I didn't feel like I was really rushing to get through a lot of books this month but I did end up with quite a feel. I think November just felt really, really long. Like I'd be looking through the list of books I added and be like 'damn, that was ages ago but it was still this month??' (Side note, I love the book ends feel of having two four star investigative journalism books at the start and end of the month. I should try to do that more.)
November Book Reviews
Bottle of Lies (Katherine Eban)
8/10 This was written almost like a true crime thriller and I think it really helped me get into the story and keep me immersed even through the various legal and medical jargon, not to mention the myriad of names. There were some parts where I felt like it was getting long, but the story and writing style managed to get me back in easily enough. There was a part where they went into the backgrounds of various companies and the timeline jumps around in decades so it was a little distracting. The amount of organizations and peoples is already enough to keep track of without mergers. The author also briefly mentions better generic alternatives so I wanted more elaboration on it but it didn't really go anywhere. Not that I really felt that this book suffered from a lack of information. I also enjoyed that it was very objective. The author didn't try to say the generics were the villains and the FDA were the heroes but instead showed the various shortcomings and accurately presented the pressures of bureaucracy. The ending was kind of a downer, realistic but a downer. It's a testament to how slowly a case study like this can move when the story follows its start in the 1980s and still hasn't reached a real conclusion in 2019. It's pretty incredible to read about something like this, which most people don't really think about too much. It's a great combination of the products of investigative journalism and a firm, engaging writing style. A definite recommended read.
The Adventure Zone: Murder on the Rockport Limited! (Clint McElroy)
6/10 I think part of why I didn't like this book as much as the first one was because of how much I enjoyed this arc in the actual podcast. I was really looking forward to seeing it in comic form, but my expectations were too high I supposed. While it's impossible to include every single joke from the podcast into the comic, I just didn't find it as funny even though I didn't feel that way for the first arc's adaptation. Part of it might have been the feeling of time; listening to the podcast and following them along from the planning to the murder investigation to the final reveal felt like a long process. That process felt super condensed in this one which made it lose some of its tension and stakes in my opinion. There were also some action lines that I found it hard to tell what was going on. Also hard was seeing various hints dropped hinting at further developments but instead of feeling like it's foreshadowing it feels more like I just missed a reference. I'll still be on the lookout for the next volume though, mostly because I didn't enjoy the podcast of that arc as much so who knows, maybe the comic version will change my opinion instead!
Stiletto (Daniel O'Malley)
6/10 I really liked the first book in this series and was a little disappointed when this sequel didn't knock it out of the park in the same way. There were familiar parts that I liked about the book like the humor, the writing style and more of the world building. Unfortunately the characters didn't endear themselves to me in the same way that Myfawny or Thomas did in the first part and while I liked that she still had parts in this one (and we got to see her being the boss she rightfully is), it really took away from the actual protagonists. Not only could we fully focus on fleshing out either of the heroines, we also didn't get to just enjoy Myfawny through the whole thing either. I liked Odette more than Felicity, but neither of them really did much to actually get to the ending. It's especially egregious for Odette because she was so involved but everything was concluded without her volition at all. The side plot about the crystal murder that Myfawny was involved in ALSO wasn't solved by her own active participation. I think this should have been a short story collection set in the same world instead because I really do like reading about the various mini cases and historical tidbits but they're just distracting tangents that put a damper ont he actual plot. Also, of all the complaints the worst one I have is this: I CANNOT believe Odette and Felicity didn't get together. Chopra was there for one chapter and shows up at the end just to be a love interest for Felicity even though Odette was right there!! The enemies to friends to lovers!! The Romeo and Juliet of it all!! They went through so much together and in the end they're just gal pals?? I feel robbed.
Malice (Keigo Higashino)
7.5/10 Not the first murder mystery I've read from this author but the first in his Detective Kaga series. As for how it stacks up...not bad. A pretty solid mystery. I didn't particularly enjoy the first person 'journal entry' style but it did help set up the twist in the story. I loved the unreliable narrator set up, especially how you know it's unreliable but it still manages to trick you. This is especially the case for the first confession because you do feel that it wraps everything up so neatly but you're still aware of the amount of pages left in the book so both you (and the detective) are left with a sense of unease. It's a cool structure of you thinking 'oh it's over BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE alright now it's over BUT WAIT!" There's a lot of clues that you think are red herrings until they're not. Spoiler: HONESTLY THE CAT THING I really did go oh of course the victim was like that because he was so mean to the cat, but then the author straight up points out to reader that that's the trick! Unfortunately, despite how interesting I found the structure of the story, the actual murder and motive are a bit lacking. With the amount of planning the culprit went through, the motive felt like a cop out - although I guess you can't complain it didn't have a theme and stick to it. Detective Kaga's own experiences with bullying was a little too helpfully relevant and I found him not as developed or interesting a character as the detective (particularly compared to Detective Galileo). Still, not a bad read and a murder mystery I could easily recommend.
