Vacation Reads: Truckee Edition

Spent the long weekend in the snow, giving me lots of time to read books! I'm about halfway through a giant one, but in the meantime, I finished some others:

Looker (by Laura Sims)

Absolutely loved it. This was marketed as a Gone Girl-style thriller but it’s not that. Instead, it’s a character study about a woman sinking into obsession with her actress neighbor. The protagonist is an unreliable narrator (my favorite, always) who reminded me of none other than Charles Kinbote, King of Zembla. The author isn't afraid to go dark and I loved the ending. Top book of the year so far!

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (by Chen Chen)

Such a great poetry collection, read for the Read Harder Challenge, by a gay Chinese man who writes about his identity, among other things. Here's a snippet I highlighted:

I’m envious of the clouds who can from time to time fall completely apart
& everyone just says, It's raining,
& someone might even bring cats & dogs into it,

no one says, Stop being so dramatic or You should see
a professional. 

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (by J.K. Rowling) 

I'm not into watching Johnny Depp do his weird Grindelwald thing, so I read the screenplay instead. Obviously a fast read, ended on a cliffhanger. The "fantastic beasts" part feels like such an afterthought to the overarching plot. Mostly I wish these were novels instead of movies and screenplays! 

Maid (by Stephanie Land) 

A compelling memoir about a single mother in poverty, albeit problematic in terms of white privilege. (She barely acknowledges it.)  Overall I feel like I would like a memoir of poverty from a woman of color, but given the world of blogs, it would be much harder for this hypothetical other woman to start a blog, and land a book deal. At any rate, Land's observations about the cycle of poverty and abuse make this worth a read regardless.