Book 41: Authority by Jeff VanderMeer

This is a hard book for me to figure out how to write about! That will be (part of) my excuse for why it took me so long to actually write this post.

Authority is the second book in the Southern Reach trilogy that begins with Annihilation. I went into the second book having been slightly sort of spoiled for something because of a plot point that a book club member had seen on wikipedia and repeated before I said that I was planning to read the whole trilogy and so didn't want spoilers, but honestly I feel like having had any expectation for what the rest of the trilogy would be made the second book even more disorienting. After spending the entire first book with the biologist as our narrator, Authority is told from the perspective of a complete new character. John Rodriguez, who is identified as Control in much the same way that the biologist is simply the biologist, is the new director at Southern Reach, and he's been sent there in order to find out what happened during the biologist's expedition. Similarly to the first book, there are layers after layers of disorientation and unreliable narratives that slowly peel back, but unlike the first book one of the main (and most frustrating) obstacles is that of bureaucracy. I constantly wanted to just get to the part where I knew what was going on in a very different way than I did with the first book, because the mystery of the first book is inherent and the mystery of the second book felt man-made in a way that was infinitely more infuriating, to me.

It was fascinating to feel how defensive I was of the biologist whenever Control would attempt to speak with her; she was mine, even though the first book is careful to maintain a distance, and I felt like I knew the truth of her experience and Control never would, even though every narrator in these books, both internally and externally, has been the definition of unreliable. By the end of the book, however, it made me desperate to know what would be happening to and with both of them. I don't know if the final book of the trilogy will reframe how I see this book in the same way that this book changed how I think of the first one, but I'm definitely anxious to finally get to the front of the line of my library's hold list.

Grade: B

Book 40: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Note: I know the author socially.

This is the second related but not directly connected book of this kind by this author, a story based on fairy or folk tales that goes in a different direction than the original. As may be obvious from the title, the foundational myth for this book is Rumpelstiltskin, but it goes far beyond that.

The story revolves around the choices of three women whose lives become interwoven. Miryem is the daughter of the town moneylender in a village that ranges from suspicious of her Jewish family to outright violent toward them. Wanda is the daughter of a drunk man who can't pay off his debts to Miryem's father and so Wanda (and eventually her two brothers) come to work for and with Miryem. And Irina is the plain daughter of a duke who wants his child to marry as well as she can for his own benefit with no regard to her wishes, and eventually succeeds in marrying her to the tsar. Each of them is framed by their world in the context of the men in their lives, their fathers and brothers and prospective husbands. Each of them rejects this narrow view of them, although it's not possible for them to truly transcend their surroundings.

Miryem first spins silver by being able and willing to collect on the debts that her father could not, solidifying the family's welfare in an incredibly hostile world. When that no longer suffices, she discovers she can spin that silver into gold and satisfy the greater threat to all members of the village, the Staryk monsters who raid for gold.

I don't want to discuss much more of the actual plot, both because I don't want to spoil any of it but also because this book is as much about how it made me feel as it is about what actually happens. I read it in the fall before the weather had actually turned, but the entire story felt like winter, that cold crisp clear silence in the clearing of a forest after a snowfall. The pacing of the story meant that with only fifty and then twenty and then ten pages left I had no idea how everything would be resolved, and it turned out that the answer was with a dagger to my heart in the final two pages. I could have read many pages more of the story, but I didn't need them, because the emotions landed so strongly for me. I want to reread this and her earlier book Uprooted next year, to see how they feel when I know what happens (but may not remember precisely how). I loved this book and I love all three of these women and I have many, many feels about the world created and how fantastical it is while also being deeply, sometimes distressingly real.

Grade: A

Book 39: His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

I actually read this book back in September and have had ‘write book blog post’ on my to do list every day since then for this and two other books, but I finally have some time while home for Christmas and I’m getting things done before the New Year, dammit. So let’s see if I remember what I thought about this book.

