March 2024 Reading Round-Up
The 3 year anniversary of the best and worst of my reading month
Welcome to the March 2024 Reading Round-Up. Each month I write about the books I’ve read and rank them from worst to best.
This post marks the three year anniversary of The Book House Blog. What started as a pandemic project has grown beyond any of my original expectations. I can’t believe that hundreds of people, many of whom I’ve never met, receive this in their email inboxes every month and that even more find their way onto the page to catch up on book recommendations. To date, I’ve written over 350 individual reviews and can’t wait to continue reading so that I can write more. Thank you to everyone who subscribes, shares, and continues to be incredibly supportive of this project.
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8. Very Nice - Marcy Dermansky
Fiction, 304 pages
After Rachel sleeps with her creative writing professor and then agrees to watch his dog for the summer while he says goodbye to his dying grandmother, she goes home to her mother’s house in Connecticut. Her mother Becca is recently separated from her cheating investment banker husband and mourning the death of her longtime dog. When the grandmother dies quicker than expected, Zahid, the professor, returns to the United States only to realize that he can’t go back to his Brooklyn apartment, which he sublet to his friend’s sister for the summer. Zahid instead travels up to Connecticut, arrives at the house of Rachel and Becca, and somehow receives an invitation to stay indefinitely. Entranced by the pool and the prospect of a quiet place to write, Zahid settles right into their lives while also beginning a clandestine relationship with the mother.
If you are thinking that this seems like a lot you wouldn’t be wrong. Dermansky tries to fit in way too much into this novel and does none of it particularly well. The chapters rotate through the perspectives of the different characters, all of whom feel like caricatures. I probably wouldn’t have finished this book if it hadn’t been one of the few that I unwisely packed for my trip to Greece, so I had to follow through to the end. I hoped that it would get better - after all, it has laudatory blurbs from Emma Straub and Maria Semple on the cover - but it never does. Save yourself the read. It’s just not worth it.
Rating: 5/10
7. The Memory of Animals - Claire Fuller
Fiction/Speculative, 288 pages
A devastating pandemic has spread around the world, in which a highly contagious virus spells almost certain death for those infected. Against the advice of her loved ones, Neffy, a grieving and adrift marine biologist with debt, signs up to participate in an experimental vaccine trial in London. On the day that Neffy is given the vaccine and a subsequent dose of the virus, a new mutation takes hold in the outside world causing an apocalypse. Inside the walls of the clinic, Neffy and the four other remaining trial participants must fend for themselves and make plans for how to go on. One of the participants, Leon, has brought with him a new technology that allows people to revisit memories in startling detail, which conveniently only seems to work on Neffy. This device becomes a crutch for the character, who uses it to remember her almost surely dead family members, and a crutch for the author, who uses it as a lazy narrative trick.
At the sentence level, the writing in this book is fairly good. On a larger plot and thematic level, I was wholly underwhelmed and frustrated by what I felt were underdeveloped ideas, plot points that didn’t add anything to the larger story, and shoddy craftsmanship. My favorite parts of the story were the descriptions of Neffy’s father’s hotel on a Greek island, but that could have been because it happened to be relevant to my own travels this month.
Rating: 6/10
6. Small Mercies - Dennis Lehane
Historical Fiction, 299 pages
In Boston in 1974, right as mandatory school bussing is about to begin, a young Black man is found dead on the train tracks in an Irish neighborhood. That same evening in that Irish neighborhood, Mary Pat Fennessy’s teenage daughter Jules tells her mom she is going out with friends and doesn’t return. Initially, the two events seem separate, but as Mary Pat runs into pushback during her search for her daughter, particularly from the leaders of the neighborhood mob, she begins to connect the dots in a way that makes her question her parenting. As Boston erupts in violence over school integration, so too does Mary Pat as she starts a vigilante quest to get justice for her daughter.
I couldn’t help but feel like the time period that Lehane places his story in is more a convenient prop than a meaningful addition to what is otherwise a gritty crime novel. This might make sense given Lehane’s professional background - he was a writer for, amongst other shows, The Wire and Boardwalk Empire - but perhaps his writing style translates better on a screen where action scenes are rewarded. I listened to the first half of the book until my library hold expired and then read the second half in hardcover. I enjoyed the listening experience much more; in that medium you can focus on the plot like you would a TV show rather than needing to imbibe some of the less than stellar dialogue.
Rating: 6.5/10
5. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop - Satoshi Yagisawa
Fiction, 160 pages
Takako’s whole life turns upside down the day she learns her boyfriend and coworker is getting married … to another woman in the office. Shocked and humiliated, she quits her job and moves into the tiny upstairs room of her uncle Satoru’s used bookstore. In exchange for the room, Takako works in the small shop and explores the vibrant Tokyo neighborhood in which the bookstore is situated. Satoru, whose wife left him five years earlier, puts his energy into making the struggling family bookstore a success while also helping his niece heal emotionally. When Satoru’s wife returns, he enlists Takako to help figure out her motivations, leading to an unexpected friendship and newfound family comprised of the eclectic neighborhood characters.
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, translated from its original Japanese to English, is a literary sensation in Japan that has since been turned into a movie. I picked up this book in the English section of a bookstore in Athens and read it in one sitting on the plane back to New York. It was a great plane book: short, cozy, and perhaps inspiration for future travels.
Rating: 8/10
4. Shark Heart - Emily Habeck
Fiction, 406 pages
One year into his marriage with Wren, Lewis is diagnosed with a rare carcharodon carcharias mutation. His nose turns to cartilage, his teeth fall out, his skin turns coarse and scaly, and he craves an immense amount of fish. In short, he’s turning into a shark. As Lewis grapples with what amounts to a terminal cancer diagnosis, Wren reflects on her childhood, college, and what led her to Lewis. In the world that Habeck builds, animal mutations are a rare but accepted condition. Wren befriends a woman at the pool who is pregnant with falcon twins and frequently visits a facility designed to transition people into their future animal lives. One of the most touching scenes of the book comes when Wren drives from Texas to California to finally release Lewis into the ocean, and after setting aside a misguided idea that she can live with him in the ocean using scuba gear, must resume her life alone. I would have preferred this scene to be at the end of the book, which would have allowed Habeck to spend more time on Wren and Lewis adapting to this catastrophic change. Instead, it takes place in the middle, which I felt detracted from what was otherwise a well-executed debut with a unique premise.
Rating: 8/10
3. Good Material - Dolly Alderton
Fiction, 336 pages
Struggling-comic Andy is blindsided when Jen breaks up with him. Together for four years, they had just returned home to London from a trip to Paris when she told him she didn’t want to be in a relationship anymore. At thirty-five, Andy is now single and fully adrift. After a short and ill-fated stay on a houseboat, he finds a room in the home of an elderly and conspiracy-minded man with a reverence for Julian Assange. When he’s not in his room or performing mediocre comedy sets, Andy spends his time trying to corral his married college friends to go out with him or eating dinner at the home of his best friend. He vacillates between being heartsick and confounded by Jen, until Alderton deftly pulls back the curtain at the end to give readers a view into Jen’s perspective, flipping the narrative on its head. What could have been a standard romance gone wrong becomes so much more in Alderton’s hands, who is such a funny writer that I occasionally laughed out loud.
My only gripe with the book is that it ended in 2020 right on the eve of Covid lockdowns at the same time that the characters each achieved a measure of personal peace. I don’t need an epilogue in every book, but in this one the timing felt like a deliberate choice and without a little more detail about what happened next, I can’t quite figure out why Alderton situated the timeline in the way that she did.
Rating: 8.5/10
2. Loved and Missed - Susie Boyt
Fiction, 198 pages
Ruth has always had a complicated relationship with her daughter, Eleanor, who left home as a teenager and has since lived with an addiction to drugs. Ruth, a school teacher and single mother, struggles to walk the line between helping her daughter and enabling her. Ultimately, however, Ruth’s ability to intervene is limited by what Eleanor wants, which does not seem to be much. In one of the opening scenes, Ruth meets Eleanor and Eleanor’s drug-addicted boyfriend on a bench by the side of a London road with a Christmas picnic. Ruth, desperate to feed her daughter and create some Christmas optimism is instead greeted with the news that Eleanor is pregnant. When Lily is born, Ruth watches helplessly as she is given small doses of morphine in the hospital because of in utero consumption of her mother’s drugs. Seven months later, Ruth takes matters into her own hands, giving Eleanor and her boyfriend four thousand pounds and an offer to watch Lily for a week. The week turns into two weeks and eventually Ruth becomes Lily’s primary caregiver as Eleanor flits in and out of their lives. Loved and Missed is a heartbreaking and intimate story of love and loss, disappointment and second chances. The deck of cards that Ruth and Lily are dealt is never fair, but the family that they and Ruth’s lifelong friends build together is somehow just enough in this slim, gorgeous novel.
Rating: 9/10
1. The Appeal - Janice Hallett
Fiction/Mystery, 416 pages
The Fairway Players are a tight-knight community theater group in the fictional English town of Lockwood. The group, which has put on shows for over thirty years, is run by Martin Haywood and his wife Helen, who are both revered by the group’s members. When Martin announces that their granddaughter Poppy has been diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer whose only hope for a cure comes from an expensive experimental American drug, the theater troupe quickly rallies to raise the money. But for those paying closer attention, including two new additions to the group, Poppy’s experimental cure and its extraordinary cost do not make sense. After a member of the group is found dead, two young lawyers are given the task of reviewing all the evidence in the case to try to work through the layers of what really happened.
The Appeal is the most clever and engrossing mystery novel that I have read in some time. By telling the story only through email and text correspondence, Hallett deftly controls the dolling out of the narrative, providing just enough for the reader to start to slot pieces together. However, right when the image starts to become clear, you remember that you are only reading the version of events that any given character wants their recipient to have, making every message, no matter how seemingly extraneous, crucial to solving the puzzle. I’m blown away by the fact that this is Hallett’s debut and am thrilled that she has since written two more books, each with unconventional formats of their own. I recommend that you read this book in a physical format because the details of the emails might not translate as well to audio.
Rating: 9/10
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Just requested Loved and Missed and Morisaki Bookshop from the library! I have seen these mentioned elsewhere, but your reviews were what pushed me to actually seek them out - thank you!
There are some really good ones here, thank you so much