January was kind of a “meh” month for reading. I read books I had high hopes for but left me feeling unsatisfied. I found myself struggling to make time for reading, so I started waking up at 5 am most mornings (not all!) to see if I can fit some pages in. Working from home, it’s easy to just sleep in until the very last second you have to be online, but it felt like I was wasting the morning that way. If you’ve never tried it, give it a shot sometime! But make sure you have coffee on hand.

The Gifted School by Bruce Holsinger

4/5 Stars

It’s parents gone bad when a new competitive school opens up in a privileged Colorado town, and kids are pitted against each other in their parents’ desperation to get them in.

Entertaining and well-thought-out plot and subplots. I thought it was a complex commentary on liberal elitism, higher education standards, and the lengths parents will go to give their children the best. There was a pretty diverse cast of characters that kept the plot entertaining, and overall this felt like a richly woven story.

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad C. Chaudhuri

4/5 Stars

This book is like an artifact of early 1900s Bengal. The level of detail is incredible, from the types of houses to be found in Calcutta to the various plants of Chaudhuri's ancestral village to the schoolboy hierarchy of his youth. The descriptions of Calcutta I found were especially fascinating, and I would recommend reading those sections if you ever travel there.

I was surprised to find not much discussion on his marriage, but maybe that is custom to keep private about.

I read this book because I have a personal interest in the time period and location, so to me I found it as helpful and insightful as a well-written history textbook. However, I wouldn't say I enjoyed reading it or would recommend it to anyone else for leisure; it was quite dry.

White Ivy by Susie Yang

2/5 Stars

Ivy is raised by her Chinese immigrant grandmother to learn how to shoplift, pilfer, and generally game the system that is rigged against immigrants. When Ivy falls for Gideon, the son of a wealthy political family, her mother is enraged and sends her off to China as punishment. Years later as an adult, Ivy returns to America and reconnects with the Gideon, but skeletons threaten to come out of her closet and expose her lies.

It's rare that I come across a book where I just don't care about the characters. In White Ivy, no one was likeable. That isn't a prerequisite for a book: indeed, some of my all-time favorite literary characters are extremely unlikable. But the writing does need to make me understand them and why they are motivated to do the things that they do, and maybe even root for them in the end. None of this can be said about White Ivy for me, sadly. I didn't care for them, I didn't care about them, and I wasn't rooting for them. Not a single one. It was like listening to someone tell you very intricate drama about people you don't know.

The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

2/5 Stars

Two timelines of a mother and daughter: Margot, who discovers her Korean immigrant mother dead in her LA apartment and must piece together what happened, and Mina, the mother who escaped the Korean War at home and faced a new country totally alone.

This was a very "just ok" book. As a daughter of a Chinese immigrant, I could at least identify with the themes of not belonging, escaping a hardship in the home country, and trying to piece together your heritage. But beyond that, I honestly found the plot and characters unremarkable, and I think that is because the writing was average. The pace was one-note, no exciting moments that I could pinpoint. The descriptions seemed to all revolve around food and only food, and the author really likes the word "striated" apparently.

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

3/5 Stars

29-year-old Alice has an amazing husband and is happily pregnant with her first child. Then she gets a head injury during a workout class and comes to as a 39 year old, completely forgetting everything in the last 10 years. Now she has 3 kids, is getting a divorce, and has a strained relationship with her sister. She must reconstruct the past, discover where she went wrong, and hope that she can fix things.

This was an intriguing premise and certainly held my interest all the way through. I like that Liane Moriarty can handle a large cast of characters and their juicy side stories. I especially felt for Elisabeth's infertility struggles. And central question of will they/won't they between Alice and Nick was balanced well and kept me guessing.

My biggest issue with this book is that every time Alice tries to ask an important question about what happened in the last 10 years, she is ALWAYS interrupted. Interruptions are a plot device that should be used like 3x max. But there were over a dozen instances where we're about to get somewhere important, and then the doorbell rings or a friend interrupts them or look! a whale! And then they never revisit the conversation. So that was just frustrating to read for the whole book, and not to mention unrealistic.

The second issue for me was that we don't really get much of Gina. We are told rather than shown that she is important to the new Alice, but I don't really feel that emotional connection and therefore didn't really care about her part of the plot.

The children were also written oddly, like the dialogue sounded like they were way older than their ages. And I guess I just don't get Australian humor, because all the jokes were pretty soft to me.

Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

3/5 Stars

A saga told completely in interview format of a fictional 70s rock band.

I'm torn. There's a lot to admire about this book, and yet, I didn't like it.

I'll start with the positives: It's different. An entire novel written in interview form is something I don't see much (maybe ever?). An oral history of rock and roll is a neat concept. I loved the last 30 or so pages with their last show on stage and the resulting conversation between Daisy and Camilla in the hotel room. Those last 30 pages were 5 stars for me; the author really nailed the emotional weight of the denouement.

Negatives: The interview form didn't work for me. Maybe it could have for another subject, but a fictional band and fictional songs are just not the right match for this form. You have characters describing an entire album with pretty intricate detail of the songs, the sound, etc and the reader just has to accept it. It's such a boring, one-sided experience to be told EVERYTHING and shown nothing. It's not like in a real music magazine or album review where the writer describes the music a certain way and then you can go listen to the song for yourself and think, "wow, they're absolutely right, it's exactly like what they said!" With this book, there's none of that confirmation.

I found the interview form just frustrating because I couldn't let go of the fact that it's all fictional. The reason I read celebrity interviews are because I already know something about these people and want to know more. Can't say the same about this novel.

And then the story and characters were your typical rock 'n' roll band. People were mostly one dimensional, and the story of the band felt like one I'd heard before. For the whole first 3/4 of the book, it just wasn't that exciting. Even the way Daisy joins the band is so mundane: a studio producer or exec decides she would go great with them, so she just walks in one day. It wasn't this magical spark moment.