Reading Roundup: February 2020
One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America by Gene Weingarten How does the year 1986 feel simultaneously like it just barely happened and also like ancient history? This book was an interesting collection of a variety of different stories about many different people and the many ways in which one particular day fit into the rest of their life. Weingarten uses a few stylistic tics that I don't particularly enjoy, but I mostly had a great time reading this book. The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung Math is not a subject I know a lot about, but thankfully the author of this book describes it in such a way that I can still appreciate its significance to the story without fully understanding all the details. Some elements of the plot were a bit too melodramatic and cliche for my taste--it's getting hard to write an original novel about World War 2 in Europe anymore--but I still enjoyed reading it. The protagonist feels both historically appropriate and ...