On Time and On Point? For Once??
Am I possibly going to write an actual regular newsletter this month? It seems like I am! What a surprise! Sometimes things just align like that.
To be honest, it has been a real shitty year so far even though we are not even two full weeks in as I am writing this. But today I read an entire book in less than twelve hours. (Would have been one sitting except I never like to go to bed after I finish a book, I always like to get a chapter or two into something new in case I wake up in the middle of the night.) It is the second time I've gotten really into a book in the last few weeks and it is giving me some hope. Reading was really off for me last year, but maybe I'm turning a corner? It's possible. I'm trying to be optimistic but also not put too much pressure on myself. (Also I hate to be vague, so the book is Piglet by Lottie Hazell, out in March.)
I am traveling this week, which means I have to have a small army of audiobooks before I can feel comfortable and safe. But it's been a few months since I've had to get all my little audiobook soldiers lined up and ready so I don't have the fatigue about it that can happen when I've been traveling a lot.
Also helps a little that now Spotify has audiobooks, though they have a 15 hour limit each month. (I simply listen to only audiobooks that are shorter than 15 hours. It is a great place to have a little Murderbot treat if you are not fully caught up.) A good place to find new releases you are not sure you want to actually buy. It isn't perfect, especially if you use it for music a lot, and it has lost my place in a book once, but mostly it's worked fine.
In other book news, for my birthday I got myself the Paperbacks from Hell series from Valancourt. I have looked at it longingly for literally years now, so it was very exciting to actually pull the trigger. (FYI they have a serious markdown every year on Black Friday so put it on your calendar.) I started with Rapture by Thomas Tessier from 1987, which I liked a lot. It's a great book with themes that still feel very relevant, a look at toxic masculinity taken to extremes. In it Jeff, a successful guy who's always been happily a bachelor, becomes obsessed with his high school friend Georgianne, who is long married with a teenage daughter. It does not go great, as you can probably guess from the knife with dripping blood on the cover. (Although no one gets stabbed so not sure where the knife idea came from!) The introduction (by Grady Hendrix) notes how it's kind of a step between A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, and it certainly does fit there. But it quotes Tessier saying that the book was inspired more by Patricia Highsmith and Hendrix does a comparison of Jeff and Tom Ripley.
But funny story, I've been reading a lot of Patricia Highsmith's novels the last few years. I read Ripley years and years ago, before the newer movie, and really loved it but haven't looked at it since. I've been thinking about revisiting it. But I felt bad that I hadn't read her other novels. So I've read The Price of Salt, Strangers on a Train, Deep Water, A Suspension of Mercy, and The Glass Cell. Lucky for me they reissued many of her novels on audio a few years ago. It's been wonderful, honestly. I didn't really love The Glass Cell but all the rest have been fantastic, and weirdly I think I liked Deep Water best of all. (Please pretend the movie version doesn't exist. It's better that way.) Today I finished another one, This Sweet Sickness. And very early on I was like, Wait a second, Thomas Tessier... because Rapture and This Sweet Sickness are not the same book but pretty darn close. TSS is about David who is obsessed with a woman named Annabelle who is married to another man. The vibes are different, Rapture feels like it's trying to speak to the cultural moment of the late 80's while Sickness is not really all that interested in social commentary and is much more of a character study. Rapture goes heavy on plot and Sickness is a very slow burn. But the broad strokes are so similar! I would write Mr. Hendrix and Valancourt a little note to say maybe the next edition they update the intro but I know they never will so instead I will just share this insight with all of you. And maybe it will get some of you to enjoy the journey into Highsmith as much as I have or give me a Paperback from Hell reading buddy. (I've been putting off starting my next paperback selection, I need a new pair of reading glasses, the print is small and I am sadly middle aged! It's truly an insult, I now do that thing where I move things far away from my face so I can read them. Aging comes for us all.)
I am, for now, ahead on galleys. I am reading into March now but I may get behind again because March has a jillion books. I don't know when publishers decided they were going to put ALL THE BOOKS out in March (actually I am pretty sure it was just a few years ago but I don't understand why they keep doing it except that they just repeat the same thing over and over like how we will get a bunch of twisty thrillers in January forever because that was the month they released Girl on the Train but we read all 12 months of the year???) but hopefully I can keep up.
So just like old times I am going to tell you the January releases that I like. Can you even believe it? Almost like it is normal over here.
