October 2022 Reading Round-Up
The best and worst of my reading month
Welcome to the October 2022 Reading Round-Up. Each month I write about the books I've read and rank them from worst to best.
Was I too quick to say that my reading life hadn’t been impacted by law school? Maybe. It seems like the workload of October is significantly more than September, so I assume November will be even worse. I’m constantly on the go, which means that I have very little time for reading physical books and am instead doing most of my reading through audiobooks. But that’s ok! My limited time is causing me to be more discerning in what I pick up, and as a result, I really enjoyed most of the books that I read this month. I have one 10/10 book, three 9/10 reads, and two great 8.5s. I hope there is a book in here that you will love too. If you end up picking up anything that I’ve recommended, let me know! It makes my day when I hear someone liked a book they found here.
As a reminder, all of the books written about below are available on my October 2022 Reading Round-Up Bookshop page, or you can click on the title of the book itself to be routed to the shop. All of the books I’ve ever recommended, sorted by post, are also available on the general shop page. Happy reading!
9. Iron Annie - Luke Cassidy
Fiction, 290 pages
Here’s a niche fun fact about me: I love reading anything that’s about Ireland or set in Ireland, whether that’s Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe or The Colony by Audrey Magee. Iron Annie, set in Dundalk, Ireland, fits my niche, but falls short when it comes to plot. Aoife, the story’s protagonist, is a small time drug dealer connected to bigger players in the Dundalk underworld. When her girlfriend Annie runs into trouble with local dealers, Aoife takes an opportunity to get out of town and sell ten kilos of stolen cocaine in England. Up until now, Annie and Aoife have lived most of their lives within the confines of Dundalk and the surrounding area, never having the opportunity to see what’s beyond Ireland. When Annie decides she wants to stay in England and leave their old world behind, Aoife becomes paranoid and frantic, putting their operation at risk. This book had potential, but it completely lost me at the end. The conclusion was dramatic but confusing, and I felt like Cassidy tried to wrap up the story extremely quickly. On top of that, I couldn’t look past the lack of self-awareness that Aoife has about her profession. Working as a drug dealer and smuggler seems like a perfectly normal profession for her, and yet she is somehow shocked when her high-stakes work ends in violence.
Rating: 6/10
8. Woman of Light - Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Historical Fiction, 304 pages
1930s Denver resembles a city not too far removed from the era of the Wild West. At the height of the Great Depression, the city became a magnet for people of all backgrounds looking for work and opportunity, which was met by a fierce backlash from the city’s growing Klan population. At the center of this tension are Luz and her older brother Diego, who has recently been forced to flee Denver after he impregnates his white girlfriend. Just shy of 18, Luz finds a job as a secretary in a Greek lawyer’s office who has made a name for himself representing people who have been abused by the police and the Klan. Interspersed throughout this story are chapters dating back to the late 19th century featuring three generations of Luz’s ancestors. Readers experience the trauma that runs deep in Luz’s Native American and Mexican family as their rights and land are taken from them with the westward expansion of white settlers. I picked this book up after seeing it recommended by Ann Patchett. A western multi-generational historical saga is fairly different from the books that I typically read, and I enjoyed getting to see what life was like in Denver and the Lost Territory of Colorado in an era not too long ago. I did not feel that the book was purely literary fiction even though it was advertised as such, especially when equating Luz’s relationship challenges with the actual hardships and traumas experienced by her ancestors.
Rating: 7.5/10
Thank you to One World for the advance reader copy of this book! This book was published in June 2022.
7. The Winners - Fredrik Backman
Fiction, 688 pages
The Winners is the third and final book in the Beartown series, taking place two and a half years after Maya Andersson was raped by the town’s star hockey player. The central characters of that story have moved away in the intervening years - Maya to go to college, Amat to try out for the NHL, Benji to travel the world - but they all return home to attend the local pub owner and town matriarch’s funeral. Their return comes amidst heightened tensions between Beartown and their rival Hed, which is experiencing a financial downturn and hockey slump while Beartown is having an unexpected boon. Unfortunately for Beartown, a local journalist has begun to investigate a pattern of corruption and graft between local political and business leaders and the owners of the hockey club. For two towns driven solely by the sport, any disruption to the status quo can lead to bigger chaos in their citizen’s lives.
