Book #114: The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty

This book starts out with Cecilia, one of the main characters in the novel, finding a letter her husband wrote to her "to be opened only in the event of his death." In it, he reveals his deepest, darkest secret which she had never before suspected, which immediately changes everything in their relationship. (I don't want to be totally spoiling everything by giving it all away and telling what the secret is, but if you read it and can start to put together the pieces of the puzzle it'll be pretty obvious pretty quickly.) The story also follows Rachel, an older woman whose daughter was murdered thirty years before, and Tess, who found out that her husband and her best friend have fallen in love with each other and they want to live together. This book is really about all of their relationships with each other and how they all can learn to forgive each other and themselves for things they've done.

I read What Alice Forgot earlier this year and really enjoyed it--more than I thought I would. It wasn't necessarily my favorite book in the world, but Moriarty has an awesome skill at the inner dialogue of characters and giving them such funny thoughts and voices. That skill really plays out in this book--I really liked all of the three main characters' thoughts and ideas in their heads. They say and think things that are so funny and real, and I liked how they even were thinking terrible, mean things that we would never say out loud, and learning things about themselves as they did it. I felt like Tess's storyline, about learning about her husband's almost-infidelity, was my least favorite, and it really didn't have anything to do with the rest of the book. You could have taken her out of the book altogether and it would have gotten along just fine. I just hate hearing about people cheating on each other, and that seemed terrible. I also felt like the ending, where Moriarty lays out all of these alternative endings/scenarios, was a little weird and almost depressing. The main strength of this book definitely lies with Moriarty's ability to write such believable, realistic, and funny characters, which was my favorite part.

Book #113: The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell

I chose this book for our family book club for October, and I even got Tommy to read it (and agree to lead our family discussion!). Helen Russell moved to Denmark from England with her husband and basically wrote this book about why Danish people are the happiest people in the world. She takes a different topic each month and interviews people and talks to them about how Danes are unique in that aspect (like, how they raise their kids or how they deal with their health), and how those things affect their happiness or the happiness of the country as a whole. She talks about their work-life balance, the country's safety net and welfare state, their relationship between the genders, etc. I appreciated that she doesn't just make it seem like a perfect utopia--like, everyone talks about Denmark's perfect gender equality, but it obviously isn't perfect, and she talks about the downsides of it too and the places where it's still failing. But I really liked learning about Denmark's culture a little bit more and seeing what they do there and what they take for granted as opposed to in our society. I wished there were more things that could be a little more applicable to us, since a lot of them felt like things that were more circumstantial to Denmark and not things we could take and apply to ourselves (like the welfare state and the homogenous society and even the possible gene that makes you happier). She does have a handy list at the end that you can get quick tips from for making yourself happier like Danes, although the main one is "Trust more" and I have no idea how you're supposed to do that, haha. I felt like this book could have been 100 pages shorter and still relatively informative and more interesting. It honestly felt too long and I felt like some of the time when she was writing she felt like she was trying too hard to be funny. There were lots--LOTS--of asides and witty comments and it seriously could have been toned down a little bit. Is that something about the British humor or something? I don't know, it just felt a little overdone in this book. I liked learning through this book though and I enjoyed it overall, though it probably wasn't my favorite ever (because of it feeling a little too long).

Book #112: The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny

This was a Inspector Gamache novel that our library didn't have on audio, so I actually had to read it--and thoroughly enjoyed it still. Each one of these books is so expertly plotted, and it's amazing how the characters are developed and how you get little glimpses into the truth, but just enough to keep you guessing and keep you reading. Penny does an amazing job of letting you know what all the characters are thinking, but only at certain times, so you may know when someone is lying at one time and not at another. I love how there is such uncertainty at all times. In this book, the murder actually happens in Three Pines again (whereas in the last one it happened at a fancy resort hotel somewhat far away but with many of the same characters present), and it implicates one of the main characters who is beloved by many of the town and the readers. It's less cut and dry than many of the other books, because usually the murderer confesses once Gamache makes it clear he knows what has happened. But the last chapter of the book ends after the trial of the accused murderer, and although all the evidence points towards this being right, there still is no confession. And I know (from reading the summary of the next book) that this story continues in the next book so I'm curious to see what happens next.

I am just so pleased with this series. I keep being surprised that I'm still interested in a 13-book series, because I feel like I don't have time for something that big, but it is so well done and so engaging that I am just flying through the audiobooks and wanting to keep going.

