October 2024 Reading Round-Up
The best and worst of my reading month
Welcome to the October 2024 Reading Round-Up. Each month I write about the books I’ve read and rank them from worst to best.
Before I get to what I read this month, I want to take this time to remind everyone to vote! Election day is this Tuesday, November 5. In some areas, early voting is already open. Below are some helpful voting resources:
If you need help figuring out where or how to vote, click HERE.
If you want to learn or confirm what’s going to be on the ballot in your state, county, and town, click HERE or HERE.
If you want to set a reminder to make sure you don’t forget to vote, click HERE.
If you want book recommendations that explain the stakes of this election to encourage you to get to the polls, click HERE.
Please vote. You get a sticker and also contribute to democracy, which only works if we all make our voices heard.
Now back to the regularly scheduled book reviews.
9. The Sequel - Jean Hanff Korelitz
Fiction/Mystery, 283 pages
Mysteries, regardless of the author, invoke a type of contract with the reader. The author lays the breadcrumbs for the outcome (i.e., who the murderer is or the reveal of the conspiracy) and the reader tries to figure out the twist before the author tells the audience. A good mystery will have some red herrings to keep readers guessing but when the conclusion is revealed, readers will be able to look back and connect the dots that were in front of them the whole time. A break from this structure, which defines the genre, either means the book isn’t a traditional mystery or signals shoddy construction. Unfortunately, The Sequel falls into the latter category.
The Sequel is the aptly titled follow-up to The Plot, published in 2021. The Plot tells the story of a writer who steals the plot of the next best-selling novel from a dead former student and ends dramatically with a spoiler crucial to the premise of The Sequel. The Plot fulfills its contract with the reader. The conclusion is unexpected but the clues were clearly there if I knew what to look for. The Sequel does nothing of the sort. The big reveal, meant to explain who has been blackmailing the protagonist throughout the novel, is someone who comes out of nowhere; introduced about halfway through the book as a throwaway character to explain an element of the plot. The fact that they ended up being the the center of the mystery speaks to subpar structuring. I recommend that if you are looking for a fast-paced, well-done mystery to read The Plot. Don’t bother with The Sequel.
Rating: 6/10
8. Butcher - Joyce Carol Oates
Historical Fiction, 352
In 1850s New Jersey, Dr. Silas Weir runs the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics with little oversight. A mediocre doctor with a chip on his shoulder for not being accepted into Harvard like his father and brother, Silas Weir is determined to make a name for himself in the underdeveloped field of “gyno-psychiatry,” the precursor to obstetrics and gynecology. He is able to do this through experimentation on the poor and forgotten women who have been admitted to the asylum, and is guided by assumptions that poor women do not feel gynecological pain. I understand that, in some ways, the point of the novel was to be graphic in order to highlight medical ineptitude and callousness towards women’s medical conditions. At a certain point, however, the book became a never-ending collection of these brutal medical procedures, which had the simultaneous effect of numbing my reaction and making me annoyed that nothing else was happening with the plot. The structure of the book is introduced to the reader as a multi-perspective approach to Weir’s life, but about a third of the way into the book everyone else’s perspective is abandoned and readers are left only with Weir’s unenjoyable memoir to explain what is going on.
Rating: 6/10
7. Five-Star Stranger - Kat Tang
Fiction, 228 pages
Rental Stranger is an app that allows people to rent a person to fulfill a certain function, typically short-term, in a person’s life. A Rental Stranger might be hired to play a member of a wedding party for a day, accompany a lonely person for a walk, or act as a boyfriend to bring to an office party. Ratings are critical, and for one top-rated man on the app — whose name we never learn, instead relying on his first-person perspective and the names he lets his clients give him — the app and his gigs are his entire life. The man has thrown himself into the work for nearly a decade, convinced that if he can make his clients happy he can atone for his perceived past sins. But, despite personal rules to always maintain a professional distance, pretending to be someone you are not can get ethically sticky, especially when children are involved. Overall, I was intrigued by the creativity of the book and was drawn to the easy reading. However, the quality of the writing was just okay and I felt like the exploration of the larger themes of the book were only dealt with at a surface level, which extended to an unsatisfying conclusion.
Rating: 7/10
6. Bright Objects - Ruby Todd
Historical Fiction, 330 pages
A small Australian town in the 1990s finds itself at the epicenter of a global phenomenon when a visiting astronomer discovers an approaching rare comet that will soon to be visible to the naked eye. The comet, named after its discovering astronomer Theo St. John, has a scrambling impact on peoples’ reason and leads to the creation of a small cult convinced the comet marks the end times. Sylvia Knight, still mourning the death of her husband who was killed in an unsolved hit-and-run, sees the incoming comet as a portent that her decision to kill herself is correct. But when she meets the visiting astronomer, her perspective begins to shift. I enjoyed the writing in the first 80% of the book, but thought the ending was too convenient to realistically conform with the conundrums presented on the preceding pages.
Rating: 7/10
5. The Examiner - Janice Hallett
Mystery, 465 pages
Janice Hallett is one of the smartest mystery authors writing today. All of her books are told through a variety of secondary sources that leave the reader guessing what and who should be trusted. Hallett sticks with this unconventional structure in The Examiner, which tells the story of a small British graduate arts program gone awry using texts, message boards, and coursework. I’m continually blown away by Hallett’s creativity and ability to use seemingly benign source material, like final essays, as legitimate, suspenseful clues in a mystery. The use of sources removed from traditional narration also ensures that the reader is always unsure of what to believe because it is never clear if Hallett has presented all of the relevant information or not (spoiler, she does not). I still think that Hallett’s best book to date is The Appeal, but the fact that I’ve read three of her four books in this year alone confirms that I’m game for whatever unique mystery she writes.
