All the Books I Read In September

 When we left off, 27 days ago, I was at 38 books for the year out of my goal of 52. Since then, football season started, I got back into a regular treadmill routine, and I went out of town for a long weekend, and all of this added up to a ton more books.

39/52: Survive the Night by Riley Sager: Charlie needs a ride home from campus back to Ohio for the December break, and Josh is putting up a poster on the ride board right when she is. Happy coincidence, right? But there's something a little off about Josh. He won't show Riley the inside of the trunk. His story keeps changing and is full of holes. He seems determined to drive her somewhere, very quickly, and Riley starts to wonder if maybe, in leaving campus, she hasn't quite left the Campus Killer who murdered her roommate behind. This was suspenseful and twisty and very enjoyable.

40 and 41/52: Goal Lines and First Times and Line Mates and Study Dates, by Eden Finley and Saxon James: The last two books in the college hockey gay romance series I was reading. Again, they're pretty much the same book over and over, but they were very entertaining on the treadmill. Maybe I should go back and finish the 50 Shades trilogy.

42/52: The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones: Ten years ago, four American Indian men slaughtered a herd of elk on land reserved for the tribal elders, and left the carcasses to rot. Now, something is coming back for them and their families, looking for revenge. This was a little different, but still good and spooky.

43/52: Bath Haus by P.J. Vernon: Nathan and Oliver seem to have it all: a dog, a townhouse, a happy relationship, but when Oliver visits Haus, a gay bathhouse, while Nathan is out of town, things go horribly awry and Oliver barely gets out alive. Now he's caught in a game with a killer, and his lies are stacking up and about to topple. Can he save himself, his family, and the perfect life they've built? And will he want to? The tone of this book reminded me a lot of Scott Smith's books, where one thing goes wrong and bad choices keep stacking up the problems. It was a good read.

44/52: Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco: Amazon suggested I read this, and since I've seen the movie a bunch of times I figured why not read it? A small family gets out of New York City for the summer by renting a vacation home that seems too good to be true. The sprawling mansion upstate rents for the entire summer for less than a month of their apartment, and the only caveat is that they must bring food upstairs every day for the lady of the house, who keeps to her room and won't be any trouble at all. It's a slow burner, but a decently distracting read. 

45/52: The Suicide House by Charlie Donlea: Deep in the woods on the grounds of an elite prep school is the Suicide House, an old former faculty residence that the students now sneak into for late night parties. A year ago, a teacher murdered two students in the Suicide House, and now the other students on campus keep returning to it to kill themselves. What's happening at the prep school, and what does it have to do with a mysterious secret student society on campus? Is there a way to win the game, and survive? This was a decent mystery, but deeply exploring all the personality quirks of the various police distracted from the plot more than it enhanced it.

46/52: Fledgling by Octavia Butler: An interesting vampire novel with an uncomfortable undercurrent of pedophilia. Based on how the novel unfolds, you can argue that it's not pedophilia, but putting your vampire in the body of a preteen and having it have sex with multiple adults sure looks like pedophilia. The novel, like I said, is interesting, but there's a strong undercurrent of uncomfortable. 

47/52: Haunted City by Joy Dickinson: Subtitled "An Unauthorized Guide to Magical, Magnificent New Orleans of Anne Rice" there's a lot of meticulously researched history in here but not a lot of Anne Rice. If you want a building by building history of every structure in the French Quarter of New Orleans, this is the book for you. If you want discussion beyond a sentence or two of how these buildings and locations shaped Rice's most famous works, then you should pass on this.

48/52: In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle: Claudio lives alone, by choice, in a hillside estate in Calabria. His only regular contact with others is his weekly delivery from the mailman, and he likes it that way. Claudio's peaceful days of writing poems and caring for his animals are interrupted when he receives a strange visitor: a pregnant unicorn chooses his farm to give birth. A chance sighting during the mail delivery leaks Claudio's news to the world, and his solitude is broken by reporters, gawkers, helicopters, and other, more sinister forces. Can he protect his life and the life of the unicorn from the overwhelming attention of a world looking for a miracle? This was short, but thoughtful.

49/52: More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera: Adam Silvera will break your heart. I know this each time I pick up an Adam Silvera book, but I read them anyway, because they're good, but they'll break your heart. In this one, Aaron struggles to recover from his father's suicide, and his own attempt soon after. His girlfriend and his friends are trying to help, but he's also growing closer to Thomas, a new boy in the neighborhood, and conflicted about his feelings toward Thomas. With so many things making him unhappy, Aaron wonders if the controversial new memory-altering procedure from the Leteo Institute is what he really needs to find happiness, by wiping away everything that troubles him.

50/52: Killing Is My Business by Adam Christopher: This is the second book in Christopher's "Ray Electromatic" series, featuring the robot private detective of the same name, who is also sometimes a robot assassin. Ray's dual roles have him playing both sides of the same case in this book, which moves very quickly. I breezed through it in an afternoon, but it was still atmospheric and fun.

51/52: I'd Die For You by F. Scott Fitzgerald: As I read these 18 lost and previously unpublished stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I got the sense that I'd read them before, and think maybe I did read the hardcover when it came out. Ether way, most of them are still a good read if you like Fitzgerald.

52/52: More Than Enough by Elaine Welteroth: This memoir felt like it was missing something. Welteroth is most famous for being the first woman of color to be named editor in chief of "Teen Vogue", but the book seems really scant on covering that part of her life. I was surprised to see that this won awards, but hey, good for Elaine Welteroth, I guess.

A lot of books

It's been a really long time since I shared a book list, and they've just kind of stacked up, so I'm going to roll right in without a lot of preamble. 

24/52: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates: I probably should have read this twice, but instead just went through a really slow reading where I'd absorb, think, go read some more, absorb, think, and go read some more again. It took me a surprising amount of time to read what is essentially a short book, but it was time well spent.

25/52: Home Before Dark by Riley Sager: I'm really enjoying Riley Sager's brand of horror. In this one, Maggie returns to the house where she lived as a child, and where her father claims they were tormented by demons and the ghosts of the family that was killed there. He turned the story into a best selling book that Maggie has spent her whole life trying not to live under, and now that he's dead, she wants answers. But what if the answers are that the book is actually true?

HALFWAY/52: Divas, Dames, and Daredevils by Mike Madrid: An exploration of the lost female heroes from the Golden Age of comics, I found this somewhat disappointing. Each chapter has a full comic story reprinted, in some cases two, but were somewhat light on comics history or a discussion of what these characters meant in the long run, what else they influenced, or why we should remember them now.

