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?

All the books I read in March

 I didn't realize that I'd forgotten to write up the books I read in March until this morning when I finished a book and thought, "Why is that stack of books still on the coffee table?" 

Ooops.

I'm pleased to report that I am already way ahead for the year. To hit 52, I only need to read a book a week, four a month more or less, but at the end of February I was already at 11 books for the year and now I'm even further ahead, so I feel comfortable saying I've shaken off the slow reading slump I fell into at the beginning of the pandemic, and am back to a more normal speed for me. It bodes well for hitting my goal.

Anyway, here's how March went:

12/52 - Modelland, by Tyra Banks, is probably going to count as the worst book I read this year, and is honestly in the running for the worst book I've ever read. It's hard to pick out, specifically, what's wrong with it but in broad strokes the world-building is inconsistent, Banks can't decide what the tone of the book should be, and the plot is often just dull.

13/52 - Four Lost Cities, by Annalee Newitz, was fascinating, and I couldn't stop reading it. Newitz travels to four ancient cities, participating in archeological digs and interviewing the archeologists themselves, to tell the reader how the cities rose, how the common people in them lived, and how a city becomes "lost", if it really can at all. Travelling to Catalhuyuk, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia, Newitz explores why people began to live in cities and why they still do, and writes in a way that makes it fully accessible to non-archeologist readers. 

14/52 - I didn't realize that You Don't Own Me, by Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke, was part of a series, as it reads like a stand alone mystery. I'll definitely want to look for the others, though, because this was a sharp, quick, entertaining read. Laurie, producer of a true crime show, is investigating Kendra, widow of a murdered doctor. While Kendra is obviously keeping secrets, do they have anything to do with the man following Laurie who almost kills her? And if Kendra didn't kill her husband, who did? And what will they do to stop Laurie from finding out and broadcasting it to the world? Like I said, this was solid entertainment.

15/52 - Do You Dream of Terra Two?, by Temi Oh, is a long book, but a fast, absorbing science fiction story. Terra Two is an earth-like planet in a nearby solar system, and ten astronauts are going to leave on a 23 year mission to fly there and begin colonization for the waves of people who will come after them. Four are veterans of the space program and colonization of Mars, and six are teenagers who have trained for this mission for most of their lives. They think they're ready, but a tragedy just before launch casts a shadow over a mission that isn't going exactly as planned. Will they still reach Terra Two? And will they even want to? This book and "Four Lost Cities" are tied for best book I read this month.

16/52 - Ararat, by Christopher Golden, is a fast-reading horror novel. An earthquake on Mount Ararat opens a cave that's been sealed for thousands of years, and competing teams of archeologists rush to be the first inside to explore the wooden ship inside. Believing they've found the remains of Noah's Ark, the archeologists waste no time prying open the sarcophagus they find on the lowest level, but discover the mummy of horned, inhuman creature rather than a lost prophet. Now, as a storm descends on the mountain, the archeologists, their documentary crew, and a UN science team are trapped in a cave filled with secrets and something that wants to be sure they never leave. This was a fairly standard horror novel, and would probably be fine as a distraction for a trip or vacation.

17/52 - Admission, by Julie Buxbaum, is a novel about the recent College Admissions Scandal, and tells the story of the family of a former sitcom star who tries to buy her daughter's way into college and is totally not Lori Loughlin even though she totally is Lori Loughlin. This was well written, and asks some hard questions about wealth and privilege, but it's a little too sympathetic toward the perpetrators for my taste.

18/52 - Standard Hollywood Depravity, by Adam Christopher, is really more of a novella than a novel. It's another entry in his Ray Electromatic mystery series about the last robot in Los Angeles, who works both as a private detective and as an assassin for hire. Ray has arrived at a club in Hollywood to kill one of the dancers, but the club is full of gangsters and the dancer isn't who she seems. What else is going on, and can Ray turn it to his advantage, or will he find himself in over his head and out of batteries before he can wrap everything up? This was entertaining, but I think I read it in one sitting.

So, that's it for March. I thought I'd read eight books, but it turns out that I can't actually count.

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.

I Read a Bunch More Books

 It's been a while since I checked in, but I've used that time to read several books. Since I want to be able to do my traditional count at the end of the year (I did not fill out an excel sheet this year, but really should have because doing it in 2019 gave a lot of interesting data), it's time we caught up on what I've been reading.

Revival, by Stephen King - I've found some of King's newer work to be less enjoyable, but this is a good, solid return to a more classic sort of King novel with hard times, supernatural menace, but the real stars of the story being regular people in irregular situations. I read this fairly quickly, but mostly because it was good and I wanted to see what would happen.

