broro117's reviews
177 reviews

The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty

3.0

The Best Friend Reading Challenge: A New York Times Best Seller from the year we graduated high school

There are so many secrets about our lives we'll never know.

As someone who's discovered more unsettling secrets about a loved one in the past couple years than I'd ever been prepared to in the course of my lifetime and is still actively working through the resulting betrayal trauma, this book was honestly a little difficult and even triggering to read at times — but I've been trying not to hold that against it.

I will say, though, that I found the titular secret and the story behind it to be a bit lackluster and less scandalous than the summary and the lead-up to the reveal implied. It might be my fault for being desensitized, but I guess I was hoping for something more gruesome, harder to guess, and just… chewier? As it was, I thought the interpersonal dynamics explored throughout were much more interesting than the secret itself.

Overall, it's an entertaining story, but after a certain point it got fairly repetitive; I think the page length could've been trimmed down quite a bit. Also, as I previously noted in my review of The Girl on the Train, I continue to be appalled at the unrestrained fatphobia that seems to run rampant in Australian and British media. This book contains the following actual sentence: "It was as though she'd thought that Felicity's fatness cushioned her feelings, as though she believed that Felicity must surely know and accept that no ordinary man could really love her!" I mean, oof.

And one last note — I followed along with the Kindle copy as I listened to the audiobook, and I've never known the physical and audiobook editions to differ so significantly. Names were changed, sentences and paragraphs were added/omitted/rearranged, and in the most glaring instance, an entire chapter was deleted from the Kindle version.

Quotes that spoke to me:

• This was how you lived with a terrible secret. You just did it. You pretended everything was fine… You somehow anesthetized yourself so that nothing felt that bad, but nothing felt that good either.
• You could spend your whole life looking at the people you loved in an oblique, halfhearted way, as if you were deliberately blurring your vision, until something like this happened, and then just looking at that person could be terrifying.
• Falling in love was easy. Anyone could fall. It was holding on that was tricky.
• That was why the sex had been so good with Connor: because they were essentially strangers. It was his otherness. It made everything — their bodies, their personalities, their feelings — seem more sharply defined, and therefore superior. It wasn't logical, but the better you knew someone, the more blurry they became. The accumulation of facts made them disappear. It was more interesting wondering if someone did or didn't like country music than knowing one way or the other.
• They could fall in love with fresh, new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of otherness, a level far beyond what sort of music they liked. It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship.

*Listened to audiobook

Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free by Linda Kay Klein

I read this on the recommendation of a friend who shared a similar religious upbringing to mine and who, like me, has also spent the past few years disassembling her faith and figuring out which parts of it she wants to keep and which parts are better left in the past. I certainly think this book would be massively helpful for anyone starting out on their deconstruction journey or anyone who's experienced sexual shame as a result of religion and is looking to kickstart their healing process.

However, I think I'm a little too far into my deconstruction journey to get as much out of this book as I might have. Also, although I participated in purity culture at the height of my religiosity — I did attend "Silver Ring Thing" and wore the accompanying ring on a daily basis for a long time afterward — at my core, I never 100% bought into the sex-shaming practices of the church.

I did suffer quite a bit as a result of loved ones and others around me who did buy in, but even as a teenager I thought the chewed-up-gum metaphor was wrongfully demeaning, the abstinence-only sex ed programs were woefully naive, and that the church sorely needed to reevaluate its stance on sex and sexuality. But I'm very glad this book exists as a resource for those who find themselves at a pivotal point in their healing journey.

Quotes that spoke to me:

• On the Romans 14 verse that's been used as justification for the whole "stumbling block" idea: Look a little earlier in the chapter and it becomes clear that Paul's larger point is that we should spend less time judging others' choices as right or wrong — arguing that a multiplicity of choices can honor the Lord depending on the heart of the individual — and that we should spend more time loving one another.
• Art was ongoing. It was as much about the way the artist projected her voice when she yelled at her neighbor to turn down his music, or grumbled into her coffee in the morning, as it was about what she did onstage. Real art couldn't stop and start any more than life could. So either I was that little girl apologizing on Blue's answering machine, or I was the artist who knew how to sing from a place so low it made her gut shake. I could be either. But I couldn't be both.
• Somehow, purity culture has turned a pornographic fantasy about a virgin turned vamp into "morality," so that now both a woman's nonsexuality before marriage and her hypersexuality after marriage are required for her to be considered good.
• Most of my interviewees eventually have come to the conclusion that the binary itself is the problem. From here, they become uniquely sensitized to fundamentalism in all forms, distrusting any community that claims they have all the answers, that assumes they are all right and that those they oppose are all wrong.
• God is above gender. He sometimes expresses himself as a mother in the Bible. And so we are the image of God most fully when we are together as one. Equal.
• I am still a Christian, but I don't go to church much anymore… I can't bring myself to attend a church that teaches purity culture and other things that I know hurt people as deeply as they do, and when I attend progressive churches I sometimes find myself thinking I may as well be at home watching a TED Talk.

Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

4.0

Very fun, super quick read that anyone who's ever used Slack for work will get a kick out of. Feels like it could be a sister novel to No One Is Talking About This.

Quotes that spoke to me: 

• It's not just the light
  quotidian beauty like [that of a sunset] defies comprehension
  it frustrates the eye.
  Majesty that predictable is impossible to grasp, I think
  so it's impossible to focus your vision on it for too long.
  It's why when you go to the Grand Canyon you wind up spending more time ogling the alien foliage and monitoring the aggressively panhandling squirrels than actually admiring the canyon
  because at a certain point it's too difficult to look at.
• I get completely absorbed in… a minor northeastern city's Facebook group dedicated to the town's "fallen soldiers" (they don't explain what qualifies someone as a fallen soldier but I get the sense it's maybe overdoses) populated with a steady stream of cellphone pictures and snapshots of photographs, actual Polaroid photographs of the recently dead posing in Slavic squats beside the recently mourning with "I miss you" scrawled across them in marker and "never thought I'd have to bury you" in the comments, a dirge scrawled across the bathroom stall of human consciousness right there for me to gaze upon until I just can't anymore, I just can't it's too much it hurts or worse it doesn't hurt but it should, somehow, I mean that kind of pain should hurt a person, it should cause physical pain in their body so I flinch at where the pain isn't and I click away from the fallen soldiers and check my email and turn up Spotify by one, two bars.
• We love to say the digital is fleeting
  like a sunset
  but these scraps of ourselves we fling into the ether will outlive most of us, like the sun.
• It’s overwhelming for a species that was basically content with an oral tradition of a handful of long-ass stories about the same six shitty gods for millennia
  now we can do all this knowing and empathizing and not-empathizing around innumerable tiny human stories and we can never fully succeed reprogramming our minds to get good at it.
• We keep forgetting to preserve things
  because it's just there every day and why would anyone want to remember last week's internet -- and we don't, but we want to remember the fifteen-years-ago internet and that was last week's internet, once.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

3.5

The Best Friend Reading Challenge: A book set in Ohio or written by an Ohioan

I really enjoyed this book for what it was, especially because I currently live ~15 minutes away from where it takes place and this is one of those books where the setting really does feel like another character.

However, there were several plot points that were implausible enough to take me out of the story a bit

(Bebe catching a last-minute flight to China despite having no money or passport for her baby, Mia refusing money from Pauline, Mia never talking to her parents again after Warren's funeral even though the reason they stopped talking had been her "selling" her baby, Elizabeth conveniently having to leave the room just long enough for Elena to look at the clinic records, Lexie using Pearl's name at the clinic, Mrs. Peters refusing to use the students' bathroom for hours until she soils herself, etc)

.

I really appreciated the overall nuance and complexity of the characters and their world; Ng is really talented at creating a fully fleshed-out image. But there were a couple moments in which I wasn't sure I sided with the characters Ng seems to want the reader to side with.

I'm mainly referring to Mia's decision to lie to the Ryans and go on the run with Pearl. There was no indication prior to this decision of Mia having any desire to be a mother; getting pregnant seemed like something she did purely out of financial necessity. Her decision rubbed me the wrong way, and I mostly just found myself hoping the Ryans found a way to have the child they so badly wanted.

Side note: The show is probably one of the worst book-to-screen adaptations I've ever seen. Characters, storylines, and motivations are butchered left and right, especially everything regarding Mia's character. Where the book (mostly) gets its points across with subtlety and restraint, the show clumsily hits you over the head with them.

*Listened to audiobook

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

5.0

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Did not finish book. Stopped at 62%.

I started this book in March 2023. It's now nearly June 2024, and although I've occasionally mustered the will to trudge through a few more pages of this book over the past 15 months, today my last little bit of will to continue finally evaporated.

As much as I know there's no shame in DNFing and that life is too short to force yourself to finish a book you're not enjoying, I'd heard enough good things from people whose opinions I trust that I thought I had to eventually find something I liked about this… right? Well, that never happened. In fact, I disliked this book nearly as much as I dislike its godawful cover.

But maybe "dislike" is the wrong word. It's more like there was just nothing to like. Despite there being approximately a million characters (none of whom I could keep straight), every single one of them feels cold and totally devoid of charm. I couldn't connect to them at all because they didn't ring true as human beings. I didn't like spending time in this world one bit, which is truly an impressive feat, as Italy has been the #1 destination on my bucket list for years now. Ferrante managed to cast a bleak shadow with no redeeming qualities over a country I adore.

Normally when I've gone a month or two without picking up a certain book, I'll quickly skim over what I've read to get myself back up to speed. But I never did that with this book because I didn't want to spend any more time with it than I had to, and as it turns out, I'm not actually obligated to spend any time with it at all.

Now excuse me while I spend the evening watching The Lizzie McGuire Movie and Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy to restore some of what this book tarnished.

The Trees by Percival Everett

2.5

The Best Friend Reading Challenge: A book by an author of a different race

Huh. This one fell flat for me, but it also definitely won't be my last Percival Everett.

