Here’s the ranking of the 20+ books I read this month. Please enjoy my impassioned rambling.
17. A Simple Favor by Darcey Bell: I had a lot of feelings about this book, but ultimately it was straight trash. The characters had remarkably poor judgment and the scheme that unfolded felt contrived. I wrote more about it here, contrasting it with the best book on my list. This is one that was bad in a way you could make fun of.
16. A Crafter Knits A Clue by Holly Quinn: Anyone who knows me for two seconds will know that if I’m not reading, I’m knitting. One of my favorite things to do is knit while listening to audiobooks because I’m an unrepentant introvert and secretly a grandma in a 30-year-old woman’s body. This book’s premise appealed to me, but the execution was ridiculously disappointing. The book was centered around a woman who ran a craft store in a small town where there was a separate yarn store. The owner of the yarn store was murdered with a knitting needle. This lackluster story was simultaneously dull and scattered. I became preoccupied with the technical inaccuracies (you shouldn’t knit alpaca socks because the fabric alpaca creates is inelastic and they’d turn into stretched out bags and fall off your feet and that would be a waste of really nice yarn!) and I just kind of lost interest.
15. Mera: Queen of Atlantis by Dan Abnett: I bought this comic on a whim when it was 90 percent off in the Kindle store. I was depending on my pal Robert’s recommendations, and I tried to branch out into the brave new world of comic books on my own, but I flew too close to the sun with this one. I was disappointed at Mera’s portrayal in the Aquaman movie, where she was just a glorified door-opener. This was not much better, with Mera spending precious pages mooning over Aquaman, who was incapacitated, but I couldn’t know about that unless I read some other Aquaman book. Then, Mera waffled back and forth over whether she wanted to be a wife or a queen. (WHY? NOT? BOTH?????) On its own, the book isn’t terrible, as Mera finally begins kicking ass toward the end, and it was fine. Held up against the other books I’ve read this month, I can’t recommend it. After the great book slump of 2017, I’ve been apprehensive about attempting to finish books I start reading and then don’t like. A bad book that I force myself to read can kill my reading mojo for weeks, and with a bold goal of now 150 books to complete by the end of the year, I don’t want to risk it!
14. Monstress by Marjorie M. Liu: If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve reached the part of the list where I’m reserving judgment until I read more. I read the first volume of this, and while I liked it, it takes place in a complex, wide world that is difficult to grasp in a few dozen pages. I’d probably have been more into it if it were longer.
13. I’ll Be Gone In The Dark by Michelle McNamara: I do not read a lot of nonfiction or true crime because that’s what I do at my job all day, but this was short and I was curious about it. My biggest gripe was that it repeated a lot of facts in various parts in what seemed to be an effort to pad it out. The book was incomplete at the time of the author’s death, and it was completed by two other people and published posthumously. I really liked the way McNamara described the crimes in an engaging way without being lurid. I probably won’t seek out other true crime books, but this was fine.
12. Red Sonja by Mark Russell: I’m probably going to seek out more of this. It was witty and hilarious, but it was another book where I have to read more to determine if I like it.
11. Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir: This is about a girl in a fictional world who becomes a slave in the house of an imperial army general in order to deliver information to a resistance faction and rescue her brother from prison. The empire kills civilians indiscriminately, and is sooper evil, but we’re not quite sure why until most of the way through the book. The plot sifted through a lot of familiar YA fantasy tropes, the characters were a little flat, and I expected more, to be honest. I think pairing it with my listening of Marlon James’ “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” (which I haven’t finished yet) made it lose some of its impact. I’ll read more from this series before delivering a final judgment.
10. A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman: Here’s the part of the list where I read some things I really liked, and could split hairs over any of them depending on my mood. I enjoyed listening to this book, and I explained why in my little book questionnaire I did in early February.
9. Scarlet by Marissa Meyer: I’m going to read a fairy tale retelling every month at this rate, and that is just wonderful. This is one of those book series that I’m not interested in pulling the trigger to buy, but I’m still interested in reading it. I think my library’s population feels the same way I do, because Meyer’s books always seem to be checked out. It’s a futuristic fairy tale retelling where earth is at war with the lunar colony. Cinderella is a secret cyborg princess! The wolf in this (Named Wolf. Woo! Creativity!) is a genetically modified man! Scarlet (this book’s Little Red Riding Hood) is trying to find out who kidnapped her grandmother and why! I didn’t like this second installment as much as when I read “Cinder” years ago, but it was still pretty good. I'm working on the third book in the series, "Cress," right now. Rapunzel is a computer hacker stuck in a satellite!
