This week the “What We’re Reading” gang from LJ, School Library Journal, and Junior Library Guild discuss a smorgasbord of reading delights and devilments, from page-turners of all genres to meditations on death and dying, princess power middle grade tales to satisfying cliff-hangers, book club selections to weird and wonderful ghost stories, and an Irish-language novel to round it all out.
Mahnaz Dar, Assistant Managing Editor, LJS
This weekend, I read Jessica Knoll’s The Luckiest Girl Alive (S. & S.). A twentysomething who works as an editor at a women’s magazine in New York City, Ani constantly scrutinizes the world around her to ensure that every decision she makes will maximize what she sees as success (the right outfit, the right turn of phrase, and the right fiancé). When the book opens, she’s prepping for two monumental events: her impending wedding and a documentary that will be revisiting a traumatic high school event. As the story progresses, readers slowly learn just what happened.
While I found this an intensely absorbing page-turner (and, dare I say it, compulsively readable), it was also somewhat exhausting. The hypervigilant main character reminded me a little of the narrator of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, except all grown up and actually deploying her catalog of information about the upper crust. A scene in which Ani describes a meeting at work where all the editors turn down free macaroons to watch their figure (and stare disdainfully at the size-eight editor who chooses to take one) made me feel a bit self-conscious, as an editor who has munched her way through more than one meeting. But it’s definitely a fun, if razor-sharp, read.
Kate DiGirolomo, SELF-e Community Coordinator
My entry this week will mostly serve as an important update to my discussion of V.E. Schwab’s A Gathering of Shadows (Tor) from the last WWR. I’ve completed reading it, and it was absolutely brilliant (no surprise there). Kell and Lila were reunited once again, much to my delight, and I’ve grown to love my Rhy (I will now call him my Rhy) all the more with every new layer I’ve discovered. More important, it ended on a cliff-hanger, which leaves me exuberant and destroyed in equal measure. Don’t worry, folks, we’re being blessed with a third installment. Someday. In the meantime, I hope to be filling the time with a book that I’ve been waiting to get into my eager, eager hands. I like a bit of mystery, so I’ll leave it at that.
Liz French, Senior Editor, LJ Reviews
For an upcoming fashion books roundup in LJ, I’m reading several titles (this is the part where I say, I love my job!—sometimes). Shannon Meyer’s Little Black Dress (Missouri History Museum) has a fun-pun subtitle—From Mourning to Night—and it is an accompaniment to an upcoming exhibit at the museum, so the emphasis is decidedly local. I love the notes about the various dresses on display and the society women (mostly from St. Louis) who wore them. The visual history spans the Victorian era to now, and the notes and comments are edu-tational. For instance, though I knew quite a bit about jewelry made from the hair of departed loved ones, and the stages of mourning dress during Victorian times, I had never heard of tear catchers:
…The use of tear catchers, also known as lacrimatories, began in the Roman Empire. The amount of tears collected was thought to reflect the status of the deceased.… The rim of the bottle was designed to fit underneath the eye to aid in the catching of tears, while the interior was funneled to collect them. Some bottles were sealed; others were left open to let the tears evaporate. Some believed that once the tears evaporated, the mourning period was over.
I recently lost an old friend, who was loved by many and admired in her community, to cancer. While reading this, I wondered how many tears her lacrimatories (sometimes spelled lachrymatories) would collect. Then I had to laugh, as she probably would, too, at the picture of all of us mourners wedging these glass vials under our eyes to catch every tear!
Elizabeth Gavril, Senior Editor, JLG
If I’m not reading madly for JLG, I’m reading for my book group. It’s about all I can do to get through that one “adult” book a month—and, alas, even that sometimes proves to be a challenge. But since 2016 started, I’ve managed to get through three books written for the adult audience. Two were for book group, and one was a beach read on a sorely needed vacation. All were absorbing: I was amazed to learn that Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees (Doubleday) is loosely based on a real Nobel Prize–winning scientist. Charles Portis’s True Grit (S. & S.) was a quick read, and I really enjoyed the narrative voice (a woman recounts the story of when she was 14 and set off after the scoundrel who murdered her father). Now I’m all set to watch the film adaptations…. Finally, I may have been the last person to read Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train (Riverhead), but gotta say, it satisfied my need for a page-turner when I wasn’t staring out at the beautiful ocean view. Will I stay on track for the next book-group choice, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (Crown)? We’ll see, but I’ve started it, so so far so good….
