What I Read: May 2019
I read six books in May, so kind of average. I was traveling a lot this month and I tend to read less when I’m away from home (unless I’m sitting at the beach, which unfortunately I wasn’t). I read 2 memoirs, 1 thriller, 1 classic, and 2 literary fiction novels. Here are my reviews:
Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future by Pete Buttigieg * * * *
Like everybody else, Pete Buttigieg burst out of nowhere onto all of my news outlets all of a sudden. I was curious about who he was, so I checked out his memoir. While I don’t think it will be a decisive factor in whether I would vote for Mayor Pete or not, I enjoyed hearing about his background and thoughts on issues. Buttigieg is eloquent and considered, and he’s experienced a lot in his less than forty years. You can tell this book is written by someone who is running for office, but there is a lot of interesting content about what it takes to run a city and I liked hearing about how his deployment changed the way he viewed his life and influenced his decision to publicly come out and pursue love. This is certainly a refreshing change to the current divisive and attention-seeking political rhetoric out there.
Women Talking by Miriam Toews * * *.5
Toews’ previous book, All My Puny Sorrows, is one of my all-time favorites, so I picked up her new release as soon as I could. This is a slim novel based on real events. The whole book is written as the meeting notes taken when a group of Mennonite women are debating whether or not to leave their remote colony after discovering that a number of the men were sedating and assaulting them in their sleep.
This book is definitely triggering and touches on horrific acts, especially considering this is something that actually happened. Toews’ trademark dry wit is present here and there is a lot of powerful writing to challenge your thoughts on the concepts of forgiveness and power. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the novel, however, because the situation/setting is already so surreal and unfamiliar that Toews’ own eccentric style just takes it to this place that makes it hard to reach or connect with. It puts it into this uncanny valley and I think the story might have been served better by a more traditional narrative.
No Exit by Taylor Adams * * *
I’m not a big thriller reader, but I was excited by the premise of this novel. Darby Thorne is racing across Colorado to get to her dying mother when she gets stuck in a fierce snowstorm. She is forced to pull over at a rest stop where she shares a public shelter with 4 other strangers. When she goes outside in search of cell service she notices a young child caged in the back of one of the parked vehicles. From that point on, she must figure out who has trapped this child in their car and why.
This novel starts out a little slow and the writing style is a little weighed down with tiny details (especially what people’s breath smells like), but once it gets going it definitely delivers on the action and thrills. I was hoping for a little more mystery, but you get a few twists along the way. There are one too many “just in the nick of time” moments, but I think this is a quick, engaging read, especially if you like thrillers. It didn’t blow me away, but it was entertaining and the ending was satisfying.
The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates * * * * *
While in some ways reading this book was like preaching to the choir for me, it was very inspiring and moving. It is encouraging to know that there are powerful people out there doing work to help lift up women and fight for their voices to be heard across the globe. It seems like Gates and her foundation do a great job of hearing the needs of the people they serve and try to be sensitive to the fact that they are outsiders and may not always know what’s best. I also appreciate that Gates gets into her personal life: from her faith, to her growing public role with the foundation through the years, and even her own journey towards gender equity in her marriage to Bill Gates.
I would recommend this book to everyone and I think Melinda Gates is in a unique position to reach people who might be resistant to ideas of feminism and gender equality. She’s spiritual, professional, and has an in-depth knowledge of the business world (especially male-dominated fields). She knows how to take what some might think of as radical positions and present them as rational, common-sense objectives (because they are!). I would hope certain politicians would read this book!
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence * *
I read this for book club because our theme for the month was banned books. When this came out in the late 1920s, it was immediately banned across the globe for its depictions of sex. Lady Chatterley’s husband is paralyzed from the war and she feels isolated and alone in his estate, so she begins to have an affair. That’s really all there is to this book, tbh.
I won’t ever be able to know the experience of reading this novel in the time period when it first came out, but by today’s standards this book is dull. Maybe that’s progress? I love a lot of the classics out there, but the characters in this one are soooo boring and underdeveloped. Connie and Mellors seem awful and I didn’t see any connection between the two of them. They seem to bicker and be kind of desperate with each other, which is annoying. The scandalous (very weird) scenes are interspersed with Lawrence’s views on industrialization, but his writing on that subject is also exhaustive and dull. Without the shock value this book must’ve had back in the day, it doesn’t have much else to offer to a modern reader. I wouldn’t really count it as a classic.
Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee * *.5
I loved Lee’s second book, Pachinko, so have been meaning to go back and read her first book for awhile. This behemoth of a novel (600 pages) is hard to summarize, but it centers around Casey Han, a young Korean-American woman who has graduated from Princeton but is struggling to find her place in the world. Her friends occupy the upper echelons of the NYC wealthy, but her parents manage a dry cleaners shop.
This novel contains Lee’s beautiful writing style, a sort of concise lyricism that reminds me a lot of Ann Patchett. That alone was what sustained me through this novel. Also, I was curious to see if anything would ever truly happen. There are too many random plot lines and perspectives in this book. Too many characters, too many erroneous scenes. I had a hard time believing in the main protagonist, Casey Han, as a character. She just didn’t seem to add up to a real person. I think there is a great novel somewhere in the many pages of this book, but it is obfuscated by too many half-formed ideas and a lack of narrative focus. I think Lee did a much better job honing her storytelling for Pachinko. She obviously loves a soaring epic, but in this case it is less soaring and more randomly meandering.
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