2018 TBR Pile Challenge

I'm so happy that Adam from Roof Beam Reader is hosting this challenge again! I've been doing it on my own the last couple of years and I'm really looking forward to participating with other people again.

As you know, I stopped keeping an official TBR list, though I started up again recently in a very limited fashion. My books are ones that I know were on my Goodreads "To Read" shelf previously, that I've wanted to read since they came out (pre-2017), or that I'm somehow otherwise fairly certain I've wanted to read for more than a year. For instance, I first read about Assata last December when I was prepping for my January display of books by black women. And one of them was on my 2017 Personal Reading Challenge and I failed to read it but still want to. I swear I'll read you this time, A Little Life!

Without further ado, here's my list:

1. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (finished 1/21)
2. Longbourn by Jo Baker (finished 2/25)
3. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson (finished 7/14)
4. Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones (finished 2/16)
5. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (finished 11/2)
6. Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur (finished 3/18)
7. Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie (finished 10/2)
8. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (finished 5/30)
9. The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (finished 7/6)
10. NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
11. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (finished 7/28)
12. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (finished 1/27)

My alternates:

1. The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson (finished 4/21)
2. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (finished 8/25)

There are some long books on here, and also more non-fiction than usual. But that's why they call it a challenge, right? I feel most intimidated by Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie. Even some of the more fun ones are pretty long, like NOS4A2. I'm reassured by the shorter books like Giovanni's Room. I think it's a great mix of titles and I'm hoping to find some new favorites here!

The Flight Attendant

The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian (2018)

Cassandra Bowden is a heavy drinker, prone to blackouts. Such is the case after she landed in Dubai, and spent the night with a passenger she had met and flirted with on her flight. She woke up in his hotel room in the morning, bits of the evening slowly coming back to her: drinking lots of arak, coming back to the hotel room, a female guest named Miranda who brought a bottle of vodka, breaking the bottle, leaving the hotel room. Yet here she still was. Then Cassie finally turned her head to look at Alex Sokolov, and saw that he was dead. Panicked, she feared that maybe she killed him. Even if she hadn't, just being beside him in the bed would surely implicate her. So she slipped out of the room and caught her next flight.

This isn't a whodunnit. We know who did it by the next chapter, though we don't know why. More important though, is what happens to Cassie, the fallout from her decision to say nothing and leave the hotel room as though she didn't know a murder had taken place there. What could possibly make a person look more guilty? Especially a person known for being a party girl, for hooking up with a lot of guys, and for generally being irresponsible.

Do you ever read a book, see what the protagonist is doing, and want to shake them by the shoulders and tell them it's a really bad idea? I felt a little bit like that with Cassie, but it was also easy to understand why she made the choices she did. She didn't make these choices because the author needed her to in order to advance the plot; her choices were completely believable for her character. Her weaknesses were real, and they determined her behaviors. It wasn't pretty, but it was genuine.

But back to the plot. I don't want to give too much away, but there's some international spy activity happening here involving Russians. And Cassie, in addition to hoping she won't lose her job because of her involvement in a murder (oh, of course it comes out! She didn't cover her tracks that well) has a strained relationship with her sister who doesn't trust her, and the baggage of their whole family situation.

During this whole time that Cassie is waiting for the authorities to figure out she was in the hotel, and then waiting for the consequences of her involvement, she's trying to go about her regular life. She's reading Tolstoy's novella Happy Ever After, and keeps putting off getting a manicure because of inconveniences like having to meet with her lawyer. She also thinks a lot about her drinking, how much she enjoys the ritual of alcohol, how she's not an alcoholic because she can go days without drinking. But, all it took was one Negroni (her drink of choice) to start her on an all-night binge that resulted in hours of lost time.

I was drawn into this story from the very first page. In the scope of Bohjalian's work, it reminds me most of The Guest Room, perhaps because someone who is essentially a bystander makes one poor decision and gets drawn into an international crime scene. But another way that The Flight Attendant is similar to that book is that I'm likely to keep thinking about the main character for a good long time.

