Summer mini-reviews, #1

Because why dedicate myself to reading all summer if I'm not going to talk about what I'm reading? Here's the first (hopefully) batch of mini-reviews of my summer reading!

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

Ooh, this was good. I kept hearing about Helen Oyeyemi so I picked this up at the library for a try, and I think it'll easily make my 2016 top ten. For such a short book, there's so many layers- a shifting point of view, a creepy house that may or may not be trying to kill people, family issues and pica and going to university and magical realism... it's creepy without really being able to pinpoint why, and I'd like to read it again soon as I think I'd be able to pick up on even more. Highly recommended.

The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han 

This isn't really my usual fare, but I believe it's always good to branch out! So Belly (not her real name, obvs) and her brother spend every summer with her mum's friend and her two sons at her beach house, and this is probably the last summer they'll do that before the older boys leave for college. Belly kind of has a thing with both brothers, so this is about their last summer and which boy she picks. This really isn't the sort of thing I normally read, but I liked it all the same. It's a quick read and super summery, really the ideal beach thing. It's also somehow not as fluffy/inconsequential as it sounds. Also, I may think she picked the wrong boy in the end, but anyway... ;) 

Possession by A S Byatt

  I'd heard a lot of hype about this book, so I think it's inevitable that I was a little... underwhelmed? Don't get me wrong, it's a good book- really good even. It's about two Victorian literature academics who discover a letter which leads them to find out things about their two favourite authors that have been buried in the past. I'm an English lit Master's student, specialising in the Victorian period and probably going into academia, so this was super relevant for me! I liked this a lot- it didn't, like, change my life or anything, but not every book has to, and I need to stop paying attention to hype, basically.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz 

Once upon a time, as a baby queer, I would pick up literally anything which even remotely involved a gay character. I'm a bit pickier now (and LGBTQ YA is much more popular now than it was when I was a teen, which wasn't even that long ago!) but it still gives me so much pleasure when I find a really decent, unique LGBT-themed story. So, Aristotle (Ari) is a teen boy who is kind of angsty and has a brother in prison who his parents refuse to talk about, and he meets Dante who is a slightly quirky teen boy who turns out to be gay, and this is about their friendship and their relationship. This was such a refreshing read in so many ways- it's set in the 80s, no-one gets kicked out of their parents' house for being gay, no-one kills themselves, and the main characters are both Mexican-American. I loved this.




The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff

I've talked a little before about how I happened to be researching an essay about the Danish Girl, Lili Elbe, around the time the movie came out (well, it was actually about Virginia Woolf's Orlando, but somehow I ended up talking about Lili Elbe a lot) and therefore, despite my deep love of Eddie Redmayne and LGBT-related things, I didn't go see the movie as I was sick of her, haha. Months later, I've recovered enough to read the book. So this is loosely based on the life of Lili Elbe, one of the first people to undergo medical gender transition way back in the 1920s. Mostly this book deals with Lili's marriage, how her wife Greta (as she's called in the book) encouraged Lili's birth and then had to deal with losing her husband to her. I liked this. It's a quiet, beautifully written, fairly quick read, kind of a romance with a twist which was nice.

March in books

March was a weird month in terms of reading. Remember how I was reading like crazy in January and February? Yeah, that sort of fizzled out for the whole of March. Even the Re-Readalong couldn't save me. I read nine books in March... five of those were for uni and one was my read-a-long of The Crimson Petal and the White, which I've already talked about so much that I won't repeat myself here. Out of the three books that are left, two of them are strong candidates for my top ten of the year, so it's definitely not all bad :)

Alexander Hamilton, American by Richard Brookhiser

Like most of the internet, I'm pretty obsessed with the musical Hamilton and I fancied finding out more about the man himself and his ridiculous life. This looked to be the best biography my university library had. It's only about 200 pages- so much more manageable than the famous Ron Chernow biography- and it's a pretty straight-forward read. It was interesting to read something that's not my usual fare- I don't go in for political biographies, or American history, all that much. But, yeah. I learned things. So this was decent.





