Book Bingo 2024: February
Feb. 29th, 2024 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Multiple POVs: Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka. [Translated by Sam Malissa] This was recommended by a Japanese ARMY in the Seom chatroom. My sister says there is a movie version with Brad Pitt. It took me about 9 weeks to read this. In many ways, I liked it. The concept is great: five assassin board a non-stop train. There's a snake, a suitcase of money, lots of quirky characters. And it's a closed setting which appeals to the locked-room mystery lover. My only qualm is that there is a lot of child violence and child-on-child violence (one of the assassins is 14 and he's a psychopath and it isn't pretty being in his POV). So that was the drawback. But if you like Pulp Fiction and Guy Ritchie films, this is the book for you.
Seasonal Read: Valentine Murder by Leslie Meier. I wanted a seasonal read that wasn't Xmas and Leslie Meier writes a cozy mystery series with titles for every American holiday. But, boy, was this a shitty book. I know there are better cozies out there. There are probably better seasonal cozies out there. I won't be ready any more about Lucy Stone of Tinker's Cove, Maine (USA). It's just weird. She has 4 kids. Her husband is a run-of-the-mill homophobe. The treatment of the gay couple is shitty (not super-shitty, just regular shitty, and one of them is a murder victim and the husband goes to the funeral and falls asleep, for real) and I was hoping her husband would be murdered by the murderer at the end (but he wasn't, he just got thrown off the roof of the library).
bethctg is a librarian and this mystery is around the library and the board and the head librarian and the antique tankard in the library. That part was kind of okay. I like to imagine bethctg solving the murder instead of this lady. I also thought this lady's relationship with technology was weird. The book's only 12 years old but she was perfectly ok with her kids pretending to be big-boobed blonde and catfishing some stranger on the internet for funsies. Like that was no big deal. And she didn't understand how poor people could be addicted to the lottery. It was just yuck. It is possible to write humor about old people not understanding (or learning about) technology and new ideas, The Thursday Murder Club series does a good job of this with Joyce dabbling in bit coin and talking about instagram. But you have to be very subtle/clever/intelligent to make it work. And this really didn't seem true to life. Banned Book: Another category I always struggle with, so I went with a children's book about a transgendered child. I am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings. I have read a few reviews. One about white washing, and I do think that's valid. She's a person of color in real life. The other is about setting up the gender binary, either you're a girl or you're a boy. Some people criticized the comment of 'girl's brain in a boy's body' And she's a girl because she likes dance and mermaids. But for what I wanted it for, which was a first conversation with Minor and Minsiculus with this topic, it was fine. And she wrote it herself (with help) so it's her voice and that's important.
Book in a Series: A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny. Audiobook. 13 hours. Narrated by Robert Bathurst.
Multiple POVs: Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka. [Translated by Sam Malissa]
With a Blue Cover: The Pattern in the Carpet: a Personal History with Jigsaws by Margaret Drabble.
Non-fiction: The Wager by David Grann. Audiobook. 8.5 hours. Narrated by Dion Graham.
Seasonal Read: Valentine Murder by Leslie Meier.
Banned Book: I am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings.
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