To start, my main gripe is that the white supremacists in this book are portrayed grotesque and overly cartoonish. Take this line, for instance, that made me physically wince while listening to it:

“That Hannity is cute,” Fancel said. “If I could get my hand anywhere near my vajayjay, I’d rub me one out just watchin’ him.”

I get that this is supposed to be funny, but I didn't find this brand of Everett's humor funny at all. In fact, I found this to be the novel's biggest issue. I think this type of condescension, painting white American conservatives as drooling buffoons, seriously undermines what Everett is going for. I understand the desire to mock people who've perpetuated hundreds of years of racial violence, but leaning too far into that is to the story's detriment. 

These characters are so one-dimensional they don't seem real, and the people involved in these atrocities were/are very real. The insidiousness of these bigots and extremists lies in the fact that they seem like everyone else, not like obviously inept morons. This type of othering doesn't help anyone, and honestly, I think it's dangerous and pretty irresponsible. I guess I want more subtlety in my satire. 

On some nit-pickier notes, the details of the murder scenes quickly grew very repetitive. The book itself needed a better editor. Some details were repeated after a few pages like they'd never been mentioned the first time, such as

Mama Z's father being hanged

.

There were also some easy fact-checking errors, like two-way police radios being used in 1913. The lynchings mentioned in the book (I looked up every single one) were only meant to be from 1913 on, but many of them were from long before that. And in one particularly embarrassing blunder, the names of lynching victims were wrong: Brothers Major and Andrew Clark and sisters Maggie and Alma Howze were lynched together in 1918, but the book referred to the victims as "Andrew Clark, Alma Major, and Maggie House."

And on one final kind-of-petty note, I found the audiobook narrator's line reading to be really poor and often confusing in a way that also hurt my experience with the book.

*Listened to audiobook

Galatea by Madeline Miller

4.0

I was never a Percy Jackson kid, but it seems like Hadestown and Madeline Miller are doing their darndest to finally get me into Greek mythology. This very short story packs a punch, with an ending so vivid and clever that I've thought about it several times since. 

I'm excited to read Miller's other works. (Speaking of which, I saw some news from years ago that she was working on a Persephone book? I hope to god that's still true, because I will be SAT.)

Bargain Bin Rom-Com by Leena Norms

I adore Leena, and I enjoyed several of the poems in this collection. So this is no fault of hers, but I remain unsure whether poetry is my thing. (I'm still trying to make it my thing, though, as the two daily poetry e-newsletters I subscribe to can attest.)

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

I have a general rule of not rating memoirs, because it feels wrong to rate people on how well I perceive them to have told their own story in the way they wished to tell it.

However, let it be known that this is another example of me really enjoying a well-done graphic novel. It's also one that hit home with me in quite a few ways.

One summer between college semesters, I spent a few weeks working in a Whirlpool plant. I only lasted that long because the work was grueling and they constantly demanded overtime and lengthy weekend shifts at a moment's notice. The plant was notorious for having people simply walk off their lines, never to return. I was constantly exhausted and felt like I didn't have any time to breathe between working and crashing as soon as I got home. 

I was in awe of all the older people, especially the older women, who'd worked there for years. How did they have the energy that I, a 21-year-old, didn't seem to have? Where did they find the motivation to show up every day? I once overheard two older female employees (who'd always been kind to my face) bad-mouthing me in the bathroom because I'd shown reluctance when I'd been told, yet again, that I'd be working another full shift on my day off. That was the day I decided to quit.

To me, it seemed as though those people didn't understand they were being mistreated and that they deserved better. Of course I showed reluctance to work on my day off for the third or fourth time in a row. It sucked. But I also understood that many of the people in that plant felt they'd never be able to do better than that job.

Interestingly, in another parallel to Katie's story, my female coworkers also tried to set me up with older male coworkers whom I had no interest in and felt uncomfortable around.

Another similarity I shared with her is being absolutely irate after finding out I'd been financially shortchanged during my entire time with a company (but that was at my first office job after college).

I really appreciated all the commentary on class, much of which I could relate to as well, like the inherent classism in higher education and the fact that often only people from wealthy backgrounds can afford to take unpaid internships or directly enter their chosen fields after graduating. 

I cried at some of the kindness of the men around Katie, but unfortunately, I cried because it seemed so rare. At one point Katie and her sister ponder whether other men in their lives would have turned into the same sorts of sexist creeps (or even rapists) as most of the men they worked with if those men had also taken jobs in the oil sands, which I found to be an interesting thought experiment.

In addition to class and misogyny, this book also delves into capitalism, environmental crises, loneliness, isolation, and boredom in really poignant, palpable ways. I also learned more about Canada from this book alone than I think I have in the rest of my life put together, which is pretty shameful as someone who grew up just across Lake Erie in Ohio.

Quotes that spoke to me:

• People do things here they wouldn’t do at home. But is that who they really are? Or are they who they are at home?
• To have enough to be generous, that's something. It really is. I never had the money to be generous before.
• I could explode with the dignity I've pushed down for this company that's bursting out now, because I'm leaving and I don't have to push it down anymore.