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african author, african stories, Black Authors, literary fiction, Nigerian Author

We Chit Chat: Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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“I’m growing old and the world has changed and I have never been truly known.”

Leggy: I finally finished Dream Count. What were your overall thoughts?

Taynement: Definitely not the best we’ve got from Chimamanda.

Leggy: I found the book very disjointed. I have a feeling these are half written characters from her years of writer’s block, and she just made them fit together.

Taynement: For me, I believe the real story she wanted to write was Kadiatou’s story, but it was too close to reality (as it’s based on a true story) and she fit the other stories around it. Kadiatou’s story was distinctly different, and her entire authors note was about Kadiatou’s story.

Leggy: The funny thing is that I was really into the book till I got to Kadiatou’s story and it knocked me out of my rhythm. But I must admit, once I got my bearings, I appreciated it for what it was. Honestly this book felt like a collection of short stories.

Taynement: I think another thing was I recently read Purple Hibiscus, and I couldn’t help but compare the books. While I think Chimamanda is verbose, I give her a pass because this is how she actually speaks.

Leggy: Yeah, I didn’t mind the writing. There were some lines I actually really loved but I completely understand why you find her verbose. Sometimes it’s like do we really need that metaphor there? What did you think about the characters? I liked Zikora the most and I found Chiamaka very annoying and foolish.

Taynement: I was so excited to dive into the many characters, but I found them to be unlikeable. I liked Omelogor’s directness but after a while it just became obnoxious. Zikora had the most depth as a character given the relationship with her mother.

Leggy: I liked Omelogor at first too then I just found her annoying. I also find it very hard to believe that anyone born and raised in Nigeria is going to ever get a Masters in Pornography. Also, her “Dear Men” website never made sense to me. But I really liked her bank story.

Taynement: I think that’s another thing. This book was about women’s dream count and getting closer to their dreams of finding a partner. I wonder if it was intentional to have such shitty men and have these women not find their partners. I’ve seen criticisms that the book is male centered but I’m okay with that because I think it’s okay for women to have the desire to be partnered.

Leggy: I also think that there is no such thing as a Nigerian woman who has successfully decentered men. Because at the end of the day, the society still makes sure your life revolves around them. Even Omelogor who didn’t care about being partnered was still forced to contend with being single because everyone (both her family and friends) reminded her she was single and childless. Her aunty wanted her to consider adoption since she has passed the age of marriage and childbirth even though she never even wanted marriage or kids ever. The society doesn’t let you have a life that doesn’t center men and anyone who says otherwise is living in a fairytale. I’m so tired of people thinking fiction should depict a reality that is aspiration instead of a reality that is.

Taynement: Did you find Omelogor’s sexuality vague? Also, I feel like the ladies’ relationship traumas were had to get behind without an understanding of how we got here. I had no idea why Omelogor couldn’t be in a long-term relationship and had an end date for each man and don’t even get me started with Chiamaka going for low hanging fruit men and leaving the one good man.

Leggy: I didn’t question Omelogor’s sexuality because at that Abuja party if Omelogor wasn’t a 100% straight she would have indulged but she never did. I also think there are people who really can’t be in a long term relationship. I never thought that had anything to do with a trauma. As for Chiamaka, she had an idea in her head as to what love is, that most Nigerian men could never live up to. She admitted at the end that she should have tried harder with Chuka. I would have married him but I think I understand why she sabotaged herself. Someone like her that’s always travelling and thinks she’s so different would have detested the idea of settling down with the very type of person every conventional person was settling with.

Taynement: But she had less with the non Nigerian men so what was the idea?

Leggy: I think Chiamaka was chasing an idea of love that doesn’t exist.

Taynement: Something I asked myself while reading this book is why when a character has a belief, I think it’s a mouthpiece for what Chiamanda is thinking, but I don’t think this way for other authors.

Leggy: Lmaooo. Probably because we don’t personally “follow” other authors. Most authors I like I don’t even know what they look like. I’ve been hate-reading Sally Rooney for years and I’ve never even googled her.