We chose this book for our book club, and I was really excited about it because I had read an article about it back when it first came out and loved the concept behind it. It’s a novel that’s told as a true crime book about a gruesome murder in mid-19th century Scotland, with the texts of the novel being the journal account of the crime as written by the murderer in jail, various newspaper accounts of the trial, the writings of an advocate and a researcher on poor peoples’ propensity to commit crimes and it being an indication of their inherently base nature, and autopsy reports of the victims. There’s never any doubt in the novel as to whether Roddie Macrae committed the murders, but the trial revolves around his mental state at the time, and the novel itself is more concerned with why he murdered them, and what it says about the lives of poor villagers in that era.

I really liked a lot of aspects of the novel; the various ‘primary sources’ were all well-written and distinctive and really hammered home how biased all points of view are, no matter how ‘truthful’ they may claim to be, and the way a reader’s opinion of the murders can change with each additional source is really compelling. I felt for Roddie and how he was essentially pushed into believing that murder was his best option in life, because so much was so unfair to him, and yet only one of the three victims could in any way be thought to deserve to die, and various inconsistencies among the accounts of what happened make it (intentionally) hard to fully believe his version. Mostly the book made me mad at the way that the poor in general but specifically poor women and children were treated by men and rich people and rich men most of all. The life of a male laborer or farmer in that era was pretty terrible by modern standards, but I found it hard to fully sympathize with Roddie or any of the men, mostly because I wanted to murder all of them on behalf of the women in their lives. Which either means that the book was completely successful in the way the author intended, or that I can’t read fiction without that as a lens these days. I wanted better for Roddie, but I also desperately wanted better of Roddie. That shouldn’t be that strange to desire of a murderer, but for me it was less about the fact that he killed people (or at least one of the people) and more because of how and why he killed the other two.

Grade: B

Book 38: St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

This is another one of those books that I've had for at least ten years and have no recollection of what made me buy it. I'm guessing I was caught by the title and the cover on a display in Barnes & Noble back when there was one within walking distance of my office, but who can say?

That's pretty similar to how I feel about this collection of short stories, honestly: a bit baffled and without a clear sense of how I got here. Each of the stories takes place in a fantasy version of modern reality, such as the titular Catholic school for reforming wolfgirls. That was one of the stories I enjoyed the most, but as with all of the other bizarre universes (a sleepaway camp for various sleep disorders that don't resemble our own at all, an alligator amusement park in the middle of a swamp, a boys' chorus used to bring down avalanches each spring in the great north), I never felt like I could hook into the worlds or the characters. Part of that may just be caused by the short story form, which often don't give me enough time to become properly invested. But most of these stories just made me feel either sad or alienated or like there was something I was supposed to be feeling, but didn't. I don't know that a book always has to have a distinct, identifiable point, but I kept feeling like I was either missing something, or that I just didn't like it, depending on the story in question. And I can't tell if this is the sort of collection that I don't think is very good, or that just isn't for me as a reader. It's not poorly written, on a sentence or even scene level, but I need something more from stories than what this collection gave me, and whether that's a failing of the book or simply a matter of taste or preference, I'm not sure.

Grade: C

Book 37: Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

This is a story that exists within the context of a much larger series and world. It's the second half of the story begun in Shards of Honor, which brings together Cordelia, a Betan scientist and captain, and Aral Vorkosigan, a captain and noble of Barrayar. Barrayar is a world which had been separate from the rest of the intergalactic society until recently, and it is very war-focused and obsessed with bloodlines and physical abilities and all that. Cordelia and Aral fell in love and got married and Cordelia got pregnant, and on top of all of that, Aral is named regent for the 6 year old grandson of the dying emperor, Gregor.

Barrayar itself focuses on their marriage a bit but mostly on how they can survive in the political situation they're in, and there are attempts on Aral's life and on Gregor's and fights between Cordelia and her father-in-law. Things come to a head in two separate incidents: one in which Cordelia and Aral are poisoned, and while they receive the antidote in time, it affects the health of her baby. So she arranges for essentially a c-section in which the baby is then put into a classic sci-fi incubator and treated, but it's very uncertain if the baby will survive, and even if he does, he will likely be deformed or weak which has made her father-in-law disown him already. And then Gregor is attacked and there's a palace coup and they need to hide the child emperor until they can save the day.

