Grief in the Fourth Dimension (by Jennifer Yu)

I picked this one up after my frantic Tournament of Books reading (I ended up reading 14 of the 18 books this year) since it has been lingering in my backlog and I enjoy young adult and speculative fiction. (Oh, you don't say...)

Two high school students die and are reborn into a mysterious room where they can view - and attempt to communicate with - their loved ones back on earth.  Definitely interesting enough to finish, although it didn't make me cry despite being about literal death so clearly there was something missing for me. I feel like maybe I didn't get to know the characters enough or didn't like them enough. (There are also some editing mistakes that pulled me out of it - one character is named Iris, but is referred to as "Alice" multiple times, for example.)

Not a must-read but also an interesting premise and not a DNF.  (And I picked up two more YAs this week that I quickly DNF'd so that's not totally hollow praise!)

Birthday Retreat Books

I spent a week taking the sea air on the Mendocino coast, and while there, finished four books!

The Making of Pride & Prejudice (by Sue Birtwistle & Susie Conklin)  

This was a gift from a few years ago and part of my quest to read through some of my physical books this year. The photos are a bit blurry and I would have enjoyed clearer photos, more interviews with the cast, basically a book ten times the size of this relatively slim volume. It definitely made me appreciate a lot of nuances that went into making the miniseries (this is about the BBC miniseries with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth), from custom-printing fabrics on muslin to hiding lighting equipment with foliage in a ballroom. A must-read for 1995 devotees, but you'll definitely wish it were longer!

Headshot (by Rita Bullwinkel)  

Tournament of Books selection and I'm gonna be honest, I hated it. The repetitive style (which is I'm sure deliberate, because this is about boxing and it makes you feel like being punched with names repeated over and over and over again...) drove me mad. I enjoyed the flash forwards but they added up to nothing I was wholly uninterested in the winner, as the only characters I really enjoyed weren't in the final. I also hate boxing. I also found it implausible that none of the 8 girls were explicitly non-white, and race wasn't even mentioned. So either they were all white, or race never impacted their lives. Did not work for me. 

The Wedding People (by Alison Espach) 

Also in the ToB, but it was very "beach read" with romcom vibes and a predictable plot. That said, I immediately loved our main character Phoebe (who shows up at a hotel that has been rented out for a wedding, and gets drawn into the lives of the wedding people) and the fun cast of characters. I could see where this was going a mile off but I stayed up late to finish it anyway because it was delightful. Will make a perfect movie.  

Mansfield Park (by Jane Austen) 

I can't remember the last time I read Mansfield Park from cover to cover, so I'll include it here! It's been decades, probably. I enjoyed it so much this time around - I'm very familiar with the 1999 film and it actually takes fewer liberties than I thought it did! (The scene of Mary undressing Fanny in the rain, for one.) Jane Austen is always a joy.

The History of Sound (by Ben Shattuck)

This was one of those great Tournament of Books surprises! I am not typically a short story fan so I never would have given this a shot otherwise. But this book is an absolute gem. Just a series of perfect short stories that are linked together - the first is connected to the last, and then there are pairings in between, spanning centuries at times, but always located in (what is now known as) New England. 

The Tournament has been hit or miss but with Irena Ray and now History of Sound, my faith is renewed.  (Today's judgment is also delightful; it busted my bracket but I couldn't agree with it more.)  

They've turned the first and final stories into a movie starring Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal, and I already know I'm unprepared. If you have seen All of Us Strangers you'll have a slight idea what you're in for, and not just because Paul Mescal is in that one too. 

Anyway, that's beside the point. These stories are amazing! And you should read this collection. The end.

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! 

Great Expectations (by Vinson Cunningham)

Vinson Cunningham worked as a staffer on the Obama campaign; the main character of this novel, David, is a young Black man working on the campaign of an unnamed politician who is obviously Obama. It melds fact and fiction into a story that actually maps in a few subtle ways onto Great Expectations, if you squint a bit.

I feel like I'm going through this year's ToB not really loving anything except, so far, James.  This is a fine read, and Vinson's prose is outstanding, but a little episodic and philosophical, lacking drama or plot, and not particularly compelling. I felt like I'd rather read Cunningham's memoir about his real experience vs. a thinly fictionalized version. 

