Hey there. It’s November. The weather is finally turning, the pumpkin spice madness still somehow continues, and it’s NaNoWriMo. I’m not actually doing NaNoWriMo this year, because I’m living in revision land on a bunch of projects, so word counts are hard, but I am trying to write every day, and so far I’m succeeding.
But before we really get into November, a lot happened in October. I finished revisions on my book and sent them off to my agent, which is very exciting. I also got to meet my agent in person, which was also great. I started a writing group, and after a lot of gathering people and deciding how we were going to operate and finding where to meet, we finally had our first meeting last weekend and it was everything I wanted it to be. I kept on working, and while I still feel like I’m pretty clueless, I’m feeling like I’m slightly less clueless. I understand a lot of the words that are being used now, at least. I also really ramped up my exercise at the barre, because I won a free month and so I just went all the time, and now I’m addicted. While I’m still really tired and can’t quite get my sleep schedule the way I want it, I feel like I’m at least starting to find a balance between work and fun, and I’m really happy.
I also read twelve books in October. Wow! This brigns me to a total of 80 books in 2019, and so I’m back on track to meet my goal of reading one hundred books this year, but also I’m straining my collage app to the limit.
The books I read were all over the map. Some were really long, and some were really short. I read one book in Braille and the rest were audio. I continued with one series I’ve been reading, read a whole new trilogy, and started another one. I was also all over the map with genre. There was plenty of fantasy, but I read a couple classics, one World War II book, three books that were set in a secondary world but otherwise didn’t have other traditional fantasy elements, one literary fiction, one sci fi, and one modern gothic horror thing. I really liked a lot of these books. A couple of these books I ended up with lukewarm feelings. I really didn’t like only one book. And all of these books were new for me—no rereads this month.
So here are the twelve books I read this month and what I thought of them. I’ll keep this spoiler-free and link to full reviews if I have them, but as I said here, part of me finding a work-life balance means I’m stopping full reviews for all books.
First, I finished Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson, the third book in the Stormlight Archive series. I have a full review for this book here. Oathbringer picks up right after the end of Words of Radiance. Kaladin is off to find his family. Dalinar is trying to pull the rulers of the world together into a coalition against the parshendi-turned-voidbringers. Shallan is having a really hard time. This book was pretty slow at first, and the ending was a little chaotic, but the plot was amazing, and I really adored the character development we got. I especially loved getting more about Dalinar’s past and watching him really struggle with it in real-time. Like wow I just love everything about this series and I am dying for the next book to come out. I know they’re massive, but they’re easy reads, and I can’t recommend this book and the whole series strongly enough.
Next, I read Animal Farm by George Orwell. Animal Farm follows a group of animals on a farm who overthrow their human owners, build their own society based on equality and sharing and all the good intentions behind communism, and take up running of the farm themselves. But as they realize what’s really involved in running the farm, their idyllic society tumbles toward more of a totalitarian dictatorship. I have a full review of the book over here, and it’s pretty ranty. I wasn’t a fan of this book. It had some good qualities, certainly, but on the whole, it felt like Orwell was spoonfeeding his morality to me, and I hate being spoonfed anything books. ,I especially hate being spoonfed morality. I know this book is a classic, but it just wasn’t for me.
After that, I went to the complete opposite end of the classics spectrum and read Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie. This book was a delight. I’m sure that you know the basic story. Peter Pan appears and whisks Wendy, John, and Michael Darling off to Neverland for fantastical adventures, where they face down Captain Hook and ticking crocodiles and so on. But the book has so much more than the Disney movie. The book spends a lot of time with the Darling parents, who notice their children have gone missing, and we spend time with their grief and their loss. The book isn’t about the kids’ adventures so much as family and childhood and adulthood, and it’s beautiful. I have a full review right here, but the short version is that I really enjoyed this book and definitely recommend it.
This month, I read the entire Winner’s Trilogy by Marie Rutkoski, The Winner’s Curse, The Winner’s Crime, and The Winner’s Kiss. You can see my full review of the first book, The Winner’s Curse, over here, but I didn’t get to do full reviews of the second and third books, and unfortunately I don’t think I will get to unless someone can find me a Time Turner so I can have more hours in the day. I really enjoyed this series. In a world where teens have to choose between marriage or enlistment in the army, Kestrel wants to be a musician. Then she buys a mysterious slave, Arin, and they fall in love, all while Arin is working as a spy in her house for the slave rebellion intent on reclaiming his country. Things get complicated. The first book had some problematic bits when it came to talking about slavery, definitely, but the second book did a lot to make that better. The second book was full of so much amazing political intrigue. I will admit some disappointment with the third book, because in the beginning-ish Kestrel loses all her memories and we spend a good chunk of the book as she tries to get them back and figure out who she is. It was frustrating because it felt like we lost all her character development from the first two books. But the ending of the series was really great, and on the whole I would recommend checking it out.
