Convenience Store Woman

Convenience Store Woman

By Sayaka Murata

Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of "Smile Mart," she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction—many are laid out line by line in the store's manual—and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a "normal" person excellently, more or less. Managers come and go, but Keiko stays at the store for eighteen years. It's almost hard to tell where the store ends and she begins. Keiko is very happy, but the people close to her, from her family to her coworkers, increasingly pressure her to find a husband, and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action...

I was going to use this book for a happily single female protagonist but the plot of the book (such as it is) involves her getting together with a man in order to appease her family and co-workers. So I'm not entirely sure that either "happy" or "single" fit, since she is not really either. Except at the end, when she discovers that her true calling is working in a convenience store after all and leaves her ersatz boyfriend and job interview.

 

This was an interesting book, particularly at first, when we're getting the skinny on Furukura's life and all the ways she doesn't feel normal, but has found comfort and enjoyment in the rules and processes of working in her store.  

But her delicate peace is disturbed when a slacker, misogynistic co-worker is fired and she joins forces with him to find out if everyone would prefer that she "act" normal (i.e. have a boyfriend and have ambition) even if said boyfriend is a waste of space and clearly just a mooch taking advantage of her. And it turns out that people do prefer that! 

This part is where it goes off the rails a bit. It's clearly aiming for a satirical expose of the ways in which "performing" are more socially acceptable regardless of whether it's good for that person but Shiraha (aforementioned terrible co-worker) is obviously a dingbat, and everyone's reactions are so overblown (not one person is suspicious or concerned that Furukura has moved an unemployed misogynist into her bathroom and quit her job but instead immediately start inviting them both to drinks out) that it loses its impact by getting too cartoon-y too fast. 

I think the central premise is good and could offer a critique on societal expectations, but it feels like it could have been presented better. If for example we'd seen this scam develop over a longer period and get more and more involved as they see people buy in to it. Or if literally any one person was a little more skeptical, it might have felt more earned, more real. But instead it begins to feel thin and ridiculous. It also makes no sense that Furukura would be so intrigued by someone who is so terrible at working at the convenience store, which appears to be the only thing she values.

 

Luckily it's saved from complete failure by not dwelling too long on the relationship aspect of it and ending on the perfect note of Furukura realizing that the most important thing is her work in the convenience store, and she drops all pretense of a conventional life.

For some reason, maybe because of how Murata describes the store, it reminds me of the ending scene of House of Stairs, when the three brainwashed kids see a traffic light and start dancing, mindlessly, as they've been trained to do. You go on dancing your bad self to the light of the frozen foods section, Furukura.

 

 

 10: A Book You Got For Free

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

By Toshigazu Kawaguchi

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Oh man, I did not enjoy this book. I don't know if it was the translation or if the writing is just bad or if Japanese people interact like they have never met other humans before, but there were so many incredibly stilted conversations and weird tics that it was like reading a manual and not a book. It's extremely episodic too, basically four separate stories about specific "customers" going back in time, and some little bit of carryover with the employees from episode to episode. But since it was so episodic, I guess Kawaguchi decided that we needed to rehash all the intro stuff over and over again each time, which was the most boring and also the most bizarre parts of each story. 

These are some excerpts from the first story, about a woman whose boyfriend breaks up with her so he can go work in the United States:

“It’s possible to go back, right?” she asked, uneasily. 

It may have been prudent to begin with this question. But it was pointless to realize that now.

“Well, is it or not?” she asked, staring directly at Kazu on the other side of the counter.

“Hmm. Ah…” Kazu replied. 

Fumiko’s eyes once again lit up. She was not hearing a no.

An air of excitement started to surround her. “Please send me back!”

She pleaded so energetically that she seemed about to leap over the counter. 

“You want to go back and do what?” asked Hirai coolly, between sips of her tepid coffee. 

“I’d make amends.” Her face was serious.

“I see…” said Hirai with a shrug.

There's absolutely no sense that these two people are having the same conversation together. Here's another excerpt, from later in this same, interminable conversation about going back in time:

“Look. I want you to listen, and listen carefully. Okay?”

“What?” Fumiko’s body tensed up. 

“You can go back. It’s true… you can go back, but…”

“But..?”

“When you go back, no matter how hard you try, the present won’t change.”

The present won’t change. This was something Fumiko was totally unprepared for – something she couldn’t take in. “Huh?” she said loudly without thinking. 

Kazu calmly continued. “Even if you go back to the past and tell your… um, boyfriend who went to America how you feel…”

“Even if I tell him how I feel?”

“The present won’t change.”

“What?” Fumiko desperately covered her ears.

First of all, this reads like dialogue, not a book. You wouldn't write a script the way you would a story. There's so much repetition (not to mention the weird asides about body tensing, and ear covering that also feels false and distracting) that an already slow conversation feels even slower and more agonizing to read. Not to mention that apparently Fumiko is "totally unprepared" for the idea that the past can't be changed even though, like half a page later:

“Why?” Fumiko asked Kazu, her eyes begging for answers.

“Why? I’ll tell you why,” Kazu began. “Because there’s the rule.” There tends to be, in any movie or novel about time travel, some rule saying, Don’t go meddling in anything that is going to change the present. For example, going back and preventing your parents marrying or meeting would erase the circumstances of your birth and cause your present self to vanish.
This had been the standard state of affairs in most time-travel stories that Fumiko knew, so she believed in the rule: If you change the past, you do change the present.

