What’s (the) Next (book)?
Jul 5th, 2016 by Ashley
It’s been a week since I finish Imagine Me Gone. While I’m still trying to digest it and hopefully write something coherent about what I think and, more importantly, how it made me feel, I’m on a quest for the next book to read. It shouldn’t have been difficult. I have, already in my Kindle, over 100 samples of books which, at one point or another, look appealing to me. I also have over two dozen books that I intended to read.
First, I turned to Jade Sharma’s debut novel Problems . I finished the entire sample and I felt like I can definitely continue to read it, but I’m not convinced that I want to delve into a novel about addiction. Moving on, I came to Anne Tyler’s Back When We Were Grownups. However, the characters seem unrealistically quirky, and I had no patience to even sit through a softball game at an engagement party, even though the opening of the book was great — “Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.” I opened Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, but as soon as I realized it is set in WWII, I retreated. Then I unwittingly stumbled upon The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. I didn’t realize it’s yet another book set in WWII because it started off with cheesy plot device — pretend to set the stage in the late 90s, fabricate a scenario that creates a question intends to hook and throw you into a “flashback”. However, it was not the fact that the main story is set in WWII that turned me off. The way the characters are portrayed is like a teenage girl’s attempt of a romance novel, affecting her non-existent knowledge of the world and human.
And then we came to The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin. I don’t remember why I got this book. Either a personal recommendation, which I doubt, or it is a “you might like this as well” suggestion by GoodRead or Amazon based on the other books I liked. I did not have high hopes because I did not particularly like the title of the book. But I was drawn in faster than I could imagined. It’s very likely because the novel seems to be about books and book loving people.
I think I’m happily settled for a while.