Kiwiria's October Reads

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Slightly more books than usual (or what's become usual post knitting anyway) this month, due to Dewey's Read-a-thon! :)
I'm posting this early, as I'm heading off to London later today (yay!), so if I finish any more books by the end of today, I'll just add it to November's tally instead :)

( 16 books this month )

Book of the Month: A tie between The Keepers of the Library and Shadow of the Night

Biggest Disappointment: Probably Crown Duel... I liked it well enough, but had expected more.

October Books

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The Ground She Walks Upon by Megan McKinney
I remember reading this in high school and swooning at the romance and the angst...oh, but reading it again I was embarrassed for my teenage self! What a cheesy, silly, melodramatic book! There is a curse on Niall Trevalyan's family, and the only way to break it is (he's told) to marry the orphan Ravenna, who is 20 years younger than he is. But rather than just courting her like any normal person would do, he seduces her, insults her, and tries to force her into marriage.

Good times.

The Taming of the Tights by Louise Rennison
The first two books in this series were funny, but the jokes are wearing thin at this point, and the plot seems to be stuck in a loop. Tallulah has long gangly legs she can't quite control sometimes. One of her teachers hates her for no apparent reason. The school she goes to is so ridiculous I can't imagine any sane parent continuing to send their child there, but every semester here they are back again, learning...not very much, really. The only reason I'm still reading these is for the Hinchcliff boys and their Yorkshire accents.

On the Noodle Road by Jen Lin-Liu
Jen Lin-Liu is obsessed with noodles. (I read her first book and it was all about eating noodles, too.) So despite her recent marriage and her just-getting-started cooking school in Beijing, she sets off along the ancient Silk Route to see whether the old story of Marco Polo bringing noodles to Italy from China has any truth. For the most part this was fascinating - when's the last time you read about daily life in Uzbekistan, for goodness' sake? - but when she stops talking about food and starts whining about her husband (How can he not like his brand new wife traveling through Central Asia on her own? What's wrong with him? *facepalm*) it gets a little tedious.

Emerald Green by Kerstin Gier
I feel like I've been waiting for this book forever! The last in the trilogy, this one promised to finally reveal all the time-traveling secrets and whether Gwen could trust Gideon or not, as well as what Count Saint-Germain was really up to. It was all that and more. I could not put this book down - I read it in a day and a half - and at the end I wished it would have been twice as long. The writing isn't perfect (though I'm willing to assume that's all because it's translated from German), and sometimes Gwen seems very young - "we're all in danger, yes, but what are we going to wear to the costume party???" - but it was such a fun book. Such a fun series.

Vicious by V.E. Schwab
Usually I keep track of books I want to read pretty well, but I can't for the life of me remember how this one ended up on my to-read list. It actually had kind of a fascinating premise - two college roommates come up with a hypothesis about how superheroes get their powers and set out to become superheroes themselves. Ten years later they're mortal enemies, but which one is the hero and which one is the villain? - but it was so violent and disturbing that I couldn't take it. I gave it up after about ten chapters.

Dreaming in Hindi Katherine Russell Rich
This has been on my book-radar for a while, but I was put off for a kind of shallow reason: the font they used for the title makes it look like Tamil or Malayalam, not Hindi. And now that I've read it I'm pretty underwhelmed. Part travelogue, part research on how we learn languages and second languages, in particular, the book never really goes anywhere. There are a lot of, "If only I'd known then..." foreshadowing moments that aren't connected later, so the story parts of the book leave you with a vague sense of unease when nothing bad is happening. And while I'm nowhere near as fluent in Hindi as the author, I was surprised by how many simple words she stumbled over. Not knowing what a pappadum is, really? When you've been eating nothing but Indian food for weeks? Or the word "mohabbat" (love), after watching a bunch of Bollywood movies? (Don't get me started on her attitude towards Bollywood...) It was okay, but not as interesting as I'd hoped it would be.

The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca by Tahir Shah
I actually wanted to read a different book by Tahir Shah, but the library only had this one, so I checked it out to see what his writing is like. Oh, I loved this book! It has everything I want in a good novel - exotic locales, a big mysterious old house, a little mystery, a little humor, a little drama - but it's all true. I loved the descriptions of Dar Khalifa, the Caliph's house of the title, and of Casablanca and other parts of Morocco Tahir and his family travel to. The servants frequently had me laughing out loud - there's one part where he lets one of them move in to the guest house after bulldozers knock down the neighborhood where the servant lived, and then the other two go knock down their own homes and come in looking very shifty, claiming the bulldozers also destroyed their homes and they need places to stay, too. And all their elaborate "helpful" rituals to placate the jinns they believe are lurking in the house...

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
I have such mixed feelings about this one. I enjoyed reading it, but the whole time I was nitpicking in my head - Why would "Simon Snow" become so popular in a world where Harry Potter also exists? Why would Cath turn in a fan fiction story for her writing class? Did I miss the part where Levi was supposed to be attractive? The slash-writing fandom thing turned me off, too. I've never understood the appeal of that sort of thing. So overall I'd say I didn't like it, but I also kind of did, just because I like Rainbow Rowell's writing. I enjoyed the way she told the story even though I didn't actually like the story, if that makes sense?