As someone who loved Beartown - I gave it a 10/10 - and really enjoyed Us Against You (9/10), I was extremely excited for the third and final book in the series. While I enjoyed it a lot, I do think that it was the worst book in the series and not worth reading unless you also liked its predecessors. For one thing, this is a beast of a book in terms of length. It could probably have been half the length and still gotten the same point across. Secondly, the writing in this book is somewhat overdone. Every page drops in some pearl of wisdom about people or life or hardship that is not necessary for the advancement of the story or the characters. It’s the same style that was used in the previous two books, but it can become grating over the course of 688 pages. I will say, however, that despite my critiques I was never bored by the story. It wasn’t a page turner, but I was invested in what was going to happen to each of the many characters until the very end, which speaks to Backman’s storytelling capabilities and ability to structure a novel.
Rating: 8/10
6. Girls They Write Songs About - Carlene Bauer
Fiction, 308 pages
Girls They Write Songs About is a character-driven novel about two friends, Charlotte and Rose. The majority of the first half of the book takes place in the 1990s, when the girls are in their early and mid-twenties and writing for a music magazine in New York. Their lives are carefree in a traditional sense - they are not tied to larger concerns of adulthood - but both harbor hopes to be artists capable of leaving a lasting imprint on the world. Although it is a story of friendship, Charlotte is the sole narrator, and so readers get only one side when conflict or differences arise. As the pair gets older their lives diverge in meaningful ways - marriage, children, relationships, money - and they remain close for as long as they can. However, I think Bauer tried to cover too much time, which ultimately made her most well-written section - the first half detailing their young adulthoods - less powerful when it became a part rather than the whole. Further, because the first half of the story is so focused on this friendship, the sudden near-sole focus on Charlotte’s life and mistakes in the second half feels discordant with the larger point of the book. Despite this, this is a beautifully written story and I really did enjoy most of the book. It is certainly character and not plot driven, with long paragraphs of musing that work lyrically under Bauer’s pen.
Rating: 8.5/10
5. Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro
Fiction, 307 pages
Klara sits on the shelf of an Artificial Friend (AF) store observing the people who walk by and waiting for a child to choose her to be their companion. One day, a pre-teen girl named Josie enters the store with her mother. Although Klara is not the newest AF model, Josie is immediately drawn to her for her above-average observational qualities and insightfulness. Klara, programmed to emulate friendship, quickly becomes attached to Josie, who is suffering from a mysterious illness that leaves her weak and in bed for long stretches of time. Underneath the surface of their friendship, however, Klara begins to notice inconsistencies in the world around her – the mother’s obsession with Klara’s ability to emulate Josie perfectly, whispers of another child who died of the same illness, and growing discontent in a world moving away from human talent and towards automation.
This book was released in early 2021 with much fanfare; Kazuo Ishiguro is a Pulitzer Prize winner known for hits that all center around similar themes of human empathy, artificial intelligence, and what it means to belong in a changing mechanical world. I bought a copy of the book when it came out, but did not get around to reading it until I joined a law school reading group on artificial intelligence. I’m so glad that I finally had an excuse to read this book. It is slightly out of my wheelhouse – I am not normally drawn to books with a sci-fi or dystopian edge – but I think that Ishiguro approaches this topic perfectly through literary fiction. The world that he has built feels very similar to our own with slight modifications, forcing readers to consider our society and its choices through a different lens.
Rating: 8.5/10
4. Assembly - Natasha Brown
Fiction, 102 pages
The unnamed narrator of Assembly has achieved every benchmark of success as dictated by “polite” British society. She is the Black daughter of immigrants, attended a prestigious university, climbs successfully through the ranks of a big-name bank, and is dating a rich white aristocrat. The striving, however, has started to make its mark in grating ways. At the bank, she is the face of their diversity campaign and constantly overhears murmurs that her success is only because of her race. In her relationship, she often feels that she is a token for her boyfriend who envisions a future political career where he can use her as a prop to promote his tolerance and liberal values. While she has always strived to be the best and to achieve what others expect of a person who looks like her, she feels unseen and degraded at all times. Her body is decaying - a cancer diagnosis early in the book perversely appears to be her only chance at agency over her own body - and as a result, her mind starts to rebel from its ascendancy of the pristine ladder right around the time that she is headed to her boyfriend’s family home for his parents’ anniversary celebration.
