Summer's in full swing - we'll see what that does to my reading habits! This year, I've been trying to focus on getting through books that have been in my to-read pile for far too long. I decided that I'm going to include where I obtained each book from in my reviews through the summer just for funsies.
Wonder - R. J. Palacio (2012)
From: Local Library (Hold List)
"I wish every day could be Halloween. We could all wear masks all the time. Then we could walk around and get to know each other before we got to see what we looked like under the masks."
This is a Y.A.book, so my thoughts on it will be colored by that. I liked the different first-person perspectives given throughout the book - I felt this made the book more compelling than it would've been to just focus on one character. My general overall thought is that Wonder a powerful and illuminating book for kids, especially, who are still grappling with many of the life difficulties portrayed. And (given the Y.A. nature of the book) although it deals with some difficult subjects, the story is positive overall.
Related Reads:
The Sun is Also a Star (Yoon)
We Were Eight Years in Power - Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)
From: Local Library (Hold List)
"In such revisions of history lay the roots of the noble Lost Cause - the belief that the South didn’t lose, so much as it was simply overwhelmed by superior numbers; that General Robert E. Lee was a contemporary King Arthur; that slavery, to be sure a benevolent institution, was never central to the South’s true designs. Historical lies aside, the Lost Cause presented to the North an attractive compromise. Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the country’s blacks.
That interpretation served the North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North’s long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the Constitution itself."
I had a hard time picking out just one quote from this book. This is a collection of essays written by the author during the years of the Obama presidency (previously published by The Atlantic). Coates gives an introduction to each of his eight essays, putting them into the context of the time he wrote them and evaluating how he thinks they held up, and concludes with a final essay. In a nutshell, this collection gives some necessary historical context to many past and present issues, and it's definitely recommended reading.
Related Reads:
Between the World and Me (Coates)
Commonwealth - Ann Patchett (2016)
From: One of the Little Free Libraries in La Jolla a few months ago
"'There’s no protecting anyone,' Fix said, and reached over from his wheelchair to put his hand on hers. 'Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.'"
This isn't the sort of book I usually tend to read, and it probably would rate higher in my mind if I read more of this genre. The story deals with a lot of serious and common issues, such as divorce, infidelity, death, and grief. Some of it also takes place in the area I grew up in, which was a nice little surprise.
On the whole, although I generally liked the read, Commonwealth left me feeling like something was wanting by the end, and I'm not sure if it's because it was good and I was left wanting more, or if it was more because it just wasn't fleshed out enough. I also had a little bit of trouble keeping all the characters in the families straight, but I'm inclined to chalk that up to a personal failing rather than a problem with the book itself.
Related Reads:
The Husband's Secret (Moriarty)
The Little Friend (Tartt)
A Clergyman's Daughter - George Orwell (1935)
From: Bought at D.G. Wills Bookstore in La Jolla last year
"Dorothy pulled a frond of the fennel against her face and breathed in the strong sweet scent. Its richness overwhelmed her, almost dizzied her for a moment. She drank it in, filling her lungs with it. Lovely, lovely scent - scent of summer days, scent of childhood joys, scent of spice-drenched islands in the warm foam of oriental seas!
Her heart swelled with sudden joy. It was that mystical joy in the beauty of the earth and the very nature of things that she recognized, perhaps mistakenly, as the love of God."
If you've read other books by Orwell, you can see this as a continuation of him drawing from his personal experiences of "living rough" on the streets in London and the surrounding countryside. This book a fascinating, bleakly realistic window into the time period and setting, and Orwell takes the opportunity to probe into several contemporary social issues (schooling, religious community, women's place in society).
Quick content notes: The main character engages in self-harm throughout the book as a form of religious penance. And although most curse words are censored out with a dash (as was common for literature at the time), there are a couple of racial pejoratives that are freely used - in one case, as a nickname for a character.
Related Reads:
Down and Out in Paris and London (Orwell)
A Little Princess (Burnett)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Hardy)
Wild Beauty - Anna-Marie McLemore (2017)
From: When I trialed a month of OwlCrate in October 2017
"These memories took root, turning into rows of uncountable trees. They became the orchard Fel had once run through. They bloomed into almond and cherry blossoms, fluffy as the cotton candy Estrella had set in his palms. They splintered into the thin leaves of olive trees."
I have to describe the prose here as flowery - very flowery. I didn't necessarily dislike the style, but it felt like a lot of the same after a short while, and the story itself is fairly slow-moving. At times, it seemed like a lot of flowery language covering up little substance. But anyone who has a love of flora will certainly appreciate the sensory experience of the descriptions here.
Some positives of Wild Beauty are its relative uniqueness (compared to my usual reads) of having the majority of main characters being LGBT+ and the book focusing heavily on Latinx characters and culture. I also enjoyed the fairytale-esque setting, although I was somewhat annoyed that I couldn't place what the time period was supposed to be.
