Book 28: The City We Became by NK Jemisin

Boy, what a book to read during lockdown, when I was in New York and yet felt so far removed from it. It was like watching Into the Spider-Verse and having the same response of longing, of recognition, of memory.

I loved so much about this book. The premise is so interesting; I loved the idea of a physical city birth, and the idea of a midwife being necessary to bring that about. And of course with New York, there would need to be multiple people to do that, because it is a city made up of smaller cities. All of the characters were so wonderful, and my god the way that Manhattan feels about New York City is just so much of what I want in my relationships.

I also loved how completely unsubtle the metaphor of everything was. We know who the protagonists are and who the antagonists, and what the root cause of the rot is, and it gets into the culture and art and money of it all. It was such an amazing fantasia on New York, and it made me so desperate to get to the other side of this current existence, on so many levels.

Grade: A

Book 27: Me by Elton John

I read this as a companion to the movie Rocketman, which was a really compellingly told biopic of Elton John but which ends in the late eighties when he gets sober and doesn't touch on the most recent twenty years. And it's a perfectly satisfying autobiography written by someone who is willing to closely examine some aspects of his life but not all that interested in getting into others, and the pictures are great (especially when you compare the real life versions of various people to the actors who portrayed them in his movie). I also liked it as someone who had always had a very post-Lion King awareness of Elton John and his career - I knew he had been a major rock star in the '70s, but I didn't fully appreciate what that looked like, and the book was an entertaining overview of that time and who he was. He's also just done so much that there was never really a dull period in his life, for good or bad. I think it was certainly more of an autobiography than a memoir; he's rarely all that interested in digging into his experience beyond the narrative elements of it, but I enjoyed it for what it was.

Grade: B

Book 26: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

A book about the longterm impacts of trauma on people's brains and bodies was certainly an interesting thing to read at the height of the pandemic in New York City. It's a very good book, with a lot of fascinating insight into the development of the fields of trauma psychology and psychiatry, but it did leave me thinking 'oh wow okay so there's just going to be so much trauma to deal with on the other side of this, great.'

I found this book interesting both in terms of how it made me look at my own life and responses to trauma, but also in thinking about this area of study and work and how underserved it is, and whether it's an area I would want to work. This has been something I've tossed around for many years at this point, with the same issues always stopping me: it would take a ton of work and effort and money, and the system is so broken. One of the most affecting aspects of this book was the description of how hard it is to get anything done because of politics and policy surrounding mental health (not just in the U.S., but in particular here), and it feels like both an impossible thing to dedicate your life to, and also something that's actually worth doing so. Anyway, I really enjoyed this book, and also found it deeply affecting, on multiple levels.

Grade: A

Book 25: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Well, this certainly was an experience. I read this book after having watched the movie for the first time a couple of weeks prior, and it was amazing to me how much of the movie isn't based on the book itself. Obviously there are lots of adaptations that really transform the source material, but I was surprised in the book by how successful Tom is in the book -- there isn't the same level of potential culpability or overt homosexuality, which makes me wonder why the movie felt compelled to make the ending as tragic as it was. Or rather, I feel like I do know, which is a shame.

The writing is really lovely and it is extremely evocative, but it is hard to know how I would have read the story if I hadn't seen the movie first, because it is so definitive. I'm looking forward to reading her other, even gayer works now.

Grade: A 

Book 24: Catfishing on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer

This is a delightful YA about a chatroom community where one of the members is in fact the internet, and is the best kind of benevolent friend version of an all-seeing AI. It's just a really nice story of what humans would like our robot overlords to actually be like: a friend who knows everything, who cares for us, who learns and acts in our best interests as well. I really liked it, but a couple of months later it hasn't really stuck with me past that. CheshireCat is the ultimate chatroom admin who just really likes cat photos, and also happens to live inside our computers, literally. An excellent romp.

Grade: B

Book 23: A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier

I really enjoyed this book! This was a classic 'sold by the cover' book for me - I saw it while taking out other books at the library and apparently I've been in the mood for historical novels that take place around or between the world wars right now. This book centers on Violet, a woman in her early thirties who was "left behind" by The Great War - her brother and her fiance were both killed, and her  family has never really recovered. She had been living with her mother and working as a typist, and then she decided to move to a different town and live as a boarder and joins a society of women needlecrafting cushions for the cathedral in town.

It is such a quiet book, but also one that really digs into the choices that women had to make in that era, and the responsibilities and needs that hit against each other. There's a lesbian romance in the story as well, and it's told in a way that feels both faithful the era and also isn't interested in being tragedy porn, either. The same is true for Violet's romances, although there is a constant specter of sexual violence that, while probably historically realistic, I found a bit out of keeping with the rest of the story. The book also has the feeling that all intra World War books written after the WWII have, which is the tension between the characters' lack of knowledge of what's coming next, and what we know will. All in all, I had a lovely time reading this, and it made me want to read a lot more about this era. Sometimes I feel that way because I was disappointed by the fiction and want more from the history, but in this case it's purely because the story piqued my interest in the best possible way.

Grade: A

Book 22: Long Bright River by Liz Moore

A book club book! Which I did not in fact manage to read in time for the actual book club meeting, but in my own defense it was scheduled as a zoom meeting for the end of March and I was not yet at a point where that was something I was remotely capable of doing. Boy, what a time.

Anyway! The book. This is an extremely well done modern crime novel, about a woman who grew up in Kensington, a very rough neighborhood of Philadelphia, and became a cop and walked the streets of her old neighborhood. Her sister was also lost to those streets a long time ago, and now there's a killer out there targeting drug users and women who are sex workers in order to buy drugs. She feels the need now to go beyond the department in order to attempt to both find her sister and protect others like her.

The protagonist is a cop, but the cops are not the good guys--in a lot of ways that's one of the only things about this book that made it tolerable to read in 2020, even before George Floyd's death. The narrative is extremely well-told, with an unreliable narrator that makes the reveals both land extremely hard and was stressful to deal with in lol March. It's not exactly my kind of book, but if you are looking for a modern crime novel that focuses on women, I would recommend it.

Grade: B