List Challenges and Book Lists

Jul12 by Rebecca

I recently discovered List Challenges, the website. I do like list challenges, especially ones about books. And here are a whole bunch of them:

NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books
(I’ve read 32 of these, and saw a bunch more that I’ve been intending to get around to reading. It really is an excellent list.)

Top 25 Fantasy Books, from IGN
(I’ve read 11 of these.)

101 Best Selling Books of All Time
(I’ve read 27 of these, but more to the point, these books made for a really odd collection. They aren’t themed or anything, just the books that have sold the most copies. Very odd.)

Modern Library 100 Best Novels (Modern Library ran the poll in 1998)
(Urg. Here are the Great Classics, the real, high literature. I’ve only read 6 of these books, and only enjoyed 3 of them. Just, urg. There’s only so much delving into the human condition that I can take and it’s not that much.)

BBC’s The Big Read – Best Loved Novels of All Time
(I’ve read 30 of these and loved most of those.)

The 50 Best Books for Kids (from the National Education Association)
(So I’m not exactly the audience for this list anymore, but I’ve still read 25 out of the 50, and not all of them while I was a kid. These are good ones, and also include books for a range of ages, from picture books for toddlers to young-adult readers.)

The 20 Best Books of the ’00s
(Now, this is just embarrassing, but I’ve only read 1 of these 20. At least I recognize several more?)

NPR’s 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels
(I’ve read 31 of these.)

This website of lists is a major time-sink so I had better tear myself away from it so I can go do something at least moderately productive. But you, dear reader, should definitely go and lose yourself in the various lists. How many of these books have you read?

Grave Mercy

Jul9 by Kinsey

Have you been thinking that there are not enough young adult novels out there about nuns who kill people in the name of the god of death? Well then, I have the book for you! But seriously, I really enjoyed Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers, and it’s lots of fun to tell people that you’re reading about assassin nuns.

Set in Brittany (now part of France) in the 1400s, the story follows Ismae, a teenage girl who is saved from an abusive father and an arranged marriage by joining a convent dedicated to Mortain, the god of death. And this convent teaches it’s novices some very specific skills, training them to be sent out into the world to kill those people marked by Mortain for death.

This was clearly published in the wake of The Hunger Games and Divergent and all those other teenage dystopian future series (this is the first in what looks like a planned trilogy), and it feels very much like those books. But if you’re a little sick of dystopian futures, like I am, this offers a nice twist by being set in the past. And while there is a bit of the magic/supernatural happening with the god of death and all, it’s really mostly a historical novel about life in medieval Europe. It featured a little more political intrigue than I would have preferred (However will the Duchess keep her crown? I don’t really care all that much!) but it also had adventure, romance, and strong female characters with a lot of agency. And it sure wasn’t like anything else I’ve read lately.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Dramatic, historical, romantic.

You might also like: Scott Westerfeld’s Pretties/Uglies series. Those are set in the future, but the books felt very similar. And I consider those really fun books, so.

Those Who Hunt the Night

Jul1 by Rebecca

Those Who Hunt the Night
By Barbara Hambly
1988

This is an excellent vampire book. There are a lot of fun vampire books, but this one is actually good. I love the characters, I love the way they interact, and I especially love the way that the author presents the vampire characters.

The book is set in Edwardian England and our main character is Oxford professor James Asher. He’s living a calm quite life, but has a rather gritty past as a secret agent for the British government. At the start of this book, the vampire Don Simon Ysidro approaches Asher, informs him that (1) vampires exist, (2) someone has been hunting the vampires of London, and (3) Asher is going to be Ysidro’s agent in tracking down the hunter or Ysidro is going to kill Asher’s wife Lydia. The plot progresses from there.

The problem with vampires (as it were) is that they eat people. Humans are their prey. There just can’t be any sort of natural alliances between predator and prey. Most vampire stories hand wave this away: the vampire just feels terrible about it, or refrains from following his natural urges, or some such. This book, though, directly confronts the fact that these vampires kill people; both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ vampires kill people. The alliance between Asher and Ysidro is necessarily deeply coercive and fraught.

Very much related to the previous point, I like a certain amount of ruthlessness in my characters. I don’t want them to be mean or cruel, but I like characters who are smart and determined and accept personal responsibility for their actions and the repercussions of those actions. Asher, Ysidro, and Lydia are all like this. They have goals and they do what they need to do in order to achieve those goals. They know what risks they take with their actions and they are very careful in how and what they do.

