Hello!
Uh, this is the part where we insert the obligatory
acknowledgment that it's been a really long
time since I've done this,
and that I'm like maybe gonna make some vague
promises to do this more consistently in the future,
but, like, we all know that's suspect, and
honestly no one cares!
Right, so: after BookNet Fest last year I
started watching a lot more booktube –
I had already been watching a fair amount
because certain people that I knew or followed
had, like, drifted into making booktube stuff.
And it just so happens that January was like
the most productive reading month that I've
had in a really long time.
And so in the interest of trying it out and
also because my accountability group meets
this weekend and I have to make a video,
I am going to a January reading wrap-up.
I read 8 books in January and honestly personal
life is a huge factor here.
But ALSO I found a delightful spreadsheet
that a booktuber made and I'm forgetting her
name, but I will link the video in the description.
And I just really love looking at this spreadsheet
so I feel like it encourages me to read more,
because I'm like, "oh I wanna enter more things
into this spreadsheet, and, like, see more
data about my books."
I mention the spreadsheet because according
to the spreadsheet my current average star
rating for the books that I've read this year
is 3.9.
So in addition to reading 8 books, which is
more than I've read in a month in, I don't
know, years?
I also liked them! So...yay!
The only physical book on this list is a library
book that I already returned, so I'm not gonna
be able to do the proper booktuber thing and
hold up all my books.
I guess this is also a good place to mention
reading goals for the year.
My official Goodreads goal right is 52 books.
Although because of how many I read this month
part of me is like, "maybe I should make it
more?" I don't know.
Beyond that, my other big reading goal is
try to get through all of the audiobooks that
I purchased in 2018.
I started the year off with a re-read of Jane
Austen's Sense & Sensibility.
I'll be honest: I did this almost exclusively
because Rosamund Pike reads this audiobook
and I bought it like as soon as I realized
that she did.
I read most of Jane Austen just sort of on
my own over the span of a couple months when 
I was about 20 years old,
and Sense & Sensibility is not one that stood
out to me as one that I particularly enjoyed.
And I truly would not have cared to revisit
this were it not for my undying love for Rosamund
Pike's narration of Pride & Prejudice.
So I was like, "OK I gotta give it a shot."
I loved all of the abundant sister feels.
The audiobook narration was of course everything
I knew it would be.
The ending of this book kind of bothers me.
I don't particularly like the way that Marianne
Dashwood is treated by the novel.
She's essentially reduced to a prize to be
won by this dude, which, I don't know, bummed
me out when I got there,
which is, like, the least eloquent discussion
of a Jane Austen novel ever, but there you
have it.
But I do love Jane Austen's writing, and the,
like, sister feels really got to me,
and the narration, again, was fantastic, so
this will definitely be added to my books-to-fall-asleep-to-when-I'm-having-anxiety rotation.
So this one got 3 stars.
The second book that I read was Convenience
Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.
This is short and weird little book about
a woman named Keiko who was always considered
strange as a child,
and as an adult she just really loves working
in a convenience store.
At 36 years old she is really happy with her
life as a convenience store worker,
but over the course of the novel she sees
that people who are maybe nice to her, secretly
view her as broken in some way.
And so this is the story of her navigating
those expectations and what she actually wants.
It seems likely that she is on the autism
spectrum though that is not explicitly stated
in the book.
For such a short book – it's only 136 pages
– it packs a really impressive emotional punch.
The moments where she is starting to understand
how other people see and perceive her are,
like, heartbreaking.
And I just wanted her to be able to be happy
at her convenience store.
I kind of felt like the story was keeping
me at arm's length for most of it,
and I don't know if that's just the nature
of the character, or the fact that it's so 
short – I'm not really sure.
I gave this 3 out of 5 stars.
The third book that I read this month was
Madeline Miller's Circe.
This was one that I checked out from the library,
but which I would like to purchase a copy
of, just so that I can have it, because I
adore this book.
This is a glorious work of Greek mythology
fanfic, basically.
Circe is a character who appears in The Odyssey
and Madeline Miller sort of fills her and 
her world out.
If you love mythology or adventure stories
of any kind, I cannot recommend this book enough.
It was wonderfully paced and just, like, all-around
a good time.
I had so much fun reading this book.
This should not be surprising at this point,
but I gave this 5 stars.
The next book I read was So You Want to Talk
About Race by Ijeoma Oluo.
This was another 2018 Audible purchase that
I've had for a really long time, so we're,
you know, 2 down, so many more to go.
This book is exactly what the title promises.