27/52: They Never Came Home by Lois Duncan: I found this on my bookcase, and like most of Duncan's books it's a solid suspense novel for the age group. Reading them when older, you notice a little more that the story often depends on a lot of coincidences. In this one, Joan copes with grief after her boyfriend and her brother vanish on a hike in the mountains together. What happened to them? Where did they go? And why didn't they ever come back?

28/52: The Darkness Outside of Us by Eliot Scrafer: Ambrose and Kodiak are teenaged astronauts from rival nations, forced together into a joint rescue mission, and they have a lot of questions. Why don't they remember the launch? Why does their ship show signs of other people having been inside? And why are they picking up radio transmission from earth that don't match the information they're receiving from mission command? The two of them have to work together to figure things out and survive, but can they?

29/52: Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas: Yadriel's family summons and speaks to ghosts, but Yadriel has never been able to participate because he is trans, and his family constantly pushes him toward the traditionally female role instead. When his cousin goes missing and is assumed dead, Yadriel takes the chance to prove himself by summoning his cousin, but instead summons Julian, the leather jacket bad boy of his high school. Now the two of them have to work together to figure out what happened to Julian and to Yad's cousin, because Yadriel's whole family is in danger.

30/52: We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper: When Becky Cooper was an undergraduate at Harvard, she heard the whispered rumor about the anthropology grad student who was murdered in her apartment, her death scene ritualistically staged and a rising star professor suspected of the killing before Harvard covered up the investigation. Eventually she discovers that the murder was real, and spends years investigating the case, the suspects, the victim, and what it means to become a story instead of a person. I'll go ahead and spoil that the killer is discovered at the end, so the book isn't incomplete, but by the time you find out who the murderer was it may not matter anymore.

31/52: What If It's Us by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera: Arthur and Ben have an adorable meet-cute at the post office, but is that all they're destined for? What if their attempts at first dates keep falling apart? Are they meant to be together in a classic New York City love story, or are they just two guys who bumped into each other? This was very cute, and an enjoyable read.

32/52: Utopia Drive by Erik Reece: This road trip through America's mostly failed utopian communities should have been interesting, but reads like a textbook. I really wanted to like this, but it was a slog to get through.

33/52: The Night Visitors by Carol Goodman: In the same way you know what you're getting when you open a Mary Higgins Clark or Tom Clancy novel, you know what you're getting with Carol Goodman: endangered woman with a complicated past, central New York location that's referred to as upstate because it's above Westchester but really there's like seven more hours of New York state above it where the actual real upstate is, and at least one secret baby per novel. They're still interesting, and fun reads.

34/52: The Sky Blues by Robbie Couch: Sky Baker is openly gay in high school, but doing his best to be invisible and just get through his four years. At the same time, he wants to invite his crush, Ali, to prom, but his plans are shattered when a homophobic email about him goes viral at school. Now, all eyes are on Sky and he only has 30 days to decide if he's going to fight back or vanish quietly away.

35/52: Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell: In the final book of the Simon Snow trilogy, we say goodbye, but what does that mean? What happens after the chosen one and his friends graduate from magical school and have to be adults? Where do they go? What do they do? And who do they want to be? This was a long goodbye, but a good one.

36 nd 37/52: Power Plays and Straight A's and Face Offs and Cheap Shots by Eden Finley and Saxon James: I am reading this quartet of books on the kindle while I treadmill. It was recommended to me by Amazon as a gay romance, and... yeah. So far the books are pretty similar: there's at least one hockey player who accidentally falls in love with another guy, who may also be a hockey player, and I'm not sure how Amazon classifies "romance" or what happens in straight people romance books, but all of a sudden there are a lot of parts going in a lot of places in extensive detail and should I have been more of a hockey fan in college?

38/52: The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix: They are the Final Girls, the sole survivors of various massacres, and they meet regularly for group with their therapist until the day that one of them doesn't come to group, because she's dead. And then they're all in some sort of trouble, and threats are coming from all sides. Someone is out to kill the Final Girls, but is it someone from outside, or someone they've shared all their secrets with all along?

All Five Books I Read in April

 I didn't read quite as many books in April as I did in March, which is odd since I read an extremely long book in March, but I also did a lot more outside walking instead of treadmill walking, so I didn't read as much on the Kindle as I did in the colder months. Still, I finished five books, which puts me almost at the halfway mark for the year, so it's not like I've fallen behind.

Also, oddly, I seem to have accidentally had a theme for the month, which was thriller/horror. Two of the books were from the same author, though, so maybe not that surprising.

Anyway...

19/52: In Later, by Stephen King, Jamie is a young teen who sees dead people. They tell him things if he asks them questions, but his single mother has convinced him that he needs to keep his gift to himself, and he does until they day they have to use it to survive. Now a policewoman who knows his secret draws him into a confrontation with a dead serial killer, but the dead can't really hurt you, unless it turns out that they can.  This was a fast read, but a good one. Stephen King wrote some real clunkers for a few years there *stares in Dreamcatcher* but his recent ones have mostly been good, and a return to his classic level.

20/52: In Laurie Elizabeth Flynn's The Girls Are All So Nice Here, the girls are not actually that nice at Ambrosia's ten year college reunion. Instead, they have questions, which they've had all along since the night during freshman year when Amb was involved in some sort of incident that unfolds during flashbacks. Somebody wants to know what happened that night, and what happened leading up to it, but Ambrosia doesn't want to share, especially when it becomes clear that someone doesn't just want the truth. They also want revenge. 

This was a pretty good book, but I was irritated by one thing: it's not clear at the beginning who died on the fateful night, and this is obscured throughout the first half of the book. That's not what I object to, though. Part of the way the death is concealed is that one of the people Ambrosia describes seeing at the reunion isn't actually there. Ambrosia is seeing her face on memorial posters. It feels like a cheap trick rather than a plot twist to keep saying you see someone's staring eyes, but then once the flashbacks reveal they're dead to start adding, "On the memorial posters all over campus". 

21/52: I could not stop reading Riley Sager's Lock Every Door. Jules, broken up with and also broke, takes a job as an apartment sitter in one of Manhattan's most famous buildings, the Bartholomew. Jules is excited to move into the setting of one of her favorite novels, even more so when she finds out that the author of the book still lives there. Broke and needing this job, Jules ignores the stories about the building, but why isn't she allowed to tell anyone she's living there? Why are the residents so secretive and standoffish? What happened to Ingrid, the apartment sitter from downstairs who moved out in the middle of the night and can't be reached? And what happened to the apartment sitter before Jules? Will Jules figure out what's happening at the Bartholomew, or will she be the next story posted online in the middle of the night? Like I said, I could not stop reading this, and plowed through it in a weekend.