Taynement: Like you said at the beginning of this, I think the biggest flaw of this book was it being disjointed and uneven. I feel like I don’t have a full understanding of the motivations for Chiamaka, Zikora and Omelogor but I completely understood Kadiatou. Chimamanda says it was a mother-daughter story, but I thought Kadiatou and Binta’s story felt secondary.

Leggy: I didn’t get the motivation for the three girls too and I thought there’d be more connections with their stories. But they stayed in their different pockets and barely interacted throughout the book. I wish I had Chiamaka’s life though. I want rich parents who let me travel. I’d date better men though.

Taynement: Yes, a clearer direction for the book would have been focusing on their dynamic. There was already meat there with Zikora and Omelogor. Zikora was so intimidated by her that when she had a breakdown about being single, her one ask to Chia was “don’t tell Omelogor”.

Leggy: Exactly. That’s why I think these are all independently developed characters that she put together, but I think now that she’s done with the cobwebs of her writer’s block, the next one is probably going to be great. I have faith in her.

Taynement: Do you think the America criticisms were heavy handed?

Leggy: Absolutely, very. Especially coming from someone who lives in Abuja and participated in money laundry. That’s the part of the book where I thought was Chiamanda talking. I think it was the after-effects of the backlash she received some years ago, from people who found some of her comments to be transphobic. She felt like it was her own people cannibalizing her and I think that whole section was her rage at that incident.

Taynement: Overall, we can’t take away from Chimamanda’s writing. I liked how the book stayed very Nigerian. I could see the vision, but the execution was rocky. I think we were left with a lot of whys and not in a Kainene type of way.

Leggy: I debated giving this book 4 stars because I actually liked the writing and the individual stories but ultimately, I settled for 3 stars because I just think the overall book was not well executed.

If you have read the book, what did you think?

Taynement and Leggy

Fiction, literary fiction

Book Review: Margo’s Got Money Problems by Rufi Thorpe

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“You are about to begin reading a new book, and to be honest, you are a little tense. The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope that from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely. But this hope is tempered by the expectation that, in reality, you are about to have to learn a bunch of people’s names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know. And that’s fine, goodness knows you’ve fallen in love with books that didn’t grab you in the first paragraph”

Margo is a 19 year old girl who feels lost in her life. The daughter of a former Hooters waitress and an ex- pro wrestler who aren’t together anymore, she attends community college and starts an affair with her married professor, Mark. The affair leads to a pregnancy and despite numerous concerns by her mom and high school friend, she decides to keep the baby, even though she knows she will be doing this on her own.

Margo has the baby and as expected, it’s not an easy feat. Her mom is no help and Margo is broke. Her dad shows up on her doorstep and offers to babysit and be a roomate to help with the rent. Jobless and facing eviction, Margo knows she needs to do something drastic and decides to start an OnlyFans account. It takes a while but she starts to make money but Margo discovers that even though she solved her financial problems, there were a whole host of other problems awaiting her.

“I’m just saying,” Jinx said, seemingly more lucid now, “when you’re lost in the deep dark forest, the thing to do isn’t to get scared of the trees. You have to find your way out again.”

This was such an interesting book. The cover art made it seem like it would be a fluff book and although it had a fluff aura, it actually was a book with realistic themes. The book alternates from first person narration to third but it’s mostly from Margo’s point of view. Thorpe does a good job of reminding us that Margo is 19. At various points in the book, I would get so annoyed and wonder why she made certain decisions but then remember how young she was. For example, it is difficult for Margo to see that she was taken advantage of by her professor and still argues that it was a consensual affair.

“And it really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell?”

Another thing Thorpe does well is even though the book is full of heavy topics, the book never feels heavy. She also fully fleshes out all the characters so you have a good understanding of them. I think it helped a lot understanding Margo’s mom and dad’s past and gave insight into Margo’s relationship with them. It was amusing to me how her mom stood her ground on not being a hands-on grandma. I did enjoy seeing the evolution of her relationship with her dad.

“It was the word unfit that scared her, a mother who didn’t fit. A mother who wasn’t the right kind of mother like all the other mothers. A mother without a ring, who was too young, who let men look at her body for money.”