The Flight Attendant will be published in March 2018. I received my copy courtesy of Penguin Random House. I was not compensated for this review.

Top Ten Favorite Books of 2017

Top Ten Tuesdays are hosted at The Broke and the Bookish. Posting a list of my favorite books of the year before the year is over makes me anxious but I'm powering through it.

I made this list by finding the books I rated 5 stars on Goodreads (minus the 2 re-reads), then sifting through my many, many 4-star books to choose the ones I like most at this very moment. The Because I am fickle. This always makes me second-guess my book ratings. Like, why didn't I give 5 stars to Young Jane Young or Miss Jane or The Power when I keep recommending them to everyone I ever talk to? My ways are a mystery even to me.

Without further ado, I present my top 10 favorite books of the year. The first half are my 5-star reviews, followed by the top 4-star, but within that they're in no particular order. All links go to my reviews.

1. The Wanderers by Meg Howrey

2. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

3. The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

4. Touch by Courtney Maum

5. Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu

6. Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin

7. The Power by Naomi Alderman

8. Miss Jane by Brad Watson

9. The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson

10. Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Interesting things about this list: 9 of them are written by women; 7 were published in 2017. It looks like 28 of the 95 books I've read this year were published this year, which I think is more newly-published books than usual.

I'd say it was a pretty good reading year!

What are the best books you read this year?

The Burning Girl

The Burning Girl by Claire Messud (2017)

Claire Messud's newest novel is essentially a character study about a teenage girl named Cassie, told from the viewpoint of her friend Julia. They've known each other almost their whole lives, and were best friends until drifting apart in middle school. Their families are very different; Julia, with a stable family, destined for college, and Cassie with her religious and protective single mother. Cassie's mother begins a relationship with a local doctor named Anders Shute, and when he moves in, the walls start closing in on Cassie. As her freedoms are taken away one by one, she becomes consumed with the idea of her biological father and enters a downward spiral that Julia feels helpless to stop.

The girls first meet Anders Shute after Cassie is bitten by a pit bull at a shelter where they volunteer. (Important note: it was her fault, though I'm annoyed that the pits were treated in a stereotypical "they're so dangerous!" way in this book.) Dr. Shute patches her up, but his slightly odd demeanor casts an ominous pall over the situation that extends to his later relationship with Cassie's mother. There's an implication that he may have inappropriate feelings for Cassie and may have deliberately sought her mother for a relationship to be closer to Cassie.

We never quite get a handle on Anders Shute, nor do we on Cassie herself, and that's one of the themes of this short book: you never really know another person. Julia observes that life is theater, and we all play roles. They may change over time, but we always choose what we let others see. To her, what's happening with Cassie is rather a mystery, just as many situations around us - especially when we're young and adults keep a lot from us - remain partially shrouded and unfathomable.

In keeping with the rather dark tone of the book, Julia and Cassie spent a lot of time visiting an abandoned mental asylum at the height of their friendship. (As one does - in my pre-teen years it was an abandoned house with lots of interesting stuff left behind from the previous inhabitants.) One of my favorite passages in the book was Julia speculating about what happened to the asylum's residents:

"In twenty years, they couldn't all have died - but even if they had, the world wasn't getting any less crazy. So the dying generation of crazies was being replaced all the time by new crazies, a rolling population of lunatics as constant as the tides. Unless it wasn't individuals that changed but society itself: they changed the laws, they closed the asylums, and suddenly the crazies weren't crazy anymore. Maybe when society changed it was decided, somehow, that they never had been crazy; it had all been a category mistake....That would mean you couldn't be sure about things. Better to believe that sane people were sane and crazy people were crazy and you could put the types of people on opposites sides of a wall and keep them separate, clean and tidy. Without that, where did the lunatics go? Where had they gone? Were they among us? Were they us?"

