I initially planned on reading The Cactus League last Spring Training. But then Covid happened, and I couldn’t go to the library to pick up the hold, and then I moved, and then the library in my new town closed again after being open for 2 months, and………… yeah. I had lots of time to psych myself up for this one.
The verdict is: the potential was there.
Read More »Between libraries closing for months and months due to the pandemic and myself moving to another state, I was not able to make a huge dent in presidential biographies in 2020. A meagre three was all I could manage.
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Where the Crawdads Sing was one of the most anticipated books on my to read list. I was certain I was going to love it since it has similar elements to some of my other favorite books: the main character is a young girl who is an outcast in some way and it takes place in the south. And it has rave reviews and a high Goodreads rating!
Once again I was burned by the hype.
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Cleopatra is a tricky subject to write about. While most people have heard of her, she has inspired a Shakespeare play and a film starring Elizabeth Taylor, few people know the real person behind the character. Only one word written by her has survived and ancient accounts of her life were written by the Romans who despised her.
This review contains spoilers.
I get the feeling Maggie Stiefvater didn’t want to let go of her characters. One more book after The Dream Thieves to tie up the story would have been a fine way to end the series. Instead we get dragged through Blue Lily, Lily Blue and The Raven King with minimal plot development in either of them. There’s some good character development, and I do tend to prioritize characters over plot, but something still needs to happen. In The Raven King the main quest of the series, finding Glendower and getting the favor, was ignored for most of the book right up until the very end.
Ed Kennedy is an underage cabdriver without many life prospects. Then one day he stops a bank robbery and starts receiving playing cards with messages on them. He must figure out the messages and help the people who the cards lead him to.
The first chapter involving the bank robbery is fantastic. It’s sarcastic, funny, and the dialogue is snappy. Unfortunately, the rest of book fails to live up to it.
Zzz… Boring. Such promise with little delivery.
Pros:
I’ve been wanting to read Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, but didn’t want to commit to reading 800 pages by an unfamiliar author. So I started off with Catton’s much smaller debut novel, The Rehearsal. It also happens to be her Master’s thesis which explains some things. It’s highly stylized and experimental with non-linear, ambiguous storytelling and characters delivering florid monologues like they’re performing in a play. Good for a writer’s workshop, maybe not for general public reading.
Here is it. The end of The Lunar Chronicles. It’s sad to finally say goodbye to these characters. I didn’t realize until the last few chapters that I was going to miss reading about them so much. It took a while to get into this series, but I’m glad I stuck with it. I thought Cinder was okay, but nothing spectacular. Scarlet again was just okay. But Cress stepped it up and Winter is a fantastic conclusion.
Burial Rites is a fictionalized account of the last months of Iceland’s last executed criminal. In 1828 Agnes Magnúsdóttir is convicted of killing a man she was a servant to, and a farmhand. She is sent to a farm in Kornsá to await her execution, with a family who thinks she’s a monster. The details of the crime she supposedly committed, and the events leading up to it, are revealed throughout the story.
Fictitious Lives 
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