So, Fumiko is aware that there's always rules about changes to the past and yet is totally unprepared for the idea that the past can't be changed? I mean, it's not the most annoying thing about the book. But here's another example, again, SAME CONVERSATION:

She wanted a convincing explanation for the existence of this unbelievable rule, that there is nothing you can do while in the past that will change the present. The only explanation Kazu would give was to say Because that’s the rule. Was she trying to tease her in a friendly way, by not telling her the reason? Or was it a difficult concept that she was unable to explain? Or perhaps she didn’t understand the reason either, as her casual expression seemed to suggest.

 We never find out!  Who knows! Leave a little mystery, I guess, because there's certainly nothing else worth reading on to find out. AND THE FUCKING CLANG-DONGS!! Every single time the door opens, we get a CLANG DONG. Here is a totally unedited two page spread from later in this SAME UNENDING CONVERSATION:

Fumiko 's attention returned to the cafe. Hirai seated herself opposite her at the table and proceeded to merrily explain the other rules. With her head and shoulders still sprawled on the table, Fumiko fixed her eyes on the sugar pot, wondering why the cafe didn't use sugar cubes, and quietly listened.

"It's not just those rules. There's only one seat that allows you to go back in time, okay? And, while in the past, you can't move from that seat," Hirai said. ''What else was there?" she asked Kazu, as she moved her count to her fifth finger.

"There's a time limit," Kazu said, keeping her eyes on the glass she was polishing. She mentioned it like an afterthought, as if she were merely talking to herself.

Fumiko raised her head in reaction to this news. "A time limit?"

Kazu showed a slight smile, and nodded.

Hirai gave the table a tap. "Frankly, after hearing just these rules, barely anyone still wants to return to the past," she said, apparently enjoying herself. And she was indeed taking great delight in observing Fumiko. "It's been a long time since we've seen a customer like you—someone totally set in your delusion of wanting to go back to the past."

"Hirai ... " Kazu said sternly.

"Life doesn't get served to you on a plate. Why don't you just give up?" Hirai blurted out. She looked ready to continue her tirade.

"Hirai ... " Kazu reneated. this time with a bit more emphasis.

"No. No, I think it's best to clearly put it out there, huh?"

Then Hirai guffawed loudly.

The words were all too much for Fumiko. Her strength had entirely drained from her body, and again she collapsed onto the table.

Then, from across the room ... "Can I have a refill, please?" said the man sitting at the table closest to the entrance with his travel magazine opened in front of him.

"Okay," Kazu called back.

CLANG-DONG

A woman had entered the cafe alone. She was wearing a beige cardigan over a pale aqua shirt-dress and crimson trainers, and carrying a white canvas bag. Her eyes were round and sparkling like a little girl 's.

"Hello." Kazu's voice rang through the cafe.

"Hi, Kazu."

"Sis! Hi there!"

Kazu called the woman sis, but actually she was Kazu's cousin's wife, Kei Tokita.

By the way, this is STILL not the end of the conversation with Fumiko about the rules about going back in time. And we get to hear them multiple times. Over and over and over, as they get explained to different people.  Grant me the patience to get through this "healing book" and the wisdom not to pick it up in the first place. The glacial pace and constant interjections and interruptions would make even the most interesting premise a rough read, and this is an extremely basic premise: you drink a cup of coffee, you go back in time to rehash a conversation. 

By the way, Fumiko's story is resolved because apparently her boyfriend tells her to wait for three more years and then he'll be back from the United States and they can pick up where they left off.  

 Seriously, that's how it ends. 

The other stories are about a woman whose husband has dementia and has forgotten they're married - after she goes back, she decides she's going to remind him about her instead of letting him think she's a stranger. One story is about a woman who goes back to talk with her estranged sister, who was in a fatal accident after leaving the cafe - she decides to go back and talk with her sister and later runs the family business as a "dying wish" kind of thing. And the last story is a woman who goes forward in time - Yes! Despite spending thirty pages on the rules about going back in time, never once is it mentioned until the last story that you can go forward as well! - to meet her child, since she fully expects to die after (if not before) she gives birth.

 The episodes themselves, Fumiko's aside, are all meant to be tear-jerkers too, but it's hard to feel anything except mild relief that after all the contortions people throw themselves into prior to going around in time, they've actually done it and gotten closure. 

Other things I found annoying:

We spend an inordinate amount of time reading about the fact that the cafe does not have air-conditioning but is never hot. This comes up multiple times.

There is a ghost woman sitting at a table. This is never explained beyond "she didn't finish her coffee fast enough." 

No one ever really addresses the fact that at one point, the daughter of the woman who dies giving birth comes back with futuristic tech to take a picture with her mother. 

A "key" plot point (in that there's any plot to speak of) hinges on the fact that somehow someone mixes up a date that is ten years away at 1500 hours with a date that is fifteen years away at 1000 hours. This is also unexplained beyond the following, which I swear I am not making up: "You planned to travel ten years into the future, but there was some kind of mistake and you traveled fifteen years. It seems ten years at 15 o’clock and fifteen years at 10 o’clock were mixed up. We heard about it when you returned from the future but right now, we are in Hokkaido for unavoidable reasons that I won’t go into because there’s no time.”

LOLOLOLOL. "We knew you had the wrong date and time and we had fifteen years to prepare for it but didn't and can't tell you why."

Well, I guess I am laughing now, remembering that. Maybe healing fiction does work!

23: A Book That Is Considered Healing Fiction

The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea

By Ernest Hemingway

The story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: after a long period of bad luck, a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.

Very little did I think I would ever be in the position of reading Ernest Hemingway. Nothing I've heard of him or his stories has quickened my appetite or tempted me to cracking a work of his.  I suppose I cannot argue with his talent, which manages to turn a story about a man fishing into deep drama that is never (well, rarely) boring.  I will say though, that I have no compliments for the format I read it on, an e-book which not only made every short page feel like an eternity, but also, at some point towards the end, began excising sections between pages, so that I would end on a question and pick up the next page halfway through a harpoon attack. I was so close though, I just kept going. 

