A repository of the books I'd like to give my thoughts on that are read through the book club I'm part of at work.
My rating scale is as follows:
edited by Miriam Lichtheim, 1975/1976/1980
read in advance for the May 15th book club meeting, finished ---/---/---
The theme for the May meeting was a book set in a non-US country, so I decided to go back in time and explore the history of writing that came from Egypt. This is a three-book trilogy, and originally I only had volume one, but my grandmother located the other two volumes on Ebay. Woot.
Xiran Jay Zhao, 2021
presented for the April 17th 2024 book club meeting
The theme for the April meeting was Young Adult/Juvenile novels, and I've been hyping this book up since our November meeting. So I made a slideshow presentation for this book rather than rereading it. It was great.
Katherine Applegate, 2000
reread for the March 20th 2024 book club meeting
The theme for the March book club was "an animal as a major character" and I was fucking Going Through It in March (bronchitis and my period simultaneously), so I gave up on something new and opted for rereading an old favorite. This was the first Animorphs book I ever read. Overall, I greatly enjoyed it.
edited by Sharon Kinney Hanson, 2000
read in advance for the February 21st 2024 book club meeting, finished February 20
So, uh...I waited until the last minute to read this book, which I don't normally do. This month's prompt was "biography", and I despise reading biographies (a lot of them are about people who just aren't that interesting, in my opinion), so I put this off. I found quite a few that I related to and loved, and also found just as many that were a miss. Overall, like the other "anthology"-type book I read, I'm putting it at a 7/10 - some are hits, and some are misses. Also, this book kept threatening to fall apart because of the age of the glue (the book is from 2000 and my copy was a library copy, so the glue isn't doing very well), so I had to do a lot of quick, careful reading to keep it from falling apart on me, so I'm deducting a point for that too.
Carl Dennis, 2001
read in advance for the January 17th 2024 book club meeting, finished January 6
The theme of the January meeting was "a book by an author who has won a Pulitzer Prize". To make things easy for myself, I selected the actual book that won the Pulitzer Prize - Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America by Marcia Chatelain (which won in 2021 for History) and Practical Gods by Carl Dennis (which won in 2002 for Poetry).
Practical Gods was one of my few forays into poetry in recent memory. I picked it up because I'm a polytheist and it felt notable that a polytheist-adjacent poetry book was given the Pulitzer Prize in the year I was born. It was a fascinating analysis of religious beliefs crossed with modern problems. How does it do this as a book of poetry? I'm not sure! But it did! Definitely worth the multiple prizes it has won. 9/10.
Marcia Chatelain, 2020
read in advance for the January 17th 2024 book club meeting, finished December 30
The theme of the January meeting was "a book by an author who has won a Pulitzer Prize". To make things easy for myself, I selected the actual book that won the Pulitzer Prize - Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America by Marcia Chatelain (which won in 2021 for History) and Practical Gods by Carl Dennis (which won in 2002 for Poetry).
Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America is exactly what I love in a nonfiction book: Super specific. This book is about the combined history of fast food and African-Americans, who have had their efforts and labor used and then promptly devalued to launch fast food as we know it today, particularly in McDonald's history. It goes into the history of protests and boycotts around McDonald's and its presence in black neighborhoods (often without hiring any black employees unless pressured), along with other notable pieces of history around the time to "set the stage" as we travel through the same few decades in different cities across the United States.
It is exactly the type of history that people want forgotten, which is why this book is so good to read: so you truly understand how deep the systemic racism rabbit hole goes and how often black people need to carefully monitor their speech and lives so they don't scare white people. And unless you get hyper-specific history books, you don't realize how truly interconnected things in the past are - like McDonald's, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jim Crow laws.
I believe the Pulitzer Prize was well-earned for this book, and frankly, I believe everyone should read it. 10/10.
Travis Baldree, 2022
read in advance for the December 20th 2023 book club meeting, finished July 12
The theme of the December meeting is "a book you would give as a gift". I would choose Legends & Lattes, which is considered a keystone in the "cozy fantasy" subgenre. Taking place in a very Dungeons and Dragons-like world, this is the story of an ex-adventurer (Viv) settling down in a city to open a coffee shop. However, these fantasy denizens have never heard of coffee, or lattes, or anything of the sort. In addition to rebuilding the store from basically scratch, Viv has to figure out how to manage things like public relations, the fae mafia, and hiring people to help run the store - Tandri the succubus as a barista and Thimble the ratfolk as a baker. This is a story about community, settling in somewhere new, and diplomatically dealing with jerkwads who you'd rather throw out the doors. 9/10!