The reviews of this novel seem mixed, and the average rating on Goodreads rather low, but I quite liked it. It was dark, sad, and ominous, and Messud's prose was a pleasure to read. Her only other book I've read was The Woman Upstairs, and I like this one better but stylistically they're comparable. If you liked The Woman Upstairs, I would recommend trying The Burning Girl.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (2017)

When the Osage people were pushed off their land, they were relocatd to an area that turned out to have oil and they become quite wealthy. But in the early 1920s a rash of murders swept through the community, and efforts to investigate and bring those responsible to justice were thwarted. Finally, the organization that came to be known as the FBI, run by J. Edgar Hoover, got involved. Some murderers were caught, but it also turned out that the extent of the crimes went beyond what was previously suspected.

Grann starts his book with the story of the murder of Anna Brown, who was shot in the head. Another sister, along with her husband, was killed in a fiery explosion. Still another sister was slowly being poisoned until she went to the hospital where she was out of the reach of her husband. Many Osage women were married to white men, and it becomes clear that many of these men were playing a long game to get their hands on their wives' wealth. It was a huge conspiracy, with so many players involved it was almost impossible to stop it. Doctors, members of law enforcement, and other community leaders were themselves involved, so there was nobody victims or their families could turn to. When someone got close to solving the crime or implicating someone, they too were killed.

It's a story about a rash of crimes, but also about white supremacy. The government had promised the Osage they could stay on their land in Kansas, but when white settlers came in demanding the land, they were moved. (Among these white settlers? The Ingalls family. Now I'm even more interested to read Prairie Fires, which I think talks about this more.) American Indians weren't allowed to have control over their own finances, but were appointed white guardians. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

Killers of the Flower Moon is a thorough examination of a piece of history I knew nothing about, told in an engaging narrative style. I know pitifully little about America's indigenous people and the ways in which white people have destroyed their culture and communities, and this was a fascinating glimpse into one small piece of that history. I highly recommend it.

Top Ten Bookish Settings I'd Love To Visit

Top Ten Tuesdays are hosted at The Broke and the Bookish. Today we're thinking about book settings we'd love to visit - how fun!

1. Hogwarts
Obviously.

2. Regency England
But I wouldn't want to live there.

3. West Egg, 1920s
I like a good party, and 20s fashion.

4. 19th century Russia
I've been to Russia, but man it's different now!

5. Lyra's Oxford
I just want a daemon, to be honest.

6. The small English villages where Helen Simonson's books take place.
They're so cozy and filled with people I'd love to spend time with.

7. Manningsport, NY
From the Kristin Higgins Blue Heron series, and I don't just want to visit, I want to live there.

8. The cold places: Alaska, Antarctica, etc
I know that's more than one place, but I can't remember which books take place in which settings, I just like the cold climates. Again, I wouldn't want to actually live there.

9. The far future world of The Power where women are in charge
I know it's still oppressive, but as a woman it would be a refreshing change

10. The fictional version of pioneer America

Look, I know that the real Ingalls family weren't the paragon of virtue that Wilder tried to convince us they were, and that they were among those who pushed indigenous people off their land. So I consider her idealistic world a fictional one, and I would like to visit it.

This was hard, because so many of the settings I read about - especially the ones that play such an important part in a story - tend to be either dystopias or set in wartime, and those are places I definitely don't want to ever go to.

What bookish places would you like to visit?

Sunday Knitting

I'm in Maine for my family's late Thanksgiving this weekend, and I finished the body of my sweater.

It looks terribly rumpled and there are loose ends everywhere, but you get the idea.

I'm very happy to be this close to finishing this seemingly endless project! I mean, it's not that close really, I've got two sleeves and a hood to knit now.

I tried it on to make sure the armholes were large enough and they seem fine. The sweater itself is a bit long, but I find that they tend to stretch horizontally which makes them a little shorter, so it should be fine. And if it's not fine, at least it will be finished and I can move on to something else.