Stories of Your Life and Others (Ted Chiang)
4/10 Wow I did not like this critically acclaimed short story collection. I had high hopes starting it, not just because of the countless great reviews, but because I actually enjoyed the first story: 'Tower of Babylon'. It was a interesting take on a well-known Biblical story and there were a lot of quotes I liked from it. Most importantly I could read through it and it had a plot, things that I felt were sorely lacking from the rest of the stories. A lot of the stories felt like reading academic essays or debates on the subject of choice and while I'm sure the content has a lot of merit it doesn't mean anything to me if I'm just desperately flipping through the pages hoping it ends soon. 'Hell Is the Absence of God' was nice in that it had some really unique world building and somewhat of a plot, but felt like a theological discussion log instead. 'Story of Your Life' also had...something? But it sure didn't feel like a plot to me. It did feel easier to read, aside from the linguistics essay excerpts. I went to read the summary of the movie it was adapted into and at least that felt like it had a plot. I don't know if it was supposed to be implied or it was there and I just completely missed it but either way, I wouldn't have reached that conclusion myself just by reading the story.
Confessions (Kanae Minato)
6.5/10 The book started out strong for me, maybe because it started like the conclusion of a mystery novel. You had the 'detective' giving their summation, pointing out the culprit and how the crime was done...complete with a mic drop of their own. But then it starts getting complicated as the story continues after that and I felt that a lot of the extra information dragged down the story. On one hand, it serves to add shades of grey to every single character but on the other, it's a bit of cliche to reveal that the culprits suffered from childhood trauma. It was interesting how it made the 'detective', the one who suffered most from the crime, into someone of a mixed morality herself. I think I would've liked the book to end the same way it started, with a little ambiguity. I read the summary for the movie adaptation which did go with an unconfirmed ending and I thought that would've been a lot more interesting. It wasn't a bad book but I felt it might have been better.
Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust (Hedi Fried)
8/10 A really great, easy to understand but straightforwardly moving book about the personal experiences of a Holocaust survivor. The format of a simple Q&A makes it an easy read and while it could be argued that it's a too simplified view of the events, I think it's a good basis upon which further reading could be built on. The personal point of view also led to some information that I might not have expected. Things like how after the war many survivors kept an overstocked fridge because of hunger they experience in the camps, or how some women chose not to have children out of fear that it would happen again. I also enjoyed the forthright way she spoke with quotes like
'I never met an SS soldier who was kind' and in answer to the question
'What was the best?' she replied
'The best? Could anything have been the best? When I got this question, I was confounded. Nothing was good, but there were moments when we could forget where we were and laugh.' I think one of the most striking anecdotes she had was a time when she and another girl managed to smuggle a leaf and a branch from a tree outside into their rooms. Simple snapshots like these really underlined how cruelly sparse the conditions were, how little sense of life and future there was and how people tried to find hope in even the smallest things.
Dreams and Shadows (Robert Cargill)
4.5/10 This book was 741 pages and for the first 500 of them I literally could not care less about any of the characters. It was a weird mix of excerpts from a folklore specialist that introduces whatever fairy or fair folk shows up in the preceding chapters and said chapters of random fairies doing random things to random people. There are a couple of 'main characters' but for the most part I really couldn't care about what they're all doing. It was on the last 30% of the book where the characters are grown up and living in Austin that it takes on the semblance of an actual plot. I did like reading about Colby as a wizard living life amongst the Other Side though Ewan wasn't all that interesting still. It picked up more in the last 10% with the culmination of all the events but it just went all to pieces when it turned out the ending was just......a waste of time. I'd be hard pressed to call an ending where everyone dies and no one strays from their destiny/nature a tragedy when the book told you it was gonna be that way with no inclinations that there might have been hope for a better ending.
Spin the Dawn (Elizabeth Lim)
4.5/10 Look...I wanted to like this book I really did. I love anything vaguely Asian themed and the whole magic seamtress thing is kinda of neat. But this book was so boring. The prologue was boring, it was Mulan inspired in that the heroine dresses up as a boy to take the place of her father to be the palace tailor but that's where the similarities end. The first part was for me the most interesting, taking on various sewing challenges to prove herself to be the best, a bit of court intrigue, stuff like that. But that part's quickly over and instead the story embarks on a generic fantasy quest to find fantasy materials and they experience fantasy dangers etc, etc. She uses her magic sewing abilities literally once during that whole quest. And it's not even very well explained how her magic scissors even work compared to magic needle or thread or something. The romance was also a bit out of nowhere for me. I don't really know at which point the male lead went from 'curious about this crossdresser' to 'having an all consuming love that he would risk his life for her even though he's an enchanter and they're never supposed to fall in love oOoOoO'. It was cute when they did fall in love but there was no steps there. The ending also felt just kind of underwhelming rather than cliff-hanger like. Basically the whole thing was underwhelming.
The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy (Michael Lewis)
8/10 I think the title could've been better without the subtitle because just the 'Fifth Risk' is such a good starter. I love where it comes from, when a civil servant is asked about five possible risks that an employee in his position has to worry about and after listing things like 'nuclear accident' and 'electrical grid' and 'North Korea' his so-called 'fifth risk' is something much more simple and way more dangerous: project management.
'It's what you fail to imagine that kills you.' This book was a great, easy to read, quick but concise delve into the myriad of bureaucratic jobs that no one really thinks about but are nevertheless indispensable for the maintenance of a functioning society and government. It of course focuses on the Trump presidency's new replacements for former Obama appointed employees, and just how terrifyingly ignorant and mismanaged that process was. Although Trump being associated with those two things is nothing new, it is eye opening to read about all the new ways his government manages to prove it. More importantly though, it highlights the unacknowledged facets of the government and paints a clear picture of what they do and why it's so important. The main downside is that it ended kind of abruptly and that reading pieces like these always makes me disappointed they're all US-centric because I'd love to read similarly well done journalism in my local government.
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