Before this, I'd had an amazing streak of great books, each text satisfying and insightful. But the greatness has dried up. I have been so disappointed in the most recent books I've read.
The characters in the highly recommended and lauded Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi were supposed to be original and unique, but they read more like Harry Potter characters living in a futuristic Nigeria. The women with electric hands in The Power by Naomi Alderman were too flat (and static -- get it?) for me to care about. And why, oh why, can't authors figure out how to tell a multi-perspective story without having different characters narrate different chapters?
The plot lines in The Memory Watcher by Minka Kent were convoluted to the point of being laughable instead of suspenseful. I know a suspense novel is bad when I, a person who would lose Clue board games to my toddlers, figured out the "whodunit" before the end.
Even when I tried to get lost in something funny, the observations in Girl Logic: The Genius and Its Absurdity by Iliza Schlesinger just seemed trite and obvious. What? Women have irrational insecurities? Stop! Really. Stop. I'm not laughing.
And to top it all of, I discovered the "book" Fire Song by Adam Garnet Jones is really just a novelization of a film script. Thankfully the film was worth watching.
Argh!!
To be fair, in the midst of all the yuck, there have been several highlights. Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr. offered a historical perspective on how we as a society have ended up with such an enormous incarcerated Black population and suggested ways we as a society could fix that. Ayiti by Roxane Gay was a beautiful collection of short stories highlighting the people and places of Haiti. The fiction book Everyone Knows You Go Home by Natalie Sylvester and the nonfiction text The Border Becomes a River by Francisco Cantu put human faces on both the immigrant and the enforcement side of the immigration discussion.
I've got about 45 days until school kicks into high gear again and that is more than enough to conquer the few books I've got left on my summer reading list. I'll be turning on the air conditioner, grabbing a fruity beverage, and getting through the dog days with these titles:
Legendary (Caraval #2) by Stephanie Garver
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
There There by Tommy Orange
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
