Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’m glad that I read Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow first, because I didn’t like his earlier book Rules of Civility nearly as much. I didn’t dislike it or even find it a struggle to read - it flows on like a river while you’re in it - but ultimately it slipped out of my head almost as soon as I’d read it.

However, on balance I liked A Gentleman in Moscow SO much that I’m still excited to read Towles’ new book The Lincoln Highway when it comes out.

What I’m Reading Now

During my childhood, the Newbery Honor book Carolyn Coman’s What Jamie Saw haunted the library displays. I always avoided it (while also staring at it in morbid fascination) because the original cover gives the distinctive impression that what Jamie saw was something nasty in the woodshed.

If I had ever opened the book to the first page, I would have discovered that what Jamie saw was his mom’s boyfriend hurling Jamie’s baby sister across the room (but don’t worry, Jamie’s mom catches her). Mystery solved!

Changing gears entirely, I’ve been really enjoying Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are. Often I find story collections uneven, some stories great and other mediocre, but this one is consistently high caliber, and I’ve been parcelling out the stories like bonbons.

They’re all contemporary stories inspired by Japanese folktales. Sometimes the magic is front and center, like “Quite a Catch,” about a woman who goes on a fishing trip and catches a skeleton, which releases the ghost of a woman from the Edo period, and then the two start dating. (They’re so cute together!) Other times, the story is a riff on a folktale, like “My Superpower,” a story told in the form of a newspaper column. The columnist muses about how her own history of eczema has given her a sense of connection to the hideous women of folklore.

The stories have a lot of fun playing with form: aside from the newspaper column, there’s also a story in the form a recruitment letter sent from the afterlife to a jealous woman (“The Jealous Type”) begging her to hold onto that intensity of emotion, because they’re having trouble finding people passionate enough to recruit as ghosts these days.

What I Plan to Read Next

Thomas P. Lowry’s The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War.

Comments

[genarti]

omg, Where the Wild Ladies Are sounds utterly delightful!

[troisoiseaux]

+2 would recommend!

[osprey_archer]

It's great! And the stories are mostly pretty short, so it's the perfect book to dip into when you've got just a little bit of time.

[troisoiseaux]

I picked up Where the Wild Ladies Are after you mentioned it in last week's post, and I really enjoyed it! "Quite a Catch" was my favorite (ghost! girlfriend!) but they were literally all so good. Speaking of playing with different forms, there's a great one later in the collection that uses three different perspectives in a very cool way. I enjoyed the slow dawning realization of the stories' interconnectedness.

[osprey_archer]

I'm glad you picked it up! It's such a fun book, I want more people to hear about it; I'd never heard of it before I picked it up on a whim.

[troisoiseaux]

I am absolutely buying my best friend a copy for her birthday, because this is so incredibly up her alley. (I've already recommended it to her, but there's a 14-week waitlist at her library, so... birthday present it is!)

[rachelmanija]

THAT COVER. OMG.

I read that book and all I remember is the baby getting hurled across the room, the mom catching her, and me thinking both that OFC this was a Newbery book and also that catching the baby wouldn't have helped much as she'd have gotten Shaken Baby Syndrome even if she didn't get splattered.

[osprey_archer]

Somehow the way the eyes are shaded makes the boy look HAUNTED or possibly like a zombie. I guess it's truth in advertising, though, he definitely did see shit go down.

I did appreciate that the book went right to the point with the title, though. I was fully prepared for it to spend one hundred pages referring obliquely to The Bad Thing Jamie Saw before at last sharing what it was in a climactic sequence near the end, by which point it could not help but be anticlimactic. But nope, we learn What Jamie Saw right there on the first page.

[asakiyume]

The Aoko Matsuda sounds excellent and wow, she's really everywhere these days--I've heard that book talked about on my local NPR affiliate, and meanwhile Little Springtime, who loves her short stories, just finished reading a novel by her (but in Japanese; it's not yet translated... and Little Springtime was disappointed in the novel, which she said was not at all as good as Matsuda's short stories).

Anyway, I'll put it on my to-read list.

[osprey_archer]

I'm not surprised to hear the novel isn't as good as the short stories. Some people are simply natural short story writers and this collection gives me the strong feeling that Aoko Matsuda is one of them - the quality of the stories is so consistent and so high.