Tag: review

Books

Conversations with Friends – Sally Rooney

by Mel2 Comments on Conversations with Friends – Sally Rooney
Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind–and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa’s orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil–and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh.

But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances’s intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5.

I’ll be the first to admit, I definitely don’t understand the hype around Sally Rooney’s books. With all the coverage Normal People has received since it came out, I thought I’d begin with her first book as a primer.

It turned out I kind of hated it!

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Books

In Five Years – Rebecca Serle

by Mel2 Comments on In Five Years – Rebecca Serle
Where do you see yourself in five years? When Type-A Manhattan lawyer Dannie Cohan is asked this question at the most important interview of her career, she has a meticulously crafted answer at the ready. Later, after nailing her interview and accepting her boyfriend’s marriage proposal, Dannie goes to sleep knowing she is right on track to achieve her five-year plan.

But when she wakes up, she’s suddenly in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger, and beside a very different man. The television news is on in the background, and she can just make out the scrolling date. It’s the same night—December 15—but 2025, five years in the future. After a very intense, shocking hour, Dannie wakes again, at the brink of midnight, back in 2020. She can’t shake what has happened. It certainly felt much more than merely a dream, but she isn’t the kind of person who believes in visions. That nonsense is only charming coming from free-spirited types, like her lifelong best friend, Bella. Determined to ignore the odd experience, she files it away in the back of her mind. That is, until four-and-a-half years later, when by chance Dannie meets the very same man from her long-ago vision.

Brimming with joy and heartbreak, In Five Years is an unforgettable love story that reminds us of the power of loyalty, friendship, and the unpredictable nature of destiny. 

Rating: 3 out of 5.

I was so excited for this book that it was one of my most anticipated reads of early 2020, but it turned out to disappoint 😦

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Books

No Time to Spare – Ursula Le Guin

by MelLeave a Comment on No Time to Spare – Ursula Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. In the last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory: the blog, a forum where she shined. The collected best of Ursula’s blog, No Time to Spare presents perfectly crystallized dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world, and her wonder at it: “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

I’ll be honest: this wasn’t exactly a voluntary pick. I usually never choose books like this for myself, being a fiction lover all the way, but as things go, it was an accidental selection from the NYPL ebooks page. I’d been impatiently looking for Wizard of Earthsea for weeks, saw a Le Guin book scroll by, and without thinking, checked it out. Then I opened it up and – surprise, it was actually a collection of her blog posts from the later years of her life! Quarantine being what it is, I gave it a shot and settled in.

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Books

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone – Lori Gottlieb

by Mel2 Comments on Maybe You Should Talk to Someone – Lori Gottlieb
One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.

As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients’ lives — a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can’t stop hooking up with the wrong guys — she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

What a great read! Lori Gottlieb is a columnist for the New York Times and The Atlantic (she’s the therapist in their Ask a Therapist series); I’ve been loosely following her writings there for a while and have always really appreciated her intelligence and empathy, so when she came out with a full-length book about being a therapist and going to therapy herself, I knew it had to be interesting.

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Books

The Starless Sea – Erin Morgenstern

by MelLeave a Comment on The Starless Sea – Erin Morgenstern
The Starless Sea is a love letter to books and readers, a masterpiece of stories within a story where fables of pirates and princesses converge with the saga of Zachary Ezra Rawlins, the son of a fortune teller.

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Unpopular opinion: I didn’t like this book much at all.

When I read The Night Circus, I was absolutely entranced by the world Morgenstern had created – I love fantasy and read plenty of it, and yet I don’t think I’d encountered anything like her writing before. Were there were some imperfections? Of course. You could call out her characters for being a little flat and the plot not quite satisfying at the end, but those paled in comparison to the imagination of her traveling circus.

Sadly, even her world building couldn’t make up for the flaws in The Starless Sea.

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Books

Born A Crime – Trevor Noah

by Mel2 Comments on Born A Crime – Trevor Noah
The compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime story of a young mans coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Wow, you guys. This book made my jaw drop open MULTIPLE times while reading it. I had zero idea what a loaded, difficult, and traumatic childhood Trevor Noah experienced growing up.

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Books

Circe – Madeline Miller

by MelLeave a Comment on Circe – Madeline Miller
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child—not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power—the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.

Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love. 

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

A little late in reviewing, but this was one of my favorite reads last year! I’m a sucker for any kind of mythology so I had a feeling I would already like this, but it turned out even better than expected. Miller is so damn good at weaving together her story that I couldn’t put it down (I tore through it in 2 days!), and even though Circe wasn’t much of a character to me at first, I was thoroughly cheering for her by the end.

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