Book #111: Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling

I read Kaling's first book a few years ago and thought it was funny, a pretty run-of-the-mill comedian/actress memoir (of which I've read plenty at this point). I wasn't really planning to read her next one, but our library had it on audiobook and I needed something easy to listen to--and this was SHORT. Only 4 something hours. Not too bad! I honestly have nothing to say about it, except that she is definitely funny, I liked getting a little behind-the-scenes looks at getting contracts and working in the TV industry, and it was a fun book to listen to rather than read because it was all in her own voice.

Book #110: One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B. J. Novak

I was in need of an audiobook to fill some time in between Armand Gamache books (the library doesn't have an audiobook copy of the fifth book, so I just have to get around to reading the e-book copy I currently have checked out), and this one was available, and it was pretty short. I kind of thought this was going to be a memoir-ish type book, because that's basically what you always get from actors, but this was actually a collection of short (some, very very short) stories that Novak wrote. It was actually a very fun book to listen to on audio, because he is a great reader and he had plenty of other famous friends sub in and help do the other voices in his stories, including lots of favorites from The Office, like Jenna Fischer, Mindy Kaling, and Rainn Wilson. I thought some of the stories were very funny and well done, like the blind date between the woman and the African warlord, the rematch between the tortoise and the hare (the opening story, which was funny and thoughtful), and the one about the sex robot who became sentient and fell in love with the person who bought her. But some were really dumb and too short. There were over sixty stories, and many of them were one page or less, which makes you wonder why the editors didn't make him cut at least a few of those and expand some of the other stories. I feel like the less-than-one-page stories are more just funny than actually bringing anything to the table, and having like 30 of them in the book just took down the quality of the whole book, I thought. But overall, it was a funny read/listen, and a few of them even made me think too.

Book #109: Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary

Oh, I LOVED the Ramona books when I was younger. And I thought this would be such a fun one to read with Dane, since it's when Ramona is in kindergarten. I just love how Beverly Cleary gets into Ramona's head, and how we get a look at how a kindergartener thinks. Ramona thinks like a kindergartener, and we get to think like her. I love, love, love that about this book. I love each of the different chapters about Ramona as well--like when she gets stuck in the mud in her new beautiful red rain boots, or how she gets sent home for pulling Susan's curls too many times, and her scary witch costume for Halloween. Kindergarteners are just so fun, and Beverly Cleary (I have to use both names, she's not just a last name person to me) really makes Ramona just fun. Dane was enthralled by Ramona too--particularly when she and Howie take the third wheel off her trike and make it a two-wheeler, and when Ramona loses her first tooth--and it was a total success. We are going to read Ramona and Beezus next (which actually comes before this one chronologically, but oh well).

Book #108: Living Out Loud by Anna Quindlen

I bought this book at a library sale years ago, before Dane was even born, and it has sat on my bookshelves ever since then, untouched. I've culled my books numerous times, but I kept saving this one because I knew that I liked Anna Quindlen as an author and I kept meaning to read it. One of my goals for this year was to finally read some of the unread books on my shelves, and I got around to this one this week. And I definitely enjoyed it. The funny thing is that it's a collection of her syndicated newspaper column that Quindlen wrote when she was a reporter--and it's from the mid-eighties. Before I was even born. So it's definitely dated in many of its essays--she writes about Ted Bundy and AIDS and living in New York and being afraid for her life, etc. But I really enjoyed time traveling to what it was like being a young parent (she is in the same stage of life that I am now, in this book) at that time. I loved a lot of her essays on parenting and her reminiscences on her childhood, and how honest she was and how good at exposing herself without exposing too much. She talked about her mother dying when she was young, and how that affected her, and her fears as a parent. The one essay that I loved the most was about how vulnerable she feels because of the power she has over her children, how the two parents are the ones who have the power to make them happy or sad, and how she doesn't want to have that power and that responsibility, and how scary that is. It's something that I think about too, and which resonates with me. I thoroughly enjoyed this book--it was an easy read of short essays (since they were originally newspaper columns) and she is an excellent writer. I'd love to read more of her works.