Kiley Reid had THE Too Much Hype Book of 2020 (though technically it was a December 2019 release) with Such a Fun Age which I liked but didn't love. It was just so heavy on cringe that it increased my blood pressure every time I picked it up. I had to switch from audio to print so that I could more easily take breaks and skim the worst parts! But I'm happy to report that her second novel is great, even better, but super different. You should not come expecting the same thing, though in a lot of ways it is another novel about social graces through a lens of race and class. If Such a Fun Age was tightly wound, this is a book that spends most of the time lounging on the couch in sweats. Until it doesn't, but somehow waiting for the train wreck in this book did not make me nearly as stressed. I cared more about the characters as we had the long time of getting to know them and starting to see that this was all going to go badly eventually but not knowing when. It's a campus novel, love the Arkansas setting, it's surprisingly gay, and if you ever had a roommate you really hated you will have fun with this one. Anyway remember how I said that I just had my second book where I sat and devoured it for hours? This was the first one.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/127823210-river-east-river-west
(The little Goodreads card isn't working, but the novel is River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure.) This is a very strong debut with two timelines that takes the immigrant story and the American dream narrative and turns them both on their head. Both stories revolve around Sloan, a white American woman who comes to China in the 1980's. In 2007 we follow her biracial daughter Alva, who has spent her whole life in China but never felt entirely at home, and is getting rebellious after her mother's sudden marriage to Lu Fang. In 1985 we get Lu Fang's story, who has managed to start a new life with a new bride after he was sent to a labor camp for the crime of being a college student. But his plans are complicated when he meets Sloan, who has newly come to China. Strikes a nice balance between being character driven and very readable.
I like to read all the nonmonogamy memoirs to see just how much they are going to mess it up. This one surprised me by not being bad! It did drive me up the wall, but mostly because I saw Molly making many mistakes I had already made. This is really focused on opening up a marriage (part of why I was dubious) and I do think it ends just when she is starting to figure it out, which is kind of a bummer! (lol maybe note to myself as that is exactly where I am ending the piece I'm working on whoops 🙃) But I liked Molly's openness, she doesn't protect her husband too much as these stories often can, and she writes openly and frankly about sex. It can feel a little like she is working to justify and explain, but she pretty much has to for most of her readers and she doesn't get super defensive. One of the really interesting subplots is that she discovers her own parents had an open marriage along the way. I tore through it even if I made many groans of frustration along the way.
Maybe the saddest thing that can happen when you finish a good book from a new author is to find out it's a posthumous release. Min died in 2019 and finished the novel several years prior but hadn't published it. The notes on it said Min originally saw it as a riff on Lolita specifically taking on men who objectify Asian women. And you still see that lurking from time to time. But while this issue of objectification is everywhere in the novel (and personified by Daniel, a white man who has exchanged one Asian woman for another with terrible consequences for the women but few for him) it is not as central as you would think. Instead this is a multi-character story that moves all through time, and starts off with a bang as a young punk rocker attempts to kidnap Daniel to make him pay for his crimes. I found the ending too kind, I liked the book most when it was more prickly, but I really enjoyed it nonetheless.
I would also like to just quickly draw your attention to two books I DID NOT LIKE so you cannot say I did not warn you. It is, as I mentioned previously, twisty thriller month and there were two particularly bad ones I muddled through and should have quit.
I don't know how Alex Michaelides wrote one great thriller (The Silent Patient) but since then is determined to write bad ones (before this one there was The Maidens) but here we are. Maybe they need to give him more time between books? I don't know but someone needs to step in. Because this one is all twists and literally nothing else. It is a magic trick where at the end it turns out there was no magician and no rabbit or hat or beautiful assistant but you still spent money on the ticket. As for Anna O, sticking with this one was totally my fault, a victim of my hope to maybe meet my reading goal for 2023 (I was two books short, but ultimately remembered that I'd picked 140 totally arbitrarily so why not change it to 130 totally arbitrarily? And so I did and thus I met my goal. Thank you.) and once I had gotten a certain amount in I felt like I was obligated to finish. It was the worst thriller I have read in a long time. One where at the end of the day nothing in it even made sense.
Now look at that, we've come to the end of a normal newsletter, and it's about January books and it came in January, what is the world coming to? Maybe this year is starting to turn around.