Joanna’s Comments (group member since Nov 17, 2010)

Joanna’s comments from the Reading with Style group.

For A3 - Author uses (at least) 3 Names

Is this Laura Ingalls Wilder?

Or are we looking for someone with 3 different pen names?

10.8 Double O

Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

As always, Robin Miles does an excellent job as narrator. This is a book that I wish the author had read herself, but Miles handles it beautifully and makes it easy to connect with these fragmented memories and vignettes.

I think I'd like this more if I hadn't just finished On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous which is also a prose poetry reflection on coming of age, but worked out to be much more powerful than Another Brooklyn. This book felt like weak tea to OEWBG's strong coffee.

There's a strong sense of place here--Brooklyn in the 1970s. Reminders of Times Square when it was the domain of porn and prostitutes rather than the tourist light show of today. Mentions of Son of Sam and jazz music and Vietnam veterans kept the time period rooted.

In the end, I just wanted more from this book. More plot. Or longer memories. Or something.

+10 Task
+10 Review
+5 Combo (10.7)

Task total: 25
Grand total: 515

20.9 Shipwrecked!

Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura

A wonderful, haunting story of a small fishing village in long-ago Japan where the villagers hope to lure ships to crash on their reefs so the village can pilfer the goods and even the wood from which the ship is made. There are details of the religious practices, the daily lives, and the social order of this village. I have no idea if this has any historical accuracy, but it felt fully fleshed out and compelling. This story will stay with me for quite some time.

The ending gutted me. I won't say more because I don't want to spoil this book for other readers.

Highly recommended.

+20 Task
+10 Review
+5 Combo (10.7)
+5 Oldies (1982)

Task total: 40
Grand total: 490

10.6 WWII

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

I wanted to like this more than I did. But the wartime London didn't come alive here nearly as well as Connie Willis managed in Blackout and the characters never really mattered to me. I had a hard time keeping the three women straight and could sometimes forget which one was narrating until I was reminded about their romantic interest.

The story unfolds backwards--starting in 1947, then back to 1944, then ending in 1941. There was some cleverness to this, but mostly I found it too cute. Knowing where the characters ended up took away some of the enjoyment of the story and some of the suspense that would otherwise be there, particularly for the final section of the book.

Overall, not a book I'm sorry to have read, but probably not one I'll be rushing to recommend.

The narrator for the audiobook made an effort to differentiate the voices, but that turned out to be more grating than helpful. A perfectly adequate narration, but also not one to make me particularly recommend the audio format.

+10 Task
+10 Review
+10 Combo (20.1, 20.5)
+5 Jumbo

Task total: 35
Grand total: 450

10.5 Banned

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Lexile 810

I'm pretty sure that I read this when I was a child, but I didn't remember the story at all rereading it as an adult. I bought this book for my 10 year old as a free add-on to a Scholastic book order. Then I saw that the audiobook was available from my library and we listened to it in the car during a long drive. I hadn't realized quite how sad this book was when we picked it up. This is definitely one that caused a lot of conversation and talking about emotions and feelings and the nature of the universe.

There's a sensitivity here to the way these characters are treated. The author is writing about teenagers, but isn't at all patronizing--they're treated as fully developed human beings with a range of emotions. I can see why this book became a classic.

+10 Task
+10 Review
+5 Combo (10.7)
+5 Oldies (1977)

Task total: 30
Grand total: 415

10.1 Sub Sandwich

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

I loved hearing the author read this very personal work. His voice resonated with feeling as he read his brilliant prose.

This book is hard to categorize. It's a novel, I suppose, but not really a linear story. It's more snippets of memory and short vignettes than a straightforward story. It jumps around as the author muses about lots of different interactions and moments in time. The language is almost, but not quite, poetry. There are many evocative images and beautiful phrases. But it's not like Milk and Honey, which is much more explicitly poetry.

I'm very interested to see where this author goes from here. He shows so much promise with this book, I'm excited to read a novel where he's not reflecting on his own experiences as directly.

+10 Task
+15 Combo (10.7, 20.5, 20.3)
+10 Review

Task total: 35
Grand total: 385

15.7 PnM2E2 - Title contains a number

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

+20 Task

Task total: 20
Grand total: 370

20.6 Monster Redux

The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks by Max Brooks

Meh. This was only okay, probably because I'm not a hard-core zombie person. I enjoyed World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War and someone gave me a copy of this around the time that I read that in 2011. It's been sitting on my kindle shelf for the last 8 years, and I only now decided to pick it up because there was a zombie task for my reading group.

The book is a little bit repetitive and goes into excruciating but well-thought out detail of what you would do if there were a real life zombie attack. And it thinks carefully through the details of the zombies involved--here, caused by a virus, not smart but strong and hard to kill (nb. but can be killed by a headshot), heightened senses, etc. etc.

As I was reading, I kept thinking about how this also somewhat works as a survival guide for what to do in the much more likely and chilling scenario of major climate change disaster such that the country is overrun by climate refugees and our general social systems and police are incapable of managing the brave new world. Things like, what is your retreat plan, what is your training, what is your armory, how have you prepared, etc.

I most enjoyed the section that purported to be a history of all past zombie attacks. This was the more WWZ portion of the book and read more as storytelling than manual.

Recommended only for those who really like zombies.

+20 Task (zombie)
+10 Review
+10 Not a novel

Task total: 40
Grand total: 350

10.7 A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin

I had in my head that these were short stories about lots of different pre-Game of Thrones things, but this is actually three novellas about the same character stapled into a single volume.