22/52: In Camilla Sten's The Lost Village, Alice and three friends travel to a remote Swedish mining town to spend a week filming a documentary on the famous "lost village". In 1959, everyone in Silvertjarn vanished, including Alice's grandmother's entire family, and the mystery has haunted Alice for her entire life. As soon as they arrive, though, things start to go wrong. Are they accidents? The supernatural? Sabotage from within the film crew itself? Or something none of them could have guessed? Alice is determined to find the secret of the lost village, but it may be the last thing she finds. This book was translated from the author's native language, so it can feel a little bit stilted at times, but that also just adds to the feeling of weirdness and things being just a little bit off kilter that pervades the tone of the book. I really enjoyed this.

23/52: I ended up grabbing the other Riley Sager book on my unread shelf, The Last Time I Lied, because I enjoyed the first one so much, and I enjoyed this one, too. During Emma's very first summer at Camp Nightingale, she got put into a cabin with three older girls. Adopted as a kind of younger sister by Vivian, the group leaders, Emma follows her cabinmates everywhere, right up until the night the three of them vanish into the woods and are never seen again. That night haunts Emma and her work as a painter for the next fifteen years, so when she is invited to return to a newly reopened Camp Nightingale as an art instructor, she takes the chance to find out what happened to her friends and finally close that chapter of her life. Someone else has returned to camp, though, someone who knows the truth and doesn't want Emma to find out, someone who will be more than happy to make Emma disappear, too. I really liked this book, too, although I read it a little slower than the one before it.

Coming up in May: I don't know. More books?

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?

 It's January first, which means it's time to tally up how many books I read this year. The answer, which I won't know until I reach the end of this entry and do some actual tallying, is probably going to be lower than most of my friends would assume. I may not even have made 52, which is my yearly goal. 

A lot of my friends assumed that I spent most of the pandemic reading on my couch like a "Twilight Zone" character who has time enough at last, but I spent most of the pandemic trying to distract myself. There was a lot of cooking, a daily regimen of Facebook posts, setting myself up to work from home, hanging pictures on my walls after living in my apartment for a year, a three week period when I contemplated making a plate wall out of vintage Pyrex tableware, deciding to go low carb in quarantine (I've lost a little over 30 pounds since March), and a weird stretch for a couple weeks when I didn't read anything. Every time I sat down to read, I just fell asleep, so I ended up playing video games while binging Netflix instead.

Last year I ended up with a tally of 40 books for the year. Not bad, but not my goal of 52 (one book a week). This year I swore I was going to do better and get back to my normal reading level, but like I explained above, 2020 didn't turn out quite like anyone planned. When I last updated on my reading in November I was up to 36 books. I've read at least four books since then, but did I read enough to get to 52?

Let's tally up the rest of my November and December reading and find out!

37) Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars. I've been getting back into Stephen King this year, after a stretch when I found his work kind of self-derivative and less entertaining than I had for the past couple of decades. The stories in this book, like the title suggests, tend to be a little on the darker side. They're definitely not happy endings, which may not be for everyone in the current circumstances, but I found them engaging and at least one of them is still sticking in my head this many weeks later.

38) Edgar Cantero's The Supernatural Enhancements. I remember this book getting a lot of fanfare when it came out, as groundbreaking and exciting. A man and his companion inherit an estate, which may be haunted, and may also be the meeting grounds of a secret society. The house is full of mysteries that they must unravel, which the author presents in the form of riddles, codes, and puzzles. I can see how people thought this was fun, but there has to be a clever story beneath the clever storytelling, and that didn't really happen here. When everything was said and done the actual plot was kind of dull, and I was reminded of that time someone told me that Special Topics in Calamity Physics was as good as The Secret History and it really, really wasn't.

39) Octavia Butler's Kindred. Before the pandemic I'd been at the used bookstore and realized that I hadn't read any of Butler's work since I was in college. I wanted to add more work by people of color to my reading, so I grabbed this and left it on my "unread books" shelves for a while. Oddly, the week after I decided to read it, Dolly Parton mentioned that it is one of her favorite books, so I guess Kindred was having a bit of a moment there. It's a really good book about a modern black woman who keeps being summoned through time to save her ancestor from death, with the complication being that she's being pulled to the antebellum South and the ancestor is white. He has enslaved her other ancestor, and she is forced to keep saving him so that he can father the child that she'll descend from. Butler doesn't shy away from the horror of the situation, and she gives it a realistic (within the circumstances) resolution when she could have given a more romanticized, expected one.

40) Tom Parker Bowles' The Year Of Eating Dangerously. I was halfway through this book before it occurred to me to read the author information on the jacket and realize the author was Camilla's son from her first marriage. I binged "The Crown" during the pandemic, so I was mildly surprised to realize I had a book vaguely connected to the royals here in my house this whole time. It's weird to read a book about travel during the pandemic, when we cannot (or at least should not) be out traveling. The author spends a year hopping around the globe eating food that is dangerous or taboo, or that is produced in dangerous settings. To his credit, he tries to temper the stunt eating with visits with locals and guides to also work in some of the culture and traditional cuisines of the places he visits, but most of this was just a long list of foods I won't ever eat.

41) Budd Schulberg's The Disenchanted. A fictionalization of F. Scott Fitzgerald's time in Hollywood at the end of his life, this story had me wishing, as I so often do when I read books about Fitzgerald rather than by Fitzgerald, that he would hurry up and die already. I love my imaginary literary husband very much, but the sloppy drunken self destruction is eventually overwhelming, and I just want it to end. I imagine Zelda and I had this in common. 

42) S.K. Tremayne's The Ice Twins. At first it seems like we're only dealing with one mystery in this book. Reeling from the loss of their daughter, a married couple and the surviving twin move to a remote Scottish island that they just inherited, hoping to rebuild their lives. As soon as they get there, their daughter starts telling them that she's the other twin, and that they held a funeral for the wrong one. Did they make a horrible mistake? And why is the husband so angry, and what's he hiding in his locked chest of drawers? And why does the wife have gaps in her memory? And is the dead twin a ghost back for revenge? This was a nice, tense read on the treadmill all the way up to the end, when the story falls apart completely and you're denied witnessing the actual climax.

43) Anna Kendrick's Scrappy Little Nobody. This was funny, and kept me from realizing that I was working out on the treadmill. It was a fun read that would probably also be good for a trip, if we can ever get on an airplane again.

44) E. Lockhart's Genuine Fraud. The basic premise here is "What if The Talented Mr. Ripley was bout women instead", but it's well written. The story unfolds in reverse, which made it pretty interesting, because it starts out seeming like one kind of book, and slowly unfolds into being a completely different one.

45) Rebecca Fishbein's Good Things Happen to People You Hate. A collection of essays billed as "hilarious", I found this entertaining, but wouldn't go quite as far as hilarious. There are some funny parts, but it's not a funny book.

