Tag: the52bookchallenge2022

Biography, Memoir, Nonfiction

Number 3: Title starting with the letter “E”

KC

Eve’s Hollywood

Eve Babitz

Words cannot express how much I love this collection. I read it every year and I always find something new to appreciate about it. Eve Babitz is commonly compared to Joan Didion, but I never understood it. In my opinion she is much more in line with Edith Wharton and Candace Bushnell, women who wrote savagely and frivolously, like pink stilettos, which is my favorite kind of writing. The difference being that they wrote about New York, and she wrote about L.A.

In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.

Of all her books, Slow Days Fast Company is probably her best, the most polished and to the point, but I like the messiness of Eve’s Hollywood. It feels like being 22 and sitting by the pool with your best friend over mojitos. Although I am originally from LA county, I did not appreciate the beauty of it while I was growing up, but I did after I read this book. It makes me homesick in the best possible way.

Culturally, L.A. has always been a humid jungle alive with seething L.A. projects that I guess people from other places just can’t see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against L.A. and say it’s a ‘wasteland’ and other helpful descriptions.

Bodice Ripper, Fiction, gothic romance, Historical Romance

Number 11: A Book With Less Than 2022 Goodreads Ratings

KC

The Demon Lover

Victoria Holt

I have a confession to make…

I could not finish this one.

I tried! After all, I take this challenge very seriously. I made a commitment. I will read two books a week until the end of 2022 if it turns my eye sockets to mush. If my apartment is on fire and my car rolls off a cliff, I will still read two books a week and report it here.

I mean, it was touch-and-go when I discovered the long-running Bravo classic Shahs of Sunset, which had nine glorious seasons to catch up on. But I am nothing if not ruthless in my binge-watching, and I am now caught up. So, I am back to the 52 Book Challenge like the book-challenge-blogger I aspire to be!

But I only read about halfway through this one because the content was… not great.

There was a lot to love about it. The setting was idyllic, the characters were sociopathic, the romantic lead was also named Kate. So far so good. After all, historical fiction is my genre, and while this was set in the regency era, it felt exactly like a time machine to the 1980s.

Tragically, the ’80s are a dated decade and nothing about them feels more dated than the way they talked about date rape.

So it was not a shock that the rape scene happened. In the context of its era, it was even rather demure. We don’t read the act itself as it was happening (thank you baby Jesus). Instead, the author mercifully treated the reader to a fade-to-black scene with all the scary bits cut out.

For that I thank her.

However, I am a finicky reader, and I have no tolerance for sexual violence. Even when it is absolutely necessary to the plot (and it’s rarely as necessary as writers seem to think), I spend the entirety of those scenes annoyed and wondering why. Why it is always so necessary to so many plots? Do we live in a world where with so many stories about people being violated?

Surely there are other forms of character development out there.

So I did not finish. Moving on!

To anyone who did manage to finish this book, send me an email. How did the whole romance turn out? Is there any way those crazy kids got a happy ending?

Biography, Nonfiction, True Crime

Number 26: Has an “Author’s Note”

KC

The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York

Alex Palmer

The Santa Claus Man covers the same period of time that Edith Wharton skewered so brilliantly in fiction, but it’s even more disquieting because it was real, and I loved it as much as I love all Gilded Age tales. The New York this book describes is a utopia where children’s letters to Santa are always answered and Boy Scouts keep American manhood alive.

But, of course, this was a fantasy. The American experiment has always had duplicity, even in our most cherished institutions. I won’t look at Christmas the same way after reading this, but I do appreciate it more.

Fairy Tales, Fantasy, Fiction, Young Adult

Number 35: From the Villain’s Perspective

KC

A Villains Collection (Villains #1-3)

By Serena Valentino

I realized about a third of the way into this ebook that what I borrowed was actually the first three books in a series, not a standalone novel featuring my favorite villains. Of course by that point I was emotionally invested, and too lazy to download three separate ebooks, so I powered through, and I am glad I did.

My favorite so far is the third one, Poor Unfortunate Soul, the tale of Ursula from Little Mermaid. This story is the bleakest and most nihilistic of the three, but it also seems to be the point in the trilogy where Serena Valentino found her writing groove. The hopelessness of Ursula’s pain and rage fit the tone of the original Hans Christian Andersen story better than Disney usually allows, and it is the first of the Villains novels that felt like it delivered on its promise.

