schneefink

These are the books I finished in the past couple of days.


• Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry: Alice has travelled to an island off the coast of Georgia to meet an elderly woman about whom Alice wants to write a biography – Margaret Ives, the last member of a prominent media family. But Margaret is also considering working with another journalist and wants to give both of them a month-long trial.

I really enjoyed the present-day story about Alice, her conversations with Margaret and her interactions with Hayden:

”Then where’d you grow up?” I ask
“Indiana,” he says.
“Did you like it?” I ask.
His brow sinks into a scowl, his wide mouth still keeping an utterly straight line. “Why?”
I laugh. “What do you mean why?”
“Why would you want to know if I liked growing up in Indiana?” he says, face and voice perfectly matched in surliness.
I fight a smile. “Because I'm considering buying it.”
His eyes narrow, irises seeming to darken. “Buying what?”
“Indiana,” I say.
He stares.
I can't fight it anymore. The amusement wins out, and a laugh escapes me. “I'm just trying to get to know you,” I explain.

But every so often there is a chapter of “The Story”, a third person account of the history of Ives family, and there’s something quite bleak about that. I got about two-thirds through and began feeling increasingly unenthusiastic about reading further.

I don’t read biographies very often and “The Story” in Great Big Beautiful Life got me thinking about why that is. I often feel sad seeing this zoomed-out view of life, in which aspects of one’s life can be perceived as a loss, or as failure, because in the summary the actual experience becomes overshadowed by the way that experience ends – either because those endings are where the drama are, or else because the story is told with foreknowledge of said ending. But that’s not the way life is lived! Life is lived in the moment. ( I’m not arguing that the zoomed-out view of life is inherently, objectively, sad – maybe it is all just to do with my mindset. Anyway, I took a break and returned to the story nearly a month later. But I’m really glad I persevered, because it was worth it!  ) The ending was unexpectedly moving.

I’m not sure if I’d say go as far as to say I liked this book more than Henry’s others – in some ways I liked it more and in other ways I liked it less – but I think it might be her best?

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• A Honeymoon of Grave Consequence by Stephanie Burgis: In the sequel to
A Marriage of Undead Convenience, Margaret and her vampire husband, Lord Riven, are on a honeymoon in Europe and have planned to to spend a month in the Black Forest so that Margaret can continue her research into the region’s supernatural phenomena.

The first half of this novella is full of bits and pieces that I liked, and yet it wasn’t holding my attention and I kept putting the book down and reading other things! However, I enjoyed the second half a whole lot more. It was fun to see Margaret discover that she is capable of making friends – and also, in life-or-death situations, of making small talk.

“I’ll have you know, if I were offered the choice between freedom to roam the world without you or a return to my imprisonment forevermore – but with you by my side – I would choose you above all other considerations. I didn’t ally with you in hopes that you would make idle small talk for me with strangers; oddly enough, I’m actually capable of managing that for myself.”
“You know perfectly well how good you are at it,” Margaret grumbled, but she didn’t shift off his lap.

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• Bound by Ali Hazelwood (audiobook): Today I went off on a tangent, trying to figure out if this qualifies as a novella or not, because I thought I’d seen it described as such but at seven hours long – twice as long as some audiobooks I’ve listened to – I’d consider this to be firmly in short novel territory. I found an interesting interview with the author in which she says:

This Spotify novella was supposed to be 30,000 words, right? The first draft was 45,000, and the last draft was 60,000, which is basically a novel. I could not stop writing about it, and I just loved it so much. There were issues, in the sense that I was in breach of contract with my full-length publisher [...] In the end, it worked out. Spotify was just so accommodating, and they were so nice. They weren’t like, “You have to cut all of this stuff.”

She doesn’t explain how it all worked out but apparently audiobooks on average have over 9000 words an hour, so I really doubt this story is less than 50,000.

Bound is told in the first person by Veronica Mercer, a grad student who is getting her PhD in Art History, but the audiobook actually has dual narrators – Brittany Pressley narrators everything except for the lines of dialogue spoken by male characters, which are voiced by William Macleod. I was startled the first time I heard Macleod’s voice but I quickly got used to this and thought that it worked so well. The internet informs me that this is called duet narration. I’d love to have more audiobooks do this! (I was actually wondering why they don’t just a few months ago, when I listened to The King’s Messenger, which has dual narrators. I kept noticing the differences in the voice that each of them gave one of the main characters.)

The other fun, unusual thing about this audiobook production is that many of the chapters have a chapter-specific illustration that is shown, instead of the cover artwork, when the chapter is played.

Bound is about how Vero becomes involved in forgery – the first few times, she just wants to prevent the other employees at the antique shop from losing their jobs. But then she is kidnapped by an unnerving, reclusive professor who wants her to forge a mysterious ancient manuscript. ( This was fun! I generally enjoy the way Hazelwood’s characters describe their experiences, and I particularly liked the atmosphere and the mystery. )