It is a work of nonfiction that is a really
thoughtful and clear exploration of how to
have conversations about race.
Specifically in an American context, as Ijeoma
Oluo is American herself.
She's also a biracial woman, which certainly
informs a lot of her experiences.
She talks a lot about the conversations that
she's had with her white mother about race.
She is really thoughtful about intersectionality
and about acknowledging, you know, her own
process of learning things.
I cannot recommend this book enough – I
gave this 5 out of 5 stars.
The next book I read was Emergency Contact
by Mary H. K. Choi.
This is a contemporary YA romance about two
characters named Penny and Sam.
Penny is an angsty but very smart Asian American
teenager who goes off to college and through
her freshman roommate she meets Sam.
She helps Sam in sort of a bizarre circumstance
and puts her number in his phone as an emergency
contact.
Because of Sam's ties to the roommate she
keeps it a secret that they know each other,
but the two of them – Penny & Sam – sorry,
Penny & Sam have a friendship almost exclusively
through text message.
And so that's the bulk of the novel – just
them exchanging cute and funny texts, but also
they're like very brooding and emotional.
There are a lot of sort of YA romance hallmarks
and staples in this book but the writing was
really, really lovely and charming.
And I just – I (1) sped through this book,
and also (2) really enjoyed it.
I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars.
The next book I read was Anansi Boys by Neil
Gaiman.
This is the 3 of my 2018 Audible purchases
that I made my way through, so I'm getting
there – I'm making progress.
I got this book mostly because American Gods
has a full cast on Audible –
it's one of the first books that I read after
I got my account – which is fantastic by
the way, I highly recommend.
But I – this is an American Gods book so
I was intrigued.
I'm wary of talking about this book because
I know that other people are a lot more sensitive about
spoilers than I am, and so...I don't know.
The parameters of American Gods also apply
in this book.
But if you have never read American Gods
– which you absolutely do not need to do in
order to read this book –
that will not be come clear to you until well
into it...?
[strained] This is going so well!
This book follows a character named Fat Charlie.
At the beginning of the novel he is about
to get married and his fiancee encourages
him to track down his estranged father.
But when he does, he finds that his father
has passed.
But after his father's passing he learns that
he had a brother that he never knew about.
And so he then reconnects with his brother
and there's all sorts of...family...shenanigans.
I'm so bad at this synopsis without spoilers
thing.
I didn't care quite as much about Fat Charlie
as I did about Shadow, so that was a little
disappointing.
I'm not sure how I would have felt about this
book if I hadn't had those expectations going 
into it.
The mythology components, though, were woven
in just as deftly as they were in American Gods.
And it was a wonderfully written and delightful
adventure, so I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars.
The next book that I started to read was The
Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker.
I had to say that so slowly, this is like
the 19th time that I've tried to say her last name.
I've been struggling a little with that one.
Hopefully that will be my first completed
book in the February version of this because
[distressed noise]
Instead of finishing that I moved onto Manhattan
Beach by Jennifer Egan.
I first discovered Jennifer Egan when I was
in high school and read Look At Me, which
I thoroughly enjoyed, and I kinda wanna reread,
just to see how I feel about it 15 years later?
But, uh, a few years later I saw A Visit From
The Goon Squad and recognized her name.
And that turned out to be one my favorite
books ever –
in spite of it doing two things that I generally
– that generally make me struggle to connect
with a book,
which is: shifting narration and jumping around
in time a bunch.
Those two things are often, like, disconnect
points for me, but she does both of those
super super well in A Visit From The Goon
Squad.
Manhattan Beach also has a little bit of that,
but far, far less; it's more conventionally structured.
There are basically three main characters
and only two major time jumps.
That said, I don't think that she uses either
of those things (the shifting narration or
the time jumps) as effectively in Manhattan
Beach as she did in Goon Squad.
Of those 3 periods of time that the novel
takes place over, the bulk of it is during World War II.
While there are three characters who get sort
of point of view chapters, Anna Kerrigan is
the, like, MAIN character, I would say, of
this book.
She's a child in the first section and she's,
I don't know, maybe 20, give or take during
the bulk of the novel.
And at some point in the in between time her
father, Eddie Kerrigan runs out on the family.
One night she goes out with a friend and she
goes to a bar owned by a man named Dexter Stiles,
who she recalls meeting in the novel's opening
scene with her father.
The three main characters are Anna, Dexter,
and Eddie.
Anna winds up getting close to Dexter and
tries to find out what happened to her father,
what their connection really was, because
she never actually knew.
Ultimately Anna was the only character who
felt truly fleshed out and realized to me.
