February 2024 Reading Round-Up
The best and worst of my reading month
Welcome to the February 2024 Reading Round-Up. Each month I write about the books I’ve read and rank them from worst to best.
Ranking my reading from “worst to best” this month feels a little silly. I was only able to read 3 books and they were all fantastic. Although the leap day gave me a chance to sneak in an otherwise unfinished book, the rest of the month was jammed to the point that my normal tricks for reading (audiobooks!) didn’t seem to work. I’m antsy to return to a normal reading schedule in March, which will be bolstered by a mid-month spring break. There are so many books to get to!
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3. Mr. Nobody - Catherine Steadman
Fiction/Mystery, 368 pages
Dr. Emma Lewis has spent the last fourteen years trying to escape her past. After her father’s dramatic death was picked up by the British tabloids, Emma and her family must leave their home in Norfolk and start anew in London. Under her new identity, Emma becomes an up-and-coming psychiatrist who specializes in patients with severe memory loss. After a man washes up on the beach near her childhood home unable to remember who he is or how he got there, Emma puts aside her trepidation about returning home in order to treat one of the most interesting and unique cases of her career. When she arrives, however, Emma is shocked to discover that although the patient struggles to remember basic things about his own life, he knows who Emma really is, including intimate details that she thought only she could know. Stuck between treating the patient and reckoning with her own past, Emma must confront her darkest secrets while trying to figure out who this man really is.
In a month where it was hard to focus on anything but the task in front of me, Mr. Nobody provided a fabulous release and distraction. This is the third mystery I have read by Catherine Steadman, also an actress known for her role in Downton Abbey. Her other books that I have read, The Disappearing Act and The Family Game, were equally entertaining and totally different. Each time I read one of her books I am amazed by her storytelling capabilities. Steadman’s mysteries are doled out deliberately, with creeping suspense that slowly speeds up to the point where I found myself racing to the finish to understand what was truly going on.
Rating: 8.5/10
2. A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan
Fiction, 340 pages
A Visit From the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and rocketed a talented but relatively unknown author into a league of modern literary geniuses. No description of this book is going to do it justice, especially not the four sentence description you get if you google the novel. The book is written around a different protagonist in each chapter, stretching and spanning timelines and geography, yet still connected to every storyline that precedes and follows. The book begins with Sasha, the assistant to Bennie, a famed but (in this iteration) fading music producer. We then jump into Bennie’s past through the eyes of a songwriter for his high school band then back forward to his first wife then to his wife’s former boss to a boss’s client and so on and so forth. The scope is wide but the reader is never lost; a sure sign of Egan’s mastery of her craft. Every chapter, every character, every plot line is developed and its all about nothing and everything at once.
Twelve years after A Visit From the Goon Squad was released, Egan returned with The Candy House, a structural follow-up that begins with a minor, bit player from a chapter in the middle of Goon Squad and proceeds in the same haphazard yet controlled manner. These books do not need to be read together or in order, but you’ll catch through-lines if you do. For example, The Candy House has a chapter written as an instruction manual in the second person in the mid-2030s, while Goon Squad has a chapter told through a series of PowerPoint slides. This would be a great book to discuss with another reader. Indeed, in writing this review, I fear I haven’t even scratched the surface.
Rating: 9.5/10
1. I Love Russia - Elena Kostyuchenko
Non-Fiction, Russian Politics/Journalism, 350 pages
Elena Kostyuchenko was a journalist for the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta until it was shut down in 2022 following Kostyuchenko’s reporting in Ukraine. Despite current events and her book’s focus on Russia’s descent into fascism, the title of her new book, I Love Russia, isn’t meant to be ironic. Instead, Kostyuchenko’s patriotism is rooted in the ordinary, forgotten people of the country who she so comprehensively describes. Each chapter begins with a personal anecdote from the author’s life and then is followed by a piece of reporting outside of Moscow. In one chapter, Kostyuchenko writes about environmental degradation from the mining industry in the northernmost city of Norilsk. In another, Kostyuchenko follows local girls recruited as prostitutes. An early chapter is dedicated to the inhabitants of the obscure villages that dot the railroad tracks from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Later on, Kostyuchenko writes about two weeks that she spent living in an internat, a state-run facility for people with mental or physical impairments, and the decrepitude and exploitation exhibited towards wards of the state.
While each of the reporting snippets are distinct - the book could be viewed as a compilation of long-form magazine articles - placed together, they create a comprehensive portrait of the people that the Russian government either wishes to ignore or actively suppresses, but who populate the country nonetheless. In telling the story of the country through the individual, Kostyuchenko deftly exposes the Kremlin’s corruption and cruelty. For her work, her bravery, and her beautiful writing, Kostyuchenko has been poisoned by the state and now lives in exile, forced to leave her country and family behind.
Rating: 10/10
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I LOVE A Visit from the Goon Squad, it is a book I always recommend - its Literature but its also so much fun and weird and wonderful at the sentence level but also at the philosophical existential pop culture level. What more could you want?? :)
Wow thanks for the exposure to the ‘I Love Russia’ book - that sounds fascinating