Life’s been wild. Reading is an escape that I’m barely recording. But here’s the list:
- Finished Wrath of the Triple Goddess (Percy Jackson) by Rick Riordan
- Death Comes to Marlow by Robert Thorogood
- A Harvest of Hearts by Andrea Eames
- The Story Collector by Evie Gaughan
- The Other March Sisters edited by Linda Epstein
- The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix Harrow
- Not for the Faint of Heart by Lex Croucher
- Into the Shadow (series)
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
- The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
- A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
- Finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
- Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Some thoughts about this list…
The short, serial nature of the Into the Shadow series suited me. I enjoy the cleverness of horror/thrillers but often can’t manage the extended suspense and just general negative energy of that genre. The collection of short stories was great – I got all the joy of an interesting, clever setting or plot without the heaviness of a post-horror read hangover.
A return to the March sisters of Little Women fame in The Other March Sisters was fun. I read the heck out of that series as a tween/teen and I liked coming back to it with more adult themes. Research on the formation of the collection was interesting, too.
Becky Chambers is delightful. I’d read one of her Monk & Robot books a while back and remember being delighted by it in a sort of melancholy way. The two books I read recently were similar. The vibe reminds me of the TV show Firefly – kind of lonely, kind of isolated, a motley crew of unlikely companions making it work out in the big galaxy.
The uncanny mood was strong for this reading period. Aside from the Into the Shadows series, where I fully expected to feel unsettled, there were a few other unsettling reads. Piranesi was uncomfortable to read, an uncomfortable setting, and an uncomfortable narrator. It was so odd. I loved it. The Knight and the Butcherbird came to some troubling conclusions. I appreciated that it challenged my ethics without making me feel like I am a terrible person; truly an art. And A Harvest of Hearts was disturbing but I can’t actually remember why.
Okay, I checked back on what the book was about and I seem to recall the setting was hecking unsettling. I enjoyed the main character a lot because she was so persistent, but I had a hard time with the oppressiveness of the setting. I think the main character kind of saved it – that book could have felt much darker than it ended up feeling.
I also finished Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (a disappointment) as the month switched over but I’ll save that for the next post. Still looking for escapist books and keep being disappointed by Serious Books because they aren’t more escapist. Definitely a me problem.