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!
No comments:
Post a Comment