That moment when your book calls you out 😳

#TitlesandTunes #Blue
Happy publication day to Jesmyn Ward for her latest! I'm always about 5 years behind, so I just finished SUS. I'd heard it described as a road novel, and it technically is, but didn't feel like one. The journey matters less than the fact that the family must share tight quarters when they'd previously been drifting apart. I spent the whole novel concerned for them all: the entire novel is located on the brink of disaster.

My local bookshop hosted this reading last night from Mona Awad and Laura Sims: Sims read from 'How Can I Help You' which I still need to read and Awad from her latest Rouge, which I only found out about last week after finishing her previous novel. Apparently, the two authors have been friends since 2018, which came through as they posed questions to each other about their work. A fun night of reflections on serial killers and dark fairy tales 😈

Nothing like a good book and a glass of the golden remedy to ease your mind, am I right? If you've read this, you'll know this last phrase is repeated over and over. After a while, I was repeating it to my cats ('That's some yummy food, am I right?'). It's one of many careless phrases uttered by the happy that serve to irritate the miserable in Awad's theater of the absurd. A perfect dark comic meditation on the gulf between sickness and wellness.

#TitlesAndTunes #Blues
From the synopsis, SUS sounds like a road novel that is steeped in loss and haunted characters (maybe literally?). The perfect pairing with this Lurrie Bell album I picked up at a record shop recently. I'd never heard of Bell before, but his guitar riffs are a joy, the kind of blues that take you on a journey, which is perfect for an emotionally charged road novel. And it certainly channels its own ghosts of blues legends.

What if you turned your dreams into short stories? Such a simple concept, but one I hadn't seen until I picked up Naguib Mahfouz's The Dreams. The content varies a great deal, and even though this one could be considered a nightmare, it made me laugh out loud just because of how ridiculous yet terrifying it became in just a few sentences 😨😲😆

#TitlesandTunes #TheWorldismyOyster
My favorite almost-pick of the year? Fitzgerald's inventive writing saves this story of a Princeton student 'finding himself' from being boring. But it also seems meandering and uneven - not like Gatsby at all in that respect. For all the strangeness of the lost social norms of the period, it's crazy to me how similar the mc's character is to a contemporary college intellectual dude. @Cinfhen @BarbaraBB

...or just open your eyes and look at the picture? 🙈

Joking aside about People's attempt at click-bait, I do like how many celebrity book clubs there are now. Seems like a great way to attract new readers. All that said, I've never actually participated in a celebrity book club - does anyone have a favorite they would recommend? I'm curious what the discussions are like.

#DramaQueen #Titlesandtunes
What a great opportunity for me to read my most anticipated selection from my shelf (I'm weirdly proud I lasted a year for it to 'wait its turn', even though that makes no sense 🤷🏻). After Bunny, I can only assume this story of a director staging All's Well That Ends Well will have some bizarre complications. I think it's 'the drama I've been craving', as Sleater Kinney sing on one of my all-time favorite albums.

Some books you read and know exactly what you think of them. Others you read, puzzle, struggle over, and consider bailing on and off for four months, with final ratings of 0-5 all seeming equally plausible. That was Art and Lies for me. I went with a cautious '4 stars' because it has undeniably beautiful sentences and stretches of ecstatic musings. But it's tough going - like Virginia Woolf, not sure I even know what's going on at times, tough 👇

#TitlesandTunes #SexDrugsandRockandRoll
A Faustian tale that isn't really about Faust so much as his bandmate who has to live with the aftermath of his bargain. It's not really about the tragedy of giving into temptation so much as the vacuum of being 'soulless'. When heavy metal becomes nu metal and gets taken over by corporate overlords, it's not mortal sin, just sad. Thankfully this novel has plenty of soul: it's darkly funny and fast-paced 👇

#Titlesandtunes #TheWorldIsMyOyster
I've never read anything else by Fitzgerald except the one we all read. While that novel is about someone looking back on his youth, his debut is about a young scholar who's looking ahead to his future with great zeal as he attends Princeton. Nas must have had a similar perspective when he made his debut album Illmatic, and I thought The World Is Yours is perfect for the theme. @Cinfhen @BarbaraBB

I'm not usually a fan of fantasy novels, and I don't usually cry from books, but this one broke both of those trends. I enjoy fantasy landscapes and themes, but I'm a poor visualizer of action sequences and prefer simpler world building. So Ishiguro's brand of fantasy that brings imagery to life through dialogue is perfect for me. The action is short and memorable, much of it being described through one character relaying a tale to another 👇