46) Mariko Koike's The Graveyard Apartment. Why not round out the year of not being able to leave your homes with the story of a Japanese family that wants to leave theirs and may not be able to. They thought the apartment in the brand new high rise was a great place to grow into their lives and move past their marriage's dark beginnings, and sure, it's next door to a graveyard, but worrying about that is just superstitious nonsense, right? Nope. Not at all, actually, and the worse things in the building get the more it looks like they may never leave.

So, to wrap up the year, I ended up six books ahead of last year, but six books behind my goal.

Maybe in 2021 we can do better.

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.

Books and a Snack

"You must be reading so much during quarantine!"

Someone said this to me the other day, and I'm not sure that all of my friends get that "working from home" doesn't mean "laying around on my couch reading books". I am reading some, though, and the last time I counted up books for my year end tally was at the end of February, so here's everything I've read since then:

Movies (And Other Things) by Shea Serrano is a funny walk through a bunch of movies that Shea and I apparently have in common as favorites. Each chapter asks a question (Who had the worst death in "Kill Bill"? Did the Rockford Peaches make the right decision trading Kit? If all the high school movies were one movie, who would Regina George's friends be?) and then argues the way to the answer along with some funny illustrations. There are some thoughtful points here, and also some reminders that I should see some of these movies again if it's been too long since last time I did.

I like Robert R. McCammon, but Tales from Greystone Bay is too short. Each of the short stories here is a little interesting, but there are only three in the whole book, so I read it in less than a day. All three stories could have been fleshed out a little more, into novellas, and this would have been a lot better.

Harbor, by John Ajvide Lindquist, is an odd sort of horror story, starting out with an ordinary family and slowly building to ancient god-monsters, ghosts, human sacrifice, and destruction. In the middle of Scandinavian winter, Anders and Cecelia take their daughter, Maja, across the frozen channel to see the lighthouse. Somewhere on the way home, in clear weather and with their backs turned for only a second, Maja vanishes. Anders returns to the island a few years later, drunk and broken, and discovers that Maja isn't the only one to disappear from the village, but instead that one person disappears into the sea every year, and has for hundreds of years. There's also a weird subplot about a magic symbiotic insect that lets the host control water, which is the part of this that was really odd. This was marketed as horror, but not really scary or disturbing.

The Fortress at the End of Time, by Joe McDermott, was much more interesting. The entire novel is a long confession from Ronaldo Aldo, an Ensign from Earth stationed at the Citadel, the farthest human colony. Humanity is connected by the Ansible, a faster than light link that lets them transmit things and people along its length, sort of: patterns are sent along to Ansible and then assembled out of raw materials at the other end, so Aldo is actually a clone of Aldo, and if he gets promoted off of the Citadel, the Aldo sent to the next colony will be another clone, leaving the original and the Citadel clone behind. The Citadel is the last outpost of a century old galactic war, forever listening for the enemy's return, and Aldo will do anything to escape from it. As his confession unfolds, we find out exactly how much of anything.

Lev Grossman's Warp is a non-event. The story of Hollis, a recent college graduate still living near his school and struggling to force himself to get a job and become an adult, is like a worse version of "Catcher in the Rye", a feat I didn't think possible.

F. Paul Wilson's The Keep pits evil against evil in the Romanian alps of World War II. A garrison of Nazi soldiers is warned by the village not to spend the night in the Keep, the ancient fortress towering above them, but the soldiers pay them no mind. By the end of the first night, two soldiers are dead, and another dies each night, killed by an enemy that moves through shadows and drains them of blood. Trapped in the middle of the struggle, a Jewish professor of folklore and his daughter must decide whether to side with the evil of the supernatural or the evil of humanity without becoming monsters themselves.

Masked, a story collection edited by Lou Anders, is a fantastic set of superhero stories, written by some of the biggest names in the industry. Authors include Gail Simone, Bill Willingham, Mike Carey, Peter David, and more, and all of the characters are originals. There are some great stories in here, and the one that finishes the book was amazing.

Like I said at the beginning, though, reading isn't all I've been doing. I've also been sitting at my new desk a lot for work. Since my new desk is right next to my kitchen, a problem a lot of my friends are having (I'm not naming names, but one of my friends set up her work from home station on the second floor so that every time she contemplates getting a snack she has to decide if it's worth a trip up and down the stairs), I'm struggling with the idea of having snacks only feet away. I'm also trying to eat better in isolation, going lower carb and looking for healthy snacks, and I landed on nuts. I'm allergic to some kind of nuts, but I love peanuts and cashews. In perusing the nut selection at Kroger, though, I discovered that getting spiced, flavored nuts adds a dollar or two per can, and I can just do that myself for cheap.

So...

Homemade Spiced Nuts

1 egg white
2 cups nuts (unsalted or lightly salted)
1 tablespoon brown sugar (the recipe called for 3, but like I said I'm trying to cut back on carbs)
4 tablespoons total of spices

You can use whatever kind of spices you want. The recipe wanted oregano, thyme, parsley, and chili powder, but again, this is up to you and what you have in the cabinet. This time, I wanted something mustard based, and a lot of recipes pair mustard with cinnamon, so I went with dry mustard, cinnamon, nutmeg, and Chinese 5 spice:



Preheat your oven to 250 F.

Mix the egg white into the spices:



and then add the nuts and stir them around to get them really coated:



Spread your nuts out on a cookie sheet:



Bake for 15 minutes, then stir them around a little on the sheet (some of them might be stuck together, so break them up a little with the spatula), bake for 15 more minutes, stir again, then bake for 15 more minutes and take them out. They'll be hot and soft, so leave them alone on the cookie sheet for 15 more minutes, then put them into a container:



and you have homemade spiced nuts. The recipe said they will keep for 5 days as long as you keep a lid on your container, but these aren't going to last five days.

If you're wondering how mine turned out, they're good, but I can't taste the mustard at all, and it might have been a bit of a waste. They're still good, though, and I've been munching a handful every time I pass my desk even though they are supposed to be for work this week.

For the next batch, I'm thinking of going for an Indian sort of mix, with curry, ginger, and garam masala. That should be low key delicious.

All The Books I Read in January

It's February, which means I have to tally up all the books I read in January before they end up sitting in a big pile on an end table, waiting for the end of the year. I only made it through four books this month, but if I'm going to make it through a book a week this year then I'm right on track.

1) I started the month and, I guess, the year with politics. As the election approaches and the field of Democratic candidates narrows, I've read Mayo Pete's book, Kamala Harris' book, a book about Joe Biden, and now Elizabeth Warren's This Fight Is Our Fight. Warren does a good job of clearly defining the problems facing the American middle class, and lays out defined, logical policies for addressing them. Right now I'm planning to vote for her in the primary, and really hope that Harris gets a vice president nod from someone, or maybe becomes attorney general.

