May 2024 Reading Round-Up
The best and worst of my reading month
Welcome to the May 2024 Reading Round-Up. Each month I write about the books I’ve read and rank them from worst to best.
Summer reading season has begun! May marked the end of the semester, a one-week roadtrip from Denver to Albuquerque, and the start of summer work. Long days and lots of sunlight make any reading project feel manageable, and I’m excited to see what summer has in store.
In case you missed it, I released my Summer 2024 Publishing Preview a few weeks ago and it is full of the books I have on my reading radar this summer.
7. The Happy Couple - Naoise Dolan
Fiction, 272 pages
For Luke and Celine, a young couple in Dublin, getting engaged seems like the proper next step. It’s clear from the start of the book, however, that marriage might not be in the cards for the two. In one of the first scenes of the book, Luke disappears from the couple’s engagement party and lies to Celine about having gone home. As the march towards the wedding continues, Celine discovers the lie, Luke cheats on Celine secretly, and close friends declare their unyielding love for the groom. Despite these obvious, early red flags, the entirety of The Happy Couple consists of many characters weighing in on the stability of a relationship that any dispassionate observer could easily say shouldn’t end in marriage. I had no qualms with the sentence-level writing of the book, but I thought there was way too much going on for Dolan to manage adequately. Even the most interesting portion of the story - why did Luke leave his engagement party and where did he go - was sacrificed to less interesting plot points down the road.
Rating: 6/10
6. How to End a Love Story - Yulin Kuang
Fiction, 366 pages
Helen and Grant’s lives were inextricably linked by a tragic event in high school. As a result, the two haven’t spoken in more than a decade. When they find themselves working on the same screenwriting team that is adapting Helen’s best-selling young adult series into a TV show, the two are thrust headfirst back in time to the horrific event that has defined the course of their lives. Not on speaking terms at first, the two slowly forge a friendship that turns into something romantic. As their feelings for each other grow, Helen must reconcile the tension between her desire to be with Grant and the adverse consequences it will have on her still grieving family. This book deals with complicated issues like suicide, mental health, and the experience of being a first generation American. Thus, while How to End a Love Story follows the traditional romance plot arc and contains steamy scenes associated with the genre, it also is much more thematically complicated than some of its counterparts.
Rating: 8/10
5. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store - James McBride
Historical Fiction, 385 pages
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store begins with the discovery of a skeleton at the bottom of a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Objects found on or near the skeleton indicate that the person was Jewish, but one of the only remaining Jewish residents in Pottstown does not know the body’s identity. To discover who this person might be, readers are taken back over forty years to the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, one of the last neighborhoods where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side. McBride explores the deep interiority of his characters’ lives while also highlighting the connecting strands between them in a town with a heavy Klan presence. James McBride, the winner of the 2013 National Book Award, has created one of the more unique historical novels that I have read in some time. It is not centered around one large historical moment, but rather focuses on the nuanced lives of one slice of the world at one point in time.
Rating: 8/10
4. The Lager Queen of Minnesota - J. Ryan Stradal
Fiction, 349 pages
Helen and Edith are as different as sisters can be. Edith gets married at 18, starts her family, and works hard as a baker for a nursing home. Helen, on the other hand, becomes the first in her family to go to college where she is intent to get her degree in chemistry so that she can become a lager brewer. Looking for money to fund her brewery, Helen convinces her father to bequeath his entire farm to her, cheating Edith out of her inheritance. The two don’t speak for nearly half a century, which means that Helen is largely unaware when Edith’s granddaughter Diana gets into the IPA brewing industry as a means of survival. J. Ryan Stradal is very good at writing niche midwestern family sagas and I found this one to be no different, even if I think he sometimes uses dramatic plot points to conveniently push the story along. This book was also an ideal listening experience; it was fast-paced, fun, and the perfect accompaniment for my morning runs.
