I don't "believe" in "astrology," but nevertheless I am delighted that those who do have assigned me an astrological excuse for all my favorite traits: stubbornness, resistance to change, love of comfort (often food-based), and something called "earthiness" that honestly is meaningless but sounds nice. This month, which included both my birthday (making me a Taurus) and most of whatever "Taurus season" is, also included a lot of the above traits in book-form. Specifically, this was a month full of:
Stubbornness: I carried around Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart for basically all of May, including nine days in Greece, unable to really make myself keep reading it because it's boring, and also unable to just give up. The only time I quit a book is when the three-month renewal period at the library runs out.
Resistance to change: Is this the same thing as stubbornness? Take it up with your local astrologer! I re-read more books this month than I usually do (two Captive Prince books--see below--plus Howard's End and Brat Farrar.) I also resisted changing my opinion about Casey McQuiston's Red, White and Royal Blue, an extremely hyped sort of YA/Romance hybrid paperback summer beach read, which I decided long ago out of probably mostly spite (all that hype!!) would not be good, and which ended up being not actually "bad" at all, but also definitely flawed. Relieved, I grabbed onto those flaws as handholds against change. How DARE you ask me to modify a deeply-held opinion just because I "hadn't read the book yet."
Comfort books: I finished the re-reading the second two books in the Captive Prince trilogy for maybe the... eighteenth? time. When a cliff-hanger-filled series is published serially online chapter by chapter over the course of five years, you re-read it a lot, looking for clues you can discuss with all your online friends. Harry Potter trivia who? Ask me ANYTHING about these books, I dare you. I also, while sick with a fever and some kind of chest mucus/alien infestation in Greece, read David Baldacci's Absolute Power, a junk-heap of a book that was deeply comforting in its uber-mediocrity.
"Earthiness": I did read Anna Karenina, in between all my comfort junk and paperback beach reads, and it was very good but also even if I'd hated 99% of it, I would still have loved it--just for those pages of Levin in the fields, mowing with the peasants. Russia is not Greece, but to read that scene while surrounded by the bloom of spring on Rhodes, trees and flowers I'd never seen before, hills covered in olive trees, was lovely--I felt something of Levin's awed and wonderful immersion in the landscape.
Anyway, on to the actual reviews! I read 10 books this month, so I'm finally trending back up after April's 9. Being on vacation for ten days out of the month may have helped.
May Book Reviews
49. Prince's Gambit, C.S. Pacat [*****]
50. Kings Rising, C.S. Pacat [*****]
The final two books in my favorite it-came-from-the-Internet trilogy, these books--particularly Prince's Gambit--are where the series takes flight and becomes something genuinely deft and even, often, stunning. Pacat is a big fan of Dorothy Dunnett (an author I'm planning to re-read soon myself, stay tuned!) and this trilogy is her homage to Dunnett's work: to her intricate, layered, slowly revelatory plots and her cool, antagonistic, impossibly brilliant and twisty heroes. Pacat's trilogy is a lighter version of Dunnett's (almost impossibly) dense tapestries, but Pacat adds romance to clever plot and convincing character, giving us, in the end, one of the very best examples of the enemies-to-lovers genre I've ever read anywhere--a romance as complex and twisting as the books' political plot, as breathtakingly impossible as its rooftop chases, as heart-pounding as its battles. Even a slightly disappointing wrap-up to part of the narrative, in the final act, can't erase the triumph I feel every time I finish this series.
51. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy [*****]What can I say about Anna Karenina here, in my monthly Tinyletter, that feels like it would even matter? Books like this are bigger than my opinion of them, of course. But for what it's worth: I didn't expect this book to be so funny, or that I would be turning pages as quickly as I could, my heart racing, worried that a character I'd come to love might be in danger. I didn't expect anything, really--I honestly didn't even know how the book would end. And I certainly didn't expect it to, if not fly by, then at least trot past so easily: a story I kept wanting to hear more of, dotted with moments of brilliant resonance that made me slow my devouring pace so that I could savor them.
52. Absolute Power, David Baldacci [**]
I read this while sick and slightly homesick in Greece, and nothing was more comforting in its bloated, nonsensical American-ness: a burglar sees the President of the United States commit a sex murder, and then has to go on the run from the corrupt Secret Service, helped only by his daughter's ex-boyfriend, a lawyer named Jack. There is nothing more American than lawyers named Jack, particularly when they used to play college football and are better, at heart, than the corporate jobs they perform for massive sums of money. This book would have been three stars if not for its ending, which was even stupider and more half-hearted than the rest of the plot. But I'm glad I read it: sometimes you just need to mainline some pure USA trash and you can't let yourself apologize for it, like the time I ate at McDonald's three times during a two-day trip to Florence in 2009.
