Anika’s Comments (group member since Dec 25, 2011)

Anika’s comments from the Reading with Style group.

20.10 Asia

Go: A Coming of Age Novel by Kazuki Kaneshiro

3.5/5 I like any book that teaches me something I didn’t know before picking it up (like: racism in Japan?! I don’t know why I’d always been under the impression that they had escaped that particular human ill—silly me, no one is immune—but was blown away to see how real and deeply-ingrained it is to this day) or reframes a topic I’m familiar with (immigration, what it means to be part of a country or people, the artificial creation of a divide) or says something beautiful about something we all know (in this case, for me, it was love...there’s a bit about a retirement home for service animals that tore me in two). It was violent and fast and confusing at times, but it worked for me in the end. Though, speaking of endings, this one was a little too “happily ever after” for my taste...but it really did need a silver lining after some pretty bleak moments leading up to it. It was a quick read and had some interesting philosophical veins...I’m glad I read it.

+20 (set 100% in Japan)
+10 LiT
+10 Review
+5 Combo (10.8)

Task total: 45
Season total: 185

10.8 Megafinish

The Greatest Love Story Ever Told by Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman

I've been on hold for this one for *months*! I didn't particularly plan on using it this season, as it's basically useless as far as points go, but I only got a two-week checkout and didn't want to wait another few months on hold.
This book was charming. I've only seen a few episodes of shows in which they've appeared and don't consider myself a fan, but I've heard them speak as actors (as opposed to characters) and was always impressed. As was repeatedly recommended in the comments left on the goodreads page for this book, I got the audiobook. It was a conversation between two people who love and respect each other. They tell their meet cute and about their low-key wedding day. They talk about how they make their 18-year marriage work with all of the other things pulling them every which direction. They talk about the families they grew up in, about their love of reading and jigsaw puzzles and gelato. They talk about pursuing your passion and creativity. They talk about attraction and sex and the whole first half is peppered with junior-high-level body part references, which was hilarious coming out of the mouth of a 60-year-old woman and 48-year-old man.
The thing that struck me most was how very devoted to each other they are. It was so nice to hear, not just from two people in Hollywood but from two people >period<.
It wasn't a groundbreaking work by any means, but it was a fun listen. And I love that they like to listen to audiobooks while assembling jigsaw puzzles. My kind of people.

+10 Task
+10 Review

Task total: 20
Season total: 140

15.3 AbC

U.K.--T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry

The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos by Anne Carson

+15 Task

Task total: 15
Season total: 120

20.9 True Crime

Picture Perfect: The Jodi Arias Story by Shanna Hogan

I've become a fan of true crime in the past five or so years (thanks to my husband's love of the genre). While I've read a couple of books (Ann Rule...well, she rules), we mostly watch true crime documentaries or listen to podcasts. I was excited to see this task to try out a new (to me) author in the genre. I wasn't familiar with the case (it all went down in the years I was living alone and didn't own a tv), though I had heard Jodi Arias's name and knew she had murdered someone.
While I liked the structure of the novel (thrown into the crime scene, followed by backstory, jump to the investigation and trial, epilogue in the author's voice), that was about all I liked.
I kinda hated the victim. NO ONE deserves to be killed in such a grisly, senseless manner but *GOOD NIGHT* he was awful! The author reiterated how great he was and how motivational, how he'd overcome the awful circumstances of his birth and became a great success, how he was so religious and moral...yet he was "successful" in what sounds like a Ponzi scheme, he repeatedly betrayed his religion and cheated on the various girls he was dating, and then the big one: he poked the beast and thought there would be no repercussions. He knew she was crazy--he would call her a sociopath to her face, he would insult her at every turn (then text her to come over for a booty call), everyone who knew her told him he should be careful yet, just like the kid who thinks the lion in the zoo is soooo cute he climbs over the barricade to pet it and inevitably gets mauled, he "poked" her one too many times until crazy did what crazy does and she offed him. I repeat, though: NO ONE deserves to be shot/stabbed/near-decapitated for simply being a jackass. Just cuz I didn't like the guy doesn't mean I'm condoning what she did to him.
And she did do it. No questions. No matter how many lies she tells or how many different stories she weaves.
Anyway. I gave this one two little tiny stars. The writing was far too subjective in my opinion. I feel like true crime should be more like reporting--it should be objective, fact-based, and written clearly and concisely enough that sentence structure and syntax don't become distracting to the reader. This one failed on all three counts.
It was well-researched and thorough, thus the two stars rather than one.

