2016 Reading Challenge: March
This one was so fun! The challenge was to select a couple of books of each color, and you canât move on to the next color until youâve finished at least one of the two of the previous shade.Â
RED: Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life by Ulli Lust
Graphic memoir, coming-of-age european hitchhiking adventure. Some good bits, nice art. BUT my main problem with it was that it seemed like a lot of nonconsensual sex. Yes, Ulli stood up for herself sometimes and was a woman traveling alone, but it felt like men always had the upper hand and forced sex on her over and over again. It made me uncomfortable.
ORANGE: Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
I recommended this book all the time at the bookstore without having read it (#booksellerconfessions). But itâs really kind of perfect, and it certainly has something for everyone whoâs going through anything. Strayed manages this amazing balance between advice, empathy, and sharing her own stories, between tough love and enveloping you in her huge huge heart.
YELLOW: Letâs Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell
A memoir of friendship and connection, seeking and finding and losing and loving. Oh, and dogs. And rowing (my second book with that in as many months). Several friends have recommended this over the years, and it was definitely worth it. Also, tearjerker warning: Iâm not really a bawler, but the last 60 pages had me tear up three times in one day, in three different places (at lunch, on the train, in bed). Youâve been warned.
GREEN: Improvise, Girl, Improvise by Lilith Latini
Great poetry collection from Topsideâs Heliotrope imprint of trans poets. Many of Latiniâs poems are about the many different ways of coming into oneâs own -- first against the contrasting backdrop of not fitting in, then through the actual physical changes, and finally growing in the nurturing soil of common experience and solidarity. I loved the pinecone as a metaphor for change -- âtorch the damn thing so it grows.â And also the gradual nature of changes that may seem drastic to others: âThey believed I charged like a train, bright light/ and steam that broke against their turned heads,/ but Iâm not sudden or new. Iâve only been walking./ I told them noon. They should have been expecting me.â Â
BLUE: Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson
Iâve read nearly everything Winterson has written -- her kids books are the ones Iâve avoided. This one was pretty good! Though it didnât really remind me of what I love about her other works, or rather, it did, but only occasionally. This one involves a nefarious corporation who wants control and monetize time, time tornadoes and irregularities that swallow up entire school busses and deposit their inhabitants across the universe in the future thousands of years, and our heroine, Silver, the Child With the Golden Face, who just might save the Timekeeper.
INDIGO(ish): Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson
I love Maggie Nelson, so when I learned that sheâs written two books that investigate the murder of her aunt, I thought theyâd be right in my wheelhouse. Jane, the first book, is an examination in verse of her auntâs life and tragic murder in 1969, several years before Nelson was born. In her characteristic style, it ebbs and flows between thought and emotion, between analysis and the visceral. She includes bits from her auntâs diary and looks at the way Jane affected the family in the decades after her death.
VIOLET: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Iâm so glad that Morrison won the Nobel Prize -- Iâve been so impressed with each book of hers that Iâve read. There is just something that feels so...powerfulâŠabout her writing. This one looks at broken families and the cruelty of kids towards each other and the ways that race in America affect both of those things in different ways.
DEEP PURPLE: The Rogue Not Taken by Sarah MacLean
The final romance I wanted to fit into last month, and thankfully it fits here as well! As was the other MacLean book I read, this one is funny and episodic and female-pleasure-centered. It focuses on Sophie, a girl who grew up in a small town, and then her father came into money and they moved to London and became involved with all things aristocratic, which Sophie hated. When she flees the city after insulting a lord, she encounters all sorts of adventures, and, of course, the Marquess of Eversley. Iâm liking the scandal rag framing devices. The one thing that hasnât worked for me are these tongue-in-cheek asides insisting that they DONâT LIKE EACH OTHER, when clearly they do, and they donât even really seem to be in denial about it. I know that the tension is really the point, but those asides detract a bit for me.
Also read: The Other Side by Lacy M. Johnson
And next up for April: books set outside of the United States!
