The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya

Wednesday, Apr. 2, 2025--San Antonio

The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya was recommended as a top book of 2024 by several sources.  I read it, and it was an interesting concept for a novel, but it was quite confusing at times, since the book was describing 3 different periods of time--a 3-month period a father and daughter spent in Sicily as he wrote a novel and she was invited there to assist him, and two simultaneous events occurring 10 years later--the mother and daughter having lunch together and discussing their lives while the father (divorced from the wife since the daughter was a young child) watches a matinee of a play the daughter has written which seems to be a criticism of what happened that summer.  By the end of the book, I did not care for any of the characters.  They are all very self-centered.  The father has always had sloppy, inconsiderate habits which bother those around him and which he seems to think are okay ways for him to be.  The mother divorced him for those reasons and seems to have tried to punish him by limiting his time with the daughter while collecting as much child support as possible (since he is a very successful author).  The daughter is the worst of all of them, however.  She is a 30 year old who feels that she has been slighted constantly by everyone in her life.  She is always ready to tell anyone else (even strangers on the street) how they are offending her by what they are saying or how they are acting.  In my opinion, it's time for all of them to go their separate ways and to never have anything to do with each other ever again; otherwise, there will never be any peace in their lives.  But I expect, the same problems will arise with anyone else who becomes involved personally with any one of the three.  I was so glad to see the book come to an end.  I gave it 3 1/2 stars out of 5 not because I didn't like the characters but because it was such a complicated construction of a novel that I found myself having to figure out too often what was happening and where and when. 

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Thursday, Mar. 27, 2025--San Antonio

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid was published 7 years ago.  I decided to read it because I read a short blurb on a news website about anticipated upcoming films and series later this year.  I've always found the original books to be better than the films or series made of them.  Books just have so much more detail than can be included on film.  It's the story of a sexy Cuban refugee living in Hell's Kitchen in New York making her escape and rising to become a very wealthy Oscar-winning film star and co-producer who marries 7 different men and eventually lives a reclusive life.  It makes me think of Elizabeth Taylor (multiple husbands), Greta Garbo (reclusive), and Raquel Welch (sexy and a name hiding her Latin heritage) among others.  It's also the story of an actress strongly protecting her reputation at great personal cost.  The entire book takes place within a two-week period when she is meeting with an author she has chosen to write her official biography with legal agreements that it cannot be published until she dies.  She wants the REAL story of her life (versus the one the public knows from paparazzi publications) to be told.  The book has sold over 5 million copies since it was published, and it definitely kept me interested and picking it up to continue reading as often as I could.  I rated the book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

In Tongues by Thomas Grattan

Sunday, Mar. 23, 2025--San Antonio

In Tongues by Thomas Grattan is a good story but has a central character I didn't like.  Gordon reminds me of too many young men (especially young gay men) who wander through life making bad decisions no matter what good opportunities come along.  One of his biggest problems is not having any sense of responsibility.  Money, when it comes, is to be blown irresponsibly.  Friends are persons to take advantage of when needed without feeling bad about it.  It's like he feels he deserves every opportunity that comes along while not needing to feel grateful or to avoid taking advantage of those who have provided it.  He fails over and over again in keeping friends, keeping jobs, in simply living life.  By the end of the novel, he seems to have finally figured some things out and made some good decisions, but his love life is still unsettled and may never become so.  I considered quitting reading the book during the first quarter of it, because I found no pleasure in reading about such a person.  But the story eventually becomes more interesting because of the persons around him--the lesbian friends he makes, the older gay art dealer and his fickle younger life partner who take him under his wing, his ultra-conservative religious father and his second wife, etc.  The book was named one of the top gay novels of 2024 and the author won a literary prize for it.  I can see why.  Sometimes, however, there are good novels that are just not enjoyable to read for a specific reason.  My final rating for the book is 4 stars out of 5 with the lost point being for the beginning when there no motivation was developed to make me want to continue reading about the life of this young man.

