiction: Jean Kwok

I kept seeing Jean Kwok's novel Searching for Sylvie Lee on recommended book lists, but alas the queue at the library was quite long, so I decided to try out her previous novel, Girl in Translation first. I'm glad I did - this is the type of Asian-American fiction that is squarely in my comfort zone - young Asian girl - recent immigrant or child of too-hard-working to be around much immigrants, succeeds in school, but never quite fits in, finds herself and her passion, but at the expense of love or the approval of her parents.  While Girl in Translation follows this formula, it is in no way rote or unimaginative.  There's a reason this story line is so popular - who doesn't love the struggle of a beautiful girl caught between two cultures, with so much promise, and so much obligation?  The writing and storytelling are easy to follow in a "beach read" way, but certainly not mindless.  This book left me wanting to read more by Jean Kwok, so I was quite happy to find Searching for Sylvie Lee waiting for me at the library.

When I was in college, I took a poetry class that was not my favorite.  I found I always wanted some background on the poet - what was s/he going through when they wrote the poem?  What was going on in the world they were living in at the time they wrote the poem?  What was the poem in response to?  What was the poet trying to say?  But every time I wondered these things, my professor - or other more sophisticated students - would inform me that a poem had to stand on its own, and it wasn't about what the poet intended, but what we took from the poem, without all of that background information.  I understood the point, but it didn't make me enjoy or understand the poems any better.  And so it often it when I read novels.  I wonder if the "fiction" is really "fiction."  Why did the author write THIS book about THESE characters?  People say "write what you know," and what is it that the author knew about the characters and places in this particular book?  And so it is with Searching for Sylvie Lee - about the perfect wife and sister who suddenly goes missing.  Her not-as-perfect sister, travels internationally not just to find her, but to find out more about the real life no one ever understood her sister was living.  After thoroughly enjoying Girl in Translation, there were parts of this book that just didn't seem right to me.  I couldn't quite connect to the characters, and felt uncomfortable about some of their relationships with each other - at the risk of including a spoiler, I won't go into it more, but I just could not relate.  But, it was because of this that I just did some brief internet research about the book - to see how it had been received, and it was there that I learned more about Kwok's background, and that she had suffered the disappearance of a sibling.  That she would then write this book is incredibly brave to me - I know it means that the book no longer stood on its own for me - but I don't care.  It made it fascinating and real, and so much more incredibly painful.  I cared more about what happened to Sylvie Lee, and what would become of her sister.  On its own, I don't think I would have appreciated this book as much as I did Girl in Translation, and maybe I didn't read it the way I was supposed to - with a little background - but that did help me connect better, and I do hope the process of writing the novel brought Kwok some much needed peace.