October reading list
1. The Magicians - Lev Grossman
2. Peeps - Scott Westerfeld
3. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America - Erik Larson
4. A Separate Peace - John Knowles
5. Ash - Malinda Lo
Quality trumps quantity. Only five books for October but all of them are enjoyable reads that give new spins on common tropes. The Magicians, about an American teenager stumbling onto a university of magic in upstate New York, reads like a mash-up of Narnia and Harry Potter for adults; Peeps is written as a pseudo-scientific POV on vampirism as a parasitic infection (the discussion of real life parasites is a gross but interesting bonus); and Ash is a reworking of Cinderella stripped of that cheerful Disney veneer.
My pick for the month is a toss-up between A Separate Peace, which I borrowed on a whim because I needed a thin paperback for my bus ride to DC, and The Devil in The White City, my first non-fiction book in months.
A Separate Peace is a coming-of-age story set at a New England boarding school at the cusp of World War II. Even though this book is touted as a classic, I came into the story cold. I was expecting the protagonist to triumph and mature after many trials. Instead, the climax occurs fairly soon in the story and everything else that happened afterwards kept me holding my breath, waiting for the denouement.
My favorite, however, is The Devil in the White City, a juxtaposition of the efforts of Daniel Burnham (yes, the Burnham of Burnham Park) to build and host a World’s Fair in Chicago and the machinations of H.H. Holmes (whom I only knew of from that Supernatural episode where Jo was trapped in a teeny-weeny box), who took advantage of the chaos and confusion attendant to the World’s Fair to murder several unsuspecting men and women. The book is a worthwhile and fascinating read, so much so that it makes me finally want to visit Chicago - something that not even the prospect of being on Oprah’s favorite things episode was able to achieve.
2. Peeps - Scott Westerfeld
3. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America - Erik Larson
4. A Separate Peace - John Knowles
5. Ash - Malinda Lo
Quality trumps quantity. Only five books for October but all of them are enjoyable reads that give new spins on common tropes. The Magicians, about an American teenager stumbling onto a university of magic in upstate New York, reads like a mash-up of Narnia and Harry Potter for adults; Peeps is written as a pseudo-scientific POV on vampirism as a parasitic infection (the discussion of real life parasites is a gross but interesting bonus); and Ash is a reworking of Cinderella stripped of that cheerful Disney veneer.
My pick for the month is a toss-up between A Separate Peace, which I borrowed on a whim because I needed a thin paperback for my bus ride to DC, and The Devil in The White City, my first non-fiction book in months.
A Separate Peace is a coming-of-age story set at a New England boarding school at the cusp of World War II. Even though this book is touted as a classic, I came into the story cold. I was expecting the protagonist to triumph and mature after many trials. Instead, the climax occurs fairly soon in the story and everything else that happened afterwards kept me holding my breath, waiting for the denouement.
My favorite, however, is The Devil in the White City, a juxtaposition of the efforts of Daniel Burnham (yes, the Burnham of Burnham Park) to build and host a World’s Fair in Chicago and the machinations of H.H. Holmes (whom I only knew of from that Supernatural episode where Jo was trapped in a teeny-weeny box), who took advantage of the chaos and confusion attendant to the World’s Fair to murder several unsuspecting men and women. The book is a worthwhile and fascinating read, so much so that it makes me finally want to visit Chicago - something that not even the prospect of being on Oprah’s favorite things episode was able to achieve.