I kept meaning to update this in November, and then suddenly it was December and I kept not updating because I thought I might finish another book before the end of the year, but I did not, so here we are. In October, the last time I did update, I had just my 52 books a year goal, so all of these books are gravy.
53/52: Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles: This landed on my radar because it was having a moment on BookTok and also on Gay Twitter, and it seemed like everyone was reading it so I decided I should, too. This book was excellent. Miller tells the story of Achilles and Patroclus from birth to death, but she tells it as a love story. There's no suggestion that they're lovers, as is often done in versions of the Trojan War. Instead, Miller takes it as a given and works from there. If you're familiar with "The Iliad" you already know, vaguely, where the story is going, but still, tears came out of my cryholes. This was one of the best books I read all year.
54/52: Patrick Boucheron's Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What To Fear: I bought this on an early fall trip to Washington, DC, at a bookstore near Dupont Circle that had my last name. It turned out to look more interesting than it actually was, as I was expecting a biography of Machiavelli. It was pretty light on the biographic details, and instead was more of a discussion of how to read Machiavelli and apply it to our current political climate. That's still a useful discussion, but not really what I wanted.
55/52: Jeremy Finley's The Darkest Time of Night: A decent mix of suspense and science fiction. When her grandson goes missing in the woods behind the family home, Lynn is reminded of the work she did in the 1960's as a grad student in the astronomy department, taking stories from people who said their family members were taken by lights in the sky. This isn't the first time someone has vanished in those woods, and as Lynn gets closer to the truth she gets closer to sinister forces determined to keep it from the public. What are they protecting, and why? And where has Lynn's grandson actually gone?
56/52: Walter Tevis' The Queen's Gambit: Like a lot of people, I got a copy of this because I watched the series on Netflix and was intrigued. If you've watched the series, you'll blow right through this, because the show is almost a page by page recreation of the book. It's still a good read and an interesting story, but neither the book nor the movie has made me want to try to become a better chess player.
57/52: Dave Quinn's Not All Diamonds And Rose: This was entertaining, but only for a very select audience. Amazon calls it "the definitive oral history of the Real Housewives", but there are a number of former Real Housewives who refused to be interviewed. They did get a lot of producers and production team members, though, and the format of one chapter for each version of the franchise makes it easier to keep up with, so kudos on the structure. As a fan, I have a few opinions:
1) How are you going to interview Quinn from Orange County without bringing up the time she put on a wig, claimed to be her alter ego of Roxy, and went out to bars to pick up guys? Are we all just pretending that didn't happen?
2) The list of people who wouldn't be interviewed is at the very end of the book. It would make more sense to have a list at the beginning of each chapter, so that you're not wondering the whole time if someone is going to jump in.
3) The DC chapter is only a few pages long, and you can tell that Bravo and Andy Cohen, who cooperated with this book, really just want to bury the whole thing. The only part of DC that they talk about is when the Salahi's crash the state dinner at the White House, and it is told entirely from the point of view of the production staff. I really wanted to hear from the DC Housewives what they thought about that incident, how they felt about being cancelled after only one season, whether being on the show had any impact on them, or really anything, but the book only spoke with a few of them and doesn't publish any of those interviews.
58/52: Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot: Jacob is a creative writing teacher, coasting on the reputation of his promising early work that hasn't blossomed into a writing career, when his student, Evan, brings him a story idea that Evan is planning to write. Evan insists that his plot, and its twist, will make his book an immediate best seller, and Jacob has to admit that he thinks Evan is correct. As a few years go by, Jacob wonders what happened to Evan, and discovers that he died without publishing. No copy of his work seems to have survived, but Jacob remembers all the details of the plot, and decides to write it himself. Now he has an instant best seller, fame, talk show appearances, and movie deals, until an anonymous email comes saying, "You are a thief." Now Jacob is trying to keep everyone from finding out what he's done while also finding out where Evan, and the plot, actually came from. This was suspenseful, but when they finally reveal what the plot was, it's not that shocking or original.
59/52: Paul Tremblay's Survivor Song: Mutate super-rabies is sweeping across New England, turning people who are bitten into violent, mindless animals. Natalie, who is due to give birth in a few days, calls her college friend Rams, a doctor, because she has been attacked by a neighbor and she has been bitten. Now they are racing against time to get to a hospital in time to get Natalie a rabies vaccine and to give birth, but the locals hospitals are overwhelmed and the streets are overrun with the infected and with heavily armed militias insisting that the virus isn't real. I guess I wasn't in the mood for plague fiction during our pandemic, because I usually like Tremblay's work, but as soon as the militia showed up I was just kind of "Ugh" and pushed through to finish this.
60/52: Liz Brown's Twilight Man: Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire: Some time back (this year or last year; I cannot remember) I read "Empty Mansions", the story of the last daughter of the Clark copper empire and the slow dissolution of the Clark family fortune, so when I saw the Clark Empire mentioned here I was intrigued. Brown tells the story of her great-granduncle, William Andrews Clark, Jr., a founder of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, backer of the creation of the Hollywood Bowl, and noted philanthropist, and Clark's lover, Harrison Post. Brown details the constant danger Clark's lifestyle placed them both in, and how after Clark's death Post, suddenly rich, was a target of his own family's plot to exploit his wealth and bleed him dry. It's a good read, and goes to some unexpected places.
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