This novel opens with Vesta, an elderly widow, finding this note in the woods behind the remote lakeside cottage she recently moved into with her dog Charlie. If you think that this sounds like an intriguing opening to a mystery, you should know from the start that this is not that novel. Because it is initially disappointing to find this isn't the mystery you think you're getting. But the odd character study that emerges is truly unique 👇

#TitlesandTunes #GuiltyPleasure
Way late with this review, but I really enjoyed this fast-paced sci-fi thriller. It seems ready-made for a blockbuster film treatment and has some interesting narrative inversions. My least favorite part was the particular phenomenon: it reminded me of trying to explain the neurological reasons why Harry Potter spells work. But it also doesn't over-explain, which helps it deliver on the action and suspense.

#TitlesandTunes #SexDrugsandRocknroll
Quite behind on this past month's read, so just starting it now, but when does that ever affect choosing a next read?
I decided to go with a double-Hendrix for my pick this month. Grady has long been on my list of authors to try - I've read Paperbacks from Hell but never any of his novels. Message to Love is from Jimi's live album Band of Gypsys, one of my favorites from college. It's chock full of solos 🎸

I know I've heard of largehearted boy before (possibly on Litsy?), but I totally forgot its main purpose of combining reading and music, perfect for #TitlesandTunes It's also been around since 2002 so I'm a bit late to the party! One of the features, "book notes" has authors creating a playlist inspired by a recent release of theirs, so I've been listening to the last few of those. My favorite is from Megan Fernandes' poetry collection (tagged).

It's been nearly a decade since I last read a McCarthy novel, but he made an impression on me - my Litsy handle is taken from Billy Parham who appears in The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, two of my favorite novels. I enjoyed those novels even more than Blood Meridian (not pictured), which has one of the most frightening literary villains I've witnessed. But The Border Trilogy focuses on two heroes, which is tougher to pull off in some ways 👇

#GuiltyPleasure #TitlesandTunes
It seems right to start this post with a confession: I don't have guilty pleasure reads. I read mostly literary fiction and have noticed what people call guilty pleasures are mostly romance or thrillers. My explanation for that is bad versions of those genres can still be fun, but exactly 0 people want a bad LF novel. So I found one thriller on my shelf - actually well-reviewed but check out the tagline 🦴🤐

Why is LoTF a great novel? Many will point to the symbolic aspects - how the tensions that emerge from the society of the boys mirror the wider world's lusts for power and violence. But for me, that's all icing, and the novel's true appeal is in how it handles the drama among its three leads. Their boyhood felt authentic to me - as they attempt leadership, they also battle fear and indecisiveness, and the suspense builds to unnerving levels.

#IslandVibe #Titlesandtunes
I was never assigned Lord of the Flies in school, but it's been a long-time resident on my shelf and one I'd been interested in trying. So this month's prompt is a great excuse, and I'm really enjoying it so far. I just finished the scene where they're feasting on pig meat, so I thought Jimmy Buffett's 'Cheeseburger in Paradise' might be a fitting song pairing (even if a hotdog theme would be even closer 🌭 🏝).

What a Shakespearean opening: in 19th century Italy on the cusp of a regime change, a Sicilian nobleman with fading influence sides with his favored nephew over his loyalist son. And the tragic action that unfolds? His nephew gets married and...that's about it. I'm being a little unfair, but the writing, which offers imaginative descriptions and an endearing, satirical humor also isn't quite interesting enough to compensate for the lack of a plot.

A favorite author of mine, Martin Amis, passed away yesterday. I think he wrote the best novels with unlikable protagonists. It's kind of a lost art today, but what's great about Amis' novels is they're neither tales of condemnation nor winking approval of bad behavior. And definitely not redemption. But you get great insights into the characters, as unsavory as they may be, and all with a biting dark humor narrating their actions.

The title refers to the author's grandfather who was a curandero, a type of healer in the Colombian mountainside town where he lived. This memoir details that family history and the incredible tales of her grandfather's and mother's apparent supernatural abilities and their connection to Colombian culture. Those stories seap into present-day and affect the author's life in surprising ways. I'm confident this one will stay with me for a long time.

