Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was wandering the shelves at Barnes & Noble and found this book, face out on the shelf, and thank Pete it was.
I loved this crooked tale of orphans, mothers, speaking with the dead, the influence of the dead on the living, cons, religion, and upstate New York. I loved that dear, dirty Worcester, Massachusetts made a cameo as the hometown of Tonya, an orphan in the same house as Nat and Ruth. Samantha Hunt does a fantastic job of weaving the story in the past (Nat and Ruth’s) with the present, where Ruth and her niece Cora take off across New York State on an epic quest, made moreso by the fact that they walk most of the journey and Cora does it heavily pregnant. The action happens along two strands of a DNA double helix connected by Ruth. So the storylines are fantastic, well-told, and her language sparkles: I love that Ceph, another orphan, is characterized as “angry enough to deform DNA.”
Beautiful book, so glad I stumbled across it.

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Personal by Lee Child
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I listened to the audiobook version of this book. Loved the reading, thought it captured Jack Reacher’s calm, calculating demeanor pretty naturally. Casey Nice is a little too much the wide-eyed innocent. The story clips along, too, and, while it isn’t earth-shattering and may be a little predictable, or guessable, it was a great way to spend a few car rides hither and yon.

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The Last Days of Magic by Mark Tompkins
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I received a copy of this book through Penguin’s First to Read program. The premise sounded great — a synthesis of myth, legend, fairy tales, and Biblical mysteries? Sounds like a fun time. I can’t fault the writer, as it is exactly what it says on the tin, a bend of all of those stories, exhaustively researched and stitched together so that even as a history the fictional threads are hard to discern, even a bit exciting to see. Oh, Chaucer makes a cameo? Gutenberg? It’s like some great historical figure mash-up!
But I think it’s the exhaustive part that wore me down, eventually. All that research and detail makes it into the book, which starts out in modern day with a compelling plot line, disappears into the 1300s for 375 pages, and then returns to the modern day for the last few pages, and I can’t help but wish we’d stayed more in the modern day. The book is well written and everything, and I’m sure you could go fact-check every single reference Tompkins makes, but I just found it too much like reading a historical register and began skimming pages about 150 pages in. Characters’ motivations seemed to be explained over and over again and I felt like each and every group of them were held at an arm’s length for inspection, explication, until the color wore out of them.
But the world is very detailed, the writing pretty good, and the facts are there to be enjoyed (as well as those cameos), so I’m sure that maybe I’m just not the right audience for the book.

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A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide to Saving the World by Rachel Cantor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loved it, loved every single mystical second of it. I had to stop folding down corners of pages I loved because I’d folded nearly every page down. I love the Neo-Maoist book group/rebel fighters. I loved the wise man Abulafia and his almost petulant demands for his aleph towards the end.
Leonard sort of bumbles along this romp in the future in which the world is ruled by fast food franchises, but Rachel Cantor writes so snappily that you enjoy being in his company as his world is turned upside down by a call from the distant past.
I feel like I would have been happy to read this book forever, had Ms. Cantor kept going, I was so disappointed that the book had ended.
I can imagine people getting frustrated with the book, as it might seem a bit self-indulgent, staring down the old belly button, but, I don’t know, I enjoyed the trips back to the 13th century, Marco Polo, Roger Bacon, and the crowd. But I felt the future world in which the book is set was pretty well-realized and that she didn’t need to explain things in great detail: she gives the reader some credit to make those leaps, and sometimes the leaps land nowhere in particular, maybe like an adult coloring book, letting you fill in your own colors, within the lines or without.

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The Circle by Dave Eggers
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I couldn’t finish this. I made it through part four of eleven of the audiobook and had to check the review on GoodReads and LibraryThing to see if perhaps I was missing something. But the reviews all seemed to support my decision to bail early. Or, should I say, I bailed early, quicker than you might expect, well before the end. Because Dave Eggers uses two, three, eight adjectives or adverbs where one or even none might suffice. You get the feeling that you’re being bludgeoned by the writer, like he’s afraid you’re not going t get it, not going to get it when he describes the characters’ faces as triangles or ovals, like we’ve wandered into some cubist nightmare of a workplace.
The writing style feels like it’s for someone far younger… but, for the life of me, I can’t figure out who this is. Is it millennials? Surely they don’t like this pandering, Pollyanna-ish tone. Do they?
Anyway, writing style aside, the book is about a woman going to work at a Facebook/Google/Apple amalgam and the giant reach of these companies into our personal lives is the target for Eggers, as he, none too subtly, paints a picture of a company that knows everything about you and to which you willingly surrender all this knowledge with very few questions asked. But I couldn’t see anything, four elevenths of the way into the book, that hadn’t been said a million ways before, or that people hadn’t noticed or questioned a million times before, but the poor characters of his novel seem to take all of the company’s proclamations with bright, starry eyed adoration, eager to dive right in to the company’s vision for them. I get that he’s lampooning the culture at these companies, who have campuses, rather than office buildings, and have adult pep rallies and free beverages and meals and scooters and all that baloney, heck, I worked for one of them for twelve years.
Look, I don’t know, maybe the book turns dark later on and cynicism about the company’s motives grows or we meet employees of the company who are other than brain-washed, simplistic cultists. But there is nothing propelling me to read, no suspense, no journey — I’m just reading some lady’s social feed over her shoulder, watching her set up social media accounts for her work, her work group, her company, herself. She marvels as she gets one screen, then a second, then a third, then a fourth, oh joy! It’s not a novel, it’s an unboxing video, but in text form!
Ugh.

