beach books - update

Well, it turns out serious history is not the best beach reading. I knew that and got all ambitious anyway. Replaced my planned books with some Agatha Christie and Carl Hiaasen. Much better. I liked the Hiaasen book - Tourist Season - a lot. 

beach books are gonna be

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz
and something else TBD

the amber spyglass

Weakest of the trilogy, in large part because it's so heavy-handed. There's an epigram for every chapter, which is absurd. And then the characters get real, real preachy at the end as Pullman drives home his points about the Fall being essential to wisdom and maturity and about the Church being bad bad bad.

Still a great story, with great adventures and full of imagination. He's up there in the top tier of world-building writers.

Also, because of the way the book ends, I've been thinking about my daemon (roughly, my inner self) and what form it would take if I could see it and interact with it. I kind of want to say it'd be a raven.

the subtle knife

Re-read in 1.5 days. Lost some sleep this weekend over it. What a story!

the blind assassin

I've run out of steam. Seems to be the same problem I have with Alice Munro: I just can't figure out how to care about the plight of early-to-mid-20th-century Canadian women to whom nothing interesting happens and who do nothing interesting. "Oh no! I was married off to a rich guy because Father's business was failing, and his sister is really mean! Also, my sister is very mysterious and a sad figure who mystifies me." SO WHAT.

However, the secondary story is still fun and interesting, so I will probably read the rest of it and just ignore the main narrative. Counting it as a half-read book when I get to the end.

EDIT: 3/4 read. BOOOOOOOORING. And badly written.