Happy October! My September reading spanned the gamut from five stars (which I bestow rarely) to two stars, which is the lowest rating I ever give books (if something is bad enough to be a one-star read for me, I just DNF it). I have many Thoughts and Opinions, so let's get into the mini reviews!
All covers are linked to Goodreads.
Fantasy/Sci-Fi Reading Challenge: A Fantasy/Sci-Fi Book that Takes Place in a School
The School for Good and Evil, by Soman Chainani
★★★
Genre: Middle Grade Fantasy
"Two best friends have been chosen to be students at the fabled School for Good and Evil, where ordinary boys and girls are trained to be fairy-tale heroes and villains. One will train for Good, one will become Evil's new hope. Each thinks they know where they belong, but when they are swept into the Endless Woods, they're switched into the opposite schools. Together they'll discover who they really are and what they are capable of, because the only way out of a fairy tale . . . is to live through it." (From Goodreads)
I went into this thinking I wasn't going to like it. In the middle, I thought I was going to end up loving it. Now, after finishing it, I'm just ... confused. What ... happened?!?
So, it was very creative. I liked that. It felt (aesthetically) like a mashup of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Into the Woods. I really liked Agatha's character arc. Sophie's just left me, as I said, confused. Was she Good? Was she Evil? What was the central message of the book? Was it that Evil can reform and Good can be corrupted? What the heck was all that with the School Master at the end?? And the whole "who needs princes anyway" attitude shift at the end felt very sudden, as Tedros had been quite central to much of the plot up to that point.
Writing-wise, the author jumped between students' perspectives from chapter to chapter and even paragraph to paragraph, which annoyed me. It was also hard to visualize what was happening sometimes.
Unfortunately, the story didn't feel coherent to me and I'm not sure I'll continue with the series.
(Side note: My husband and I tried to watch the Netflix movie based off of the book, but, in our humble opinion, it was so awful–bad acting, bad atmosphere, bad CGI–that we gave up after 20 minutes and watched My Neighbor Totoro instead, which we liked much better.)
Mood Reads
Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
★★★★★
Genre: YA Dystopian
"Sparks are igniting. Flames are spreading. And the Capitol wants revenge. In Catching Fire, the second novel of the Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins continues the story of Katniss Everdeen, testing her more than ever before . . . and surprising readers at every turn." (From Goodreads)
HOW WAS THIS EVEN BETTER THAN BOOK 1?! Honestly, it was probably because I already knew a lot of the major plot beats of Book 1, but I was experiencing Book 2 for the first time. I don't think I was even reading for the last quarter of the book, I simply inhaled it. Katniss and Finnick's banter made me laugh, and the arena was just brilliant.
Neverseen, by Shannon Messenger
★★★★
Genre: MG Fantasy
"Sophie Foster is on the run—but at least she's not alone. Her closest friends from the Lost Cities have gone with her to join the Black Swan. They still have doubts about the shadowy organization, but the only way to find answers is to start working with them. And as they settle into their new lives, they uncover secrets far bigger than anything they’d imagined. But their enemies are far from done, and unleash a terrifying plague that threatens the safety of an entire species. Sophie and her friends fight with everything they have—with new allies joining them—but every choice has consequences. And trusting the wrong person could prove deadly." (From Goodreads)
I love how the world building and characters keep developing in this series! I liked the philosophize-y bits in this particular book too.
Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles
★★★.5
Genre: Historical Fiction
"On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society—where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve." (From Goodreads)
I really enjoy Amor Towles' writing. I wonder if this would be better on the second reading.
We Were Liars, by E. Lockhart
★★★★
Genre: YA Mystery/Thriller
"A beautiful and distinguished family. A private island. A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy. A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive. A revolution. An accident. A secret. Lies upon lies. True love. The truth. Read it. And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE." (From Goodreads)
Cadence was the best unreliable narrator I've encountered for a long while–probably since reading Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I devoured this story, which blends fast-paced prose with snippets of verse, in two days. I literally gasped out loud at the end.
