Books I Read in September

September - another high-volume reading month! (By the way, anything over, like, two or three books I would consider a high-volume reading month.) I felt like this was a productive month because I not only read two books from my own collection that I've owned for a long time, but I also finished a book I had started in April or June, and just got around to finishing. I also have read three children's lit books in the past two months. Do I regret it? Not a bit.

I hope you enjoy these reviews!

Pax by Sara Pennypacker

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Shelves: Children's Lit

Review: ** SPOILERS ** The descriptive writing in this book was beautiful, and it was a quick and easy read. The illustrations were also pretty great. I wasn't fully invested in Vola as a character, and the story seemed to lack depth, although the ending still brought me to ugly tears. I think the ending, specifically, would have benefited from a little bit more depth, a little bit more time spent on it, because it seemed very abrupt for a whole book to be built on this reunion. I did enjoy the illustrations a lot, and Pax the fox will be a character I think about in the future. What a noble little creature.

Timeline by Michael Crichton

Rating: ⭐️⭐️.5

Shelves: History, Sci Fi

Review: Pretty disappointed in this book. Michael Crichton is a great action writer - you get sucked in to every impossibly complicated scenario whether you want to or not because he knows how to write action. My issue with this book is that there is something going wrong on basically every page, and it feels extremely overdone/overplayed. I grew up loving the movie, which I rewatched when I started this book. Spoiler: the movie and the book are two separate things, but the movie in retrospect just isn't that great. The book, I feel almost the same about. It was okay. There is definitely a lot of action and fun history if you enjoy those things, but I just got worn out on there being a cliff-hanger or a mishap or a nail biter at every possible moment. Because, without all of that action, I felt like the characters could have been more developed and therefore could have been more likeable, or I could have been more invested. You can still have a good action novel without overdoing it, which I think is what this book really suffers from.

Me by Elton John

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

Shelves: Memoir-Biography, Gay Lit

Review: I love Elton John - I always have. His music has been a source of joy for me growing up and in my adult life, and his performance style has been something of magic. I was excited to read his biography because I didn't know that much about him even while being a fan.

This book is good - he holds nothing back and doesn't censor his addictions and shortcomings. The only reasons it didn't score higher for me was the text's rambling quality - I understand it's a biography, and he's not a writer by nature, but it felt like stream of consciousness rather than well thought out - and that most of the interesting aspects of songwriting or his career in the 70s and 80s were glossed over. This could have been because he was high for most of it and therefore chose not to write about details he maybe didn't remember a lot of. There were details about relationships and binges, but not a lot about the creation of his music.

The last third of the book was what I enjoyed best: when he was sober and finally coming into the person he was most meant to be. However, I feel that the last third was the one where he experienced the most heartbreak: he lost a lot of his good friends and family members. But he also met and married the love of his life and became a father.

If you are a fan of Elton John, I think you'll enjoy this book. I'm not 100% sold on biographies by rock stars if they all involve drugs and sex and who they know/knew, but every time I read this, I did find something enjoyable in it.

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Timothy Basil Ering

Rating: ⭐️

Shelves: Children's Lit

Review: I so wanted to like this book. The illustrations are cute, the book with its "torn" pages, it centering around a mouse. But I was very much let down. This reads like a stereotypical fairytale in a time where I feel like we should be championing other values, especially when reading it to children.

It felt overly negative, despite the light and dark comparisons. Between the terrible worldview of the rats to the mouse family to the way Miggery Sow was treated (both by the characters in the book, but especially by the author who had the power to turn her into something so much better than a stereotype) to the lack of mothers or mother figures, even to the deliriousness of Pea's father . . . I kept thinking what the value of this book would be if read to my future children. Unfortunately, the brief moments of bravery and the happy ending didn't make up for the rest of the book.

I didn't enjoy it, and I can't recommend it as something to be read to children. Disappointed in this one.