Willa & Hesper by Amy Feltman
I picked this up as part of this year’s BookRiot Read Harder challenge “A Debut Novel by a Queer Author.” I picked up the Kindle Sample and then got it from the library because I knew I had to finish it. Willa and Hesper fall in love and then break up (don’t worry, that’s not a spoiler), and then they have to deal with it: the breakup, their families, their ancestry, their traumas. They each rebound to Europe: Willa on a Jewish heritage tour of […]
The Terror by Dan Simmons
We chose this for our October 2019 book club. I just finished it. It is a very long book. Honestly, I would not have read this but for the book club. Nothing about it seemed all that appealing to me. “I need to read it before watching the miniseries”: nope. Scary ice monsters: nope. 900 pages: nope. A slow, cold descent into terror and death: NOPE. Dan Simmons: Honestly, neither here nor there. Old ships: OK MAYBE. So I’m as surprised as anyone that I […]
Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis
This is a beautiful book. I picked it up because I read a few good reviews and because it hit a lot of categories in this year’s reading challenge. I didn’t really have any idea what it was about. It’s about five women -“cantoras” or “women who sing” (implied: to other women…) in Uruguay in the 70s and 80s. I did not know this, but in 1977, a military government Uruguay, a military government came to power and, unsurprisingly, crushed dissent, as you do when […]
Educated by Tara Westover
I picked this up knowing the broad strokes: rural girl in highly religious community and no formal education per se claws her way into and through the education system, to eventually receive a PhD. That’s right, broadly. But this memoir is not just about “book learning”: it’s about learning about your family, and learning that there are many ways to have a life, learning how to trust yourself when it seems like everyone else has given up on you, and learning to nurture your own […]
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
After reading and enjoying A Gentleman in Moscow, I picked up Rules of Civility, a book I’d checked out from the library before but never actually read. Tl;dr: It was good, but not as good as Moscow. I think Gentleman in Moscow corrected some of the things that annoyed me in this book, was slightly better edited, and had more of a “punch” that resonated long after finishing the book. The story is about Katie Kontent, and her life in New York in the late […]