Related Reads:
A Court of Thorns and Roses (Maas)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez)
Wonder - R. J. Palacio (2012)
From: Local Library (Hold List)
"I wish every day could be Halloween. We could all wear masks all the time. Then we could walk around and get to know each other before we got to see what we looked like under the masks."
This is a Y.A.book, so my thoughts on it will be colored by that. I liked the different first-person perspectives given throughout the book - I felt this made the book more compelling than it would've been to just focus on one character. My general overall thought is that Wonder a powerful and illuminating book for kids, especially, who are still grappling with many of the life difficulties portrayed. And (given the Y.A. nature of the book) although it deals with some difficult subjects, the story is positive overall.
Related Reads:
The Sun is Also a Star (Yoon)
We Were Eight Years in Power - Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)
From: Local Library (Hold List)
"In such revisions of history lay the roots of the noble Lost Cause - the belief that the South didn’t lose, so much as it was simply overwhelmed by superior numbers; that General Robert E. Lee was a contemporary King Arthur; that slavery, to be sure a benevolent institution, was never central to the South’s true designs. Historical lies aside, the Lost Cause presented to the North an attractive compromise. Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the country’s blacks.
That interpretation served the North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North’s long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the Constitution itself."
I had a hard time picking out just one quote from this book. This is a collection of essays written by the author during the years of the Obama presidency (previously published by The Atlantic). Coates gives an introduction to each of his eight essays, putting them into the context of the time he wrote them and evaluating how he thinks they held up, and concludes with a final essay. In a nutshell, this collection gives some necessary historical context to many past and present issues, and it's definitely recommended reading.
Related Reads:
Between the World and Me (Coates)
Commonwealth - Ann Patchett (2016)
From: One of the Little Free Libraries in La Jolla a few months ago
"'There’s no protecting anyone,' Fix said, and reached over from his wheelchair to put his hand on hers. 'Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.'"
This isn't the sort of book I usually tend to read, and it probably would rate higher in my mind if I read more of this genre. The story deals with a lot of serious and common issues, such as divorce, infidelity, death, and grief. Some of it also takes place in the area I grew up in, which was a nice little surprise.
On the whole, although I generally liked the read, Commonwealth left me feeling like something was wanting by the end, and I'm not sure if it's because it was good and I was left wanting more, or if it was more because it just wasn't fleshed out enough. I also had a little bit of trouble keeping all the characters in the families straight, but I'm inclined to chalk that up to a personal failing rather than a problem with the book itself.
Related Reads:
The Husband's Secret (Moriarty)
The Little Friend (Tartt)
A Clergyman's Daughter - George Orwell (1935)
From: Bought at D.G. Wills Bookstore in La Jolla last year
"Dorothy pulled a frond of the fennel against her face and breathed in the strong sweet scent. Its richness overwhelmed her, almost dizzied her for a moment. She drank it in, filling her lungs with it. Lovely, lovely scent - scent of summer days, scent of childhood joys, scent of spice-drenched islands in the warm foam of oriental seas!
Her heart swelled with sudden joy. It was that mystical joy in the beauty of the earth and the very nature of things that she recognized, perhaps mistakenly, as the love of God."
If you've read other books by Orwell, you can see this as a continuation of him drawing from his personal experiences of "living rough" on the streets in London and the surrounding countryside. This book a fascinating, bleakly realistic window into the time period and setting, and Orwell takes the opportunity to probe into several contemporary social issues (schooling, religious community, women's place in society).
Quick content notes: The main character engages in self-harm throughout the book as a form of religious penance. And although most curse words are censored out with a dash (as was common for literature at the time), there are a couple of racial pejoratives that are freely used - in one case, as a nickname for a character.
Related Reads:
Down and Out in Paris and London (Orwell)
A Little Princess (Burnett)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Hardy)
Wild Beauty - Anna-Marie McLemore (2017)
From: When I trialed a month of OwlCrate in October 2017
"These memories took root, turning into rows of uncountable trees. They became the orchard Fel had once run through. They bloomed into almond and cherry blossoms, fluffy as the cotton candy Estrella had set in his palms. They splintered into the thin leaves of olive trees."
I have to describe the prose here as flowery - very flowery. I didn't necessarily dislike the style, but it felt like a lot of the same after a short while, and the story itself is fairly slow-moving. At times, it seemed like a lot of flowery language covering up little substance. But anyone who has a love of flora will certainly appreciate the sensory experience of the descriptions here.
Some positives of Wild Beauty are its relative uniqueness (compared to my usual reads) of having the majority of main characters being LGBT+ and the book focusing heavily on Latinx characters and culture. I also enjoyed the fairytale-esque setting, although I was somewhat annoyed that I couldn't place what the time period was supposed to be.
Related Reads:
A Court of Thorns and Roses (Maas)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez)
