We’ll be checking in once in awhile to talk about the books we’ve read. Please share where your bookmarks have been hiding in the comments!

Andrew: I’ve kicked my reading hours way up since retiring! Today I’m NOT going to talk about the best book I’ve read this year since M just started it and I think we’ll do a full post on it once she’s done. I’m also slowly reading a short story collection by my favorite author which I’m savoring and will share my thoughts once I finish.

The Cipher by Isabella Maldonado. A free Kindle book via Amazon Prime.

My Rating: ****

An FBI agent is attacked by some idiots while on a jog. The idiots live stream the attack which goes very poorly for them. Unfortunately the agent had been abducted as a teenager and escaped from a very evil man who recognized her and is now on the hunt. The FBI is also quickly on the chase for him too, making this a dangerous game of cat and… cat.

The titular ciphers were not very interesting and many plot points were easily predicted. However, this was a fast and tense read which unexpectedly had me cheering for the protagonists in the final pages. There are some very explicit scenes of violence and sexual assault which may upset some readers.

Happy Doomsday by David Sosnowski. A free Kindle book via Amazon Prime.

My rating: ***

The pandemic may have lessened my normal appreciation of apocalypse novels, but even taking that into consideration I don’t think this story stands out. Three teens from different high schools in the United States work to survive after everyone else around them mysteriously drops dead. If you want to read an AMAZING book with similar themes pick up Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers and enjoy (or watch the superb adaptation available on HBO). I reviewed that novel HERE.

One of the survivors is a boy with autism spectrum disorder. The one reason I’d recommend this novel is for his character. He has an interesting perspective, makes unusual but understandable decisions, and constantly surprises the reader. Unfortunately the other two teens aren’t as interesting.

Spoilers – I am going to touch on some of the plotlines while discussing this novel, if you are going to read it skip on to the next book review now. The other survivors are a boy who is on the cusp of becoming a suicide bomber the moment the apocalypse strikes and a girl who is suicidal due to an unwanted pregnancy (I didn’t mention above but the other boy is also contemplating suicide). These other characters’ story arcs are comparatively boring and by-the-numbers.

Furthering my frustrations are the lack of a supporting cast and lots of unrealistic inconsistencies about the world state after the incident. It’s a bummer but I can’t really recommend a book that irritated me more than 2/3 of the time. Instead I’ll hand you a copy of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time which is top-notch and tells a story involving a boy with ASD.

End Spoilers

The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Ebony Tower both by John Fowles. Paperback editions from a used book store.

My ratings: *** and ** respectively.

A few years ago I picked up this combination of paperbacks by John Fowles. I love a good romantic comedy (I finished Jingle Bell Hell last month, it was OK) and often enjoy post-modern fiction (for example the stellar A Naked Singularity). Why not try some boundary pushing romance?

Both novels were overwrought and overlong. In these novels (The Ebony Tower is a short story collection) most of the stories have a literary conceit, for example The French Lieutenant’s Woman is in the Victorian style but the narrator has the perspective of a modern historian. Fowles repeatedly breaks the fourth wall by doing things like inserting himself or his other stories directly into the plot. Invariably though the writing comes off as pompous and tries to constantly remind you that the novelist is very intelligent and knowledgable and a professor.

A good author uses references to further and enhance the story and I’ll go out of my way to research them, for example I’ll listen to a referenced song if I’m not familiar. Fowles’ references are often indirect and obscure, for example he leaves quotes untranslated from archaic French or offhandedly references a single line of a play but never names the play itself. Most egregiously, I often felt non-plussed after doing the legwork to understand the reference.

Finally and most infuriating is the fact that almost every woman in these stories is a convoluted set-piece who will be an eventual sexual conquest for a male character. If someone wants to get into a discussion about this I’d be glad to, otherwise I’ll stop wasting words on these not-very-good books (in my opinion).

Michelle: I had delusions of grandeur at the beginning of the pandemic and thought that I would use my extra at home time to read a ton of books. That didn’t happen. I also have a compulsion to finish every book that I start. This is crazy, I know, but maybe I am a literature optimist at heart. I don’t want to judge a book harshly and then fail to find the potential redemption and payoff in the last 50 or 100 pages. Sometimes this means I slog through books at a “molasses in winter” pace only to find that a given book just didn’t do it for me.

The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes by Suzanne Collins. A lovely hard cover book gifted to me by my husband (it did not accompany me on the trip to Portugal).

My rating: **

I started reading this book in August of 2020 and finished it in May 2022. I would usually read a couple of pages before bed. Most nights I wouldn’t get very far and would pass out like I had swallowed an Ambien or two. Some nights I would make a bit more progress, but 50 and 60 page nights were exceedingly rare.

My favorite thing about the book is its cover. The bird and snake pictured are a raised bronzy gold which is offset by a green and black background that looks like an homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It deserves to stand proudly with the other amazing Hunger Games covers.

When I started the book, I was mildly interested in following the origin story of Coriolanus Snow. Shortly after I started, I began to wonder why. For me, the narrative was an overblown backstory and there were very few characters I was invested in enough to actually care about. There were too many secondary characters and it was near impossible to keep them straight from one another. The heroine of the story is another version of Katniss, which is fine I guess, but her sweet songbird voice and humble origins (um, almost everyone in the Districts is in the same boat) weren’t that compelling for me.

The part of the story I was actually interested in – Coriolanus fighting back from destitution, embarrassment, and the establishment to seize the day, was actually a small portion of the overall book. The latter part of the story with Coriolanus at various military schools, studying under Dr. Gaul as a Gamemaker, and his journey to the presidency were glossed over and could have transformed this novel into a winner.

Both of Us: Andrew has loved Infinite Jest since he first read it in 1995-1996. He’s just started reading it aloud and we’ll be posting updates in these book posts. If you want to read along now would be a great time to start – we have read less than 30 pages so far.