Another wonderful thing about this book and these characters is that Lydia, Asher’s wife, is an excellent character in her own right and the marriage between her and Asher is equitable. They not only love each other but they also respect and support each other. They are honest and forthright with each other. They trust each other, not just to be faithful, but to be capable.

Anyway, the investigation that makes up the actual plot itself was good, but what makes this book shine are the characters and their interactions with each other. I definitely recommend it.

Among Others

Jul1 by Anna

By Jo Walton

Kinsey introduced me to Jo Walton through her Small Change series, which is actually pretty brilliantly titled, now that I think about it. The three books, titled Farthing, Ha’penny, and Half a Crown, are solidly written English murder mysteries with the added brilliance of being set in an alternate history in the 1930s and 40s in which England supported the German Nazi Party (which is not all that improbable: if not for Wallis Simpson, Edward, a known nazi sympathizer, might have stayed on the throne). Anyway, the mysteries themselves are intriguing, but it is the setting and characters that really make those books shine.

When I ran across several (very favorable) reviews for her new book, Among Others, I added it to my to-read list immediately. It was described in the reviews as a coming-of-age story set in a world of magic and fairies, and I was so there! It…isn’t exactly that. I still really, really liked it, but the magic is very much in the background, an alternate setting like in the Small Change series. It follows a teenage girl from Wales recovering from personal tragedy while attending a very British preparatory school, and on occasion she confers with local fairies for advice. The magic of the world is utilized very effectively as a way to look at the world around you and make decisions for the direction of your life. I quickly got over any disappointment in the marginalized fantasy because once again, the characters and settings were completely engaging.

I’ve insisted that Rebecca read it next because I think she’ll appreciate the one aspect of the book that I found a bit alienating. Very minor spoiler: Mori, the heroine, finds comfort and friendship in a SF book club held at her local library. Much of Among Others is a love letter to the genre of science fiction and all the great authors that founded the genre. I’m not much of a SF reader, though; I had only read a few books by the authors mentioned, and I had liked even less. (The book is set in 1979, so I kept having to bite my tongue against criticism over the omission of more recent authors.) The heroine and the club are very sniffy about people who don’t like science fiction, and the book does such a good job of carrying that feeling through in the writing that I felt the alienation a bit as a reader.

—Anna

Dark Places

Jun25 by Anna

By Gillian Flynn

Dark Places made me feel terrible, but at the same time I read it straight through in just three days, staying up far too late into the nights.

Kinsey has previously reviewed two of Gillian Flynn’s novels, Gone Girl and Sharp Objects, and had recommended Dark Places to our friend Cara. (Kinsey in fact said that when Cara asked for summer reading recommendations, Kinsey, knowing her tastes, combed through all of her recent favorites for the most grim and depressing.) When I went to visit Cara a couple of weeks ago, I picked up her copy to just check out the first few pages. One of the first things I did when I got home was put a reserve on it at my library and then waited with literary withdrawal symptoms (lack of focus, irritability…) for my request to come in.

The book follows Libby Day, the sole survivor at the age of seven of her family’s massacre, supposedly by her older brother in a Satanist sacrifice. At the beginning of the book, she is a severely emotionally stunted adult who simply lives off of the charity donations that accumulated during the news frenzy of her family tragedy. She is nearing the end of her funds when she is contacted by a club of true crime fans who want to pay her to help them prove her brother’s innocence. She agrees solely out of financial desperation but becomes caught up in the investigation herself.

The book seesaws between Libby’s current search for the truth and first-person perspectives from both her mother and brother on the day before the massacre. I mean this as a total compliment, but as I read through it, the sense of doom and accumulating circumstances felt very real, like gathering storm clouds. (This is not a good book for Rebecca.) Like Kinsey described in Gone Girl, as a reader you have no idea how it is going to pan out, and keep wavering in each chapter: did the brother do it? Surely not, but wait, did he, though?

One night, after finally tearing myself away from the book, I was thinking about how insane all of this Satanist stuff sounds, like just completely bonkers, and all of a sudden I remembered it! For those of you who didn’t live through the 80’s, it sounds completely absurd, and it absolutely is, but it was also truly there: this very real fear that there were Satanist cults lurking in every town, just waiting to grab young children off the street and sacrifice them in a violent ritual. It is so ridiculous (and eventually discovered to be totally unfounded) in retrospect that I had completely forgotten about it until this book, and suddenly I remembered as a child, peering into graffitied tunnels (where I’m sure the local teens just went to smoke) and thinking, “that could be a lair for the Satanists.”