+20 Task
+10 Review
+5 Combo (10.3)

Task total: 35
Season total: 105

20.1 Moll Flanders

Margot by Jillian Cantor

It's been a loooong time since I've last read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank; I'd entirely forgotten that she had a sister. When I tried to find anything about her on the internet, I found a few school pictures and no information other than what one would find in Frank's diary. This book takes someone who is in plain sight (considering Anne Frank's diary was the 10th best-selling book in the WORLD, according to a 2012 statistic) yet somehow still hidden and gives her a voice.

Margot Frank died in Bergen-Belsen, a couple of days before her famous sister. In this book, Jillian Cantor saves her: she jumps from the train and survives, making her way to Philadelphia to start a new life as Margie Franklin.
This is one of the best revisionist-histories I've ever read, everything seems possible, viable, something you wish could have been reality. It was slowly paced, sometimes claustrophobic, very internal and introspective--it felt like the mirror image of The Diary of a Young Girl, complete with the expulsion from the hidden place at the end.
Margot/Margie was entirely believable as a survivor: harboring hope that others she loved had made it, too; experiencing survivor's guilt (most specifically in regards to her sister); feeling the need to stay hidden in order to remain safe.
I like that the book is set when the movie The Diary of Anne Frank was released: her sister becomes very much an active character and someone she has to confront, despite the fact that she is long-departed.
Sometimes it felt repetitive, the same flashbacks over and over with a few more details revealed each time. I know that's how memory work and I recognize it's a device to lay the groundwork for the reader, delivering additional information piecemeal, but sometimes it bogged things down for me. That is the only reason this is getting 4.5 stars from me. Otherwise, it was a compelling, quick read. Definitely recommended.

+20 Task
+10 Review
+10 Combo (10.8; 10.9)

Task total: 40
Season total: 70

Thank you for the quick responses, ladies! You guys rock.

Would Margot by Jillian Cantor work for this one? It's the story of Margot Frank, Anne Frank's sister...it imagines that she escaped from the train to Bergen-Belsen and was able to eventually make it to the U.S. and this is her story of life after the war.
Does it work as a "fictionalized biography" because it creates a future for an actual young woman who lived, but who died before any of this happened--or does that move into "story that features someone who lived" territory?

Also, would this work for 10.9? While her sister is dead, she is very present in the flashbacks (which account for a fair amount of the book) and is even present after her death in a prominent way, as both the book and movie of "The Diary of Anne Frank" play big roles in this book.
Both of these questions will just confirm/rule out combo points since I'll be claiming this for 20.1, so if they're both "no"s it's a-okay ;-)

15.2 AbC

Poland--Ryszard Kapuscinski Prize

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich

Task total: 15
Season total: 30

Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "Anika wrote: "Would Le Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table work here? I know there’s a scholarly debate as to whether he was an actual historical figure...
..."

I can't even decide if this is borderline ;-), but we'll allow it.

Thank you! Knowing that finishing it will be worth some decent points and fill a task that I'm (oddly) struggling to find a book from my shelves at home to fill will hopefully motivate me to plow through it.
It makes me feel a little better to see some of the comments of other readers of this book--that it has also taken them 6+ months to finish it; that it's a miserable slog through piles of nameless bodies; that the middle English is at times near-indecipherable. I haven't read this much middle English since having read The Canterbury Tales at University 20 years ago! I wish I had found a more updated "translation"...it might have made this a little less painful!
Okay. I'll stop complaining already and get back to that torture device of a book...thanks again for giving it a thumbs up for this task.

