Reading In/Out 5/12/2026
My 4-day weekend ended up offering me quite a lot of reading time, even though I did many loads of laundry and several loads of dishes. Let's review.
OUT
Glory In Death by J.D. Robb - This is the second book in the series and I officially do not care for the narrator. Her accents are not as good as the later narrator. In this one, prominent, beautiful women are being murdered on the street. The killer tries to go after the top crime TV journalist, but accidentally murders her video tech who was wearing her coat. I had the bad guy pegged pretty quickly, but there was a good red herring.
Morgue: A Life in Death by Dr. Vincent Di Maio - This was a morgue memoir. The author was the chief medical examiner in San Antonio for many years, and has some interesting tales to tell. There are really just 6 stories or so told here, but they are all pretty high-profile situations. It was interesting to read about his testimony on cases that relied on an autopsy by a really experienced medical examiner to get to the truth.
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar - This is one of the books Mike got me in March. It's a very short book about two sisters. It has a fairy-tale quality given by the poetic language. There is another world one can access through a grove of trees. One of the sisters falls for a man from the other world and rejects a man from their neighborhood. The man from their neighborhood drowns her in the river and begins to court the sister. The drowned one is resurrected in the other world and has to make a choice about whether or not to go back and warn her sister, or stay where she is. If she stays, she can be herself. If she goes back, she has to change into something else. She goes back as a swan to warn her sister. This is one the first book I read by an AAPI author, although now that I think about it, Lebanese may not count.
Somewhere Only We Know by Maurene Goo - This YA romance was pretty cute, if predictable. Lucky is a Kpop star in Asia who is about to break out in the U.S. after an upcoming appearance on a late-night talk show. She's just finished the last show of her Asian tour and is feeling uncomfortable with how rote it all is. She takes her sleeping pills, and then decides to sneak out of her hotel to get a hamburger. Jack is a teenage kid who is in her hotel because he moonlights as a tabloid photographer. He just got a picture of a famous guy and his mistress in their hotel room. They share an elevator on the way down and go their separate ways. Until they end up on the same bus and he feels bad for the dumb drunk girl and decides to take care of her. He doesn't know who she is until late that night when he's put her to sleep in his bed and decides to scroll the internet. He decides he'll get an exclusive article by hanging out with her all day and taking pictures surreptitiously. Except then he starts to have feelings for her, and he starts to question his plan to expose her.
London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe - This kid from a regular family gets struck by the money bug. He starts hanging out with the rich kids at school. After high school, he starts hanging out with older businessmen from the Middle East. At 19, he disappears and his parents dig into his contacts trying to find him. Turns out, this kid has convinced all these high-powered rich guys that he is the son of a Russian Oligarch. Like with a Russian accent and everything. That's where I'm at right now. I'm 25% into it. I can't imagine what could possibly fill up the other 75%. We have now figured out where he was and what happened to him. What the heck else could there be?
The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan - This is the next book by an AAPI author. Chan is Chinese, which definitely counts as AAPI. I'm almost 40% through this one, but I'm not loving it. Maybe I'm not in the right mood. It's about a woman who leaves her 18-month-old baby alone at home for 2 and a half hours while she went to get a coffee and go to the office. Eventually the police find her and now she's in a lot of trouble. The ex-husband and his new girlfriend get sole custody and she gets sent to a year-long school for good mothers. They use robot dolls to stand in as the children and collect information from them on the mothers' ability to mother. It's pretty gross. They tell the mothers how long to hug, how to do baby talk, and judge them when they can't get their doll children to mind them. Maybe I'm just not in the right head-space, but I am not enjoying it.