So Many Books, So Few Reviews

Please forgive my unintentional hiatus. I went away on a Friday in July, fully intending to return on Tuesday, and then I just didn’t. I have reasons, but most of them are boring. Nothing dramatic, nothing earthshaking. Let’s just say that summer takes it out of me, and I am so happy to see the light changing and getting tiny, tiny hints of fall in the air now and again.

I’ve been away from the blog, but I most certainly have not stopped reading. In fact, I’ve kept up what for me is a pretty decent pace considering my limited reading time. I believe the last book I mentioned reading was (Man-Booker long-listed) We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. I finished that in early July and since then I’ve read:
Stoner, John Williams
Lucky Us, Amy Bloom
The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets, Diana Wegman
The Children Act, Ian McEwan (Pub date Sept 9)
The Secret Place, Tana French (Pub date Sept 2!!! Yes, multiple exclamation points!! It’s so good!!!)
Canada, Richard Ford

(And I know I’ve had A Man Came out of a Door in the Mountain listed as “On My Nightstand” for like six weeks. And it was on my nightstand. I just wasn’t reading it. I am reading it now. Really.)

With a couple of exceptions, all of these really deserve their own reviews. One that doesn’t warrant a full review for me is Amy Bloom’s Lucky Us, which I thought was just okay. Lucky Us is the story of two half-sisters, Iris and Eva, told through alternating points of view by Eva in the first person and other characters through third-person POV and letters. The story takes place in the United States during the late 1930s and through the 1940s. The book begins well enough—Eva at least is a compelling narrator—but if the heart of the book is really the two sisters, it seems to lose its way. An accident estranges Iris from Eva, but something about the accident–something about the whole plot–just never came together for me. Bloom writes smoothly and Eva is a compelling narrator in her sections, but ultimately it’s rather dull. (But look at that lovely cover! Away also had a lovely cover, and was also…well, read on.)

I discovered Amy Bloom when I read her debut short story collection Come to Me in graduate school. In fact, it was probably one of the first short story collections I ever read, as at the time I was a stranger to short fiction. For several years, I named it as one of my favorite books. I hesitate to say I was wrong and just didn’t know any better at the time, mainly because I haven’t read it in at least 15 years. But then again, I haven’t read it again in the last 15 years, and I HAVE re-read (many times) plenty of other collections I read back then. I tried to read her novel Away, but I never finished it. As with Lucky Us, nothing was wrong with it—I simply found it ho-hum. If you’ve read my blog for any period of time, you probably know that I am all about character-driven fiction. I’ve seen many of my favorite authors’ books—Kent Haruf, Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson—labeled boring. So if I say something is dull…well, maybe chalk it up to my mood. (Or maybe it’s just dull. I’ll let you decide for yourself.)

Alright, enough about that. I need to get busy writing reviews of all those other books. Believe me, if I can do them justice, you definitely won’t want to miss some of them!

*Image and links from Powell’s; links are unaffiliated. I received my copy of Lucky Us from NetGalley.