All Fours by Miranda July

Thursday, Mar. 29, 2025--San Antonio

All Fours by Miranda July was named a Top 10 book by Time and a finalist for the National Book Award.  I actually waited weeks with this book on hold before getting it on my Kindle through the Libby App (my local library paying for it, thank goodness, rather than me).   It's the story of an obnoxious woman making bad decisions.  Supposedly funny, I didn't laugh once during the 15% of it that I read.  I just couldn't stick with it any longer.  From the reviews, I can see that it is women who love the book, and apparently it's women frustrated with their lives.  There was just nothing about it that appealed to me.  It joins a small group of books with prominent award nominations that I swear must have been achieved by "sleeping" with the judges!!  I decided to quit the book and give it 1 star out of 5. 

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang

 Tuesday, Mar. 18, 2025--San Antonio

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang was named a best book of 2024 by TIME.  The plot is a great one--two people who were not friends in high school and are pushed further apart by a tragedy just months before graduation, go their separate ways for years with both becoming writers, and then find themselves on the same writing team for adapting the novel of one of the two into a screenplay for a mini-series.  I found the story and the characters to be exciting.  I thought, "I am reading such a good novel."  Then throughout the 3rd quarter of the novel I started noticing things:  Is this a romance novel?  There are pages of detailed descriptions of the steps of a sexual encounter.  And it repeats and repeats with every sexual encounter.  It was far more detail than was needed for a novel and became a distraction from the good story I was reading.  And there were repetitions of terms--"the tattoo of my heart" (meaning the beat), "gripped my heart" and other expressions written too many times compared to what is expected in a serious novel (versus other creative ways to say the same things when a feeling is repeated).  Fortunately, the book turned back into a really good novel during the final quarter.  By that time, however, I had realized that I could not rate it higher than 3 1/2 stars out of 5.  If only the author had stuck with the real story rather than wandering off to spend so much time describing multiple sexual encounters in almost the same words, I could have raised that rating!

Long Island by Colm Toibin

Friday, Mar. 14, 2025--San Antonio

Long Island by Colm Toibin was named a best book of 2024 by many top publications.  It is a follow-up to his novel Brooklyn.   Toibin is a good writer.  His style is easy to read and clear and precise.  In this book, the character Eilis has returned to Ireland for the first time in 20 years (from the setting of the first book) to visit her mother supposedly to celebrate the mother's 80th birthday, but really to get away from a problem that has popped up in Brooklyn where her life has been somewhat suffocating from living on a cul de sac that has four houses filled with Italian in-laws.  She is at a point where she must make some major decisions about her life that will affect others--her husband, her children, and her family and friends still living in the small Irish village where she grew up. The book is so well written, that each step of the way the reader can foresee problems that don't have good solutions and the book ends with the reader left in this quandary.  What decisions did every one make?  If this was decided, this would be a problem.  If another decision was made, there would be this a different problem.  All the characters have their faults, so there are reasons for the reader to want the story to go in different ways.  I really enjoyed the book and rated it 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor

Wednesday, Mar. 12, 2025--San Antonio

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor is set on a small island 5 miles off the coast of Wales where fewer than 40 people live and half of the homes are abandoned due to the hard life on the island and the desire of young persons to leave for the mainland.  One young girl is a star pupil who knows not only Welsh, but also speaks and writes English.  The timing is the 1930's with rumors of war coming, but the news is always delayed by a couple of weeks or more before arriving on the island.  Two researchers from Oxford arrive on the island to study the people and their culture--their music, their stories, their life daily lives, etc.  They hire the young girl to be their assistant for interacting with the locals and for writing what is said and translating it into English for the book the researchers will publish.  The book gives a great picture of what the harsh life is like on the islands.  It also shows that the "researchers" are misinterpreting what they are seeing and hearing and will be presenting a story that is not really true to the life there but to how the researchers have romanticized it to themselves.  (Reading the book brought back memories of the criticisms that Margaret Mead and other anthropologists from that time period eventually received for their work in remote civilizations being misrepresentations.)  The researchers eventually disappoint not only the young girl but also the reader in an emotional ways.  But that was apparently a typical problem for anthropologists of that period in time.  It took a while to really get interested at the beginning of the book, but I soon found myself really enjoying the "real story" of life on the island.  I gave it 4 stars out of 5.