Author Archives: Kinsey

The Best of the Rest of 2014

by Kinsey
I’ve said here before that when I read a really great book, I am so excited to share it with people that I immediately write a blog review. Hence, my short list of the best things I read this year would be The Goldfinch, The Signature of All Things, Love, Nina, and Americanah. (I was looking at the list of the books I read this year and wondering why it was so much shorter than last year–I read about 45 books this year, rather than my typical 80-100. Maybe it’s because I spent half the year reading giant doorstop literary novels that took forever? At least most of them were good; let’s just not talk about The Luminaries.)
But  I did read a few other things in 2014 that I loved but that never made an appearance here. So before this year runs away from us entirely, let me put in my vote for a few more things:

1) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

I have a love for the first Bridget Jones book that I cannot explain. I just think it’s brilliant and is working on about four different levels and I still reread it once a year. Even Helen Fielding would probably admit that the second one went off the rails a bit, but I really, really enjoyed this third Bridget installment. Rather than picking up where things left off, the book ages Bridget and puts her in an entirely different situation. Bridget is still recognizable, but she’s gown up a little, and as predictable as the book was, I found it charming and surprisingly touching.

2) Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

I am kind of obsessed with the Soviet Union, but I find it really difficult to find things to read about it. Nonfiction books tend to be incredibly dense, academic tomes along the lines of “and then that other diplomat issued a statement that countered the previous statement  . . . ” And fiction tends to be unbearably dark, which is understandable but difficult to read (Child 44, you still give me nightmares). This memoir uses food–from pre-revolutionary excess to the siege of Leningrad to Soviet institutional cafeterias–to show how the Soviet state affected the everyday life of it’s citizens. And it shows how one family rebelled against that state, at least partly through food. Really charming, although I’m not likely to cook any of the recipes provided.

If you are not already reading the website Bitches Gotta Eat, you should go do so immediately, because it is one of the funniest things on the Internet (assuming you’re over 18–if you’re not, please go look in our YA tag for something more appropriate, because this sure isn’t). Meaty is a collection of essays by Samantha Irby, who writes the site, and it is equally funny. However, I should warn you that she uses the essay format to also tell some less funny stories about her life, including one about her mother that was so sad it made me put the book away in a drawer for several months so I could recover. But the funny stories are really funny, the sad stories are stunning, and Irby definitely deserves a bigger outlet than she’s gotten so far.

Books You Already Knew I Was Going To Tell You To Read

by Kinsey

I was on the road quite a bit in December and read a whole pile of books I enjoyed. But none of them quite seemed to warrant their own review, since none of them are going to come as a surprise to anyone who’s spent any time here. So a list seems appropriate, so I get to mention a few things that I heartily, if predictably, recommend:

1) Landline by Rainbow Rowell. I saw Rainbow Rowell speak in person earlier this fall, and that woman is made up entirely of curly hair and charisma, and the stories she told about writing this book had the audience literally screaming with laughter. This is no Eleanor and Park, but I’m not sure my heart could handle another one of those, so this story about a marriage and a magic telephone will do just fine.

2) Dreams of God and Monsters by Laini Taylor. Quite a while back on the blog I mentioned the first book in this trilogy, Daughter of Smoke and Bone. That book was your fairly standard YA, magical realism, independent female narrator, star-crossed lover sort of story. And then book two, man, book two took a turn. It got dark and weird and tragic and bloody, and I actually put off starting the third one for months because I was scared of where things might go. But I ended up really liking how the story resolved, and I promise you, you have not read anything like this.

3) One Plus One by Jojo Moyes. I’ve already raved about Me Before You and The Girl You Left Behind, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that Moyes’s latest was equally heart lifting/breaking. (Note, because I know my readers: don’t worry too much about the dog. It will work out.)

4) The Secret Place by Tana French. This wasn’t my favorite of the Dublin Murder Squad novels–that would be The Likeness–but it was a compelling read. While the plot and mystery of this one didn’t grab me the way some of them have, it still delivered on the two things I think Tana French does best–unsympathetic but fascinating characters, and a romance-free vision of modern-day Ireland.

