books – Page 4 – meghan rose allen

#20booksofsummer20

By meghan rose on Monday, May 25, 2020

(Of course, idea stolen from Reading In Bed, which, in turn, found it at 746 Books. This should come as no surprise that I am taking ideas from elsewhere, as I have been clear I have no new ideas.)

Can I read twenty books this summer? Let’s say no. Could I have read twenty books a few summers ago: yes. But, like everything else in my life, I am lagging with reading.

The books, chosen from shelves and piles left around my house.

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, 502 pages
Selected Stories of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka, 328 pages
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje, 290 pages
Middle England by Jonathan Coe, 424 pages
Vox by Christina Dalcher 388 pages
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad, 214 pages
The Spirit of Science Fiction by Roberto Bolaño, 196 pages
I Love You, Beth Cooper by Larry Doyle, 290 pages
Bec & Call by Jenna Lyn Albert, 94 pages
The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre, 364 pages
The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North, 453 pages
The Magicians by Lev Grossman, 402 pages
Swimming in the Congo by Margaret Meyers, 261 pages
The Madrigal by Dian Day, 370 pages
Floating City by Kerri Sakamoto, 246 pages
Heartbreaker by Claudia Dey, 260 pages
Memento by Christy Ann Conlin, 375 pages
Africville by Jeffrey Colvin, 371 pages
this is not my life by Diane Shoemperlen, 354 pages
¡No Pasarán! Writings from the Spanish Civil War by Various, 393 pages

Now laugh, laugh laugh laugh at me considering I think I’ve read twelve pages in the past week, and also, that I am still making my way through Ducks, Newberryport, which I can only read in short bursts because it stresses me out too much.

books Uncategorized

Twelve year old Meghan is very excited

By meghan rose on Thursday, May 7, 2020

Link

So is now the time to get on my re-reading of all the Christopher Pike books I have (I have thirteen. No I did not get up to go check; they are within my eyeline of where I am writing) and posting reflections of them on my blog?

(Picture is my favourite Christopher Pike novel, which I read a few years ago, and it is not good but totally is.)

books

on books I loved but can’t pass along

By meghan rose on Monday, May 4, 2020

I read a book and started biting my nails because the character did it in the book. I still have the book, although its not the copy of the book that caused me to bite my nails. It’s a later book. I bought my copy now on eBay. The copy then, I think, was from the library, but maybe from the table of books for sale for a quarter at the front of the library, which would mean I bought it, read it, read it a again, got rid of it, and bought it at least one more time. Why would I have gotten rid of it? Was I a teenager and got rid of a bunch of my books? I know I got rid of my copy of Jurassic Park because my friend bought it and showed me my name written in the cover afterwards. But I got rid of Jurassic Park because there’s not much one needs to reread in Jurassic Park, although someone’s favourite novel must be Jurassic Park and they read and reread all about those dinosaurs eating babies in Costa Rica once or twice or three times a year. But me, maybe I had a copy of the book from which I learned to bite my nails, and then didn’t, but now, at least, I have it again.

It’s from the seventies, this book. It uses the word negro and the only black woman is a maid, a janitor at the start of the book. And there’s a sequel; I also have that. The sequel I remember purchasing on ebay, although I did read it before I bought it again. My sequel is a hardcover, maybe an old library copy. My nail biting book is a paperback novel, which are my synesthesia words because the words paperback novel are words that I like putting next to each other and thinking about. Maybe I do have the original copy of my book because the original one I read was also a paperback novel. Or maybe I bought it at that used bookstore I only went to once in Waterloo, a used bookstore I also bought a Judy Blume paperback novel at, and a Juliana Baggott paperback novel, and once I was giving away books for a book sale and I had no trouble giving away the Judy Blume book, but the Juliana Baggott one I still have because I put it in the box, then felt so sad I had to take it back out and keep it forever. Then, at the other used bookstore in Waterloo, where I went all the time, I bought many Solzhenitsyn books, of which, of the Solzhenitsyn books I bought there, I have read zero. Those Solzhenitsyn books I bought are all paperbacks, but not all are novels, so they don’t make me as happy as a paperback novel would.

There’s another book I liked growing up. My grandmother gave it to me. She’d bought it at her libary’s discount table, and then read it, and then gave it to me, not because she read it and thought I would like it: she thought I would like it, so she bought it, read it, and then gave it to me. This annoyed my mother, who sulked about it for a few days. To be clear, what annoyed my mother was not the present, but that my grandmother had the gall to read it, admit to that, and then still give me the book without shame. A castle gets moved brick-by-brick from Scotland to Texas and the ghosts come along and how is this not a Studio Ghibli movie already I don’t know, except maybe for the fact that one of the characters is obsessed with Adolf Hitler and the book isn’t that great about its treatment of the Indigenous peoples of what is now Texas, and I remembered none of this until I reread the book when I was thirty-one. So there’s another book gone and maybe, considering she read the book before giving it to me, my grandmother should have been concerned about the Hitler-idealization, even if it’s done by a villain, and it’s less about murdering Jews and more about the mustache and the oratory skills. Even in villainy, do we really need to try and find some parts of Hitler to emulate?