I'm certainly not capable of saying anything about Hemingway that hasn't been said before: his prose is short but compelling, this story full of masculine energy and pride and nature's agony (this could have easily qualified for the prompt in which nature is the antagonist). Surprisingly, I did find myself rooting for Santiago. I didn't expect to care or like him much, fishing is not my interest, and I've perhaps been predisposed to dislike anything of Hemingway's, but Santiago was so matter of fact and had so little pity for himself that I felt none for him as well, and without pity, you can begin to admire, at least a bit, his determination to see it through, even in the face of overwhelming odds. There is a poignancy in finishing a game in which you have been roundly defeated, for your own pride. Interestingly, the only other game in which Santiago participates in the course of the novel is arm wrestling, which he wins so soundly that he loses interest in it.  Hemingway lightly connects the dots between that man and the present Santiago, who is barely phased by eighty-five days without a catch, by alluding to Santiago's unnatural doggedness, both in arm-wrestling and fishing. 

The appeal of the book is easy to understand: the setting of a challenge between man and beast, where there is literally nothing else to impinge or impede on the battle, just your will against its will.  A clean and pure contest, of which the man is the victor even after his prize is taken away, a loss without defeat.

The Old Man and the Sea reads like a fable or a fairy tale, and it is simple enough that a three year old can understand it. I know this for a fact, because I had just finished reading it and my three year old asked for a story and, fresh out of ideas, I told the story of the fisherman who didn't get a fish for 84 days and then hooked the biggest fish of all, but before he could get it back to shore sharks ate it.  Being as it lacked any kind of magic, happy ending, or princesses, I don't think my three year-old was at all impressed, but who should you believe: a small doubting child or the Pulitzer Prize committee?

44: A Book You Have Always Avoided Reading

The Midnight Feast

The Midnight Feast

By Lucy Foley

It’s the opening night of The Manor, and no expense, small or large, has been spared. The infinity pool sparkles; crystal pouches for guests’ healing have been placed in the Seaside Cottages and Woodland Hutches; the “Manor Mule” cocktail (grapefruit, ginger, vodka, and a dash of CBD oil) is being poured with a heavy hand. Everyone is wearing linen.

But under the burning midsummer sun, darkness stirs. Old friends and enemies circulate among the guests. Just outside the Manor’s immaculately kept grounds, an ancient forest bristles with secrets. And the Sunday morning of opening weekend, the local police are called. Something’s not right with the guests. There’s been a fire. A body’s been discovered.

 I suppose I have a weakness for thrillers. I tend to find even the bad ones readable.  I relish the experience of trying to figure out the twists (there are always twists in today's thrillers. I remember when thrillers could earn the name by atmosphere and plot alone but those aren't nearly as fun) and usually have no trouble putting on the blinders required to overlook plot holes. I'm not generally reading these trying to look too closely at how it all hangs together, I enjoy the thin facades. All that is to say, I have no complaints about The Midnight Feast. It fulfilled all expectations, which is that it required very little in the way of concentration, verily zipped by, and contained enough outlandish shenanigans, both criminal and revenge-oriented, to satisfy anyone's thirst for skullduggery. 

To be fair, the plot does involve both past murder and present arson and there's a fair number of people who all have duplicate aliases in each timeline, so there are some who complain about trying to remember everyone. I didn't find it that hard though, everything gets repeated and then spelled out in detail, just in case you're very slow. Everyone has a secret and everyone is keeping tabs on everyone else. 

I did find the way it all tied together to be gratifying, and no plot holes were so glaring that they intruded on the afterglow. Does it make any sense how often people were both lost and yet constantly finding other groups of people and/or mysterious scenes in the woods? No!  Was I confused about how Eddie managed to jump on his bike after it specifically mentions that he lost it in the woods the previous day?  Yes! Does it make sense that Eddie was able to duck back into the Manor, get a costume on and catch up to Francesca on said bicycle while she's driving a car?  No! Did I enjoy the discovery that the explanation for one character's mysterious and oddly-timed disappearances was "playing fortnite at a local club"? Yes!

Read this one if you're in the mood for escapist thriller fun, where all the bad guys get their comeuppance and the good guys all make it out intact.  Read it if you're in the mood for cow-butchering secret societies who "right the wrongs" and you like hearing about rich people losing their investments.  Read it if you don't take yourself too seriously and have some spare time to wallow on the coast of Dorset in the fictional town of Tome (pronounced "Tomb" because of course!) enjoying the summer solstice.

27: A Book Set At A Luxury Resort

 

A Walk in the Park

A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

By Kevin Fedarko 

A deeply moving account ever of walking the Grand Canyon, a highly dangerous, life-changing 750-mile trek.

The Grand Canyon is an American treasure, visited by more than 6 million people a year, many of whom are rendered speechless by its vast beauty, mystery, and complexity. Now, in A Walk in the Park , author Kevin Fedarko chronicles his year-long effort to find a 750-mile path along the length of the Grand Canyon, through a vertical wilderness suspended between the caprock along the rims of the abyss and the Colorado River, which flows along its bottom.

Consisting of countless cliffs and steep drops, plus immense stretches with almost no access to water, and the fact that not a single trail links its eastern doorway to its western terminus, this jewel of national parks is so challenging that when Fedarko departed fewer people had completed the journey in one single hike than had walked on the moon. The intensity of the effort required him to break his trip into several legs, each of which held staggering dangers and unexpected discoveries.

