What you should read next – March 2020 – “You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”

Book reviews, bitches!

Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

This was the first book I read after my December binge and I could not get into it to save my life. I normally give up on books after 99 pages if I’m not feeling it, but my good friend recommended it, so I wanted to finish.

The story itself was fine — this world harvests children for their organs; I think I was just tired of reading. It took me so long to finish it. Like two weeks.

The Last Season

by Eric Blehm

The only reason I didn’t give up on this book was because it’s a book club book and I’m an obliger and good at living up to other people’s expectations. Other people expect me to read it, so I will.

I found it to be a slow crawl of a read, learning about the life and search for a backcountry ranger in the Sierra Nevada. Kind of dull.

Again, I might just be burnt out by reading.

Narcissus and Goldmund

by Hermann Hesse

I wish I remembered who recommended this book to me so I could go through and delete all the other books they might have suggested to me. The language is old fashioned and the story boring and crass. It’s about two monks, Narcissus and his pupil, Goldmund.

Goldmund goes out into the world and becomes a man whore. It’s pretty gross the way the author talks about women, as if they’re empty, stupid, and unimportant vessels. Props in the story. All the women are throwing themselves at this homeless wanderer? Please.

Also, the author writes really horrific descriptions of the black plague. Haunting.

This book sucked. I only finished it because I was in a waiting room and had nothing else to read.

Another thing. It’s mostly about Goldmund. I don’t think Narcissus warranted a mention in the title.

Guts

by Raina Telgemeier

This is my second book by this author in as many months. It’s a graphic novel for kids. I bought one of her books for my cousin’s kid for Christmas too. The books are cute and fun, thoughtful, easy reads. I finish them in a single sitting.

Absent in the Spring

by Agatha Christie/Mary Westmacott

Imagine being so successful you need another pen name.

Agatha Christie was one of my favorite authors as a kid, but this story is very different than her mystery novels. She writes about an English woman, stuck out in the desert for a few days waiting for a train. She has a lot of epiphanies about her life that turn out to be true, but she dismisses them when she gets home, so it seems kind of pointless.

The Testaments

by Margaret Atwood

Have you read The Handmaid’s Tale? It was one of my favorite books as a teenager. This is the sequel to that book, written 35 years later. It’s a chilling world, a dystopian future where women have no rights.

I had to put the book down several times as it was hard to read, but I still had to finish it in one day. It was too dark to leave overnight.

There’s even a lawyer named Anita in flashbacks to when the U.S. government falls. They execute her.

You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.

Margaret Atwood is an incredible writer.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are.

Brave, not perfect

by Reshma Saujani

As a society, we teach our girls to be perfect and our boys to be brave. The author thinks that’s stupid.