Book 19: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

I have no idea why this book caught my eye; it's not my usual genre (psychological thriller), and it's a story that ostensibly about a woman but told from the POV of a man and written by a man, which I find really suspect at the best of times (which 2019 is, quite clearly, not). But I put it on hold at the library and then had a firm deadline once I got it, since there are a million holds on every copy of the book in the system and so it's impossible to renew it. That deadline meant that I did in fact make myself read it before it was due, and I'm really glad I did.

The setup is that there's a woman named Alicia Berenson who's a successful painter who murdered her husband, and then simply stopped talking. She's found not guilty by means of insanity (or whatever the equivalent legal situation is in the UK, which is where the story is set), and now lives in a mental hospital run by the state. Our POV character is Theo Faber, a psychologist who's obsessed with figuring her out: why did she stop talking? Why did she kill him? What did the self-portrait she painted after her husband was murdered mean? The narrative cuts back and forth between Alicia's journal entries in the month leading up to the murder, and Theo's POV as he uses progressively more dubious means to attempt to unravel who Alicia was before she murdered her husband, including visiting her relatives and the relatives of her dead husband. I knew that there was something I was missing, some connection that the narrative wasn't giving me quite enough information to put together, until suddenly it all hit at once. I didn't have the time to reread the book from the beginning, but I did think that much like Gone Girl, it's the sort of story that would read extremely differently the second time through. If this sounds remotely intriguing, I really recommend it.

Grade: A

Book 18: Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson

This was another sci-fi/fantasy book club read. It's a novella rather than a novel, which is definitely a good thing, I think, for the size of the narrative. I could imagine a longer version of this story, but I think the limitation of where the story started and finished made it stronger and more interesting.

The book takes place in an apocalyptic future, where people moved underground in the far north after climate change destroyed people's abilities to survive further south. It's also a universe in which people could have body modifications, like animal tentacles or legs, that changed their physical capabilities, and there's constant real time monitoring of their physical well being via nanobots. The main people who have these modifications are the plague babies, who initially survived the epidemics and fled the surface, and are now returning to attempt to restore the earth and build a new kind of society. The protagonist, Minh, is one of those plague babies, who is frustrated by how developing technology is interested in traveling back in time as a means of escape and entertainment, rather than as a means of obtaining the necessary knowledge to rebuild their habitat.

She gets the opportunity to go back in time to ancient Mesopotamia and do research on the river basin. But of course the trip doesn't go exactly as planned, due to her travel partners being interested in slightly different things than she is, and to the chaos of time travel. It's not my usual kind of story, but I found it really compelling and unpredictable--even when I thought I could guess where the narrative would go wrong for Minh, what that eventually meant for her was completely different than what I expected. There's also a parallel story that's told at the beginning of each chapter that feels unrelated to the main narrative, and when those two paths finally come together it's really satisfying and also fairly shocking. I wouldn't have read this outside of my book club, but I'm really glad I did.

Grade: B

Book 17: Good to Go by Christie Aschwanden

I have a whole subcategory of books on my to-read list that are books I heard about on the longform podcast and decided I needed to pick up. This one made the list because I loved the author's interview, and the concept of actually analyzing which kinds of physical recovery techniques make a measurable difference and which ones don't really intrigued me. I am not an athlete, but I am a fan of many sports and someone who is becoming more and more aware of how my body is changing as I get older, and so I read it both with the aim of potentially discovering better ways of living and seeing which tried and true methods are at best placebo effects and at worst actively hinder people.

