Books read, August
Oct. 29th, 2025 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraWhat did I spend August doing instead of reading? Writing, mostly.
Play date, Alex Dahl. Elisa lets her daughter Lucia have a play date and spend the night with a new classmate - but Lucia isn’t returned in the morning, and when Elisa goes to the house where she dropped Lucia off, it’s a rental being cleaned out and there’s no trace of the people she met. Who has taken her? Why? Will they ever find her etc etc. I liked that this was set in Scandinavia but otherwise it’s pretty clunky and the twists are irritating.
Love in the afternoon, Lisa Kleypas. Cyrano de Bergerac style het historical romance. Quirky nature-loving Beatrix takes over writing back to the dashing soldier Christopher when her much sought after friend Prudence can’t be bothered - and, as war takes its toll on Christopher, the letters grow more intimate. He comes back intending to marry the woman he’s fallen in love with, but Prudence seems fonder of the decorated war hero than the man who wrote the letters… This was okay. I liked what Kleypas was doing with Christopher’s PTSD but it didn’t always mesh with the romance, and Beatrix is both super certain of herself and yet determined not to tell Christopher who she is. There’s a great dog in it, though.
Slugfest, Gordon Korman. Yash is a fantastic athlete but unfortunately the fact that his middle school has been sending him to play on high school teams comes back to bite him when he doesn’t have the state-mandated PE credit for 8th grade. He’s sent to the summer school PE program, which is nicknamed Slugfest because it’s usually populated by non athletic losers - can they all come together as a team? Multi pov, and a satisfying story with just enough surprise to keep things interesting. Not one of my all time Korman faves but I can see myself re-reading this sometime.
Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons. I went along to the first meeting of a local book group in a spirit of enquiry, which was serially dashed by a) the person who said she didn’t want to analyse books like we did at school and probably half an hour of book talk would be enough, after which we could talk about things like what Netflix series we are all watching b) the person who said she reads five books a week but ONLY real books not those e ones and only motorcycle club het romance, fostering stories and cosy mysteries c) the person who said she’s written a book, it’s amusing things her children have said interspersed with parenting tips and she’ll bring us all a copy next time d) everybody in their introductions except me saying they didn’t like sf/fantasy (we’d been told to bring a book we’d recently enjoyed and I was waving around my e copy of Black Water Sister) and e) the person who was telling one end of the table about how her teenage daughter had decided she was trans and now wouldn’t talk to her and how unreasonable this is.
Despite this really rather appalling start, there were two other people there I vaguely knew & liked, and one of them seemed to be capable of talking about books. One of the more organised people there came up with a choice of three possible books to read for each meeting, and although I missed the next one due to other commitments I decided rather belatedly to go back at least once more, which meant I ended up having an afternoon to read either Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, or Kaye Gibbons’ Ellen Foster. I have largely avoided Faulkner apart from a few short stories and saw no reason to change this, so I borrowed the other two from the library and started on Tom Lake. I think Patchett is a great prose writer who writes books I don’t like - I was not wild about Commonwealth - and although I enjoyed the opening few chapters of the process of casting for a production of Our Town once I realised the book set up was going to be mother tells daughters about her past fling with now famous Hollywood actor I was almost entirely disengaged.
So I read Ellen Foster, which is about a poor white girl growing up in the American South in (probably) the 1970s, whose father is abusive, whose mother overdoses and dies, who has a Black friend (Starletta) to whom she is racist, etc, etc, etc, all told in non standard English. It’s readable and Ellen’s voice works well, and it isn’t as unrelentingly miserable as I’ve made out, but it ’s in a weird space book-wise where I’d probably rather either have a memoir or something explicitly fiction (as I’m typing this, what I really want to do is re-read the Tillerman series by Cynthia Voigt). One other person at the follow up meeting had read it and hadn’t loved it (two of them had read Tom Lake, the motorcycle foster cosy person hadn’t been able to bring herself to leave her comfort zone, another person was immured in Lucinda Riley’s Sister series, and everyone else cancelled at the last minute). Will I go again? Hmm.