Accompanying Fedarko through this sublime yet perilous terrain is the award-winning photographer Peter McBride, who captures the stunning landscape in breathtaking photos. Together, they encounter long-lost Native American ruins, the remains of Old West prospectors’ camps, present day tribal activists, and signs that commercial tourism is impinging on the park’s remote wildness.

An epic adventure, action-packed survival tale, and a deep spiritual journey, A Walk in the Park gives us an unprecedented glimpse of the crown jewel of America’s National an iconic landscape framed by ancient rock whose contours are recognized by all, but whose secrets and treasures are known to almost no one, and whose topography encompasses some of the harshest, least explored, most awe-inspiring terrain in the world.

It would be hard to say that any book or video (but especially a book without many pictures) can do justice to the experience of being at or inside the Grand Canyon but Fedarko gives it a good go. There's a point at which he says that he realizes that he's been trying to "experience" the Grand Canyon at its most pure, i.e., by walking through it, but eventually comes to acknowledge that even the casual hikers who skim just the merest part of it can still find real appreciation of its natural beauty and power. 

Speaking as one of those casual hikers who, upon approach to the Grand Canyon was immediately awestruck, I appreciate the concession.  The Grand Canyon is aptly named. It is so magnificent a landscape that I cannot conceive of a thinking, feeling person who, when confronted with it, is not in some way awed and amazed.  

That being said, I really don't think even reading this book (or any book) can do justice to it, so it's no fault of Fedarko's that it falls short. There is just no replacement for being in the canyon itself, something is apparent when we hear about the people who are drawn, again and again, to hiking and exploring it, regardless of the dangers. We learn about several people who did in fact die while exploring it, who are only small steps of association away from the author himself. It's sobering and comes at a point when you almost feel that the risks are overstated.  Fedarko admittedly likes to cast himself and his hiking partner Pete McBride as somewhat hapless, unprepared "off the couch"ers, which can be amusing at points, but I think also does a disservice as it understates the preparation and fitness required to make an adequate attempt at what they achieved. 

The first sections are mostly scene setting and the first initial foray into the planned through-hike, which ends in disaster.  The latter sections, as Fedarko and McBride get further underway (and more comfortable) also explore the connection of the native tribes to the land (for better or for worse) and the prospect of further development and commercialization. There's an upsetting couple of chapters as they hike past Grand Canyon West, the skywalk and helicopter tour on Hualapai tribe land, which begs the question of whether and how tribes and other landowners should be allowed to profit off of the Grand Canyon (given the deterioration of the canyon unders also the kind of non those conditions), especially when the policies of the American government towards the tribes has created the conditions of poverty and social ills which they seek to escape by commercializing the only asset left to them. 

 If nothing else, this book certainly does not make me want to hike the Grand Canyon. Preserve it, yes. Boat through it, maybe. But definitely not walk through it. As far as non-fiction books about hiking misadventures go, I think Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods sets the gold standard. A Walk in the Park, while paying homage, fails to meet the high standard set. But still, it calls up memories of one of the most wondrous places on Earth. And even a fainter echo is still something special.

46: A Book Where Nature Is The Antagonist

The Comeback

The Comeback

By Lily Chu

 Who is Ariadne Hui?

• Laser-focused lawyer diligently climbing the corporate ladder
• The “perfect” daughter living out her father’s dream
• Shocking love interest of South Korea’s hottest star

Ariadne Hui thrives on routine. So what if everything in her life is planned down to the minute: That’s the way she likes it. If she’s going to make partner in Toronto’s most prestigious law firm, she needs to stay focused at all times.

But when she comes home after yet another soul-sucking day to find an unfamiliar, gorgeous man camped out in her living room, focus is the last thing on her mind. Especially when her roommate explains this is Choi Jihoon, her cousin freshly arrived from Seoul to mend a broken heart. He just needs a few weeks to rest and heal; Ari will barely even know he’s there. (Yeah, right.)

Jihoon is kindness and chaos personified, and it isn’t long before she’s falling, hard. But when one wrong step leads to a world-shaking truth, Ari finds herself thrust onto the world stage: not as the competent, steely lawyer she’s fought so hard to become, but as the mystery woman on the arm of a man the entire world claims to know. Now with her heart, her future, and her sense of self on the line, Ari will have to cut through all the pretty lies to find the truth of her relationship...and discover the Ariadne Hui she’s finally ready to be.

I was just idly scanning the 2024 prompts and realizing I'd just read something that totally qualified, through no intention of my own.  Serendipity!  However,  I have read like, three books in between (the two Robert Galbraiths and the Emily Wilde one) so my recollection is already a bit faded. I like to write the reviews as soon as possible afterwards, when it's fresh because it's too easy for me to forget. I was also considering whether Where the Dark Stands Still qualifies as an "enemies to lovers" since I read that out of turn too, but I wasn't sure whether they truly qualified as "enemies" from the get-go. 

[For a very mini review of Where the Dark Stands Still: fun, but seems like almost a complete knock-off of Uprooted? The author thanks Naomi Novik in the notes, so presumably she's aware of the influence, but a young woman who semi-accidentally falls in with a long-lived tree magician who is fighting creeping corruption in the woods? In an eastern-European (i.e., Polish) inspired setting? If you wanted to read two almost identical books, read these!]

Anyway, back to The Comeback: I have no idea how the book wound up on my potential read list but I checked it out because I was entertained by the idea that some korean pop star is hanging out undercover at his cousin's while this lawyer goes about her business.

[I'm pretty sure I also read Chu's The Stand-In, which I thought was... fine? I don't remember hating it, but I also don't really remember it at all, which I suppose is damning it with faint praise. I vaguely recall the premise, but the plot points described in the blurb don't ring a bell. The Comeback is more of the same: fun while you're in it, but easily forgotten.]

