A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
In an effort to read books that might help shake off the writer’s block I had suffered since May, I picked up a copy of Gilbert’s book, and I must say, as fall merged into winter this year. I am pleased I did. While Gilbert’s literary voice grates at me from time to time, I thoroughly enjoyed nearly all of her points and assertions in Big Magic and will encourage other creatives to give it a readthrough if they have not already. Big Magic provides readers with no-nonsense suggestions and best practices for shedding the fear of failure and endeavoring to create if called to do so.
For readers who appreciate a suspenseful fantasy interwoven with a good dose of romance, Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015) and the four books that come after it will delight.
The first in this series, A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015) establishes the divided world in which we find our heroine, Feyre Archeron.
After experiencing the tragedies of Boone Caudill and his companion and best friend, Jim Deakins, alongside the level-headed wisdom of Dick Summers in The Big Sky, I eagerly reached for Gutherie’s second novel, The Way West. The Big Sky had certainly impressed me, and I looked forward to reading The Way West, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, wondering how Gutherie would continue the story.
Sometimes we find our way to delightful novels that transport us to fictional communities full of quirky, loveable characters; Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s Library at the Edge of the World (originally published in the UK in 2016) and the four novels that continue the Finfarran Peninsula series (Summer at the Garden Café, UK published 2017; The Mistletoe Matchmaker, 2017; The Transatlantic Book Club, 2019; and The Month of Borrowed Dreams, 2020) offer their reader precisely that.
Caroline Lea’s recent historical fiction, The Metal Heart: A Novel of WWII (2021) fictionalizes events on the northern Scottish islands of Orkney during the 1940s. Twin sisters, Dorothy and Constance, flea to a remote island said to be cursed after the death of their parents. Facing the brutal elements as winter descends, the sisters find their isolation invaded by a population of prisoners of war who are relocated by the British Army to Orkney in order to labor on a protective earthen barrier around the islands.
Emily Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020) is an unsettling read; one replete with ghosts, curses, nightmarish yellow jackets, and plenty of the uncanny. Yet, in addition to the horror—a genre Danforth clearly plays with on multiple levels in PBH—the reader meets the witty, modern narrator, with her references to social media posts and snide humor. Plain Bad Heroines explores the lives and loves of women, both contemporary and early twentieth-century, as they unapologetically make their own ways. Plain Bad Heroines, like Danforth’s first novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, is LGBTQ fiction.
Elisabeth Sharp McKetta’s She Never Told Me About the Ocean (2021) scrutinizes the experiences and emotional lives of various mothers and daughters, set on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific ocean, with a hefty dose island myth. Through a story that incorporates the everyday and the mythical, She Never Told Me About the Ocean highlights the interconnectedness of birth, death, and humanity.
While many have certainly heard of Dickens’ other history (A Tale of Two Cities), few know his first. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty was originally published in installments throughout 1841 and it fictionalizes the very real Gordon Riots of 1780.
Margaret Atwood’s Dearly: New Poems (2020) is a lovely collection that reflects themes of aging and loss as well as the mythology, the classics, and magical creatures.
Nuala O’Connor’s brilliant, moving, and yes, delightful, NORA: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce (2021) gives today’s readers a first-person narrative through which to meet and admire Nora Barnacle Joyce. From her own perspective, O’Connor’s Nora shares details of her life with legendary James Joyce, from courtship, to shared self-exile, parenthood, chronic illness, literary success, and, ultimately, death.
Catherine A Hamilton’s debut novel, Victoria’s War (2020), is a moving and informative historical fiction. Victoria’s War opens as Germany invades Poland, shattering the life of its titular character.
Rarely does a book-length poem hold its reader as tenderly and intimately as Ross Gay’s Be Holding (2020) held me. I never would have thought I would encourage everyone I know to read an ode of sorts to basketball legend, Julius Erving (famously called Dr. J.), and yet here I sit, enthusiastically doing just that.
Michele Duster’s Ida B The Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B Wells (2021) is at once a powerful, aesthetic biography of Ida B Wells and the Civil Rights Movement generally, and a coffee table book brimming with engaging photos and moving graphics accessible to every member of the family.
works that envision various possible experiences of enslavement and the Underground Railroad like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2017), provide modern Americans with ample food-for-thought when considering race relations, questions of reparations, and more. Whitehead’s novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017 and the National Book Award, provides an alternate history of slavery in the American South, not in terms of downplaying its brutality, but by exploring various means of dealing with its consequence.
Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017) is a gut-punch of YA novel. Starr, the novel’s high school protagonist, exists between two worlds. She lives in the poor, predominately Black, neighborhood of Garden Heights; she attends high school in an upper-middle class, predominately white suburb.
J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) is memoir punctuated by social commentary. Thirty-something Vance tells his life story, which, no doubt, starts out like many kids who live amidst broken families and poverty in the American Midwest. Growing up in Ohio, the grandson of Kentucky hillbillies, Vance’s memoir becomes an elegy for all the Scots-Irish of Appalachia, all the hillbillies.