How To Cook a Wolf

by Kinsey

I can’t remember why I requested How to Cook a Wolf from the library. It must have been recommended online somewhere and I’m sure that the kick-ass title caught my eye, but by the time it came around on my library holds list all I could remember is that it was about cooking during World War II. And I guess you could describe it that way, but that summary really does a disservice to an entertaining, funny, and thoughtful book. No interest in cooking or history is required here–the writing is enough.

MFK Fisher was one of America’s premier food writers (and was also, based on the portrait on the front of the edition I read, a stone fox) was published in 1942, right as food rationing was kicking in, in order to offer readers advice about how to make the best of their meals during the war years. However, she never mentions the war directly, talking instead about how cooks can work to keep away the wolf of poverty, always sniffing at the door. As a result, the book has a timeless feel–she could be talking about about any hard times that stretch to the kitchen, and a lot of her suggestions fit remarkably well into out post-recession world. Especially since the book is not so much about the specific how-to-cook-things instructions, but is more about a philosophy or a way of approaching food that is frugal and reasonable, but also hopeful. So her chapters are called things like How to Rise Up Like New Bread, How to Be Cheerful Though Starving, and How to Comfort Sorrow.

There are recipes involved here and you could definitely cook from this book, although I suspect that the dishes Fisher describes are made for the palates of a previous generation (she wants you to add tomato juice to A LOT of things that I don’t think should have tomato juice anywhere near them). But even when she is talking about specific dishes, her writing reminds you that food is not just about the ingredients, but that it speaks to how we feel about ourselves and about life. For example, before offering her minestrone recipe, she says, “Probably the most satisfying soup in the world for people who are hungry, as well as for those who are tired or worried or cross or in debt or in a moderate amount of pain or in love or in robust health or in any kind of business huggermuggery, is minestrone.” And some of the recipes sounded pretty good–I was tempted by something she recalled from her childhood as War Cake, and at least one blogger out there made this with great success.

The other awesome thing about the edition of the book I read is that it was a re-release from the 1950s, and Fisher had gone back through and added notes throughout the book either agreeing with her original statements or offering an updated perspective. Here’s an example from the How Not To Boil an Egg chapter:

“Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.

Until then you would think its secrets are its own, hidden behind the impassive beautiful curvings of its shell, white or brown or speckled. It emerges full-formed, almost painlessly {The egg may not be bothered, but nine years and two daughters after writing this I wonder somewhat more about the hen. I wrote, perhaps, too glibly.} from the hen.”

I think I would have liked having cocktails with her. Anyway, it’s a quick read and it’s quite funny, while also reminding the reader how different things were not all that long ago, and that there are likely still tough times to weather ahead. Also, if you would like the read a sexist but otherwise entertaining original 1942 review of How to Cook a Wolf from the New York Times, you can find that here.


Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Wonderful historical snapshot.

You might also like: For more great food writing, you can check out Julia Child (obviously and forever) or Ruth Reichl. But if you’d like to read some fiction of the era with a similar voice, try the Mitfords or Barbara Pym.

Bellweather Rhapsody

by Kinsey
I’ve talked before about how I like reading seasonal books–scary things at Halloween, spring-time-ish books as winter is ending–and I think Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia would be an excellent addition to an autumn/winter reading list. It’s creepy, sort of dark, and definitely wintery–the kind of book that makes you want to wrap up in a blanket with a cup of hot chocolate.

The story takes place over a few days in the Bellweather, an once glorious but now shabby upstate New York that is hosting a high school all-state band event. Over-achieving teenagers, their tired chaperones, ambitious conductors, and harried hotel staff are already bracing for the event when things get derailed by a blizzard and the mysterious disappearance of a student. Hanging over this is all is the hotel’s past–it was once the site of a tragic murder-suicide where a bride killed her new husband and herself on her wedding day.  Rather than seeing all this from one point of view, the action is narrated by a whole list of characters including, but not limited to, twin high school student named Alice and Rabbit Hatmaker who each have their own talents and secrets, their music teacher who has a complicated past of her own, the hotel caretaker who cannot quite believe what is happening to his beloved Bellweather, and a guest who has come to the hotel to face her demons.

