February 2014 Reading List

Started more books this month than I ended up finishing.  Have been focused on reading ones that have been on my shelf for longer than they should have:

1. The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom
2. Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
3. The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar
4. Alif the Unseen by G Willow Wilson
5. The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger

The Kitchen House is a Southern slavery tragedy with a slightly new twist whereby an irish immigrant, orphan girl is thrown into the mix.  As the girl grows up and serves out her indenture the tension increases as she finds herself between two distinct worlds.  It was ok in my opinion -- just ok.

Shadow of Night is the second in a series.  In this outing the couple (witch and vampire) travel back to Elizabethan England to uncover Diana's latent talents.  I really don't like romances which is a key element of this story but I am distracted enough by the complexity of play between the different creatures and the weaving of history into the plot to really enjoy it.  The system of magic that Harkness creates is also very rich and complex that I can totally forget about the lovey dovey stuff.  If you like Outlander by Gabaldon then Shadow is in the same neighborhood.

I very much enjoyed Barbarian Nurseries.  Not so much for it's depiction of a couple going through relationship problems and the effect this has on their housekeeper but more for its slice-of-life description of Southern Californian society and the forces that shape it right now.  Tobar has a technical grasp of language that reminds me of how I would describe something.  His use of wry understatement has to make you laugh out loud sometimes.

I'm still not sure how I feel about Alif.  On the one hand it tells a story that is fresh to westerners like me because it is based in a type of society that I am not very familiar with -- and of course the idea of the Jinn -- and I liked that.  But on the other hand if the subject matter was more familiar to me I might think this story to be overly simplistic.  It took me a while to complete this story which overall tells me that it was just ok.

Having not grown up in the US, I completely missed out on what many high schoolers experience as a rite of passage to read Catcher.  So I addressed this shortcoming by tackling it this month.  I have read that this book is controversial and certainly it must've been when it was released.  But now anyone that reads it for the first time like me has to wonder what the fuss was all about.  Societal attitudes (for most of us anyway) have changed in the past 60 years such that the shock value is not there.  What remains is a very unique narrative style (to me anyway) and reminder of what we have had to deal with as norms have changed.  I am sure that a modern day Holden could still shock us but that would need a rewrite.