mozaikmage

It was a very slow month at work so I got a very normal amount of reading done! Structured in order of when I read them, because I have a narrative arc in the middle there.

Check back in with me next month when I read... probably less, because our busy season is starting up again and also I have less hours in March for some reason and I mostly read at work lol.

Here are once again my books of the previous month in reverse chronological order because that’s how Storygraph sorts them!

I read 15 books and no VIZ manga volumes because I got COVID and had no motivation to do anything at all for a good chunk of the month there.
If You Could See the Sun by Ann Liang- god she's so funny. Funniest YA writer working today. Really well-drawn portrait of a very specific environment, really clever gimmick and way of using it. All of the characters felt believable and varying degrees of likeable, and I really felt for Alice's struggles. I can't believe this was her first book. And she was still in college when she wrote it! What am I doing with my life. Also I just realized the title is a pun lol.

Wellness by Nathan Hill- Sad, but also funny. Some of the psychology stuff was interesting. The length of the bibliography was also interesting. It’s kind of refreshing to see a novel with so much research put into it. I think I liked it overall, but it’s hard to tell.

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang- Sex scenes were pretty good, if het. Somehow very obvious the author is an experienced TV writer but a debut novelist. A little weird that the characters are from a similar part of the country to me, but not as weird as reading Suburban Dicks. I don’t know if the whole... dead sister thing is handled as well as I’d like it to be. I also kind of wanted it to be more about the TV show than their personal lives lol.

The Price of Salt, or Carol by Patricia Highsmith- Slower-paced than I expected it to be. Also less explicit than I thought it would be. And a lot more focused on both the roadtrip and Therese’s life ambitions. The happy ending was sweet though.

Flung Out of Space: The Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith by Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer (reread, because I’d started reading Carol and thought wait what was her life story again)- Ughhh still so good so beautiful and well-paced we have no choice but to stan (Ellis/Templer, not Highsmith) etc.

The Wake-Up Call by Beth O'Leary- Cute and funny! Both of the leads made sense to me, and their relationship developments also made sense. And the premise was really fun too. I liked this one.

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich- Read it because my girlfriend read it and asked me if it was accurate about working in a bookstore. Unfortunately the bookstore I worked at is a lot worse than most bookstores, so I couldn’t really say. Hard to read when in the middle of having COVID, which was when I had it checked out.

Funny Story by Emily Henry- If I had a nickel for every book I read in August with a male protagonist raised by a narcissistic mother, I’d have two nickels (the other being Wellness) which isn’t a lot but it is weird it happened twice. I did enjoy this one, but I’d put it in the middle of my Emily Henry tierlist (Book Lovers and Beach Read are my favorites, personally.)

Hilariously while I was reading it at work some patrons walked by carrying Funny Story tote bags and I mentioned this to them and they said they were a bunch of bookstagram friends meeting up together at my workplace. Wild.

A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid- I liked this more than I expected. The oppressive cold wetness was a very strong vibe for an atmosphere, and I liked the worldbuilding even though it felt kind of decorative. I had a hard time buying that everyone was just sooooooo obsessed with this one recently-dead author, though. I feel like it normally takes a little longer for someone to become a classic. The romance was okay.

Reboot by Justin Taylor- I’ve been thinking a lot about Extremely Online Books (as an extremely online person) and I think where Reboot and Exalted work and where My First Book (Honor Levy) and Fake Accounts (Lauren Oyler) don’t is the specificity of the way they are both online. By not trying to portray every single way someone can be Online, they portray an Onlineness that feels real. I did enjoy Reboot, though it is absolutely not a “voice of my generation” book on account of it is at the very least the voice of the generation before mine. I thought it would be more Bojack Horseman-like but then they referenced Bojack and I realized it was not that at all. Also, it has scenes, in which characters interact with each other and say words, and sentences of different lengths instead of all annoyingly short sentences (Levy) or all painfully long sentences (Oyler). Or maybe I’m just bitterly resentful of the fact that someone my age got a book out already and that’s why I’m so annoyed with Levy and her onlineness. 

Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater- I can see the influence of JSMN on this, so it’s a good thing I read that one first. I thought it worked well, the romance felt believable and the more fairytale aspect worked for me. I wish the aunt who sucked got more retribution in the end though.

Women of Good Fortune by Sophie Wan- Generally pretty fun and interesting choice of setting, but I feel like Jane was a little too hard to like for too long. Also Lulu should’ve been a lesbian sorry.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke- Extremely elaborate lore, dryly funny, the footnotes and all the fairy stories and the fairy world stuff was all really imaginative and interesting but the commitment to that 1800s aesthetic made it dense and kind of difficult to read. I felt like it took me forever to finish reading it, even though I did enjoy it all the way through.

The Self-Made Widow by Fabian Nicieza- I can’t talk about this book in too much detail without doxxing myself. It gave me psychic damage. The plot worked for me, and the ending was satisfying. Otherwise. It sure is a book that takes place in locations that exist. Including. My fucking workplace!!!! How's that for a jumpscare!!!
Personal update: thinking real hard about Querying my Book and getting scared and going back in to revise it again. Signed up for the Daisuga big bang. Finished a comic and got it printed in time for Flamecon and Anime NYC, then got COVID and missed Anime NYC.