When I recommended Jodi Picoult’s newest book to one of my book club’s for this month’s read, I felt sure that we would find an entertaining, not-too-taxing read in which believable people confront real problems and work to overcome them. That, in a tiny nutshell, is how I think of Picoult’s books. Don’t get me wrong: I read almost all of them. They can be a balm when all you want to read is a good, relatable human drama.
I want to begin this review by saying that this is an incredibly well-written book and it deserves much of the praise it has received. I’m certainly not claiming to know more than the Nobel committee or my mom and fellow reviewer who loved it (review here). That said, it was really not my cup of tea.
I was eagerly awaiting Courtney Sullivan’s new book Friends and Strangers for months before it came out. She’s one of my “go-to” authors: I just know that I’m going to love her new books because I’ve loved all of her past books. Only this time, she let me down. Friends and Strangers is perfectly readable. It just didn’t pull me in and keep me there like her past novels.
If judging a book by its blurb ever worked, this would seem like the perfect one for me. It’s a coming of age story about a young woman at a performing arts high school. She falls in and out of love with a classmate, with acting and with theatre education as a concept. But this book is boring and kind of dumb.
I very much wanted to like this book. Written by a Bates College alum; set on the campus of a small Maine college; compared repeatedly to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History; it had everything going for it. The story definitely drew me in. But the author’s choice to use two awkward literary devices detracted from the book enough that ultimately I was turned off.
This is the second book by Schiff that I was incredibly excited to read and ended up slogging through, counting pages until the end. Both books (the other is The Witches about the Salem witch trials) deal with topics that are among the most interesting in history, and yet these books are DULL.
Not only did theSkimm praise Three Women, but a friend had recommended it. In this non-fiction book, Taddeo explores desire in women. The book’s flap copy promises “the deepest nonfiction portrait of desire ever written.” Taddeo does in-depth studies of three different women – of different ages, backgrounds and regions of the US. I found the book read like pornography. Since finishing it, I keep thinking about why I had such a strong, negative reaction to it.
There are a handful of books that have been on my list to read since before I started noting who made the recommendation and this book is one of them. As a result I have no one to ask, “What the heck did you like about this book?!?” Set in a post-apocalyptic future where the ruling class uses some sort of musical chimes to control the memories and minds of the common people, the prose is dense and meandering with so much music terminology worked in I felt like I couldn’t understand at least 25% of what I was reading, and I consider myself to be fairly musically literate.
When B. A. Shapiro published The Art Forger in 2012, I loved it so much that I thought it was one of the best books of the year. Somehow, I missed her next book, The Muralist. But when I encountered The Collector’s Apprentice in a bookstore, I scooped it up and couldn’t wait to read it.
Mordechai Richler is a very famous Canadian author, and this is the first of his books that I have read. It is quite well-written, but just not a story I was very interested in. My biggest issue was the style of narrative which is first person, as though the narrator is writing his memoir.
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.