Racculia manages a neat balance in that the book feels big and sprawling with all the character threads weaving in and out, but at the same time has a sense of claustrophobia as everyone is trapped in this one old hotel that does not feel particularly welcoming. But this isn’t a horror novel, as much as the trapped-in-a-hotel piece makes it sound like The Shining, and it’s not a traditional mystery, even if the central question of the book is what happened to the disappeared student. Instead, it felt more like reading a modern Dickens novel. Characters and back stories and coincidences and problems kept piling up and up and I kept getting more nervous, trying to figure out how it was all going to resolve. But I did find the ultimate ending gratifying, maybe because I was surprised by the outcomes of many of the characters–narrators I thought were reliable turned out not be, people I initially hated started to endear themselves to me, someone I was desperately worried about pulled herself through and out the other side, that sort of thing.

It’s not exactly heartwarming, and it’s not exactly funny, and it’s not exactly scary, but it sure made me want to keep reading to figure out how it was all going to end.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Quirky, creepy, and satisfying.

You might also like: This reminded me of Skippy Dies and The Lonely Polygamist, although Bellweather Rhapsody is kinder than either of those. But more than anything else, this made me think of Fargo–both the original movie and the recent TV series adaptation. They all share something in the matter-of-fact way that bizarre people and things are presented.

Love, Nina

by Kinsey

Some of my favorite people on Twitter are a group of British authors that includes Bim Adewunmi (@bimadew), India Knight (@indiaknight), Jojo Moyes (@jojomoyes), and Emma Beddington (@Belgianwaffling). In addition to being generally hilarious, they often have conversations amongst themselves about what they’ve been reading, and paying attention to those back-and-forths is a fabulous way of staying on top of what the cool (but non-pretentious) kids in publishing are reading and enjoying. The problem is that not everything they talk about is available in the U.S. I spent months watching them rave over a memoir that I couldn’t get, but just when I was about to cave and pay the insane shipping on amazon.co.uk, Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home by Nina Stibbe came out in the U.S. And it is just as great as they said it was.

Now, if I had just read a description of the book, I’m not sure if it would have caught my eye: in the 1980s, a young woman takes a job working as a nanny for two boys whose parents run in London’s fancy literary/artsy circles, and this is a collection of the letters she wrote home to her sister. I don’t know, it sounds very, innocent-country-girl-in-the-city? Or like a pre-Internet mommyblog? I’m just not sure I would expect much. But it is so much more sharp and thoughtful and, friendly than it sounds.

First of all, Nina and the family she works for are all hilarious. It’s clear that MK (the mom) was far more interested in a nanny who was clever and could keep up with the jokes and get along with the kids than in someone who could cook, clean, or successfully park a car. So there’s no employee-employer feel here, but rather it seems like you’re reading about the daily lives of a snarky bunch of friends. In the letters themselves, Nina often entertains her sister with retellings of conversations she has with the kids or MK, which are awesome. And presumably because these were going to a sister she was close to, Nina doesn’t try to make herself look good in the letters (there is kind of an on-going joke about Nina lying when she gets stuck in unpleasant situations). But that just make her seem even more relatable, and like someone you’d very much like to hang out with. In fact, the whole books feels like you’re getting to be in on all the jokes and secrets of some very cool people—there is one bit when Nina is evaluating a number of people on whether she is going to try to make friends with them, and I found myself thinking, “I really hope she’d have thought I looked worth the effort.” There’s no huge dramatic arc here, or any big tragedy, it’s just a lot of smart people who like each other chatting and having tea and reading things. It’s the perfect life, really.

