It goes without saying that my presence on the blog has been limited lately. Life has been, well, busy for the past year. At work, one thing they tell us when you’re running behind is to not get too involved in making excuses to the clients you’re late for. They don’t care why you’re late, they just want you present and focused when you go get there. So I’m not going to spend a ton of time making excuses or trying to tell you guys about all the diabetics and deranged knees and ear infections I’ve had to deal with. If you wanted to read about my adventures as a veterinarian, you’d be reading that blog (there isn’t one, so don’t go looking for it). But you’re reading a book blog, so I’ll talk about books. I came up with the idea last night to just get myself caught up quickly, and doing a single post with brief thoughts on all the books I haven’t posted about so I can check them off my list and more along. So that’s what I’m doing.

I Regret Nothing, Jen Lancaster

I started a post about this book a few weeks ago, but found myself getting nowhere fast. I feel like all of my recent posts about Jen Lancaster books involve me saying that this one isn’t as good as her earlier books. That statement is definitely true here. I read Jen Lancaster because I love her voice, and I want to keep up with her. She’s like an old friend with whom I don’t have much in common anymore, but the affection is still there. I Regret Nothing continues the cataloging of Jen’s adventures in “adulting,” including a trip to Italy (and Jen does it right—she takes Italian lessons so she can communicate with the people she meets in their native language, she avoids tourist traps) and starting a furniture refinishing business and trying not to get blackout drunk on her annual girls’ trip to Savannah. Jen was more amusing when she was worse at adulting than she is here, but I still enjoyed this book. Her stories about her pets and her snarky comments about the people in her Italian classes saved it for me.

A God in Ruins, Kate Atkinson

It is a tragedy to me that I let so much time pass between finishing Kate Atkinson’s latest book and writing about it. I love Kate Atkinson, have since maybe 2000, and am glad that she has achieved a measure of commercial success. A God in Ruins is a companion piece to Life After Life, focusing on Teddy Todd, the younger brother of Ursula Todd, the protagonist of the first novel. Teddy is not able to reset time life his sister, and is stuck living the same life once, as far as we know. Historical fiction is a favorite genre of mine, so having one of my favorite authors write not one, but two historical fiction works, is like a huge deal for me. I am torn between wanting Atkinson to keep writing about the Todd family and wanting her to go back to her Jackson Brodie detective novels (I love mysteries too), but I figure either way she goes next will be a win for me. I loved A God in Ruins, and will refer you to Bethany’s post about it if you want more details.

The Awakening and other stories, Kate Chopin

This book is one of my boss’s. The copy I have may or may not be older than I am, so that was kind of intimidating. I had read The Awakening before, of course, in college or maybe high school. Maybe I’d read one of the short stories before, but I can’t remember. In short, I loved this collection. The stories take place in the late nineteenth century, mostly in the south, but I think there were others set in different places. Sadly, I don’t remember much by way of details at this point, but I definitely recommend reading any and all Kate Chopin stories that come your way. Her ability to create a complete world in a small number of words and pages is akin to Alice Munro’s.

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

I finally read this book after years of being harassed by my husband about how I needed to read it after he publicly shamed me on Facebook for not having read it before. Bethany said in that thread of comments that she thought people would only enjoy Fahrenheit 451 if they read it when they were adolescents. I can’t remember her reasoning at this late date, and that conversation probably happened close to 9 months ago. I’ll never find it buried in social media. I partially agree with her opinion, but not completely. I did enjoy this teeny tiny proto-dystopian novel. I wished there had been, oh, you know, more like hunger games action type action or Divergent type genetic manipulation. The biggest thing in this book was a four-walled interactive TV, which I still can’t totally wrap my head around, because I’m trying to liken it to something we have now: is it like Skype? Are the screens 4K UltraHD? What sort of WiFi speed must they need for something like that? And why aren’t they just streaming Netflix? And the answer comes to me in a flash: they aren’t live chatting on Facebook because Bradbury didn’t know that Facebook was going to be a thing back in 1953. I wish I had read this book back when I was a sophomore in high school and read 1984 and Brave New World, both of which I loved. I wonder how I would have felt about Fahrenheit 451 then.

In Twenty Years, Allison Winn Scotch

I read this book because it was a Kindle Unlimited book and I was on vacation and needed something light to read while laying by the pool in Mexico. In Twenty Years fit the bill. This novel has no message, other than the one that’s obvious to anyone who has lived more of their life since finishing high school than she lived before and during it: time accelerates after the age of twenty-two. It is the story of a group of college friends who are called to reunite at the house where they lived together by the ghost of their dead roommate. The gang is not as close as they once were, and some of them parted on terrible terms. Over the course of a long summer weekend, these people air all of their dirty laundry and figure out where they all got so turned around in their lives. It was compelling but not a future award-winner. BTW, it wasn’t a real ghost who summoned them; this was not that sort of book.

Trail of Broken Wings, Sejal Badani

Another Kindle Unlimited book! Loved this book. Was about an Indian family, three sisters, a mother, and a very abusive father who falls into a coma at the start, calling home the prodigal daughter. Her two sisters have stayed close to home. While they wait for their father to recover or die, secrets are revealed and relationships are mended. My hair stylist and I often make fun of Kindle Unlimited books and how they are low quality tripe, but this was actually a really good book, though a bit overwrought. I did really like it, and think most people would enjoy it.

The Man in the High Castle, Phillip K. Dick

Another Kindle Unlimited book. I thought I would love this one. Yes, I read it because of the Amazon show, though I don’t watch it. In case you don’t know, this novel supposes that German and Japan had won World War II and divided the USA up between them. It was fascinating to read about what Dick thought might have become of us twenty years after this not-event happened. I had kind of a hard time with this book, not because it was poorly written, and not because it was boring, but because I guess I wanted more information about the particulars of the Allies losing the war. I enjoyed glimpsing the lives of the Japanese living in San Francisco and the Jews hiding in San Francisco and the Americans living as second-class citizens in San Francisco. It was disturbing but fascinating. I’m not going to watch the show, though, because I know that liberties have been taken with Dick’s source material and for some reason, this time, that’s not okay with me. This is a thinking person’s speculative fiction novel, and don’t go into it thinking it’s going to be action-packed, because it isn’t. I was also a bit annoyed that Dick drops us into these peoples’ lives and then pulls us back out again before anything is resolved. I wanted to know what happened next.

Burying the Honeysuckle Girls, Emily Carpenter

This novel was the last one I finished in 2016, and was another Kindle Unlimited selection. I’d put this in the same category as In Twenty Years: a fast-paced plot driven novel directed at women of a certain age. In this book, our protagonist, Althea, returns home to Mobile, Alabama following yet another trip to rehab. Her family has a problem: all the women develop schizophrenia when they turn thirty. Or do they? Burying the Honeysuckle Girls was completely compelling, escapist fiction, which is the only kind of book I’ve been able to focus on lately. Carpenter did a good job getting me to care about Althea, who seems like she was kind of a terrible person prior to the action of the novel. But she’s trying to do better, and isn’t that all we can do? Try? It was part mystery, part addiction/recovery tale, part historical fiction, part southern gothic, and I definitely enjoyed it, though perhaps it, too, was a bit overwrought….

And that brings me to the end of 2016. I hope I can get some thoughts up about the books I’ve read so far in 2017 soon.