r/IReadABookAndAdoredIt

I adored this book! It’s hard to find a book that can balance some very dark stuff with a proper dose of absurdity. What an absolute fun ride it was throughout. Initially, as I read the first few pages, I thought this book would be pretty surface level as it was heavily leaning into over-the-top (almost slapstick) scenarios, but I was surprised at how much I cared for the characters towards the end. This is such a wild ride of a book. Quirky, hilarious, chaotic, and dark at times, but ultimately full of heart. Absolutely recommend!

A quick one second summary on it:

A 60-ish year old lottery winner embarks on a journey across the US with his daughter, two of his recently orphaned niece and nephew, and cat that can predict when someone dies, to win the heart of the “one who got away”. Crazy plot right?! Trust me, it all makes sense!

A favorite quote of mine:

“Death is a magnificent invention, the cat knew, because it’s the impermanence of life that makes it beautiful.”

What a book! This is exactly what the movie “300” should have been: an in-depth study of the Spartan philosophy towards life and war. I found the beginning a little slow until the narrator, Xeones, finally made his way to the service of the Spartans and began to describe their training and lifestyle. From then on, I couldn’t put it down as Pressfield masterfully depicted the battle scenes but also the more emotional and vulnerable moments of the fierce men and women.

My favorite character by far was Dienekes: an Obi-Wan like figure that exhibited a lot of wisdom and thought underneath his weathered appearance. The moments where he discussed fear and the proper responses were inspiring. Gates of Fire is a perfect example of why the historical fiction genre is so intriguing and incredible.

Everywhere Mallory goes, people die, and she can't help herself from solving the crime. Thinking it's all her fault and she's a catalyst for murder, Mallory seeks sanctuary on an alien space station where humans are forbidden. Unfortunately, murders and her need to solve them, follow her into space.

I really thought this would be a fun sort of Murder She Wrote on a space station, but it was actually far more complex and layered than that. Very pleasantly surprised! I'm going to start the sequel right away!

I literally just finished this and I’m almost bursting to tell someone about it. After their parents die, seven nearly-feral sisters decide to withdraw from society even more and survive on their own in the woods. This book was fun, exciting, gross, inventive, and engaging until the last page. It’s the best book I’ve read so far this year (okay, maybe a close second to Wolf Hall). I can’t recommend it enough.

I like to keep up with children's/middle grade fiction so I can gift my nieces and nephew books that aren't just the ones I remember from my childhood. I read Sangu Mandanna's adult books so when I saw she had a middle grade book I wanted to check it out and honestly I think I loved it even more than her adult books.

Vanya is a normal girl growing up in the UK. Well mostly normal she can talk to the priceless books in her parents bookshop and they actually talk back. She thinks she's the only one but when a monster attacks her family she learns there are a lot of secrets her parents have been keeping from her.

After the secret magical world her parents have been hiding from her is revealed she's whisked off to a magic school/library - Auramere. Where she learns about the wonderful magic that exists in the world but also about new dangers she could have never imagined before.

This book was such a delight to read. Vanya is such a fun character to follow and there are so many great side characters. The author weaves in different creatures from different places and cultures in a really interesting way. Also the audiobook was so well done. If you enjoy middle grade books or have kids in your life I highly recommend it

the story - Midnight's Children is about Saleem Sinai, who is born exactly at midnight on August 15, 1947 the moment India becomes independent. He later discovers that he and the other children born in the first hour of independence have special powers, with his own being the ability to communicate with them. As Saleem grows up, his life is shaped by family secrets, love, loss, and major political events like wars and the Emergency. The novel mixes history with magic and fantasy to show how Saleem's personal journey mirrors the story of modern India, exploring themes of identity, destiny, and the impact of history on ordinary people.

why I liked it - this book sold itself to me solely on the basis of prose! It’s a beautiful beautifu book. Even at those points where I’m not fully engaged I cpuld continue that’s how evocative and vivid the prose is. also, I usually do not enjoy magical realism but here it worked for me to an extent

I truly do consider this to be the best modern American gothic I have read in years. SGJ is almost flawless in all his executions in this book and I enjoyed it SO much.

This is actually so rich, beautiful and transcendent idek. I actually felt like I had to get out sticky notes to mark things which admittedly I hardly do lol. I’ll dogear pages sometimes but I was like stunned frequently and just had to w this book. I feel like this found the transience and liquidity of meaning. Her prose kind of says you might be everything, and that is almost unbearable

I almost read it like an elegy for both the living and the dead or maybe for those in-between, all the ghosts that wander the earth

She’s always testing whether meaning can be honestly held by someone, and her prose is so precise and specific about the that inner way of looking out at the world. I think it rested the entire time in that in-between place between the physical world and our interpretation of it or what is beyond it, what we can extract from it even as it moves away from us or we move away from it or even if like Lucille all we want to extract is fitting in or presenting an image (opposite of Ruthie who doesn’t care she’s almost a living ghost, quiet and letting intensity wash over her at all points)

Sometimes I really started thinking about Keats and the concept of negative capability which is the capacity to remain in uncertainty and intensity without grasping for relief, which I think this asks of the reader. I also love that the intensity never feels contrived, it just feels like it has to happen, like it is inevitable

Anyways wow I’m gonna put an excerpt here cos nothing I can really say will accurately explain how I felt about this book.

“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rise finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be a greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and it’s shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, brings us wild strawberries.”