The three stories trace the travels of Ser Duncan the Tall--aka Dunc the Lunk, thick as a castle wall. Dunc is an unlikely knight. He's really just a ruffian who was taken in by a minor knight and knighted by that guy when the guy was dying. So he's had some training as a knight, but no real resources. Really, his primary defining trait is that he's just shy of seven feet tall. Sort of unbelievably, he manages to hook up with the King's youngest son, who convinces Dunc to take him along as his squire. Thus begin the travels of Dunc and Egg.

I have read the first three of the Game of Thrones book, so I have passing familiarity with Martin's world and some of the kings and players here, but that isn't necessary to understand these stories. This is more King Arthur than dragons and Winter is Coming.

I found the narrator's accent just a tad grating and the narration volume was inconsistent on the version that I listened to, which meant that on some of my devices it was hard to hear, but not always. Probably I'd pick this up in print if I had a choice.

+10 Task
+10 Review
+10 Not a novel (three novellas)
+5 Combo (20.4 - b. 1948)

Task total: 35
Grand total: 310

10.3 Andre Gide

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Let's get the obvious out of the way first. This book wasn't necessary. The Handmaid's Tale stands alone as a masterful tale and doesn't need a follow up. This book is in no way necessary.

But it's so timely. Now that The Handmaid's Tale feels closer to reality than ever and almost like fortune telling for a book over thirty years old, everyone wanted to revisit Gilead. We wanted a hero to root for. We wanted some hope. And this book provides that. I wanted more delving into women's complicated relationships. There are hints of this as we learn more about the interior workings of the The Aunts, but nothing like what I've come to love from Atwood classics like
Cat's Eye.

The readers for the audiobook did an excellent job with the narration. I recommend this as an audiobook. Though, if you haven't listened to Claire Danes narrate The Handmaid's Tale, you might do that first because I really enjoyed revisiting the classic in audio format.

+10 Task
+10 Review
+15 Combo (20.1, 10.7, 20.5)

Task total: 35
Grand total: 275

20.4 The Line of Beauty

Filter House by Nisi Shawl

A wonderful collection of short stories. It's hard to believe that all of these stories are by the same author--they range from folk tales to fairy tales to magical realism to hard science fiction. There's issues of power and race threading through most of the stories, but just as part of the fabric of the story, not as a way to smash the reader over the head with moralizing. With nearly every story, I wanted it to be longer--the worlds were so interesting, the characters intriguing.

I really want to read a book set in the world of "Maggies". This was probably the most truly science fiction story of the collection, set in a near future or perhaps other planet, with terraforming work of a most clever description.

I also especially liked "The Pragmatical Princess" - a wonderful twist on the fairy tale trope of a dragon who captures a princess.

Thanks go to my mother, who picked out this collection for me.

+20 Task (b. 1955)
+10 Review
+10 Not a novel (short stories)

Task total: 40
Grand total: 240

15.6 PnM2

F5 - Author name P-S (Patrick)

Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness
Lexile 1010

Task total: 20
Grand total: 200

15.5 PnM2

F4 - Author name L-O (Marlon)

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Task total: 20
Grand total: 180

20.7 Lincoln in the Bardo

The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness
Low lexile

Task total: 20
Grand total: 160

20.8 Periodic Table

MacCarthy on Cross-Examination by Terence MacCarthy

This is a practical trial practice guide for attorneys. Unless you are trying jury trials, there is no reason to read this book. If you are a trial lawyer, this is a basic level refresher about the way to control a witness during cross examination and how to tell a story through cross.

This book may have seemed revolutionary or contrary to the norm when it was published in 2007, but it's right in line with what I learned in trial practice classes at NYU in 2002-2005 and with the way I was taught after that at a BigLaw and an attorney general's office. That said, it's solid advice, well-presented, and always good to be reminded what one should be doing.

The end of the book is an appendix of trial transcripts of cross examinations. I wish the author had annotated these with additional commentary about whether there were ways that the attorneys in those examples could have altered their questions to elicit better testimony and/or to point out places where the system being taught worked or didn't work. Of course I can parse this myself, but it would be more useful if these were incorporated more directly into the text.

+20 Task - Thulium
+10 Not a novel
+10 Review

Task total: 40
Grand total: 140

15.4 PnM2
E6 - X in title

American Paradox: The Conflict Of Thought And Action by Merle Curti

+15 Task

Task total: 15
Grand total: 100

15.3 PnM2
A1 - set 75%+ in Chicago

Brief Cases by Jim Butcher

+15 Task

Task total: 15
Grand total: 85

15.2 PnM2 C3

The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld

Task total: 15
Grand total: 70

15.1 PnM2

C2 - Narrator is one month before his 13th birthday

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
Lexile: 860

+15 Task

Task total: 15
Grand total: 55

20.3 Hotel du Lac

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

This delightful book was selected by my bookclub for this month. It's a perfect choice--juicy Hollywood gossip with enough romance and twists to the story to keep everyone engaged and probably enough meat to generate at least a little bit of conversation. I couldn't wait to get back to this book and loved these characters. This isn't high literature, but it sure is fun.

The readers for the audiobook brought each of the voices to life and helped keep straight which part of the story was happening--the journalist doing the interview, the aging movie star Evelyn Hugo, or one of the other characters in Evelyn's life.

Highly recommended.

+20 Task (journalist writing a biography)
+10 Combo (10.7, 20.5)
+10 Review

Task total: 40
Grand total: 40