Just read this passage while on the train headed to work 😆

In just 87 pages, we glimpse a world inside a single house where 'the naked ones', a society of hermaphroditic individuals, live completely cut off from the larger world outside, their only contacts being 'the clothed ones' who visit, have parties, and torment the naked ones for their own amusement. Weird? Yes. But it's a great example of how fantasy can provide insights into the nature of oppression without relying on some simplistic allegory.

Gioconda Belli was recently stripped of her Nicaraguan citizenship along with 93 others. I don't think it was president Ortega's intention to remind me that this novel of hers was on my TBR, but it did, and now hopefully you can add it to yours and we can increase the readership of authors who resist their fascist governments. The novel is about Adam and Eve: Belli has fun showing us what a world without history looks like from their vantage.

Absorbing novel that looks at five stories of relatives from the same family grappling with a curse that manifests in the form of mental illness. The first is from 1750 and steeped in Ugandan folklore, but the other four set in modern times show different ways the characters interpret their shared history as influencing their present challenges. Makumbi is skilled in examining how personal, political, and family histories speak to each other.

I never heard of this novella or author, but when I picked it up in the bookstore, these opening sentences hooked me. I bought it without knowing anything else about it and am enjoying the strange and creepy interior fantasy world. I will have to check out more by Evelio Roselio and New Directions publishing. Also thinking I should choose more books based on reading the first page 🤔

That DKK is set in the 1960s isn't the only source of its nostalgia. Its style is also more like an older novel: colorful characters, dialogue with rhythm, and a plot that involves criminals dueling over territory, cops just trying to keep up, hidden treasure, and even some romance. But none of that concerns the novel's title character, who prefers to be called Sportcoat even though his alcoholic nickname dominates his image in the neighborhood 👇

#IndependentWomen
I didn't get to read the book this time, but how could I not pop in to join in the playlist-making fun?
This one has many favorite artists of mine, but it's mostly songs I've liked on Spotify in the past year. So there's a mix of recent releases and old favorites. Looking forward to checking out everyone's lists!
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2O8We4i0ILmukrRTWSsGF0?si=jjKKmxEjR6Ofv6unBDRF...

Question for you all: teeth sucking... have you witnessed it? I see it in books all the time and understand it's an expression of anger, but have never seen it used that way in real life. I've only seen it when someone reacts to hearing about a painful injury. I got a partial answer from Google: a blog post says it is an expression of annoyance in West Africa (this novel takes place in East Africa so probably close enough). But......👇

Late #AuldLangSpine review here: this is an incredible story of Harris' struggle to advocate for her son's medical health and educational rights due to a mysterious undiagnosable medical condition. Harris shares intriguing reflections on her experiences: how she responds given her own anxiety issues, why her son's condition also contributes to what makes him special, and other responses to maddening ambiguity. Emotional, yet sharply written.

#AuldLangSpine
Thanks @ncsufoxes for your list this month: I finished three and am still working on This Boy We Made but enjoying it very much. I think I'm going to keep referring back to the list this year and pick up a couple more. Nice chatting with you as well!

@monalyisha thanks for organizing this event! I really like this method of getting recommendations. Looking forward to participating again in the future 😀

#AuldLangSpine @ncsufoxes @monalyisha
The Devil has entered the town of Breathed, Ohio in the form of a 13-year-old boy. Or wait...has he? This tale of the events of a 1984 summer is relayed by the now elderly protagonist as if it were a fairy tale, full of ambiguity. At its core, it's a story of a child discovering the world to be less magical than he thought, full of hate and death. Beautiful language and imagery keep it from being depressing.

#AuldLangSpine @ncsufoxes @monalyisha
I went in knowing very little about deaf society and culture, and this story that follows two deaf students and the hearing headmistress of their private school was a great primer on the societal intolerances deaf people face, especially with the use of ASL. At the same time, I think the author spent a little too much time educating newbies like me - I learned a lot but also wanted more from the characters.

#AuldLangSpine #MLKday
At first I assumed (wrongly) that Clint Smith was a journalist: as he travels to different sites with a link to slavery in the U.S., he asks questions of other visitors and tour guides to hear their views on what the sites (including plantations, museums, a prison, graveyard) reveal about the legacy of slavery. His skill at posing the questions is clear: he neither shys away from creating discomfort nor courts it.👇

I'm not a #botm member but my sister got me a gift certificate, so I picked this bunch from past months. True Biz is one of my #AuldLangSpine picks, so I'll be trying that one pretty soon. Most of my shelves are paperbacks, so it's strange to pick up three hardcovers all of a sudden 📚
I'm looking forward to these - lots of buzz about two of them, but The Verifiers also sounded intriguing.
@ncsufoxes @monalyisha

Look, I appreciate the vote of confidence, Goodreads, but let it go already, IT'S NOT HAPPENING! 😑

Here's to a new year and opportunity for meeting our reading goals (or just being content with wherever we land). Happy New Year everyone! 🥳🎉

This is my first time trying the #jolabokaflod tradition. This is the first book up, and it opens with a knife-wielding maniac chasing a toddler after having just murdered his whole family 😨 Not very festive, but enough action to keep me awake, with the help of some gingerbread sandwich treats.

