Week in Review: 3/1 – 3/7

Here’s what I read this past week along with some thoughts on the books. Hopefully I can do these every week from now on! I just don’t always have enough to say to warrant a full review. 😅

Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by Lorna Landvik – 3/1/20
5 stars
I enjoyed this book way more than I thought I would. Someone suggested it in the Goodreads group for the POPSUGAR challenge and I thought “Well, why not?” since I needed to fulfill the prompt. This book about a group of neighbors with a book club just grew on me. It is definitely a friendship book which I normally don’t enjoy (mainly because they remind me I don’t have any supportive friends) but these were all very real characters with very real problems and it made me feel like I was kind of tagging along, in it with them. This is a book I would recommend to my mom (though definite content warning for someone getting cancer!).

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami – 3/3/20
4 stars
I also read this for the book challenge, since its title is a pun in Japanese, though I had it on my to-read list ever since someone recommended I check out Murakami since I was having a “surrealist Japanese literature” moment. It is mainly about a woman, Aomame, who finds herself in a different reality than the one she knew and a man, Tengo, who helps a perplexing young author rewrite her strange and captivating story. I can’t in good faith say just anyone should read this book as it is 900+ pages (or 46 hours) long. On top of that, this is an excellent translation in that it retains a sense of not having been written in English, which makes this a more involved read. The story is very Western influenced but definitely Japanese. both surreal and grounded in reality, and very much a reader’s book.

Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky – 3/4/20
3 stars
In 1999, Stephen Chbosky wrote one of my favorite YA novels The Perks pf Being A Wallflower. Then, 20 years later, this book was published. It bares little resemblance to Perks and that is okay. It is about a young boy who gets lost in the woods for several days and comes back a little different and with a new friend only he can hear. I did enjoy reading this book, and then somewhere around the middle, I found I really didn’t care what happened in the end. I couldn’t say exactly when, but at some point I was reading just to finish. It’s not extraordinarily long, only 705 pages or 24 hours, so it;s not that I got bored, the story just failed to make me keep caring about it’s characters or the resolution. Despite that, the first half was very good to me, so that’s why this sits at 3 stars and not 2.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin – 3/5/20
4 stars
This book has been on my to-read list for a bit, since I decided to read all the recent Hugo Best Novel winners. Since two cities get absolutely decimated within the first few pages, I figured this would fit my :seven deadly sins” prompt for wrath. This book is about three women orogenes, who are a special group of people who are feared for their ability to control the earth. Just amazing worldbuilding and an excellent science fantasy novel. I will definitely be reading the sequels!

Be sure to check my POPSUGAR Reading Challenge and 2020 Books posts for updates on how I’m doing on those fronts! Click below to subscribe and get email notifications for new posts!