Rainbow and Robert

Current Read: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
Current Listen: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Hello all! It's December, so things are getting intense in terms of me finishing up my reading goals for the year. It's looking like I will read at least 80 books this year. I'm at 76 after today, which is definitely the most I've read in a year since I've been keeping track. Some thoughts on what I've read:

Over Thanksgiving weekend I finished Landline by Rainbow Rowell, which was the last of hers I had to read! This was in the same category as her book Attachments in that it was for adults rather than teens. It is about a woman named Georgie who writes for a sitcom in Los Angeles. She knows her marriage is in trouble, especially when she has to cancel going to her in-laws for Christmas to attend a meeting about a new TV show. Here is where it gets weird. As she struggles to decide what to do, she discovers that when she calls her husband from her childhood landline she speaks to him as he was when they were in college. It's essentially a time traveling phone. It sounds totally bizarre, which is why I was so hesitant to read it.

But I should not have doubted her. Rowell is great at avoiding writing the flat, static characters that are so common in chick lit. All of her characters, major and supporting, developed and changed through the course of the novel. There was much crying and #feels, and it turned out to be a really great read. Not my favorite of hers, but everything she writes is really easy to relate to, even with the semi-magical premise.

Then today I finished the third Cormoran Strike novel by Robert Galbraith, Career of Evil. This is a series written by J.K. Rowling under a pseudonym, and I do not think that these novels get enough credit. They are just solid, dependably good crime novels. Cormoran Strike is a really great character (who I'm sure will get a movie at some point in the near future). All three of them have had great premises, complex twists and turns, and CREEPY suspects. In Career of Evil, Cormoran's assistant, Robin, is sent a severed leg in the mail with a letter referencing Blue Oyster Cult lyrics, lyrics that were tattooed on Strike's mother, a famous groupie who died under suspicious circumstances. Strike must sift through the list of enemies he has made during his career as a military policeman and private investigator while fearing for Robin's life.

Though I loved every second of this book, I do feel the need to give a trigger warning. This book heavily references domestic violence, rape, and sexual abuse against children. I KNOW. Some deep, scary stuff and some huge creeps for suspects. Just FYI. Probably not for everyone.

That's it for now. I'm halfway through Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which is very interesting reading, and I have both the last book in the Mrs. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children series AND the last book in the Lunar Chronicles series. There also might be some sort of haul post soon, since I picked up some things at the friends of the library sale and on black Friday. Happy reading to me! That's all she read.