I should say that this is an incredibly English book. There is a lot of discussion of English foods and dish soap and lots of slang, and lots of references to people that I suspect are more household names in the U.K. than they are here. The book opens with a list of main characters, and I did have to refer back to it and to Google occasionally to make sure I understood all the references. But you wouldn’t have to do this—the point here is not the celebrity gossip, and I think you could skim over every odd English reference and still enjoy this immensely.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Cool, charming, and funny.

You might also like: This is not at all original, because a number of other reviewers have mentioned this, but Love, Nina feels a lot like 84 Charing Cross Road, another sweet English book of letters. And Nancy Mitford’s books are from a different generation, but I think they also have a similar chatty, inside-joke sensibility (with just a tiny little bit of added Nazis).

Longbourn

by Kinsey

Pride and Prejudice is my very favorite book. It says so right in my bio for this site. I’ve read it dozens of times and love every bit. But I’m not overly precious about adaptations or modern takes–I really like seeing how someone takes such classic material and uses it to say something new, or just puts their own spin on a good story. Now, some re-purposings of the Bennet family have worked better than others. Bridget Jones’s Diary is another of my favorite books and I think it is absolute genius, and the Bollywood movie version Bride and Prejudice is completely delightful. And of course we are all big fans of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries here on Biblio-therapy. But I deeply, deeply disliked Austenland and I don’t even want to talk about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I tell you all this so you understand that I am a discerning consumer when it comes to the Jane Austen industry, as it were, and I am heartily recommending Longbourn by Jo Baker.

The one sentence summary sounds very Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abbey—Longbourn is about what the Bennet family servants were doing during the action in Pride and Prejudice–but Baker has taken what could have been just a cute idea and turned it into a really thoughtful story about complex, layered people.

Now the hook for the reader, of course, is how the story in this book will line up with the action we’re all familiar with, and how Baker writes about well-established and -loved characters like Jane and Lizzy. And don’t worry, the Pride and Prejudice fan will find plenty of things that mirror the classic. For example, when Mr. Collins comes to visit, the servants are all very concerned that they make the best impression possible, since when he takes over Longbourn he could chose to fire them all. And a few of the Bennets who don’t get the most sympathetic treatment in the book (including Mrs. Bennet and Mary) have an opportunity to show the reader a softer side. But what I found most impressive is that the heart of this story is the entirely new characters Baker creates from the ghostly background characters that Austen mentioned in only in passing and generally not even by name.

While the Bennet girls are sorting out their marital futures, the Longbourn servants are dealing with their own dreams and struggles. Sarah, the maid, dreams of life beyond the structured, never-changing Bennet house. Hill, the cook, has built her whole life at Longbourn, but struggles with what she has given up to create a peaceful space for thew family she’s assembled and how fragile a life spent serving others can be. And James, the mysterious new footman, wants to escape his past and fit into his new household. The beginning of the book describes a life so peaceful and prescribed that it cast a spell over me, lulling me into the quiet rhythms of an English country house. But as Lizzie’s story picks up speed, so does the action below stairs, and the fates of these characters ended up feeling as dramatic and important as anyone’s should be. While the plot of the book hangs on the structure of Pride and Prejudice, Baker’s story takes on its own life. I enjoyed her take on the behind-the-scenes in the Bennet household, but her characters stuck with me after the book was done and Longbourn is worth reading for their sake.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Contemplative modern take.

You might also like: Well, Pride and Prejudice obviously, if you haven’t read it. It really is lovely. But there was also something about Baker’s writing–the deliberate calmness, maybe–the reminded me of Ann Patchett, so you might want to try Bel Canto or State of Wonder.

The Cuckoo’s Calling

by Kinsey

I’m a little late to the party here, because although I followed all the revelations* about J.K Rowling writing a mystery novel under a pen name (Robert Galbraith), I just now got around to actually reading the book. Which was a shame, because The Cuckoo’s Calling is really a cracker of a mystery novel.