The Book-Censor’s Library (by Buthaina Al Eissa)

A Tournament of Books entry from a Kuwaiti author, translated from Arabic. It's a pastiche of (and explicit homage to) dystopian novels like Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 as well as Alice in Wonderland and Zorba the Greek. A Book-Censor starts to read forbidden books, and is drawn into an underground (see: Alice) world of illicit literature.

The plot goes a bit off the rails at the end - I did enjoy the metatexual ending a lot as well as the inversion of Orwell, so maybe I'm just holding the daughter's fate (which made me sad) against the author here. Still, it's going up against James in the first round, and although underdogs win in the ToB all the time, my personal vote would go to James. 

Martyr! (by Kaveh Akbar)

A book from the Tournament of Books that also qualifies for the RHC under the category of "a book about immigration or refugees."  Cyrus's family is Persian; his mother was killed when an Iranian passenger flight was shot down by the United States, and he and his father relocated to Indiana. 

It's told in vignettes (for example, Cyrus pairs up people and listens to their conversations in dreams, so there is an interlude of his father talking to Rumi, or his brother talking to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar); there are multiple points of view in addition to Cyrus's, like his best friend or his mother or a dying artist he befriends. Cyrus wants his death to mean something; he longs for martyrdom and is writing a book about it.

I'm not a huge short story reader because the context changes so often; I felt the same in the first part of this novel, where the POV kept shifting and I had to regain a toe hold on the material.  It comes together in the back half though, where the throughline of the novel becomes clear.  It's interesting how many of these ToB novels are from the perspective of, frankly, whiny men. Cyrus is like George from Book of George is like John from Liars - but he's the best of the three and I enjoyed where the narrative takes him. 

I loved this less than many ToB fans did, who raved about it in the Goodreads group, but I did enjoy it and it has lovely passages and moments. The Persian-American perspective was especially good. Overall, I liked it. Four stars.

The Book of George (by Kate Greathead)

Like Liars, another Tournament book about an annoying man-child. However, because he's aware of it and often quite self-loathing, it was more entertaining than rage-inducing. Sometimes hilariously funny, in fact.  And people call out George directly all through the novel, which is satisfying. 

The blurb describes it as a "razor-sharp but big-hearted excavation of millennial masculinity" and I agree that it's big-hearted. The reader does feel for George, even as he bumbles through his life making terrible decisions, losing his temper, and being an awful boyfriend to his long-term partner Jenny.   

I also enjoyed the format, which is vignettes from George's life that each generally skip ahead about a year each time.  Overall, as you can probably tell, I liked it a lot!

Beautyland (by Marie-Helene Bertino)

I may be a little tired of coming of age novels (which is unfortunate since I think at least two more Tournament books are coming of age novels) but Beautyland is in the tournament and was highly regarded and my library had it so, here we all are.

The premise is that our main character, Adina, is a Generation X alien sent to learn about earth culture, and she transmits messages back and forth to her superiors via fax machine.  It's not quite other-y enough for me, but the writing is beautiful and the ending is just exquisitely sad.  Whether or not Adina is an actual alien (and I think the ending of the book makes that clear), I enjoyed her meditations on her human life and relationships. 

Will be an interesting tournament discussion. It's up against Great Expectations in the brackets, which I hope to get to soon. Oh, and total sidebar, Adina sings "Simeon the Whale" instead of "Send me on my way" and I thought that was just me! It's been Simeon the Whale for years! I was delighted.

Anaheim Reads

Spent last week traveling for work again and finished three books, so here's a summary!

Make My Wish Come True (by Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick) 

I waited until December to read this, a sapphic romcom in two alternating points of view by the authors of She Gets the Girl, which I really enjoyed. Like this one, more new adult than young adult vibe.  This is a classic Hallmark movie vibe - city girl who has made it big in Los Angeles comes back to the small town and has a fake relationship with the girl she left behind. Charming characters, delightful writing, excellent chemistry - very cute.

Liars (by by Sarah Manguso) 

A Tournament of Books entry abut an extremely toxic marriage. I had to read this in what I called "rage-snippets" because it's about a man who is such a classic tool of the patriarchy (and the woman who stays with him) that I found it enraging to read.  I gather it's somewhat autobiographical, which is why this man has no redeeming qualities, but watching a woman throw away years and have a baby with a man who is awful in every way doesn't make for a fun read.  Anyway, I snippeted my way towards the end. The patriarchy is garbage.

