QUARTERLY WRAP-UP | OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2019

I started off autumn doing pretty well with my reading, but it kind of tapered off. November I got the worse cold of my entire life that turned into some kind of bacterial infection (I’ll save you the details, but suffice it to say it was not pleasant). Then as I was recovering from that and the damage the coughing did to my back, December hit. Now, I love Christmas. I do. But it’s a fuck of a lot of work, and very, very busy! It used to be a break from school or work which, aside from a few ill-advised forays into the bowels of a local mall for presents and a few days of festivities, was largely devoted to marathon TV watching sessions, sleeping in, drinking more than is probably advisable, and catching up on some reading. Now I’m lucky if I manage to read a quarter of what I do in a usual month! That said, I do have several books to revisit for you, so let’s see what I managed to read, shall we?

October

          

Greenwood was one of my most anticipated releases of the year. I adored Michael Christie’s first novel, If I Fall, If I Die, and I’ve been eagerly waiting for a follow-up for four years. I started reading it as soon as it arrived, and though I didn’t love it quite as much as the first book (let’s face it, that would be near impossible), I did very much enjoy it and highly recommend it.

I love kids’ books that really draw you in, set a cosy scene, and make you feel like you’re part of the story. The Time of Green Magic did that for me. It wasn’t perfect – I felt like the climax was a bit rushed and lacking in intensity – but overall I thought it was fantastic, and bonus points for a modern and diverse representation of family life. I think this is a great book for kids who are dealing with a blended family and the emotions that accompany all those changes. Definitely a highlight.

I was really looking forward to Breaking and Mending. I know it’s had mixed reviews – it’s definitely not easy going and paints a pretty grim picture of life as a newly minted doctor – but I thought there was a lot of great stuff here. I loved her honesty and the amount of thought she has clearly put into the ethical and personal dilemmas involved in being a good doctor. It’s short, but it packs a punch.

     

I’ve been slowly dipping in and out of Poverty Safari for a couple of months, but finally finished it during Dewey’s Readathon. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year, possibly in the past five. It’s got a great tone and a wonderful way of boiling down some very complex issues to their vital points and presenting them in a way that is easy to understand. I highly recommend that you read it if you have any interest at all in social issues.

I also finished Raising Demons during the readathon, and it’s just as good as Life Among the Savages – the first of Shirley Jackson’s hilarious and touching memoirs about family life. This one was even better. I loved that she’s even more honest in this one, and willing to admit her failings and even vent a little frustration with her husband’s shortcomings. I highly recommend this to any mom out there who is at the end of her rope. It shows you you’re not on your own, and that a lot of things haven’t changed all that much since the 1950s. Some things are just timeless. (Unfortunately usually the bad things.)

November

     

As those of you who read my weekly reviews might know, I did not love Mrs. Fletcher. It was entertaining, and an easy read. It also challenged pre-conceptions about age and gender, and featured a transgender character that seemed relatively well-done to me (not that I have much expertise to judge, so please feel free to correct me if my perception is incorrect!). But there were a lot of things I didn’t love about the characters and their decisions, and about how the writing framed their behaviour.

The Year of Magical Thinking, on the other hand, I thought was excellent. Again, not perfect, but its imperfections were minor and more than balanced out by its many positives. I’m glad I finally got around to reading it, and it felt like such a raw and unflinching portrayal of loss and grief (it’s about the sudden death of Didion’s husband, John Dunne, and the effect that had on her for some time afterwards) that I’m sure it has been a positive portrayal for those who have suffered in similar circumstances. I went on immediately to read Blue Nights, which is a follow-up of sorts dealing with the death of Didion’s daughter not very long after losing her husband.

December

           

I think I liked Blue Nights even more than The Year of Magical Thinking. Maybe “like” is the wrong term. More that I felt more connected to it, and it touched me more deeply. Though I definitely think a certain amount of the impact came from reading the two back-to-back. I have no idea how Didion survived the two losses in such short order, nevermind finding the will and strength to write about both with such depth and honesty. I highly recommend reading this as well as The Year of Magical Thinking, even though that is the book most people seem to talk about.

I’d been working on Lemn Sissay’s memoir for a couple of months before making a final push in December. It’s about how Sissay was taken from his young, unmarried mother in the UK in the 1960s. She the returned to her home country of Ethiopia, and despite her attempts to locate and be reunited with her son, was never given the opportunity to bring him home. He uses the records from his file as a ward of the state to track his life’s trajectory, and intersperses his own recollections and emotions with the transcriptions. The result is a story that is crushing in its emotional impact. There’s a reason it took me a while to get through this book. It doesn’t offer up the closure we, as readers, may want, but it does offer some valuable insight into what it means to be placed in the care of the state, and the ways in which the state often fails in its attempts to care for its charges. It also highlights the employees who try, despite the limitations of the system, to do everything they can to protect their charges. Sissay is a poet, and his way with words makes his story all the more poignant.

Next, for a bit of light reading, I picked up Just Mercy. Yes, that was sarcasm. This is a book about the criminal justice system in the USA, particularly death penalty cases and prisoners who were arrested as children but tried as adults and sentenced to life without parole in adult prisons. Stevenson shares some of the specific cases he worked, and some of the situations he experienced that highlight the racism that still exists, particularly in the Southern US. Though most of what takes place in this book happened in the 1980s and ’90s, it feels timely and relevant. Things haven’t changed as much as we’d like to think, or as much as they should have. It’s an excellent book, and one that will provide a lot to think about.

And finally, I finished Olive Kittridge. I mainly read this one so that if Olive, Again shows up in the books I am assigned if I get to help judge the BookTube Prize this year, I will have read its first installment. It’s not really the kind of book I usually go for. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very good book, and it does some interesting things with form and structure. I can understand why it has been given so much praise and attention. But it definitely didn’t make my top books of the year. I think it was a little too real for how I was feeling at the time I read it, and it definitely wasn’t a comfortable reading experience. But I suspect it will stick with me, and does a masterful job of showcasing the human condition – it all its messiness.

I didn’t finish it in this quarter, but I feel like Ducks, Newburyport also deserves a mention. I’m trying to get through it by reading about ten pages a day (with some breaks here and there when things are busy). I’m only about 10% of the way through it now, but I’m making slow progress! I can see what all the fuss is about, and am finding it a slow but hypnotic reading experience. I didn’t expect to enjoy it, but oddly, I am. Even if it is impossible to find my place each time I go back to it!

And on that note, I’m about ready to bid farewell to 2019 and dive into whatever 2020 has in store, with some trepidation based on the rollercoaster that has been the past few years! I’ll be doing an end-of-the-year survey shortly, so look out for that if you want to know all the highs, lows and random info about my 2019 year in reading!

That’s it for this quarter! What have you all been reading in the past three months? Any books that blew you away? Any disappointments? Books you wanted to pick up but didn’t get to yet? Have you read any of these? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!