Confident Women: Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Feminine Persuasion (by Tori Telfer)

Read this for the “nonviolent true crime book” category, although one of the stories does involve violence, I am still going to say it counts because it is only a small part of the book. 

This nonfiction book offers a series of short biographies of women con artists throughout history - like one who claimed to have nearly died on 9/11 and started a group for survivors, and the first women spiritualists, who scammed their way through high society. 

A fine and breezy read but ultimately very lightweight. One Goodreads review said it “lacks a central thesis” and I agree. Doesn’t delve into the historical and cultural forces at work very much, reads more as an excuse to tell some fun stories about colorful characters in history, and does that well.

Fireblooms (by Alexandra Villasante)

This was my Read Harder Choice for a YA book by a Latine author, although for some reason I kept bouncing off the title and the cover. (Turns out I definitely do judge books by their covers.)  But I am so glad I had the little nudge to read it because not only is it a great YA, it's also speculative fiction!

Both characters are Latine and Spanish is interwoven beautifully in the book in a completely organic way. You have enough context clues to understand, and at least a tiny bit of familiarity with Spanish helps, but it is done incredibly well.  It's a dual-perspective novel from two kids who live in a Tech Utopia/Dystopia type of town - one is there to help his mom, who was abusive and has cancer, and wants nothing to do with the surveillance state - the other is nonbinary and appreciates the Big Brother aspects of the Utopia/Dystopia to help save him from harm. 

One of the characters is nonbinary and it's a better example of a novel with a main character who uses they/them pronouns than the one I actually read for this category; it feels way more organic here for some reason and was very easy to adjust to. I think it's just really, really well written all around, and if you enjoy YA speculative fiction, deserves a read! 

Before the Coffee Gets Cold (by Toshikazu Kawaguchi)

The RHC category for this was "a work of magical realism or fabulism" - it's the first book in a popular Japanese series about a cafe where sitting in a particular seat can send you back or forward in time - for just long enough until the coffee gets cold.

This was made up of four vignettes of different people using the time travel seat, and the community within the cafe itself. 

I was curious as to why Goodreads average was so low and it was pointed out that the book is mainly about women who end up sacrificing themselves - over and over again. Really all four stories kind of qualify here.  (I looked it up and yes, the author is a man.)  I don't know if this continues for the rest of the series but it is a bit striking!) 

That said, I love Japanese literature anyway and its cozy vibes, even if it stressed me out how vague "before the coffee gets cold" is. (Only to find out they have an alarm they can use in special cases... just always use the alarm!)  If you've read beyond this first book, let me know if it's worth continuing! 

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? (by Roz Chast)

A graphic memoir by a New Yorker cartoonist about the final years of her aging parents. This was for the Read Harder Challenge category of "nonfiction comic" so I bought it on paper, which I prefer to trying to read a graphic novel on my phone. 

As a person with aging parents (who are getting increasingly frail) this was so relatable and honestly probably arrived at the right time in my life. It handles the topic with sensitivity and humor, and painted such a vivid picture of her parents, and that mix of frustration, guilt, avoidance, more guilt, and everything else that comes up towards the end of life. But again, it's not a depressing read either, it's just very real.

I know this is one I'll continue to think about in the coming years.  

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (by Emma Southon)

This cleverly titled book is by an historian who writes in an accessible style - including a lot of humor and pop-culture references - about the history of murder (and what was and was not seen as "murder," and the entire concept of "murder") in ancient Rome. 

I could have done with a bit less cutesy and a bit more academic rigor but I love a dense nonfiction read with lots of footnotes so that might just be a preference. As far as pop history goes, this really was very informative. Since this is a deep dive specifically about murder, I counted it as "a microhistory" for Read Harder Challenge purposes. 

And look, it's not Dungeon Crawler Carl! 

The Black Unicorn (by Audre Lorde)

This is a collection of poems by Audre Lorde, who was a librarian, thus fulfilling the "Read a book by a librarian" category of the RHC.

I respect Audre Lorde tremendously, and there are some moving poems here - in addition to strong themes of Black (and queer) womanhood, the African pantheon, and brutality against Black Americans. But on the whole, I have to say her work is more abstract than I prefer. I am a visual person, and I like poetry with more concrete imagery than is offered here.  