2) My parents got me Rainbow Rowell's Carry On for Christmas, and I enjoyed it, so I ordered the sequel, Wayward Son. It finds our heroes, Simon, Baz, and Penny in a road trip across America in a convertible, finding wild magic, dragons, vampires, monsters with goat heads, and maybe themselves? What does the hero do the summer after he fulfills his destiny?

I enjoyed this, but the end makes me want another sequel and it took a few years to get this one, so now I'm a little bit sad about it.

3) Stephen King's Elevation was a novella, rather than a novel, and probably would not have gotten full hardcover treatment if it came from a less established author. Scott is busy fighting with his neighbors, a married pair of lesbians who moved to town to open a struggling restaurant, over their dog pooping on his lawn. Scott is also, a few pounds at a time, becoming immune to the effects of gravity, a secret that he'll only be able to keep for so long as his scale slowly counts down to zero. This was an interesting character study, but really should have just been part of a larger collection.

4) On the last day of the month I finished Mike Pearl's The Day It Finally Happens. Pearl is a disaster thinker, and this book walks through a number of world-shaking scenarios: the day Saudi Arabia runs out of oil, the day the internet fails, the day we verify the existence of extraterrestrials, and even the day we build Jurassic Park, among other things. What was a little surprising is that even though Pearl is a worst-case thinker, he manages to sound rather optimistic and hopeful. Overall, he thinks we'll get through it.

So, like I said, I'm on track for reading in January. Let's try to keep it going in February or, possibly, maybe even get a little ahead.

Books 31-40: What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I'm sure this comes as no surprise to anyone who knows me, but the first thing I pack for any trip is books. I tend to pick out clothes the night before, but I start picking out books a week or two in advance, or sometimes even longer. If I'm driving, like I did on my vacation two weeks ago, I bring extra books, because then I have choices. When I'm flying I have to be careful, and a lot of times two to four books end up in my carryon because I worry about the weight of my checked baggage.

Anyway, this all means that at the end of my vacation I had a stack of completed books:



but before I got to them I had to finish Book #31: Matthew Bruccoli's exhaustingly comprehensive biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Some Epic Sort of Grandeur. I've been curious about Fitzgerald's life since I read Therese Anne Fowler's Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, which was based on Zelda's life, and I've had this book for a while, but was waiting for a time when I could devote myself to getting through it, because it's a giant book.

I'm not kidding. The paperback is over 2 inches think. If I lived in a Lifetime movie, I could bludgeon someone to death with this book.

That's why I said it was exhausting. Fitzgerald kept journals for his entire life, and Bruccoli does a fantastic job of combining them with letters, publishing files, other people's diaries and letters, and other contemporary sources to paint a full picture of what Fitzgerald was doing whenever anything he wrote was published, and how his ongoing changes of circumstance shaped his life. If someone taught a college class just on Fitzgerald, this biography would be the main textbook, but reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's entire life on a month by month basis from college to death was mentally draining.

At one point, close to the end, I posted, "I just want F. Scott Fitzgerald to die" on Facebook, and I meant it.

And then he did.

When I finally finished that, I wanted something light, so I went for some young adult fiction that looked interesting:

32) Karen M. McManus' One of Us is Lying. The premise of this mystery seems simple: five students enter detention alive, and four of them leave that way. Something happened in the room, but what? And why? I enjoyed this book a lot, even if I did figure out a few of the plot twists before they were revealed.

Bronwyn, Addie, and Cooper all say they were framed, and didn't do the identical thing they all got detention for: having a cell phone ring in class. Nate perpetually has detention, so his presence there isn't a surprise. And then there's Simon, a social outcast who runs an online gossip website at their high school. Lots of people hate Simon, and by the end of detention Simon has died from a severe allergic reaction. The questions start immediately: Why were all the epi-pens missing from the nurse's office? Who planted extra cell phones on the other four students? The questions intensify when the police discover that Simon was planning to publish stories about his four detention-mates the next day. Was one of them willing to kill to stop him? And are the others in danger now?

This was a fast read, but very engaging. I enjoyed it.

33) I didn't enjoy C.L. Hodges' As The Sun Smiles as much. I bought it because the author was one of our student staff members, and I wanted to be supportive, but the book feels disjointed and in need of better editing. There are interesting ideas here, but the execution could use some polish.

Part coming of age story and part dystopian glimpse of America's future, this is the short story of a family in present day Knoxville, and their struggle to survive as society collapses around them. It's very introspective, with the protagonist frequently ruminating on his place in the world and in his family, to the point that it often takes a backseat to the actual plot.

34) Fiona Davis' The Dollhouse is heavy on plot, with the narrative shifting back and forth from chapter to chapter between the present day, when journalist Rose Lewin becomes consumed with the life of her mysterious neighbor, Darby McLaughlin, in their condos in the former Barbizon Hotel for Women, and 1952, the year that Darby arrived at the Barbizon to become a secretary in New York City.

Pursuing the rumor that Darby was involved in a long ago fight where a hotel maid fell to her death, Rose begins crossing ethical lines as her own life disintegrates, digging deeper into Darby's past even as she loses her relationship, job, and home. Meanwhile, in 1952, Darby struggles to fit in among the hotel's other female guests, the secretaries, models, and editors who all want to make it in the Big Apple. When a maid befriends her, inviting her out to see the nightlife and all the excitement that the city has to offer, it feels like Darby's whole life is about to change, and it does, but not in ways she ever could have imagined.

This was an engaging, fascinating read, and a perfect book for summer.

35) Tim Johnston's Descent was also an engaging read, but I feel like it wrapped up a little too conveniently.

The Courtland family is on vacation in the Rocky Mountains, but when the kids, Caitlyn and Sean, go out for an early morning run only Sean comes back, badly injured by a truck. Caitlyn is gone, taken, the only trace of her a disconnected phone call to her father. As the family, the sheriff, and the town search for answers, the lives of everyone involved unravel under the stress, guilt, and loss.

This was a little bleak, and, like I said before, the ending seemed a little too convenient, but it was a decent read.

36) Amazon informs me that I purchased John Green and David Levithan's Will Grayson, Will Grayson in 2015. That I'm just now reading it in 2017 tells a horrible story about how many unread books there are on my "To Be Read" pile, doesn't it?

Will Grayson and Will Grayson don't know each other. They both live near Chicago, but they go to different schools, have different friends, and have different problems until the night that they meet by chance, and their lives are suddenly and rapidly intertwined. Before you know it, Will Grayson is dating Will Grayson's best friend, who is writing the most epic high school musical ever about his friendship with Will Grayson. There's laughter, tears, and lots of heart, and this is overall an amusing read for vacation.