Cedric Caballes, 2022
read in advance for the November 15th 2023 book club meeting, finished November 1
The theme of November was graphic novels. Alongside the two long-term mangas I'm reading (Dragon Ball Super and Snow White with the Red Hair), I recently picked up The Witch's Throne. It's a LitRPG graphic novel based on a webcomic about people who are modernly born into specific "classes" coming to challenge each other for the right to kill the Witch, a great force of evil and destruction that spontaneously appears once a decade.
I quite enjoyed this graphic novel and quickly read both volume 1 and volume 2 (though the second wasn't until after book club). I look forward to volume 3, which is slated to come out in June 2024. Between character design, worldbuilding, artstyle, and pacing, I'd give this a 10/10!
Kiersten White, 2018
read in advance for the October 18th 2023 book club meeting, finished October 8
Due to the nature of the original Frankenstein book (which the author presumes you have read and are familiar with) being a retelling of the events from Victor to the captain, it enables this book to be told from the first-person perspective of Elizabeth Lavenza, who is notably a liar and manipulative to ensure the safety of her position among the Frankenstein family. We have gone from one unreliable narrator (Victor, who believed Elizabeth was the best thing since sliced bread) to another (Elizabeth, who is determined to not let anyone know that Victor has gone mad).
Since this is a retelling, it alters how things happened. Elizabeth (and, to a much lesser extent, Justine) gains a lot of agency. More characters are introduced, those that Victor would never have bothered speaking about. There are fascinating details and twists that Victor would never have kept track of in the original Frankenstein, giving Elizabeth the chance to shine as the protagonist of this tale. Though I should emphasize protagonist, not hero. It's a very delicate yet important difference here.
One of the most impressive parts is where the author plays with the original Frankenstein story, setting it up again as a journal of Victor's, until the very end. And damn, what an ending. 10/10, especially for how it plays with the format of Mary Shelley's tale. Also, the monster gets canonically named Adam in this one! It's utterly fascinating how even the dead characters keep popping up, just as they should in a story such as this one. Though I do wonder about Ernest's survival in this telling... At least we know what happened to good ol' Papa Frankenstein.
Mary Shelley, 1818
read in advance for the October 18th 2023 book club meeting, finished September 30
So the thing about this book is that the protagonist sucks. That is his entire point. He is a shit person and a shit relative and he's a byronic hero, and I'm fairly certain that that was on purpose because Mary Shelley was being constantly asked by Lord Byron if she had come up with an idea for a story yet while they were hanging out.
For fun, I also analyzed the sections of 1800s homosociality, along with how many deaths are directly the fault of Victor's because he's an IDIOT.
Also, was anyone going to tell me that Victor still called Elizabeth his cousin even after they got married, or was I supposed to find that out myself? Same thing with him having TWO younger brothers rather than just one? And that one of them seemingly survives the story, along with their father?
It's a classic and I enjoyed it. The thing that gets me the most about this book is the clear yearning for community. Robert Walton desiring a friend, Victor Frankenstein desiring the creation of life in a less-than-sexual method, and Adam (the creature) desiring a partner who could understand him and was the same as he. The thing that gets me second-most about this book is the role that the cycle of abuse plays. If Adam had not been abandoned, he would not be hunting down everyone bearing the Frankenstein name, up to and including his creator. 10/10, but I skipped some of Victor's dramatic monologuing after getting bored.
Fredrik Backman, 2019, translated in 2020 by Neil Smith from Swedish
read in advance for the September 20th 2023 book club meeting, finished September 6
There were some parts of this book where you can tell it was translated. This was just such a good and wholesome book and I'm a sucker for a story where everything turns out okay in the end. I didn't think I would like it, but the writing and translation style carried the book even in its less eventful moments. The level of stakes in the story wavered, sometimes feeling very high and sometimes feeling really low. Those wavering stakes helped to carry the story, keeping me engaged through the whole book.
This book makes heavy use of medium-length or longer sentences, occasionally using shorter sentences for extra punch. Dialogue tags rarely include "said", making everyone seem very intense in personality. Which is fair, because they all are. As our bank robber and the narrator alike say several times in story, this is the worst group of hostages ever, and they become even more difficult during the police interviews.
The thing that gets me the most about this book is the emphasis on there being no true antagonist or villain. You get to look into the heads of pretty much every character, though some points of view are more favored than others. Even the bank robber (with a genius switch of pronouns due to the obscurity of the situation) is deeply sympathetic.
Overall, quite an enjoyable book. I gave it a 10/10 because it did make me tear up at one point. If a story makes me cry tears of happiness, it usually ends up on the higher end of my scale.