Rating: 8.5/10
4. The Country of the Blind - Andrew Leland
Non-Fiction/Memoir, 291 pages
Andrew Leland was diagnosed in college with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that slowly turns sighted people blind. When delivering the diagnosis, his doctor assured him that he wouldn’t become fully blind until he reached middle-age, and that by then, it was likely the medical community would have developed a cure. Now, as his eyesight deteriorates and he approaches his mid-40s, a cure is as far away as when he was formally diagnosed. Rather than despair, however, Leland uses this memoir to explore what he has experienced thus far and what awaits him in the world of the blind. Leland attends a convention run by the American Foundation for the Blind to explore the political dynamics of the community. He spends time in a school that teaches people how to navigate the world without sight. He explores the history of the treatment of the blind in American history and popular culture. He raises interesting philosophical questions about the relationship between sight and bias and the ways the seeming triviality of the sighted world permeates that of the blind. And, most touchingly, he writes about his relationship with his young son and his wife, all of whom are adapting to a changed reality. This extraordinary memoir was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for good reason. It achieves so much in just 291 pages: historical survey, cultural examination, and beautiful personal reflection.
Rating: 9/10
3. Intermezzo - Sally Rooney
Fiction, 448 pages
Intermezzo, Rooney’s fourth book, follows Peter and Ivan, two brothers with a ten-year gap between them. Externally, Peter is a successful Dublin lawyer and Ivan is a recent college graduate and aspiring chess grandmaster. However, like in any Rooney book, there is a lot more to the two brothers than what meets the eye, beginning with the different ways they are handling the recent death of their father. While Peter was a teenager when his parents divorced and left home shortly thereafter, Ivan spent most of his childhood with his dad and a (fabulous) dog named Alexi. They have grown apart in recent years, and their father’s death has not helped their relationship. In the early stages of their mourning the two seek solace in relationships: Peter with a girl ten years younger than him and his long-term partner who ended the romantic portion of their relationship after a debilitating accident, and Ivan with a woman ten years older than him.
I struggled with condensing my thoughts for this book because I simultaneously have great appreciation for Rooney’s sentence-level writing and an aversion for some of the plot decisions. There’s been a lot of criticism about the ways that Rooney writes Peter’s chapters in sentence fragments, but honestly, this didn’t really bother me. I appreciated that Rooney was using the staccato formatting to emphasize the instability of Peter’s mental health, which contrasts well with the balancing of his relationships with the younger woman, his long-term partner, and his brother. However, these women were only ever written about from Peter’s perspective, even though Rooney decides to give agency to the woman Ivan is dating. I also think that some elements were a bit too on the nose to be taken seriously, like the symmetrical age gaps, Ivan’s braces, or the neat resolution with its neat treatment of the female characters.
Despite these criticisms, I think this book really had great potential. There is no doubt that Rooney is a gifted writer with a keen eye for detail that other authors rarely possess. There is one scene, describing a seemingly mundane moment, in which Ivan and Margaret watch a video of Ivan’s father playing with the dog and Ivan realizes that his grief for his father is rooted in a realization that they will never again share simple, ordinary moments. This scene was written with such poignancy that I had to put the book down and give myself a break because it made me so emotional. I’m not sure how to balance the conflict between my disappointment and the capacity that this book had to move me, other than to say that you should read it too and let me know what you think.
Rating: 9/10
2. Started Early, Took My Dog - Kate Atkinson
Fiction, 371 pages
Started Early, Took My Dog, published in 2011, is the third book in Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie detective novel series. The book begins in Leeds, England, as Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police detective, makes a split-second decision to buy a young child off a sex-worker in broad daylight. Convinced that she has done the right thing, Tracy sets about covering up her tracks and making sure that no one comes back for the kid. Unbeknownst to her, the purchased child is the least of her concerns. A private detective named Jackson Brodie is in town to investigate the parentage of a woman who was adopted and brought to New Zealand thirty-five years ago under suspicious circumstances; circumstances that Tracy might have information about. A few miles away, at the same time that Tracy is buying a child, Jackson Brodie buys a dog off a man about to abuse it. These simultaneous actions set in motion a well-constructed, well-written, well-paced mystery that is just as much about the characters as it is about the underlying plot. Although the Jackson Brodie series came first, Kate Atkinson might be better known for her 2014 masterpiece Life After Life, proving that she is a supremely talented writer with the rare ability to write beautifully across genres.
Rating: 9/10
1. The Hypocrite - Jo Hamya
Fiction, 230 pages
A father, a famous author, enters a theater on the West End of London in August 2020 to see his daughter’s breakout play. He hasn’t read any reviews before he comes because he wants to be able to give her his thoughts honestly and without bias. As soon as the play begins, however, the father realizes that the character he sees onstage is him and that the show is an indictment of a vacation that the father and daughter took to an island off Sicily ten years earlier. At the same time that the father is watching the show in horror, his daughter, Sophia, is anxiously eating lunch in a restaurant nearby with her mother, the unnamed father’s ex-wife. Told over the course of one afternoon with intermittent flashbacks to the vacation, the entirety of Sophia’s critique of her father is laid bare until he can’t take it anymore, leading to one scene near the end of the book that involves brioche and a bathroom that I truly don’t think I can ever forget. As the afternoon unfolds, it becomes less clear what Sophia’s debasement is supposed to accomplish, leading to questions of agency, power, and which narrative should conquer. I really enjoyed this book and was blown away by the pacing, structure, and writing.
Rating: 9/10
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Your overview of Janice Hallett is spot on! The way she writes is so clever and it hurts my brain if I think too much about how she comes up with her stories.