These books are prequels, and they do feel like it in many ways. I haven't read the rest of the series, but I know that the protagonist is Miles Vorkosigan, so I know the baby has to survive one way or another. There's a lack of suspense at points as a result, and a feeling that the story is showing various aspects of the society for reasons I don't understand yet but will later. But the main ambivalence I feel about the story is I don't know how to feel about the culture and characters in general! There is a lot of very odd sexual politics--characters who are supposed to be people we like in some ways have very bizarre sexual desires and practices, and while Cordelia herself is also experiencing a sense of outrage over a variety of things, it's just an odd world to be a part of right now. I don't need my characters to all be completely good, but there's a level of moral relativism in this book that I'm not sure how to handle. And again, while there's plenty in the book that's high stakes, that's lessened by the fact that I knew at least one thing that had to happen, and from that I could extrapolate quite a bit more. I don't know! I can't tell if this just isn't exactly my style of speculative fiction, which is possible, or if there's something more that didn't sit quite right with me.

Grade: B

Book 36: It Takes Two to Tumble by Cat Sebastian

Now this is the sort of story I'm hoping for when I pick up a Cat Sebastian novel!

The central focus of this story is in many ways a version of the romance plotline from The Sound of Music. Captain Phillip Dacre has been off with his ship for two years, leaving his three children to be cared for by his sister and tutors after the death of his wife. His last letter from his sister informs him that his children have been running amok, and his plans for his summer at home in the countryside are to re-instill discipline in his household! But when he gets there, he discovers that the most recent tutor is the local vicar Benedict Sedgwick, who is wonderful at handling wild children as a result of raising himself in an even more chaotic home by his bohemian poet father. Ben is engaged to his closest childhood friend Alice out of a sense of friendship rather than passion, since she's quite ill and he feels indebted to her family, and also because his interest is in men rather than women so a marriage based on friendship seems to be the best he could ever want.

Of course, that becomes far more complicated once he meets Phillip and begins to see the caring man underneath the strict disciplinarian. There are other complications in the town caused by Ben's father and brother and Alice's family, but I honestly glazed over a fair amount of them, because the real point and draw of the story is the developing relationship between Phillip and Ben and with the three children as well. I found the story a bit tense at times because I kept being afraid that their attraction would be discovered when it shouldn't be, but it's not really a story that's interested in that kind of conflict. The resolution at the end is a bit too pat for my liking, but it's a reasonably satisfying fantasy ending of how two men could essentially share a life and three children together without raising too many eyebrows, without too many complications too easily waved away. It was definitely my favorite book by this author since The Lawrence Browne Affair.

Grade: B  

Books 34 and 35: Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

I'm writing one post for two books because the story is really a single giant novel published in two parts, and I don't think discussing the two parts separately would benefit me or a reader in any way, since I've already finished both of them. So! Here we go.

These books take place in a larger book universe in which time travel has been invented at Oxford University in the mid-twenty-first century, and is used as a means of learning more about historical events by going back in time and essentially observing. The predominant theory is that historians can't make significant changes to history, so they don't need to worry about changing things, just to avoid something calamitous happening to them in the past, because if you die in the past you die in real life, too. In the first book we're introduced to three historians, Michael, Polly and Merope. Merope has an assignment in the English countryside during the Blitz (where she's known as Eileen), when children were sent away from London, Michael is about to go to observe the Dunkirk evacuation, and Polly is going to London itself during the Blitz to work as a shopgirl.

From the very beginning of Blackout the reader is more aware than the characters that something isn't quite right. The way time travel is supposed to work is that there's a drop location in time and place where a person goes when they want to be retrieved by the future again, and for all three of them their drops don't work. They each also get closer to the big inflection point moments of history than they had been taught they would be able to get, and Michael and Polly in particular begin to worry that they've both altered history that they weren't supposed to, and that the reason they can't get home is because they've changed things so much that England no longer wins the war. The book ends with the three of them finding each other in London (which was never a part of their assignment originally).

