Hard to believe, but I read seven (!!) books this month. Only two are murder mysteries, so maybe I’m getting better at branching out? Certainly book clubs help. Two of the books were selections by my Amnesty book club group and two were books that were recommended in my Big Island neighbourhood book club. As mentioned in my 2024 wrap-up, I’m not formally adopting any reading challenges this year, but I do like the 2025 challenges selected by the Reading Glasses podcast, and will keep these in mind over the course of the year. Mostly because I’ve already completed a few of them haha!
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
There’s really nothing like starting the new year off with a refreshingly optimistic outlook on the future, is there? Unfortunately, I wouldn’t know, since I started the year off with this unnerving tale of a dystopian future that seems entirely and ominously plausible. We’ve already seen the freedoms that people are willing to sacrifice in the name of fear and “security”. Well, tack that onto a world where birth rates are way down – and we all know how much capitalism depends on high birth rates – and you find men and women(!!) creating a society where women of childbearing years are assigned by law as handmaids to bear children for couples who are unable to conceive. And really, it only gets worse from here.
As horrifying as the scenarios in the book are, Atwood says in her introduction that everything she writes about has already happened somewhere. As just once example, in 1966 in Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu passed a law requiring women to bear 4 children, and were mandated to take pregnancy tests every month. Why? Because birth and fertility rates were low. I consider this book a cautionary tale, and strongly recommend all women read it.
Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies, by Catherine Mack
This is almost a very fun and entertaining book, except for her heavy-handed overuse of footnotes that were meant to be funny but were actually just distracting. At one point, she does invite you to ignore them, it’s not in my nature so I kept getting pulled abruptly out of the story, often to read a footnote that was not enlightening or funny, but just stupid. If you’re gong to read this book consider keeping a piece of paper handy to cover the footnotes so you won’t be tempted like me to read them. Just another casual aside, something that stood out for is is that the main character engages in the same kind of negative self-talk that I do, particularly around missing things she thinks she should have seen coming.
This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams
If you want to read a book with the most poetic and lyrical writing style, a book that makes you savour each and every sentence, paragraph, and chapter, a book that subtly makes you rethink your life priorities, and ultimately a book that just makes you happy, then this is a book for you! Set in a tiny Irish village in 1958, a young man named Noe is sent from Dublin to live with his grandparents. At the same time, the grandparents have taken in a border named Christy, who has come to town to prepare the villagers for the long-awaited arrival of “the electric”. Together, Noe and Christy learn what it means to live a life full of happiness. [many heart emojis]
We Have Always Been Here, by Samra Habib
I’m not sure I’m in love with Samra Habib’s writing style. The book is a memoir, made up of chapters that are essay-ish, a bit like A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, except that Habib’s chapters do seem to connect together a little bit better. Still, it seemed to me like she was just scarping the surface of some deeper and more intimate stories. Like her relationship with her father which, in one moment is completely estranged after she “shames” him by getting divorced, and in the next, has him telling her how he’s proud of the difficult decisions she’s made in her life. I’m not entirely clear how we got from point A to point B. On the other hand, it’s won a boat-load of awards, and hey, I am not a writer! And honestly, memoirs are not my favourite genre, so maybe just ignore me on this one.
A Shimmer of Hummingbirds, by Steve Burrows
Burrows’ best book of the series, so far! I had originally expressed concern that the idiosyncrasies of his characters had the potential to become tiresome without some significant growth over time, and boy does he deliver! Big events happen in this book, many of which actually started in Book 3, and his characters are, I expect, going to be permanently affected.
The Life Impossible, by Matt Haig
On about page 50, this book started to give off some serious Celestine Prophecy vibes. I thought it might recover from that, but it doesn’t. An alien presence bestows magical powers of telepathy, telekinesis, and prognostication on a very few chosen individuals who’s purpose must then become to save the planet. Actually, to save a small island off the coast of Ibiza Spain, but po-tay-to po-tah-to.
I didn’t like this book. I find Matt Haig to be a frustrating over-explainer in a way that feels like he’s delivering a lecture. I said this before, about The Midnight Library. Haig comes across to me like he either doesn’t do nuance or he doesn’t trust his readers to understand nuance. And so he has to explain, ad nauseum, how math works, or how positive thinking works, or how ecosystems work, or how brains work … I could go on (ad nauseum) but I trust that you get the idea. I know lots of people loved this book and found it rewarding, and that’s ok! It’s just not a book for me, and in fact, I think it’s more that Matt Haig is not my thing. This will be the last book of his that I read.
A Room With a View, by E. M. Forster
A Room With A View is in my Top 10 list of favourite movies and, fun fact, it is Helena Bonham Carter’s movie debut! I wanted to rewatch it after the many references that kept popping up in Still Life but it’s not streaming anywhere so I decided to read the book to satisfy a craving. I am very pleased to report that the movie and the book are extremely closing aligned, so reading the story was like playing the movie in my brain. Very satisfying indeed! The book was written in 1908, so if you’re thinking of reading it, fair warning that the language is a bit old-timey on top of English proper. Which is, of course, what makes the movie so charming! BTW, if you happen to own a copy of this movie I would love to borrow it!
