My October Reading
A few less books, but some good ones among them.
For no discernible reason, I read a few less books this month than the prior two which I think is a more normal pace. I read one non-fiction book I quite enjoyed, as well as two quicker reads (the Hunger Games prequels) and overall, there was a lot of good here.
Hampton Sides - The Wide Wide Sea is a biography of Captain James Cook, but mostly his final passage. Sides also wrote “Ghost Soldiers” which is a phenomenal book at the Bataan Death March, so I knew going in I was dealing with a talented writer. While I will say there’s not a ton of “oh my god, I never knew THAT” here, it’s super compelling and interesting all the way to the last. Well worth the read. Rating: 4.25/5
Suzanne Collins - A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is the first Hunger Games prequel, mostly dealing with the antagonist of the trilogy, Coriolanus Snow. My general feeling was that it was smart to show how crude and brutal the original games were, but that there wasn’t nearly enough to show Snow’s evolution into such a villain. Rating: 3.5/5
Ocean Vuong - The Emperor of Gladness is the second novel by Vuong, and I LOVED his first. The prose here is just as strong but the story was a bit weaker for me. The middle part of the book dragged a bit and there’s some dreamy, fantastical sequences I could have done without. Still, a remarkable writer. Rating: 4.0/5
Yasmin Zaher - The Coin is a book I heard about from some “Book Tube” folks and it was available on Kindle so I read it. I thought I was very clever in comparing it to “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” as both are novels about women who willfully lose their minds and self-sabotage in extreme ways, and I found this much less enjoyable than the book that I - and almost every reviewer I read after finishing the book - compared it to. Rating: 3.25/5
Suzanne Collins - Sunrise on the Reaping is the other Hunger games prequel, this one focusing on Haymitch, who is in the trilogy as a mentor to Katniss Everdeen, so we of course know that he survives and wins. But this book cleverly shows - in a way that somehow hits fairly hard given how pulpy and over the top the series truly is - the trauma that hits Haymitch, and why he’s such a mess when we first meet him in the Hunger Games first novel. I was surprised how much I enjoyed this one. Rating: 4.25/5
Aisha Muharrar - Loved One has a cover that makes it look like a romance. Instead, it’s a story about a woman whose longterm friend -and sometimes boyfriend - has died tragically, and she’s trying to collect some of his items for her and his family’s memories .. and also find out fill in some gaps in his life when they’d lost contact. One of the appeals of the book is that author Muharrar has written on several shows I adore like Parks & Recreation, The Good Place and Hacks. While this book has SOME of the humor and spirit of those shows, it’s a bit of a different tack, which is fine - and I want to read more from her when that comes. As a debut novel, it’s really impressive. Rating: 4.0/5
Onto November!