I read a fun variety of books this month, starting 2021 off strong! Thank you Random House for gifting me these books, noted with a star.
Savage Appetites
Rachel Monroe
This is a great book about women who have become obsessed with crime in one way or another. One woman became obsessed with solving crimes so she developed new police officer training techniques, another became obsessed with a victim and began seeing herself in that role. It’s a really interesting look at the societal fascination with crime and what happens when it goes too far.
Wake Siren
Nina Maclaughlin
Nina is a local author recommended to me by Christina, the bookseller at All She Wrote Books. This volume was a series of stories reimagining Greek and Roman myths from a feminist perspective. I enjoyed a lot of these stories, it’s nice to see women who are repeatedly treated badly taking back the narrative. It did drag on a bit for me at the end. Most of the stories involve a graphic rape scene, as they did in the original texts, and after a while it becomes very challenging reading one after another after another. They lose their power. I would’ve been happy with half as many stories.
One Day in December*
Josie Silver
Though I love romcoms, I’m normally not a romance reader. But when Random House sent me this festive new holiday romance I went for it. It was really fun to dive into an easy-to-read, somewhat fanciful story. Like a Hallmark Christmas movie you don’t read it for the quality, but for the comforting pleasure of seeing them always get together in the end.
Rules of Civility
Amor Towles
I loved, loved A Gentleman in Moscow but I wasn’t sure if it was solely because of my love of Russia. Turns out, I also love Amor Towles! This was such a wonderful novel about a woman in the 1930s who gets accidentally swept up in the glamorous upper class world and has a series of adventures and romances along the way. It’s DELIGHTFUL, I can’t recommend enough. There’s a sequel that I’m hoping to dive into next month.
Hag-Seed
Margaret Atwood
This was our book club book this month! It’s a contemporary adaptation of The Tempest. In it, Prospero (here called Felix) is a theater director who’s maliciously removed from his post by a rival arts director. He ends up teaching Shakespeare to prison inmates while plotting his revenge. I enjoyed this book, it was very well done, but in a contemporary setting I found the characters so much more sad. In Shakespeare’s work it’s a little more fanciful, but here it was easier to see how deeply troubled and tragic each person was, most likely because have non of the personal growth we expect to see in ourselves.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed*
Mariana Enriquez
Mariana Enriquez is right up there with Samanta Schweblin as one of my favorite authors! This is her newest English translation in a bit and I devoured it. It’s a series of eerie stories delving into themes that are universal, like poverty, fear, and crime, but with a uniquely Argentine mysticism and setting. Read it immediately so we can talk about it.