With the end of Summer coming I took every opportunity to read outside and go for long walks with audiobooks and it lead to a great month of reading.

Starting with the audio books, I borrowed City of Thieves by David Benioff (yes, the Game of Thrones guy) from the library. It was darkly funny, well-paced, and well-researched and Ron Perlman was a great narrator. Unfortunately, my complaint boils down to one also put forward by a character within the book: “every time I turn around you are talking about sex.”  It’s one thing to have sex be one topic of conversation – or for an author to write scenes to show a character’s obsession with talking about it. But Benioff is very much a tell don’t show writer and makes the readers suffer through a great deal of boring conversations about cocks and masturbation and explicit descriptions of women. They are clearly meant to show a character’s tendency to overshare and another writer would have done this once and trusted the readers to understand it was a repeated character trait without making us endure them with the main character in full, every time. About halfway through I learned to just fast forward through those scenes because they added nothing to the plot or characterization that hadn’t already been established. Considering I was never impressed with how sex was handled on Game of Thrones, I’m not surprised it was the weak point of his novel.

I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys and read by Edoardo Ballerini is a young adult novel set in the 1980’s in Romania when the secret police ran a campaign to make everyone an informant and the public struggled for basics while their leader lived in luxury. There’s no sense of hero worship or romanticization – instead Sepetys gives us a believable cast of teenage characters and shows how they changed their country. The scenes with Christian, our main character, and his American friend reminded me of trip to Prague when I was 13 where we met a young tour guide who had grown up just at the end of the Soviet Union – like Christian he was clearly interested in the lives of American children and he quizzed me and my friend (what did we take to school for lunch, did we have televisions in our rooms?) Sepetys’s epilogue also explores the pain that controlling regimes can leave on a society for decades even after they are gone.  I also appreciated the author’s note at the end encouraging those interested in historical fiction to also turn to primary sources and non-fiction and to share the history you learn with someone.

No One Goes Alone by Erik Larson and read by Julian Rhind-Tutt is an excellent ghost story and was probably my favorite audiobook this month. I’ve enjoyed a number of Larson’s books and was fascinated by his ability to combine crime history, scientific history, and biography in his book Thunderstruck. No One Goes Alone is the product of his own continued interest in the research from that work that has been sitting in his desk as a side project for a decade. The Marconi machine and wireless technology made plenty of people wonder if we couldn’t communicate with other unseen forces. This idea was not just something exploited by con artists running fake séances, it also led genuine researchers to run experiments. Larson initially wanted to just post this story on his website but when his publisher suggested an audiobook he jumped at the chance to continue the trend of oral storytelling so important to ghost stories. I loved the slow build of the evil spirits combined with the historical details woven deeply into the tale. The central tension between researchers and the awareness of con artists in the field made for some great character clashes and Larson’s essay at the end explaining his inspiration and research is the cherry on top for anyone who loves fiction built on a foundation of good history.  

When I finished Larson’s tale I was ready for another mystery and turned back to Gillian Flynn who I have definitely enjoyed in the past. Her smash hit may be Gone Girl but I also really liked (although that’s probably not the right word for a book as messed up as it is) Sharp Objects. Unfortunately, Dark Places (read by Rebecca Lowman, Cassandra Campbell, Mark Deakins, and Robertson Dean who were all great) did not at all fulfill my expectations. It started out with a really interesting idea – what happens if a victim who needs money but would rather forget the crime that defined her life has to deal with true crime fans (and armchair detectives) desperate the solve the case? Unfortunately, the novel quickly turns away from the intriguing set up and instead halfheartedly tackles other big issues including Satanism, pedophilia, and twentieth century farm economic despair. A number of the scenes are the opposite of short and sweet – long and gross – sometimes to the point where the horror of what’s being describes wears off a bit because the scene is so long.  And the ending… it was somehow both absurd and unsatisfying which is a lethal (excuse the pun) combination.  

The grand finale audiobook this month was the abridged Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin and read by Richard Thomas. I have an event coming up that meant I needed to dip a toe into the work but did not have time for the colossus that is Goodwin’s original text. The abridged version is excellent though and still offered plenty of history and perspective. Thomas’s reading was top notch – emotive and engaging without going too theatrical for a non-fiction work. Even though you know the ending, it was still devastating to hear the personal and societal pain Lincoln’s assassination caused just as the country readied itself to end the war and move into a new era.

As busy as I was with audiobooks I also sat down with plenty of physical books this month starting when I absolutely tore through Fledgling by Octavia Butler. It was the perfect mixture of lore, mystery, and modern fantasy (or science fiction? A whole conversation worth having). Scenes that in less skilled hands would be endless background and exposition instead were moments of discovery and character consideration for our amnesiac vampire. I do hope someone makes this story into a really good television show because I could picture it all.

The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston was a good midweek break from work/life stress. A charming story of a heartbroken romance ghostwriter and how she finds her way back to believing in love and happy endings. It will make your teeth hurt but if your insomnia kicks back in like mine did this month, it makes 2 AM a much less depressing time to be awake.

The American Boy by Andrew Taylor has been on my shelf for years, mostly because of its high page count and tiny font, but during a quiet work week I dove in and had an enjoyable trip into the underworld of the Victorian aristocracy. The main conceit on the back of the novel, that this is a book about young Edgar Allen Poe, is wildly exaggerated. The plot mainly focuses on our main character and the family of Poe’s school friend. The tension of the central mystery builds well, and the text is full of dramatic, Dickensian scenes with unspoken tension and class conflict but there is not grand reveal or twist at the end you usually expect from a novel like this – I guessed the villain in the first 100 pages and I was right.

Meanwhile Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan was the opposite experience – it was short but bursting at the binding with everything a novel can be. Our main character, Bill Furlong, is an Irish coal merchant preparing for Christmas in 1985 with his family. By the time you close the book you’ve delved into his mind, his family, his past, his society, and his moral compass. Keegan’s text is the right kind of heartbreak, where you learn about injustices of the past and human failings without a desire to give up on humanity itself. I am going to track down the rest of Keegan’s work because this text… this was something.

The Deep by Alma Katsu was a mystical, dark tale about a woman aboard the Titanic and her doomed sister ship the Britannia. (After Hag it was interesting to get a glimpse of some Irish sea folktales!) Although the mystery and haunting at the center of the book was a bit muddled by the very large cast of characters and time-period shifts, the build-up does lead to a very dramatic and satisfying second half of the book. A recommendation for anyone who loves a ghost story.

I picked up a tiny 1970’s paperback of The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey at a book sale the last weekend of August and immediately went home and dived in when the bookseller told me I had a great pick. A small, funny, mash-up of genres this book scratched an itch I didn’t even know I had as a reader. Everyone with an interest in history and fiction and the relationship between the two should pick up a copy.

Finally, I finished off with I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell. I always want to spend more time in O’Farrell’s prose, but a memoir is always a very different experience than a novel. I loved some of the stories so much that it made me overlook some of the more frustrating parts of the text (why would you keep swimming if you’ve almost drowned that many times?!) This book also confirms that I love a memoir that focuses more on theme and perspective than on strict chronology. Mostly I was just impressed that O’Farrell has yet to let fear take over her life even though she has every reason to.