Rebecca Miller, Editorial Director, LJS
Two books that have been my touchstones recently are the very brief and moving Oliver Sacks’s Gratitude (Knopf), which I read in one sitting on the floor of Burton’s Bookstore, next to my son, who considers the beanbag there a favorite spot. I purchased Sacks’s little book—a collection of essays written as he was dying—to have it live near the other book I’m reading, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters at the End (Metropolitan: Holt). A longtime fan of Gawande, I find his honest treatment of the end of life both confronting and comforting. I am confronted by how hard we let the last years be for too many people, including our closest and most beloved, and how entrenched in society a hands-off, medicalized approach has become. I am comforted by a voice so kind and generous to explore these hard things with me as a reader and as a mere mortal, welcoming his help.
When things are less contemplative in my house, we are reading, out loud, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series—this time with my daughter, Harper, as the main listener, but with many interjections from her older brother, John. We are in the middle of the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Scholastic), and racing to number four. It’s wonderful to hear her build the world with her recall of the dreamy first read she must have overheard; discuss the departures taken by the movies; and watch the story unfold again for John, as he freely interjects, clearly relishing the relationships and the mysteries that unfold.
Kiera Parrott, Reviews Director, LJS
I just finished reading a delightful new middle grade fantasy, Brian Farrey’s The Secret of Dreadwillow Carse (Algonquin). When the queen dies, a young princess must ascend to the monarchy and take over responsibility for the entire land. But with her newfound responsibilities comes a terribly intriguing warning: she must never, ever set foot into the Dreadwillow Carse, for if she does, the monarchy will fall. The princess cannot let well enough alone, and when she meets a girl about her age, the two new friends hatch a plan to discover the secrets of the dark and mysterious marsh. Beyond the detailed worldbuilding and multilayered characterization, what I love about this book is the underlying theme of sacrifice. The protagonist is faced with a heavy burden and a seemingly impossible choice—how she finds the courage to make the right decision is something that will stay with readers. This reminded me quite a bit of classic works by Ursula K. Le Guin and Madeleine L’Engle.
Lisa Peet, Associate Editor, News & Features, LJ
I recently read Samantha Hunt’s newest, Mr. Splitfoot (Houghton Harcourt), and man, it is a weird, weird, wonderful book. It’s a ghost story set in rural upstate New York, and there are orphans and con artists and fake spiritualists and spooky motels and religious cults and the records that Carl Sagan made to send up in the Voyager spacecraft. And Elton John lyrics. And an incident of the most bizarre drug abuse I’ve ever read anywhere.
There were a few moments when I wasn’t sure what exactly Hunt was up to—there’s a lot that seems totally random at first, and this is not a book for readers who need instant gratification as they go. But have faith, as the crazy preacher who runs the orphanage would no doubt counsel you—in the end it all makes perfect sense, in a very weird, weird, wonderful way. I kind of want to skim through it again now and check out all the parts that seemed loose end–like to see where they fit, because they all do.
I think this may not be for everyone, but I just loved it—I read the last quarter in a white-hot sinful heat when I was supposed to be doing a bunch of other things. Now I really have to read her novel about Nikola Tesla, The Invention of Everything Else, which I’ve had on the shelf for ages.
Henrietta Verma, WWR emerita
At the moment I’m reading Beairtle Ó Conaire’s Irish-language novel, Iad Seo Nach Bhfaca, which translates to something like The Unseen. It’s about a man who returns to his hometown and finds things greatly changed—I guess story lines don’t change much the world over! I can’t say yet how it is, just that my vocabulary is improving. I already watch a great Irish-language TV channel, TG4—it’s available online and through their app. So I do all right with listening and speaking, but I want to improve my Irish reading, so I bought this ebook the other day from Irish bookstore Cló lar-Chonnacht (which is also the book’s publisher). The store, in Connemara, Co. Galway, Ireland, has a decent selection of recently written novels given that, apart from children’s books, mostly only classics are available in the language. (Sigh.) I’m inspired to this madness by two things: my job means I get enough of reading in English, and I need to do something different to get a break; also, I’m now reviewing Jhumpa Lahiri (writer) and Ann Goldstein’s (translator) In Other Words (Knopf, Feb.) for LJ. No spoilers, but Lahiri’s determination to learn Italian is inspiring.