Am I Normal Yet? by Holly Bourne

I've talked before about how I love YA that deals with mental health issues. I picked this up randomly in Waterstones one day and read the blurb and the main character is on the same medication as me, so that was kind of... not nice exactly but new and interesting and reassuring? And then I went away and read up on this a bit more and found out that it's feministy as well as dealing with mental health problems, so I knew then I just had to read it. I'm happy to say it was just as good, if not even better than I'd hoped! So, Evie's just started college and is hoping to make a fresh start away from being 'the girl who went crazy'. She's struggled with OCD but is doing well in recovery. That's another thing I love that we definitely don't see enough- characters living with mental health problems, not just the drama of when they first manifest or particularly low points. The only other book I can think of that does this is Will Grayson Will Grayson and it's not something we see anywhere nearly enough. Anyway, Evie doesn't want her friends to know but at the same time feels bad about it, and worries that maybe she's getting worse again. And yes, there's feministy bits with the issues the main characters face as teenage girls, and yeah, I'm pretty much in love with this book. It's first in a series- I think the others follow Evie's friends, Lottie and Amber- so I can't wait to get my hands on those as well. Highly recommended.


The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan

Oooh, now this was a strange wee one. It's going to be difficult to describe. So, it's set in a possibly-future world where the earth is flooded and people are divided into 'landlockers' and 'damplings' (people who live on land and people who live on the sea) and there's all sorts of complicated stuff going on between them. North and her bear are performers in a sort of floating circus, and through one thing and another she meets and befriends a landlocker called Callanish, who's a Gracekeeper- someone who attends to the dead. Honestly, the whole world is so well developed- the whole thing is just really magical and watery and slightly melancholy. I loved this.

Much belated February round-up: Part 2

Okay, yeah, this is beyond late. To the point where I seriously began to wonder if it was even worth posting. But, hey, I had it mostly written and I like the idea of having a little something to say about everything I read this year, so here it is, my mini-reviews/talky bits for books I read in the second half of February!

Volpone by Ben Jonson

My degree was English/French combined, which was great in some ways- I got to pick the best modules and didn't have to settle for any filler, but it also meant I missed out on some things that I really ought to have read by now. So I've kind of been making an effort to read those books, push into different eras/styles and all that. And I have to say, my initial foray into that experiment was not... particularly successful. It's Renaissance era, which is something I basically never read, and it's drama, which I don't read enough of... but yeah, this wasn't really for me. As a comedy I didn't find it particularly funny- not in the way Shakespeare can make me laugh, and the misogyny kind of turned me off- yeah, yeah, part of the time and place and that, but even taking that into consideration. So, not my thing. But, I'm still glad I read it and I'm not going to give up this weird project of mine.

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
So, there was a lot of hype about this book a while back and I was intrigued, but also a little cautious because of natural distrust for hype and a few negative reviews I read (nevermind all the positive ones- apparently I only remember the bad ones...) Also, come to think of it, because even though I love the epidemic-apocalyptic in theory, there are an awful lot of well-loved books on the topic that I just couldn't get into- The Stand, The Passage, World War Z...

But I eventually picked it up and I really enjoyed it, so yay! In case you've somehow managed to avoid this, it's set in the aftermath of a deadly virus that killed most of the world population. The protagonist travels the desolate US in an orchestra/Shakespearean theatre group, which is kind of awesome. There's shifting point of views and flashbacks to the outbreak itself and everything just kind of worked- the world building, the writing, the characterisation. One of my favourites of this year so far!

The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits by Emma Donoghue

Emma Donoghue is one of my absolute favourite writers, and it breaks my heart that I'm getting towards the end of her back catalogue. She is still writing though, so there's that. Anyway! This interestingly titled book is a collection of short stories based on anecdotes and oddities in old newspapers that Donoghue encountered while researching other things. Including, yep, a woman in the 18th century who apparently gave birth to rabbits. This is a pretty great little collection- some stories are funny, some are downright horrifying. All are really quirky and interesting.




Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, ed by Mattilda AKA Matthew Bernstein Sycamore

Passing is a topic close to my heart. I've been gender non-conforming for pretty much my whole life. Basically, I only identify as a woman some of the time- the rest I'm a boy or, just, neither. I've struggled with trying to 'pass' as a boy for as long as I can remember- and, since about the age of eight, with little success. I'm small and slight and have 'feminine features' and yeah, sometimes that's bothered me a lot. But I also know that the whole idea of 'passing' is pretty much bullshit and leads to all sorts of dangerous and problematic ideas. Which is something that's pretty relevant these days, because while there's a lot of talk about trans acceptance, if anything there's even more pressure on trans people to look 'feminine' or 'masculine' enough.

So anyway! I picked up this book in the hope of exploring these ideas and I was not disappointed. The essays are incredibly diverse, dealing not only with sexuality and gender but also 'passing' with regard to race and religion and other things. So, I really enjoyed this and it made me feel good about being the girly boyish girl mess that I am. Really good stuff, definitely best of 2016 material.

February Mini Reviews: Part 1

So I'm still reading... quite a bit. I know I sound surprised, but my reading had sort of fizzled out a bit (well, by my standards) by the end of last year. Now I'm back to the pace I was reading years ago, getting a book finished nearly every other day. Of course, uni has helped a bit in this regard. At undergrad, I thought having to read a book/per class/per week was bad, but at MA level it's suddenly 2 or 3 books per class per week. Most of what I've read so far has been pretty damn good. I'm doing Irish Gothic and Fin de Siècle fiction, both of which are kind of my jam. So a lot of the texts on the syllabus are stuff I've read before and stuff I really love, so that's nice.

Anyway. I'm dividing this month into two parts, and then doing a separate post for my uni reading too, just because I like it when these posts don't drag on for too long :)

Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters by Joan Ryan

If you're confused as to why I decided to read a 20-year-old book about competitive gymnastics, let me explain. I first encountered this book in this article on Autostraddle back in wow, 2010. Not going to lie, I have a sort of morbid curiosity and a grizzly exposé of the gymnastics world sounded interesting to me. Then Book Riot mentioned it in a recent article and I was like, oh, that book. I wonder if I can find a copy. And I did, and it was pretty great. It's pretty much as bad as you can expect- eating disorders, 14 hour training sessions, brutal injuries, gymnasts being forced to continue competing with brutal injuries. Of course, this was published in 1996, which begs the question of how much has changed. Hopefully a lot, but I suspect maybe not so much. As for the writing: I know this book has been criticised for being biased, but I don't think balance was really what Ryan was going for, so that doesn't bother me. What does bother me: she could seriously have used a better editor. Little details like ages were sometimes inconsistent, and there was some repetition- yes, it's incredible that gymnast Kathy Johnson, due to being forced to keep her weight dangerously low, didn't get her first period until she was 25, but does it really need to be said three times? Still. I liked this a lot, actually. I wholeheartedly echo Book Riot's call for more gymnastics books.


Lumberjanes Vol. 1: Beware the Kitten Holy by Noelle Stevenson, Brooke Allen & others

This is a graphic novel about a bunch of girls at a scout camp and all sorts of strange and wonderful things that happen to them. I was excited about this ever since I first heard about it- from Autostraddle as well, oddly enough- but I had to wait ages for the trade paperback to come out, and then ages for it to come out in the UK, and then several months more because a certain online store messed up my pre-order. But it was totally worth the wait and well-deserving of the hype- it's so fun and original. The only problem is that it's so short- even for a graphic novel, as this only includes 4 issues. But Vol. 2 is out already and Vol. 3 is out soon, so you bet I'll be grabbing those ASAP.