Just finished A Good Person and loved (to hate) it. Its protagonist Lillian is perhaps the most frustrating anti hero I've ever read -- in exactly the way the author intends.

She's given juuuuust enough of a tragic backstory to ensure you give her the benefit of the doubt, and then goes and does something so stupid, self sabotaging and harmful that you want to rip your hair out. She's like if instead of being filled with cunning Amy Dunne was filled with wine (there is Mad Men levels of booze consumption in this book).

It's just...a beautiful mess, written incredibly with more than enough killer one liners to have you chuckling as you cringe page after page. Bit of a content warning - there is one scene in the first third that features some pretty awful SA, which our main character views so flatly and appears so unimpacted, I found it chilling.

In fact (not to play armchair Psychologist here) it's very clear Lillian has...something. BPD, Narcissistic Personality disorder...psychopathy? Hard to say, but as you read along you're living in the head of a stunningly anti social, unempathetic person. And it feels very real (and weird.)

All in all -- check it out if you have the stomach for TRULY unlikeable protags!

Many of you are probably familiar with this book, as it's a classic that's been around for decades. I was introduced to it when in middle school when it was part of our reading curriculum. This book was important to me because it helped broaden my taste in reading. Prior to this book, I was mostly into science fiction and fantasy. I adore this book, because it is a ground and harrowing adventure, and the main character, Dicey, is a strong female character.

Homecoming is the beginning of a series, but you could just enjoy this book and it would not be necessary to read the rest. I think I read the sequel, Dicey's Song, years ago, and I would be curious to see where the story goes through the rest of the novels.

The story follows Dicey and her siblings, who are abandoned by their mother at a shopping mall in Connecticut when the story begins. Dicey is 13, and works to keep her siblings safe, fed, and together as they're journey to find a new home.

I recently found this copy at a thrift store. It's a 1st edition former library copy, and I had to repair the binding, but otherwise it's in good shape. I'm looking forward to reading this story to my own daughter.

WOW.

This collection of short stories about love just absolutely tore me apart in the best possible way! I didn't expect to be as moved by the shorter stories as I was, but every single piece in this book had at least one line that made me pause reading and just sit and think about what I'd just read. Absolutely incredible. I checked it out from my library but when I get paid tomorrow I will be buying my own copy!

Anyone else who's read this: I would love to know which piece was your favorite! I think mine was "A Serial Monogamist's Guide to Important New York City Landmarks."

What I appreciated the most about “Hiroshima” was how no words felt like they were wasted. Hersey describes the suffering of the six individuals that the narration revolves around and others without dwelling on them, even though it would have been righteous for him to do so. The admiralty of the six individuals is not in their survival of the atomic bomb but how they responded to it in their personal ways. A very short book and one I’d encourage everybody to read.

I loved this book so much— it is brave, heartbreaking, unflinching, unapologetic and gorgeously written.

It opens with Jan living in a shack on the coast of Mexico, waiting for her 22-year-old husband John to come home, hoping that he’s caught some fish because otherwise they have nothing for dinner. She is eight months pregnant. She is fifteen years old.

From that opening the book divides into two alternating narratives. One is about her childhood and everything that led up to Mexico. Her mother was a fearless child of the ‘60s, entangled with the Beat poets, but women sometimes get pregnant, and men romanticizing being On The Road aren’t going to stick around for that. Jan grew up in true poverty, but loved deeply by a mother who worked hard to balance her own restlessness with her children’s needs. Sometimes that was enough. Sometimes it wasn’t.

The other narrative moves forward into the years after Mexico, becoming a coming-of-age story told from the road. You travel with Jan through the ‘70s, sampling hippie life on the West Coast, a dip into sex work in the Southwest, a journey back south into Central and then South America where she ends up with a man whom she truly believes is going to kill her, and from whom she must escape.

I don’t know how bleak I’m making this all sound, but the book doesn’t feel that way when you read it. Jan is utterly unapologetic and she also asks for no pity from you as a reader – in fact she actively refuses it. She has a sly feminist eye and does not miss the fact that exploitation always seems to end up in play with the men she gets involved with— as she says, “somehow I always ended up playing the servant”— but the next job, the next man, the next adventure is always just a bus ride away. She dips in and out of drugs and in and out of sex work, as she owns all of her choices. And the book is full of her joy in stolen moments— in fifth grade when her mother was a month late bringing her back to school from their beach vacation, and she was briefly queen of fifth grade and the envy of all the other kids there; the beauty of the birds surrounding her in Mexico as she sits and watches them for hours in the lush greenery; the friendships with women that she makes along the way- especially that.

This is a book about women in a way that only slowly becomes clear, as you move toward the book’s point, its revelation, and I don’t want to give that away. I will say it very much is a book about mothers and daughters.

This particular edition has an awful introduction. Do you ever read an introduction and think, “did you just read the same book I read?” I don’t think either the reviewer’s judgmental views on drug use nor her fascination with Jack Kerouac served her very well (Jan only met her famous father twice and even in that brief span she noticed his sexism). Jan didn’t write this about her father, she wrote this about her own journey.

It’s not just her story that haunts me now, a week after I finished it, but also some of the images and moments that she describes so beautifully that it’s as if you were there. At the same time, I don’t think I’ll see the Beat poets the same way: “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” looks a lot grimmer from a woman’s point of view.

Such a powerful book. It’s an incredible ride.