The second book is more chaos and inability to get home and talking at cross purposes and characters withholding information from each other AND from the reader even when it's in their POV and a couple of big reveals that are either lessened because the reader has realized the truth long before the characters have and/or because the characters really should have been more insightful in general. There's so much about this story that I like, and I enjoyed the setting immensely and Eileen's arc is delightful and the most genuine in my mind, but so much of the tension is from characters behaving in ways that may be understandable but that I found deeply frustrating. The entire story needed to be edited down by about two hundred pages between the two books, in my opinion, and there are aspects of how time travel is supposed to work in this universe that just felt almost unreasonable to me, someone who grew up watching Quantum Leap and has a lot of thoughts and feelings about what people are supposed to be able to change about history and what they're not. These are two books about incredibly high stakes--indeed, what I found the most affecting were the discussions of how many coincidences or quirks of geography resulted in England being able to win the war, and how close it all really was--but I never felt those stakes for the characters themselves, or felt that they truly appreciated what they were doing while they were doing it, and especially before they got trapped in the past. The role of a historian in the universe as described would really be the role of a spy and actor, and none of them seemed to fully appreciate that.

Having said all that, there's another book by the author in the same general Oxford time travel universe that I'm definitely going to read, because while I was quite frustrated by a number of things in these books, I also really enjoyed many aspects of them, and I'm glad I read them. They're the sort of books which are close enough to being great that the flaws are even more frustrating than they would be in a lesser story.

Grade: B

Book 33: Spectred Isle by KJ Charles

Not entirely intentionally, I have read a bunch of books this summer that have been stories about England in the first half of the twentieth century, but with a twist of some kind. This one is set five years after the Great War ended, and it's focused on a man named Saul Lazenby whose life and career is ruined by his experience in the war, but not in the way most were. He takes a job working for an eccentric older Major who is convinced England is at the center of supernatural happenings, and he's there to provide information as someone who had studied archaeology but can no longer be employed in a real position. 

He encounters a tree that spontaneously alights, and also encounters Randolph Glyde, who shows up at every new location Saul is sent to in order to investigate the secrets of the past. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more clear that there are in fact supernatural forces at work, a secret underworld of magic that had contributed to the War and subsequently weakened most of the protections that had existed for years. Randolph is the last of his family, which had been protectors of the world for centuries, and he's very grumpy about all of it. As the two of them are thrown together, their attraction to each other also grows and complicates everything even more. 

I liked a lot of aspects of this book, and the main pairing is a type that I generally enjoy a lot, two damaged people whose strengths and weaknesses complement each other in interesting ways. I wanted the mythology to be a bit more in some way, either more deeply explored or grounded, or even less explainable and incomprehensible. There were parts of it that were handwaved in ways that made it feel insubstantial to me, and I wanted it to either be more fully other or to not actually be supernatural at all. This is a book that at times felt like it wanted to be more of a speculative fiction novel and less of a romance, but in order for it to be that it would have needed to be far more detailed and complex to be satisfying for me. Still, I enjoyed it a lot, and this author writes very good early Twentieth Century gay romances in general. I think I would have preferred a book that was a more straightforward story about the Bright Young Things generation in Britain, and those who couldn't be (or refused to be) a part of that culture.

Grade: B   

Book 32: Hidden Sins by Selena Montgomery

I think one of the best parts of this whole book blog is being able to identify exactly what it is that I like and don't like in a story. Some of the books that I read and don't like are simply not good books; the story is thin or the writing is poor or the entire premise is flawed in some fundamental way. But other books are just not stories that I personally am interested in reading more of, and it's good to discover and confirm that, I think.

This is one of the latter kinds of books. It's a contemporary romance that's also sort of a thriller mystery, involving the hidden treasure of one of the main character's grandfather, and as it turns out that's not actually enough for me. The central conflict between the romantic pair is that they had been together when they were teenagers but then she had to leave him, and he's never forgiven her but he's also never forgotten her, and now she's on the run from bad dudes who are also trying to find this treasure, and there's a bunch of mythology about it all that could be interesting but feels both obvious and also so complicated there's no way for the reader to be involved in the discovery of the secrets. All in all, not the book for me.

