Last Month in Review: May 2016

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My reading concentration is slowly improving, so I’m a-gonna talk about the books I read last month as a  prelude to writing an actual book review.  Some of these books were amazing.  In chronological order, here’s what I read:

Mischling by Affinity Konar. Holy shit, y’all.  This is some serious stuff. Here’s the succinct blurb that I gave the publisher, else I’d just be rambling up in here tonight: It’s difficult to imagine a more horrific subject for a novel than the sadistic experiments Dr.Mengele performed on twins in Auschwitz, but debut author Konar manages to craft something magnificent from such dark origins. Pearl and Stasha tell their stories in alternating chapters, each twin doing her utmost to protect her sister in the camp, their shared history almost enough to create their belief in a shared future on the other side. Konar’s language is so fresh and inventive, even occasionally playful, that it creates a powerful and shocking juxtaposition against the narrative. This author is going places, and after reading this book, I will want to be along for the ride. Every. Single. Time. 

The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson.  This was charming.  Did you read and love her previous book, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand? If so, you would probably like this.  Did you love the first two seasons of Downton Abbey, right before and then during The Great War? Then you’d probably like.  It’s a small English village, a woman who has been scandalously hired to teach Latin to school boys, and all of the insulated gender and class restrictions of that age. This is not one of those life-changing-but-exhausting-to-read books. This is a book you’ll want to read when you want to escape a little without putting your mind entirely on vacation.

Redemption Road by John Hart.  This was an audio book I listened to, narrated by Scott Shepherd.  Pretty good.  I don’t read thrillers, by and large, but the publisher sent an advance listening copy to the store, so I nabbed it. Maybe it’s because I’m required to listen at a slower pace than I would read if I had a physical book in front of me, but there were several plot "twists" in this book that I saw coming from pretty early on. There were a few moments where listening to this book creeped me out, but I doubt anybody who regularly reads thrillers would feel that way.  I felt the ending was a bit too pat, and to me the serial killer identity was pretty obvious from the early chapters, but the writing is really solid and Hart brilliantly evokes certain parts of North Carolina with his prose.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  This was an audio book that I purchased for the specific purpose of driving home from Portland, ME one weekend.  It was the perfect length.  I figured that I would like this book and find it both moving and anger-inducing, and I was spot-on about that.  But what I wasn’t expecting about this book was the sheer lyricism of the prose.  Really beautifully written. The author reads it himself. I highly recommend this one.

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett.  This is a quiet novel, especially compared to Bel Canto or State of Wonder.  It opens on a fateful day in LA -- a community comes together for a christening, but their lives are forever changed when the husband of one family falls in love with the wife of another. We see the parents and the children across the years and the consequences and emotional fallout wrought by that first infidelity.  Very good.  Patchett often sneaks up on the reader with her writing and insights.


The Best Revenge and The Best Revenge: Time of the Basilisk by Arsinoe de Blassenville.  This is a pairing of Harry Potter fan fictions, the first of which is novel length and the second of which is a novella. They begin with the “What if Snape was the first wizard Harry interacted with?” trope and they end with events from the canon book two, but in reality, all of the action takes place within Harry’s first year.  Because of his relationship with Lily Evans Potter, Snape becomes Harry’s wizarding proxy and things turn out very, very differently. I love these stories -- they’re well written and well paced, and they show sides of both Hufflepuff and Slytherin that Rowling herself was unable to show due to the Harry filter.

Not a terrible showing. I don’t know how many pages the fanfics would be, but Goodreads tells me that my page count for all of the other items comes to 1,753 pages. Except where noted, all of the books I read were advance reading copies provided by the publisher, often at my request.

How ‘bout y’all?  What books were you most excited about reading in May?