The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

This has a Jeffrey Eugenides blurb on the cover which is rather fitting because this is so similar to his The Marriage Plot. I mean, I suppose in lots of ways they're very different- Eugenides' book is about immediate post-college life while this one follows the characters all the way to middle age. But it had a lot of the same feelings- even the main female characters of both are married to men with mental health problems. Basically, it follows a group of friends at an arts summer camp in the 70s and what happens to them afterwards- how some of them try to reach their goals and some of them succeed and some of them fail and some of them do well in other fields. Some of them marry each other. Some of them leave the group forever. It was an interesting (sorry) read, one that makes you think about your life and your teenage goals and all that.


Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

This is another book/author that had been on my radar for some time, and I'm glad I finally got around to it. It's a collection of essays, some of which (but by no means all) are about feminism. Other essays are about race, TV and competitive Scrabble. No, I'm not kidding about the last one. It's hard to talk about it as a whole, since the essays range so much. I enjoyed pretty much all of them, even when she was tearing apart things I like, as her arguments were all pretty sound. So, yeah, this was a really good read. I already have her novel An Untamed State on my Kindle and I'm looking forward to getting to that soon.

January Round-Up: Part 2

Welcome to part 2 of my January round up! I actually thought I'd posted this, like, a week ago, but I must have hit 'save' instead of 'publish'. Oops. Better late than never. Here's the rest of the books I read in January.

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

I'll preface this by saying that Middlemarch is one of my favourite books. It's so, so good. Please read it, if it even at all sounds like it might be your jam. Don't be intimidated by the size of the thing- I was, and I used to actually use it as literal door-stopper in my old flat. Anyway, I thought it was about time I read some more George Eliot, of the slightly shorter variety.

There's something nice about reading classics that while still famous, aren't so famous that nothing in it is a surprise. Like, everyone's heard of Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre, but Maggie Tulliver doesn't ring any bells for most people. As a result I went into this more or less blind, which was nice. There's something to be said for the free kindle editions that don't have so much as a blurb attached to it.

Pretty much the only thing I knew about this, actually, is that it's supposedly Eliot's most autobiographical work, which just makes it even more heartbreaking. There's the Family-Going-To-Ruins bit which you see in so many Victorian novels, but more than that for me was the gender stuff. Maggie gets told repeatedly that she's just a girl and couldn't possibly understand things, and her brother gets educated even though he's... not the brightest, while she is super smart and curious about the Latin and stuff her brother's learning and totally bored with but she can't have any of it. I don't know, that's really stuck with me for some reason. I know George Eliot maybe didn't experience this so much since her father was apparently awesome and encouraged her education, but you have to wonder. Also everything I've read about George Eliot seems to emphasise that the only reason she even got an education was because she was considered ugly by everyone and therefore not likely to get married, which is a whole other level of depressing, but there you go. Nineteenth century, you were crazy and as much as I love you, I'm thankful I was born when I was.

So, Maggie and Tom are miller's children, and there is Trouble At Mill, as you might expect, and things go downhill for the family, which is the basic plot. There's some interesting brother-sister dynamics- which you really don't see often enough in literature, and Maggie gets involved with a sort-of enemy of the family without it being ridiculous and Romeo and Juliet-y. I liked this book a lot. It's no Middlemarch, but few things are.


Life After Life by Kate Atkinson 

Look at me reading hyped books two years after they were published! In case you've managed to escape this one, it follows Ursula who dies and comes back many times throughout the book. It's quite hard to explain, but it makes sense in the book- so there's all sorts of 'what if' moments, little things that end up killing Ursula and little things that end up saving her. Ursula is born in 1910 and the book follows her life (not always in chronological order) up to after WWII, and when I realised this and read the first chapter I was worried this was going to be a clichéed 'would you kill Hitler if you could' thing. But that part was fairly minimal. I was more interested in the details of her lives- it reminded me of Jo Walton's My Real Children in a way, all the little choices you make in life that lead into bigger things. This was also superbly written- I'd never read any Kate Atkinson before but I'm encouraged to track some of her other stuff down.


