Touch by Claire North
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like her own creation, Kepler, I felt like, when I touched the pages of this book, I, too became something else, someone else. The Reader.

The book was paced really well, the action and flips from one person to the next effective. So Kepler is this sort of creature who inhabits people’s bodies upon touching their skin. Their kind has lived for ages, passing from one host to the next, absconding with that new person’s life, leaving their old host suddenly days, weeks, years older and minus the intervening memories. It’s a great idea for a story and it raises so many practical and philosophical questions, and Claire North dredges most of them up and paints an empathetic picture for The Reader — it’s not that the protagonist, this Kepler, is purely good, you get the sense that there is a myriad of shades of grey and all sorts here, and it just makes the story more entertaining.

The author has a great ear for snappy dialogue, and since we’re also dealing with people who realize that the other person to whom they’re speaking has just been in possession of their own body you have the occasion for discussions about what the other has been eating while inhabiting the owner’s body which might get a little dizzying, but fun.

If Claire North started writing the information on the side of a box of cereal I would suddenly start buying a lot more of that cereal, she’s just the business, and I’m very jealous, indeed.

While this book wasn’t as good as the mesmerizing “The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August,” it’s still an excellent read. I worry that maybe I *had* been possessed by something , something that even still has a hold of me and makes me want to rush around the streets, accosting strangers, asking them if they haven’t read “Touch” just yet, and if not, why not?

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A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a beautiful, raw book.

Look, I’m a little slow, and I needed, like a hot bath or something, some time to ease in. In fact, I read the first chapter over twice, three times. The second was to figure out what was going on, who’s voice this was, and then the third was to savor it.

So the style’s a bit different than your run-of-the-mill novel, but man oh man, does she use it well. It reminds me a little bit of Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, but Eimear McBride’s book is so so so so much better.

The main character, her relationships to her family and those around her are all so well depicted, and so heart-breaking, this book lived up to the hype.

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The Intern’s Handbook by Shane Kuhn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was another great, entertaining summer read. I thought the diary/handbook-like voice worked well with this hard-boiled, rough and tumble intern who also happens to be a trained killer.
There are a few punches that might have been telegraphed that would have been more effective when they landed, but overall this was a fun read.

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Strings by G. Miki Hayden
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was thinking this might be a modern-day Wrinkle in Time for the kids to read, but it wasn’t quite there, didn’t quite grab in the same way.
It seemed a little more haphazard, random, and the characters didn’t grab me the way I thought they might or might grab the kids.

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The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another rollicking read from Adrian McKinty, who captures the grit and humor and sucks you into the story like few others.
Can’t wait to get to the next in the series.

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Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed the narrator’s voice in this book. It reminded me a little of Lisa O’Donnell’s _The Death of Bees_, but with an older narrator (though also in her own less than ideal circumstances).

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I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Loved this book, a perfect summer read as we gallivanted from Ireland to Massachusetts. I can’t tell you what I was doing there, other than reading “I am Pilgrim.”

But it most certainly wasn’t stopping a potential terrorist from infecting the western world with smallpox. But that’s all I’m allowed to say.

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Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oh man, oh man oh man. I loved this book.
In fact, a few weeks after finishing it I was sitting on a concrete step watching a concert below on the stage, backdropped by the sun setting over the water. It was a little cool and the clouds leaked towards the horizon, turning grey, and I thought to myself, “I remember those days when we watched concerts by the water and life was pretty much perfect just before the apocalyptic plague hit.”

The book see-saws from the future, in which we don’t get concerts like that any more, to the present day to the past loves and lives of Arthur Leander, the actor, and wraps the strands so tightly together, so well, and it just adds to the sense of sadness at what was lost. I loved the writing, the plot, the structure of the book, everything.

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Foucault, in Winter, in the Linnaeus Garden by Michael Joyce

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Look, I’m biased. I think Michael Joyce is an amazing stylist, one of the most beautifully elegiac writers working today — his hyperfictions, Going the Distance, The War Outside of Ireland, Disappearance, Twentieth Century Man, these books perform this amazing literary boxing act: the emotional punch of nearly every passage, the urgency you feel while reading his stuff can discombobulate you, throw you off balance, but the prose hugs you in tight, making it difficult to break away.

I leapt at this one because of Joyce’s technical abilities, despite not being a Foucault expert (fan? I knew of more of Foucault in terms of the pendulum that old Umberto wrote about, the same Umberto who once joked that Michael was “the real Joyce”) and being a bit wary of epistolatory novels.

I think I would have enjoyed it even more, had I been a Foucault scholar or more au fait with French and/or Swedish. The letters, some sent, some unsent, are written in an English mixed with a hybrid of Swedish and French, and the overall effect, early on, was to make me feel very dumb (which I’m not disputing is the case… it was just highlighted in this case). When Gabrielle comes onto the scene, with her Brazilian exoticism in an already exotic (albeit cold) locale for Foucault, the narrative picks up. She’s kind the center around which Foucault will (or will not) hold as he begins to spiral, in his letters, into or around madness. I really enjoyed her appearances, as Foucault does, and as time has past since I read the book — I really spent a long time on this review, waiting to digest many of the impressions I’d had, and as I have I’ve grown to appreciate it more and more — I appreciate the more subtle aspects to the way Joyce has constructed this book when I may have been less inclined towards the more meta (almost to the point of an obsession) moments in the letters.

There’s an interview with the author at http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/04102015/complicated-geometry-michael-joyce-and-foucault that goes into the reasoning behind why the book was written the way it was and some extra background material on Foucault’s life that wiggles its way into some of the letters.

Of Michael Joyce’s works, this may be one of the more dense, more difficult, for me, anyway, but when the narrative shifts at the very end, like Foucault’s fateful motorcar, I realized I’d been immersed inside the mind of the fictional philosopher and was just as haunted as he was.

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The Ghost of Plenty by Gerald McCormack
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loved this story — very funny alternating diary entries from the perspective of the well-meaning but bumbling English landlord of an Irish estate and the well-meaning but bumbling Irish lad named Redmond O’Leary returning from four years of education abroad in England.
I thought the voice was excellent for both diaries and the story zipped along as the two protagonists’ paths crossed and crossed again under the unrest and wilds of Galway in 1855.
It reminded me of a Flann O’Brian book, replete with footnote asides and meanderings

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