I am generally a Kristin Hannah fan: I loved The Nightingale and The Great Alone. But she missed the mark with The Four Winds. In the book, Hannah tells the story of Elsa Wolcott, an unloved, unattractive, aging young woman forced to marry a man she hardly knows to legitimize the baby they’d unwittingly conceived.
John Irving is an incredible writer—I don’t think many readers would debate that fact. However, I found In One Person failed to hold my attention like his other novels. As in many of Irving’s books, In One Person paints an intimate portrait of a man—this time a young man exploring his bisexual “crushes” at an all-male boarding school in Vermont in the early 60s.
I never know when I feel disappointed after reading a book like The Other Black Girl if that comes from having heard so much about the book before reading it. There had been so much hype. I really wanted to read it. Did I have unrealistic expectations? To be clear: there were many aspects of the novel that I admired.
A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara’s breakout novel published in 2015, was a masterpiece – one of the best novels I’ve read in the last few years. For that reason, I suggested that my husband and I read The People in The Trees, Yanagihara’s earlier book, as our read-aloud selection. At 467 pages, it was an undertaking, one which turned out to take grit and determination to finish.
I wasn’t sure if The Illuminations was going to be my Not My Cup Of Tea this month because I didn’t actively dislike it. It was fine. But honestly, if we are going to spend our energy telling you what you should read, then I figured I could take a paragraph and tell you that this is one to skip!
One of the joys of reading a good book by an author new to me, is going back and reading previous books by that author. Not long ago I read The River by Peter Heller (reviewed in January 21, 2021 L&L) and loved everything about the book: the poetic writing style, the vivid descriptions of nature, the relationship between the book’s main characters.
Here I Am is set in present day D.C. and mainly follows the disintegration of a marriage over the course of several months. In the process, old wounds resurface and bad decisions are re-lived. The couple’s three sons deal with the rift in their own ways, but with no one addressing the real issues, the fractures go deeper and deeper.
I am certain that one of the several reasons that I was disappointed in Pachinko is because my expectations were so high. Friends who are avid readers, book store salespeople and random people who saw me holding the book in pubic all assured me how much I would enjoy it.
Although this book predates Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by six years, I read it second and it suffered mightily in comparison. Both books are about young-ish women living in London, working in fairly dead-end jobs, and isolated from a normal social life by a past trauma and psychological difficulties.
Humor is a funny thing. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist that.) Either I find someone funny or I don’t. Alas, I have discovered that I don’t find Bill Bryson particularly funny. To read an entire collection of essays, which Bryson has pulled together and called a memoir, had me grinding my teeth by the book’s end.
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.