Play date, Alex Dahl. Elisa lets her daughter Lucia have a play date and spend the night with a new classmate - but Lucia isn’t returned in the morning, and when Elisa goes to the house where she dropped Lucia off, it’s a rental being cleaned out and there’s no trace of the people she met. Who has taken her? Why? Will they ever find her etc etc. I liked that this was set in Scandinavia but otherwise it’s pretty clunky and the twists are irritating.
Love in the afternoon, Lisa Kleypas. Cyrano de Bergerac style het historical romance. Quirky nature-loving Beatrix takes over writing back to the dashing soldier Christopher when her much sought after friend Prudence can’t be bothered - and, as war takes its toll on Christopher, the letters grow more intimate. He comes back intending to marry the woman he’s fallen in love with, but Prudence seems fonder of the decorated war hero than the man who wrote the letters… This was okay. I liked what Kleypas was doing with Christopher’s PTSD but it didn’t always mesh with the romance, and Beatrix is both super certain of herself and yet determined not to tell Christopher who she is. There’s a great dog in it, though.
Slugfest, Gordon Korman. Yash is a fantastic athlete but unfortunately the fact that his middle school has been sending him to play on high school teams comes back to bite him when he doesn’t have the state-mandated PE credit for 8th grade. He’s sent to the summer school PE program, which is nicknamed Slugfest because it’s usually populated by non athletic losers - can they all come together as a team? Multi pov, and a satisfying story with just enough surprise to keep things interesting. Not one of my all time Korman faves but I can see myself re-reading this sometime.
Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons. I went along to the first meeting of a local book group in a spirit of enquiry, which was serially dashed by a) the person who said she didn’t want to analyse books like we did at school and probably half an hour of book talk would be enough, after which we could talk about things like what Netflix series we are all watching b) the person who said she reads five books a week but ONLY real books not those e ones and only motorcycle club het romance, fostering stories and cosy mysteries c) the person who said she’s written a book, it’s amusing things her children have said interspersed with parenting tips and she’ll bring us all a copy next time d) everybody in their introductions except me saying they didn’t like sf/fantasy (we’d been told to bring a book we’d recently enjoyed and I was waving around my e copy of Black Water Sister) and e) the person who was telling one end of the table about how her teenage daughter had decided she was trans and now wouldn’t talk to her and how unreasonable this is.
Despite this really rather appalling start, there were two other people there I vaguely knew & liked, and one of them seemed to be capable of talking about books. One of the more organised people there came up with a choice of three possible books to read for each meeting, and although I missed the next one due to other commitments I decided rather belatedly to go back at least once more, which meant I ended up having an afternoon to read either Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, or Kaye Gibbons’ Ellen Foster. I have largely avoided Faulkner apart from a few short stories and saw no reason to change this, so I borrowed the other two from the library and started on Tom Lake. I think Patchett is a great prose writer who writes books I don’t like - I was not wild about Commonwealth - and although I enjoyed the opening few chapters of the process of casting for a production of Our Town once I realised the book set up was going to be mother tells daughters about her past fling with now famous Hollywood actor I was almost entirely disengaged.
So I read Ellen Foster, which is about a poor white girl growing up in the American South in (probably) the 1970s, whose father is abusive, whose mother overdoses and dies, who has a Black friend (Starletta) to whom she is racist, etc, etc, etc, all told in non standard English. It’s readable and Ellen’s voice works well, and it isn’t as unrelentingly miserable as I’ve made out, but it ’s in a weird space book-wise where I’d probably rather either have a memoir or something explicitly fiction (as I’m typing this, what I really want to do is re-read the Tillerman series by Cynthia Voigt). One other person at the follow up meeting had read it and hadn’t loved it (two of them had read Tom Lake, the motorcycle foster cosy person hadn’t been able to bring herself to leave her comfort zone, another person was immured in Lucinda Riley’s Sister series, and everyone else cancelled at the last minute). Will I go again? Hmm.
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