9/4/20 - Books!
Hi! Long time no newsletter. I hope you all have a luxurious long weekend stretching ahead of you. Last week I spent 3 days tucked away at a little farm in Annandale, kayaking, napping, looking at chickens, and reading. I read 4 full books and a bit of 2 others! So why don’t I tell you about them all, in order of my reading.
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
This book was short, kind of interesting, and extremely bleak. Tale as old as time, this girl’s dad is obsessed with ancient Britons and makes their family take a vacation against their will to join an academic historical reenactment troupe. It’s a slow, quiet book until things take a very sudden and dark turn with literally like 10 pages left. Let’s just say some people take the historical reenactment too far……!!!
Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison
This book was also short! I specifically checked out and packed very short books specifically so that I could breeze through a bunch. This one was a cute adventure. Just a real solid, classically Hobbit-y book about dragons and bears and Valkyries and mermaids and pirate ships. The beginning was the best, the middle was a smidge boring, and I don’t remember the end but I think I liked it. This would be a great bedtime story for like… a third grader? I don’t know how old kids are.
The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink
I read like 50 pages of this book and chose not to finish it. It flowed too quickly and not narratively enough, plus all the characters were just sort of bad.
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
I’m a real Knives Out head but I’ve never read a single Agatha Christie, so I figured I should! I’m sorry to say that this book was boring :( I’m used to Encyclopedia Brown style mysteries that encourage the reader to actively solve the crime while they read. Unforch our good friend Hercule Poirot would find clues all by himself and not tell us about them until his revealing soliloquies! I found myself getting angry when he was like “I knew it was not the Admiral, because his left ear turned red when I questioned him” and I was like excuse you HOW was I supposed to know that, I’m not with you on that snowed-in train!! Even though I trudged through most of this book, I do have to admit I was really delighted by the the plot twist reveal at the end. I won’t tell you who did it, but it’s good.
French Exit by Patrick deWitt
I really liked this one! One of my favorites that I’ve read in awhile! The plot and the characters and the writing are all silly and fun, but there’s also enough depth that nothing feels superficial or flippant. The mother/son relationship at the heart of it all reminded me a lot of Charlie Bartlett. The cast begins small and kooky and then grows larger and kookier! A good chunk of it takes place on a cruise ship! I try to seek out modern adult fiction that’s actually truly funny (not wry, or dry, or droll, or acerbic - all the words that book reviews use to mean “this is the closest thing to funny that fancy people will allow themselves to enjoy”) and it’s surprisingly hard! This one checked all my boxes - buoyant, heartfelt, easy to read. Don’t listen to Ace, he sounds insufferable.
Malice by Keigo Higashino
This also came up when I googled “books like Knives Out.” I only read about 20-30 pages before I had to leave, and as we all know you can only read books on vacation and not in your own home. It seemed like it was going to be an okay book with too many men in it, but I’ll never find out.
As a Rec for the Road, I’d like to share with you a collection of videos from a very specific genre that makes me laugh - if you know any others, please share them with me!
xoxo
Ali