Rating: 8/10
3. Some People Need Killing - Patricia Evangelista
Non-Fiction, 339 pages
Patricia Evangelista is a Filipina journalist who writes about extrajudicial killings and street violence. This book, a brave piece of journalism to publish in a country known to retaliate against journalists, tells the story of a six-year long drug war that resulted in the deaths of thousands of people and has been labeled a crime against humanity by Human Rights Watch. At the behest and with the encouragement of President Rodrigo Duterte, who was elected in 2016, police officers and vigilantes tracked down and slaughtered thousands of former and current addicts in their homes and on the streets. As a night reporter, Evangelista traveled to many of the crime scenes, documenting the stories of the victims, their families, and attempting to reconcile the discrepancies between the official narrative and what really happened.
Some People Need Killing was one of the top ten books of 2023 according to The New York Times, and I can see why the book made the list. Evangelista has a talent for telling the story of a country through the lens of Duterte’s supporters as well as the ordinary people whose lives were deemed unworthy by their government. The book reminded me in many ways of I Love Russia; two young and intrepid reporters who are motivated by a love of their countries to report on its wrongs and attempt to make it a better place.
Rating: 8.5/10
2. Long Island Compromise - Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Fiction, 464 pages
Long Island Compromise begins with the kidnapping of Carl Fletcher from the driveway of his palatial Long Island home as he’s getting ready to head to work at his polystyrene factory. He is held hostage for a week, unfindable by the FBI, until his wife Ruth comes up with a $250,000 ransom payment, dropped on a luggage turnstile at JFK. Although Carl returns to his previous life and his wife and mother attempt desperately to make things seem and feel normal, the family is never able to get over the trauma of that week.
The kidnapping, which took place in 1980, is only the first chapter of the book; the rest takes place in the present and is told through the lens of Carl’s three struggling adult children. While they have been blessed with an extraordinary amount of money from their father’s factory that pads their lifestyles, each of them is utterly dysfunctional in nearly everything they attempt. When they discover that the factory has been purchased by a hedge fund that sees no financial future in domestic styrofoam production, they are each forced to face the reality of a dwindling fortune while also salvaging their crumbling personal lives.
The description of this book reads like an utter downer, and that’s not totally untrue. Each character is living a comedy of errors, hitting rock bottom right as you think there is no farther for them to fall. However, in the hands of Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of Fleishman is in Trouble and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, the tragedy becomes absurdity which translates into comedy. The story is meant to be a type of satire on the evolution of American Jewish life and assimilation. It is also a quasi-moralistic fable about wealth and struggle, which wasn’t always subtle. My biggest problem with the book was that the central trauma that inspires everyone’s problems - the kidnapping - is never fully explained or resolved. Brodesser-Akner reveals who the true kidnapper was at the end, and it is shocking, but the motivations and minutiae are either ignored or explained away in a few sentences. Given that the book is comprised of approximately four large chapters, each told from the perspective of a different member of the family, it would have been fully justified to dedicate an additional chapter to the kidnapper, which I think would have adequately addressed the larger ethical themes that Brodesser-Akner is attempting to explore. Overall, however, Long Island Compromise was an enjoyable reading experience and I look forward to seeing people’s reactions when it is released on July 9.
Rating: 8.5/10
1. Visitation - Jenny Erpenbeck
Historical Fiction, 192 pages
Visitation is the story of one plot of land along a Brandenburg lake outside of Berlin over the course of a century. Erpenbeck expertly weaves together the lives of twelve people who inhabited the land from the late 19th century until the collapse of East Germany, beginning with the town’s mayor in the late 1800s. Lacking any sons, the mayor chose to sell the land to an architect and a Jewish family at the turn of the century. The architect developed a beautiful home but fled during the Soviet invasion at the end of the Second World War. The Jewish family was forced to flee to South Africa in the late 1930s, and the home was eventually placed under the control of the East German government. The land is leased by the government and parceled until unification, when the architect’s family attempts to reclaim what they saw as lost. I have no idea how Erpenbeck packed so much history, detail, and individual mundanity into so few pages, but if I have learned anything since picking up The End of Days back in January, it is that Erpenbeck is a once in a generation writer. Erpenbeck is so talented that she is frequently floated as a potential future winner of the Nobel Prize for fiction and was the 2024 recipient of the International Booker Prize.
Rating: 9/10
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Want to see past months’ round ups? You can find those here. You can also check out my most recent posts below.
I read ‘Some People Need Killing’ in May too!!! Equally enjoyed it & makes me more interested to read ‘I Love Russia’