Back to business: a lot of the complaints are about Ari - she's wishy-washy, gets in her own way, too naive to be a 30-something, one review calls her "bitter, judgemental and close-minded" which I assume is because she initially thinks k-pop is for stupid, etc - or the melodrama in the last third of the book (some reviewers had no idea why there would be issues after Ari and Jihoon decide to get together, and one reviewer complained that Ari's valid objections to his intense superstardom were talked down, others complained about the multiple break-ups) but I really didn't have an issue with any of that. I felt like Ari, although certainly more of a "sit on the sidelines" kind of a person than most romantic heroines these days, made reasonable decisions for herself and her life. Certainly she didn't display any of the confidence that you'd hope to see in a 30 year old, but she also didn't feel like a teenager, just someone desperately unhappy in the wrong job and unable to imagine anything else.  I didn't feel like other characters were unfairly criticizing her for turning down the position of pop-star girlfriend - sure, you want your two friends to make it, but no one called her a coward for turning him down (that I can recall). The Big Misunderstanding here that in an effort to quell public interest in their relationship, Jihoon goes along with the idea that they're not dating  - and implies that she's some sort of stalker - doesn't feel like a cheap manipulation just to keep them apart. 

I don't know. I was never a fan of One Direction, but I was still appalled and taken aback by Liam Payne's young death. The hyper-scrutiny and public fascination and parasitical relationships that fans form with the stars is so skin-crawlingly weird, it was  interesting to read about it from the perspective of the girlfriend. 

I guess I just don't agree with all the negative reviews. Is it going to win the next Nobel Prize? No, but that's not the point. It was a fun, inoffensive foray into a modern day Cinderella story - handsome prince plucks a nobody out of obscurity and makes her his queen - and I wasn't spending too much time worrying about whether they'd get back together or whether Ari would get a new job doing tours once she's fired as an attorney. The conflicts didn't bother me, and the personalities didn't grate. To each their own.

20. A Book That Fills A 2024 Prompt You'd Like To Do Over (Or Try Out) [5: A Book About K-Pop]

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales

By Heather Fawcett 

Emily Wilde has spent her life studying faeries. A renowned dryadologist, she has documented hundreds of species of Folk in her Encyclopaedia of Faeries. Now she is about to embark on her most dangerous academic project studying the inner workings of a faerie realm-as its queen.

Along with her former academic rival-now fiancé-the dashing and mercurial Wendell Bambleby, Emily is immediately thrust into the deadly intrigues of Faerie as the two of them seize the throne of Wendell's long-lost kingdom, which Emily finds a beautiful nightmare, filled with scholarly treasures.

Emily has been obsessed with faerie stories her entire life, but at first she feels as ill-suited to Faerie as she did to the mortal world-how could an unassuming scholar like herself pass for a queen? Yet there is little time to settle in-Wendell's murderous stepmother has placed a deadly curse upon the land before vanishing without a trace. It will take all of Wendell's magic-and Emily's knowledge of stories-to unravel the mystery before they lose everything they hold dear.

Another small disappointment. The book is enjoyable and a reasonably satisfying conclusion (I assume) to the series, but the entire plot hinges on Emily reading a bunch of fairy tales and then doing the things in the stories, to the same effect. It's kind of boring. There's very little in the way of surprise, and Emily displays basically no ingenuity, which is one of the most entertaining parts of the previous books - her plans and plots.  Although the book is as long as the earlier ones, it seems like very little happens: she and Wendell journey to his realm and get settled in, they discover the old queen has poisoned everything, they investigate and stop her (mostly by dull research and using again, the exact templates we see Emily read about several times when comparing various stories) and then Emily has to ask someone else to save Wendell (this involves more library time for her and the actual rescue is done by someone else off screen pretty quickly) and then Emily decides to save the queen - this is pretty much Emily's only action piece and it's arguably far too little, too late.

 We spend some time with Wendell and Emily, there's a few entertaining pieces, mostly concerning Wendell's uncle, when Wendell has to win a battle against him, and when Wendell's cat, Orga demonstrates her irritation with him. But Taran never really manages to fulfill early hints at menace or duplicity, so it's another piece of tension gone. The book flirts with the idea that Wendell becoming a faerie king could change him for the worse and make him tyrannical as well, but then kinda just backs off of it completely. Emily rescuing Wendall from his own transformation might have been an interesting point of tension, but again, it peters out to a big old nothing-burger.

Look, there's absolutely nothing wrong with a cozy story with characters one presumes you like, but it doesn't live up to the earlier books in the series and if it had been the first in the series I would not have gone further. 

19: A Highly Anticipated Read Of 2025

The Running Grave

The Running Grave

By Robert Galbraith  (J.K. Rowling)

Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside. 

The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organization that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths. 

In order to try to rescue Will, Strike's business partner, Robin Ellacott, decides to infiltrate the cult, and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito among its members. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her. . . 

I'm not even entirely sure how this happened, but I was randomly browsing books that might fit the prompt. I haven't read any earlier books in the series, but just decided to read the preview on a whim, and 10% of the book later (which turned out to be a sizable chunk, this book is over 900 pages long), I ended up checking it out. One of the biggest persuaders was "Jayson's" review on GoodReads which took multi-chapter chunks and reviewed them in turn, giving their own thoughts and predictions on the mysteries. It was just the right amount of intrigue without the dramatics. 

