American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins has a lot of buzz. It’s a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. It was the Amazon January 2020 Spotlight Pick. My local Barnes and Noble made it a monthly book club selection. I included it on our list of intriguing January-released books.
I read it. It turned out to be … not very good. How did this book get so much hype?
February is upon us and we have been scouring the new book releases to find those books we’re most excited about.
Check out this list of books we can’t wait to read in February, and let us know which ones you’re excited about (and which ones we may have missed)!
Antelopes have 10x vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. That means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.
As the new decade approached, many websites published lists of the “Best Books of the Decade.” The novel Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill appeared on a LOT of those lists. Curious, I read it to see what all the fuss was about. It is freaking great!
a paper star that has been unfolded and refolded
into a tiny unicorn but the unicorn remembers a time
when it was a star and an earlier time when it was part of
a book and sometimes the unicorn dreams of the time before
it was a book when it was a tree and the time even longer
before that when it was a different sort of star
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern is the 200th book I’ve read since I started keeping track of that sort of thing on Goodreads. The Starless Sea turned out to be a great thematic selection for that #200 spot because it is a celebration of reading and stories.
What is it about?
Some chapters are composed of myths and legends about love, about fate and time, about the moon and a man, with bees and keys and stars and owls and swords and rabbits and pirates and doorways and books. Other chapters follow a grad student who, after discovering a book in a library in which he is a character, goes on a bit of a quest to unlock the origins of that book, to decipher the meanings of the myths and legends contained within, and to find a doorway which he had earlier refused to enter.
Happy New Year!
Have you decided to read more books this year? Do you want to explore a variety of genres? Are you interested in what we are adding to our (already hopelessly behind) stack of stuff to read? This post is for you!
At the beginning of every month, we scour the interwebs for info about new book releases. We read a lot of sites for recommendations: Amazon, B&N, other bloggers in our WordPress Feed, NYT, Washington Post, AV Club, Ars Technica, Popular Mechanics, and many many more that google-fu or spam email might provide. We each make lists of the particularly interesting stuff that stands out to us, we talk about them, and we get really excited about the coming month! This year, we’ve decided to share those monthly lists with the public!
Here are the books on our radar screen for January 2020:
I don’t really know what to call this decade. The 2010s? The Teens? The Decade That Provided Solid Evidence We Are Living in the Dark Timeline? Despite not knowing its name, I will absolutely remember this decade for its eventfulness. I made a bunch of new friends. I attended too many funerals, but fortunately attended even more weddings. I started new hobbies and rediscovered old ones. Like reading books.
I was an avid reader as a kid and teen, but I didn’t read very much for a long time. I just didn’t prioritize it. Well, around 2016, searching for ways to spend my spare time in healthier ways, I read some of the books on this list, and I fell in love with reading again.
So here are, in order of publish date, my Top 15 books of the Decade. Maybe they’ll make you fall in love with reading too.
“God bless the man who first taught the world how to cure olives. He and the man who invented cheese are two unsung pillars of civilization.”
“They were probably women,” muttered Fatima, fanning her face with the sleeve of her robe. “If they were men, we would remember their names.”
The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson is a historical fantasy novel about a concubine, a gay Muslim “sorcerer” (for lack of a better word), and a jinn fleeing the Inquisition after the fall of Granada. It’s good!
It scared me that the only thing between this moment of calm and the biggest tragedy of my life was me choosing not to do it.
Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins appears to be an oral history of Daisy Jones and the Six, one of the greatest rock bands of the 1970s. Except it’s not. Daisy Jones and the Six never existed. None of the “interview subjects” ever existed. Daisy Jones and the Six is a completely fictional novel that uses the format of an oral history book to tell a classic tale of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It’s pretty dang great.
When I was a kid, Indiana Jones was my hero. He was smart. He fought Nazis. He had a whip!! I wanted to be just like him. While I never became an archaeologist (or learned how to use a whip), my love for Indiana Jones did provide me with a lifelong fascination with history. I love reading history books. I even minored in history in college. But somehow, I hadn’t learned much about the Roman Empire, even though it’s one of the most important institutions in the history of civilization. When I saw Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine by Barry Strauss sitting on the new releases shelf, I thought it would be a good opportunity to fix that gap in my knowledge.
I ended up being disappointed. Perhaps I had unrealistic expectations. After all, it was not really fair to expect 300-ish pages to provide me with all of the information I would want about a time period spanning 400-ish years.
It was a beautiful seventy-degree night in late August. At two a.m., a young woman wearing one red sneaker, one orange sneaker, jeans, and a big, baggy button-down shirt stood in front of the public computer terminal in the empty lobby of her temporary dorm. She squinted, studying the screen. “Choose your username,” it said.
Her first day at MIT —- and already a test.
Breaking and Entering: The Extraordinary Story of a Hacker Called “Alien” by Jeremy N. Smith is a strange book. It is the biography of a hacker, but it is not written in the style of a biography. Instead, it reads more like a thriller, with short, easy-to-read sentences and a lot of dialogue. The book does not spend time on broad cultural issues nor does it seek to place the narrative within a larger historical context. Aficionados of non-fiction are used to well-sourced exact quotes, and this book is certainly not in that mold. If you insist that non-fiction should not contain whole conversations (that were not recorded) from the 1980s or (speculation about?) what someone was thinking in the 1990s, this is not the book for you. If you think that all perspectives of a nonfiction narrative should be included, this isn’t the book for you. It holds on tight to the limited perspective of its central subject: the hacker “Alien.” I didn’t mind that.