I feel the same way about Amanda Gorman, to be honest. Too much abstract, not enough concrete.  Sorry Audre and Amanda; it's not you, it's me.  

Dungeon Crawler Carl (The First Three) (by Matt Dinniman)

My friend group (with whom I play tabletop games and RPGs) has all been devouring this series and insisting that I need to read it because it is my type of humor and also Princess Donut (the cat) reminds everyone of me.  Now that I know how magical Princess Donut is, I take this as a profound compliment.

I was also told to read it as an audiobook since it has an amazing narrator, and that's what I did for the first one, which allowed me to check off the 2015 RHC category of "an audiobook" and thus "pick a challenge from any of the previous years’ challenges to repeat."  I didn't love the choice for Carl's voice and audio isn't fast enough for me, so I switched to downloading books in text format. It took me less than a day to read book two and about another day to read book three. I need to slow down.

As you might imagine, it is in fact propulsive and very entertaining. The humor is very juvenile and there's some problematic elements; you can definitely tell a guy wrote this. The way fat female bodies are repeatedly described as monstrous isn't amazing. But there is enough delightful worldbuilding, action, humor, and heart to keep me wanting to read on. Just be forewarned. 

Also it's pretty gory because there's a lot of monster-killing and creative murder. So be forewarned! But as you can tell, it's also very addictive. 

Much Ado About Nothing (by William Shakespeare)

The Read Harder Challenge is put on by Book Riot, and one of their categories this year is to read a book from their podcast, Zero to Well Read.  I've read quite a lot of them so I decided to read a play that I've of course seen adapted, but never read, Much Ado About Nothing.

(I learned that Nothing is a triple? quadruple? pun - in Elizabethan times it was pronounced "noting" so there are a lot of puns about noting things and musical notes, and it's also a reference to a woman's genitals since she has... "no thing." Oh, Shakesy, what a rascal you are.) 

I feel the comedies especially work better as performed. I kept pausing to go watch some of the Branagh adaptation or to look up what the hell Dogberry is talking about so I didn't miss any jokes. And as usual, I hate Claudio in this and love Beatrice and Benedick.  I mean what is there to say about Shakespeare? It's a classic comedy and reading it is never a waste of time. 

I think this also puts me officially as halfway through this year's challenge, a bit ahead of schedule.  

BFF Birthday Trip Books

I recently took a trip to Europe for my bestie's 50th birthday. If I hadn't come down with apocalyptic food poisoning, I might have read more books and taken fewer naps! But as it is, I finished four books, and here they are: 

Limelight (by by Andrew Keenan-Bolger)

Written by a Broadway performer about a kid from an abusive household in Staten Island going to a performing arts school in Manhattan. Really impressed me with its writing, since I didn't necessarily expect a Broadway-caliber performer to also be a terrific writer. This is set in 90s New York and has so much nostalgia - down to the kids waiting in line to see Rent at the Nederlander. You also really root for our main character and also appreciate the lack of the fairytale ending whereas still being hopeful and satisfying. Far above average queer YA and highly recommend.

My Cambodia: A Khmer Cookbook (by Nite Yun) 

I read this for the Read Harder category of "a cookbook about a culture whose food you’ve never eaten" - which is an increasingly difficult category, since I am fortunate enough to have tried a lot of different foods! But I learned a lot about Khmer culture and history from this book, and also appreciated that the author is a local chef whose restaurant I can visit! (She had a pop-up in the East Bay but is now located in the Ferry Building.)  There was enough personal reflection between the recipes that made this a good read, although I will never enjoy reading endless lists of "1 clove garlic, peeled.... 2 shallots.... salt... blah blah blah" that you have to read in order to "read a cookbook."  It seemed really good though, in that the instructions were detailed and extremely clear. 

According to Plan (by Christen Randall) 

Read this YA for the category of "a novel with a main character who uses they/them pronouns." I am a big proponent of the singular they but it can get grammatically confusing at points, so this is a good category to have.  I thought this book was more successful in some areas (found family, shitty parents, a well-written sibling relationship) than in others (the romance) but was overall a good YA. This book did commit a major sin, which is having our main character, an editor who loves grammar, use the "for Emerson and I" grammatical overcorrection in the text. Please don't do this to me, it hurts me. 