[Sidenote: I absolutely cannot stand the number of reviews on GoodReads which seem to exist solely to demonstrate the reviewer's library of gifs, reaction images, and emojis and describe the books only by superlatives. The YA ones are the worst, here's one I found after just three minutes of idle searching:

WHAT A GREAT BOOK!!! 🌷💖🎀

A BEAUTIFUL READ, JUST LIKE ITS BEAUTIFUL COVER! 💍🌹😼

If you’re a fan of Stephanie Garber and Holly Black, then read it IMMEDIATELY…😘
FINALLY, a lovely fantasy read after so long! 🤗

This person writes reviews like they have a brain injury. Anyway, the nicely organized review by Jayson  - and this seems to be Jayson's M.O. - was a nice surprise.]

So I was somewhat forewarned and forearmed against the potential problem of diving into a series halfway and not knowing who anyone is. I also had the bare bones of the relationship between Robin and Cormoran - apparently full of Unresolved Sexual Tension - and the nice thing about this book is that since they're separated for a good chunk of it while Robin is undercover, we spend a minimal amount of time on their interactions which, for someone like me who is only reading this because of a macabre interest in modern day cults rather than an interest in seeing whether Robin and Comoran smooch (Spoiler: they don't), bettered my reading experience.

I assume most people who read about cults assume that they themselves would never fall prey to one, which is exactly what I would assume about myself. I have enough confidence in my cynicism and venality to feel that I wouldn't be tempted by ideas of grandeur and hidden secrets to the meaning of life - if only I give up all my creature comforts.

Now, I absolutely think that anyone who doesn't have the choice to leave would be indoctrinated like anyone else - it's basically torture with a side of brainwashing. But the question is why people who have an opportunity to leave, like the retreat members, after one week, would ever stay. The Running Grave answers this question somewhat indirectly. Obviously Robin would leave, were she not investigating the cult, but we get to interact with Will Edensor, a cultist who is "questioning" - we can easily understand why would find himself trapped, as he comes across as someone who is trying to understand everything and, when given no rational explanation, finds he must believe the supernatural. He also seems to think he's smarter than he is. And people who have no experience with normal loving relationships could easily be taken in by the ersatz strings-attached kind of love that the cult provides. 

But as unpopular as Rowling is among the liberal faction these days, you have to give her credit where credit is due: she can write a doorstopper of a book that doesn't feel long at all. Little did I know that I would be gulping up a 960 page book in a matter of days (when I had other books to finish first). The sense of dread that permeates the chapters, particularly Robin's, as she gets further and further entangled, is a masterclass in keeping suspense up. And we're able to see how Robin's weeks and then months slowly begin to break her down, and the process doesn't feel rushed or unnatural.  Now I will say that with the length, I did find myself forgetting or confusing people. I had trouble keeping the Dougherty and the Pirbright families separate, even though the children were fairly distinct, since both involved young kids in the early days of the cult.

I congratulated myself on figuring out very early on that Daiyu, the Drowned Prophet, did not actually drown at the beach (and didn't even actually go), but I assumed for most of the book that she'd been drowned at the farm instead, possibly accidentally while her parents were trying to set her up as a cult icon.  I did not guess the actual mystery, or the explanation of the cult-within-the-cult. Humorously enough, the cult's actual crimes (which include concealment of corpses, medical maltreatment, rape, and baby snatching!) are basically footnotes by the time we progress to the climax. It all seemed to hang together although I can't say that I love the "detective confronts the killer by themselves in a long monologue tying it all together" which may be a hallmark of the series? I dunno, I ended up reading the first book in the series after this one, and Cormoran does the same thing in that one, so either I'm unlucky or it's a pattern. And, like the personal relationship stuff that I mostly skimmed since I care not a whit about Cormoran's exes or his and Robin's agony about whether to get together or not, the agency's other cases and shenanigans about their employees seemed like so much filler to me, but presumably for those who have been following the series from the beginning, it is more satisfying. For my part, I would have been fine with merely a 700 page book about going undercover at cults.

7: A Book About A Cult

 

 

Family Style

Family Style

By Thien Pham

Thien's first memory isn't a sight or a sound. It's the sweetness of watermelon and the saltiness of fish. It's the taste of the foods he ate while adrift at sea as his family fled Vietnam.

After the Pham family arrives at a refugee camp in Thailand, they struggle to survive. Things don't get much easier once they resettle in California. And through each chapter of their lives, food takes on a new meaning. Strawberries come to signify struggle as Thien's mom and dad look for work. Potato chips are an indulgence that bring Thien so much joy that they become a necessity.

Behind every cut of steak and inside every croissant lies a story. And for Thien Pham, that story is about a search―for belonging, for happiness, for the American dream.

 I liked Family Style, although it suffers from the same problem that so many graphic novels do: it's so fast (and relatively easy to read) that it feels less substantial than it should.  For example, I'm pretty sure I read and liked The Best We Could Do, but it doesn't stick in the memory the way a longer, heftier tome would. Anyway, maybe writing this review will help. 

 I liked the framing device that Pham uses, of focusing on certain moments in his life and spotlighting them, along with the food that they're associated with, the early chapters involving his family's escape from Vietnam and subsequent stay in a refugee camp, then culture shock in the United States, integration, and finally citizenship.  For some reason the last section felt very disconnected from the earlier parts, and I'm not sure if it's because it seemed like the author skipped so much time or what. I did read the book over several days so I guess that may be partially to blame, but it still took me a really long time to figure out that we were still following the main character (i.e., the author) and hadn't switched to his father's point of view.  

But by far the best part was the commentary and Q&A section at the end. His conversations and interviews directly with his family members (and illustrated, to boot!) were hilarious. I love the Calvin & Hobbes 20th Anniversary book for the same reason: we frequently get commentary and annotations from actors and singers but less common is an author's commentary on their own book (aside from introductions) and even less often (but very fun) is a comic artist's commentary. 