National Hispanic Heritage Month
The Cemetery of Untold Stories, by Julia Alvarez
★★★★
Genre: Fiction
"Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories , doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma’s characters unspool their secret tales. Among them: Bienvenida, the abandoned second wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States. The characters defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories." (From Goodreads)
I love how this book wove together elements from Julia Alvarez's own life (I'm thinking particularly of her Scheherazade Project, although of course there is the motif of the four sisters that all her books have) with Dominican history, and then wove together the characters within their own world as well–Filomena's connection with Manuel, Manuel's connection with Bienvenida, etc. "Quiet richness" are the words coming to mind to describe this book.
Nonfiction
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, by Michael Pollan
★★★★
Genre: Nonfiction
"In Cooked, Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements - fire, water, air, and earth - to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer. In the course of his journey, he discovers that the cook occupies a special place in the world, standing squarely between nature and culture. Both realms are transformed by cooking, and so, in the process, is the cook." (From Goodreads)
I really enjoy Michael Pollan's writing style, and I think Cooked was my favorite of his books that I've read (I've also read The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food). This was meticulously researched, evenly balanced between science and anecdotes from his time learning about the four elements/types of cooking he covers in the book, and absolutely fascinating. I will just say, though, that it baffles me how someone who knows so much about the Bible can be so agnostic/atheistic (I know they're different, I just can't figure out which one he is).
My favorite quote from the book was: “It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to be able to do one thing at a time, one thing to which you give yourself wholeheartedly. Unitasking.”
Paper TBR
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
★★
Genre: Classic
"Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them." (From Goodreads)
The storyline was boring, the characters were unlikable, and I'm not Catholic, so the whole point of the book was kind of lost on me. Plus, the casual racism sprinkled in here and there made my blood boil. As did Charles going, "I felt much better about cheating on my wife after I found out she was cheating on me too."
Questions I had that did not get answered: why did everyone hate Lady Marchmain? Why did everyone love Charles? Why did Sebastian hate his whole family to the point of becoming an alcoholic? Everything about the Flytes was very dark and mysterious at the beginning, but Waugh didn't deliver on his foreshadowing, imo. They just turned out to be a plain old messed-up family. And why was Rex only partially a person?? Julia kept saying, "He isn't really a man at all", and I never understood what she meant.
*DON'T READ THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU CARE ABOUT SPOILERS, WHICH, WHY WOULD YOU SINCE YOU REALLY SHOULDN'T WASTE YOUR TIME ON THIS BOOK* I really thought Julia showed some promise, but she broke up with Charles at the end not because their being together was morally wrong, exactly, but because she thought by breaking up with him she could somehow redeem herself from the wrongness she had already committed. She says something like, "If I give up this one thing I want so much [i.e. marrying Charles], God may relent", or "there's some hope for me after all", and her belief in works-based salvation is disappointingly revealed. She is, essentially, trying to get back into God's good graces by punishing herself. *END OF SPOILERS, SUCH AS THEY ARE*
I saved the narrator for last because he isn't Waugh's fault: he was difficult to hear, didn't make a huge effort to enunciate, and occasionally let loose such a sharp and sibilant "s" that I flinched. He couldn't do accents to save his life, and listening to him try to read Rex's Canadian accent was especially hilarious, because he had to pause and gather himself to attempt it every time Rex spoke.
The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom
★★★★★
Genre: Memoir
"Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker who became a heroine of the Resistance, a survivor of Hitler's concentration camps, and one of the most remarkable evangelists of the twentieth century. In World War II she and her family risked their lives to help Jews and underground workers escape from the Nazis, and for their work they were tested in the infamous Nazi death camps. Only Corrie among her family survived to tell the story of how faith ultimately triumphs over evil." (From Goodreads)
Have you ever put off reading a book for years for the sole reason that everyone talks about it? That was me with The Hiding Place. As it turns out, people talk about this book for a reason. Everyone should read it. Christians will benefit from the ten Booms' incredible faith, and even non-Christians, I hope, can gain a deeper sense of love. This book is truly life-changing.
Reading Challenge Updates
Organized challenges I'm participating in:
2025 Cover Lovers Reading Challenge - 2 books
Fantasy/Sci-Fi Reading Challenge - 1 book
2025 New Release Challenge - 0 books
Personal challenges:
Books I Didn't Get to Last Year - 2 books
National Month - 1 book
Middle Grade - 2 books
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