Books 2018: Quarter 3

As you probably already know, I've been reading a classic a month for the last few years. It started as a one-year project in 2014, but I've enjoyed it enough to keep going with it & will probably continue until it starts to feel like a chore. You can find my past reviews by clicking on the "books" tag at the end of this post, or be my friend on Goodreads. (You can also just go to the site & hunt down my review feed without being my friend. Don't worry, you won't hurt my feelings.) ICYMI, the classics I selected to read in 2018 are here.

On to the reviews!

THE CLASSICS:

July: Tess of the D'ubervilles, by Thomas Hardy (1891, 518 pages). 3 stars. I didn't actually get around to this until September so don't tell anyone. Honestly, I found it infuriating more than anything else as it is mostly about a young, naive woman getting sexually assaulted in rural England & the fallout. Thomas Hardy is officially the king of tiresome dude characters that just can't stop annoying young marriageable women. Also CW for "nice guys" being dicks to their wives about their sexual assaults. ie: "I know it wasn't really your fault, technically, I guess, but I am still feeling emasculated by the fact that you have a body and a past and don't know how to deal with that like an actual grown-ass adult, so, thanks for offering to kill yourself so I can save face with my man-friends. It's fine, tho, I'll just go hang out in Brazil for a while with your friend as my mistress."

August: The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexander Dumas (1844, 1276 pages). On pause. I got about a third of the way through this one and had to switch over to something else. I won't say I'm abandoning it, but I may have to just go back to it periodically when I feel like it. Part of it are fun & interesting but it's a bit one-note to subject yourself to for 1200+ pages without a break.

September: Sophie's Choice, by William Styron. (1979, 562 pages). Not started yet. I wanted to listen to this on audiobook but when I went to get it, I couldn't find an audio version. I got a hard copy but currently Gravity's Rainbow has been taking up most of my actual-physical-book-reading spoons, so I'll get to it when I get to it.

OTHER RECENT READS:

The Champion Mindset: An Athlete's Guide to Mental Toughness, by Joanna Zeiger. (2017, 272 pages)
Read because: I'm trying to work on my mental game.
Review: 4 stars. Lots of good advice from someone who has been both near the top of the endurance sports world as well as the absolute bottom after a horrific bike crash, and also brings a coaching perspective. The chapters cover topics like "Proper Goal Setting," "Keeping it Fun," "Building Your Team," "Improving Motivation," etc. I found a lot of it very helpful (and honestly I probably need to read it again at this point.)

The Brave Athlete: Calm the F*ck Down and Rise to the Occasion, by Simon Marshall & Lesley Paterson. (2017, 360 pages)
Read because: Again that mental game thing.
Review: 4 stars. This book was written by a married couple--Marshall a sport psychologist and Paterson a three-time world champion triathlete and coach. I would say this booked covered similar ground to The Champion Mindset but from a different and complementary lens, so I thought it was worth reading both. This book definitely has a lighter (and sometimes goofier) tone (those Aussies!). A lot of how they present things is around your three brains--the "chimp brain" (the irrational, emotional, instant gratification brain), "the professor" (the rational, objective, reasoning brain), and "the computer" (which runs all your automatic decisions and habits, good or bad--and how they interact to impact athletic performance.

Let Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory, by Deena Kastor. (2018, 286 pages)
Read because: If you're a distance runner it was hard not to hear about this book everywhere you went after it came out. A lot of friends had been recommending it, so I finally added it to my audible queue.
Review: 5 stars. Ahhhhh I loved this book so much! First, holy shit, Deena Kastor may be the most talented female distance runner in U.S. history. Her resume is kind of insane. But so often we only get to see the careers of tip-top elite runners from the outside and don't get the day-to-day details of training and traveling and goal-setting and injuries and achievements and setbacks. Even less often do we get a peek into the head of the athlete herself. In particular, I feel like I am somewhat inundated at times with the elite/pro athlete archetype where EVERYTHING is PAIN and EXHAUSTION and TEARS ALL THE TIME because THAT IS THE PRICE OF EXCELLENCE!!1! and you start to wonder, not even excellence can be worth all the constant misery, can it? I really appreciated getting a different perspective from Deena's story: Someone who excelled, and won, and got better and better and better, while still running with glee and optimism and for the pure joy of finding out just what, exactly, her body could do. It definitely made me re-think the psychological side of my running, like, "You know, if Deena can throw down 120-mile weeks under the pressure of actually making a living at this, I bet you could stand to put a little less pressure on yourself and have just a *bit* more fun. Just a thought."

Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, by Alex Hutchinson. (2018, 320 pages)
Read because: I am a total sports science junkie & have probably read just about everything Alex Hutchinson has ever written on the internet.
Review: 3 stars. I have to say that I did not find this book as fascinating as his articles. Maybe it's just that I enjoy this sort of thing more in the short form than in the long form, or that it's about human physical endurance, writ large, rather than specific to running science in particular. Or that I felt like I'd already read a lot of this before in previous articles he's published. I dunno. I'm glad I read it and enjoyed parts of it, but a lot of the time I found myself zoning out and just trying to get through a less enthralling section.

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, by Gino Wickman. (2007, 247 pages)
Read because: I have a new role at work that is basically requiring me to be a kind of startup CEO, so I'm trying to fill some knowledge gaps.
Review: 4 stars. This book is basically a "how-to" to get the most out of your organization. I don't know if mine will be adopting every strategy in it, but I found it very useful in thinking through how my organization functions (or doesn't) and how groups can get everyone rowing in the same direction as efficiently as possible.

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, by Richard P. Rumelt. (2011, 320 pages)
Read because: Another learn-to-be-a-startup-CEO read.
Review: 4 stars. A lot of this book is on what strategy actually is, and how if you ask a lot of people or groups or companies, what they actually tell you is their goals, OR a bunch of vacuous inspirational stuff that contains no actual information OR strategy. The rest is about different types of strategy, and how to differentiate good strategy from bad. Interesting read if you lead an organization that wants to accomplish stuff.

The Word Is Murder, by Anthony Horowitz. (2018, 390 pages)
Read because: It is fall now, and in fall we read murder mysteries. This one was recommended by Janet Reid. (Also I'd been reading Tess of the D'Ubervilles & really needed a break for some light entertaining crime drama.)
Review: 4 stars. Author Anthony Horowitz (a fictional version of the author) accepts an offer from disgraced murder detective Daniel Hawthorne to write a book based on the detective & split the profits 50/50. Except, the Hawthorne is kind of a dick. For their first case, a woman visits a mortuary to arrange her funeral and is then murdered later the same day in her home. The detective (as disgraced dickwad detectives often are) is brought onto the case by the local police as a consultant. Hawthorne investigates; Horowitz takes notes and tries not to let Hawthorne drive him batshit insane. Hijinks ensue. Entertaining, clever, & funny, with lots of fun twists & turns.

The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency, #1), by John Scalzi. (2017, 336 pages)
Read because: The sequel is coming out next month & I LOVED this one and wanted to refresh my memory of the plot before reading The Consuming Fire.
Review: 4 stars. However many hundreds of years into the future, humans have left earth and spread out across the galaxy thanks to the discovery of The Flow, which, to grossly oversimplify, is kind of a network of wormholes that have "in" ports near some planets and "out" ports near others. It's this intricate "Flow network" that holds human civilization--The Interdependency--together in a kind of economic ecosystem. But a physicist and close friend of the Emperox (head of The Interdependency) has discovered via the Powers of Math and Science that the Flow is in fact unstable, and one by one the portals that connect vastly distant parts of the galaxy together are about to disappear. And because that's not dramatic enough, the Emperox is dying, and his carefully-trained-and-painstakingly-prepared heir has mysteriously mysteriously died in a mysterious mysterious accident, leaving only his very very NOT trained and prepared bastard daughter to ascent to the Emperox-ship. Politics, plotting, and machinations ensue. Also, did I mention the many kickass female characters? THERE ARE SO MANY AWESOME KICKASS FEMALE CHARACTERS!

The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist, #1), by Rick Yancey. (2009, 434 pages)
Read because: It came highly recommended from YA fantasy friends.
Review: 4 stars. In late 1800's New Englad, 12-year-old orphan Will Henry has been left to serve as assistant/apprentice to the monstrumologist (i.e., the monster-studier) Pellinore Warthrop, as did his father before him. There has apparently been a rash of attacks by a type of monster called Anthropophagi, which Warthrop resolves to study and hopefully stop. But their study takes the pair to dark places both literal and metaphoric, where they must confront not only the monsters but also who they are as people and why they're doing what they're doing. I didn't find the premise itself all that earth-shattering, but there are some really rich, well-done characters and the writing was just gorgeous, almost gothic or baroque in style, without feeling high-falootin' or getting too flowery. Fans of Poe-style horror might find it intriguing.