25: A Book Where The Main Character Is An Immigrant Or Refugee

 

 

One

 One

By Sarah Crossan

Grace and Tippi. Tippi and Grace. Two sisters. Two hearts. Two dreams. Two lives. But one body.

Grace and Tippi are conjoined twins, joined at the waist, defying the odds of survival for sixteen years. They share everything, and they are everything to each other. They would never imagine being apart. For them, that would be the real tragedy.

But something is happening to them. Something they hoped would never happen. And Grace doesn’t want to admit it. Not even to Tippi.

How long can they hide from the truth—how long before they must face the most impossible choice of their lives?

 

One is basically spoken word poetry about being a conjoined twin. Presumably Crossan has researched the topic so I'll trust in her characterization of Grace. While it seems unfathomable to me to want to remain physically attached to someone else, Crossan does a good job of explaining why, to Grace and Tippi, the question would be so offensive. The sisters aren't bad people, they're twins, and what's more natural than staying with your twin? And what kind of alternative is there? At one point, Grace overhears someone saying they can't imagine anything worse. Obviously hyperbole, but as Grace says, there are so many things worse than this, and brings it back to the idea that to be with a loved one forever is not the worst fate.  It reminds me that people are infinitely adaptable. What may be intolerable to someone used to living independently can be eminently reasonable to someone intertwined from birth.  

We're presented with the twins' growing pains over a period of a few short months: as they're unable to afford homeschooling and now have to attend (private) school for the first time.  They make friends, they watch their father wallow in alcohol, their sister slowly starve herself and their mother lose her job.  Grace develops a crush and a heart problem and the sisters have a choice to make. Several, in fact. 

It's a fast read, for all that it's 400 pages, since it is again, like poetry, half pages lost (another reviewer pointed out that the typeface changes alignment from left to center after the twins have surgery, which is a really cool detail) and trailing thoughts. Each "chapter" is basically a poem, and most are <2 pages. And that's fine, since the subject matter is pretty heavy. Prose would have taken ages to finish. 

 

Because of the style though, the book feels less rooted, more dreamlike. For all that Tippi is the person who is closest to Grace, I feel like we barely talk to her the entire book. We're at a crossroads in the twins' lives, which makes for more interesting dilemmas, but contrariwise, I'm not sure that the sisters' relationship feels as developed as it needs to be to support the climactic separation. And the sisters have to consider death and mortality when they consider the surgery options - but there's very little wrestling with that idea too. They make a couple of bucket lists and that's about it. Again, is that realistic? I don't know. As a sixteen year old, I was pretty confident I wouldn't die, but then again, I wasn't conjoined with anyone with a limited life expectancy. 

This feels like an incredibly interesting topic, nicely executed, but also lightly touched.  I don't know that it strikes as deeply as it ought to, considering.

50: A Book That Features A Character With Chronic Pain

The Echo of Old Books

The Echo of Old Books

By Barbara Davis

Rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer’s affinity for books extends beyond the intoxicating scent of old paper, ink, and leather. She can feel the echoes of the books’ previous owners—an emotional fingerprint only she can read. When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound volumes that appear to have never been published, her gift quickly becomes an obsession. Not only is each inscribed with a startling incrimination, but the authors, Hemi and Belle, tell conflicting sides of a tragic romance.

With no trace of how these mysterious books came into the world, Ashlyn is caught up in a decades-old literary mystery, beckoned by two hearts in ruins, whoever they were, wherever they are. Determined to learn the truth behind the doomed lovers’ tale, she reads on, following a trail of broken promises and seemingly unforgivable betrayals. The more Ashlyn learns about Hemi and Belle, the nearer she comes to bringing closure to their love story—and to the unfinished chapters of her own life.

I have absolutely no idea how this is so highly rated on Goodreads. I don't want to be rude about it, but I found both romances unsatisfying, the mysteries unmysterious and the inclusion of Ashlyn's magical "book-sensing" power to be completely irrelevant and unnecessary. And look, it's not that bad! But an average of 4.26 stars??? Nothing like severe disappointment to ruin the experience for you.

Maybe we'll go in reverse order: Ashlyn, bookseller, who is sad and alone because (we find out in installments) her mother died of cancer instead of getting chemo, her father shot himself a few weeks later, and her cheating ex-boyfriend committed suicide to taunt her, has the ability to touch certain books and "feel" the emotions of the owner. This ability is described in detail in the first chapter, and has no impact on any of the rest of the story. Why is it included you might ask? I have no idea! It would be perfectly reasonable for Ashlyn to be interested in a privately published book with a sad love story even without sensing anguish from its owner. Nothing else in the book smacks of magical realism. It feels so weirdly shoehorned in that I have to imagine it was left over from a separate author idea and Davis just couldn't bear not to use it, no matter how little sense it made.

Then, we have two competing storylines, Ashlyn and Ethan in the present, tracking down the original lovers, and "Belle" and "Hemi" in the past. And of course this is a personal preference issue, but every time I wanted to read "Hemi" as a nickname I wanted to cringe (it's short for Hemingway because he wants to be a writer!). This was only made worse when it was apparent that Belle and Hemi (real names: Marian and Hugh) actually called each other these things in real life and they weren't just nom de plumes.