But from my grandmother, I learned you can read books before giving them. I did that for my mother-in-law, although that book was a reread, and also, the book was out-of-print and the copy I gave her already used. I did that for my neighbour, with a book I read on an airplane. When my neighbour rereads that book as an adult, what will she be shocked I let slide? I didn’t tell either of them, though, I read their books first.

There’s supposed to be a sequel to the sequel of my nail-biting book. There isn’t. There’s a book of poetry by the same author I sometimes think about, because the words strung together are like the words paperback novel: The Pearl is a Hardened Sinner, which is a book I’ve never read or seen or know anything about other than the synesthesia sound of its name. The author of all these books is old now, and in Minneapolis, and I doubt I’ll ever find out what happens to Skinny and Big Alice and Mr Foreclosure, but before I get angry about this, I wrote a book of which there is a sequel that only exists in a bloating file on my computer and maybe there are the same number of people who read my book as who read this book who are waiting in vain to find out what happens to Enid and Margery and Amber, but instead my book sours and rots, but I’m pretty sure none of my characters ever mention nail-biting, so at least I saved a handful of tweens from a habit as badly formed as all that.

netgalley copy

Review of Slothilda by Dante Fabiero

By meghan rose on Monday, March 18, 2019

I read a book, in fact this book, about a lazy sloth. Am I a lazy sloth? Somewhat, although the continuing revolution of who is sick in my house at any given time (always a two out of three scenario), plus my broken iPad (fuck you apple, and also the tile floor I dropped it on a while ago), plus my belief I can do much more than I realistically can, definitely makes me want to lazy sloth away. Although, Slothilda has a dog, and not cats, like me. So can I really relate? I’ll say yes. Can non-lazy people relate? Probably too, but I am lazy, so I’m not going to go through the leg-work to find out.

Slothilda by Dante Fabiero went on sale October 2, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

netgalley copy

Review of Ghost Money: Death in Dubai by Thierry Smolderen and Dominique Bertail

By meghan rose on Friday, February 22, 2019

What if 9/11 was really a plot for Al-Qaeda to gain money through short-selling stocks and then someone made an action movie about it with sex robots? If you have ever asked this question, then do I have the comic for you!

Pros: interesting idea, international locales, double-crosses and sneakiness abounding!

Cons: Hard to distinguish between some of the CIA operatives (perhaps a consequence of my low-res review copy?), lots of goofy action-movie tropes, written by people who like to draw/look at boobs, i.e.:

Seriously? She takes off her coat and there they are? WHY ARE YOU NOT WEARING A BRA CHAZMA (that’s her name)? With knockers that size, you need a bra.

Here she is a frame before:

where we can see her coat’s furry collar between her head and the dude behind her. And then, next frame, coat off, and:

gravity-free boob city! Then there are like five more frames after this just so we can stare at her boobs.

(Not even mentioning that this is a surgical suite and she walks in right off the street with her clothes, no sterilization, and then promptly receives non-life-saving (i.e. there was time to properly sterilize and put on a hospital gown) surgery to her face, so why is she topless?)

How long until my blog devolves into just me posting photos from comic books with bad female anatomy? People who write comics, you do understand that there aren’t special spacial dimensions that exist solely around breast tissue, right? Right? Because I’m starting to believe that you guys don’t understand how breasts work at all.

Or maybe she has implants and they are hard as rocks with steel reinforcements to keep them up. I don’t know.

Ghost Money: Death in Dubai by Thierry Smolderen and Dominique Bertail Lee went on sale July 31, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

netgalley copy

Review of Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

By meghan rose on Thursday, January 31, 2019

So tonnes of people loved Pachinko. The Netgalley blurb gives me:

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW TOP TEN OF THE YEAR * NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 *A USA TODAY TOP TEN OF 2017 * JULY PICK FOR THE PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB NOW READ THIS * FINALIST FOR THE 2018 DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE Roxane Gay’s Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER * WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER

Okay. But you know what: I did not love Pachinko. It isn’t as if I think the book is unimportant; in fact, I think it is an important book, documenting the story of ethnic Koreans in Japan over generations. It just isn’t very … um … good isn’t the right word, because it isn’t the goodness or badness that annoyed me throughout. I guess, at a level, it’s fairly shallow a book. It’s almost like if a photo album was a novel: we get scenes, and strung together, the scenes tell a story, but there is just as much narrative in the gaps that gets completely written off as lonely sentences here and there (i.e., Oh, so and so’s wife died, moving on). As for the characters, again, somewhat stock ones, like in a photograph, never moving very far beneath the surface. You can see the people in the photos, you can see them smiling, or fake-smiling, or frowning and say to yourself, “On that day they were happy/faking/angry,” but in the end, a photo doesn’t tell you what type of happiness they felt, whether some of their fakery was tinged with regret, whether the anger was a joke on the photographer, etc. Pachinko is like that. You can almost feel it all, but really, it’s pretty flat.