Date Me, Bryson Keller, by Kevin van Whye - This was below my reading level, but cute and charming. Bryson Keller, popular senior, has agreed to a bet where he must date the first person who asks him out on Monday morning for a week at a time. Kai Sheridan didn't think the bet would apply to boys or that Bryson would say yes, but now they're dating for a week even though Bryson is straight and Kai is about to get his heart broken... but maybe not?

A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World, by C.A. Fletcher - This post-apocalypse novel is actually the last book I bought in a Barnes and Noble in the Before Time, back in February, so it was interesting to finally get around to reading it deep into social distancing. Griz lives with his family and his dogs on a remote island off the coast of the United Kingdom (maybe off of Scotland? I'm bad at UK geography) many years after the end of civilization. They sometimes interact with another family many islands away, but for the most part keep to themselves until the day a trader comes, and leaves with one of Griz' dogs. Chasing after him in one of the family boats, the thief leads Griz on a chase through the remains of our world and an unexpected final twist. The only thing I didn't like about this book was that the author leans heavily into a "serialized story" kind of writing, where every chapter ends with an ominous mention of something terrible coming up.

Strange Weather by Joe Hill - This was the first in a string of short story collections over the past couple of months. I enjoy Hill's writing, and these stories were pretty entertaining. My favorite was one about a sky diver who crashes onto the top of a UFO disguised as a cloud, but everything in this book was pretty good.

The October Boys by Adam Millard - A friend suggested this, but it wasn't that great. In 1988, four boys are out trick or treating when they are pursued by a rusty ice cream truck in the middle of the night, and only three of them make it home. 27 years later, they are seeing the truck and hearing its jingle again, and they know the Ice Cream Man is coming back. There was an interesting idea here, but it doesn't feel like an original idea, and the back quarter of the book jams in a lot of sudden backstory to flesh the whole thing out. This isn't a bad book, but I forgot pretty much everything about it as soon as I was finished, and just had to read the summary on Amazon to remember the basics of the plot.

Don't Look Behind You by Lois Duncan - Somehow I had this on my unread books shelf, so I plowed through it in about a day, if that. This story of a family in witness protection, pursued by a hitman, would probably make a pretty good Lifetime movie since the teenage daughter is a brat who repeatedly compromises them and endangers their lives through her tantrums, and Lifetime loves bad teenagers. 

Just After Sunset by Stephen King - Another King book, and another short story collection. There are 13 stories here, and while they're not all about the supernatural they are all disturbing in some way. Again, in classic King tradition, the real monsters tend to be regular people, but there are also some good old fashioned monster monsters, too. I enjoyed this collection. 

Halloween Season by Lucy Snyder - A collection of stories and poems related to Halloween (some of them only loosely), this book is short but impactful. If you're familiar with Snyder's work (you should be, if you like short horror stories), then some of these will feel a little thematically familiar, but the writing is good and the stories are entertaining. Snyder has a skill for doing a lot of world building in a short amount of space without it feeling forced, and it leads to some very interesting tales.

The Museum of Dr. Moses by Joyce Carol Oates - I wasn't kidding when I said I went on a little "short story collection" binge. There's definite tension in these stories, and they're well written. The title story was, to me, one of the least interesting in the book, but overall this was a nice, diverting read.

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley - I impulse bought this at the store because I had heard a lot of good things about it, and it turned out to be a good mystery. A group of old college friends gets together every year for New Year's, and this year the celebration is taking place at a remote Scottish lodge, deep in the woods. By the end of the first chapter one of them is dead, but this is a double mystery, in that you spend most of the book trying to figure out who died and trying to figure out who killed them. You're pretty far into the story, told in the present day and in flashbacks to three days before, before you even get a pronoun on the corpse, but this approach works well. There are plenty of people in here who maybe should be murdered, and plenty of reasons for murdering them.

I read some more books

Sometimes I think about January. Remember January? It might be hard since it was about 85 years ago for many of us, but I remember that it was a completely different world where I went out to eat and got in my car and drove places and made plans to get on airplanes and went to movies and plays in theatres (possibly in theaters, as I am never sure which word I should use), and generally things were very different. One of the things I swore to do in January was get back to regular blogging, but doing so implies a regular existence, and it turns out that one thing is kind of hard without the other.

I also haven't been reading as much as I usually do during the pandemic. I have read a few things since the last time I updated, though, and there's very little else going on in lockdown (even though we're not officially in lockdown anymore; I'm just still staying home as a high risk person), so let's talk about the things I've read since the last time I talked about the things I've read, shall we?

