Best Books of April
As I say every month, I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Jessica Lahey. She has a recurring monthly date where she reviews all the books she read that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better about doing this.
So. I’m going to review them here and also online, but I’m going to do it a little differently. I’m only going to review the stuff I really liked. I don’t see a reason to spend my time writing about something I didn’t love; it’s just using up more of my energy. So only positive reviews.
These are the books I liked (or mostly liked) from April.
The House in the Cerulean Sea (T. J. Klune): In another time and place, I may have smiled wanly while reading this book, but encountering it during the pandemic was like being thrown a happiness lifesaver. It is such a sweet story about a social worker for magical children who is sent to a remote orphanage to report on the conditions. I loved every character in the book, and I still have Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea” stuck in my head. But mostly I laughed aloud at a time when I really needed a good laugh.
In Five Years (Rebecca Serle): What you think this book is and what this book actually is isn’t clear until you close the last page. And while that normally would have made me annoyed, in this case, I was blown away. Like literally blown away by the ending. It’s a 3 or 4-star book that becomes a 4 or 5-star if you stick with it to the last page. And I can’t reveal any more than that or you won’t get the big mouth drop when you realize that you had it all wrong.
The Secret History (Donna Tartt): It’s a classic. And there’s a reason it’s a classic. A classmate is murdered—you know from the opening that he’s dead—but it takes the whole book until you understand why and how the murderers did it. It’s chilling, and maybe not the best book to read when we’re all feeling a little stressed out by the pandemic. But still an amazing read to put on your TBR list for another time.
Eight Perfect Murders (Peter Swanson): I enjoyed it, but I also had big feelings about the book (see yesterday’s post). So… I give this one a solid maybe. I have the feeling I’d like other books by the author, though I don’t know if you’ll love this one unless you’ve already read all the books that he ruins or if you really don’t care about spoilers. I do care about spoilers, so I had mixed feelings about this book, but it was an enjoyable read, that fact aside.
What did you read last month?
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I’m having trouble reading these days (opting instead for binge watching The Crown), but I’ve added these to my library list. You know. for when libraries open again.
I had a big reading month in April, in part because of a dearth of other leisure activities, and in part because I read simpler/shorter books than usual, for the most part.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. I don’t know what I was expecting with this book. I have been meaning to read it for ages, and it was my first Toni Morrison. It was heavy and depressing and not at all suited to my current mood, but I’m glad I read it.
The Lost Vintage by Ann Mah. This was my book club’s April selection. Although it was quite trite and predictable in some ways, I liked it. I learned something about WWII that I didn’t know before, which is something, given that I’ve read loads of books from that period.
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren. This was a light, quick and entertaining read. . . the kind of book that you zip through and then forget you read a year later.
What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty. I liked this book, too. I read it because it was on Modern Mrs. Darcy’s list of feel-good fiction books you can read in an afternoon.
World War Z by Max Brooks. This book is so much better than the Brad Pitt movie of the same name. I really liked this book, and in an odd way, it made me feel better about our current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic because it highlighted the fact that things could be SO much worse.
The Lost Husband by Katherine Center. This book was outside the norm of what I’d usually read; I picked it up because it was also on Modern Mrs. Darcy’s list of feel-good fiction books you can read in an afternoon. Like The Unhoneymooners, it was a quick, light, forgettable read.
The Last Widow by Karin Slaughter. I’m a big Slaughter fan, and this book was a really good one, typical of her style.
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. I bought the Kindle version of this book after hearing about on Hax’s chat. I read a little bit each day at lunch over weeks because I wanted to savor it. It really give me a mental boost when one was desperately needed.
I had real trouble reading in April. I was trying to get some things done in April, but didn’t succeed with much, though I did make my first batch of sticky buns!
Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak was good, but also a bit frustrating, and took me a while to read. I also kept feeling this dissonance in the first half – for some reason I first pictured it in New York or somewhere like that, and kept being jolted back to Sydney (I think), Australia, until finally I settled in! I don’t know if I would have gobbled it up at another time, but I liked it better once I figured out what was going on. I don’t always like his prose – it is as if he is trying too hard to be poetic, and sometimes it works beautifully, and sometimes it is like fingernails across a blackboard. I gave it four stars on Goodreads.
I listened to the audiobook of Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka on my daily lockdown walks. I’d never read it before, though I knew what it was about. But when I saw it on my library app, and that it was read by Benedict Cumberbatch, I couldn’t resist it. I enjoyed it, but perhaps its story of otherness was not what I was looking for at this time. So I gave it a solid three stars, which for me means it is good, I recommend it, but it won’t go in my list of favourites.
I read two other books in two different series of easy books I’ve been reading. They’re not great, either of them (different authors), there’s no character development, and everything is resolved too easily, but they are books you can fly through in almost one sitting. I know I’ll read the next in the series too, just because. They were just what I needed to get my reading mojo back, and get back on track for my Goodreads target this year.
Late to the party (it’s almost time to list May books!! eeekkkk…) I only read two books in April: “The Women in Black” by Madeleine St. John, which was a fun, fast little read, and “Rilla of Ingleside” by L.M. Montgomery (about Anne of Green Gables’s daughter growing up during the years of WWI — possibly my very favourite of all her novels). That was a re-read, although it’s been quite a while since the last time I read it. I picked it up again when I found a Facebook group that’s doing an in-depth readathon of the book, and I am enjoying the discussion hugely. 🙂
I read “The Secret History” years ago, when it first came out in paperback. I remember it as being very dark but also un-put-downable.