But then again, what do I know compared to everyone else who love, love, loved this book.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee went on sale February 7, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

netgalley copy

Review of Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinsborough

By meghan rose on Tuesday, January 29, 2019

I hate when they market books with blurbs that are all like “You’ll never see the twist!” Well, of course I will now. Why can’t I discover there is a twist on my own? Trust your damn readers publishers. We are smarter than you think.

So Behind Her Eyes is a fairly typical Jane Eyre-esque Brit-mystery that alternates points of view between Behind Her Eyes‘ Jane and Mrs. Rochester. There’s some missing people and bodies and burning-down of things. Then there’s the twist, which the book builds up to, so it isn’t completely out-of-nowhere, nor was it particularly hard to guess. What took me until the explanation to figure out was the why of the twist (because my mind works in a bland hetero-normative way I found out via Behind Her Eyes).

So I don’t know. There is definitely some cleverness to Behind Her Eyes. The pacing doesn’t drag (as it shouldn’t) for a mystery novel. At some point, when I was a kid living in the UK, I must have visited some similar places to the novel, because I could envisage the apartment and the houses and the office perfectly. Or maybe I should give credit to the author’s ability to describe these places without dragging down the plot through over-description. Ignoring the twist, it’s an above-average, vicarious-thrill-safe-from-the-comfort-of-my-own-home, marketed-to-women, thriller. Including the twist, it’s still that, but a bit harder to categorize.

Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinsborough went on sale January 26, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

netgalley copy

Review of True or Poo by Nick Caruso and Dani Rabaiotti

By meghan rose on Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Ever since Fabulous Animal Facts That Hardly Anyone Knows (Fact: I still have my original edition from 1981, all taped up but still fact-full), I have enjoyed books filled with animal facts. Is True or Poo? a book filled with animal facts? Yes. Did I enjoy it. Yes. Are there pictures? Yes. Are there as many pictures, and as in colour, as Fabulous Animal Facts That Hardly Anyone Knows. No, but the facts are just as odd, and given with more detail and explanation (likely because Fabulous Animal Facts That Hardly Anyone Knows is geared towards, let’s say five year old me while True or Poo? is geared towards ten year old me. Doesn’t matter; thirty-eight year old me loves books filled with animal facts!). I did know most of the facts already, likely because of my (have I mentioned it yet?) interest in other books on animal facts. But I still love this animal fact book.

Plus the same authors have one on farting. I bought it for my nephews.

True or Poo? by Nick Caruso and Dani Rabaiotti went on sale October 23, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

netgalley copy

Review of Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

By meghan rose on Thursday, January 17, 2019

(I continue with books I got from Netgalley, never read, and then later took out from the library to review.)

The stories here are hard and sad and difficult, like the women, who, of course, are difficult because we blame women for their faults, for the faults of others inflicted against them, for the faults of the world that weigh down on their, and only their, shoulders. It is not a book for those who need comfort. It is not a beach read, or a cozy Christmas time blanket curled up read (when I read it) either. I read it and felt sad and powerless and lay under my blanket and hurt.

Difficult Women by Roxane Gay went on sale January 3, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review, although I read a copy from the library not the netgalley one.

netgalley copy

Review of The Altered History of Willow Sparks by Tara O’Connor

By meghan rose on Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Yup. I disliked high school too.

Yup. I wished I could magically make myself into something wonderful.

Yup. We can take the past tense out of the last paragraph and switch it to a present tense too: I still wish I could magically make myself into something wonderful.

So Willow Sparks can, via what she finds in the super-secret room in her town library, where also the cool kids hang out. Do cool kids hang out at libraries? Of course, there are consequences because stories with monkey’s paws need consequences, although no one dies (other than of embarrassment), and again, I realize, that I need to start mentally considering most graphic novels as short stories rather than novels because even with all their pages, most of the time they end up being more amuse-bouches for my brain than full meals. And, unlike the monkey’s paw, non of the consequences are too severe, because the audience, I assume, is for middle-school/high school kids, and me (What would your high school senior quote be? my ten year old asked me yesterday. Didn’t high school end eighteen years ago? I told her. That would be my quote. Didn’t high school end eighteen years ago?).

So it’s a cute, little morality tale. My middle-school child will like it. I liked it well enough too.

The Altered History of Willow Sparks by Tara O’Connor went on sale March 6, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.