I've always liked Dominick Dunne's books, so I read Robert Hofler's Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne thinking, "Oh, this will tell me more about his life while he was writing various things, and will offer insight," and it kind of did. It also told me, repeatedly, that Dominick Dunne had gay sex. A lot of gay sex. All the time. So much gay sex that Hofler seemed compelled to include as much of it as he could, even in places where including it was odd. You'd just be reading about him moving to a new city and buying a new apartment, and then all of a sudden it's like, "Dunne got a vintage designer living room set for the space at a Sotheby's auction, and then later wrote in his diary about doing lines of coke off of a male hooker's back before getting railed on the ottoman. He had lunch with Faye Dunaway the next day, and only ordered a salad." I know Dunne was gay, and I know that repressing that shaped his life and the way he wrote about some people, but wow, there was a lot of sex in this biography. As I said to a friend while reading it, "This biography of Dominick Dunne reads like a book by Dominick Dunne," and maybe that was the point.

I was picking over my "unread books" shelf and thought, "I've had this copy of Peter Straub's In The Night Room for a while. Maybe I should read it." As it turns out, based on the receipt I found tucked in the front cover, "for a while" means I bought this book 14 years ago in 2006, when I still lived in Albany. Talk about the world being very different... Anyway, I got kind of bored reading this. There are Peter Straub books that I like and immediately get into reading, and there are Peter Straub books that feel like I was assigned them for a class I don't want to be in, and this was definitely the second kind. Even the twist, which I should have found interesting, just landed kind of flat.

On the other hand, maybe I couldn't get through that book because I knew that Stephenie Meyer's Midnight Sun was waiting patiently for me on the coffee table, and I couldn't wait to throw myself back into the world of vampire insanity. Let me tell you: everything you hated while you were hate-reading the entire Twilight saga (except "Good and Evil", which we are apparently all politely ignoring based on the back of the book:



) is still here for you to hate, but also... THERE'S EVEN MORE! I'm going to just split this out into some highlights:

1) There's still no reason why Edward and Bella fall in love. If you remember reading the original and thinking, "Why does she just suddenly love him?", then wait until you read this story from Edward's point of view and find out that he doesn't know either. They just meet in biology class and they're in love, and that's it.

2) Edward really hates Mike and Jessica. Like, a lot. He hates them so much that his mental monologue sounds like Joe thinking about Peach Salinger on You. I don't remember if he ever mentioned to Bella in the original series how much venomous bile (not to be confused with the venom that constantly floods his mouth around Bella because they're in love) he has for those two, but he hates them to a level that even I, a person who checks my high school yearbooks to see if someone has a black X over their face before I accept friend requests, was amused and concerned. 95% of this book is really about how Edward, a 100 year old man deeply in love with a literal child, needs pyschological help way more than he needs a girlfriend.

3) Bella smells so good, intoxicatingly good, to Edward, but he never tells us exactly what that smell is like even though he mentions it on every page, sometimes multiple times on the same page. Since he's a vampire and he's smelling her blood, is it food based? Like she smells like maple syrup? Merlot? Buttercream (my all time favorite discontinued Yankee Candle scent)? We'll never know. We'll just know she smells. Also, because he's smelling her blood and is suddenly in love with her, all I can think about every time he says it is Margaret White ranting to Carrie about, "First comes the blood, then the boys, comin' for that smell! To find out what that smell is!" and I doubt that's the feeling Meyer was going for.

4) The cover design is terrible. I get the whole pomegranate metaphor (if I didn't, Edward spells it out in literal terms in the story, because that's the reading level these books are designed for), but it's visually unattractive. The front of the book is not appealing. In short, this already deeply flawed "romance" is not improved by knowing what Edward was thinking the whole time.

I wanted a palate cleanser from garbage, so after the Twilight book I read Mitch Landrieu's In The Shadow of Statues, which seemed especially fitting in light of recent events. Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans and lieutenant governor of Louisianna, talks about his lifelong journey toward understanding racism and his part in it, culminating in his long and ultimately successful battle to remove Confederate monuments from the streets of New Orleans. He also talks a lot about Hurrican Katrina and the aftermath, which opens a discussion about racism and classism in politics, and how the two are almost always linked. This was an interesting read.

I wrapped up my recent reading with Maria Sherman's Larger Than Life, a fun history of boy bands from the 1950s up until now, which my friend Kristin sent me. A breezy, entertaining read, there actually is a lot of history of the music business in here, some fashion and marketing critique, and an interesting discussion about how product consumed mostly by young women is viewed by society. I liked this a lot, too.

Now I'm halfway through a Stephen King book, because my friend Jackie went on a Stephen King kick, so I guess I'll be writing about that eventually.