I like mysteries and have read a trillion of them, but I tend to get disillusioned with how much they blend together. Yes, I realize that most mysteries are going to have a formula, but I have read enough “death in a quiet English village” books and “death in a major American city” books to last me a lifetime. Rowling’s book may not stray far from the formula, but it is so well done that it definitely doesn’t blend in with anything else–it has it’s own distinct voice and feeling. The basic story is that a down-on-his-luck PI in modern-day London is asked to investigate the death of celebrity. The police have ruled it a suicide, but her brother is convinced it was murder. So far, so formulaic. But the details and the characterizations in this story are fab. All of the characters are crisply drawn–my favorite was the PI’s temp assistant, a great, smart female character who is not the typical genre girl assistant. The details about life in London make the city feel like a character itself, and the mystery was twisty enough that I didn’t see the solution coming.

As I was reading the book I was asking myself, as I’m sure everyone was, whether I would have ever guessed it was by Rowling without being told. And the answer is . . . of course not. It’s a mystery novel written for adults and it’s not like any of the characters suddenly start casting spells. But once you know she’s the author, there are definitely elements that feel familiar. Like, the character names have a Harry Potter-ish ring to them: the murder victim is Lula Landry, and the PI’s name is Cormoran Strike. And, as many reviewers have pointed out, the plot leads to a lot of musings about celebrity culture and the paparazzi; one has to imagine that Rowling’s thoughts on this come from personal experience.

While the book wraps the central mystery up quite nicely, lots of threads are left hanging with the characters, who clearly have lots more to do. I found myself curious about how the PI would handle his disastrous love life, and whether the assistant would get do some real sleuthing of her own. Which is convenient, since the second Cormoran Strike novel, The Silkworm, was just released, and I am definitely looking forward to it.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Twisty, modern mystery

You might also like: Case Histories, or any of the Jackson Brodie mysteries by Kate Atkinson, or the Duncan Kincaid mysteries by Deborah Crombie. Both of these are series set in today’s Great Britain, and both have an of-the-moment, edgy feel. I’ve also heard fabulous things about Denise Mina’s books, but I have been defeated by my to-read list and haven’t gotten to these yet–someone else should read some and report back!

*I know that Rowling is doing perfectly fine and there’s really no need for me to feel sorry for her, since I’m sure she’s perfectly happy somewhere counting her piles of money, but it does seem sad that it’s apparently impossible for her to trust the people around her with even a fairly unimportant sort of secret. How can one hope to have any sort of normal life like that? As Bill Murray says, “I always like to say to people who want to be rich and famous, try being rich first. See if that doesn’t cover most of it.”

Code Name Verity ALERT

by Kinsey

YOU GUYS. THERE IS A FOLLOW-UP TO CODE NAME VERITY. I have no idea how I missed this, but Elizabeth Wein’s Rose Under Fire is a companion to one of the best, and most heart breaking, things I read last year. I’m starting it tonight and fully expect to be crying tomorrow. I guess I could have waited until I finished the book and reviewed it, but I felt like this was a discovery you needed to hear about immediately. MORE CODE NAME VERITY, PEOPLE!

Apple Tree Yard

by Kinsey

First of all, if anyone reading this hasn’t seen Anna’s post from May 26, stop right here and go read that immediately, because Anna is amazing. I know that this blog is usually all about YA fiction and torturing ourselves with Atlas Shrugged, but Anna’s post is a good reminder of why we chose the name for this blog, and how important books have been and continue to be for all of us.

And now for a book review that is neither YA or Ayn Rand.

