More Lockdown Reading

I swore that this was the year I was going to get back to blogging, but it turns out that being in lockdown and going on a low carb diet where you rarely cook anything fun or exciting doesn't really leave a lot to blog about. My friends think that I'm reading a ton, but I have to admit that sometimes it's been a little difficult to focus on reading. Sometimes I just sit and watch TV, something I never used to do, and sometimes I just go to bed at 9 PM because I'm just done for the day.

I'm still reading some stuff, though, so here's a list of the books that I've read since April and a few thoughts about them:

Norse Mythology, by Neil Gaiman, is exactly what it says it is: a collection of stories from Norse mythology. Most of the reason I read this was as a companion to that reading of "The Mighty Thor" that I did a few months ago. I like the Thor movies, and I love "The Mighty Thor", so it was nice to read something that adds a little depth to both of those things that I already liked, and Neil Gaiman's writing is always a pleasure.

Growing Things and Other Stories, by Paul Tremblay, was a collection of somewhat unsettling, often disturbing short stories. Some of the stories tie into his novels, which I've started to become a fan of, but most of them are stand-alone short works. Oddly, I thought the title story was one of the weaker ones, but overall this was a decent collection of things to read in small bites, and might be great if you like horror but have trouble concentrating right now. On the other hand, we're starting to live in a story that could be in this book, so maybe it's not really the best idea.

Some Hell, by Patrick Nathan, tells the story of a family dissolving after the father's suicide. He leaves behind a collection of notebooks, and as the family members secretly read them to try to understand, they spiral in different, but equally destructive, directions. I'm going to go ahead and give a spoiler about the ending, though, so skip to the next paragraph now if you don't want to know what I think. OK, if you're still here, I have to tell you that the ending is a huge let down, because it feels like the author didn't know where to go. Everyone is at a crisis point, and then they suddenly all die in an earthquake, and that's the end.

I've never read fiction by Roxanne Gay before, and I didn't read the dust jacket for Difficult Women, so I didn't realize that this was a collection of short stories. The first one is told in the first person, and I was reading it thinking, "Oh my God, I had no idea she survived this kind of trauma. How did this not come up when I read that other book by her?", but then someone used the narrator's first name and I was like, "Oh. I'm stupid." The women in these stories are labeled difficult, but most of them were just women trying to live their lives in the face of adversity.

I went into The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Suzanne Collins' "Hunger Games" prequel, with reservations, because I was worried that this story was going to be an attempt to paint President Snow, one of the villains of the previous books, as sympathetic and misunderstood. At first, it seems like that is the story that Collins is telling, on the surface, but the deeper into this you get, the more you see that she subtly chips away at that message. Snow talks continuously about how the wealthy Capitol citizens suffered through the war, trying to put them on the same level of sympathy as the poverty stricken Districts, but there's also a constant series of references to an incident where one of his rich neighbor families eats their maid. The rich literally eat the poor to survive, and Collins makes sure you never forget that through the book. Snow is lauded for being well-bred and honorable, but he also cheats, lies, and sells out his fiends at every turn, convincing himself that he's doing it in service of a higher good. Snow might come out of this book thinking he's a good person, but the reader doesn't, and I'm ok with that.


Beautiful You, by Chuck Palahniuk, had a lot of sex, but you can't really tell the story of a Steve Jobs type who tries to take over the world with nanite-infested sex toys without a lot of sex. Most of the sex is very clinical, and some of it definitely borders on distasteful, but it's a Palahniuk book and in this case it's also kind of the point.

Now, let me do you a favor: don't bother buying or even reading the free version of John Bolton's The Room Where It Happened. It's dull. All the good parts have already been covered by the media, leaving behind 500 pages of boring.

This weekend I finished Carol Goodman's The Sea of Lost Girls, and it was comforting in the same way that Mary Higgins Clark's books are comforting. If you've read a few, you know what you're getting: a solid, entertaining read with a few themes in common with her other books. There's always a mysterious death in the past that has some sort of ties to a death in the present, a female protagonist is always in danger, things are never what they seem, and there's usually a secret baby somewhere along the way. All the books don't have these elements, but they have enough of them that if you like them, you like each book the author gives you, and I like Goodman's books. Oddly, I always think, "This would be a great read for a plane," but I don't think I've ever read one while traveling.

Now, we're halfway through the year and I'm only at 21 books. I'm going to have to pick things up a little if we're getting to 52, but I'm on track to beat last year's total, so... fingers crossed, but not crossed so much that I can't turn pages.