The Last Love Song (by Kalie Holford) 

Another young adult (see, I needed a palate cleanser after my rage-snippets) and it requires a whole lot of suspension of disbelief.  The main character is from a small town, her mother was a famous country star who died young, and she gets sent on a scavenger hunt around the town (by her deceased mom) at her graduation day.  Why wouldn't her grandparents ever even mention how her mother died? (It's not even some dramatic reason.) If her mom's so famous, why wouldn't she just check Wikipedia? The town is dedicated to her mom yet nobody who knew her as a person has ever had a single conversation with her only child? And the fight that gets in the way of the romance at 80% just makes the love interest look like an asshole. (Yes, Mia isn't very brave or bold. But you allegedly are in love with her and she clearly never has been. Also Mia is so emotional about her dead mother's letter she has literally just vomited. And this is the time to have a fight and break up? It's too contrived to believe that anyone would actually behave this way.)  Anyway, I liked the song lyrics and I liked the characters, I just needed a bit more believability.

Service Model (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)

Justice for Annie Bot! This was a fun read (also about a sentient - or is he? - robot) but not nearly as thought provoking as Annie Bot. But this is the one that made the Longlist so here we are. And it was good, just not as good, to me.

Even so, I already had this checked out because I was interested in it beforehand. It's about a robot valet who murders his master (for a reason unknown even to him) and goes on a journey of self-discovery as a result. I particularly enjoyed the ways in which each part was a homage to a classic author - to copy the cheat sheet from Goodreads: Part I KR15-T: Agatha Christie, Part II K4fk-R: Franz Kafka, Part III 4w-L: George Orwell, Part IV 80rh-5: Jorge Luis Borges, Part V D4nt-A: Dante Alighieri). 

The Christie and Kafka sections were my favorites but the whole thing is very well done. Our protagonist, Charles (or Uncharles) is a naive narrator and he encounters his Virgil, a fellow robot (or is she?) named The Wonk.  If you're interested in speculative fiction and you wish Ishiguro had written a combination of Klara and the Sun and The Remains of the Day, this is the novel for you!

Orbital (by Samantha Harvey)

This novella won the Booker Prize this year, and is basically a short meditation on earth from the perspective of six astronauts and cosmonauts on a space station.

I tend to zone out on descriptions of scenery, as you may remember, and this is basically all descriptions of scenery. (Yes there are characters, there is slight tension about a typhoon in the Philippines, but basically it's just descriptions of scenery.)  True, the scenery is the entire earth and it's being viewed from space so it's at least more interesting than average! Still, I found this boring. 

I chose this one off the longlist first because it won the Booker and because it was short but I actually took a break and read a second book in the middle of it because IT IS BORING.  I'm sure there are people who loved the prose and the perspective of Humanity in the Vastness of Space and the Care we should Have for our Planet, Mother Earth and blah blah.  But I'd rather watch a video taken from the space station and meditate on it all myself.

The Husbands (by Holly Gramazio)

It's here! It's here! The Tournament of Books longlist is out.  I've only read two books on it - Margo's Got Money Troubles and James.  But I did have a handful of books on hold and even a few checked out already, so I started with the ones that were almost about to expire.

The Husbands is a fun read about a woman whose attic magically produces a series of husbands, parallel universe style, and our main character sees how her life changes depending on who she's married to.  It doesn't feel particularly like literary fiction, or particularly worth deep discussion, but as a book, I really enjoyed it! Fun and entertaining, and unlike some of the Goodreads contingent, I thought the ending was interesting.

I'm bad at predicting what's going to make the shortlist but I will say I'm shocked The Husbands made the longlist but Annie Bot, which has a lot more depth, did not.  Again, its not bad, it's very entertaining! But more lightweight than I have come to expect from ToB.  Still, glad for the nudge to read it. 

On to the next one!

Alaska Books

I spent a week in a cabin in Alaska; due to weather and flight delays, I also spent a whole lot of time holed up in the cabin and in airports and on planes. As a result, I finished a whopping nine books, so this might be a long post! This covers many of my favorite genres: litfic, young adult, speculative fiction, and Japanese mystery.

