January 2019 Reads

And just like that, it's Spring Break for me and it's time to catch you up on my reading so far!

In January, I read these books:

• Fairest of All by Serena Valentino
• The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker
• Downriver by Will Hobbs

I'm not going to talk about every single one at length like I have tried to do in the past.  Instead, I'll highlight the ones that I liked the best.

This was a great reading month in terms of numbers and there were some true gems that I had the honor of reading this month... or at least ones that got a strong reaction out of me.

Fairest of All by Serena Valentino

I started going to the library again probably around the end of 2018 and every time I went there, I would see these books and just be so intrigued.  The whole point of them is to tell a more complete story of these Disney villains we know and somehow still adore.  I definitely have my favorites (Maleficent taking first place), but I thought I'd start at the beginning of this series.  I honestly hadn't thought much about the evil queen in Snow White.  I'm not even sure she got a name, just the title "evil queen."

I love that this story gives the queen the benefit of the doubt.  She isn't inherently evil, but she's suffered trauma in her early life that affected her future.  So even though I was skeptical about her love and care towards a young Snow White at first, you get used to her being genuinely loving and kind towards people.  You grow to accept that this is her true form.  It challenges you to think about what might have led to the character that is immortalized on screen in the Disney films that you are so willing to detest.

Honestly, I thought this would be a really hokey book that would try too hard to make readers care.  But I felt invested and now I want to read more of these books.  I look forward to Maleficent and also Mother Gothel from Tangled.  I'll let you know when I get to those!

Downriver by Will Hobbs

I am on my (likely) last tutoring assignment and one of the books that he was asked to read was this one.  So in order to help him, I got this book and read through it with the intention of helping him write a paper about it.  But I didn't expect to have such a strong reaction to this book.

I thought it was really neat that this book takes place in the Grand Canyon, since I have been there before and have even a tiny idea of what things look like in this book (even though I didn't do any whitewater rafting, I could still picture it).

To be honest, when I started this book, I thought I was starting in the middle of a series.  It seemed like there were some details I was supposed to know already and so there wasn't a ton of character development up front.  I'm still not sure that I picked up the first book in the series of if this even is a series.  It's because of this that I didn't connect with any of the characters and I felt more infuriated when they did stupid things than I felt empathy for them.  But sometimes good books don't make you feel empathy, they just make you feel something.  This book had me yelling out loud when the map was thrown-- not dropped, thrown-- in the rapids and when there were near-death experiences.  Sometimes it's enough to be involved in the story and not caught up in the characters.  Every once in a while, I appreciate a story like this.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

When I choose a book to read, it is usually not sci-fi.  But my Book Club kids chose to read this book and then watch the movie.

I'm going to go on the record and say, the movie sucked.  The book was just... incredible.  It blew my mind.  I was excited by the amount of knowledge around the 80s I didn't know I possessed and I was even more blown away by how much I couldn't possibly have known prior to reading this book.  There was excruciating detail that took a lot of love, care, and devotion to include and make this world so crazy real it was almost hard to believe at the same time.

The character development in this book was incredible.  I didn't feel super connected with our main man Parzival (his username... his real name is Wade), but even then I respected him and thought he was pretty badass.

One thing that kind of scared me though was not the parts involving the sixers and their disconnect with... well, everything and everyone.  It was when Wade locked himself inside his apartment and regimented himself around the Oasis.  He painted his windows black and didn't go in or out of the apartment for anything.  He was completely cut off from the outside world because his entire world existed inside of the Oasis.  And that was truly terrifying for me to read about.

Usually I say a book is good if the story is engaging or if I care about the characters.  But when a book really makes you feel something on top of those other things, that's truly special.  This book will live on my shelf for a long, long time.

Thanks for reading!  I'll be getting February and March posts out in the next couple of weeks.

--Jude