Grade: C

Book 31: Choose Your Own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris

As is probably clear from the title, this is an autobiography. But it's also a book which cannot really be thought about independently from its specific form, and how it both makes it more fun and more interesting and also, in my experience of it, distances the reader from the subject in a way that's a curious choice for a biography!

Neil Patrick Harris is a former child star who got new life as an actor in his twenties and thirties on both a sitcom and Broadway. He's also openly gay and married to a man with whom he has two children, and the story of how he was outed and then more or less required to be an out public figure feels both quaint in 2018 and also is a good representation of how much has changed and also how much hasn't. This book was published in 2014, and much like Possible Side Effects (although even more startlingly, given how much closer in time it is to the present), the book reads like a tiny time capsule. There are bits and sections of this book that I cannot imagine being edited in the same way if it had been published today, and there's a security in what the future will look like that feels hard to remember experiencing from this vantage point.

The format of the book is to tell the biography in the same way as the Choose Your Own Adventure books did, where the reader gets to the end of a chapter and then decides what they what to happen next in the story. There are two problems with this format for an autobiography. One is practical: there is only one actual narrative to follow, and it's what really happened, and the book isn't constructed in a way to actually get the reader to experience all of the book unless you don't actually follow the paths, which feels poorly constructed! If you're going to make it into a game of sorts, it should actually work.

The second problem is bigger, which is that the story is told in the second person POV, since the conceit is that you are NPH and are choosing what will happen, etc. The problem with this in an autobiography is that it distances the reader from the subject in a way that's difficult to ever bridge successfully. It made me feel like NPH didn't actually have to reveal himself or his experiences in a way that wasn't artificial. I know more about what has happened in his career and life, but I don't actually feel like I know him better, and while that may mean that he feels like he succeeded, it's not what I want from an autobiography. I wanted less gimmick and more introspection, I guess.

Having said all that, it was still worth reading in the end, even if it made me feel like 2014 was forty years ago rather than only four.

Grade: B

Book 30: Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs

Man, it's really fascinating to read a memoir of essays like this in 2018. Possible Side Effects is the fourth collection of personal essays based on his life that Augusten Burroughs published in the 2000s, and there was a period of time for five or six years when that style of writing dominated book publishing, in large part due to the success of his first memoir, Running with Scissors. I had read his first three books around the time they were published, and enjoyed all of them, but I had purchased this book back when there was still a Borders next to Penn Station.

The book is only twelve years old, and depicts events that take place in the 1970s through the mid-2000s, but it's remarkable just how dated it feels. That datedness isn't necessarily a problem; my reaction wasn't exactly 'oh this didn't age well,' but it was more an awareness of the fact that it was describing a different time, both in terms of the settings of the stories and the time in which those stories were written. I was reminded of a couple of essays in The Salmon of Doubt in which Douglas Adams described how he interacted with technology in the 1990s and how he expected technology and life to evolve as a result. It wasn't even that he was wrong about everything, but I had to grapple with just how differently the world I was a teenager was from how today is. We adapt so quickly to changes, even ones that feel (and, truly, are) monumental, and Burrough's descriptions of dating via personal ads and then craigslist postings and other methods of the trade feel simultaneously very familiar and completely foreign.

This book feels like a fourth collection of essays, which is to say that while the writing is still as inventive and compulsively readable, the stories being shared don't feel like the big jewels anymore. There's still something to be discovered in them, and I don't regret reading them as well, but I didn't really engage with them as a reader so much as I engaged with them as someone who is approximately the age now that Burroughs was when he wrote them, and that's an interesting place to be when thinking about the stories. I discovered from reading them that I still deeply care about whether the person of Augusten Burroughs is doing okay now; he's married, although not to the man who he was dating while writing this book, and he's working on a couple of projects, although nothing too major, compared to his earlier successes. But I really hope the life behind the wiki entry about him is happy.

Grade: B

Book 29: Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen

This is one of those books which I've had for I don't know how many years and yet had never read. So I finally did, and it was charming!

