I skipped a few months, but I will continue the count and, hopefully, fill in the middle one of these days.
45. A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire Book 5, George R. R. Martin.
46. Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories, Amitav Ghosh.
47. This is Why We Lied, Karin Slaughter.
48. The Five Star Weekend, Elin Hilderbrand.
49. Golden Girl, Elin Hilderbrand.
50. The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese.
51. Katherine, Anya Seton.
There are some books on this list about which I have little to say. The George R. R. Martin is part of a longer post that has been swirling about in the back of my mind, a post I hope to get to one of these days, although at the moment my days are busy enough and I am content. This state of affairs does not drive me toward greater achievements however. There are many things I wish to accomplish, and a long bookish post on a fantasy series is just one project among many.
I wrote about The Covenant of Water a year ago, after my first reading. I read it again for book club. At that time I wanted to discuss it in book club, and found it far more compelling and thought-provoking than the book that group read in lieu of this one. When my second book group chose to read it this year I was eager, although we really didn't get into the meat of the book. Still the book works so well, both as a compelling and touching story, and as thought-provoking novel and it holds up well to re-reading.
Five Star Weekend and Golden Girl are both summer beach reads, light, fun, entertaining and unsubstantial. They fall into the category I call "popcorn fiction". They are books that you dive into, read too fast, want to read more than you should, and which are then rapidly forgotten -- fun, filling, with no nutritional value. Still, I enjoyed them. I was recovering from a flu-like virus and my brain wasn't really up for anything more compelling. Books like these can be great palette cleansers, whatever their genre (mystery, romance, fantasy) and they are quick reads. But indulging in a diet too heavy on this kind of reading and I feel like I become a dull girl indeed.
I enjoy Karin Slaughter's novels, although perhaps "enjoy" is not the best word as they tend to delve graphically into the darker aspects of human behavior. I preordered This is Why We Lied, and started reading it pretty much the instant I took it out of its package. I'll also admit I enjoy the main characters and have followed their development. This is also a pretty fast read but it sticks with me much longer, not so much because it is insightful as it is disquieting. Still, I think it is good to read things that disturb us, that make us think about the aspects of life we would rather avoid. Am I willing to read disturbing books more now that I am retired and live in my own peaceful little bubble, more than when I was out in the world and wanted to escape every day pressures? I don't know the answer to that. I'm not sure the question occurred to me before today.
I was sixteen the first time I read Katherine by Anya Seton. I loved the story, the romance of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, but I also loved all the historical detail about life in medieval England. In fact, this book kicked off a long time love of medieval history and early English literature, a passion I still carry today. I have carried that book around, and it is one I read occasionally, although it has probably been over 20 years since I last read it. There are books we hold onto as much for the emotional weight of their influence on the people we become as the merit, historical or literary of the works themselves. I'll admit that I cannot read Katherine without, at least in part, connecting with memories of my younger self. And yet I also see the book differently than I did. I understand that we know more about the period, and about both Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt than perhaps was known when Seton researched this book. This knowledge does not significantly alter the worth of the book, or my enjoyment of it; the book is about a time and a place as it is about a particular love. That endears it to me further. If anything the depth and extent of the "extraneous" details, the attempt at historicity, the development of people and a culture who think differently than I do, think differently than do the people of my own time and culture, makes the story itself, and the romance, all the more solid and enjoyable in my mind.
That leaves me with Amitav Ghosh's non-fiction book Smoke and Ashes, which was, by far, the most compelling and absorbing book I read in September. Not surprisingly, it is beautifully written. I loved reading the book despite the sometimes heavy information load. There was a great deal of information that I knew little about, as well as some things I might have known vaguely, along the fringes, but about which I had never connected the dots: Information about the drug trade, exploration, and the what I see now as perhaps unsavory, and certainly morally questionable, foundations to the very structure of a society in which I live and from which I benefit. Anyway, this is just my reading and my understanding, and my long-standing policy with non-fiction books is not to review the information, but rather that the way I rate the book is based on how likely the book is to make me question my own understandings of the world in which I live, and drive me toward doing further research. Said research may uphold or refute the authors statements.
My main goal in life is to never become complacent. I find complacent people, and complacent books, boring as hell. This book is anything but complacent. A worthy addition to my library.