37) F. Scott Fitzgerald's I'd Die For You is a collection of "lost" (according to the title; they all exist in the collections of his papers so I argue that "unpublished" would be a better word) stories.

There's been a lot of discussion in recent years about unpublished works of famous authors, centered mostly around Go Set A Watchman and, to a lesser degree, Summer Crossing, but the difference here is that these are stories Fitzgerald attempted to publish. Publishers just didn't buy them, or sent them back for revisions that he disagreed with. A lot of these are darker in tone than the short stories that Fitzgerald was known for, but a few of them could have benefited from the editorial changes suggested.

38) Emma Clines' The Girls tells a story the public almost feels like it knows: in a hot long ago 1960's summer in California, Evie, a confused, outcast teenager falls in with a group of older kids at a commune, where they live with their hypnotic leader, a spiritual guru. In the present day, an older but not necessarily wiser Evie reflects on that summer, and the horrific murders that ended it.

Rather than focus on the cult leader, Clines focuses on the women around him. They struggle for position, for survival, and in Evie's case to figure out their place in the world that they've built on their strange ranch. Does Evie belong there, or is she just visiting? As the summer ends, tensions build, friendships fray, and Evie finds herself on the road to a terrible act, unable to turn away.

This was a fast, intense read.

39) Earnest Cline's Armada also tells a story that the reader may think it already knows, introducing us to Zach Lightman, who has grown up among the geeky relics of his deceased father's science fiction addiction.

Zach has spent enough years playing video games to recognize the flying saucer that appears outside his high school one day, and then to recognize the government spaceship that comes to get him. They're both straight out of "Armada", the video game he plays for hours a day, and where he is one of the ten best players in the world. Now, Zach discovers that the aliens are real, and the video game is a training program for people to fight an interplanetary war. It's just like in that old movie Zach's father loved, and that's why Zach is both enthralled but also immediately suspicious. What's going on here? Why are these aliens attacking? And what does it have to do with the mysterious conspiracy Zach's father filled his notebooks with before his accidental death?

This was another fast, good read.

40) I started Howard Frank Mosher's North Country before my vacation was over, but it's taken me this long to finish it because I didn't really enjoy it. The story of Mosher's road trip along the entire length of the US-Canada border, I was hoping for something like Theroux's Deep South, but this book lacks the warmth or context of that one, and is instead a pretty straightforward point by point description of what Mosher encountered on the road.

Overall, my vacation picks for reading turned out pretty well.

The Month in Books: October

If I'd given October a little more thought, it would have been a great month to read ghost and monster stories in honor of Halloween. I didn't plan that far ahead, but I did end up spending the last half of the month in a state of "vampire madness", a condition I haven't suffered from since I read most of the Twilight saga back to back in 2010. Vampire Madness is the state of mind when you read books about vampires that slowly move from "just a little weird" to "batshit crazy" over the course of the series.

Before I fell into Vampire Madness, a state that I am half a book from getting out of, I read some other things. I also embarked on a major project regarding my books: getting rid of them.

I'm not getting rid of all of my books. There are sentimental books that I want to keep, but lately I've been looking around my apartment and wondering what I'm going to do with all these books. There are ten bookcases in my living room, stacks of books under all three end tables, a stack of books in the bedroom, a stack of books on the kitchen counter, a stack of books on the counters in both bathrooms... there are a lot of books in my apartment. I will reread some of them, but the rest? I just keep looking at them and wondering why I'm saving them. I'm not having kids. I don't have nieces or nephews. I don't have rare first editions or a valuable library that may sell well at an estate sale when I'm gone. With that in mind, I've been slowly evaluating and clearing out books this month, and anticipate that it will be a continuing project for a while. Eventually, it will have some definite benefits:

1) Fewer books in my house. Anything that makes me less of a hoarder has to be a good thing.

2) More books for me to read. Unless I'm giving them to someone specific or donating them to The Pride Center I take my books to McKay's for credit, which I can then use to buy more books, DVD's, and CD's. McKay's also has a donor bin for books they don't take, and people love picking things out of the free bin, so I'm still getting books out of the house and giving them to a stranger is better than throwing them away.

3) Eventually I will open enough shelf space to start putting my cookbooks on a shelf, rather than stacking them in multiple places around my apartment. This will let me use them more.

With all of that in mind, here are the books I read this month, and their final fates.

1) Erin Kelly's The Burning Air tells a story of revenge against the MacBride family. Privileged and comfortable, the three MacBride children were raised by their father, the headmaster of a private school, and their mother, a magistrate and social crusader. When they gather to spread their mother's ashes, together as a family for the first time since her death, the family immediately unravels as they discover a stranger in their midst and a master plan of revenge that someone has been waging against them for decades, convinced that their mother was a murderer who escaped justice, determined to right the wrong. Unfortunately for the reader, the twists and turns of the revenge plan turn out to be much more exciting and satisfying than the novel's conclusion, which seems rushed and falls a little flat.

I was so annoyed at the lack of actual revenge, and then dumb last minute "shocking twist" that I not only sent this book to McKay's but pulled both of her other books from my shelf and sent them, too.

2) Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls is the story of Harper, a killer of women who moves throughout time thanks to a House that opens onto different decades at will, and Kirby, the girl who survived a serial killer that no one else believes exists. Troubled and bitter after barely surviving her attack, Kirby and newsman Dan Velasquez are trying to track down a killer who shouldn't exist, chasing clues scattered across decades and women with no links between them except the man who killed them. Even if they find him, how do they stop him when he can step away into their past or their future? And how will they see him coming when he sets his sights on finishing what he started with Kirby? This book was tense, gripping, and a really good read.

I read it on my kindle, so nothing went to the bookstore.

3) Chris Beckett's Dark Eden introduces us to The Family, a collection of a few hundred people living on a faraway world known as Eden, a cold place of eternal night where they huddle in a village beneath the light and warmth of the Forest's glowing trees. Surrounding the Forest are the dark frozen wastes of the Snowy Dark, a place they never venture into as they wait for the travelers from Earth, a legendary planet of brightness, to return to them in boats that sailed the skies. John Redlantern is different, though. He wants to know what lies beyond Snowy Dark, and as food becomes scarce and the Family begins to fight among themselves, John will venture where none of them have gone before, and will learn the shocking truth about their world.

This started out interesting, but ultimately turned into "Lord of the Flies" in space. I probably will not pick up the sequel, and I took it to the bookstore.