The book is set on a desert world where dragons are raised and trained to be fighters in pits for entertainment, essentially like gladiators. The protagonist is a boy named Jakkin, whose father had been killed by a feral dragon he had been attempting to train. As a result, he had become a bond boy who had to work off his debt by cleaning and raising dragons on essentially a dragon ranch. But he had a plan to clear that debt by stealing a dragon egg or hatchling and raising it on his own to be a fighter.

It's the first of a trilogy, and you can definitely feel that in terms of how far the story gets, and the way it's setting up the larger arc of the series. But I definitely became invested in Jakkin and his dragon, and the secrets that he keeps while training his dragon and the secrets that others have which he's largely unaware of. There are times when Jakkin is a bit slow on the uptake, but in a way that's largely charming rather than frustrating. I am definitely looking forward to reading the next two books in the trilogy.

Grade: B

Book 28: The Ruin of a Rake by Cat Sebastian

I have hit a string of books this month where I didn't really love anything I read. This was another one of those, unfortunately--a perfectly serviceable story, but not one that left much of a lasting impression on me.

This is the third book in a connected trilogy of stories, and it's the one that hangs together the least well for me. Julian and Courtenay, the couple this book focuses on, are fine, but all of the plot around them essentially revolves around everyone in the story being incapable of having a straightforward conversation about anything. Courtenay is the rake in question, a man who we meet in an earlier book and is described as being terrible and wicked, but of course he's not really. And Julian is the straight-laced man who just needs to let love into his life, who has a sister he adores who he thinks sacrificed her life for his health by moving to England from India, and it's just all very complicated and not particularly satisfying, in the end. The plot intrigue needs to either be more important or less; I have read one too many historical romance novels recently that have insurmountable obstacles that are just magically handwaved without actually convincingly solving those obstacles, and I don't have much patience or interest in it at this point.

Grade: C

Book 27: Don't Stop Believing by Gwen Hayes and Tragen Moss

This is a classic holiday romance novella, featuring a former marine loner who was hurt in the past and a librarian who always falls for the wrong guy who happen to get snowed in together over Christmas. It was written by the same author of Romancing the Beat, and you can really see the point by point beats she laid out in her book in the story. The book is fine because the premise itself is the draw, but it doesn't really get any deeper or more interesting than that, unfortunately. Also, this is one of those gay romances where the names of the characters don't match--I kept wanting Simon to be the librarian and Adam to be the marine, and the fact that it was the opposite made reading the story genuinely harder. Not the worst option if you need a quick holiday romance to read, but not much more to recommend it.

Grade: C 

Book 26: Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes

This is a pretty straightforward 'how to structure a romance novel' book that I bought because I've had an idea floating through my head for the past year and I was sort of hoping that mapping it out via a beat sheet would help me actually write it. There's some good and useful tips in this book, but my reaction to a bunch of the beats outlined was more along the lines of 'oh, here's the section in a lot of romance novels that I dislike' rather than 'this is how the magic works!' I don't regret buying or reading it, and I think there's some useful structural advice in there, but it feels a bit like a paint by numbers instruction manual that doesn't actually result in a pretty or particularly interesting picture.

Grade: C

Book 25: Wicked Intentions by Elizabeth Hoyt

I read this book two weeks ago and have already forgotten most of it, other than that it is the sort of historical romance novel that is surely perfect for someone but isn't for me. There's a rich guy with unusual sexual appetites who everyone thinks is bad but really he's just kinky and sad because his mother didn't show him enough love, and there's a widow with a secret who's trying to save all of the orphans from the slums of London, plus the deaths of a bunch of prostitutes and overprotective older brothers and a sister who sacrifices her own virtue to save her ungrateful husband, like you do. So there's obviously a lot of stuff that happens in this book, but there's very little heart or real human behavior, and I just don't like straight romance well enough these days to get past all of the nonsense, sorry.

Grade: C

Book 24: The Guru Investor by John P. Reese

So this is one of those books which I own because of a friend. Usually in those situations it's because the friend is the recognized author, and in this case my friend is the ghostwriter of this book. I went into it a bit skeptical because it's a personal finance book about how ten money managers/investors have systems to do the thing that historically speaking almost no one manages to do in the long term (beat the market), but I was also curious about it because I am in personal finance fandom and so this stuff is of interest to me. I came out of it slightly less skeptical of the theory but even more firmly convinced that for the vast majority of people, investing in index funds rather than attempting to actively manage your portfolio (or paying someone else to do it) is the way to go.