The three separate threads of Anna, Dexter,
and Eddie – while ultimately intertwined in a
way that was I guess interesting –
the storytelling often felt really just, I
don't know, disconnected and discordant almost?
I don't know.
The stories felt almost like different books
in a way.
The bigger problem for me narratively, though,
is that every peripheral character – everybody
aside from those three people –
seemed to be brought forward into the novel
to do things that were always just really 
convenient for the plot.
That said, there are a lot of wonderful conceptual
things happening here.
I like the way that this book explores the
idea of secrets and what they mean to people.
And the way in which the different threads
are intertwined...also, like, good?
Again, I'm not sure how I feel about the execution
of them, but the idea, the concept is very strong.
And I really do love Jennifer Egan's writing,
still.
So I gave this book 3 out of 5 stars.
The last book that I read this month was Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson.
This was a book club pick – this was my
book club pick.
I honestly did not know what I was getting
into when I picked this book,
but we are kind of making our way through
some of the 2019 Read Harder challenges.
And so the very first challenge is epistolary
novel and I just googled epistolary novels
and I saw this at the top of the list, and
this is, you know, on many a best-of list.
I own and enjoyed Housekeeping, so I was like
OK, cool, Marilynne Robinson, this seems,
like a book that people love, let's go with
it.
Gilead is a very long letter written by a
77 year old man named John Ames who learns
that he is dying and has a 6 year old son.
And the knowledge that he is going to pass
soon and will never know his child as a grown
man, uh, is sitting with him,
so he decides to write his son a letter.
The novel takes place shortly before the election
of Eisenhower.
Ames is a reverend who is descended from a
line of reverends.
His grandfather was an abolitionist and his
father was an ardent pacifist.
The book gets is name from the town – Gilead,
Iowa – where John Ames lives,
and it's a lot of him talking about life in
this town and his life as reverend, and his
family history.
There's a sporadic quality to the storytelling
that is very lovely and good and feels very true.
One day he sits down to, you know, tell this story
about something that happened when he was 12,
and then the next day he's sits down and he's
like, "oh wow, you, my son, you're playing 
and that's cute!"
He also talks about his best friend a lot.
"My best friend said this and then he said
that.
My best friend did this other thing."
And I'm like "yeah that's what I would do
too."
In spite of this being a book written by a
dying man, he's a fairly –
he's got a fairly joyful attitude about his
life and what he is trying to leave to his son.
He seems like a really really lonely dude,
but in spite of that there's a joy to the
writing of this very extensive letter.
That said, there is – understandably – a
ton of religion in this novel.
And I don't think that that is a problem,
like I think is necessary.
I think that for me it made it hard because
there kept being references to explicit biblical things,
and I just could feel the sense of disconnect
between myself and the story.
Like, the degree to which something is being
said here that means something to a large
portion of the audience,
like, you just said, uh...referenced a specific
section of the bible?
I don't even know how to describe, the, like,
number – you know, Genesis numbers numbers?
and what is that, I don't know?
And every time the book does it I'm aware
that the book is saying something that I'm
not getting?
And so it's not that it makes it not make
sense, but it does make me very aware of the
distance between me and John Ames.
There are a lot of really lovely and interesting
bits where he is navigating ideas of faith
that I really loved, and that stuff was great.
Truly, it was the specific moments where he
references passages of the bible that I just 
this moment of,
"I feel like you're saying something here and
I wish I got it, but I don't, and I'm certainly not
gonna stop reading to look it up."
The sort of sprawling nature of the book,
while ultimately something that I loved about
it, made it hard for me to get into at first,
and so I wound up switching to the audiobook
fairly early on.
Actually what I did was listen to the audiobook
while also reading it, which is my favorite
way to read, like a child.
I had an interesting experience with this
book and I would highly recommend it to anyone
with sufficient religious background to understand
all the things that i didn't understand.
And I gave this book 3 out of stars – I
went back and forth actually.
My spreadsheet and Goodreads – my
spreadsheet says 4 but Goodreads still says 3?
So, um, I'm not sure? 3.5 stars?
And that is all of the books that I read in
January.
I still have to finish The Animators and I
have already started reading Shonda Rhimes's
The Year of Yes,
so that's some of what's coming in February.
Let me know in the comments below what books
you read recently,
what you're planning on reading this month,
anything that you think I should pick up in February.
Also tell me how to do a plot synopsis without
spoilers in less than 20 seconds 'cause that
would be a cool skill to develop.
OK bye.
[music: "Vault" - jahzzar]
