July Wrap Up
Since we are nearly halfway through August, I guess I could review the books I finished in July. Here we go.
Just Plain Filthy: The Story Behind Book Banning's Trial of the Century by Anthony Aycock - I can't believe I read this just last month. It seems like forever ago. This is about a case in Long Island where a school board decided to ban a list of books from school shelves. They hadn't read the books. They got the list from some other group banning books, and decided to follow suit. The case eventually made it to the Supreme Court, which is unheard of for book banning cases. Of course, Aycock had to go over other book banning cases over the history of the U.S. He also name-dropped a colleague of mine and her book on book banning.
Break Room by Miye Lee - This is so Korean. In my experience, Asian fiction tend to be very weird. This one is about a reality tv show. At the beginning of the filming, the contestants are told that they were nominated by there coworkers as the worst person to share a break room with. They assign everyone a nickname based on their most egregious break room villainy. Our nominator is called Ice Cube because he put soda and coffee in the ice cube trays in the freezer. This is arguably the least heinous crime committed by the contestants. And through the course of the book, you find out each person's reason for doing they thing they are villified for. For example, one woman is accused of leaving a huge cake box in the fridge taking up all the room. She says her coworkers keep giving her cakes. She doesn't even like cake. She doesn't want to take it home. Ice Cube was putting coffee and soda in the ice cubes after hearing a colleague complain about ice watering down her drinks. One of the contestants is actually a mole, planted by the producers. The contestants have to figure out who the mole is to win a cash prize. They can get information about the other contestants by breaking the rules. They don't know what the rules are, but when they break one, they get to choose which contestant they want information about. It is indeed very weird. But honestly, I would probably watch this show, and I hate reality TV.
Everyone in this Bank is a Thief by Benjamin Stevenson - This is the third full novel in a series about Ernest Cunningham who fell into detective work when he was snowed in at a ski resort with his family and someone was murdered. The thing I love about this series is the way he breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader directly. This time, he and his fiancee have traveled across the entire country (Australia) to ask for a loan to start a detective agency. When they meet with the bank president, he wants them to find his missing brother before he'll fund the agency. While they're doing that, a guy comes in to hold up the bank. He takes them all hostage and says he wants $1 from the bank vault. The problem with that is that the missing brother is the only one that knows the code to the vault. It just goes banana pants crazy from there.
The Second Sleep by Robert Harris - I started listening to this one because I really liked Pompeii by the same author. I read that approximately a floppity-jillion years ago. This was absolutely NOT what I expected. It starts out as a medieval mystery. A young priest is sent to a little town in the middle of nowhere England to perform a funeral for the village priest there. When he gets there, he realizes the priest died by a fall from a cliff. There are rumors that he was pushed. While staying in the priest's study, he finds a large collection of books and artifacts from the time before the apocalypse. These things have been ruled heretical by the church and a priest should definitely not have them. Father Christopher can't help himself, and he starts reading. There is a young widow in the area whose late husband collected items from the area that he had dug up from a site on her property. They work together to find out how all these things connect to the death of the priest. There is a twist in this book that absolutely blew my mind. It competely made me rework my ideas about what I thought was happening. I loved it. The end was not how I wanted it to go, but it didn't really ruin my experience.
The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo - This takes place in the 1930s in British-occupied Malaysia. It is told by three narrators: Ren, the former house boy of a doctor who has picked up a lot of medical experience and now is houseboy for a different doctor; Ji Lin, a young woman who is apprenticed to a dressmaker, but moonlights as a dance hall girl to make extra money to pay her mother's gambling debts while keeping said debts secret from her step-father and step-brother; and William, the doctor who is now the employer of Ren and who has noticed that somehow everything always seems to work out for him. Before Ren's former employee died, he told him he had to find his missing finger and reunite it with his body or he would be doomed to walk the earth as a ghost. That finger is what binds all these characters together. Ji Lin finds the finger in the pocket of a man she dances with at the dance hall. She gives it to her step-brother who works at the hospital where they keep various amputated body parts. He figures they can just add it to the pile. This whole story gets twisted by the folk tale of a tiger running around in the night eating people, but he's really a man who turns into a tiger. It's really weird and fascinating. I enjoyed it, even if there is a quasi-incestuous relationship going on.
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster - I read this for a challenge to read a children's chapter book I missed as a kid. Man I sure picked well! I loved all the word jokes that permeated the whole book.
Milo is a boy who is not interested in school or reading or learning. He only wants to play outside. One day he finds a toy tollbooth in his room. He puts it all together in his room and gets his toy car and drives through the tollbooth. Suddenly, he is not in his room. He drives on until he finds a town. He gets roped into saving the entire land by rescuing the two princesses Rhyme and Reason who have been imprisoned in a tower. Their brothers have quarrelled ever since and they are the kings of two separate areas: one based on the idea that words are worth more than numbers, and the other insists that numbers are more important than words. Tock the Dog goes along with him as well as a humbug.
It's just lots of fun, and I'm glad I forced myself to read another middle grade book this year.
Shady Hollow by Juneau Black - Vera Vixen is a journalist for the Shady Hollow paper. She hears the gossip columnist exclaiming that she found the body of the grumpy toad that lives at the pond floating in the pond. Vera of course goes to investigate. When the police officer pulls the body out of the water, there is a knife in his back. Murder! The coroner determines the toad was actually poisoned, not stabbed or drowned. When the owner of the local mill nearly dies from the same poison, Vera is definitely going to find the killer.
Everyone in this town is a woodland critter. The Chief of Police is nearly useless, but the one officer is no dummy. The local vegan restaurant is owned by a Panda Bear. Obviously he's from out of town. There is a sheep that is known as a fast lady and is known to have had affairs with men all over town. It's adorable and a fun cozy mystery.
Freaky in Fresno by Laurie Boyle Cromton - When I started this, I thought I was not going to like it. Ricki, the narrator, and her cousin Lana used to be best friends, but their interests diverged and they both felt like the other had turned her back on them and they are now really mean. I didn't think I'd like it because Ricki was just as much of an asshole as Lana. Their aunt gives them a cotton candy pink Buick Skylark (my grandparents had one of these, not in pink) but they have to share it equally. This is where it becomes a re-telling of Freaky Friday. Ok, now we're getting somewhere. Watching these girls figure out how to live each other's life so that they don't mess them up, is really fascinating. Of course, the figure out how the other person is feeling about their relationship and how hard it is to live their life. This is really confusing.
The aunt who gave them the car lives in a yurt in the middle of the desert and owns three wolf dogs. The dogs were, of course, the best part of the story.
That should be 8 books. Not too shabby. We are nearly halfway through August and I've only finished 1. Probably won't make it to 8 books this month. That's ok. Some of these books had a lot of pages. Maybe I should be tracking pages instead of number of books. That would be really hard. I'll consider.