I cannot wait to read more!

Poetry

Number 23: Author with an X, Y, or Z in their name

KC

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Omar Khayyám, Edward FitzGerald (Translator)

I enjoyed this one so much more than I expected! Poetry can be difficult to get through, but this is a delightful little ode to coping with the fear of nihilism through sheer, unbridled hedonism. And with versus like this, how can you resist?

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend;

Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie,

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and – sans End!

It gives me chills. But it’s not all wine, gin gets a mention.

Oh Thou who didst with Pitfall and with Gin

Beset the Road I was to wander in,

Thou wilt not with Predestination round

Enmesh me, and impute my Fall to Sin?

But it’s mostly wine.

And lately, by the Tavern Door agape,

Came stealing through the Dusk an Angel Shape,

Bearing a vessel on his Shoulder; and

He bid me taste of it; and ’twas- the Grape!

I will be borrowing from it the next time I need to give a toast.

Memoir, Nonfiction, Pop Culture

Number 17: A Book Picked Based on its Spine

KC

The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

Grace Perry

The category for this was obvious. This was the book that I picked based on its spine. I grew up in the 2000s, and I have so much nostalgia for the time it is a wonder I have space in my brain for anything else. This book did not disappoint! Grace Perry is awesome, and I would like to listen to her thoughts forever.

And now, a montage of the various pop culture this book made me miss:

What came first, the overeager collegiate dyke desperate for affection or the Banter Boy… was I mirroring him or relating to him?

So, that’s when I became a girl. At a time where gender-bending was encouraged and celebrated, but homophobia still reigned.

What a decade it was! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some movies to rewatch.

Financial, Investing, Memoir, Nonfiction

Number 10: A Book Based on A Real Person

KC

Invest Like a Shark: How a Deaf Guy with No Job and Limited Capital Made a Fortune Investing in the Stock Market

by James DePorre

Invest Like a Shark is a book on investing that dates back to 2007. I specifically picked it for this fact because 2007 seems like a lifetime ago. Since then, there has been a recession and a pandemic, the near-domination of the tech industry, and the introduction of cryptocurrency, so I was genuinely curious how dated this book would feel.

The answer is, not very.

Since this is a story of one man’s investment strategy, it is heavy on theory, but not as heavy on the mechanics of actually trading stock. In terms of investing metaphors, it is less egregious than some I have ready, but I am not a person who does well using with heavy visual metaphors to explain abstract concepts, so my memory of the book looks something like this:

Photo by Harrison Haines on Pexels.com
Photo by adiprayogo liemena on Pexels.com
Photo by Vova Krasilnikov on Pexels.com

Also, there is a forward by Jim Cramer, so you can’t say you don’t know what you’re getting into.

Fiction, gothic romance, Historical Romance, Romance

Number 15: A Five-Syllable Title

KC

My Cousin Rachel

By Daphne du Maurier

When I picked up this novel in the early days of 2020, my impression was “wow, this book seemed right up my alley: gothic romance, brooding heroes, moral ambiguity. What’s not to love?”

Perhaps she was two persons, torn in two, first one having way and then the other.

And love it I did, right up until March of 2020, when I was about a third of the way done. At this point in time, I was working long hours in a cubicle at my corporate job and living in a wonderfully creepy cabin down a dirt road in the country. It was a perfect setting for a slow read full of meditations on good and evil, love and betrayal.

But then the pandemic forced us into our homes for over a year, and I traded the cabin in the country for an apartment in the city, and the idea of life on a manor suddenly seemed too claustrophobic for my tastes.

So I put it down and did not pick it up again until I decided to do this challenge. To give myself a head start on reading two books a week for the next six months, I cheated a little (shhhhh), and decided to go with a book I already started.

Once again, this book did not resonate with me.

My tutor… told us once that truth was something intangible, unseen, which sometimes we stumbled upon and did not recognise…

In all likelihood, it just has not aged well. When My Cousin Rachel was written, people had longer attention spans, and the anti-hero was a less common trope. This book has phenomenal writing, but what made it unique at the time has been done countless times since then. Overall it was a good read, but it felt too familiar to be groundbreaking.