February 2023 Reads!

Oof, hi friends, long time, no post. I have a race report almost ready to publish BUT in the mean time, please enjoy this missive covering my February reads. Hang on to your hats, last month was a doozy. 

 In case you missed it...

January 2023 Reads Reads from previous years

(8) First Born by Will Dean (368 pages, 2022). Audiobook. Outgoing, extroverted Katie is at Columbia on a full ride, while her mousy, introverted, pathologically anxious twin Molly hides from the world back in her London condo. But when Molly's parents call to tell her that Katie has been murdered while they're visiting her in New York, Molly must steel herself to fly to the U.S. to support her parents and the investigation of Katie's death. This took a super interesting turn riiiiiight at the end but there was a lot of kind of boring stuff in the middle and I came very close to not bothering finishing it.

(9) Run Time by Catherine Ryan Howard (373 pages, 2022). Audiobook. Another mystery/thriller with a twenty-two-year-old woman at the center. Once a rising star, recently disgraced actress Adele Rafferty has left her native Ireland for LA in a desperate (and thus far unsuccessful) attempt to revive her career. When she's offered the lead in a small, hush-hush indie horror film back in Ireland out of the blue, the deal seems almost too perfect. But soon Adele starts to feel as if the eerie events of the script are happening around her for real, and it seems as if her tumultuous past has somehow come back to haunt her. Reasonably entertaining but I've liked previous works of hers better.

(10) Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl (336 pages, 2018). Audiobook.

A few years after her boyfriend Jim mysteriously died their senior year of high school, Beatrice sheepishly reunites with the high school friend group from which she drifted apart after Jim's death. The five narrowly escape a harrowing car accident together, only to find out that they actually did not narrowly escape the accident and are now caught in a "neverworld wake" -- a time loop in which they will all continue to re-experience the previous day until at least four of them can agree on which one of them should survive the car accident while the other four die. Solid but not life-changing.

(11) Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson (275 pages, 2022). Audiobook. Lydia is a mediocre translator for the Logi, a species of extraterrestrials who have recently established a presence (complete with an embassy, ambassadors, and cultural attachés!) on earth. Alas translating to and from the Logi's unique "thought language" has the unfortunate side of effect of intoxicating the translator. Things get messy when Lydia blacks out one night from translating and wakes up to find the cultural attaché she translates for has been murdered in his study, and she is under suspicion. A very unique and interesting premise, though the plot played out in a rather mundane way. Still reasonably entertaining.

(12) The Algebraist by Ian M. Banks (434 pages, 2004). Paper book. In this epic space opera, a set of wormholes that people have been using to traverse the galaxy have suddenly been destroyed, which is obviously a huge bummer as huge swaths of it are now effectively cut off from each other until near-light-speed ships can deliver new ones. Fassin Taak is what's called a "slow seer," i.e. basically an anthropologist of the "slow" species ("Dwellers") that inhabit the local gas giant planet of Nasqueron. After the wormhole disaster, he's sent on a secret mission to uncover a long-held secret of the Dwellers' that may solve the wormhole problem. Unfortunately a sadistic warmonger is meanwhile on his way to conquer the system. Epic space adventures ensue! It’s Ian M. Banks so of course brilliant and very cleverly written but LORD I wish he’d had a heavier-handed editor in this case. I think the entire story could have been told just as well in half the pages and I probably would have enjoyed it twice as much.

(13) ⭐ Drowning Practice by Mike Meginnis (400 pages, 2022). Audiobook. One spring, the entire human race seems to have had nearly the exact same dream of being guided to a water death by a loved one on November 1, which most have interpreted as implying the end of the world as humankind knows it on that day. The book follows the stories of precocious 13-year-old Mott, her paranoid homebody mother Lyd, and her estranged, controlling, narcissistic father David as they wrestle how life should be lived when you the entire world may be ending in just a few months. Kind of a strange ending, but it was a really unique and interesting premise and the writing/characters were top-notch and kept me engaged all the way to that very strange ending.

(14) The Other’s Gold by Elizabeth Ames (352 pages, 2019). This is a good and well-written book that I think a lot of women will like and relate to, particularly those around my age (i.e., you’ve made it to roughly the age the four women have reached by the time the book ends). That said, while all four of the girls/women are rich, multi-layered, nuanced, multi-dimensional characters…they were all really annoying and treat each other and other people pretty shittily throughout the book, and I definitely would not want to be friends with (or even hang out with) any of them. While I could sometimes identify with the various situations they found themselves in and the thoughts/feelings they had in those situations, I mostly didn’t find them to be very relatable or characters I could identify with at all. It kind of felt like an Oprah book which is not really my bag.

(15) Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (256 pages, 2020). Amanda & Clay are headed out for a summer vacation with their kids at a vacation rental in remote Long Island. Not long after they arrive, though, property owners Ruth & G.H. arrive on their doorstep in a panic as a sudden blackout as swept NYC. The book description finishes, "But in this rural area—with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service—it’s hard to know what to believe." Wrong, that's not what this book is about it all. It's clear from very early on that Ruth and G.H. are indeed the owners and that everyone has perfectly good intentions and also has no idea what kind of disaster is going on in the outside world. And that is literally all that happens for the entire rest of the book. Honestly it felt like the author got halfway through writing a potentially interesting novel and just....stopped.

(16) ⭐ Good For a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World by Lauren Fleshman (274 pages, 2023). Paper book. I can't overestimate how much I loved this book! If you are not familiar with Lauren Fleshman's story, it's a good one and she told it in such a lovely, rich, heartbreakingly meaningful way. If you think you do know her story, you'll probably enjoy all the details you didn't know! The thesis is essentially that because men's organized sports came first, women's and girls' sports have kind of been built on the same kind of template -- which often does not work for us long-term and in some cases has caused active, serious harm. But people are working to change this, and there is hope! I've been telling every adult I know who has young female athletes in their lives to a) read it and then b) get it in their daughters' / granddaughters' / nieces' / athletes' hands. Honestly it could be the book that saves their lifetime love of sport.

(17) Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (272 pages, 2020). Audiobook. While walking alone with her dog in a nearby woods, our recently widowed narrator finds a handwritten note on the ground" Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." Except there is no dead body. Essentially the narrator begins to obsess about this Magda and who she is and how she met her end and becomes convinced that she is finding evidence in the real world to support her rather baseless suppositions. This was…a really strange book. In spite of its brevity, I found the beginning so boring I wasn’t sure I wanted to finish it–basically you’re treated to the meandering internal monologue of the main character, and without any context for it, it is…not interesting. Even when you kind of sort of start to understand what’s going on, it still didn't much hold my attention.

(18) The Guest List by Lucy Foley (313 pages, 2020). Audiobook. After a fairly brief courtship, a charismatic TV star and ambitious women's mag editor plan their Instagram-ready wedding on an island off the coast of Ireland. As the story rotates between the perspectives of six key players--the bride, the groom, the best man, the bridesmaid/sister, and the "plus one" (the bride's long-time friend's wife)--we begin to learn that not all are what they seem and long-standing hidden resentments and petty jealousies begin to brew. As a coastal storm brews, someone is plotting revenge. Entertaining enough but not my favorite of Foley's.

If you've read anything good lately, let me know!