It really kind of boggles the mind when this kind of national hysteria occurs, and one of the most powerful aspects of this book is that it really brings home how unlucky individuals can be destroyed before we all recover our senses.

—Anna

The Outlaws of Sherwood

Jun21 by Anna

By Robin McKinley

I mentioned The Outlaws of Sherwood in my previous review as a possible non-homophobic treatment of a heroine-in-disguise romantic plot. I decided that since it had been years since I’d actually read it, though, I was a bit fuzzy on the actual treatment, so figured I’d better reread it.

Robin McKinley is a favorite author of mine, so even though this isn’t one of my favorite books of hers, it is still better than most books out there. It is also the most realistic and least romanticized version of the Robin Hood story that I’ve ever read/seen/heard. This can make it a bit slow at times—Robin is often unsure of himself and uncomfortable with his increasing renown—but the characters really shine. The outlaws of Sherwood Forest are desperate people who are simply trying to stay alive in a time of political and economic upheaval while keeping as much a moral compass as possible in their circumstances.

Unfortunately, per my previous review, the Little John storyline was not quite as extensive as I’d remembered, with the woman-in-disguise element dealt with summarily enough that it does not really address the issue of potential homophobia. On the flip side, the female characters themselves are, I believe, the most interesting and nuanced characters, so at least there is a strong feminist theme.

—Anna

Life After Life

Jun17 by Kinsey

I feel like I have a habit of recommending the hottest book of the moment, as if people don’t already know that they should go read Gone Girl or Where’d You Go, Bernadette. But sometimes the masses are correct and I am powerless to do anything but join in with the chorus. In this case, that means saying that Life After Life by Kate Atkinson is amazing and everyone should go read it.

In case you haven’t seen the many, many glowing reviews, Life After Life is about Ursula, a British girl born in the early 1900s who dies almost immediately. Except, then the story starts again and this time she lives. Over and over, the book skips ahead and then backs up again, with events playing out in different ways and alternate timelines spinning out into different futures that hinge on the smallest things. Now, this is not a time travel book–the point here is not whatever magic allows Ursula to do this, and she only has the barest sense that anything is going on. Rather, the point was wide range of possibilities that every life contains. Sometimes Ursula is alone and sad, other times she has family and friends around her. By the end of a possible timeline, things feel inevitable, but Atkinson immediately shows you how different Ursula’s life could be. And because of the way the book is structured, I felt a growing sense of hope as I read, like Ursula was slowly figuring things out and fighting an invisible battle for the best life possible for her and the people around her.

I’m afraid this makes the book sound heavier and more complicated than it is–it was really a joy to read. Ursula’s various outcomes don’t play out exactly in order, but it’s so carefully written that it is easy to follow. Major sections of the book take place during World War II, including some especially harrowing sequences during the London Blitz, but there is plenty of family drama and it doesn’t feel like a war story. It’s a long, dense book, but I was sorry when it ended because I wished I could spend more time with the characters. Just so, so good.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Intricate, contemplative, and hopeful.

You might also like: For World War II stories and complex structure, try The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. Kate Atkinson’s other books, especially the Jackson Brodie mysteries, are also great. And I want to recommend Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, although the only thing they really have in common with Life After Life is being amazingly written.

I also want to note that another book with the same title also came out this year. The Life After Life that is not getting all the attention is by Jill McCorkle. I haven’t read it yet, but Jill McCorkle is a North Carolina author who I met years ago when she came to speak at the creative writing summer camp I attended. She was fun and sweet and voluntarily chose to spend time with a bunch of dorky teenagers attending a–let me say it again–creative writing summer camp. I also really enjoyed her earlier books, especially July 7th. So if anyone’s read her Life After Life (it is a really good title), let me know how it was, because I have a soft spot for her and feel a bit bad that her book is getting overshadowed.

Seven Daughters and Seven Sons

Jun14 by Anna

By Barbara Cohen and Bahija Lovejoy

Rebecca and I were discussing the other day whether it is possible to have a romantic storyline with the old trope wherein the heroine dresses as a boy without including even a hint of homophobia. You know: girl is disguised as boy, girl meets and falls in love with boy, and boy discovers the disguise when he also falls in love with girl since he just knew he could never have those kinds of feelings for another boy. The Fourth Vine writes up an excellent analysis of the inherent homophobic issues in Georgette Heyer’s The Masqueraders here.