Book #107: I've Got Your Number by Sophie Kinsella

Okay, I'm obviously on some sort of Sophie Kinsella streak lately because this is the third one I've read in the last week or two, haha. It's just so easy because I can read one in two or three hours, it doesn't take much concentration, and they're always fun and work out pretty well in the end. I read this one before and enjoyed it enough to re-read it this week. Poppy, the main character in this book, loses her engagement ring and her phone in the same night, and she finds a replacement phone in the trash can at the hotel where she was and uses it. She manages to fall in love with the guy whose phone it is while discovering that her fiance is kind of a jerk so she gets to break it off with him at the altar and stay with her true love. Haha.

I liked that Poppy was a normal, not-super-ditzy girl (like some of Kinsella's heroines are, in Shopaholic and Can You Keep a Secret?). I laughed out loud a few times in the scenes where she was feeling really dumb with her fiance's super smart academic family. She did still end up getting into some ridiculous situations, which seem kind of inexplicable and unrealistic--but I guess that's part of the genre. All in all, it was a fun read and worth it if it only takes a few hours to get through.

Book #106: A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny

Another Armand Gamache novel--another successful murder mystery. I really enjoyed listening to this one, about a murder that happened at a resort-ish hotel where Armand Gamache was staying with his wife to celebrate their wedding anniversary. The woman killed was there as another guest with her family, and they naturally become the prime suspects. Much of the plot is investigating the family's very messed-up dynamics, and examining how they treated each other and hurt each other in important ways. It was depressing to see how much they all were hurting at times--Penny is very good at letting us see characters' thoughts when it's helpful--and how they lashed out at each other. She is also good at showing that everyone has some reason behind their hatefulness, if they are indeed being hateful: they are usually hurt somehow by someone else. It makes all her characters more well-rounded and makes you feel more compassionate towards them all.

This book had a more dramatic finish than the last few, with Gamache almost dying in his attempt to save another potential victim. I have to say, I love how he manages to figure out each mystery without compromising or changing his standards. I love how he is solid and strong and emotionally in tune and in love with his wife. He seems like the best person everywhere he goes and is able to deal with all sorts of really damaged people. I think Gamache's character is the reason why this series is so popular and works so well.

I'm moving on to the next one, although our library doesn't have an audiobook copy, unfortunately... so I'll have to read it on the Kindle.

Book #105: The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emma Orczy

It's so sad to me that I haven't read this book in the whole time I've been keeping this blog! Same thing with To Kill a Mockingbird. These books are such classics and are some of my very favorites, but I have been reading so many new books the last few years and not as much re-reading, that I am missing out on some joy of these beloved books that I have read so, so many times before now. But, I pulled it out yesterday or the day before and got it started, and just thoroughly enjoyed this book. I don't think I love it mostly because of the nostalgic factor--we spent HOURS singing the songs to The Scarlet Pimpernel musical that we saw when I was maybe twelve--it's just a really excellent story. The romantic factor of a secret identity of a man saving people's lives with no benefit to himself--it's just awesome. And I love how you get to see most of it through Marguerite's eyes and get to see her transformation. Sure, maybe her newfound love for her husband comes on a little strong and out of nowhere, and I'm always slightly annoyed by how dainty and alluring and perfect and astoundingly beautiful women in fiction of this era are, but it fits along with the times and it's not terrible. Marguerite is actually the heroine of the story and shows how tough she is by trying to save her husband (although walking for a few miles is enough to render her incapacitated and bloody-footed... mm-hmm).

TOTALLY love this book. I just wish I could find a version on the stage of it these days so I can relive the amazingness of the musical. We LOVED it for a few years at my house.

Book #104: Can You Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella

I read this book because when I was looking at the Goodreads page for My Not So Perfect Life I saw this book cover as another book Kinsella had written and it was like a deja vu bomb went off in my head. I used to have this book--when I was in high school--and I totally remembered reading it and enjoying it and vividly remembered the cover. But I had no memory of what was actually in the book. Our library had an e-copy so I checked it out and enjoyed this walk down memory lane.

In this book, Emma Corrigan is on her very first business trip and the plane ride home has terrible turbulence--so terrible she's convinced they're all going to die. So in her panic she begins spilling out all her secrets to the man sitting next to her on the plane, which ends up being a problem when he shows up at her work the next day as her boss, the owner of the company there for a visit. Ahh! There's the inevitable romance and all sorts of inexplicable awkward situations that I feel like are pretty common to Kinsella's novels, but it was definitely a fun read. It took only two hours, so I mean, what is there to complain about a book that you can read that quickly and check off the list with so little energy? Ha!