The answer to the first part of that inquiry is basically that getting a sufficient amount of quality sleep is the most important aspect of any kind of physical recovery, and the aspect other methods of recovery are the least good at mimicking or replacing. Our bodies are simultaneously incredibly adaptable--she goes through a whole section demonstrating that basically as long as our bodies get some kind of food within an incredibly wide period of time post-exertion, our bodies will generally extract the fuel it needs from anything--and also incredibly finicky and demanding, and what it really comes down to is that every body is different, and if you truly believe that something you're doing is making a difference, it probably will, because we're creatures of habit and the placebo effect is real. Most of the things we believe (dehydration kills performance, icing and ibuprofen after exertion and/or injury helps, eating protein within an hour of weight training is vital for gaining muscle) are either probably not true and based on studies funded by industries that only publish the studies that benefit them (and are unconfirmed by independent studies), or are the result of confirmation bias/survivorship bias: we look at how the best athletes in the world train, and assume that their performance is due to their training methods, rather than them being exceptionally talented individuals who would succeed no matter what within a fairly broad framework of methods and techniques, so long as they believed their methods helped. But that's not something that can be marketed, so instead we are told (and believe, no matter how much we tell ourselves we're too smart for this) that Michael Jordan is MJ because he drank Gatorade, and not because he's an exceptionally talented individual.

I actually found the fact that there's no magic pill (aside from sleep) to be extremely reassuring and helpful. It turns out I didn't miss out on a secret that would have made me a natural athlete; bodies are simply different, and the best thing that I can do is actually listen to what my body is telling me it wants or needs, and do my best to provide that. Easier said than done, but at least I won't need to start sitting in ice baths.

Grade: A

Book 16: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

So this was a read that was a classic 'man I wish I actually liked this book as much as I wanted to' book. I read it for my sci-fi/fantasy book club, and the premise of it is really interesting: a meteor strikes the earth in the early 1950's, and in addition to causing initial chaos and upheaval and all that, scientists are also able to calculate that within ten or so years the earth will warm to a degree that will not sustain life. So there is a push for the space program to work to set up a colony in space for the survival of the species, and of course any kind of successful long term colony would require that both men and women become astronauts.

Elma York, who was a female pilot during WWII and is married to a scientist in the space program, is a natural candidate for women to be included in this colony. But the entire book after the initial aftermath to the meteor strike is just two steps forward and one step back repeated ad nauseam, as she's confronted over and over again with sexist roadblocks and red tape, and also learns the same valuable life lessons about how no matter how difficult it's been for her, it's even harder for black women, a truth that she never actually seems to remember that she's learned before. A friend of mine mentioned that the bureaucratic nonsense that she deals with felt very true to life in terms of how government works, but something being realistic doesn't necessarily make it a good or compelling narrative, and I just found myself getting so impatient for the actual story to start. And of course it's actually the first book in a series, and so the story in fact barely does start even by the end of the book.

I actually found the first part of the story to be the most interesting, when the world is dealing with the ramifications of a major meteor strike only seven years after the end of WWII. But the book itself is only interested in that major world event to the extent that it's a good catalyst for the space program to be both fast tracked and forced to include women, and the narrative wasn't compelling enough for me to stop myself from pulling on the thread of how else such a major event would have changed everything. This book has been lauded by many and clearly must work for other people in a way it simply didn't for me, but I felt at many points of the story that I would have enjoyed reading the historical and scientific works that the author read as part of her research far more than I did the narrative result.

Grade: C 

Book 15: Any Old Diamonds by KJ Charles

I had a bad couple of days in terms of migraines this past week, when I didn't feel well enough to do anything while medicated but also desperately needed to keep my brain happy and calm and engaged. This book was exactly what I needed, and I was very grateful to it.

This story and setup feature the kind of characters who in my opinion Charles does best: people who are fundamentally good but have a moral ambiguity to them, whether because of their occupation or general motives of behavior. Given that one of the main characters is a jewel thief and the other is the man who hires him to rob his father and stepfather at a celebration of their marriage anniversary, moral ambiguity may seem too positive a view of them. But her scoundrels manage to be both law-breakers and extremely sympathetic.