4) Douglas Coupland continues to trick me in Generation A. I'm sure I've explained this before: once I read a Douglas Coupland book and really liked it, and I continue to read his books with the assumption that I will find another that I enjoy as much as that first one. Once again, it hasn't happened, and I had to force myself through this unsatisfying story of five strangers in the near future, who are all stung by bees long after bees are declared extinct.

I was so enraged at being tricked, once again, by Douglas Coupland that this book turned out to be the straw that broke the camel's back. I took all of the Douglas Coupland books on my shelf, including Girlfriend in a Coma, the one that I read once a really long time ago and enjoyed, to the used bookstore. Not only did this fill me with momentary joy (almost as much as when I threw Jonathan Franzen's books in the bag later in the month; I thought I understood the true meaning of Freedom when I finally turned the last page and escaped that dreary paper doorstop, but it turns out that turning a profit on getting that thing out of here was even more uplifting), but I also discovered that Coupland didn't even write one of the other books that I was counting in the "sometimes he's not terrible" pile. I love Dictator Style, but somehow it's escaped me for the past eight years that Coupland only wrote the introduction.

5) Is Bruce Wayne doing the most good possible by being Batman, or could he help Gotham City more in other ways? Is it morally wrong to turn your ward into a crimefighter? Is Batman really any different from the Joker, or are both compelled to follow their absolute truths? Is Batman more heroic than Superman? And can Batman and Superman ever have a friendship of equals? If you've ever wondered about these, or a dozen or so other philosophical questions about Batman, then you might enjoy reading Batman and Philosophy, in which twenty authors dissect the ethical, moral, and philosophical implications of Batman and his actions through the writings of history's greatest philosophical minds. For the most part, I enjoyed this, except for one chapter that asks, "Could Batman ever be the Joker?", walks us through a dozen or so densely written and sometimes confusing pages, and then says, "Well, we didn't even really need to ask because it happened in this issue."

I got this from McKay's and it went back to McKay's when I was done.

6) In Lexicon, Wil is on the run from a mysterious organization. Wil has seen something that has killed three thousand people, and somehow he's survived. He is the outlier, immune to the effects of glimpsing a forbidden word that drives people to murder everyone around them. Emily is a Poet, trained by the organization chasing Wil. She can use language to confuse, mislead, or outright control people, and she and Wil are now on a collision course. They may not survive, and the world may not, either. This was a good read, fast paced and sometimes surprising.

I've read some of Max Barry's other work and enjoyed it, and I enjoyed this, so for now his books remain in the apartment.

7) V. E. Schwab's Vicious introduces us to Victor and Eli. Ten years ago, they were college roommates working on their senior thesis projects, Victor's on the body's adrenaline response and Eli's on the aftereffects of near death experiences. When they get the idea to combine them, the results are immediate and catastrophic. Ten years later, Victor is a convicted criminal, rumored to be superpowered and considered extremely dangerous after escaping prison. Eli is a hero, lauded in the newspaper for stopping a bank robbery. Victor is coming for Eli, to settle old scores and new ones, to determine once and for all which of them is really the hero and which is really the villain. This was a fast read, but entertaining and at times rather tense.

I read this on my kindle, but would probably have sent it to the used bookstore even though I liked it.

And then... VAMPIRE MADNESS!

8) I thought "Twilight" was the most batshit insane vampire series I've ever read, but apparently that was only because I somehow forgot about reading Christopher Pike's "The Last Vampire" series when I was younger. Thirst: Book 2 finishes the reprint of the original six book series, with the three final books of Sita's story. For those who don't remember, the first three books introduced us to Sita, a five thousand year old blue eyed, blond vampire from India (she's ancient Aryan) who was the last vampire in the world, pursued by Yaksha, the first vampire and her creator. In the last book she fought Yaksha, went back to high school for some reason (why do vampires do this?), detonated a hydrogen bomb outside of Las Vegas, and the book ended when she used a mysterious alchemical process invented by her lover from the Dark Ages to change herself back into a human.

In this book, she gets impregnated by a ghost, gives birth to an Indian death goddess' human avatar, saves a reincarnated Baby Jesus from being eaten by lizard aliens, becomes an even more powerful vampire, then travels back in time to kill the first vampire before he can make any others, erasing herself from history. You'd think erasing herself from history would be the end, but no, there are somehow three more books after this one.

9) In Christopher Pike's Thirst 3: The Eternal Dawn it's been 15 years since Sita, the last vampire, went back in time and erased herself from history, except that it turns out she didn't! Like many time traveling vampire ladies, she telepathically commanded the author of her previous adventures, her friend Seymour, to believe that she was a figment of his imagination and that she'd erased herself, when in reality she went back in time to defeat alien lizard people working with the Moors to invade ninth century Europe through Sicily, and then she retired to a quiet life in an unspecified state to stalk Teri, the college athlete descendant of her daughter from before she became a vampire. After killing a rapist who is stalking Teri, Sita ingratiates herself into Teri's life, befriending her and Teri's sexy boyfriend, sexy Matt, who Sita cannot stop thinking sexy thoughts about even though she would never do anything to hurt Teri.

Meanwhile, Sita is being stalked by an evil corporation called the ICC, whose telepathic Array is letting them take over the world. Sita is also being stalked by an ancient race of Egyptian immortals, the enemies of the ICC. Both sides want to recruit her for reasons which are never specified, and their pursuit of Sita endangers her, Seymour, Teri, sexy Matt, all of humanity, and the reincarnated Jesus from the last book, who is now a video-game obsessed teenager. Can Sita protect herself and those she loves? And does sexy Matt hide a sexy secret? And, also, can Teri win gold in the Olympics because there isn't enough happening in this book already?

10) In Christopher Pike's Thirst Book4: The Shadow of Death, Sita and her friends are still fighting the mysterious IIC, the corporation bent on psychic manipulation and domination of the world's governments and financial markets, and the Telar, the race of Egyptian immortals determined to wipe out humanity with their genetically engineered supervirus plague that's also a toxic poison, because science works that way. At the same time, though, everything has changed! At the conclusion of the last book, Sita turned Teri into a vampire, but then Sita was killed... OR WAS SHE?

NOPE.

Teri died, but Sita is still alive in Teri's vampire body, because teenaged reincarnated Jesus stuck her in there for reasons! Some sort of mysterious reasons, because tennaged reincarnated video game playing Jesus works in mysterious ways. Now she has to continue the fight even though she is a newborn vampire and plagued by the thirst for blood for the first time in thousands of years. Also, she has to keep Sexy Matt from discovering that she's not really Teri, because she figured out that she and Sexy Matt can have sex now since he won't think he's cheating on Teri, and she gets right to the sexing even though the fate of the whole world is at stake. Now, can Sita use the IIC to destroy the Telar before the IIC betrays her? And even if it succeeds, can she also defeat the IIC? And keep Sexy Matt from discovering the unsexy truth? And also survive her trip to the Greek underworld? And defeat a surprise last minute villain: LUCIFER HIMSELF?

