Other Women's Stories: What I'm reading this week (3/4/19)

Last week I finished:

I have loved all three of Jane Harper's books. She's one of my new favorite auto-buy authors. Her books are thriller/mysteries set in Australia, and The Lost Man, released in early February, is my favorite so far. Taking place in the Australian Outback, it focuses on the Bright family. The book opens with the legend of the stockman's grave, a grave and stone in the middle of nowhere, and soon the family finds the middle son, Cam, dead in the same spot. His vehicle is abandoned a ways away, in perfect working order, full of water, food, and other essential supplies. Why would he have left his car only to die of thirst and exposure in the dry Outback? The story builds and builds and builds as all of Harper's do, and that's the genius of her writing, I think. She never hurries anything, and she unveils only what she needs to when she needs to. There are never loose ends or things that bother me at the end. The characters here are superbly drawn, and their motivations and thoughts are very true-to-life. What I almost loved best about this one was the barren landscape where brothers live on adjoining land but are still hours away from each other. It's a three-hour drive into town. And the heat and dust are so oppressive they pose very real danger. If your vehicle breaks down, no one might come along for quite some time--and perhaps not in time. I love books where the landscape is a character in the plot, and this book is top notch because of it. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes a good mystery/thriller. I don't think you'll be disappointed. My rating: 5 stars.

I have a thing for women's self-help books, so I picked up Girl, Wash Your Face (subtitle: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are so You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be). This is tagged as Christian self-help, but you don't get as much Christian talk here as in many others from the same category, such as Glennon Melton, Jen Hatmaker, or Shauna Niequist. In the book, Rachel Hollis presents the 20 lies she and other women must destroy in order to live a better life. This includes things like: I'm Not Good Enough, I'm Bad at Sex, and I Am Defined by My Weight. Her writing is personal and frank, but this book didn't end up being one of my favorites of the genre. I found Hollis a little too preachy (not preachy about God, but preachy about How To Be), and I found her overconfidence in having all the answers because she's lived through it all (she's in her mid-30s) disingenuous. Also, her constant bragging about her media empire, or whatever (I still haven't figured out what it is she does or what the company she's built does, or even what she's known for), off-putting. She came across to me as trying too hard and lacking the humility required for me to take heed of another woman's advice. I guess I just didn't trust her. You might (probably will) disagree. This book is enormously popular, but perhaps in a younger demographic than I generally read in. In short, try it, there's some good stuff here, but my favorites remain my favorites for an authenticity I don't find here. My rating: 4 stars.

I picked up a pristine copy of The Woman in Cabin 10 at a used bookstore recently, and I finally decided to listen to it or I wouldn't get to it for quite some time. This is a murder/thriller about a group of people on a cruise (a small group on a small cruise ship). When our main character, Laura, called Lo, who battles drunkenness and mental health issues, thinks the woman in cabin 10 has been thrown overboard, she has a hard time getting anyone to believe her. There was no one booked for cabin 10. Lo soon finds herself wrapped up in something much bigger than a simple mystery, and she fears for her survival. I was excited about this one because all the action takes place in one small space (like Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express), but I found it a little to the left of the kind of thriller/mystery I enjoy. It felt a bit formulaic, and I just never cared for the main character. It was good on audio because the English and Scandinavian accents added to the mystique, but I didn't find the depth of characters and writing finesse I like in a murder mystery. I like my mysteries to still be literature--which is tough to pull off. Plus, there was always the fear that the narrator wasn't reliable, and that kept me from committing to the plot. In short, it was fine, and I think many will find it a good read, but it wasn't exactly my cup of tea. My rating: 3 stars.

I went through audiobooks this month like they were water. I kept realizing I could listen to one more, then one more, then another, and I kept putting more on hold. One of the books I snuck in was Ellen DeGeneres's Seriously...I'm Kidding, which was only three discs long, so I listened to it in one sitting. I enjoyed this one. Ellen is a load of fun, and beneath the screw-ball comedy is real depth. There are times when she's going on humorously about something like how hard women are on how they look, when what she says hits home better than any women's self-help book ever does. (She is a cover girl, you know....) Other times, she's a little too silly for me, but no chapter lasts long enough to annoy the heck out of you. Though, to be honest, by the end of three discs, I was ready for something else. But overall, I liked this one a lot. It was honest, astute, and funny without being meanspirited. And the fact that it was narrated by Ellen herself was icing on the cake. My rating: 4 stars.

There's no doubt one of my favorite books of poetry for 2019 will be Dorianne Laux's Only As the Day Is Long. I have been long familiar with Laux's poetry, though I found it on my own, not in a poetry class or workshop. Her poems are visceral, often domestic, and they often involve love--or the lack of it. She writes about being abused as a child, and though the poems are hard to read, they are beautiful too. She's had some things to work though in life, and I'm glad she's done it with poetry, because they've given her some beautiful verse. I marked many poems in the book. I was reading a library copy, but I'll be buying my own because this is a collection I'll be going back to. My rating: 4 stars.

Last week I abandoned:

Inheritance is getting a lot of attention lately, and while I think the story is great (the author discovers that the father who raised her is not her biological father), Shapiro's overall tone is kind of depressed. I like more emotion in my writing, especially in memoirs. I was finding myself reluctant to pick this one up to read it, so I'm putting it aside. Maybe I'll try the audio someday, because I am interested in finding out what happens, I just don't want to plod through a whole month to find out.

This week I'm reading: