I wrote down some thoughts I had from every book that I finished in February. This is in the order of when I finished these books.
An Immense World by Ed Yong
Personally what I look for in non-fiction books is information of course but also a thesis that changes the way that I look at the world. The thesis of this one is that we can't look at animal senses in comparison to our own and that there is this fundamental unknowability of how other creatures sense the world. This is certainly not a novel take but Yong puts it in a succinct way and really shows how easy it is to slip into this language and human-centric mode of thinking. Many of these facts weren't new to me (although I did definitely learn new ones too) but the thing that has stuck with me is mostly how little we still know. It's also really interesting how difficult it is to imagine how other creatures sense the world. It reminded me of the kids show Wild Kratts where these cartoon characters could transform into different animals and truly that might be the only way to really experience the world through the eyes (and there's the human-centeredness again) of other animals.
4/5
Stay True by Hua Hsu
I find it difficult to judge memoirs largely because I feel like I get a lot less enjoyment out of them than most people do. It's hard because there's this element of "plot" but it's not as if you could say you didn't like the "plot" of someone's real life. It's more about the framing of the story and if I think the story gets somewhere and I just feel like most memoirs don't really ... get anywhere. I think Hua Hsu does a better job than most. It's not a coming of age story and it is not a story about grief and it is not a story about being Asian American but rather it is his story at this specific moment which necessarily deals with his experience growing up, dealing with grief, and being Asian American. It might feel a bit contradictory from what I said earlier about memoirs at large but I did really enjoy seeing Hua Hsu grow in the story and also his growth from writing the story. There is tremendous growth to be had in how you center yourself in your own life story and what makes the cut and what does not. I feel like I would've enjoyed this much more if I knew Hua Hsu's other work because as it stands it was reading the intimate life moments of a stranger but I nonetheless enjoyed how much detail he was able to pack in and his subtle humor that made the story all the more his.
4/5
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
It surprises some people that I am not actually very much of a absurdist fiction fan despite some of the great loves of mine in terms of literature (this of course, but also Gombrowicz and Vonnegut). Some fiction is just simply fantastic even if I don't like the genre.
5/5
Book Lovers by Emily Henry
No thoughts - I gave this a try because someone said that this was their favorite Henry book and that the other one I had tried was their least favorite. This type of romance novel is simply not for me I think.
2/5
I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
I was afraid that this being a celebrity memoir and with a provocative title meant that it was not going to be good. I am so pleasantly mistaken. It's hard to say I loved this book because it deals with some heavy topics and ones that intersect strongly with my own triggers and so I had to put the book down a few times for my own mental health. But Jenette McCurdy actually does such a good job of showing how a child thinks and how a child is unable to process the abusive situation that they are in. This is the greatest strength of the story. I felt like the retelling of the slightly older days was definitely a weaker narrative. That being said, I think I am also a bit biased in having grown up watching her shows and having that bit of parasocial relationship. Perhaps it is partly because of the parasocial relationship but it was definitely very easy to be engaged in this story and thus it was also really interesting to me that it ended up at her current point in life.
4/5
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
A masterpiece of literature and yet ... boring. I think my mistake was expecting a memoir. I mean it is a memoir but it is also Nabokov so perhaps it is unsurprising that it is this. I loved the literary references (Carlyle etc) and Nabokov's writing is beautiful as always but I just felt that I came out of this knowing nothing new about the soul of Nabokov. Individual lines spoke to me very deeply ("What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul" for example) and just tons I want to dwell on. He sorts his retelling by themes (as what an autobiography should be, Nabokov claims) and I think the end product ends up feeling quite manufactured. I'll grant that that was his goal. He's a literary genius and produced a work of literature. I think my issue is that he could've explored far more with a work of fiction (and there are elements of fiction sneaking into this retelling anyway).
3/5
Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie
3rd and final book so I don't want to say too much. Abercrombie's characters are fun and interesting...his plot can be weak.
4/5
The Furrows by Namwali Serpell
I was engaged by the premise and then...the story just...derailed. It's atmospheric which seems to be a popular thing these days. Sadly though this does not break the mold of atmospheric literary fiction and thus leaves a lot to be desired. The main character says repeatedly that she doesn't want to tell the reader what happened but rather how it felt. Super interesting premise but I was left feeling weird and confused. (Spoilers from here on out). The premise of the book is that there's the main character who at a very young age (12) witnesses her brother (7) die when they were left alone. From there, she seems to see him everywhere. There are men who share his name and look a lot like him to the point of potentially able to impersonate him that she sleeps with. I think the point was supposed to be the way that grief can come out of nowhere and affect you even so much later in life and how you will see your dead loved ones everywhere but it just...it was just so weird I felt no grief and just felt weird.
2/5
We Don't Know Ourselves by Fintan O'Toole
Read a lot of non-fiction this month and this kind of mixes memoir with history. I liked the premise and I think it worked rather well. I was enjoying most of it too but the closer to recent times, the more the book felt unengaging. I don't have a strong reason why but maybe the premise had been interesting and lost its newness. I feel like there's better books to read for the pure history and as a history buff maybe that's why I wasn't so interested. If you're not a history buff and the experience of a "commoner" might help keep the history interesting, then this is probably for you.
3/5
The Bowery Boys by Tom Meyers, Greg Young
It's more of a historical facts list than a book so I won't comment on it.
4/5
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Ah this is the book that inspired me to write this at all. With such an overhyped book I felt like I was sure to hate it but instead I loved it. I usually dislike books that are too close to my personal experience largely because I feel like I nitpick or criticize the parts that I think aren't true enough to my experience. Like whenever people who clearly didn't go to Ivy League schools try to present it as such a studious place or something instead of just...kind of some school. So yeah I was definitely nervous about a book that had that elite university setting for part of it followed by a lot of programming and love of video games with some Asian Americanness to boot. But to some degree, none of that mattered (although to be clear I think she did handle those topics well too).
What has stuck with me is just such an interesting look at love and friendship and grief and death. These characters have stuck with me largely because they all universally suck. They are all selfish and make mistakes and fail to communicate and normally miscommunication in books is such a turnoff but this was done so realistically, I couldn't be mad. But mostly I liked how the way death and grief worked in the story. Multiple characters talk about life as a video game but a fundamentally unwinnable one. Or the way that we play video games where we can try all of the paths and go back to checkpoints and start again and generally restart. Life to some degree is special because we can't do that, because we only have this one. But at the same time the Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow soliloquy is a slightly different look. Of course it comes from the same starting premise that death is inevitable and we are all trying to win life but the soliloquy holds more of the perspective that it is all meaningless except of course to the one alive.
The perspective on the blurriness between love and friendship is interesting too. Two characters are not quite ever in a romantic relationship and yet sometimes their friendship definitely borders on it. One says that he knew he loved the other but that in creating with her that was a more profound thing to him than any romantic or sexual relationship with her. I thought it was interesting especially since creating things is often how people think about their legacy and living on after death. That this longevity might be in the long run matter more than the fragile lives that we hold.
5/5
11/22/63 by Stephen King
There's this thing that Stephen King fans say sometimes which is that even if you've read several of his books it's still not quite enough to grasp the breadth of King. I feel like even the biggest King fans admits that he has duds so no matter how many you read, maybe you just haven't read the one you will love. But gah I just don't think I like King's writing. His writing of women is notoriously bad (and I definitely hated it here). He has very interesting premises sometimes, which was the case here, but sometimes he just drags on for so long, I'm just no longer interested. King's premise here was something that I felt would really appeal to me but it kind of follows the traditional time travel plot so once the worldbuilding was done, I was just bored. I love the amount of effort King put in to make the historical part of this book be as realistic as possible. He talks about fashion and food and historical events with such detail and the research he put into it is something that really appeals to me. However, at some point the main character just like goes and lives in the past for a while and has a domestic life. It was just so totally unnecessary for the book and given that the main character was mostly just a caricature of a nice guy anyway there was just nothing for me to root for there.
2/5
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
I notice (and it's really hard not to) that there's been a lot more books about historical figures in their mundane lives or the family's of historical figures and their mundane lives. The Jill Lepore writing about Jill Franklin effect. And then we got Hamnet which totally blew up and really blurred the line between fiction and fact. On one hand I do think the fiction format works a lot better because of the lack of "real" information we can get about these famous-adjacent people (particularly women of the past too). The Netanyahus fit this mold in some ways but also kind of alters the genre. I suspect we'll see a lot more of this in the future. The interaction with a famous family was a great thing to riff off of - one that is in some ways more doable than writing a whole narrative on the famous family given that blur between fiction and fact. The difficulty of course is that the narrator then has to be interesting in his own right. Cohen does a great job with this because the narrator, a Jewish American, makes all of the discussions about the Jewish diaspora and Jewish identity and America's relationship with Israel and history and present realities and the way that we as individuals represent but also deviate from our identities all the more interesting. I initially rated this book a 4 but I actually decided to change it to a 5 because Cohen is able to pack just so much in this very short book. I feel like this book that will stand up to a reread, the type of re-read that just gives you more out of it.
5/5
Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim
Honestly I had a fantastic reading month because this is yet another book that wiffle waffled between a 4 and a 5. This is a book with the type of family saga that I love - one that explores a moment of immense change and how different generations deal with this revolutionary period. It's a bit smaller though, definitely focused on one generation in particular unlike say Pachinko. It's a book about forging national identity from a moment of crisis and I feel like there's been a number of Korean independence stories that have been fictionalized. This one adds an element of magical realism - no magic just events that are improbable enough to raise questions combined with connections to folklore. Some of this did feel a bit forced - the tiger which plays a large role in the book simply didn't need to. Except for the fact that it connects to the folklore, there just didn't seem to be a reason it needed to exist. I had a similar critique about Poppy War's usage of folklore. On the other hand on several other occasions the story came together in ways that really elevated the story.
One of the ideas that I really liked was independence for the sake of independence. A lot of similar books use atrocities as a galvanizing moment for an independence movement but Kim makes it clear that this thirst for freedom is everywhere. I loved the characters and so much of what this story was trying to do but it just felt like it could use a little bit more polish. We can see the civil war coming towards the end of the book but then it just ends when I thought this would've been such an interesting thing to explore given the Communist influence on the fight for independence and many discussions about the strictness of class prior to the war.
4/5