In this particular situation, Alec Pyne has hired two jewel thieves to steal the most closely guarded necklace in the country outside of the crown jewels--namely, the one his father the Duke of Ilvar is about to give to his wife at their twentieth anniversary party. There is a slow, drawn out reveal of exactly why Alec would want to do this, with him confessing his family's past to Jerry Crozier, one of the thieves, as Jerry instructs him in how to deceive his family to achieve his goal. Naturally, one of the methods of his teaching is in sexual rewards, which is so compellingly written it makes the entire story work, in my opinion.

I truly did not know how they were going to succeed in the robbery, or what Jerry's grand plan or any of that was until it happened. Part of that is due to a sleight of hand in how the tale is written, and what is omitted to the reader; I didn't have a problem with how it was constructed, but I can see why it might not work as well for everyone. I was expecting a twist of some kind, and I was reasonably satisfied with the one we got. And the ending was just about everything I'm ever looking for at the end of a good heist story.

This isn't a direct sequel to any of her other books, but a couple of characters from a previous trilogy make appearances, which I enjoyed more than I expected to. All in all, I really liked both the main couple and the overall setup of this book a lot.

Grade: A 

Book 14: Band Sinister by KJ Charles

What a delightful romp! This is a slightly different flavor of the regency romance novels Charles is so good at: it's a gothic novel which knows that it's a gothic novel, and so it's almost like a backstage story or something of the like. A big house full of scandalous people and the two vulnerable young people who are trapped there for weeks and discover that perhaps their outside perceptions are wrong. But it's not precisely a "everything that's assumed about the villains is actually wrong" story, more of a "look closely and perhaps it's society itself that's villainous" tale.

Our story begins when Amanda Frisby falls from her horse and badly breaks her leg while riding too close to the estate of the treacherous Philip Rookwood. This would be difficult for her and her brother Guy under the best of circumstances, but for reasons both within and without her control, Amanda's reputation is extremely fragile, and Rookwood Hall is about the worst place for her to be unaccompanied. So Guy goes to the house, learns that she cannot be moved for weeks without potentially endangering herself, and has to sit and watch as she nearly dies from fever. On top of all of this, Rookwood has numerous guests staying at his home, including a notorious lord, all of whom Amanda wrote a thinly veiled novel about anonymously. Things get increasingly complicated, especially Guy's emotions when he discovers that not only is Rockwood much less evil than he had always presumed, he's also captivating and not at all a threat to Amanda's virtue, but his own.

This book was just fun, and the romance between Guy and Rockwood is really satisfying. It feels both classic and fresh: Guy is a tentative virgin who's never even been kissed before, and Rockwood does introduce him to all sorts of things, but the dynamic doesn't feel rote or boring, because it's so specific to these two characters. The inevitable third act conflict and drama is a touch by the numbers, if only because the potential solution is fairly evident, but it's still really lovely to see them get there, and to watch Guy and Amanda and Philip all grow and figure out themselves. It was just a good read from start to finish.

Grade: A 

Book 13: Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley

You know those books that have been on your bookshelf (or, in this case, on my e-reader) for so long that you have no idea how or why they got there in the first place? This is one of those books.

It's a short novel set at the turn of the twentieth century, right in the period of The Music Man, and it has a similar sensibility. It's about a woman who manages a farm in New England with her brother, but once he starts writing and publishing books he has less and less time (or interest) in keeping up his half of the bargain of running a farm. So when a traveling salesman comes by with a horse-pulled bookstore (the titular Parnassus) and tells her he's looking to sell the whole business, she buys it with her savings to prevent her brother from doing the same once he returns. And then she goes off and has some adventures, to the consternation of her brother, and the salesman, while not the scam artist I kept expecting him to be, sticks around for a variety of reasons as well.

It is a charming enough read, one I thought (correctly) was written in that era, rather than being a historical novel; it's just a novel. There wasn't a ton of suspense or intrigue, but enough to keep me happily reading it on my commute, which is about all I can ask of that sort of story. I still don't know why or how I obtained that book in the first place, but I don't regret reading it.

Grade: B