Reading The Starless Sea is a magical experience. This book is a love letter to bibliophiles, written in the style of a fable or fairy tale. It's a very meta book: a story about stories, a narrative that contains myriad tales nested within each other. The characters within the overarching narrative read books whose stories and fables come back around to have an impact on the plot. It's such a clever, well-conceived book, and I am in awe that Morgenstern was able to not only conceive of it, but also bring to life such an intricate and beautiful world. The world of the Starless Sea is rich and detailed, yet it seems like so much of it is left unexplored; even though this book is 500 pages long, I wanted to know more about every place and every character in this book. However, part of the magic of this book is that Morgenstern doesn't supply every little detail, but leaves spaces to be filled by the imagination of the reader. The endless possibilities presented and the questions raised are both wonderful and frustrating (in the best way possible).
These books are great fun to read thanks to a plucky heroine / narrator who isn't afraid to make mistakes on her road to self-discovery. It doesn't hurt that the story is set in London in the early- to mid-90s, and that the London music scene is integral to the story. Our narrator Johanna (aka Dolly Wilde) does her laundry at the same laundromat as a member of Blur and finds a worthy object of her affection in a musician named John Kite (who, in my mind, looks very much like Ben Dickey from Blaze; it's a missed opportunity that they didn't cast him in the upcoming film version of How to Build a Girl), but doesn't let her love for one man stop her from having wild and humorous encounters with plenty of others in her quest to be the best version of herself that she can possibly be. These books are a must read for anyone who has been a young woman discovering herself, her tribe, and a city to call home.
Varina is an atmospheric tale of a bygone era that feels fresh and alive in every sentence. Frazier brings to life the strong willed, opinionated Varina Davis (wife of Jefferson Davis) as she looks back over her life, particularly the fall of the Confederacy. This character's unique perspective on the Civil War is intriguing and thought-provoking. Though she was aligned with the wrong side of history, and is not always a likable character in this book, Frazier humanizes Varina and makes it possible to empathize with her, presenting and judging her in the context of the values of her own time, rather than the values that could be imposed upon her today. Varina is a tale of resilience, adaptation, and a woman always doing what seems right and best in the moment, even if that perspective changes with hindsight.
I love a good pop culture-filled memoir, and Holmes delivers a well-written, witty coming of age / finding yourself at any age tale filled with a plethora of 80s and 90s music references and gossip. However, the best thing about this book is that it's laugh-out-loud funny thanks to Holmes's dry humor and a writing style that is in turns slyly clever and relatable. Also, he includes Mayer Hawthorne's "The Stars Are Ours" on his list of "12 Songs to Pull You out of Your Despair Spiral", which is correct.
This is a novel, but it is also a biography, a unique combination that allows the reader to get very close to Hockney. The thing that stands out most in this closeness is that Hockney encountered a lot of tragedy in his life in a relatively short period of time. It speaks to Hockney's remarkable resilience and knack for reinvention that despite all of the loss he has experienced, he has always been able to find a way through and keep creating art, exploring new techniques, and bringing new people into his life. David Hockney's life is indeed quite remarkable and inspiring and it definitely deserves a book as lovingly written as this one.
This collection of some of Hillerman's non-fiction work for magazines is both educational and entertaining. The pieces about the Bubonic plague and Folsom Man are particularly fascinating, while the title piece is highly amusing. Having read all of Hillerman's Leaphorn & Chee novels, it was cool to see how Hillerman took inspiration from the real world, as I recognized many themes and ideas from these non-fiction pieces that ended up in those novels.
I read these two adventure books back to back, and, even though I'm not an outdoorsy person, I found them engaging and inspiring. In Rowing to Lattitude, Jill Fredston writes about her adventures kayaking with her husband in Alaska and other arctic locales. While such excursions would never appeal to me in real life, I still enjoyed getting a glimpse into Fredston's life and passions. She does a wonderful job weaving technical details, naturalist viewpoints, and personal stories into a cohesive narrative.
Eiger Dreams is a collection of essays that Krakauer wrote on climbing, mountaineering, and cayoneering for various periodicals. This book has been in my TBR pile for a while because I liked James Salter's Solo Faces so much and because The Eiger Sanction is a great Clint Eastwood movie; it turns out that Krakauer references both of these seminal climbing-related works in his essays. Both Fredston and Krakauer truly bring to life the vast and awe-inspiring landscapes they have encountered with vivid and detailed descriptions.
This book is a captivating piece of historical fiction about Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the Army enriched uranium for the atomic bomb program during WWII. Beard brings Oak Ridge's Clinton Engineering Works and the town built to support it to life. I hadn't known anything about this aspect of the war effort, so I enjoyed getting a glimpse into this microcosm of wartime America. I liked that one of the characters, Sam, is a Jewish physicist originally from Brooklyn. The other main characters – June, Cici, and Joe – are also interesting and engaging in their own ways. The plot tends toward melodrama, but Beard skillfully walks a line between keeping things light with romantic intrigue while also giving proper weight to a serious subject matter.
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