Every Day by David Levithan

I was intrigued by the premise of this book- every day, 'A' wakes up in a different body and lives a different life for the day, never forming any connections or continuity. Then one day they fall in love with their host person's girlfriend. The actual science behind the body-swapping is a bit ropey- conveniently, they're always a sixteen-year-old in roughly the same geographic area, and the change happens every night at midnight when A is asleep (seriously, what if they can't be asleep at midnight?!)- but I didn't really mind. More important to the book is the actual emotional consequences of being a different person and being in love with the same person, and trying to make that work. There's a lot of queer subtext- A is constantly changing sexes, genders, races, body types, personality types... It was an interesting read and one that I got through very quickly.


Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson 

I'd been meaning to re-read this, and then I spotted a copy for just £2 in my favourite second-hand bookshop at the end of a day hunting for university texts- hey, if I'm spending money on books I might not even enjoy, I might as well treat myself! This is a sort of companion book to Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Winterson's own memoir of her childhood. The reality is much stranger and sadder than the fiction, it turns out. Like the protagonist of Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Winterson was the adopted child of a fervently religious mother who threw her out for being a lesbian. Winterson then lives in a car, reads lots of books and somehow ends up at Oxford. I loved this; the drive to just live your life the way you want and the influence that your parents have over you, no matter how much you try to escape them. This also reminded me that I really need to re-read Oranges- I've only read it once, when I was still in school. So, I need to get to that.

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

So like a lot of people, I loved the crap out of Gone Girl and am always trying to fill the void that book has left, and Dark Places was the remaining novel of Flynn's that I hadn't read. Libby Day is the sole survivor of the horrific murder of her mother and two sisters. Her evidence led to the conviction of her older brother for the crime. Twenty-five years later, she meets a group of crime enthusiasts who believe her brother is innocent and she is, well, forced to confront her past, but in a less cheesy way than that. This was a good read- I admit I'm a bit like those crime enthusiasts in that I love a good unsolved murder- don't get me started on JonBenét Ramsay, for example. This book was also clearly influenced by the Satanic Panic and McMartin Preschool Case, another thing I find endlessly fascinating. This book keeps you guessing, and I definitely didn't see the ending coming- but perhaps it is just a little, well, unrealistic? That didn't bother me much though, and if it doesn't bother you this is definitely worth a look.

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell 

I loved Fangirl but I was surprised when Rowell released Carry On, a book set in the fictional universe Fangirl's Cath writes fanfiction in. Simon Snow to me always seemed like just a surrogate for Harry Potter, but I still wanted to see what Rowell could come up with. And that's actually kind of a lot, it turns out. Yeah, Simon and Baz are basically literally Harry and Draco, but that's sort of the point. The universe is actually surprisingly well thought out, and Rowell totally needs to write more fantasy, if just so I can have little things like merwolves and worsegers (like badgers, except worse). This is a fun, unapologetically indulgent read and I actually really loved it and consider it my favourite of the year so far. My fangirl crush on Rainbow Rowell has increased even more, if that were even possible!



That's my January! 15 whole books. February will probably not be so prolific, what with university starting up again. Then again, my master's requires me to about 3 books a week, so in theory I should have an equally full list, albeit with a bunch of 19th century texts. We'll see!

January Round-Up: Part 1

I've been reading pretty well so far this year, mostly thanks to the Bout of Books read-a-thon which really kicked me into getting into the habit of reading in little odd moments throughout my day. It's crazy how those pages add up. So, I'm dividing my January Round-Up/ mini-reviews thingy into two parts!

The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

I've read the odd Terry Pratchett book- I read Mort and Hogfather a few years ago, and I may have read a few others as a child- my brother had loads of Discworld books when he was younger, I'm sure I picked one or two up at one point... But the lack of Terry Pratchett in my life has always been an embarrassing oversight on my part, and I'm attempting to redress that. So I went back to the very beginning! Even I can see that this is really different from later books in the series- it's much more of a parody of tropes of fantasy novels, which I found hilarious. I really enjoyed this, and the consensus seems to be that this one isn't even among the best Discworld books, so I'm looking forward to continue the series. Maybe in order, maybe not. Libraries NI has a disappointing lack of Discworld books, so I'll just pick up whatever I can find!



