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.

Skater Boy by Anthony Nerada

Saturday, Mar. 8, 2025--San Antonio 

Skater Boy by Anthony Nerada is, I believe, the first book that I have ever read within 24 hours.  But after about 7 books in a row that didn't excite me much (even though some were well written), it was such a joy to be reading a book that kept me wanting to stay with it page-after-page that I even changed my daily routine to keep going until the end.  It was identified as one of the top novels for young adults from last year (although it likely will be banned from many school libraries because of its subject matter).  It's a coming-of-age novel about the lives of various misfits in their senior year of high school--the tough guys who are considered delinquents, the school nerds, those becoming aware of sexuality issues, etc.  The central character is one of the tough guys in a group of three who call themselves The Triads.  He has been rebelling because of events in his earlier life.  His father was an alcoholic and an abuser until he and his mother finally decided to try to escape.   But a tragic event occurred and they have been afraid of being found by the father for 9 years.  They live a lower-class life in a small apartment above a business.  He works at a local pizza place owned by the father of one of his friends in the Triads to help his mother with the expenses.  He cuts classes, gets into trouble often, and is in danger of failing and having to repeat his senior year.   He is also discovering that he is apparently gay and is afraid to come out to his friends or his mother.  But he has seen and met a ballet dancer who is the best friend of the daughter of his mother's boyfriend's boss when the "family" (mother, son, mother's boyfriend, and boyfriend's daughter) make their annual trip to the local theater during the Christmas season to see a performance of The Nutcracker.  That sets the stage for the coming-of-age events within the lives of multiple people during the final semester of their senior year.  Bad behaviors are analyzed and changed,  enemies come to understand they have more in common than they realized, and adolescents begin to mature and to make amends for the past.  I gave the book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Liars by Sarah Manguso

Friday, Mar. 7, 2025--San Antonio

Liars by Sarah Manguso is a book that took me some time to become invested in it.  It begins with tales of how horrible a marriage is.  The central character is the wife who is being mentally abused by her husband--a man who does nothing to help around the house or with their child, who is a frustrated because of being unsuccessful both as an artist and as a failed (3 times) tech entrepreneur, who is envious of his wife's successful writing career, who constantly manipulates her to feel like she is a failure (in all possible ways), and who regularly implies to friends that she is crazy by emphasizing that she received psychological treatment years before they were married and exaggerating the story as if she had been confined to a mental hospital.  At the same time, the woman keeps downplaying/overlooking/excusing the severity of the abuse while it continues to happen regularly.  I wanted to yell at her.  By the last third of the book, I realized that I had needed to go through all the first 2/3 to understand the situation better and to observe the slow evolution that was occurring in their relationship. I didn't want to put the book down during that last third of it.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.

Poor Dear by Claire Oshetsky

Monday, Mar. 3, 2025--San Antonio

Poor Dear by Claire Oshetsky has lots of good reviews.  I read it because of one on NPR.  But it was slow reading for me, especially in the beginning.  I spent the whole time I was reading the book trying to figure out exactly what was happening.  Margaret seems to be autistic with indications of high intelligence.  She teaches herself to read by looking at the books as someone reads to her.  She creates her own form of script to write the stories that appear in her mind.   She has a vocabulary that is far above what is expected of a child her age.  But at age 4, a tragedy occurs.  Her best friend is a bit of a wild child--always seeking adventure in dangerous ways.  While playing a game in an unused shed, the friend suggests a game and hides in an old ice chest that locks automatically when she closes the lid.  Margaret can hear her friend panicking and trying to get out of the chest, but Margaret cannot figure out how to operate the latch to free her.  She spends her whole life feeling guilt from that day with the entire town believing that the death of her friend was her fault.  Margaret's conscience seems to take the form of an imaginary animal called Poor Dear which is almost always around needling her about what happened and what she needs to do to atone for the death of her friend.  As the story progresses, there are good and bad experiences in Margaret's life, but the mental illness she is developing keeps interfering.  It's an open-ended book where the reader must decide what Margaret eventually does.  I gave the book 3 1/2 stars out of 5.