One of the interesting parts in the book to me was how people define and see sex work. Even though Margo had an OF account, at many points she had to defend herself saying “I am not having sex with people”. At the end of the day, the book is about a young lady who is lost, made some bad decisions arguably because of how she was raised and is now trying to make the best of the cards she was dealt with. I did this on audio. It was narrated by Elle Fanning and I have to say I wasn’t a fan of her narration even if I understand why she was probably cast. As expected, the book is being turned into a series starring Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman.

Taynement

celebrity memoir, Memoirs, Non-Fiction

Book Review: From Here To The Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keough

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“I have a vague memory of this one conversation we had in that room about a passage that Elvis had underlined. I started to call someone to help me remember it, but realized that there’s no one left to call”

Whatever you felt after reading the quote above, is basically the feeling you’ll have about this book. For me, it was sadness and the feeling of loss and that’s what I got from Lisa Marie while reading her memoir. For those who don’t know, Lisa Marie, only child of Elvis Presley, decided to write her memoir but got stuck and enlisted her oldest daughter, actress Riley Keough to help her complete it. Not long after this, Lisa Marie passed away and Riley is left to complete what her mother started.

“Grief settles. It’s not something you overcome. It’s something that you live with. You adapt to it. Nothing about you is who you were. Nothing about how or what I used to think is important. The truth is that I don’t remember who I was.”

This was a very captivating memoir because it was everything a memoir should have, especially the most important – being honest. Lisa Marie was very open and honest about her life. She laid bare the good (which wasn’t very much), the bad and the ugly and you could feel her struggle and pain through her words. Even when she made decisions that seemed outrageous like deciding she wanted to be a mom and Danny Keough had to be the father and essentially trapping him, you just want to give her a pass because you just wanted to help ease her pain away. The honesty also rang even truer if you do the audio because you get to hear actual audio of Lisa Marie recounting her memories (which is what Riley used to finish up the book)

“He wasn’t an angry person, he didn’t live there. Some people full-on live in destruction. Others buy real estate and walk around in anger for a little while. My dad would just visit.”

Lisa’s first big loss was the loss of her father when she was 9 years old and I don’t think she ever recovered from it. She had a bond/connection with her dad that I can’t whole heartedly say was healthy. Not to say that they didn’t love each other, they did but her dad was an addict and as his addiction got worse and his moods became erratic it seemed like Lisa focused on just making sure she was on his good side. I say this to say that the book sounded like Lisa idolized him especially post-humously and it was almost like he could do no wrong. A stark contrast to her feelings towards her mom. She definitely wrote more about her dad than her mom.

“She mothers my daughter through me.”

As much as this was Lisa Marie’s memoir, the biggest impact it left on me was a desire to know more about her daughter, Riley. I mentioned earlier how it felt like Lisa Marie idolized her dad, I do think Riley did the same for her mom. She did a fantastic job of finishing the book for her mom and piecing together stories told to her by her mom. I felt that Lisa Marie didn’t stand a chance at happiness in life with everything that she went through and I wondered the same about Riley and how she was able to navigate the dysfunction and heartbreaks such as her brother’s suicide. She seems to be a parentified child and the person who kept the family together as the sensible one and it made me want to know more about her true feelings and how she navigated it all.

“I looked at my face as a child and thought, My God, if only anyone could have told you what you were going to go through in this life, what you were going to be up against. That cute little blond-haired child in the matching dress with her mommy. It overwhelmed me.”

Overall, I definitely recommend this book. It’s a quick 6 hour listen on audio. Julia Roberts narrates Lisa’s part and Riley narrates her part (I will admit I was not a fan of Riley’s voice). As mentioned earlier, we get to hear the actual raw tapes of Lisa Marie talking about her life and there is an honesty there that made me believe everything she said. She gave an aura of IDGAF and honestly, what was there to lose? I learned things I didn’t know about her previously like her romantic relationships, her music career and how fraught her relationship with her mom was. All this and more provided for one of my favorite memoir reads.

I’d like to give trigger warnings as there is mention of sexual assault, drug use and suicide.

Taynement

Fiction, Historical, literary fiction, race

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

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“Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.”