Pretties by Scott Westerfield

I'll make this short: basically, I did not like this book. It's a shame- I liked Uglies enough that it held up on a re-read, but this was just didn't fire my imagination the same way. It's also kind of badly written and the plot just didn't work. I don't know if it's middle-book-syndrome but... I won't be continuing with the series. Bleh, disappointing.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

This is one of those books I've had on my shelf for ages and knew I should have got around to earlier, and when I read it I still thought I should have got around to it earlier. Anyway. This is a great collection of Plath poetry- some of which I was already familiar with, some not. Pretty dark in places, but pretty diverse in themes. It's hard to talk about poetry because I feel like it doesn't really impact you until you've read it a few times, but yeah, this is a keeper.






Opal Plumstead by Jacqueline Wilson 

I'm a lifelong Jacqueline Wilson fan- I could talk for hours about how much of an impact Secrets and The Illustrated Mum had on me as a child- but I haven't read any of her books in quite a few years. So I found Opal Plumstead in the library- about a suffragette girl in 1913- and yep, that was me sold. Opal's a scholarship girl who's forced to leave school after her father goes to prison and has to go to work in a sweet factory, where she gets involved with the women's suffrage movement. I liked this a lot, but it was really heavy- despite being a children's book it's one of the saddest books I've read in a while. There's also class stuff and gender stuff and it's definitely worth a read if it sounds like your kind of thing.

What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton

So, I'm a big fan of Jo Walton in general. This is a collection of her blog posts on Tor.com centered on the theme of re-reading. Few of the books she talks about are very well-known- many are obscure and out of print. I haven't read maybe 90% of the books she talks about, but this didn't bother me as much as I thought it might- Walton talks so engagingly about books, I ended up adding scores of them to my mental wishlist. What I love about Jo Walton is that she is such a reader, one of us, and she throws in little anecdotes like 'I first read this in a cafe while eating a poached egg' and 'I got this book out of the library just before Christmas in 1988' that just make everything so real. Most of the essays are dedicated to specific books, but there are more general ones too which I got more out of- everything from whether you 'sip' or 'gulp' books to how George Eliot would have been a terrific science fiction writer. So, I really enjoyed this. My love affair with Jo Walton continues!


The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides 

This is actually a re-read- I first read it when it came out and I was in my first year of uni, but since it deals with post-college life I figured it was due for a re-read at this point. Also, I have now had the pleasure of being exposed to semiotics, so I get a lot more of the jokes now. Anyway. So, Madeleine is an English major, classical literature lover; her boyfriend Leonard is a biology major who struggles with bipolar disorder; and then there's Mitchell, a religious studies major with romantic history with Madeleine, who goes travelling after college and ends up in India. A lot of this really rang true to me- the characters resemble people I remember from uni, and the post-college oh-my-god-what-am-I-doing panic is spot on. Then there's Leonard's painful struggles with his illness, and Madeleine's struggles with dealing with it, and Mitchell's religious crisis... there's a lot in this book, and I think I liked it even better on a second reading. Also, this was literally my third audiobook ever (excepting when I was a child...) and I got on pretty well with it! So that's good. I'll be converted to audio format yet :)

Harry Potter: Film Wizardry by Brian Sibley/Warner Bros

So this isn't strictly a traditional book- it's a companion to the Harry Potter movies, with all the lovely pictures and design sketches that you'd expect. There's more writing than you'd think, too- explaining how they did this and that effect; interviews; random anecdotes. I love how generally speaking, the crew preferred making things to just using computer effects- things like Fawkes were mechanical instead of CGI, for example. Also, all the little cast notes that we love hearing about, like when Alfonso Cuarón asked the Trio to write essays on their characters and each ended up approaching it like their character (Daniel Radclyffe wrote a page or two, Emma Watson wrote pages and pages, Rupert Grint never handed anything in). And that's not all! This book is also full of little removable facsimiles of things like the Marauder's Map and Umbridge's proclamation posters. All in all, this is a wonderful book if you're a HP nerd (and isn't half the internet?)