I love thinking about what made this novel such a runaway hit. You can enjoy the world of the novel or the philosophical questions it poses. Although I did enjoy thinking up theories, the world drew me in more than anything. It's got so little in it - two people, statues, large rooms, water, birds, fish, a couple skeletons - and that is somehow enough in combination with Clark's storytelling to make for a completely immersive reading experience.

Even if you're like me and love Jacqueline Woodson's writing, this slim novel from 1995 with a mere 149 ratings on Goodreads is easy to scroll past. But it's no less perfect than her more popular ones: she packs so much into a sentence. One example: in the title story, the narrator looks at an old family photograph and imagines words her sister will say as an adult "are there already, festering inside my sister's brain, waiting to explode."?

#AboutMe #AuldLangSpine
Here's a few things about me:
-I live with my fiancee of 7 years (yep, that's years not months 😄) in NJ.
-We've got two amazing 1-yr-old brother cats - Jem (middle right) and Scout (bottom right).
-The kids are my nephew and niece (ages 3 & 5).
-My partner and I love going to concerts & museums.
-Music is my favorite hobby next to reading - I love indie rock and hip hop most.
-Have gotten into birding in recent years 🐦‍⬛

#AuldLangSpine
Very excited to decide how to start off my 2023 reading year based on this excellent list courtesy of @ncsufoxes I might start with the ones pictured, though there are several fiction and nonfiction choices that appeal to me, so this could change. I didn't have the best reading luck in 2022 so I'm hoping these recommendations will get 2023 started off right.
Thanks @monalyisha for arranging this event once again!

#nyrbbookclub members I'm struggling with my first NYRB selection since the monthly picks. I like a challenge every now and then, but to give you an idea of what this one is like, this single sentence (which is too long to fit in its entirety) contains the phrases: "post-traumatic cicatrization", "passionate peroration", and "an extracting maieutics" ?‍? I'm torn about continuing - not exactly the murder mystery I was hoping for!

My Halloween read this year was a good one: a very spooky tale involving a vengeful elk spirit. While many horror tales co-opt Native American culture as almost an afterthought, having characters who are part of the same culture makes the novel richer and more interesting. I also enjoyed Graham Jones' dialogue - so good you forget you're reading and not watching a movie. I did have a tough time visualizing some of the lengthy action sequences. 👇

Each essay in this collection focuses on a famous animal, spanning from prehistoric times to present day. An essay collection on animals sounds like a light read, but this was easily my most challenging of the year. One reason is that the essays aren't 'about' the animals as much as the animals within the historical contexts they appear, and the entire spectrum of human responses that occur, from reverence to exploitation to downright cruelty 👇

#Fearfulfall #Happyhorror
I'm sorry I won't be joining the group read this time, but how could I not post a creepy playlist? I took some favorites from past Halloween playlists and added some new discoveries. I tried organizing by genre: classical, film scores, rock, hip hop, and electronic.
Happy Halloween all 🎃!
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0eVxzG07soO0ejYFlnMxOb?si=7ZCg1r2nTEycftP5Ff1f...
@Cinfhen @BarbaraBB

Take a standard Twilight Zone episode plot, give it an artistic makeover, and you have Subdivision. Things begin in dreamy fashion where a woman whose personal history is never mentioned rents a room from Clara and 'the Judge' (both retired judges named Clara in fact) who are hospitable and advise her on finding work and permanent housing in this unnamed 'Subdivision'. Yet they are also oddly intent on her assembling a mysterious jigsaw puzzle 👇

I really enjoyed the unique structure and concept - 618 short passages, some authored by Shields, while others are quotations, bits of interviews or other materials to fit each chapter's theme. Those themes also cover interesting intellectual topics on the fraught border between fiction versus nonfiction. But I kept hearing this implication that traditional fiction is tired and some new experimental fictive nonfiction is superior somehow 👇