Austerlitz (by W. G. Sebald)

The New York Times released their "100 best books of the 21st century" a couple of years ago, and Ian and I had fun comparing notes. (I think I've read 38, and have loved many of them. There are some DNF's on there though and at least one - Detransition, Baby - that I hated.)   We also each chose a book that the other had not read, that we thought they should.  He chose Austerlitz (which was #8 on the list) for me and I chose The Great Believers (#64) for him.  

I went into this knowing nothing - I saved the introductory essay for the end - and was slowly wowed as this book unfolded itself to me.  Even knowing it was published in 2001, it feels like an older classic novel in its structure (the main character telling the narrator his life story) and its vocabulary (translated from German by Anthea Bell).  Also of course its setting - Austerlitz is growing up in post-war Europe and exploring his mysterious origins. Knowing he was taken in by a Welsh couple in 1939, his mysterious origins aren't hard to guess at, but the way it all unfolds, the way Sebald describes it, the restraint in the way he tells it... well, I understand why it made it to #8 on the NYT list.  If you have any other must-reads from the NYT list, let me know about them!

The Second Mark: Courage, Corruption, and the Battle for Olympic Gold (by Joy Goodwin)

Published in 2004, this book is about the pairs skating scandal at the 2002 Olympic games, and more specifically about three pairs - from Canada, Russia, and China - and their journey to the Olympic games.

I enjoy following figure skating and remember this year, and the book was an interesting read. I was hoping it would delve much further into the actual corruption - Goodwin seemed to just give up on digging particularly far, just reporting straightforwardly on the outcomes, after which the book ends. It's really more about the skaters themselves - growing up in communist China, the Soviet system, and the "free market" of Canada, and how different their paths were. 

I wasn't a particular fan of any of these skaters, but it definitely made me feel a lot of admiration for Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo, who had an extremely difficult path to become Olympic contenders. It also kind of reinforced that Salé and Pelletier were slightly annoying, which was also my impression at the time. The Russians won the short program, Canada's silver was not a huge injustice, and it came off like bad sportsmanship to me then, and still kind of does. 

Anyway, fun to dig back into all of this drama! And rewatch all the skating on YouTube, of course. 

A Midsummer Equation (by Keigo Higashino)

I do love Higashino, but this was my least favorite Higashino so far, mostly because of the solution to the murder, so I can't really say much without spoilers.  But it didn't quite work for me, even though I enjoyed the setting and the characters a lot.  If the murderer had been an adjacent person instead of the actual person, it would have worked much better.  And (spoiler) if the ending didn't hinge on me sympathizing with a murderer who didn't seem to have a good reason for murdering (end spoiler)

Any rate, this was for the RHC category of genre book in translation and you know I was going to use Japanese mystery for that! This brings me to 7 books read for the Read Harder Challenge, which puts me on better track than I was last year.  Woo! Something is going not horribly this year! 

The Stars, Too Fondly (by Emily Hamilton)

Read for the category "a book set in space" and I think I would have DNF'd it otherwise. An easy read - it reads like YA, which is a problem since allegedly the characters are all postdocs - but right from the get-go, it's ridiculous.

A group of four friends (which conveniently includes an Asian man, a nonbinary person, and a Black trans woman - very YA-coded) accidentally steal a spaceship that blasts them into another solar system. This ship w" as supposed to go into space years before and "something went wrong" with the "dark matter engine and the entire crew disappeared, and then everyone on earth decided to just leave the ship lying around and not investigate it at all.  Definitely how science and humanity works! 

Then our lead character falls in lesbian love with the AI avatar of the captain, they watch a lot of 90s movies (very YA coded), and work to try and get back to earth, in implausible fashion. Sacrifices are made that have no real stakes attached to them. None of this is grounded in anything, or feels real whatsoever. It's just a light, breezy, very young adult read. 

Non-Vacation Vacation Books

I almost took a trip to India for work and fun, but I didn't get my visa in time, so I did not go. But I still downloaded a bunch of books for the very long flight, and spent a full day reading as much as possible to still get the binge-reading travel experience I had been looking forward to. So here are the books that I would have read on my trip if I had been on the trip except I wasn't.