Planetside, by Michael Mammay. (2018, 384 pages)
Read because: Hard sci-fi and military stories tend not to really be my bag, but I've learned to trust both John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig when it comes to just about anything in any genre. I don't remember the order but I read a post about this book on one of their sites and thought, "Hm, sounds interesting," then saw the other and thought, "Hm INNNNTERESTING, this sounds familiar, oh hey, it's that same book!" It was short & I was intrigued, so I picked it up and was not disappointed. But you want to know the main reason I read this book? Because in one of the posts, the author described how he'd had a beta reader read it & they asked, "Sooo, how come basically all your speaking parts are men?" and the author thought, "You know what, good question." And went back and changed half the characters--both key roles and background players--to women. And ended up with a stronger book for it.
Review: 4 stars. A couple millennia into the future, Carl Butler is a semi-retired colonel with Space Command who is asked--not ordered--by a friend and highly respected general to personally handle a delicate situation: The disappearance of the son of a high-ranking diplomat/politician (can't remember?) currently serving at the front of an ongoing war with an alien species. Butler agrees because this is a man he'd do pretty much anything for, but quickly begins to suspect that not all is as it seems and someone is going to a lot of trouble to hide information from him. Great characters, well-written story, rich and three dimensional and believable, AND my eyes didn't glaze over with futuristic jargon or military lingo (one of the main reasons I avoid these types of books usually).

What Alice Forgot, by Liane Moriarty. (2010, 476 pages)
Read because: I had just finished watching Big Little Lies & mostly enjoyed it, despite the fact that everyone in it (except the girl from Divergent & the kids) are horrible people.
Review: 3.5 stars. File under "pleasant diversions." Alice is 29, madly in love with her husband, & pregnant with their first child. Or, she was; after taking a spill & suffering a nasty bump on the head at a spin class, she now finds she's actually 39 with three kids & in the middle of a nasty divorce. Hijinks ensue! Well written, entertaining, & enjoyable, if a bit simplistic & not life-changing.

Angelfall (Penryn & the End of Days, Book #1), by Susan Ee. (2012, 288 pages)
Read because: In my mind "YA Supernatural/Paranormal" is pretty much synonymous with "cringe-inducing schlock," but a lot of people said, "You know, this was not half bad?" So I decided to give it a shot, having never read an angel book despite how "on trend" angel YA was for a certain period of time.
Review: 3 stars. It did not suck? In more or less the present day, angels have taken over the world and basically transformed it into a post-apocalyptic hellscape where bands of vagrant humans just barely scrape by, living off of cat food and dry ramen noodles & what have you, doing their best to escape the notice of violent human gangs and the not-so-angelic angels. The angels, for their part, are living it up in posh San Francisco hotels. Six weeks into this craziness 17-year-old Pennryn witnesses a band of angels try to kill one of their own; she manages to save his life, but not before the others have cut off his wings and kidnapped here seven-year-old paraplegic sister. Pennryn and the de-winged angel Raffe make a deal: They'll help each other get to the angels' headquarters in SF so that Raffe can get his wings reattached and Pennryn can find her sister. While I had a few quibbles here & there, the story was actually quite well written and the characters were reasonably believable. The story itself didn't really generate enough curiosity for me that I'm dying to read the follow-ups, but I AM still sort of curious about the whole basic premise, and the writing and characters were decent enough that I'd actually consider it.

, by . (xxxx, xxx pages) x stars. Read because:

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Currently Reading:
Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon (obviously)

Currently Listening To:
The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins

Up Next:

• My Antonia, by Willa Cather
• If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Covino
• The Husband's Secret, by Liane Moriarty
• The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency, Book #2), by John Scalzi
• Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military, by Neil deGrasse Tyson & Avis Lang
• Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor
• Broken Monsters, by Lauren Beukes
• Chalk, by Paul Cornell
• Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle
• Radio Silence, by Alice Oseman
• Carve the Mark, by Veronica Roth
• Legend, by Marie Wu.
• Jade City, by Fonda Lee
• Everything, Everything, by Nicole Yoon
• Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Leah on the Offbeat, by Becky Albertalli
• Danse Macabre, by Stephen King
• Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie.
• The Secret Place, by Tana French

And who knows, whatever else tickles my fancy. (Taking future suggestions as always!)