Adult Summer Reading Log 2021

Each year our four local libraries sponsor child, teen, and adult reading challenges.  I've only participated a handful of times. I decided to participate this summer though, partially thanks to the ability to take out e-books from the New York [City] public library.  That ability was granted to all New York State residents during the pandemic, and is (so far) continuing.

Only one of the local libraries permitted you to list books you didn't take out from their library.  I know, their rules, like it or go somewhere else.  There may be good reasons to require people to take books out from their library (funding for the library, I'm thinking, would be a primary reason).  "So be it".

I just finished my fourth book. There's no minimum, which is nice, because it end by August 19.  Here are my four, with a little (or a lot) about each (NOT to be considered a book review).

TRIGGER ALERTS - the first book I mention includes scenes of murder, rape, and other horrors of war and its aftermath.  The third book's topic is a pandemic.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker.  This is a retelling of Homer's The Iliad from the point of view of a female character, Briseis, a Trojan queen taken captive and enslaved when the Greeks take her city and sack it.   I don't read much historical fiction but this intrigued me because I have never read The Iliad.  I had to study The Odyssey, a kind of sequel, multiple times, but never The Iliad, and I have no idea why.  Could I enjoy Ms. Barker's book without any Iliad background?

YES! (although I had to look things up from time to time).

Now, I want to read The Iliad but it's going to have to wait for winter.  As for this book - I have mixed feelings about it. On the whole, it was well written. However, the British slang threw me out of the story more than once (minor quibble - certainly the soldiers couldn't speak in Greek for the English audience!) .  Also, I wondered why, if this was a book telling the story from the point of view of a woman who never had a chance to tell her story, Ms. Barker spent enough time writing from the point of view of one of the major male characters, Achilles.  So it's a book about a silenced woman partially written from the point of view of a man?

I understand Barker isn't done telling the story of Briseis, which I look forward to when the next book in the series is published.

Four Stars.  I recommend it.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth, by Carrie Ryan.  I enjoy dystopian literature and (some) zombie literature.  I love a good zombie apocalypse, and looked forward to a good read.  It disappointed me. Stilted writing and one of the weirdest love triangles I've ever run across in dystopian young adult literature, just for starters.   I won't be seeking out the sequels.

The End of Men by Christa Sweeney-Baird.  What I loved about this book is that it was written not long before before the COVID-19 pandemic.  So, one could compare and contrast the reactions to the pandemic in the book (a virus that kills only males, and kills most of them) to what happened "in real 2020 and beyond life". The book is presented to us as written by an (initially) unknown author some years after the pandemic struck.

Ms. Sweeney-Baird did an excellent job anticipating how people would behave, even though the pandemics were totally different.  The book is written from the points of view of several women, and one man (Spoiler Alert - the man survives). One of the characters, at the end, is revealed as the author of the book, someone who interviewed the rest of the people whose stories were told in order to help the author to heal.    The book also ponders many questions, from "what if a pandemic kills loved ones of almost everyone alive?" to "how do we handle a labor force in a world where much of the population dies over a matter of months?", to the obvious "how do we keep the human race going?"

I give it five stars.  Highly recommended.

Finally, a non-fiction book Zero Fail, The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" by Carol Leonnig.  For the benefit of my non-American readers, the United States' Secret Service is tasked with many duties, the most important of which is the 24 hour day protection of the President and Vice-President of the United States and his/her family.  Carol Leonnig, an investigative journalist with over 20 years experience, has written a well documented (and scary) book of triumphs and failures taking place mainly from the Kennedy administration to right after the end of the Trump administration.  

It can be a bit hard to follow at times, and it took me part of the summer to wade through it (because I was only allowed to take it out for two weeks, and then I returned to a holds list), but it was well worth it. You learn a lot about our various Presidents - perhaps, in a few cases, too much for comfort.

I give it five stars.  Highly recommended.

As I approach my 70th year on this planet, I get more and more impatient over books that seem to be wasting my time.  Three out of four of these books delivered.

Now, perhaps in the next week, I'll start The Forest of Vanishing Stars, which I need to read and write a book review for on Goodreads after winning it in a contest.

Read any good books recently?