January Wrap-Up

So January's over? It's certainly been an interesting few weeks of 2017.

In the midst of the crazy, there has certainly been some good, though. Snuggles from adorable three year olds. Big conversations with a certain nine year old. Laughing and weeping through a Broadway show. Having all of my sisters in the same place. Seeing my best friend and BG's namesake.

What I Read/Reviewed:
I'm off to a good start book-wise. As of today, I've read 13 books this year. I reviewed five books during January. Three were for review and two were from the library. I am still reading my own books, but I just don't feel as much impetus to review them if I don't desperately need to write about them! I'm going with Michael Chabon's Moonglow for favorite January book and, quite possibly, a favorite for the year.

   

Favorite Kid Books:
D is flying through the Pegasus and Wings of Fire series, while BG is insisting we never return the Missy's Super Duper Royal Deluxe books to the library.
 
   

Favorite posts:
I wrote about my favorite 2016 books, which you can read here. Like many book bloggers, I find that blogging is sometimes not getting much time and that's ok (go do your important stuff, people!). But I also want to keep blogging because I think reading books and talking about them are important things, right now and always.

What I've Been Watching:
Jane the Virgin. This Is Us. Sherlock. The Good Place. Most importantly, the glorious Miss Phryne Fisher. Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries is on Netflix and it will do your heart good.

                     

What I'm Into:
1. Pretzel Rolls
Trust me, this is what your sandwich has been missing. A pretzel roll makes everything taste better, including buffalo chicken burgers and yes, I know this from personal experience.

2. Duolingo
My dad is Romanian, but we only spoke English in our house growing up. Duolingo just added Romanian and it's a great way to easily learn a language.  You only need a few moments each day and you can work right from your phone or  computer. If you are thinking about learning a language, this is a great way to do it!



What were you into during the month of January?

Mini-reviews: The Mother Letters and Moxyland

Amber and Seth Haines had three children in three years and Seth could see his wife was exhausted and frustrated by the million things that go into caring for small children every day. So he reached out to friends and writers to draft letters detailing the struggles and joy of being a mom. Each letter is encouraging and reminds mothers that we are not alone when we find a crayon in the dryer or can't figure out what to make for dinner (again) with a table full of picky eaters.

There is a whole market of books like this, where the writer (or writers) try to give encouragement to parents. Parenting is, as my mom likes to put it, "the hardest job you will ever love." It is exhausting on every single level, but this kind of book often comes across as trite and sappy in the face of very real struggles. Fortunately The Mother Letters manages to escape this, perhaps because it features so many women with different stories and writing styles. This would be a perfect gift to give to a new mom or one who has been parenting for many years. It's a wonderful book to have on your shelf to dip into at the end of a long day and remember that other moms have walked exactly where you are now. Make sure you pick up the print version, because the book itself  is beautiful!

The Mother Letters:
Sharing the Laughter, Joys, Struggles, and Hope
By Amber C. Haines and Seth Haines
Fleming H. Revel Company April 2016
192 pages
Read via Netgalley

It's 2018 in Cape Town, South Africa and citizens are increasingly controlled by a police state that operates through technology. Kendra has recently been injected with nanotechnology that makes her a walking, glowing billboard for a popular soft drink. Toby is a blogger who mouths off about the wealthy, while surrounding himself with luxury goods. Lerato works for a giant corporation, but she isn't sure she can stay loyal to their practices. Tendeka wants to protest against a corrupt government by encouraging local teens to vandalize their city. While they don't know each other at the opening of the book, their lives will soon intersect in surprising ways.

I have read and really loved (or been creeped out by?) other books by Lauren Beukes. She is such an imaginative writer. But this one fell a bit flat for me. Each character wants to fight the system that is oppressing them, but it's tough to keep reading a story where everything seems hopeless and the methods of the oppressed are often no better than those of the oppressor. Beukes certainly has interesting ideas here and added a new voice to dystopian writing, but it is easy to see how she has grown as an author from this book to her more recent novels The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters. 

Moxyland
By Lauren Beukes
Mulholland Books August 2016 (originally published 2008)
320 pages
Read via Netgalley

Review: The Wicked City

Ella Hawthorne flees her wealthy life after she finds her husband cheating. She moves into a Greenwich Village apartment where the residents hear mysterious jazz music late at night. The speakeasy that used to be next door was a frequent stop for Gin Kelly in 1924. She's a flapper who seems as if she doesn't care about anything or anyone. But Gin has some secrets: her stepfather is an infamous bootlegger and a Prohibition agent wants her to be a pawn in a dangerous game to bring down the entire operation.

Beatriz Williams is a much-beloved author and this is my first time reading a book of hers. She does a good job of managing dual storylines. I often find myself wishing to spend more time in one or the other, but both are engaging in The Wicked City. There are some nice parallels between the two stories as Ella leaves behind a relationship and expectations to find what she really wants, while Gin considers for the first time that it might be good to be needed.

From reading further about this book and its writer, it seems that Williams enjoys connecting her stories and characters. Devoted readers will be thrilled to see some familiar faces, but I wonder if some things were lost for this reader who didn't know the other back stories. There seemed to be quite a few people and story threads that were introduced only to be abandoned. I did read that this will be the first of at least two books, so perhaps they will get more page time in the second story. I also found that Gin was hard to get to know as a character. It's noted that she is gifted at turning on a different personality depending on who she is with and what situation she finds herself in. While this makes her fascinating, it is hard to really grasp who she is.

The Wicked City is a fun and fast-paced historical read that will immerse you in the dazzling possibility and dangers of New York City during the 1920s.