The structure of the book is basically ten mini-biographies of investors who fall into three main categories, depending on what their investing focus is: value investors, growth investors, and quant investors. All of them managed to beat the market average gain over the lifespan of whatever their fund was/is, and essentially all of them have numbers-based (rather than impulse-based) reasons for holding or selling the particular stocks in their funds, and they make calls based on that. And whether or not their individual methods succeed basically depend on a person's ability to trust that a downturn in a particular fund is temporary, because there's science behind the method, and that the fund will bounce back up eventually.

All of that is fine; it's essentially the same theory as buy and hold in general, only more targeted. But the fundamental appeal of buy and hold in index funds, which track the S&P 500 and don't involve active management and so therefore have very low fees associated with them, is that you don't have to think about or worry whether your method is actually a successful one, or whether the numbers you have based your decisions on are an accurate reflection of how a company is likely to do in the future. Plus, the only way to actively manage picking stocks to buy and sell that isn't just based on hunches and emotions is to do so actively, i.e. spend time and energy managing those investments. And if you want to do that, more power to you! But for the vast majority of people who want to invest in the stock market as a form of saving for retirement, that is almost certainly going to demand more time and energy than you want to give, and cause more anxiety and stress in the process. And if you want to invest in a fund someone else is managing to achieve the same 'better than the market' results, you've got to trust that the additional fees you will pay to own those funds won't be more than the market beat the funds will have, and that the particular fund you pick is actually managed by someone who is following a system and whose system works.

This book was written in 2008, before the financial crisis really hit home, and before it became clear that a lot of the public information that was available about various companies was, in a word, unreliable. I don't doubt any of the information included in the book is accurate, in terms of how much the various funds and methodologies had earned in various points in the market. But I do wonder very much how many of the people invested in those funds were able to stop themselves from cashing out at the bottom of the market because they hadn't been saved from that downturn by the money men in charge. If they had stayed in, they would have made back their money and some. But so did anyone invested in index funds, without the additional fees or worries. The structure of the book and the sentence-level writing was as good as I would have expected from my friend's writing ability. But I can't say that I came away convinced by the central arguments of it, or inspired to do more active investing with my money.

Grade: C

Book 23: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

Man, I really wanted to like this book! But it did not work for me.

The protagonist of this story is Monty, the eldest child of a Lord in England in the early 18th century. He's seventeen and has been kicked out of Eton for love letters between him and another man, and his very mean father has told him that if he doesn't behave himself on his Grand Tour, he will disinherit him and leave the entire family estate to Monty's baby brother. So Monty is viewing his Grand Tour with his best friend Percy, who is biracial and was raised by his aunt and uncle after his father died, as his final adventure before he'll be forced to manage the family estate. Things immediately go wrong in Paris when he behaves badly at a ball and steals something from a Duke in service to the King of France and then there are highway robbers and alchemists in Spain and Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean and a sinking island off of Venice with a treasure inside and all of this should be one hundred percent up my alley, and it's not, in large part because I don't like Monty at all. He's a rich spoiled brat, who has a terrible father, to be sure, but I know I'm supposed to sympathize with him and find him charming and I just don't. He likes drinking and he likes gambling and he likes sex with men and women, none of which I have a problem with in a character, but there's nothing else to him. I understand that running your terrible father's estate probably wouldn't be the most interesting career out there, but there's nothing else Monty wants to DO, other than be an idiot. He likes Percy, which is nice, and there's some decent pining there, but it's established in literally the first chapter that Monty is in love with Percy and yet there is no good reason for that to be a secret between them aside from the fact that the narrative demands it.