Tampa by Alissa Nutting

Funny story: when I was in first year of uni it seemed like half the books we were assigned dealt with student/teacher (or lecturer) relationships- J M Coetzee's Disgrace, David Lodge's Changing Places, Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal... we used to wonder whether this was our lecturers' way of encouraging or discouraging us from dating them. So, I got pretty fatigued with this whole theme and actively avoided any book (movie, fanfic...) involving student/teacher relationships. So I nearly skipped Tampa, about a female teacher who has an affair with a fourteen-year-old male student- but I can't resist controversy, so I thought I'd give it a go. Turns out it was totally different than I'd assumed. This isn't about a student-teacher relationship so much as it is about a female paedophile (ephebophile, if we want to split hairs) who is deeply, deeply unpleasant. The book's told from her point of view and the whole thing is just... really uncomfortable. Fucked up stuff happens. I'll say that much without spoiling anything. So... I enjoyed this book, I think? In the same way that you can weirdly enjoy books that horrify you and make you very uncomfortable. I've definitely never read anything quite like this.

It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini

I have a lot of feelings about this book. Complicated feelings. So, I love books about depression, especially YA. I've had depression on and off since I was eleven and have a few people very close to me who are suffering/have suffered from very severe depression, and I like books that help me make sense of it all. I'd heard great things about this book, about an over-achieving teenager who nearly kills himself and spends five days in a mental hospital. I liked how Craig basically has it all- he doesn't seem to have any real problems, supportive parents, friends, goes to a good school, family is well-off, etc etc. Because sometimes depression does strike people with no simple 'explanation'- like I've seen in some books about depression. The book is really about Craig's time in the hospital, and the people he meets there, and doesn't really deal with Craig's depression as much as I would have liked. It's very much 'hey, look at all these quirky characters in the hospital!' and I'm not so sure I liked that. I especially didn't like the treatment of a transgender patient, and that really soured the book for me to be honest. Still, bits of the book were really good and really realistic depictions of depression, so I'm still glad I read it, even if it's not going to be one of those books I really love.


So, there's the nine books I read in the first fifteen days of January! January reading did not stop (and is not stopping there). Rest of January reading will hopefully be up in a prompt fashion at the start of February... although the university term starts up again by then, so, we'll see ;)

How's your month been for books?

I'm not dead! (Very belated November wrap-up)

Yeah, I kind of fell off the radar for a bit there. Like so many others, I took part in NaNoWriMo this year, and that kind of ate up my November as I had the feeling that if I was writing something, it should be my novel. But November is over, so I'm back to write occasional blogposts and Doctor Who ramblings and Sherlock Holmes fanfiction, if I'm so inclined.

As a side note on NaNoWriMo... I've taken part every year since 2010. This is the first year where I failed to make it to 50,000 words. And yeah, that sucks, and I'm kind of sad. It was partly that I just couldn't get into my novel like I have in past years, partly the fact that my life is kind of insane.

Honestly, it's helped me to realise that I need to sort of shift things about in my life to prioritise what matters to me. I do a lot of things. I'm studying a master's part-time, which is great and something I want to do with my life. Then I work full-time in fast food, which is not something I want to do with my life but I need the money. Then I have my writing and my music, which is my absolute biggest passion in life but sadly gets shifted to the side far too often. Then I need to make time for life things like keeping a clean house and my friends and girlfriend and family and social life, and try to find some time to you know, kick back and read and watch TV and that. That's a lot. And I haven't really been balancing that so well lately, which is why I'm writing my first blog post in nearly two months. So, I'm going to make an effort to readdress the balance and hopefully do more of the things I actually want to do in life.

