Book Review

Whew, section two of this read-a-long was a doozy. It was slightly more pages than the first section, and boy, did that chapter with the letters take awhile to get though.

Anyway, I liked the format from the last recap, so I’m going to use that again. (If you missed it, here are my thoughts from chapters 1 through 6). You can also catch my co-host, Lu’s, thoughts on this section here.

Woo! I’m made it through the first six chapters of Possession! This is a feat I have never accomplished, so I feel like a read-a-long winner no matter what happens next.

I’m not sure how to structure these updates, so I’m just going to meander and see where this goes. Feel free to join up the conversation in the comments or leave links to your posts there too (I’ll watch today and make sure they don’t get sent to spam).

Even though I’m not really behind with reviews (which was the purpose of doing mini-reviews in the first place), I decided that I like the format and want to keep it up. As a way to balance out my reading, I’ve decided to mostly focus on fiction in mini-reviews and save “real” reviews for nonfiction. Fiction gets covered extensively by other bloggers who write much better than I do, so I feel comfortable leaving the territory to them.

Anyway, for this pair of reviewletts, I decided to focus on two recently-released books that made my cry: Me Before You by Jojo Moyes and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.

On November 14, 1889, 25-year-old intrepid reporter Nellie Bly left New York city on a steamship heading for England, hoping to set a record for the fastest trip around the world and Phineas Fogg’s fictional trip in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. Hours later, 28-year-old journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Bisland left New York by train toward San Francisco, intending to race Bly around the globe. In Eighty Days author Matthew Goodman follows these two remarkable journalists on the endeavor, which for 70 odd days captivated the world.

Based on that description, I’m sure you can understand why I’m writing about this book. There’s pretty much no way I was going to let a book about two adventurous lady journalists get away from me — there really isn’t a more promising premise for a book. And happily, Matthew Goodman didn’t disappoint in the least. Eighty Days is a page-turning travel adventure, sprinkled with the kinds of historical tidbits that make up the best narrative nonfiction.

Outlaw Platoon is one of the most difficult and most addictive books I have read in a long time. Although it is not as philosophical or analytical as other war memoirs I’ve read (Karl Marlantes’ What It Is Like to Go to War? comes to mind), Outlaw Platoon is effective as a snapshot of what war is like for soldiers today who haven’t yet had time to look back or process these experiences fully.

I have to admit that I went into Where the Peacocks Sing with a little trepidation. I’m often very hot or cold with memoirs and fiction of this style, loves stories in exotic places where a shallow person comes to realize the True Meaning of Love/Life/Home/Family through a relationship with someone else. And this story — a woman who loves Jimmy Choo shoes falls in love with a modest Indian man who then turns out to be part of a wealthy Indian family — seemed like it could be an excellent travel story or be too close to chick lit for my taste.

In One Hundred Names for Love, author Diane Ackerman writes about the five years after Paul’s stroke — his daily struggles to make himself known, the challenges an illness that takes away language does to a relationship built on words, and the process of designing a new life in the wake of a condition that all but destroys what used to be.

It’s no secret that I have a little soft spot for dystopian fiction. And while I wouldn’t necessarily classify the two books I’m going to review here dystopias, both Arcadia by Lauren Groff and The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker have these currents of things falling apart  running through them that I found very appealing. Ultimately though, what makes both of these books great reads in their main characters and the journey each goes though during the course of the novels.

If you need an example of how individual recommendations sell books, the way I came to read The Revolution Was Televised is a perfect example. Sometime last November, my favorite pop culture critic, Linda Holmes, tweeted about how great this book was. I looked it up on Barnes & Noble, saw the topic and price, and bought it immediately. Last month, a trusted book blogger, Florinda (The 3R’s Blog) posted a review and recommended I start it right away. So I did.