Would Le Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table work here? I know there’s a scholarly debate as to whether he was an actual historical figure...
(I’m really just trying to find motivation to finish this beast...I hate it, but I’ve already invested so much time in it and it completes a difficult part of my reading goal for the year so I don’t want to just walk away from it....ugh!)

15.1 AbC

New Zealand—Ockham New Zealand Book Award

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

+15 Task

Task total: 15
Season total: 15

(Set +85% in Papua New Guinea re:group project.)

Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "Anika wrote: "Would White Crow work or is "crow" too specific, as it's a type of bird?"

Crow doesn't work because it's a bird. We're excluding birds from the animal task and looking..."

Ooops---just saw that answered up at the top. Sorry to make you repeat yourself! Back to the drawing board...

Would White Crow work or is "crow" too specific, as it's a type of bird?

Thank you so much for compiling this list, Elizabeth! You've made this task infinitely easier to tackle.

I really loved the Over and Under task from last season--it had me looking at books that have been missed by the general reading population and I quite enjoyed most of the books I read which fit that category. Perhaps "Underrated" (a book that has fewer than 1,000 ratings) could be a style bonus one season?

20.7 Charles Darwin

Parlor Games by Maryka Biaggio

+20 Task (May travels from Michigan to Chicago to San Francisco to Shanghai to Tokyo to London to....yeah, she keeps going. Everywhere. Often changing names and being hounded by a Pinkerton agent. Quite the adventure. It's crazy that this is all based on a real woman! If you are intrigued by this in the least, don't bother with this book, though. Just read the "May Dugas de Pallandt van Eerde" Wikipedia page...)
+25 Combo (10.2; 10.4; 10.8; 10.9: MB=Manitoba; 20.6--even though she's poor in the first chapter of the book, it doesn't last for long. She was marvelously wealthy for the rest of the book--even becoming a baroness at one point--despite the fact she acquired her wealth by questionable/illegal means)

Task total: 45
Season total: 1490

possibilities I don't want to forget:

New Zealand: Mister Pip
Poland: Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
Austria: The Only Story Julian Barnes; Austrian State Prize for European Literature
UK: The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, T.S. Eliot Prize
Turkey: 2015 Erdal Oz Literature Award. Author Orhan Pamuk Snow
Finland: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, J.A. Hollon palkinto
Spain - Prince of Asturias Awards: Leonard Cohen, The Flame
Chile: In the Midst of Winter Isabelle Allende, National Prize for Literature

Sweden: something by Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Munro, or Pablo Neruda; Nobel Prize in Literature

USA: Less, Pulitzer-fiction

Australia: The Museum of Modern Love, New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards

Czech Republic: something by Margaret Atwood, Franz Kafka Prize

Canada: A Complicated Kindness, McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award; Malarky Amazon.ca First Novel Award

France: The Mars Room, Prix Medicis; The Library at Mount Char https://www.goodreads.com/award/show/...

Israel: something by Joyce Carol Oates or Karl Ove Knausgård; Jerusalem Prize

10.2 Goodreads Authorized

The Moment of Everything by Shelly King

+10 Task
+15 Combo (10.4; 10.8; 10.9: KS=Kansas)

Task total: 25
Season total: 1440

10.9 State Your Name

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield

+10 Task (SD=South Dakota)
+10 Combo (10.2; 10.5)

Task total: 20
Season total: 1415

Thanks for the congrats, Elizabeth and Tien <3 and Happy Valentine's to all!

15.10 BtE2, Land and Sea

Finland: A, B, and C

The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna

+30 Task

Task total: 30

+100 Finisher Bonus
+200 MegaFinish

Season total: 1395

Congrats on that finish, Tien! Ending with War and Peace was a straight up baller move ;-)