Seattle Books

I visited Seattle for work last week and finished four books, pretty much all on airplanes, as is my wont.  Two for the ToB, one for the RHC, one for fun. Here they are:

The Extinction of Irena Rey (by Jennifer Croft) 

Read for the Tournament of Books, and probably my favorite so far apart from James in this somewhat underwhelming year so far.  It's got a sprinkling of Pale Fire (footnotes of an unreliable narrator who is allegedly translating a book written in Polish by a Spanish translator into English...) and Annihilation (gathering of semi-strangers in an uncanny landscape). This novel is about a group of translators who get together, kind of cult-like, to translate the magnum opus of a Polish author, who disappears, and things get weirder from there. It's one of those gems that the ToB helps me discover and it was a surreal read.

The (Big) Year That Flew By: Twelve Months, Six Continents, and the Ultimate Birding Record (by Arjan Dwarshuis)

Read for the RHC category of "a nonfiction book about nature or the environment." This is a Dutch birder who broke the global Big Year record and raised money for the Preventing Extinctions Program. His memoir is equally about birding and observations on conservation efforts (and the impact of climate change and deforestation) that he sees along the way.  I would have liked it to be more linear - he does a lot of flashbacks to his childhood that interrupt the narrative - but enjoyed it overall.

Colored Television (by Danzy Senna)

About a biracial author living in Los Angeles who gets drawn into the television industry.  I loved this until the halfway mark where the main character started making inexplicable decisions and I started getting annoyed because this is not how Hollywood works! I liked the unpredictability of the ending and my annoyance had ebbed by the end. Well written overall and would definitely read more by Senna.

The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy (by Elizabeth Kendall and Molly Kendall)

Whenever I drive by Lake Sammamish I think about Ted Bundy. I dipped back into The Stranger Beside Me and then followed some breadcrumbs to this memoir, which I didn't know had been rereleased and updated in 2020.  Kendall was Ted Bundy's girlfriend for many years and ended up going to the police no less than three times when she started to suspect his involvement in the murders.  Molly was her young daughter, to whom Bundy was a father figure. She first wrote the memoir at a time when she still talks about how part of her will always love him; she's traumatized and still healing.  The memoir is kept intact with a new afterword that talks about how she feels now, decades later. There's also a chapter from Molly that is unforgettably chilling and satisfyingly full of rage. Worth reading for true crime fans!