October 2017 Reading/Watching/Listening

READING

My Mother Was Nuts by Penny Marshall - This has been on my list for a long time. It was so good. Seriously, five out of five stars. Her life was fascinating and I loved how she handled everything. I just want to be a cross between Penny Marshall and Dolly Parton. I didn't realize she had directed so many movies I love. I have seen and re-watched all of them except for one. However, there was a section of this book that gave me that yucky feeling in my stomach. I don't expect funny people to have funny life stories - quite the opposite - and her story isn't really sad, but there was something about it. First, her child was sort of taken from her and sort of abandoned by her when she was only a few years old. As a mom of a toddler, that was horrifying. I don't judge her.

2016 Books I Read

Short, sometimes one sentence, reviews of books I read in 2016. The reviews go in reverse chronological order of when I read them. So, books I'm still reading are first and books from last January are at the end. 

I read forty-three books in 2016 (probably more as I re-read a lot of books that I have and check out a few physical copies of books that aren’t available for check out online for Kindle). Twenty-eight by women (I thought there would be more. Ever since I did that year of reading books written only by female authors, I’ve lean towards books written by women. I think I read 70+ books in 2015, so the decline is something to ponder.

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All I Did Was Shoot My Man: A Leonid McGill Mystery (Leonid McGill series Book 4)

Walter Mosley

Almost finished with this one. I just want to sit in a warm corner with hot cocoa and finish it whenever I’m doing something else.

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The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Malcolm Gladwell

Everything from STD outbreaks, to decline in crime, to fashion trends and how they happen. Something as small as reducing medical personnel by a few people can have a disproportionate effect. Not finished, but so far, so fascinating. Makes sense since I liked Blink by the same author.

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Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison

Piper Kerman

I love the series on Netflix and it was fun connecting the people in the book with the characters on the show. It was a lot more poignant than I thought. Well-written.

Broken Harbor by Tana French

What a bloated, cliched, overwrought mess. I don't understand how this happened. Her first three crime novels were layered with well-developed, multidimensional characters.

This novel orbited around Detective Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy, a peripheral character in her three previous novels. I was looking forward to getting to know more about him, but he turned out to be what everyone else judged him to be in the previous novels: rigid, narrow-minded, cold.

A family gets murdered, with the mother surviving, in the town where his family used to holiday. This brings up all sorts of emotional baggage - his mother killed herself there. I understand that such an event is traumatic and fundamentally affects a person and continues to do so for the rest of their life, but the way it kept being brought up, it was like a broken record. Nothing new was revealed, emotionally, just harped on. His need for control and success are rooted in that event. I get it. How about some growth?

It just didn't make sense. The ham-handed foreshadowing that led to a reveal about his partner and the reveal about what actually took place. Everyone in the story was crazy and it made me feel crazy reading it. I hated all of the characters. None of them were believable. The good friend who turns into a well-meaning stalking creeper? What? I don't recommend this book. I still recommend all three of her other novels.