Monty's younger sister Felicity is a bit more interesting, but even there I don't understand why that relationship functions the way it does. They start off hating each other, and then as the book goes on they hate each other LESS but only when it seems convenient, and it just doesn't read like real people to me. And the overall story has the same problem a lot of historical romances can run into, which is that there's this big obstacle or issue preventing a couple's long-term happiness that makes them miserable for most of the book, and then the resolution is that...they're just going to do it anyway, and somehow it'll all work out. It doesn't feel believable, and it doesn't read like a happy ending to me, and it just doesn't make for a good story. Monty learns a bunch of valuable life lessons by the end of his misadventures, and I suppose that's good and all, but there's still no place waiting for him and Percy in the world, and the book doesn't do any of the work carving one out for them. I don't know. I expected to like this book a lot, and instead it was just not for me, I'm afraid.

Grade: C

Book 22: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Another book club book! Our theme for this month was books that had been adapted into movies recently, and I was really excited to read this one because I was intrigued by the movie and had heard from my brother (who has read the entire Southern Reach trilogy, of which Annihilation is the first book) that the movie was quite different from the book. So I wanted to read the series first and then see the movie, even though both aren't in my usual genre wheelhouse. The movie looks quite scary, and that's not normally my jam!

Well. I don't know if I would describe the book as being scary, exactly, but it definitely freaked me out. There is an Area X in this world, that is blocked off from the rest of the world, and periodically there are expeditions sent there to do...something. Observe and record and report on...something. It's never quite clear.

The current expedition is made up of the biologist, the psychologist, the anthropologist and the surveyor. We never learn any of their proper names, not even that of the biologist, who is our (fairly unreliable) narrator. The framing of the book is that she's telling the story of what happened to her after it happened, which is one part of what makes it unreliable--she is choosing when and how to reveal the information she does, and at times mentions casually that something will happen a day later in the narrative, but for the most part the structure of the story is chronological, with flashbacks or memories to her life before the expedition.

I had a sense of unease for the entire time I was reading the book. The reader is never certain what's going on, and it's unclear how certain the biologist is about what's going on, and how accurate her version of events is, for a number of reasons. Other members of my book club found it very frustrating that we rarely get clear cut answers to anything, but that wasn't my experience with it, I think in part because I didn't expect a first book of a trilogy to have a full explanation of anything. But I also thought that was missing the point, a bit. I think it's both a weirder and more subtle book than what they were hoping.

A comparison that kept coming up was the television show LOST, because there's a group of people in this strange place and no one knows where it is or what it is or why they're there, really, and there's definitely scary stuff out there but no one can explain what it is. But LOST ended up collapsing because the creators kept insisting that they knew where it was going and that there was a rational explanation for all of it. Annihilation never makes that promise, implicitly or explicitly. So the creeping dread of not understanding is part and parcel of the experience. I genuinely have no idea what will happen in the next two books, but I'm definitely going to read them now.

Grade: A

Book 21: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

In the midst of what feels like constant terrible political news and reports of the rise of fascism and authoritarianism in areas all around the world, what better kind of book is there to read than a novel about the arrest, imprisonment, unfair trial and execution of a political dissenter?

Darkness at Noon is one of those books that I've had since college and have no memory of reading, although I did find markings in the book that resemble my marginalia, so it's quite possible I did. Either way, it would have been twenty years since I had read it, so I was almost certainly due for a reread. The book was written by a man who had left the Soviet Union in the late thirties and was imprisoned and almost killed before he was able to flee to the U.K., and the story focuses on the story of a citizen of an unidentified country whose revolutionary party has now become the tyrants. It's a compelling read, even though it takes place almost entirely during his time in a prison cell, but the reader learns who he was before his imprisonment and can see the mechanics of his conviction and execution being carried out. I hesitate to calling it hopeful, or even worse a great warning for our own time, but it gave me a lot to think about specifically regarding the cycles of political and societal progress and regression that occur over time. The protagonist is not presented as a hero wrongly maligned; the reality is far more complicated than that. He is someone who was actively doing the right thing, until it became clear to him that it wasn't right at all, and that sort of reassessment simply wasn't acceptable. The system failed him, whereas they would say that he failed the system. I am glad I read this book, and if I did read it as a college student, I wish I knew what I thought of it then.

Grade: B