Despite this being marketed as the last final Last Vampire book, I'm currently halfway through the sequel, which has Sita fighting Nazis, Lucifer, a malevolent computer artificial intelligence, and her continuing sexy desires for sexy Matt.

Vampire Madness is real, and it's insane.

The Month in Books: September

Technically I should probably wait until tomorrow, the first day of October, to write up the month in books but I'm going out to dinner with friends tonight so I'm fairly confident that I won't be finishing another book by midnight. September turned out to be a pretty good month as far as reading goes, in that I've been walking on the treadmill most of the month instead of outside, and that means I've been finishing more books on the kindle. The treadmill may be the only time I use that thing, but it's getting a lot of use.

In order of completion, here are all the books I read in September, and what I thought about them:

1) I should have known when they marketed it with a tagline of "Hostage Girl returns snarkier than ever" that I would find Lexie Dunne's Supervillains Anonymous, the sequel to "Superheroes Anonymous", underwhelming. If all your book has going for it is a snarky narrator, and you're not really that amused or entertained by her (somewhat weak, actually) snark, then what else is there to recommend this? The plot picks up right where the last book left off, with the narrator framed for murder and thrown into supervillain prison, but even though this resolves all of the loose threads from the last book it reveals a glaring problem, too: Dunne didn't spend enough time worldbuilding in the first book. That means that all of the shocking reveals of who characters are and what their motivations are isn't all that shocking, because you had no idea those people existed or were important in the first place. I guess when you're writing about an entirely fictional universe there's a really fine line in how you put in the kind of exposition needed for worldbuilding, but if one of your plot's shocking twists is discovering that someone isn't dead, your readers should probably know that person was alive at some point and was important. So many things were revealed in this book that way that it almost felt like there was another prequel that I'd missed.

2) I have no idea how long Real Life at the White House has been sitting on my "unread books" pile, but the fact that it's out of print and that it chronicles all of the presidents but stops at Clinton suggests that it's maybe been a while. An account of daily life at the White House with a chapter for each presidential administration (starting with Washington, who started construction but never actually lived there), it was an interesting source of trivia but 400+ pages later I found myself unable to summon up enthusiasm for another discussion of rugs and wallpaper. This was comprehensive, but exhausting and ultimately tedious.

Random interesting facts:

-As a prisoner of war, Andrew Jackson once survived on acorns.

-George Washington oversaw the beginning of White House construction, but was the only president never to live in it.

-People who tell you that there are no political dynasties and inherited power structures in the United States are ill informed. The history of the presidents is riddled with cousins, fathers and sons, grandfathers and grandsons, and in-laws.

3) Beth Revis' Across the Universe introduces us to Amy, a young girl who gives up her life on Earth to be frozen with her parents and sent on a voyage of hundreds of years to another world. Someone activates Amy's compartment 50 years too early, though, and now she finds herself in the strange society of the ship, which carries not just the sleepers but also a live cargo of people, animals, and plants for the new world. At first Amy believes she was awakened by mistake, but as someone begins thawing other sleepers and letting them drown Amy realizes that someone tried to kill her, and that person is now trying to kill all of the sleepers. Now, with few allies in a society she doesn't understand, she has to figure out how to save the rest of the sleepers and herself.

I'm not sure who recommended this to me, but I figured out the main points of the plot about halfway through, so then it was just a matter of pushing myself to finish so I could see if I was right. There are sequels, but I'm not sure I'm interested enough to read them.

4) Claudia Gray's A Thousand Pieces of You was entertaining and a decent read at the same time. It follows the story of Marguerite, the daughter of twin scientists who have invented technology to allow people to move their minds through parallel dimensions. When her father is killed by one of his assistants, Marguerite and the other assistant, Theo, chase Paul through a succession of alternate universes to take revenge. Each time she uses the Firebird, Marguerite jumps into a new version of herself in a world that's both familiar and unfamiliar, chasing a Paul who may or may not be the one responsible for her father's death after all. Is Paul her enemy? Can she trust Theo? Or is her father's death part of a greater plan that spans multiple universes and endangers all of the Marguerites, everywhere?

I really enjoyed this. It can be a little "teen girl love story" at times, but there's some decent science fiction and a lot of really strong characters. I plan to pick up the sequel, or someone can someday pick it up for me since I stuck it on my wishlist so that I'd remember to buy it later.

5) In Daniel O'Malley's The Rook, Myfanwy Thomas awakens in the rain in a London park, surrounded by dead bodies wearing latex gloves, with no idea of who she is or how she got there. Following the clues in a letter in her jacket, she discovers that she left herself letters in every jacket that she owns, because she knew that she was going to lose her memory. In fact, her memory was taken from her when one of her coworkers in the Chequy, a secret government organization protecting the British Isles from supernatural threats, tried to assassinate her. Now, she's trying to do Myfanwy's job as a Rook of the Chequy with only letters and notes from her past self to guide her, while also trying to figure out who tried to kill her and why. This was a pretty enjoyable read, and was also surprisingly funny at times.

6) Jim Grimsley's Dream Boy isn't for the faint of heart. A quick story about unexpected teenaged love between Nathan, a new freshman, and Roy, his senior next door neighbor, it hides a simmering undercurrent of violence from within Nathan's abusive home and from the other boys at their school. Parts of this book were emotionally heartbreaking and parts were shockingly brutal, but it manages to end on a feeling of hope that may not actually be there. My feelings about the book are complicated, but I'm glad I read it. At the same time, though, I continue to be depressed about the perpetual theme in gay literature that being gay always ends up being tragic somehow. I may need to go back and read Boy Meets Boy until I feel better.

7) Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a fairy tale for adults, a story of wonder and magic but also of terror and consequences. Following a death, the narrator meets his neighbors, the occupants of a strange farm in the English countryside, and quickly discovers that they aren't quite what they seem and neither is the rest of the world. This was a fast read, but I enjoyed it.

8) Rich Benjamin's Searching for Whitopia takes us on a strange journey across the country to all of the tiny little outer suburban communities that are almost entirely white. These are almost all planned communities, affluent, conservative, and in almost every case swear that they are not racist. Benjamin visits the communities, lives in them, house hunts, joins their poker games and church groups, interviews their leaders, and studies who these people are and why they move there. The whole thing was fascinating, if a little dry in places. What struck me most about it was the number of people who claimed not to be racists, but just wanted to live with people just like them.

So, those are the eight books I read this month, which were mostly interesting but not very impactful.

Onward to October!