I get book recommendations from many sources and this one came from a friend. She said it was the best book she’d read in a year, so I was eager to read it. The critics’ quotes on the book cover called it, “A fairy tale of love and class and money and death and New York City in the 1980s” (NPR) and “Glorious, dark, dirty, and sexy.” (Amanda Eyre Ward) So why did I dislike the book so strongly?
This is the kind of book that gives beach reads a bad name. The description of the plot was interesting enough for me to pick it up, and I am always willing to explore a new Canadian author. But wow, this author needs an editor! There were typos and missing words, repeated phrases and awkward transitions. It honestly felt like I was reading a draft a lot of the time.
This novel has been on my “to read” list for quite a while. (Pub date of 2003.) It’s been recommended to me many times. And in the past, I have loved Margaret Atwood’s novels: not just Handmaids Tale, but Alias Grace(one of my all-time favorites), Hag-Seed (reviewed in April 2017 L&L Review), and The Blind Assassin. Did Oryx and Crake disappoint me because I had such high hopes?
I’m not sure why important books so often end up in the “Not My Cup Of Tea” category, but America Is In The Heart is another one that I just did not enjoy. The story is a fictionalized version of Buloson’s own life growing up in a rural, poverty-stricken are of the Philippines and eventually immigrating to the west coast of America to become a laborer and eventually an organizer of laborers.
In the October 18, 2018 edition of the L & L Review, I reviewed Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, an eye-opener for me in that I’d never read a book about history that I’d found readable and interesting. Based on that experience and recommendations from friends, I decided to read Jill Lepore’s newest book, These Truths: A History of the United States.
I know this book is quite famous, widely-read and highly praised. And I can see why. It is incredibly well researched, explains cancer in a way that I could almost understand, and is probably the most interesting book about a disease I could imagine. That said, aside from the patient history, and even some of the history of cancer funding and research, I thought Mukerjee got very bogged down when he got into the genetics.
Jodi Picoult is one of a handful of authors that whenever she publishes a new book, I have to buy it and read it right away. A Spark of Light contains a riveting concept: a crazy gunman bursts into a women’s reproductive health services clinic and starts shooting.
This is a classic example of good cover, good premise, bad book. I always am drawn to Wolitzer’s cover art, and the idea of a modern day Lysistrata is great! But this book, sadly, is not.
I picked this book up because it had received so much good press and it was an Oprah’s Book Club 2018 selection. (I’m not going to lie: I find I like most of the books that Oprah recommends.) An American Marriage begins with the story of Andre, a successful, young, black business executive and Celestial, an up-and-coming artist.
If you are not Canadian (like me), you may not know who the Menonites are; but if you’re curious, I would not recommend this book as your answer. Basically the Menonites are Canada’s version of the Amish, but with a bit less coherence to their religious fervor for shunning all things modern.
I found Christina Baker Kline’s concept for A Piece of The World intriguing. She based the novel on the famous painting “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth and researched the life of the woman who lies in the center of the painting, looking longingly towards an old farmhouse in the distance. Kline also includes facts about Wyeth’s life at that time. Then she builds a story about how the painting came to be.
Before explaining why The Boat People wasn’t my cup of tea, I must point out that it speaks to the current political moment with heartbreaking power. One of several protagonists is a man being held in a detention center in Canada after fleeing Sri Lanka, and being separated from his son. If you are someone who likes to dig into a distressing topic, then this might just be your cup of tea.
I so loved Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (reviewed in L & L in Feb. 2018) that I couldn’t wait to read her 2011 Pulitzer Prize winning novel: a visit from the goon squad. I guess I understand how it won. It has a very broad and far-reaching premise: we will all grow older and lose our edge; how we choose to do that will affect our happiness, our health and ultimately our lives.
I think We Are Not Ourselves came to me by way of a friend who was cleaning out her shelves, that is to say, not specifically recommended. It sounded good to me from the description of a young Irish-American girl growing up in New York City in the sixties. But the description was misleading, and the book was boring.
I suppose the amazing thing isn’t that I didn’t like this latest (book #5) in the Lisbeth Salander series (the first three books were The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson), but that I’ve hung in there for so long. Detective/thriller isn’t usually my go-to fictional genre.
I still don’t know exactly how I feel about this book, or even what its purpose is. But in the interest of reading and reviewing broadly, I want to share it with you. The narrator of the story is James Wolfe, the British General who won Quebec from the French in 1759 at the Plains of Abraham (a very famous battle in French Canadian history). But mysteriously, the first chapter is set on “September 2, 2017.”
I picked up this debut novel up because it was on The Skimm’s must-read list. I’m beginning to think that as much as I enjoy reading The Skimm each morning when I wake up, the editors’ taste in novels and mine may differ dramatically. (The Skimm editors are 30-somethings. Have I been kidding myself?) The book’s premise is intriguing.
I was hesitant to put this book in the “Not My Cup Of Tea” category because it was incredibly popular this year, and was picked as a top book of the year byThe Skimm, whose taste is usually quite similar to mine. Not to mention it was a wonderful Christmas gift from my thoughtful and talented mother and co-reviewer. But…
Moonwalking With Einstein is one of those books that I somehow never got around to reading when it came out in 2011 and I always felt like I should have read. You know, those books that everyone talks about and you feel like you’re missing out somehow because you didn’t read them? So here it is six years later and I finally read it. And…? I was disappointed.
I’m sure I picked this book up, bought it and then decided to read it because I loved The English Patient, Ondaatje’s breakout novel. When I love a book by an author, I often want to read others that s/he has written. But here’s something I’ve come to realize about books written prior to the author’s breakout book: they are often not nearly as good.