So there's that. But all the same, I wrote more than 30,000 words last month and you know what, that's still pretty freaking awesome. So, no regrets.

Anyway. Here was my November! I read eight books, which was more than I'd expected. Towards the end of the month I finished a bunch of books I was stuck on for ages, and that kind of spurred me on to finish a few more.

The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson

So this was the tail-end of my RIP reading, when I was in the mood for something scary and trashy. Despite the fact that I've never seen the original The Amityville Horror movie (only the meh remake), I've always been kind of fascinated with the Amityville Horror story- a family moving into a house where a gruesome murder took place, only to find it's so badly haunted they leave, terrified, after a month. Of course, I don't believe that any of it really happened, but it's fun to pretend. Unfortunately, this was kind of badly written (which I pretty much expected) and really not scary, which rather defeated the purpose. Still, there's something vaguely trashy and enjoyable about this book all the same.



Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Dramatic difference in quality now- this was really superbly written. It's about a family in 1970s Ohio after their daughter is found drowned in a lake. There's the mystery element of just what happened to her and all sorts of tensions in the family- as well as race stuff, as the father is a second-generation Chinese immigrant, and gender stuff, with the mother being deeply uncomfortable in her role in the family. The whole thing is just really excellently done and well-observed and seriously, just read this.

Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind

I'm a huge fan of the musical of Spring Awakening, so I thought it was about time I read the original play. Written in 1891, it's about a group of adolescents and their sexuality and all the themes that come out of that- rape, homosexuality, abortion, death, masturbation. As controversial as it was when it was first performed, it's still pretty amazing how relevant it is today. I read an old, contemporary translation, but apparently Jonathan Franzen did one that I'd be interested in checking out. Sadly, I think my A Level German isn't up to scratch to read the original...




Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J K Rowling

Don't mind me, just rereading this for the millionth time. I really do think this is one of my favourites in the series. It gives us Lupin and Sirius and hippogriffs and expecto patronum and Marauders and all those wonderful things.






Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Yes, I finished this, despite sort of dropping out of posting the read-a-long updates! I'm not going to lie, it was difficult. I haven't had so much trouble reading a book in a very long time. The vast majority of it, I hated. There were little glimmers that stop me from writing it off completely, and maybe I will pick it up in a few years... but yeah, I'm thinking this is one of those classics I Just Don't Get.

The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Hey, look at me reading hyped books several years late! Yeah, this has been on my radar for a long time, but I kept reading negative reviews of it that threw me. I actually really enjoyed it- the suspense was good, it gave me the creeps in places, and that ending, dear god. I think I need to read the sequel.

All the Light we Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

I really don't know what to say about this book. You know when a book is really hyped and gets outstanding review and everyone raves about it, and then you read it and you wonder if you've read the same book? Yeeeah. There was nothing wrong with this book, really. The setting was really interesting- France during the Nazi Occupation, so I enjoyed it from a historical point of view. But nothing grabbed at me. I just feel sort of indifferent about it. A decent read, but nothing to get excited about.





Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua

So this was actually... really good. It's a memoir type thing about a mother who prides herself in being the Stereotypical Asian Mother and how she raised her two daughters. And there's a lot of crazy. Chua's daughters weren't allowed to spend time with their friends and instead spent hours a day practising music, even when they were on holiday. By the time I got to the bit where Chua says her kids had to learn violin and piano, because other instruments like drums were the gateway to hard drugs, I was prepared to hate-read this. But as I went on, I found it's actually more complicated. Chua makes fun of herself, frequently, in very subtle ways that are easy to miss (I'm 90% sure her drums = drugs remark was satire. I hope.) Then there's that her hardline approach worked on one daughter but not the other... and she's okay with that. Or maybe I saw a bit of my own childhood in there- I too was brought up in a "Bs are fail grades!" house and also fought against my parents pushing me into classical music. Anyway, I really enjoyed this, for whatever reason.



And that's November! December/End of Year wrap ups will hopefully be up in a timely fashion, essays permitting :)