The Books I Read In February

 I started out strong in January, knocking out seven books in a month, but I did not maintain that pace in February. I don't really have a reason why, other than it being warm and me walking outside more instead of treadmilling, but I still finished a decent four books. One a week is better than a lot of people accomplish, and still keeps me on track for hitting 52 this year.

8/52 - Kristen Biggs and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby Undead - When Gatsby passed into the public domain this year, it was only a matter of time before we started getting prequels, tie ins, and reimaginings, and this was one of the first out of the gate. Imagine if, in addition to his secret past and the mystery of how he got his wealth, Jay Gatsby had another, even deadlier secret. Imagine if Jay Gatsby was a vampire.

This wasn't as bad as it sounds. Biggs manages to keep the melodrama under control, and once you get past the absurdity of scenes like Jay Gatsby breaking into an asylum in the middle of the night and just embrace the story, this turns out to be a decent little vampire adventure. It even managed to have a few surprising twists.

9/52 - Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr's Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune - I guess I was on a "big mansions and tragic reversals of fortune" kick, because I started reading this after letting it sit for seven years on my unread books shelf. (It's not even the book that's been there the longest.) I remember buying this because it sounded interesting and because a coworker's husband was distantly related to the Clark family. The Clarks are mostly forgotten, but the family founder was a copper mining magnate and peer of the Rockefellers and Carnegies, and this book tells the story of his youngest daughter, who withdrew from society completely in the 1950s but maintained houses across the country.

From a historical perspective, this was interesting, but the overall story is also somewhat sad. Huguette's money seems to have made her happy, but she definitely seems to have been taken advantage of by her caretakers in her final years, something that happens to a lot of older people. 

10/52 - Karen M. McManus's The Cousins - Continuing on my rich people, big houses, and mysterious pasts kick, I read this tale of the Story family on the treadmill. Aubrey, Milly, and Jonah Story have never met their rich, reclusive grandmother because she disowned all four of her children before the cousins were born. Their parents claim not to know why, and when she writes to invite the cousins to work for her at her island resort for the summer, the parents let them know that they're taking the offer, no questions asked. When they arrive, the resort manager who hired them has vanished, their grandmother doesn't seem to have known they were coming, and they quickly find themselves caught in a web of murder and secrets that they may not survive.

This was a pretty good distraction read on the treadmill. There were twists and turns, mostly believable, but the four narrator structure sometimes distracted from the story more than it helped to tell it. Overall, though, this was entertaining.

11/52 - Emma Cline's Daddy: Stories - Based on the reviews, I'm one of the few who didn't like this short story collection. It wasn't bad, and sometimes had interesting characters, but a day after finishing it I can barely remember what any of the stories were about, with vague recollections of two and the other eight just being a blank. These were well written, but often felt incomplete.

So... onward to March, and more books!

New Year, New Books

We're five weeks into the new year, and I've read more than five books, so I guess I'm ahead. Some of this is because I've been trying to get back into a more regular treadmill schedule, and I read the Kindle on the treadmill to make me forget that I'm on the treadmill, but also I've read a few interesting books that I kind of flew through.

1) Void Star, by Zachary Mason - I must have read about this in an article, because it was sitting on my Amazon wish list when I logged in to spend my holiday gift cards, so I ordered it. It takes place in the near future, where sea levels are rising and vast AIs serve tech millionaires. Irina, who has a cybernetic memory implant, reads a secret in her employer's glasses and finds herself in danger while Kern, a thief and street fighter, is hired to steal a phone and finds himself pursued across the planet. Meanwhile, Thales tries to recover from injuries he received during an assassination attempt on his father, and all three of them end up on a collision course with each other in surprising ways. This was interesting, but also felt a little hollow. I liked it, but it felt like something undefined was missing.

2) The Meaning of Mariah Carey, by Mariah Carey - I'm just going to go ahead and say at the front end that I underestimated Mariah Carey. Even knowing that she writes her own songs and is not an unintelligent person, I was still expecting this to be a fluff book, and it was anything but. I was definitely not expecting a compelling discussion of racism and classism, not just in the entertainment industry but also just in every day life. There are a few parts where things are clearly glossed over, notably any part that would reflect poorly on Mariah, but most of this is honest, entertaining, and sometimes heartbreaking. If you like stories about other celebrities, there's enough of that to entertain, too. This was a really good book.

3) Red, White, and Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston - The son of the American president and the younger prince of the UK (not Harry, because this is fiction) have been tabloid rivals for years, and after a disastrous incident at the royal wedding of the crown prince, the two of them are thrown together in a goodwill tour. And then they're in a very hot and heavy secret affair. Will the Crown accept a gay prince? Will the scandal sink the President's reelection? And will the relationship survive when the whole thing blows wide open? This was a cute little fantasy, and a very entertaining read.

4) X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga, by Stuart Moore - I knew, going in, that this was an adaptation. Movie and comic adaptations tend to take the main story, and embroider a little. There will be things that add some depth, give some background, or show you what characters were doing when they weren't featured. For example, the novelization of the final episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation", "All Good Things", includes a scene with Dr. Pulaski that wasn't in the show. It fits in the book because thematically, it felt like it should be there. 

This is a long way of saying that good adaptations add to the story instead of subtracting from it, and that this book is not a good adaptation. Some of the changes are to update the story, as cell phones and the internet didn't exist when the original was written, but some of them make no sense whatsoever, and add nothing. Professor X is absent for most of the novel, the subplot with Dazzler is removed entirely, and a subplot of Jean and Emma Frost fighting over Scott is added in, decades before that happened in the comics. Overall, this book was kind of a mess and you should skip it.

5) Severance, by Ling Ma - Candace Chen works in the publishing industry in Manhattan, and keeps coming in to work as Shen Fever spreads throughout the city and the world. Moving into the office as the city empties and shuts down, she finds herself completely alone until she finally leaves New York and ends up with a group of survivors led by Bob from IT, who is leading them to a mysterious Facility in Chicago where they can survive. Bob isn't what he seems, and neither is the Facility, but by the time Candace realizes that, will it be too late? This was entertaining but a little bit sad, making it maybe not the best thing to read during a pandemic.

6) Night of the Mannequins, by Stephen Graham Jones - Sawyer and his friends wanted to play one last senior year prank on their friend, sneaking Manny the mannequin into the movie theatre where she works. It all seemed like fun and games until Manny got up and walked out with the rest of the crowd at the end of the movie, vanishing into the night, and then Sawyer's friends started to die. Is the supernatural at work, or is there a problem a little more grounded in reality? In the end, as the deaths circle closer and closer to Sawyer, will it even matter? This was a short, fast read made even faster by how quickly it ratchets the tension up, and I enjoyed it.

7) The Invention of Sound, by Chuck Palahniuk - Gates Foster has been searching for his missing daughter for 17 years. Obsessed with tracking pedophiles across the Dark Web, his life and sanity are on the verge of disaster. Mitzi Ives is one of the leading Foley sound engineers in Hollywood. If you want the sound of a man being eaten by rats or a woman screaming as she's stabbed to death, you call Mitzi, but where does she get her authentic sounds from? As the two of them head closer and closer to each other, will they bring each other down, or will they expose the terrible truth about Hollywood and the value of human suffering? This wasn't Palahniuk's best or his worst, but it did feel kind of skippable.

Having finished all of these, I'm reading a fictional book about a rich family with dark secrets on the treadmill, and a nonfiction book about a rich family with dark secrets off the treadmill. I guess maybe I have a theme for February?