I had suggested Robin McKinley’s Outlaws of Sherwood as a possibility, in which Little John says that after he began to have feelings for an apparent boy, he studied her more closely to see what was attracting him since he had never before felt that way for a boy, and then saw through the disguise. It is a fine point, but an important one that he didn’t automatically know that she was a woman because of his feelings, so he wasn’t immediately repudiating homosexual attraction. Confusion instead of repulsion.

Rebecca suggested Seven Sons and Seven Daughters, in which the middle daughter in a family of seven daughters dresses as a man in order to go out and make her fortune in trade like her male cousins do. I’d never read it, but was at loose ends, book-wise, so figured I’d give it a shot. It is also quite short, since it is more Young Readers than Young Adult (I would estimate late elementary/early middle school). It does still have some of the inherent anti-gay sentiment, though more by omission in that it never occurs to the love interest that he could be romantically attracted to a boy. Either he has a strong brother-like friendship with a young man or a great romance with a young woman, and the gender of his person of interest will determine that. Considering that this book is the retelling of an eleventh-century Iraqi folktale, that is pretty good.

More interesting than the treatment of the romance-in-disguise, though, was the description of the evolution of Sharia law in the Middle East. The heroine Buran’s family is very poor and pitied by the locals because having seven daughters and no sons at all is clearly a curse from Allah. Sons are how one gains wealth and prestige, and Buran’s wealthy uncle is considered additionally blessed with his seven sons. When coming up with her idea to set out as a man, Buran thinks back over the previous centuries, when women were free to be “musicians, scholars, warriors, poets, and merchants,” and describes how the caliphs had given their power away to the conquering Persians, who brought with them the hajib, and then the Turks, who brought even stricter restrictions for women.

Even though the book itself is very clearly pro-women, the pervading anti-women sentiment in the general society can be a bit shocking to modern ears. One reason Buran is able to stay disguised as male for several years is that no one believes that women have the minds for business strategy, so if someone is successful in business, that person is unquestionably male, all appearances aside.

As evidenced by this quite long review, this 220-page, large print book for young readers gave me quite a bit of food for thought, especially in our current political discourse on the Middle East, Islam, terrorism, gender roles, definitions of traditional families, and sexual equality. Not so bad for a couple day’s reading of a folk tale and love story.

—Anna

A Book About Design by Mark Gonyea

Jun11 by Rebecca

A Book About Design: Complicated Doesn’t Make It Good
by Mark Gonyea
2005

Another Book About Design: Complicated Doesn’t Make It Bad
by Mark Gonyea
2007

These are awesome! I love them both.

In theory, these are picture books about design, written and illustrated for young children. As such, they are about as long and have about as much text as you might expect from a picture book intended for to be read either by or to very young beginning readers.

In practice, they are design books that show some of the foundational concepts of design, and are a great introduction for adults as well. There is very little text, but it is all exactly on point and the illustrations do an excellent job of actually illustrating the concepts presented.

Plus, there’s a certain humor in the presentation of the concepts that I really enjoyed. I thought the books were useful, but I was also grinning the whole time I read them. I highly recommend them.

Code Name Verity

Jun5 by Kinsey

I’ve been home sick from work for a couple of days now, and while I am tired of coughing and sick of my couch, I did get a chance to finish an AMAZING book: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein.

This WWII story is about a young, female British intelligence agent who is captured in Occupied France while on a mission, and is writing her confession for her Gestapo captors. But telling her story also involves describing her friendship with a female pilot, so while it’s a war novel, there’s also this lovely thread of friendship running through it. I’m a sucker for WWII stories and this one is clearly impeccably researched. It’s also really cleverly put together–things are not the way they may appear on the surface of the story, which is completely appropriate for a tale told by intelligence officers. As I was reading, I had a sense that something else was going on, but was still surprised by how things came together at the end. It was difficult to read, at times, but so well constructed. After Eleanor and Park, this was the best thing I’ve read this year.

One note: my library classified this as YA, but I found it pretty disturbingly violent. Realistically violent, not gratuitously so, but still. I would call this a book for adults or maybe older teens.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Harrowing, heart-breaking, and gripping.

You might also like: The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, or How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, or Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy