April 2024 Reading Round-Up
The best and worst of my reading month
Welcome to the April 2024 Reading Round-Up. Each month I write about the books I’ve read and rank them from worst to best. As always, it’s been a busy month and law school finals are around the corner. I’ve loved taking advantage of the longer and warmer days, listening to audiobooks while I run in the morning and pretending like I have a backyard by bringing my studying to the dog park in the afternoon. Once finals are over I’m looking forward to starting my favorite reading projects of the year: my summer publishing preview and summer reading guide!
April 2024 Reading Stats
Number of Books Read: 7 (one non-fiction book is not reviewed here since it was for school)
Genre Breakdown: 4 fiction (57%) , 3 nonfiction (43%)
Average Rating: 7.78/10
If you like what you’re reading, please consider spreading the word about The Book House Blog by sharing this newsletter with anyone you know who might enjoy. And, if you haven’t already, subscribe for free to receive new posts.
6. Something in the Water - Catherine Steadman
Fiction/Mystery, 342 pages
Erin and Mark’s honeymoon in Bora Bora was shaping up to be close to perfect until the two find a mysterious bag while scuba diving that is filled with items they can’t unsee. Erin, a documentary film maker, has an insatiable curiosity to figure out where the items came from and to whom they belong. Mark, a recently unemployed investment banker, sees a financial opportunity in the bag’s contents. Both of their motivations will lead to danger and disruption that follows them home to London, forcing them to reevaluate their priorities and their relationship to one another.
I’d like to first provide a caveat and state that I am a fan of Catherine Steadman’s mysteries and that she is one of my favorite writers in this genre. However, Something in the Water, Steadman’s debut from five years ago, is not her best work. Perhaps in a more experienced writer’s hands the plot would have been shaped differently, but here it felt like there were too many things going on and very few of them were resolved adequately. This was particularly disappointing because I enjoyed the first two thirds of the book a lot, and was eager to see how everything would come together. When it didn’t, I was left feeling underwhelmed and disappointed. However, if you are looking for a mystery, I encourage you to check out Steadman’s other works. I recently read and loved Mr. Nobody, thought highly of The Family Game, have recommended The Disappearing Act in my Summer 2023 Reading Guide, and cited Steadman in my audiobook recommendations since she narrates all her books.
Rating: 7/10
5. Modern Greece: A Short History - C.M. Woodhouse
Non-Fiction/History, 357 pages
There are very few times when the word “modern” is used to describe a history that begins in the year 300. However, when it comes to Greece, a country with thousands of years of history and the archeology to show for it, beginning the lesson with the Roman Empire feels somewhat reasonable. A month ago, while in Greece, I realized that although I was getting a lot of information on the Ancient Greek’s, I knew very little about the country’s modern past. Although my definition of modern only includes the past 200 to 300 years at most, I was excited to find this reasonably sized book in an English language bookstore early into the trip. Because this book was published in the 1990s, the book never ventures into truly modern times, but it does provide a comprehensive portrait of the political landscape in each era of Greece’s “modern” history.
Woodhouse, a British historian, is very clearly a Philhellene (a lover of Greece and Greek culture), which lends itself to a less than critical view of some of the topics that he writes about. In Woodhouse’s telling, Turkey is always in the wrong, the larger European powers are under-appreciative of Greece’s contributions, and Greece wasn’t such a bad place even when under the rule of dictatorships. Although he covers almost a thousand years of history in under 400 pages, Woodhouse loves to discuss the intricacies of political and military maneuvers, which could be tedious. I would have preferred a bit more discussion of ordinary people, but that isn’t Woodhouse’s forte as a historian. Overall, the book provided a primer on a history I would not have otherwise gotten, but if you are looking to delve into Greek history, there are perhaps more current books to try before this one.
Rating: 7/10
4. Show Them a Good Time - Nicole Flattery
Fiction/Short Stories, 256 pages
Show Them a Good Time is the 2019 debut short-story collection from Irish author Nicole Flattery, who recently also published her first novel Nothing Special to high acclaim. Each story in the collection, which follows women in all states of disarray, is expertly crafted at a sentence level and never failed to leave me feeling slightly unsettled. In the first story, a former sex worker returns to her small town for a position working at a garage which appears to be designed as a rehabilitative and performative scheme. In the last story, “Not the End Yet,” a middle-aged woman goes on a series of mediocre dates with men she met on the internet as the world around them chips away and crumbles. In another, a woman from a small town moves to Paris with her new husband and stepson, who has severe behavioral issues in school owing to his mother’s recent suicide. Nicole Flattery’s writing is slightly off-kilter, (which I mean in the best way), forcing me to slow down to take in each page to fully grasp what was going on.
Rating: 8/10
3. The Memory Police - Yoko Ogawa
Fiction/Speculative, 274 pages
On an unnamed island in an unnamed dystopian reality, objects disappear at random. No explanation is given for these sudden disappearances. One day an object exists, the next it slowly fades from people’s memory until the object, if it still exists, is unrecognizable to the island’s populace. A minority of people, however, including the unnamed narrator’s deceased mother, are impervious to the mysterious disappearances and therefore pose a threat to the stability and order of the island. To counter this threat, the Memory Police hunt down those who remember until those people disappear. When the unnamed narrator, a young writer, discovers that her editor is one of the few who can remember, she comes up with a plan with a close friend to hide him underneath her floorboards. Haunted by the loss of her mother, who she was unable to protect, the narrator goes to great lengths to preserve this man’s life as everything slowly vanishes around them.
The Memory Police was originally published in Japanese over a decade ago and was only recently translated into English. The book, which is wholly devoid of any overt political references, is fully political in its depiction of a dystopian world at both the societal scale and individual lens. Despite the larger plot, the book is intensely character-driven, which is not a flaw — I love character-driven novels — but at times moved a bit slow for my taste.
Rating: 8/10
2. You Could Make This Place Beautiful - Maggie Smith
Memoir, 309 pages
You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a memoir of Maggie Smith’s marriage and its dissolution. Smith’s world shatters when she discovers that her husband has been cheating on her. The red flags of her previously decaying marriage suddenly become impossible to ignore and she must learn to live, for one of the first times in her life, as a single adult. At the same time that she is grappling with the administrative burdens that come with the end of a marriage, she is also figuring out how to parent alone, support her family as a poet, and come to terms with the structure of her new life. Smith is a poet most known for the poem Good Bones that went viral in 2016 (read it). The precision that she applies to her poems shines brightly in this unconventionally formatted memoir. Smith interweaves the vignettes of her life with interluded musings on womanhood, anger, grief, betrayal and more. There is intention in every word of every sentence, which has both a beautiful and sometimes melodramatic effect. I enjoyed listening to this book because Smith reads the story herself, which I think adds value, especially when she is reading her poems.
Rating: 8.5/10
1. The Guest - Emma Cline
Fiction, 304 pages
22-year-old Alex has nowhere to go after she is kicked out of the home of Simon, the older man she has been staying with in the Hamptons. Alex is behind on rent, despised by her roommates back in New York, and owes money to a man who we can only assume is dangerous. In light of all this plus a heavy dose of delusion, Alex resolves to stay in the Hamptons until Simon’s Labor Day party where she is convinced he will take her back if he is just given space. The novel unfolds over the course of these few days, as Alex flits from one temporary situation to another. In one scene, Alex inserts herself into a house share, pretending to be friends with one of the people who hasn’t yet arrived. After they realize no one actually knows her, Alex sneaks her way into a beach club pretending to be a child’s nanny and takes advantage of the child’s family’s limitless tab at the snack bar. She spends one night in the guest house of one of Simon’s friends who isn’t home, another night sleeping on the dunes. In each of these scenarios Alex effortlessly shape-shifts and morphs to meet the needs of those around her in this rarefied world of money and exclusivity.
The Guest is more than just some beach read with a party girl whose life has gone awry. Instead, Cline has written both a biting commentary on a slice of society as well as a fascinating character study of someone who recognizes early on that to survive, “only her presence was required, the general size and shape of a young woman.”
Rating: 9/10
If you like what I’ve written or want to see more reviews, recommendations, and round-ups about a wide range of novels, histories, and more, consider subscribing now by entering your email.
Want to see past months’ round ups? You can find those here. You can also check out my most recent posts below.
Great reviews, i'm interested in the Emma Cline book!
Good luck on your finals! I'm graduating in a couple of weeks. I'm glad you found a good place to study - remember it when the bar comes around!