I’ve already raved here about how much I loved Gone Girl, and Anna has written about enjoying another Gillian Flynn book. For the past couple of years I’ve seen a great deal of discussion about what would be “the next Gone Girl,” and one of the suggestions that came up was the English book Apple Tree Yard.  Apple tree yard–doesn’t that sound pretty and pastoral, peaceful almost? Yeah, that not what this book is at all. But if you’ve liked any of Gillian Flynn’s creepy mysteries, I bet that you’ll enjoy this one as well.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but from the beginning you understand that the main character, a British woman in her 50s, is on trial for something bad that went down when she was having an affair with a mysterious man who isn’t names until late in the book. The real story is the process, the downward spiral of exactly how the affair happened and what went so terribly wrong. The whole thing is very grim, and everything in the main character’s life–marriage, work, children–seems to have a dark cloud hanging over it. In fact, each time I closed the book I found myself feeling a bit disappointed in people and in life. Here was this woman who seemed to have made such good decisions and have such a nice life, and yet things were just rotten underneath it all and everyone and everything was sort of horrible. Much like the Gillian Flynn books, I sort of wanted to take a shower after reading.

Although there’s not a single huge twist as in Gone Girl, I found myself frantically turning pages to learn how things all went so wrong. The book also offered a nice look into the English justice system, which is a bit different than we’re used to seeing on American TV. And for the record, Apple Tree Yard is the name of a tiny London side-street where something unseemly happens. So, definitely not pastoral, but very gripping.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Dark courtroom drama

You might also like: Lionel Shriver’s books, which also tend to be grim, women-centered books about the tragedy of everyday life in modern England. The Post-Birthday World has been my favorite of hers so far.

The Goldfinch

by Kinsey

Yet again, Kinsey is here to tell you to read a book that everyone on earth already knows about! This time, I’d like to refer you to the novel that just won the Pulitzer Prize, Donna Tartt’s new book The Goldfinch.

Actually, I am not here to tell everyone to read this. I ultimately thought it was great, but it also took me a month to read and was long and weird and I completely understand the people who didn’t like it and why the reviews were sort of all over the place. It’s an odd book–better, and more focused I think, than The Little Friend but not as streamlined or hard-hitting as The Secret History. I think you SHOULD read this book if:

1) You like long, rambling epics. This book is something like 800 pages long. (I read it on my Kindle so I didn’t see a page count, but man did those percentages go by slowly.) And it feels long–and like several different books, actually. It starts off in New York City as an urban, city kid story, but there’s a long stretch in the middle where the main character (Theo) is in high school in Las Vegas, and then another looong stretch as him as an adult. It was as if different stories with very different atmospheres all mushed together into one superlong story. So be prepared to make an investment.

2) You’re okay with a sense of dark foreboding. It wasn’t just the page length that made this book go so slowly for me. I kept setting the book down for days at a time because while I was desperate to find out what happened, it was so tense and all seemed so destined to end badly for Theo and the other characters that I couldn’t stand to keep reading. At one point, I was on an international flight, trapped in an seat for hours with plenty of time to finish the novel, and I was so dreading what might happen that I chose to watch a bunch of episodes of Two and A Half Men instead. I KNOW.

3) You like art (specifically Old Masters kind of art). For the two people who don’t know, the book centers around a painting that Theo accidentally takes from the Met when he end up in the middle of a terrorist attack on the museum (this sounds preposterous when I say it, but it makes sense in the book). There is A LOT of description of this painting, and other paintings that Theo ends up coming into contact with. And further, there is a lot of discussion of “art,” and of what art, and paintings, and this painting in particular mean to people’s lives and to their souls. I didn’t find this until I after I finished the book, but someone put together a genius Pinterest board that shows all of the various art work mentioned in the book–it’s a huge help to be able to actually see what Tartt is describing.

4) You don’t mind a useless/immoral main character. I certainly had sympathy for Theo  after spending so much time with him, but he’s frustrating and (especially as an adult) not a particularly admirable character. There were any number of points when I just wanted to throw my hands up and tell him that if he didn’t stop making such bad decisions I was going to have to give up on him.

So, don’t go into this book expecting a beach read, is what I’m saying. But I did like the book, and a number of the supporting characters were so great that I wish I could read 800 more pages about them (Boris!). Also, I will give away the tiniest spoiler, just because know my audience: nothing bad happens to the dog.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Sprawling modern saga

You might also like: Three Junes or The Whole World Over by Julia Glass, which are also dense, chewy books with New York City settings.