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran by America in a senseless accident and his father moved them to the same country responsible for his mother’s death. His father’s life in America is that of survival and making sure that Cyrus also survived. But now, after his father dies, Cyrus is truly alone and is struggling with a lot of addiction issues while developing an obsession with martyrs. He decides that he also wants his death to mean something as he stumbles upon an art installation in New York City where a woman who is dying of cancer is lying there every day until her death, talking to anyone who wants to talk.

“There’s this story I read one time, some old-school Muslim fairy tale, maybe it was a discarded hadith I guess, but it was all about the first time Satan sees Adam. Satan circles around him, inspecting him like a used car or something, this new creation—God’s favorite, apparently. Satan’s unimpressed, doesn’t get it. And then Satan steps into Adam’s mouth, disappears completely inside him and passes through all his guts and intestines and finally emerges out his anus. And when he gets out, Satan’s laughing and laughing. Rolling around. He passes all the way through the first man and he’s rolling around laughing, in tears, and he says to God, ‘This is what you’ve made? He’s all empty! All hollow!’ He can’t believe his luck. How easy his job is going to be. Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled.”

It took me a while to actually start this book because every time it would check out to me; I would send it right back. I saw it so much on Instagram and on so many lists. I read the blurb and felt bored but eventually I decided to just give it a go and I absolutely enjoyed it. One of the reasons I was avoiding this one is because I expected it to be depressing. Martyrs? Lord. But once you meet Cyrus and his self-righteous deep thinking, you can’t help but roll your eyes at all his navel gazing. For a book that explores death, depression and sobriety, it never feels depressing. I actually found it funny in so many ways and the wry humor kept me reading even though Cyrus is the embodiment of “youth is wasted on the young”.

“The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief. Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.”

This book is Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, and everyone knows I grade these on a curve. I’ve never read any of his poetry and I wonder if his writing would have felt familiar if I did. This is an ambitious work that sometimes misses the mark but through Cyrus, we investigate the concept of identity, especially living in a country that caused your mother’s death. And even though you want to lean into your identity as an Iranian, you find out that most of your thoughts and even your addictions are thoroughly American. As he dives into his family’s history – his father’s slow descent into despair and alcoholism, his uncle dressed as the Angel of Death during the Iranian war to convince dying soldiers to die with dignity and not try to desert the army – you begin to understand why Cyrus is so obsessed with death.

“An anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.”

Cyrus doesn’t want to be just another depressed boy who kills himself. He wants his death to mean something, and he is convinced that the woman who is dying in a New York art gallery will help him understand how to make his own death mean something. I really loved Cyrus’ discussions with Orkideh. When he tells her of his plans she says: ahh, another Iranian man obsessed with martyrdom.

“Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus? Of course it would be easy to establish bedrock faith after such clear-cut revelation. How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation?”

I didn’t know the author was a poet before starting this book but the amount of quotes I want to share with you shows you how incredibly well this book is written. Did it set out to do too much and at the end succumbed to cliche? Yes. But I liked the journey and even the cliche ending didn’t dim that for me. I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads.

Leggy

Fiction, literary fiction, romance

Book Review: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

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“Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you.”

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties while his brother, Ivan, is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player whose career has stalled before it could even take off. In the wake of their father’s death, they each deal with this tragedy the best way they can – Peter over medicating himself and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women while Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman and becomes intensely involved with her. Rooney follows these two grieving brothers and the people they love or try to love through a period of desire, despair, possibility and growing up.

“what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”

When the blurb for this book came out, everyone went on and on about how this is Rooney stepping out of her comfort zone and writing about brothers. Actually, this is very typical Rooney, she is still exploring human sexual and romantic relationships but this time her main characters are brothers. Like all her books, people fall in love and engage in toxic relationships or less than ideal relationships so that the book suddenly becomes literary fiction instead of plain old romance. I feel, at this point, I’ve accepted that as much as Rooney annoys me, and I genuinely believe that I hate-read all her books, that she has become a must read author for me. Rooney releases a book, and I read it, she just writes books that I enjoy ranting about. I do not even know if I truly enjoy any of her books.

“Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.”