 Endling (by Maria Reva) 

This is in the Tournament of Books, and was spoken of highly in the Goodreads group. A metafictional novel about a woman who is trying to save various species of snails in Ukraine, before and during the Russian invasion. It took me a while to power through this for some reason, but it should be fun to talk about. 

Sorcery & Small Magics (by Maiga Doocy)

I read this for my most dreaded Read Harder Challenge category, romantasy with a queer main character. Obviously the queer part is fine but romance and fantasy are my two least favorite genres. But this ended up being so delightful - a slow burn romance between two sorcerers with an interesting magic system - and I need the second book immediately.  This is exactly why I love the RHC - because I would never have given this book a chance without it! 

The Ten-Year Affair (by Erin Somers)

Another Tournament book, and one I personally enjoyed more than Endling. (For true verisimilitude, this book expired while I was still reading it, so I finished the book in airplane mode.) It's about a married women and her married male friend and essentially plays with the idea of them having an affair in a parallel timeline.  I liked the writing style and the exploration of the grass being greener / the road not taken. It's not judgmental about its characters and not melodramatic - feels grounded and truthful.  Oh, and as a bonus, this was on a number of "best book covers" lists, so it's a RHC check also!

16 Forever (by Lance Rubin)

This is a time-loop YA about a kid who loops back to his 16th birthday every year - except he remembers nothing about the previous loops, and everyone around him does, including the girl he fell in love with last time around. Great premise! Uneven execution. I enjoyed the main characters' family dynamics but our main character just seemed annoying. I didn't understand why the love interest even liked him or why they were drawn to each other, and the ending is super abrupt and fell flat for me. 

When You Listen To This Song (Lola Lafon)

I believe this one was recommended by Ian via the New York Times - a memoir in French about a writer (whose family is Jewish) who spends a night in the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam.  It's contemplative, beautifully written, and beautifully translated by Lauren Elkin. The ending really packs a punch. I wrote down "a gem of a book." 

The Seven Dials Mystery (by Agatha Christie)

For the category "a book recently adapted for film, TV, or musical," I had quite a few choices - especially since I just watched both Heated Rivalry and the first part of Bridgerton season four.  But as far as book qua book, I figured I couldn't go wrong with Christie.

Our detective is an amateur detective named Bundle, aka Lady Eileen, who lives with her father in an Emma Woodhouse type of situation, except with a sports car. (After being very confused by the trailer, I am told she has a mother in the miniseries, played by Helena Bonham-Carter.)  

A group of friends at a country house plays a prank on a friend, who ends up dead.  Is it murder? The characters are delightful although I admit I wasn't sure how on earth Christie would surprise me... until I literally gasped at the end. That Agatha Christie, man. She knew what she was doing.  

Anyway, a very fun book and I look forward to the series!  

Breaking Free: How I Escaped Polygamy, the FLDS Cult, and My Father, Warren Jeffs (by Rachel Jeffs)

Trying to hit the ground running on the RHC, so I also finished this book for the category "a book about a cult." And wow. 

I can't believe Warren Jeffs is still alive and probably still perpetuating this horrible situation (he was giving directives from inside prison right up until Rachel Jeffs left). There's the multiple wives and child brides, yes, but also everyone in this "church" is being horribly abused.  Rachel Jeffs was molested by her father and she discusses that, and how it impacted her relationship with the church, but makes sure to state at the outset she's not a victim.

I'm happy she got out with her kids and seems to be living her best life.  I hope that is the outcome for every person, especially girls and women, trapped in this cult.  

Heroines, Rescuers, Rabbis, Spies: Unsung Women of the Holocaust (by Sarah Silberstein Swartz)

I chose this as my first Read Harder book of the year, for the category "a nonfiction book about resistance."  

It is a profile of ten different women, including the first female rabbi (who died in Auschwitz and was forgotten for many years) and others who survived the war.  Some of the subjects are more interesting than others - it turns out that among the nine women are the author's mother and aunt as well as a friend of their family.  I'm sure the author's passion for their stories is what led to this book but it does feel a bit self-indulgent and maybe not quite as compelling as some of the other stories.

Still, it was worth reading and I'm glad Swartz highlights the bravery and resistance of these women via this book.