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Version Control by Dexter Palmer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Easily one of my favorite books of the year so far, even though it turned out far, far different than I’d expected. The book was just so much more full than I’d anticipated, from the jacket copy. I think I expected a light-hearted, jokey romp around the causality violation device setup but I got something so much more. A musing on love in the digital age, race relations and predispositions, scientific progress, our busy, unforgetting world, and at the center of it a lovely and sad family story of Philip, Rebecca, and Sean. And then it does have its genuinely funny moments, like the dream of YHWH as the worst of all possible tenants towards the end.
The way Palmer builds Philip and Rebecca’s relationship, from the very start on the Lovability site to its various ends across multiple timelines is heart-breaking, lovely, and real, and I think is what made the book sing, for me. The author takes full advantage of his unique perspective allowed by the causality violation device to paint the book like a palimpsest, to paint history like one, for that matter. Where the use of a time machine could easily become hokey or over-explained, this one just fits. There is no fantastic flash from the machine as it’s working, in fact, you (and they) are not even sure it is working at all. And that’s the same way the book worked for me — not a thunderbolt but just something that felt perfectly right.

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The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I listened to the audio version of this book and holy cow, did Clare Corbett, Louise Brealey, and India Fisher do a fantastic job bringing the voices of Rachel, Megan, and Anna to life. I think, had I read the story myself, with my distinctly non-British female narrator’s voice in my head, I would have had a much different experience and I might have even gotten frustrated with Rachel’s difficulties. But I didn’t, not with these ladies reading it. I could feel Rachel’s desperation as she struggled to escape the alcoholic stupor that the book hinged on, really, and the desperation of all the girls in the story, actually, as they took center stage for various parts of the book.
A million stars for the reading, for sure.

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In the Woods by Tana French
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I found this one in a Little Free Library around the neighborhood, out walking the dog with the kids, the kids who I will never let into the woods on their own, which is no problem, because we live in the urban sprawl, so no chance of a scary wood popping up nearby.
I was excited because I’d read almost up to the latest Tana French book without ever having read the first one. But I was a little apprehensive because my former state police father had soured on old Tara at some point, due to some police procedural issues he had with one of her books, and I suspected it was this one (he forgave the somewhat off-the-wall scenario in “The Likeness” where Detective Cassie Maddox turns out to be a doppleganger for a dead girl). And I can see where it would frustrate someone on an actual Dublin Murder Squad or nonfictional equivalent: the alarm bells that ring when Detective Adam Ryan takes on a murder case in the very wood where he was found, blood in his shoes, many many years ago, his two companions gone, presumed dead, are pretty persistent, throughout the book, as he gets more and more entangled in the two cases as they may or may not be linked. But as entertainment, she paints a great picture of someone suffering a bit of PTSD as the investigation intensifies and the action and intrigue is enough to keep you going.
More than her other books (or perhaps as much as the Likeness’s dead ringer premise), this one pushes willing suspension of disbelief a long way: not only do we have the dubious murder connections between the present day one and Ryan’s case from long ago, but we also have the will they, won’t they plot line between Detectives Maddox and Ryan that sort of is plausible, considering the emotional intensity of their work, but there was a small piece of me nudging that suspension of disbelief, saying, “Come on, man, you’re not buying this, are you? You’re not, are you?”
But she writes well, I couldn’t wait to get back to the story when I was away, and it drew me in, all the way to the end.

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Save Yourself: A Novel by Kelly Braffet
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a little like reading a slowly smoldering firecracker. The characters are a perfectly wrecked set of small town folks, each set dealing with their own trials (some literal) and tribulations. But Ms. Braffet does an excellent job painting each scene, making each character full and real, instead of some hollow caricature.
I thought the book’s title beat like a kind of pulse throughout the whole story, driving to the end. Great read.

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A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Richard Matthews read the audiobook version I listened to and man, oh man. In the words of one of my kids, “he sounds so smart, this man. But he’s probably just reading it all out of a book.”
It’s a fascinating book, you feel like a rock skipping across a very shallow but full pond of astounding facts, figures, and anecdotes. The introduction to large figures and ideas in the history of science is really enjoyable, sort of like a different take on Arthur Koestler’s “The Sleepwalkers.”
At a certain point large number fatigue sets in, where you feel like it’s one unimaginably large number after another preposterously large number, and I think he even acknowledges that fairly early on. But it was a great, engaging listen.

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