Friday, July 8, 2016

April-June 2016 books


I have been so lazy with reading lately. My brain is tired when I get home from work, so I procrastinate on my towering to-read list.

Miss Match by Catherine Avril Morris. Free Kindle ebook, early April
Another lame trope-y chicklit romance. I was pretty irritated that the leading lady's friends hired a "romance expert" to basically seduce her without her knowledge and consent, and the friends are never made to see how awful and inappropriate that was; instead, the protagonist apologizes to her friends for being mad at first! (She and the romance expert fall in love for real, of course.) I should stop reading taming of the shrew type stories. 3/5

The Lamp of Darkness by Dave Mason & Mike Feuer. Free Nook ebook, mid-April
This is Biblical historical fiction about Elijah, Ahab and Jezebel from the perspective of a young shepherd boy/musician that is told like fantasy, so I LOVED IT. The authors are rabbis so they definitely know their story and its historical context. This was so good I want to buy a physical copy as well as read the next book(s). 4.5/5

Kahlo by ?. Physical purchased book, lateish April
This is a biography of Frida Kahlo (forgot to get the author's name) with full-color illustrations of many of her paintings and sketches. It's in Spanish, so it took me a little longer to read. I bought this when I was in Mexico with my family at this fancy hotel/restaurant/store called Sanborns, and I read it throughout our vacation there. I wanted more of an analysis of her art and its themes instead of just a straight telling of her life story, but whatever. I got a good deal of that from a scholarly article I got off JSTOR ages ago about the Aztec imagery in Frida Kahlo's paintings, which I read on the plane on the way to Mexico. I was especially troubled at the lack of references, endnotes, or even a bibliography. Where did you get your sources from, person? What if we want to read more? 3.9/5

Safe People: How to Find Relationships That Are Good for You and Avoid Those That Aren't
 by Henry Cloud and John Townsend. "Gift" physical book, lateish April-early May
My mom bought this book "for me" (really so she could justify buying it to read), and I also read it during my Mexico trip after I finished the Kahlo biography. Cloud & Townsend are Christian psychologists who have written tons of relationship and self-help books separately and together, and I've read several of them thanks to my mom's buying habit. This one was good but a bit 2real at times (I had to fight back tears at the airport, which was kind of embarrassing. Luckily I was sick so I could blame that for the snuffling). 4/5

The Lake House by Kate Morton. Library book, early-mid May
My bookclub chose this book for May, and I thought at first that it was a book the Sandra Bullock rom-com was based on and was prepared for a chick lit book with some time-traveling. It's actually a sweeping mystery set in England that bounces between various characters' views and flashbacks in the "present day" (1990s), 1890s, 1930s and 1940s. I actually already read a book by this author, and I found both books super similar: they have a precocious bookish heroine with authorial aspirations who falls in love with an older guy who encourages her writing so she thinks he likes her back and kisses him and it's super awkward and she and we think it's one of the big mysteries but it isn't, a classic children's book (which doesn't exist in our world) based on a real girl and/or real themes in the book that somehow ties in to the mystery, spouses cheating on each other, mysteries centering around a particular well-loved house that is almost a character in its own right and is later abandoned due to said mystery, guilt, WWII, sisters and their relationships, flashbacks between characters and between the past and the present day, the present day is the 1990s otherwise I guess research would be too easy and the book would be over too soon, there is a historical protagonist and a modern protagonist who are intertwined somehow... Really a lot of similarities. She's a good writer so it puzzled me a bit that the books have so many similar elements. I liked this book way more than The Distant Hours since this one actually had a happy ending. 4/5

Wonder Woman Vol.3: Iron by Brian Azzarello, illustrated by Cliff Chiang. Library comic book, late June
I wanted to read a Wonder Woman comic since I don't think I ever had and I don't want to be a fake geek girl. I usually hate reading series out of order but this one was the first one the library had. Basically this series is, what if Wonder Woman's dad was Zeus? Fantastic. I ordered the rest from the library so I can read the whole series. 4.5/5

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