Fair warning: Kinsella loves the f-word and other swearing, and there's a little bit of sex, but part of me thinks it's because she's British and the whole cultural difference in what curse words are appropriate.

Book #103: My Not So Perfect Life by Sophie Kinsella

Could anything be easier to read and lighter than Sophie Kinsella? I am pretty sure the answer is no. I read a few of her Shopaholic books when I was in high school and then a few other ones through the years, but I'd heard this one was cute and thought it would be a great light audiobook to listen to, and it was. Kinsella is great at creating relatable, slightly hilarious main characters, and this book is no exception. This book is about Katie Brenner, who works in London at a branding agency, and her attempts to create a perfect life for herself through her Instagram photos. But when she gets fired from her job and moves home to the country to help her dad start up a glamping site, she begins to question a lot of things about her decisions.

I thought this book was super contemporary--as in, it definitely seems very 2017. The Instagram perfect life is a major theme in the story--and that's such an everyday issue. And there was a ton about glamping too. I wonder how much of this book may seem outdated in a few years--but obviously that's not an issue now. I liked this one, although after a while I was wishing I could have just been reading it instead of listening to it, because I could have powered through this book in two hours instead of having to listen for ten. I liked how Katie's relationship with her boss Demeter changes over the course of the book--although it seems surprising how close they were at the end--and of course the romance was cute too--although I was less interested in the romance in this book, since it definitely seemed secondary to the storyline of Katie's job and her wrestling with what she wants to do.

This was cute, fun, not too long--definitely a fun chick lit read. Obviously a little different from The Brothers Karamazov.

Book #102: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

I read this a long time ago, and I'd seen the movie adaptation at some point, but it had been so long that I didn't remember any specifics of the story and had forgotten who the murderer was. All I remembered was the basic premise: that someone is killing people on this island one by one, and nobody can figure out who it is. So this was a fun book to revisit. This is apparently one of Agatha Christie's best-known novels (if not THE best-known) and I can see why--it's creepy and suggestive enough to get your heart rate up a little bit, and totally throws you off because there's no way to really figure out who did it. This is apparently a faux pas in the mystery-writing world; apparently you are supposed to drop hints here and there that the reader can look back on and say, "Ah! That's what that meant!" when they find out the ending. But not so in this book--you have no idea who it was until the epilogue. But I didn't mind that about this one; the story is so shocking and out-of-the-ordinary that you don't expect it to work like any other ordinary murder mysteries.

Definitely worth a read for anyone. It's short, fun, and exciting.

Note: I have a hard copy of this book, but I forgot about it when I started reading it (for book club this week), so I downloaded an e-book copy from the library. I'm glad I read the e-book because it helped me to not skip ahead and try to get a hint of who did it! It made it more satisfying at the end. For this book that really mattered.

Book #101: The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

I am really enjoying this Inspector Gamache series of books. It's awesome that our library has most of them as audiobooks, because I couldn't commit to a series of thirteen books to read, but I'm always searching for books to listen to since not everything is on audio and now I have a huge series to fill up my workout time.

In this book, another murder happens in Three Pines. (Sidenote: isn't this unlikely, that the murders keep happening in this tiny, so-called peaceful village? The murders per capita rate must be extremely high compared to the rest of Canada! But this is where the suspension of disbelief is important. That doesn't bother me enough to detract from my enjoyment of the series.) This one happens during a seance the villagers hold at the old, haunted Hadley house--one of the group falls dead from a heart attack caused by fright during the seance. It comes out later that the heart attack was caused by a drug slipped to the murdered woman--and who did it? Inspector Gamache figures it out again, with his trademark intuitive, emotion-sensitive style. But this book is also focused on the betrayals headed towards the unsuspecting Gamache by his best friend. The reader knows what is happening, but Gamache has no idea who is leaking terrible stories about him and his family to the press, and it's torturous to watch as it unfolds. I'm curious to know what will happen for him in the next book, since the climax of the story involves this coming to light.

Definitely a fun book to listen to, and Penny has a huge talent of telling a story and creating these characters I love, who seem real and have personalities of their own. I'm looking forward to the next one soon too.

Book #100: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

First, a quick summary of this classic: there are three brothers and sons of Fyodor Karamazov, Dmitri, Ivan, and Alexei. Fyodor is the world's worst parent and a pretty horrible person, and everyone knows it. The three (motherless) brothers have grown up thanks to servants taking care of them and other people basically raising them to adulthood. However, they're all grown now, and have all returned to their home town where their father is for short stays, and are becoming reacquainted with him and with each other. There's a lot of deep discussions about right and wrong, about their Karamazovian natures, etc. Then Fyodor is murdered and Dmitri is the immediate suspect, and the second half of the novel is describing the arrest and the trial and the aftermath of the accused patricide.

