What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin
Read as part of cbr13bingo: pandemic This is the second time I’ve tried Alison Gaylin’s work and for the life of me, I don’t know why I can’t connect with it. The first book I couldn’t even finish because I found myself not caring about the lead. This one was a chore, even if I enjoyed parts of it. Again, even with the multiple POVs, I couldn’t bring myself to muster energy for the lead. I have mixed feelings about Gillian Flynn but there’s a […]
How Lucky by Will Leitch
I was a bit nervous for this one! We’ve got a middle-aged white guy writing from the POV of a protagonist with a pretty specific disability (SMA, a degenerative disease*) that he doesn’t share, and I wasn’t familiar with Leitch as a writer, but this was the only BOTM the month it came out that interested me, so I took a chance, and I’m glad I did! I thought the whole thing was very sensitively done, and I thought Daniel ended up being a great […]
Endless Night by Agatha Christie
Read as part of cbr13bingo: fauna. There’s a raven on the cover. Endless Night is the rare Agatha Christie standalone and I’m finding that between this, A Pale Horse, and And Then There Were None, I’m finding that I may enjoy her standalone works more than those that feature her superstar heroes Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. (A Crooked House may be the exception to this rule. That’s one I liked a lot less than I thought I would.) I think without the need to shoehorn the large personality and abrasive, […]
The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda
Read as part of cbr13bingo: landscape on cover When you’re having a long week and/or a rough week, it’s easy to lose focus in what you’re reading. Your attention drifts, your energy weakens, your focus isn’t there. It’s tough to maintain the scope of anything mildly complex. The book I was reading for the landscape challenge of CannonballRead’s Bingo wasn’t holding my attention. Which is a shame because I was hyped to read it. There were weaknesses but the main weakness was how I wasn’t […]
Through the Woods by Emily Carroll
4.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Shelfie In five creepy stories ranging from the historical to more recent times, writer and artist Emily Carroll gives us her take on proper spine-tingling fairy tales. Accompanied by her absolutely beautiful art, the tales are all the more chilling because of the illustrations. This absolutely qualifies as a graphic novel, or probably more accurately a graphic short story (or fairy tale) anthology. Some of the stories are short, some are longer, all managed to truly unnerve me, while also entertaining […]
The Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
The Murder on the Links and The Murder on the Orient Express and The Secret Adversary and And Then There Were None Agatha Christie has always been one of my go-to re-reads. It’s my literary comfort food. I’ve read and re-read most of what I have in my library, but didn’t feel like cracking the cover of an old favorite once again. My to-read pile didn’t look appealing, either, so what to do? I had a bunch of Audible credits and found a bunch of (free) […]