53. Howard's End, E.M. Forster [****]
I spent the first few chapters trying to remember if I'd read this book before, and it turned out that I had--turns out that, for much of the beginning, it's hard to tell this book's slow, atmospheric, melancholically British meditation on class from the other hundreds of books that could be described in that exact same way. The plot eventually picks up, though, and then it threatens to disappoint you just before it takes one final turn: a sudden opening, a turn towards generosity and goodness that I didn't see coming. It was lovely, not to remember, and to be surprised into joy all over again.
54. Brat Farrar, Josephine Tey [****]
I had memories of this, another re-read, as one of the best mysteries I'd ever read. It may be one of the best first-time-read mysteries ever, but it relies very heavily on a single, unfortunately memorable plot twist, and therefore seemed disappointingly predictable to me this time around. Even averaging out both reading experiences, though, this is a good book. It scratches all those British Mystery itches you (I) might have, and it's also more than just a mystery--there's a sweet story in there about family and belonging, plus more than enough loving descriptions of horses and wide-open fields to get any current or former Horse Girl's heart pounding. If you've never read it and you're a mystery fan, though, run don't walk, and tell me if my original first impression--adrenaline and awe--was correct.
55. Red, White, and Royal Blue, Casey McQuiston [***]
A very hyped, very popular m/m "new Adult" romance that will probably be making an appearance on beach towels across America this summer, and also my problematic rating of the month. I initially hyped myself up to love this book, a fun comedic love story about the First Son and the Prince of England, and then I over-hyped myself and suffered from self-induced overexposure and decided I would hate it and it would be terrible, and then I actually read the book and... I enjoyed it. I didn't love it. It almost reads as if it couldn't decide what to be--"enemies to lovers" or a coming-out story about an established relationship? a cartoonish, Parks and Rec-inspired vision of a Better Political World, or a thoughtful critique of the legacies of imperialism inherent in a story about the British monarchy? a pop culture-referencing, meme-filled YA novel or a timeless, sweeping story of adult love?
But I also didn't hate this book! How could I? It's well-written and sweet, a fun read that flew by, and even if parts of it nagged at me because I thought they could have been more or better, I'm truly glad that a (sort of? does a one-off joke about waterboarding have a place in a light-hearted book?) light-hearted queer romance is doing so well as a mainstream publication. I'm hoping it's opened the door for future books I'll really fall in love with.
56. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen [***]
God, I don't even know! I was so bored by this book--deeply, deeply, bored--and yet I think it might have been good? Did I just not have the patience for this, another slow, atmospheric, melancholically British meditation on class so soon after Howard's End? Perhaps. I had to drag myself through this story about a young girl living with her estranged brother and his stylish wife in London, and yet about two-thirds of the way through that dragging I stumbled on a passage that took my breath away. There was a sudden clear moment of truth, a vivid little descriptive nugget that captured a very particular scenario of youthful heartbreak (no spoilers!) so perfectly that I suddenly wondered if maybe the whole book was good, even brilliant. I actually think it might be--but I don't know. I don't have the strength to read it again and see.
57. The Bird King, G. Willow Wilson [****]
There was a whole lot to love in this book, a historical fantasy about a concubine and a map-maker set in Muslim Granada at the start of the inquisition. Aside from all of the good things it does with representation, I thought that this novel's explanation of its central character's enslavement was brilliant, one of the very best I have ever read: fondness for the woman who's raised her side-by-side with a violent desire to kill the same woman, who is her owner; desire for the king side-by-side with hatred for what he does to her; a longing to be free at any cost and for any price, even if it means being hungry and in danger and lost, that never dims.
I also really loved the central love story in this novel, which is both romantic and not--the love between the female protagonist and her best friend, the map-maker, a gay man. It's fiercer than mere friendship, and it felt different than any love story I've read before, and maybe truer. The plot in this book is not quite robust enough to live up to the weight of that love. But it doesn't really matter--it's more of a fairy-tale than a fantasy, anyway, a slim concoction of a plot that's just enough to tie together what it's telling you about human nature.
58. Spring, Ali Smith [****]
The third in a strange and strangely compelling quartet that, with each newly-released book, feels more impossibly current, as though Ali Smith sits down on Monday to read the paper and turns in a new novel by Wednesday at the latest. It's hard to really describe these books, and sometimes hard to understand what's actually happening in them. Still, I've come to like them more and more with each installment, and to look forward to the way they weave together history and literature and art and music and current events and the particular syntax of racist YouTube comments, the way they tell stories that are joyous and hopeful and crushing and depressing and defeatist, how they seem too subtle to ever understand and too obvious to even count as good literature--and then the moments when all of those things overlap in a perfect collage and, even if only for a few pages, the book makes brilliant sense. A brief revelation, as though suddenly you can really understand our world. That's why, you think, and then another page and it dissolves again into something difficult or pretentious or even silly--but the sense that maybe there is something true at the heart of all of it stays.