The October book for the National Federation of the Blind book club was Long Road To Mercy by David Baldacci. Atlee Pine’s twin sister, Mercy, was abducted when they were six years old. Now, almost thirty years later, Atlee is an FBI agent working in the Grand Canyon. When a mule is found stabbed to death on the Canyon floor, Atlee is sent to investigate, and soon she’s uncovering an international conspiracy. I admit that this wasn’t my kind of book. I’m not big into spy thrillers, and this felt like it had all the cliché’s of a lone detective story. It was certainly a page-turner, and it was easy to read, and there were some great characters. But given the title, Long Road to Mercy; the sister’s name, Mercy; and the emphasis on the sister’s abduction in the beginning of the book, I expected the sister to play a larger role in the book. Minor spoiler, the sister has almost nothing to do with the plot. Her sister’s abduction is important to Atlee’s character, of course, but that was the part of the book that felt most overdone to me. I don’t feel strongly enough about this book to devote a whole post to it, but this would be a great place to talk about the importance of correctly setting up reader expectations. I expected the sister to matter to the plot. She didn’t. I was disappointed. This disappointment affected my entire impression of the book. And this could have been solved with something as simple as ‘a different title. Sorry to harp on this but it really bugged me, and some of the people in the book club discussion just didn’t get why I even expected this to be part of the plot. Anyway, while I won’t say I disliked the book, I didn’t really enjoy it that much either, but it’s also just not my kind of book. If you really like spy thrillers or suspense books, this might be the perfect book for you, and you should take my thoughts with a handful of salt.
I also started The Remnant Chronicles this month. I read the first book, The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson. I will definitely have full reviews for this book and its sequels, which I’m reading now, because I have so many interesting writing thoughts on this. So keep an eye out for that. The main premise of The Kiss of Deception is that we have a princess, engaged to marry a prince, but she doesn’t want to, so she runs away and settles in a little seaside town and is very happy. Then we have the jilted prince, who sees her as a challenge and goes after her. And we have an assassin from another country also looking for her. They both find her in the little seaside town, and because it’s a YA fantasy, a love triangle ensues. Yes the assassin is one of the corners of this triangle. I admit I was one hundred percent skeptical when I started this book, and if I could roll my eyes there would have been so much of that. But I really enjoyed it. The world building is really rich, and while Lia, the princess, is pretty insufferable for the first half of the book, she has so much great character growth. But my favorite thing about this book is that it surprised me over and over and over again. I went in thinking this was just another love triangle YA fantasy novel, and I made predictions accordingly, and I was so wrong. For example, I was one hundred percent convinced I knew which of the guys pursuing Lia was the assassin and which was the prince, and I was wrong. But looking back, it totally made sense. And this gave me so much respect for this book and for Mary E. Pearson as a writer. As ridiculous as the premise of this book sounds, I highly recommend you give it a try. I’ve already finished the second book, and I’ll say now that it’s even better than the first.
Next, I read Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. This is the book we’ll be talking about in December for my NFB book club. I’m planning a full book review for this one too, because I’m really interested in how Verghese plays with time in this novel and I want to talk about that from a writing perspective. When a nun working as a nurse in a mission hospital in Ethiopia suddenly goes into labor, has twins, and dies in childbirth, the hospital rallies around the infants and raises them as their own. The book tells the story of the twins’ lives, starting seven years before the twins are born and ending when they’re fifty years old. It’s hard to describe this book beyond that, but it is really phenomenal. Just a small warning, if you’re squeamish about hospitals, surgery, and blood and guts, that’s a big part of this book, so it might not be for you. But I loved it, and I highly recommend.
I’ve never read Night by Elie Wiesel. I’ve read so many World War II and holocaust books, and I thought it was high time I read this book. This was such a raw and visceral account of the holocaust. I can’t say that I loved it, because it was an incredibly difficult book to read. But I also think it’s an important book to read, and I’m glad I read it. If you haven’t read it, you should, though it is not a book to read right before you go to bed. Unless you don’t want to sleep.