This book took me a LONG time to read. This is one of those books that is the equivalent of five other books--because of its length, but also because of the difficulty of reading it. It was about 775 pages long, so much shorter than War and Peace or Anna Karenina (the two books I keep comparing it to, since they're both long Russian classics I've read as well), but it felt longer than those because it was heavy. All the summaries and reviews I read of this book talk about how it is a "philosophical treatise on morality" and "a passionate philosophical novel set in 19th century Russia, that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality." This basically translates to whole chapters being long, LONG monologues from different characters without there being even normal paragraph breaks. Ten whole pages will go by with no dialogue and hardly any new paragraphs--which makes for slow, slow reading. I was determined not to skim and skip things (which happens automatically for me sometimes, when faced with entire pages with no distinguishing breaks), so I moved much slower than I usually do. Add in the fact that it's heavy stuff, talking about our agency and what is right and wrong and debating the existence of God and Christianity--and that makes it even slower. Additionally, the plot was difficult to stay engaged with, and many of the characters (other than Alyosha) were not sympathetic. However, it was easier to follow which character was which and not get confused about who was who, which was nice.

I don't say all of that to say that I didn't like the book. I did, but not as much as War and Peace or AK. I wish I had read this with a class where I could have discussed it and gotten some insight into why things were significant. I read the Sparknotes for each section of the book as I was going, and that helped a lot to give me insight into things that I missed the importance of as I was slogging along through the book. The philosophical elements that I enjoyed thinking about was how much of an effect our natures have on our actions (everyone was always talking about their "Karamazovian natures") and Ivan and Alyosha's disagreements about right and wrong. Ivan believed that if there's no God, there's no afterlife, and everything is permitted and nothing is wrong. This belief, which he talked about a lot and discussed with many people, blows up in his face and ends up driving him insane when the repercussions of it strike him finally. Alyosha was my favorite character, and obviously Dostoevsky's as well--he was angelic and beloved by all and always trying to do good for everyone. I didn't quite understand the need for the character of Father Zosima, the elder at the monastery who was Alyosha's mentor in his attempt to become a monk, and I thought it was super weird how an entire section, out of nowhere, was dedicated to his life story and his beliefs about everyone being responsible for everyone else's actions (I get that it was supposed to be in response to Ivan's atheism, but it seemed super weird). I kept thinking, "This would NEVER be allowed in a book being published today."

All in all, I am glad I read this. I have had this book on my shelf for YEARS and YEARS--I bought a secondhand copy while I was at NCSU, so at least six years ago--and I've always felt lame that I've never gotten around to reading it. I'm trying to work through the books on my shelves that I haven't read yet, and this was a major one. I don't honestly know if I'll want to read it again, though. It really dragged for me, and I don't know if the interesting insights were worth all the pages of blabber it took to get them.

But hey--book 100!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! CHECK ME OUT!

Book #99: Where I Was From by Joan Didion

I read this book in 2011, before I started keeping this blog. And I got the idea for a "family book club" (from a friend who does it with her sisters), and this ended up being the first one we picked for our family discussion. Although only a few of us ended up reading it, I'm glad to have revisited it again--it reminded me of what a great writer Joan Didion is, and how I feel like her ideas are so much deeper and more thought-provoking than my thoughts usually tend to run. This book is basically different essays dissecting Didion's relationship to and understanding of California, her home of her childhood. She writes about the many contradictions of California as a whole, as the supposedly picture-perfect place but with many issues hidden beneath the surface that I think surprised her as she grew up and became aware of them. She writes a lot about different ways the federal government has supported and then pulled out of California, such as the railroad and the aerospace industry, and about the growth of the prison system, and the Lakewood Spur Posse gang issues of the 1990s. I really enjoyed her discussions of the pioneers who first came to California in the 1800s, and thinking about the difference between her pioneer ancestors/heritage vs. our Mormon understanding of ours.

All in all, it wasn't probably the best book club choice for our first book. But it was still fun to try and discuss with my mom and Camille, and I'm excited about the next one we chose. I think this is a fun experiment. We'll see how it continues.