4 Short Book Reviews

For the last week or so, I've been on the kind of reading binge which normally only occurs when I'm on holiday and am somehow struck with an insatiable urge to consume as many books as I possibly can. I think the main trigger for this is the fact that my library membership is expiring soon, and as I won't be renewing it, this means that I have to read all the books on my library wishlist before I'm no longer allowed to borrow them.

Since I have been reading so much, I thought that for this week's post I would do a little reading round-up of all the books I've read recently. While not all of these were borrowed through my library, most of them were. Also, with the exception of Wuthering Heights, all of these were read in ebook format. With that out of the way, let's move on to the books.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Ah, the Bronte sisters. Authors of those elusive classic novels which I somehow never get around to reading despite always claiming I intend to. Thanks to Wuthering Heights, I've been able to actually read a second Bronte novel (the first being Jane Eyre), despite buying my copy approximately a year ago. This was an intense, emotional, Gothic read which I highly enjoyed, although in hindsight I wouldn't recommend reading it while ill - every other character seems to fall ill with a minor cold and then die with very little notice. I think Wuthering Heights gets a bad reputation because Heathcliff is romanticised by some, but the book itself makes it pretty clear (to me at least) that the man is a definitely horrible person. Most of the other characters in the book even say as much. Anyway, I liked this book a lot and would love to do some literary analysis of it in the future.

Verdict: darkly fascinating and very dramatic - a Gothic romance legend

Something to Talk About by Meryl Wilsner

I've been seeing loads of hype about this book online, which seems to be one of a few F/F (female-female, for the uninitiated) romance novels which has gone rather mainstream. Of course other books like Carol and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit have been successful too, but this one stands out as a light-hearted, fluffy love story in which there's little gay-related angst and no lesbians being killed. I sped through this novel in about a day, it was so easy to read and entertaining. Just a warning though: there is a sexual harassment plotline in here, which sort of makes sense given the Hollywood setting and it being published in light of #MeToo and #TimesUp, but it caught me a little off guard. 

Verdict: Very cute, very funny, and very gay.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

This is one of those contemporary "modern classics" which I've been meaning to read for ages but only just now got around to. I had high hopes for this novel based on Roy's reputation as a critically-acclaimed writer, and I'm happy to say it didn't disappoint. TGOST is the story of a wealthy but dysfunctional family in Ayemenem in India, focusing particularly on the lives of the twins Estha and Rahel. Themes of forbidden love (prohibited by the "Love Laws", in Roy's words), caste, and classism feature prominently alongside the importance of both the small and big things which impact us in our lives. I felt utterly immersed in the lives of Estha, Rahel, and their various friends and family over the course of the novel, an experience I didn't want to end even when it took devastating turns.

Verdict: Fluid, powerful, and heart-breaking - a justified modern classic.

Bunny by Mona Awad

Out of all the books mentioned in this post, Bunny is probably the weirdest. I read it because I saw it classed as a "dark academia" novel along the lines of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, but it reads more like a hallucinogenic combination of The Island of Doctor Moreau and Heathers, complete with both mean-girl cliques and human-animal hybrids. While it's definitely an interesting, reasonably inventive concept, in practice I didn't find it that fascinating beyond just a surface level "wow, that's kind of messed up". I'm not sure exactly what the author was trying to achieve (horror? comedy? bildungsroman?) so it's hard to judge if they managed to do it. The characters were too flat to be interesting, the satirical takedowns of artistic creator-speak got repetitive, and the ending took the punch out of the rest of the storyline. 

Verdict: Trippy enough to get a few entertaining conversations out of, but too muddled and vague to leave a lasting impression. 

So if you've made it to the end of this post, I will tell you a secret: this isn't actually all the books I've read recently. I just finished reading The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and have started reading Tokyo Ueno Station by Miri Yu, but I obviously can't write about the latter yet and I feel it would be too rushed to add in the former now. Still, perhaps you can expect a post about them sometime in the near future. 

Until then, please let me know: would you read any of the books above? Which, if any, sound most interesting to you?