Next, I read Our Dried Voices by Greg Hickey. Full disclosure, Greg gave me a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This book actually isn’t available in any of the places I normally get digital Braille or audio books, so I’m really glad Greg contacted me, because I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to read this book otherwise. There is so much to talk about here. The book is set in a distant future where humans have cured all diseases, colonized another planet, and basically built a society where all of humanity’s basic needs are taken care of by automation. But now the machines are breaking, and no one knows how to fix them. This sounded like a really cool premise, but I had a hard time with this book. I particularly struggled to suspend my disbelief on what felt like the main premise of the book. The fact that humanity would build automated systems to take care of all their basic needs and not include some trouble-shooting mechanisms or backup systems is beyond me. Like aren’t computer problems ubiquitous? In all fairness, this one is explained by the end of the book, but it still made it hard for me to get into the book. More importantly, I really just don’t buy the premise that if you don’t have to work, you will lose your identity. The humans in this colony just romp mindlessly through the meadow, they eat when the bells ring, sleep when the bells ring, they have no independent thoughts of their own, they barely even speak. I admit the book and the writing do a really good job describing this and setting the scene, but I just couldn’t get behind it as a premise. If people have no need to work because all their basic needs are provided for, why wouldn’t they spend that time cultivating creative or intellectual pursuits? Just because all disease has been cured doesn’t mean there’s no need to continue studying science. That sort of thing. Personally, I found the idea that the need to work for our survival is key to our identity to be problematic. More so because when we actually confront this idea toward the end of the book—the people of the colony are actually compared to animals at one point—we sort of come at the confrontation sideways and never really resolve it. The ending feels like the book is just avoiding the issue it set up to talk about. Basically I wanted our main character, Samuel, to take a stand, whatever that stand might be. But he chose the option that was not taking a stand. This isn’t to say that there weren’t things about this book that I liked. I really enjoyed discovering how the world worked along with Samuel. I really liked Samuel’s adventure beyond the colony and character growth as he learns the truth. I liked that the theories I had were wrong. There were also so many moments where the writing in this book was crystalline and beautiful. I’ve actually come to the conclusion that I would have liked this book a lot better had I not had the timeline with the history of humanity from 2000 onward in the front of the book, and if I didn’t have the description saying that humans had cured all of the world’s ills and colonized another planet. If I had gone into this book with no idea that this was supposed to be advanced humanity, for example, and it was more of a mystery figuring out what was going on, I think I would have enjoyed it more. We could have built up to the realization that this was what automation did to humanity. That would have been really cool, though I’m still not sure I agree with either the premise or the ending. So while this was a pretty neat book, short and fast and easy to read, and I enjoyed many parts of it, on the whole it just didn’t work for me the way I wanted it to.
Finally, my law school book club friends who also moved to D.C. have decided to keep up our book club. This month, in honor of Halloween, we read White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi. Lily Silver has died, leaving behind her husband and teenaged twins. They’re all grieving, but her daughter Miranda is taking it particularly hard. She already has a rare eating disorder where she only likes eating chalk, and now her mother is dead and she basically has a haunted house to contend with. I had a hard time following what was going on in this book, but I still really enjoyed it. The writing was so good, and it was so creepy. It really took me back to the American horror class I took my first year of college. I saw all the same themes and everything. I loved how gothic this book felt, very much like The House of the Seven Gables or The Haunting of Hill House, but also how very modern it was. And the writing in this book is just so vivid and beautiful. If you like bizarre and creepy haunted house stories, this is for you.
Wow! I read a lot in October, and a lot of different books. It was a pretty good reading month, too, because I really liked most of the books I read. I have some great plans for the books I want to read in November—The Starless Sea, Tunnel of Bones, the rest of the Mistborn books, the rest of the Remnant Chronicles, this book called Daughters of Nri which just came out and which I am so excited about. And as I said, I’m planning some full book reviews for a few of these October books, along with some writing discussions I hope you’ll find interesting. In the meantime, have you read any of these books? What do you think? And can you recommend a photo collage app that will handle more than nine photos?
Seventeen-year-old Kestrel is the general’s daughter in a vast empire that is constantly waging war on other countries and enslaving the conquered people. Like all teenagers in the empire, Kestrel must soon choose between marriage or enlisting in the military herself, but Kestrel isn’t really interested in either. She just wants to play the piano, but only slaves are allowed to be musicians. Then Kestrel buys a young slave named Arin, and everything turns upside down. As Kestrel and Arin become friends, we switch between Kestrel’s and Arin’s points of view. Kestrel is navigating the world of high society, and doing so very well. She’s very clever, good at strategizing, and politically savvy. But she’s also falling in love with Arin, and maybe Arin is falling in love with her, even though Kestrel’s obvious preference for him is stirring vicious rumors, and Arin is working as a spy for the slave rebellion planning to overthrow the empire and reclaim their conquered home.