8. Giant Days by John Allison: Another light, funny and enjoyable read about a group of different girls who become friends at college. It was relatable. More, please!
7. Battle Angel Alita Vols. 1-3 by Yukito Kishiro: I read my first manga because of a movie that looked cool. Spoiler: It was cool! Go see it! I kept paging the wrong way on my Kindle and reading the speech bubbles in the wrong order, but I got the hang of it eventually! I want to read the other six volumes of this story, too. The movie kind of mushed together the storylines from the manga. Yugo was introduced right away in the movie, but in the manga he doesn’t show up until vol. 2. In the movie, Ito is much less creepy. And all of the motorball stuff, which begins in vol. 3, is placed much sooner in the movie. I’d say the movie is a solid adaptation, but the source material is excellent.
6. Bingo Love by Tee Franklin: This comic was about two young black women who fall in love, but because of the extreme taboo of the time, they can’t be together. They grow old, and then when they meet again, they decide to be together and are willing to make sacrifices to do so. At the end, the story flashes forward to the future, where you can change your appearance so you’re still recognizable to your loved ones who have Alzheimer’s disease, but there’s still homophobia. I might have been crying while I read this, but it’s TOTALLY NOT because this book was endlessly endearing and unresolved love stories cause my heart to languish in a brittle pool of angst and yearning. Nope, definitely not.
5. Saga (Anthologies 1 and 2) by Brian K. Vaughan: I read the first 3 volumes of this ages ago, then the writers dropped off the face of the earth, then I bought the hardbound anthologies after realizing the series was back on and had been for years. The third big book comes out in June and I’ll probably get that too. The worldbuilding is a little easier to grasp than "Monstress," but it’s still expansive and interesting. I am in love with the role of the romance novel in the story. I think everyone who reads comics likes Saga. I don’t have a bad thing to say about it.
4. Captain America (#1-7) by Ta-Nehisi Coates: Was it a bad idea to read Captain America before reading Black Panther or any of Coates’ essays? I don’t think so. This was amazing on its own. It was peppered with delicious notes of toxic masculinity and warped American values. I loved it.
3. The Light Between Worlds by Laura E. Weymouth: This book is loosely based on the premise “What happens to the kids in Chronicles of Narnia after they come back from Narnia?” The place wasn’t Narnia and the kids were not Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, but the ideas were the same. This story got DARK. After I was finished with this book, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I wondered if I would ever be happy again.
2. Mister Miracle by Tom King: This was recommended to me by my Goodreads pal and former sports editor Chris (Hi Chris!) This comic hits all of the old-school comicky notes, but with little riffs in the art and modern-day themes. Mister Miracle can escape from everything and everywhere, but can he escape from mental illness and childhood trauma? This book has everything: Tragedy! Romance! Action! It has the mundane goings-on of everyday life! I’m discovering that I find the comedic timing in most comics to be really great, but when it’s translated to a movie, it comes off as kind of cheesy. Anyway, on top of this book being spectacularly written and illustrated, there’s a whole page of Darkseid eating a carrot from a relish tray. He’s a double-dipper. So there’s that.
1. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng: Almost everyone I know has read this book, meaning I actually have people I can talk to about a book I’ve read! It is invigorating! I talked about it more when I contrasted it with “A Simple Favor.” I just want to say that in my long time reading and reviewing books, there are books that offer a simple plot, and those are fine. But once in a while you discover a book that offers more to the conversation. So last month, when my best book was “The Stone Sky,” I liked it because it was an adventure/survival fantasy story, but it ALSO was about racism and the right oppressive societies have to exist. “Little Fires Everywhere” was about a group of teenagers coming of age, but it ALSO was a thorough examination of the mother-daughter relationship AND it was about classism. Books that go the extra mile tend to float to the top of my reading lists every time.
Last month's rankings.
Unranked
I read these as part of City Book Review’s sponsored review program and can’t talk about them here.
Sourpuss by Merricat Mulwray
Gift of the Seer by KB Laugheed
Radical Revolution: The Fight For Animal Liberation by Stephen Saunders
That's an amazing reading total for a month. Both impressed and jealous! Haven't read anything by Ng yet. The one's that been sitting on my shelf ia a copy of Everything I Never Told You that I picked up at a book sale. Psyched that you liked Mister Miracle. All sorts of other Tom King you could dive into, but Vision is probably best. Tighter and more emotional story than Mister Miracle. Then there's also The Omega Men by King, among other stuff.
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