Asking for a Friend (by Kara H. L. Chen)

Cute YA about Taiwanese-American kids with complicated families who enter a business competition. In fact, the first of two books on this list about second-generation Asian kids! I enjoyed the depiction of Taiwanese culture and as a second-generation kid of immigrants (though not Asian immigrants) a lot of relatability in this one. Cute but not amazing.

Inspector Imanishi Investigates (by Seicho Matsumoto) 

I believe this was a new author for me that I got from a recommendation on Reddit.  Slow-paced, lots of minutia which I normally love, but but not enough balance in the other direction, and not enough excitement in the mystery. It's like "here is every detail about a very slow paced investigation, and the killer is the exact person you most medium suspect, and you'll discover that very slowly." Not a must.

True Love and Other Impossible Odds (by Christina Li) 

This was the one that made me cry.  It has lot in common with the first book on this list, as it also deals with the pressure of being the child of Asian immigrants. Bu it's a little more mature (the characters are college freshman), the romance is a Sapphic one (always a plus), and in general it was more affecting (I cried). Of all the YA books (or early adult in this case) on this list, this was by far my favorite.

James (by Percival Everett) 

I've been meaning to read this one since the summer, as it was selected for Camp ToB and is by one of my favorite authors. It's a high concept novel (a loose retelling of Huck Finn from Jim's perspective) and it's by Percival Everett, so of course it's a masterpiece. This will definitely make my end of year best books list and probably be in the 2025 tournament.  It's wonderful.

In the Orbit of You (by Ashley Schumacher) 

Another YA, with good chemistry and a nicely complex love story but an unsatisfying ending that didn't quite ring true. As an aside, I knew the Goodreads crowd would dislike this one because they get very mad when anyone is emotionally (or god forbid physically) cheating in a YA novel, but I cannot be the only teenager with the messiest love life. (A sample of my high school days: I cheated on my first boyfriend by kissing a hot guitar player at a party, he responded by bringing me flowers and forgiving me, which didn't make sense until I catfished him for fun only to discover he'd been having sex with his male best friend for years. We stayed together until I successfully convinced him he was gay. We've been best friends for over 30 years. That's high school for you!)  

Margo Has Money Troubles (by Rufi Thorpe)

I decided based on reading her ToB judgment last year that I had to read something by Rufi Thorpe and indeed, this novel is exactly as smart, fresh, quirky and funny as I expected. 

The Half-Life of Love (by Brianna Bourne) 

This was both speculative fiction and YA; the concept is that you get a twinge when your life is halfway over.  A lot of suspension of disbelief was required because they are scientifically investigating it as if it's some chemical thing but also apparently you're immortal before this happens? Like, what happens if you blow your brains out with a pistol? But it's a love story between a researcher who lost her baby sister and a teenage boy who's about to die.  I didn't love how the ending played out (not in terms of what happens, but in terms of how Finch doesn't get agency over his planned death) but it was an interesting high concept, and I liked September as a character and just generally pondering how we live our lives and what's important. Also I was on a bucket list trip (to see the Northern Lights) so led to some interesting contemplation about the purposes of a bucket list and why this trip was important to me.

True Letters from a Fictional Life (by Kenneth Logan)

I wasn't sure if the characters fell flat for me because I was tired from travel at this point, but my thoughts were echoed on Goodreads and the more I thought about it, the more flat it fell. It's about a sporty kid who's figuring out he's gay but I had a lot of problems with it: there's a lot of homophobic and transphobic stuff that is never challenged or addressed. It doesn't feel like in 21st century Vermont of all places there would be this many people using the f-slur, punching gay kids, assuming gay people are pedophiles, or panicking about gay people getting AIDS. Like the widespread regressive attitudes don't ring true. The romance is absolutely tepid. And I couldn't really visualize any of the characters so they all fell flat. A big miss for me.

Salvation of a Saint (by by Keigo Higashino) 

Last but not least, from the author of The Devotion of Suspect X, another Howdunit.  There was one part of the Howdunit that I figured out very early on; the other part was ingenious and I didn't. I loved the character of the female junior detective.  I loved the entire plotline and the unraveling of the mystery. Goes into my top tier of Japanese mysteries for sure, and a great note to end my vacation reading marathon on!