Assembly is an extremely short book. Indeed, even with my busy schedule, I was able to read it in one sitting. I highly recommend picking it up. The writing is crisp and inventive, jumping through time to provide context for the seminal scenes of her arrival at the manor house. Brown packs in so much content into so few pages, and I am still thinking about the narrator and her life.
Rating: 9/10
3. Mercury Pictures Presents - Anthony Marra
Historical Fiction, 433 pages
The year is 1941, and America is about to join World War II. In Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures, a financially troubled movie producing studio, is under fire from Congress for promoting anti-American content. The studio employs a diverse cast of characters: two Jewish immigrant brothers who run the company, Maria, an Italian emigré assistant producer with more talent than a sexist world will utilize, and a Chinese-American actor typecast as the Japanese villain for all his roles. Each of these people have come to the movie industry for different reasons and carry their own baggage. For Maria, whose interconnected storylines take up the most space in this large novel, her life is overshadowed by worry about her father who has been imprisoned by the Fascists in Italy for over five years. When a stranger arrives in Los Angeles with news about her father, Maria must confront her past and her role in his arrest.
This is a mammoth book - not necessarily in page count, although it is relatively long - but because of the scope of topics covered. The story stretches from 1930s Italy, to 1940s Los Angeles, to propaganda movie sets constructed to look like German towns in the desert. Marra expertly emphasizes the lives of a dozen different characters, making them all seem whole and human. He is an extremely talented writer who has written a beautiful story about a period of time in America’s history and the complicated people who existed within it.
Rating: 9/10
2. Bad City - Paul Pringle
Non-Fiction/Investigative Journalism, 270 pages
Paul Pringle is an investigative journalist for the Los Angeles Times. This book is an expansion of his Pulitzer Prize winning story series about the incredible corruption in leadership at the University of Southern California. In April 2016, Pringle received a tip about a drug overdose of a young woman in a fancy downtown hotel. Present at the scene was Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the head of the USC medical school, who was the girl’s drug supplier and enabler. A few weeks after the overdose, Puliafito quietly stepped down, and USC moved on like nothing had ever happened. But Puliafito continued his relationship with the girl, supplying her and her friends drugs while maintaining his medical license. Pringle, intent on getting to the bottom of the story, could never have imagined just how far the cover up would go, stretching from the president’s office of USC to the city of Pasadena and LA County. The corruption even extended into his own newsroom, where leadership in bed with USC attempted to block the publication of his story for over a year, violating every imaginable code of journalism ethics. My friends know that I’m a massive fan of heroic journalism stories, and this book is exactly that. Like many others, I’d heard about the Operation Varsity Blues scandal at USC, but was shocked to hear about the depths of corruption and malfeasance present at USC and throughout the LA elite.
Rating: 9/10
1. The Boys - Katie Hafner
Fiction, 256 pages
Ethan is a man with quirks. His lonely childhood carried forward into adulthood and as a result, he is not one to take risks. Extremely smart and musically gifted, Ethan would be content to stay in his lane - working and going home to a life comfortable for him. His wife Barb is the antidote to his personality, pushing him to travel on a Backroads style bike trip (providing very funny scenes) for their anniversary, to adopt a cat, and to consider having children. Fertility issues lead them to consider adoption, and one day Barb comes home with two Russian children to foster. Previously worried about his ability to keep children alive, Ethan becomes obsessed with the twins, crafting their lives within an immaculate bubble. When the pandemic hits (yes, this is in part a pandemic book), Ethan’s behavior towards the boys becomes compulsive, driving Barb out of his life. As the world returns to a closer approximation of normal, Ethan, newly single, decides to take the boys on the same biking trip that he and Barb enjoyed a few years earlier. Hilarity and one of the weirdest and most enjoyable plot twists that I have read in recent years ensues.
This book is so wonderfully creative. It is very rare that I am utterly surprised by a twist in a book’s plot and, if I am, that I am also delighted by it. I guarantee you that you will not see the twist coming - it comes from so far out of left field and is completely bizarre - but somehow Hafner makes it work perfectly. Hafner’s writing is also perfect for this book and expertly crafted. It is a character study of one man’s idiosyncrasies as well as a story about family, travel, and isolation. I am in awe of her ability to dupe the reader the way she does and would frankly consider re-reading the book to see if I should have been able to see the surprise coming. Please pick this book up. You will not be disappointed.
Rating: 10/10
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Want to see last month’s round up? You can find that here.
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