Wandering Stars is Tommy Orange’s second novel and a sequel of sorts to There There. I’ve been sitting on this book since last fall because I knew it was going to be a difficult read, and yes, it is difficult to read because it is sad and tragic, but Orange’s writing is so devastating beautiful that it helped propel me through the book.
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An Awfully Big Adventure was originally published in 1989 and is set in Liverpool in 1950. Beryl Bainbridge was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for this novel, and was nominated four other times, but never won. I bought An Awfully Big Adventure from Daunt Books in Marylebone, London on my recent trip to the UK. I bought this novel because it is supposed to be a “darkly comic novel” about a theatre company, but I do not find anything comic about An Awfully Big Adventure because all the characters in the novel are pathetic.
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I feel like mystery thrillers these days are all about the shock factor rather than crafting a good mystery story that makes sense. Tiffany Crum’s This Story Might Save Your Life is no exception. Did I devour this book to find out what happens at the end? Of course I did. I am like a cat; curiosity got the better of me. Did I mostly dislike this book while I was reading it? Also, of course I did. I have really got to stop reading overly hyped mystery novels.
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I bought The Blood of Others during my trip to Paris last year from the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. It felt appropriate to buy a book written by a French author, and I choose The Blood of Others because it is about fascism in Europe before and during WWII, which feels like a timely topic given the current global political climate.
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If you like novels with a protagonist who is a narcissistic, mean, pseudo-Christian tradwife Instagram influencer, then Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear is for you. And even if that does not sound like your cup of tea, I think you should still read this book because it will suck you in and you won’t want to escape it until you have finished the last page, even with its absolutely terrible main character.
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There are two reasons why I bought Japanese Gothic: 1. The word “Gothic” in the title. 2. It is a dual timeline story supposedly involving a ghost. Japanese Gothic is an unexpected read. I think I like it, but it’s hard to tell with the melancholy I feel every time I think about it.
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My husband and I spent two weeks in the UK recently, and we spent a lot of time on planes and trains, so I had a lot of time for reading.
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Heather Marshall’s Liberty Street is one of those dual timeline historical fiction novels that I love. It also taught me something about my own country’s dark history in its treatment of women. Not really a win, but it is still interesting.
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Tall Oaks is Chris Whitaker’s debut novel. It is interesting to observe his progression as a writer from this novel to We Begin at the End and All the Colors of the Dark, but I don’t find Tall Oaks to be a particularly good novel.
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Iain Reid is the author of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which I have not read, but I did watch the movie adaptation by Charlie Kaufman, which was surreal and confusing, even if I was able to parse together what was going on by the end. I let the movie put me off from reading the book, and I almost did not read Foe either, but I am glad I did because I got a kick out of the ending (Foe has also been made into a movie, as you can see by Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal being on the cover of the book, but I haven’t watched it and I am glad I read the book first).
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