This Is Where I Leave You - Jonathan Tropper

Yet another Library Sale Shelves book, but not a winner. I like to read contemporary novels as they read faster for me than, say, Jane Austen books do, and sometimes I just want to be in a relatively contemporary setting with modern vernacular and settings and stuff like cell phones and whatever. This book wasn't awful, but it just didn't grab me. Maybe because it was more about men, father/son relationships, and that sort of thing - who knows. My copy happens to be a movie-tie-in version with a photo of the cast on the cover, and they got some great actors for the movie, so maybe I should give that a try. I guess this one is a "meh" for me.

Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All - Jonas Jonnasson

This book was found at a dollar store and it looked interesting so I picked it up and read it on two flights for a work trip. It was an entertaining novel and kept me quite content on the plane, which is as good of a recommendation as I can make for it. I liked the characters and how the story changed them (or didn't, as the case may be). I'd definitely read other books by this author.

The Girl on the Velvet Swing - Simon Baatz

Evelyn Nesbit is a name I have run across while researching my vaudeville-era obsession, so when I ran across this book in the library, subtitled "Sex, Murder, and Madness at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century," I had to pick it up. The crime central to this book isn't well known today but at the time it was the scandal on every front page. This book is really well researched and well written and the story is bizarrely tragic and doesn't quite end how one might expect. This book is well worth a read.

A Matter of Degree - Don Massey & Rick Davey

Came across this non-fiction book in a museum gift shop. It was on sale and I thought the topic (summarized in the subtitle: "The Hartford Circus Fire and the Mystery of Little Miss 1565") seemed interesting so I picked it up and actually managed to even read it without having it gather dust on the TBR pile for a silly length of time first. The authors are a writer and a firefighter who both extensively researched this infamous fire for years before writing this book and solving the mystery of a little girl who went missing during the fire. The subject matter is disturbing, as you might imagine, but the book is written well (if the tone is a tad lofty and dramatic at times) and the research is obviously impeccable. A well done and educational read.

A Lesson Before Dying - Ernest J. Gaines

There is nothing I can say about this book that could in any way match the elegance and power of the writing and of the story. This book is heartbreaking and moving and should be required reading for all humans. Highly recommended.

The Master Butcher's Singing Club - Louise Erdrich

This author is someone I've been wanting to read for a while, so I was happy to get this book from the Library Sales shelves a while back. I liked this book, but I wish I had liked it a little more. On the one hand, the time period in which it's set, the actual setting, and the characters were all very appealing to me and I liked them a lot. On the other hand, I feel like the story meandered around a bit for my tastes, there's a couple love stories that are a little random and not set up as much as maybe they could have been, and the titular singing club isn't featured in the book as much as it maybe could have been. But all that said, I did like the book and it kept me reading. This author has some other books that look really good, so I hope to clear my TBR pile and get to them sooner rather than later. All in all, recommended.

Buying on Time - Antanas Sileika

This book encapsulates my love for the Library Sales shelves - you can run across some really interesting books that you might otherwise have never heard of. Readers, I LOVED this book. It's a series of short stories, but they are all about the same characters, so it's the best of all possible worlds for short stories as far as I am concerned - I get to spend a lot of time with characters and situations that I really enjoy, without the constraints of a novel-length plot, etc. Everything about this book was awesome - the beautiful, clear writing; the fully developed characters; the time period. With a bonus of also being a book about the immigration experience. I cannot wait to read this author's other works, so I really need to clear up my TBR pile ASAP. Highly Recommended.

I am going to claim this book in the "red" category of the Color-Coded Reading Challenge as the cover is mostly red, as shown below. I couldn't get a good image of the entire cover and I didn't want to break the spine of my copy, but check out the neat cover design.

The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri

Readers, I have mixed feelings about this book. To be honest, it was relentlessly joyless and sometimes even brutal. I also feel like the same story could easily have been told in half the page count and the book would have lost nothing but some repetitive language. The setting(s) were interesting; I enjoyed learning more about India's past and politics, and I like reading about immigration experiences, as I often wonder what it would be like to move to a foreign country and adapt and etc. But all in all, maybe I just wasn't in the mood for this book.

January - This Month in Reading

Well, I managed only 4 books in January, but they mostly counted for challenges so I'm happy with that. Of course, at this rate I will only read 50 or so books in 2018, so I am hoping to do better in February. With that in mind, I will say I'd like to read 6 books, and have them all be for challenges. Totally doable.

How did your 2018 reading start off?

Travels with Charley: In Search of America - John Steinbeck

So I still love Steinbeck, and I enjoyed this book for what is was, but on the other hand it didn't knock my socks off or anything. It's ostensibly the author's "search for an authentic America" but it is more about his random encounters while traveling around "incognito" (he doesn't tell people who he is, etc.) Maybe it's that subtitle that bothers me; if it wasn't there I wouldn't expect him to describe, you know, America, as opposed to his custom-built camper and his dog - I would have just enjoyed the story on that level if I hadn't been looking for some kind of analysis.

To be fair, the author does bemoan what we nowadays call the "mallification of America" - even back in 1960 regional differences were starting to get wiped out in favor of some kind of uniform cookie-cutter same-chain-stores-in-every-town culture like the one we have today. There is also some social commentary on racism, particularly as it relates to the desegregation of the south that was actively taking place in the early 60s. This seemed very Steinbeckian but it wasn't very in character with the rest of the book; it seemed sort of tacked on, like he wrote a book about his travel misadventures and then decided he had to make it socially relevant. In fact, there is one character that he describes interacting with that I don't think existed; I think this character was a work of fiction Steinbeck added to help him make a point. I don't begrudge him that but it all just seemed like it should have, or could have, been part of a different book.

All in all I guess I would say that there were parts of this book that made me laugh, and I didn't dislike it, but it isn't my favorite book by him at all.