The Wicked City
By Beatriz Williams
William Morrow January 2017
384 pages
Received for review from TLC Book Tours and the publisher

Want to learn more about this book? Visit Harper Collins here.
Want to read some more reviews? You can find the rest of the TLC Book Tour reviews here.

Looking Back at 2016

Wow, it has taken me forever to write this. I usually wait and write my yearly wrap-up post in January but this is late even for me!

So let's talk reading during 2016, shall we?

Books Read in 2016: 131
Books Reviewed in 2016: 87
First Book of the Year: Ten Thousand Skies Above You (Firebird #2)
Last Book of the Year: The Paris Wife
Pages Read: 43,889 
Fiction: 64
Non-fiction: 23 
Books by male authors: 30
Books by female authors: 57


Favorite books of 2016

Returning Favorites:
I've read and loved books by these authors before, and they certainly didn't let me down this time around.

Emily, Alone is essentially the story of an elderly woman learning to live alone after the death of her husband. Emily is a delightful character who will stay with you for a long time.  

Flight of Dreams is a book I could not put down. I carried it around with me, desperate to read a few more pages. You know how things will end if you know your history, but I needed to know immediately which characters were going to make it. Ariel Lawhon writes speculative historical fiction like no one else. 

I love a good WWII story and Everyone Brave is Forgiven did not disappoint. It's both a specific look at World War II and a universal story about the unrelenting cost of war. 

I didn't even write a review for Commonwealth. I finished the book and thought that it was an effortless and beautiful novel. I didn't know what to write besides "is it possible for Ann Patchett to get any better?" I don't see how, and yet I certainly hope so.


 





I love Ramona Ausubel. She is on my automatic, no questions asked, buy it right now list. Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty follows a family one summer in 1976 when a financial crisis threatens to tear them apart. Novels about poor, sad rich people are usually a skip for me, but this one is amazing.

 







New-to-me Authors:

I am not entirely new to Emily Wirenga's writing, since I've read her work before on her blog and some other websites. But Making It Home is a stunning book about feeling inadequate in the constant pull between loving and caring for others and trying to find some time for yourself. It's a book for parents, but really it is a book for anyone who loves beautiful and honest writing. 

I read this book for almost two months, so I need to give it some love. I love Lin Manuel Miranda's musical based on this book and I love history, so I was excited to join a readalong at Reading Rambo. Alexander Hamilton is a well-written, well-researched door-stopper for all of you history nerds! 

I've figured out somewhat recently that I really enjoy books that combine medical history and personal narratives (see The Immortal Lives of Henrietta Lacks). Patient H.M. is an examination of a man who taught us much of what we know about the brain after he was in an accident and became a life-long test subject. The author here is the grandson of the man who studied H.M. so he is able to mix personal memories with some ethical questions about his grandfather's actions as a doctor.

Mr. Splitfoot is dark and creepy and mysterious and I loved it. This is the kind of book where it's good to go into it without knowing too much, so take my advice and go read it!

 








Great historical fiction? Check. Questions about faith and family and what it means to be human? Check. Magic? Check. The Golem and the Jinni was an incredible book and I can't wait for the sequel next year!









It's your turn! What were the best books you read in 2016? 

It's Monday, who's reading something good?

Well, it's certainly been an eventful week here in the US, but it's been a relatively quiet one here at my house. At least as quiet as it can be when you have two kids! I'm trying to get into an exercise routine. I would like to do some yoga and ride the stationary bike most days. I seem to do ok for a week or so, and then life inevitably gets busy and I find myself going days or weeks without exercising. Any tips from exercising readers?

This week, I read Plainsong by Kent Haruf. It was a quiet sort of small town novel and it was good for the soul. I also read Bellevue, which examines the history of the infamous hospital and the effect it had on both New York City and modern medicine. Then I read Carli Lloyd's memoir When Nobody Was Watching, since I'm a big soccer fan and she is a fellow New Jersey girl.

Now I'm reading The Wicked City for an upcoming TLC Book Tour as well as Faithfully Feminist. 

 

What are you reading this week?

Review: Moonglow

On his deathbed, a grandfather tells his grandson all of the stories that he has never divulged before. These tales may be or may not be based on the ones that Chabon's own grandfather told him. The grandfather takes his grandson and the reader on a dizzying journey as he jumps around in time from a childhood in Philadelphia to the battlefields of WWII to the space program and even a Florida retirement community.

In many ways, Moonglow is the story of a life and a family. The people have highs and lows and triumphs and defeats. But this is also a book that grapples with the importance of story - do we have an imperative to tell our stories? What is the importance of truth when relating our pasts to the people we love?

It's also a beautiful tribute to a space program at the height of its powers, when girls and boys and men and women dreamed of going beyond the stars. The grandfather is in love with space and dreams of being the engineer who makes something fly to its farthest reaches. But his attention is also earth-bound as he falls deeply in love with a woman who has scars from WWII.

It took me some time to get truly invested in this book and the people that I met between its covers. But weeks later, I am still thinking about the characters and the moments that shaped their lives. If that isn't indicative of Michael Chabon's power as a writer, I'm not sure what is. Up to this point, I would have said that my favorite of his books is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Now? It just might be a tie.

Moonglow
By Michael Chabon
Harper November 2016
430 pages
From my shelves

It's Monday again. Can we introvert now?

Hey friends. What a week. This introvert is feeling like some quiet time and some time to evaluate what is important for this year and how I'm going to direct my time and my energy. If I'm honest, it's also time to eat snacks and watch Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. 

But still reading. Always reading. This week, I read Make Bright the Arrows and Swing Time. I finished listening to Brown Girl Dreaming as I made dinner tonight. Any suggestions for a new audiobook? Now I'm reading Bellevue and Kent Haruf's Plainsong.

What are you reading this week?