Marian and Hugh's love is supposed to be one for the ages, one so overpowering it conquered a prior engagement, and kept them bitter and in pain for DECADES after they split. In the book, we find out that they meet at her engagement party to another man, and they're together for about four months when they're 21 and 26, respectivey. Alas, our lovers begin fighting because even after four months, Marian hasn't ended her engagement, and then she finds out Hugh has lied to her about writing a hit piece about how her father shut her mother up in an asylum because she was Jewish, but also crazy, and then slipped a knife to her so she could commit suicide. This information upsets Marian, naturally, but Hugh blames her for not trusting that he wasn't actually going to publish it. Truly, a love to last. 

Also, there's a lot of suicide in this book.

Ethan and Ashlyn's love is less overwrought but correspondingly less interesting as well, so the chapters with them slowly deciding to kiss have all the appeal of a warm bowl of oatmeal. It's good for you, but it's not what you look forward to in the mornings. 

I liked Ashlyn fine until she decides to track down the original people in the book and (1) instead of looking for Belle/Marian, who we are told was super rich and her engagement party was the toast of the town and we know the date of the engagement party and also the identity of her fiance - instead of looking to see if there was a mention of the party in the papers (WHICH THERE WAS, we find out later) instead she tries to track down Hugh/Hemi's boss, a tangential character nicknamed Goldie, because she was a lady who owned a newspaper, despite the fact that knowing who Goldie was would absolutely not give you any more information about who either Belle or Hemi were. THEN (2), she assumes that some dude banging Goldie when she died thirty years later was Hemi. Why? I'm not sure, but I guess the idea was that this guy who was apparently so hung up on Belle that 13 years later he's writing bound books to her, becomes his old boss' lover twenty years later. I mean, it makes sense if you ignore logic and reasonable probability.

Ethan has no personality other than "willing to welcome a strange and nosy woman into his house and life".  Hemi/Hugh is distractingly obnoxious, given that he blames Marian for being upset that he lies multiple times - first about the fact that he was there to investigate her father and second that he was actually investigating her mother's suspicious death. He's also upset that she doesn't trust him more. Why should she, you wonder, but it's okay because in return, he later gets told he missed the first 43 years of his child's life. 

The fact that Marian was pregnant when she left New York was totally expected, so much so that I assumed that to be the case based on absolutely nothing but my sure confidence in this book's use of cliche. How else to stuff more melodrama into this whole affair than for her to discover she is carrying her terrible lover's child, but alas, too late! They are already parted forevermore. Also pretty obvious that Cee-cee, Marian's older sister, somehow swapped the notes so Hugh got the break up one instead of the "Wait for me!" one. The only surprise there was that the little messenger boy, Cee-cee's son and Ethan's father, Dickey, wasn't also involved, given how suspiciously guilty he acted.

The book is fine, it's FINE.  But there's no tension at any point - we know Marian and Hugh separate and we know they don't get back together before 1984.   As mentioned above, none of their separation brought tension or surprise either. In fact, I began to wish Marian and Hugh would separate sooner, since they were so much more annoying when they were together. Ashlyn and Ethan also don't carry any tension or surprise. They seem to get involved with each other more because it's expected of them as two of the primary characters in this book who are single and the same age. Perhaps it's a little surprising that Ashlyn doesn't end up with Marian's kid Zachary, but otherwise, ho hum. 

The only really bizarre thing is that SOMEHOW after 43 YEARS and several missed connections, Hugh decides to show up at Marian's big event the DAY AFTER Ashlyn and Ethan discuss the whole affair with Marian and find out that Zachary is actually Hugh's child. And the two events are completely unrelated. Now that really does take some magical thinking.

4: A Book With Two Or More Books On The Cover Or "Book" In The Title

Between Two Kingdoms

Between Two Kingdoms

By Suleika Jaouad

 In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

 It was an interesting experience to read about someone whose personality seems so diametrically opposed to mine. Cancer treatment notwithstanding, it seemed very clear to me that Jaouad is substantially extroverted, someone who thrives on interacting with people and a serial monogamist, seemingly incapable of being alone. Which makes her road trip all the more intriguing, although it does sound like she spent a good chunk of it dwelling on her romantic prospects. 

Jaouad spends the first half of the book detailing her first cancer treatment (since the time frame of the book, it sounds like she's had at least two more bouts) and then the first part of the second half talking about how hard it is to adjust to not being sick anymore, so the road trip takes up a fairly small chunk. For a road trip lasting 100 days and circumnavigating the continental United States, we spend a whole chapter and two weeks not even leaving the state of Vermont and then skip directly from Texas to the end of the story. 

She's a great writer. It's a long book but beautifully described. Naturally, almost all of it is internal musings and descriptions of her pain and care, but it's still well paced, and doesn't get bogged down. And as exhausting as she sounds to be around at points, I both admire and grimace at her bravery in writing about the end of her relationship with Will (again, not a spoiler for those who do a casual google search, she's currently married to Jon Baptiste). It sounds like she was lucky to have Will for as long as she did, doing as much as he did, but never felt lucky. But how could anyone feel lucky, with that kind of diagnosis and illness hanging over their heads? You're more likely to feel like the sword of Damocles is waiting to fall. 

In the end, I don't think that Jaouad comes up with any philosophical ideas outside of ones that seem common sense for someone in that position: focus on the present, not the past, learn to live comfortably with uncertainty, accept the love that others want to give you, etc., etc. But while I think much of the book is Jaouad trying (and mostly failing, so I hope that she's gotten better at this since 2015) to come to terms with her experience, I think much of the value of the book for others is the deep dive into what it feels to be so torn between being sick and being well - between two kingdoms, is the metaphor she uses over and over again. It is hard for many to imagine being so sick for so long that you have something like PTSD from it. And it is a small revelation to consider that being well again after something like that can be harder than being sick, and you should not expect unalloyed joy from a bill of good health.

12: A Book About A Road Trip