I anticipated that my reading would slow down as we progressed into fall. Helping my kiddo manage his school load, plus adding a grad-level writing class of my own, has meant less time devoted to whatever strikes my fancy.
However, there were also a couple of hits-and-misses that went back to the library, one forever (The Wedding Date) and one I might pick up again at a later date (Ask Again, Yes). And you’ll notice that of the five books I read this month, three I wasn’t sure about and yet enjoyed as I hung in there for the duration.
How do you decide when to stop and when to keep reading? Is there a book you’d recommend now that took more than one start to enjoy?
Book titles link to Amazon for more info + easy purchasing. Please note: As an Amazon Associate, I may earn from qualifying purchases.
The Proposal by Jasmine Guillory
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Cute, fun, light. Plus girl power. Easy, entertaining reading.
Edited to say: I’m glad I started with this one. I didn’t realize this was #2 in a series, so I went back to read The Wedding Date…and promptly gave up because it had no plot.
Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today by Joan D. Chittister
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
So much wisdom! I first read this book more than a decade ago for a spiritual disciplines I took in seminary. I picked it up again since the pandemic erased my daily routines and I thought it could offer a much-needed perspective. Amazing that Benedict’s rule, written in sixth-century Italy to establish order among monastics, and Sister Joan’s meditations on it written 30 years ago, still have so much to say to life in 2020.
Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The early relationship between Lillian and Madison was so gross I almost gave up, classic rich-girl // poor-girl at boarding school nonsense; poor girl takes the fall and rich girl gets the good life she hasn’t worked for or deserved. But then, wow… I didn’t want this book to end.
You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
What makes for a good fairy tale? And who deserves one?
This book grew on me. It’s light, fun, and culturally timely: a Black, queer girl growing into herself in a predominantly white Midwestern town. When I finished, I immediately texted the title to a friend I thought would enjoy it.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It took me a while to get into this one. It’s a fairly simple story, and the title character – at least at first glance – also seems a fairly simple guy. An Everyman, even a fool.
But it won the Pulitzer, so I suspected there had to be more to it. There is and, in the end, I loved Less – the character and the book.
Like this observation:
It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they’ve survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival.
And each of these descriptions:
We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations; it is the salt in the pudding.
He looks up at a closed-circuit television to follow the fleeting romances between flights and gates…
It was nothing like he expected, the sun flirting with him among the trees and houses; the driver speeding along a crumbling road alongside which trash was piled as if washed there (and what first looked like a beach beside a river turned out to be an accretion of a million plastic bags, as a coral reef is an accretion of a million tiny animals); the endless series of shops, as if made from one continuous concrete barrier…
The boat ride is half an hour, during which Less sees leaping dolphins and flying fish skipping like stones over the water, as well as the floating mane of a jellyfish. He recalls an aquarium he visited as a boy, where, after enjoying a sea turtle that swam breaststroke like a dotty old aunt, he encountered a jellyfish, a pink frothing brainless negligeed monster pulsing in the water, and thought with a sob: We are not in this together.
He sees, in the lines around her mouth, the shadow of the smile all widows wear in private.
He is shown to a car as small, bland, and white as a hospital dessert…
…he takes the wheel of what basically feels like an enameled toaster…