This book has no quotation marks. That’s probably why you’re reading the above quote and wondering if I made a mistake, but I didn’t. There is just no quotations or commas in the entire book. I came across a clip of Rooney on Instagram in which she said she enjoys exploring different human relationships and accessing what it’s like to need people. I think that clip made me enjoy this book more and I intend to find the full interview and listen to it. Maybe if I listen to her perspective, I’d enjoy her books more. That being said, I ended up appreciating this book even though I started out completely annoyed by the structure. I enjoyed reading about the relationship between the brothers and the relationship they have with their mum. I think this is one of Rooney’s books that I’ve appreciated in a long time.

“Didn’t human sexuality at its base always involve a pathetic sort of throbbing insecurity, awful to contemplate?”

I never recommend Rooney to anybody because even though I will be the first to say that she is a fantastic writer, I still think her books are sad girl aesthetic. Her books are about nothing or about sad people being sad and having sex with each other. It is about people of a certain class, navel gazing about things the rest of the world barely thinks about. Rooney is good at fucked up relationship dynamics, but Ivan and Margaret were just cringe to me. I can’t believe Margaret listened to Ivan chatting like a 12-year-old as opposed to his 22 and still made the decision to sleep with him. Ridiculous. I liked Peter more than Ivan. I found him to be a more complex character but then Rooney decided to wrap everything up in a bow and everything was just tidied up at the end. I found that completely disappointing.

“Nobody when they’re rejected believes it’s really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction — which even makes sense from an evolutionary perspective — is simply the strangest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.”

Overall, I liked this book better than I did her last offering. I gave this 3 stars on Goodreads. Am I going to read the next Rooney book? Who am I kidding? Of course!

Leggy

Fiction

Book Review: I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin

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“I have this theory, that everything that happens on our screens is designed to do exactly what’s happening here, to repel us from one another, to create a war of all against all. It’s like a filter that only shows you others’ bad behavior, blocking the pure and letting through the poison, to make you scared of everyone who isn’t exactly identical to you. I think that, long-term, it traps your brain in a prison, that it’s designed to keep you inside, alone, with only those screens for comfort. A friend of mine came up with a name for it, for these algorithms, this media mind prison. We call it the black box of doom.”

Abbott Coburn is a 26-year-old Lyft driver who gets a job to take a woman to LAX. When he gets there, he meets a woman (Ether) who makes him an offer – $200,000 to cancel the ride on the Lyft app but instead drive her and the big black box she’s sitting on to Washington, D.C. The catch is that they have to get there by the 4th of July for him to get the balance and he can’t come with any electronic devices. She gives him $100,000 upfront and promises him the balance if he keeps to their deal.

Abbott is a Twitch streamer and when he goes back to this house to pack, he uploads a quick video to let his followers know that he would be gone for a while. As he leaves all his electronic devices behind and embarks on a cross-country journey with this strange woman he just met, he is unaware of the online furor that unleashes due to his video spearheaded on Reddit and then spread across all online platforms.

“A sprawling audience of spectators whose demands for compelling news were growing faster than it could be produced. Attention-seekers were eagerly filling the void, and that, friends, is how you build a bullshit machine.”

This book has excerpts of threads from Reddit and comments from spectators as strangers track these two from California to Washington, D.C. The comments get more outrageous as video of him picking up said woman and the big black box with what is thought to be a radiation symbol on it surface online. Everyone has their own theory from a planned terrorist attack on the capital to aliens to drugs to dead bodies.

It’s fascinating and true to real life, watching people make up their minds about strangers who they do not know in real time. People pull up Abbott’s entire Twitch streams and find rants he’s made about women which clearly shows that he has incel tendencies. Every single thing he’s ever said in the past are examined and put up as proof of his intentions.

“Our whole society is idle and overeducated, and nothing spices things up like conflict. There’s an old saying that a child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I’d update it to say the child not sufficiently entertained by the village will burn it down for the spectacle.”

Abbott is a very unlikeable character, but I enjoyed reading his arguments and why he is the way he is. When I was reading comments about this book, I saw a lot of people say they hated this book because they couldn’t “relate” to an incel, and I think this is what is wrong in today’s art. I called it the Taylor Swift effect where everyone wants to relate to art for it to be good. We are demanding that people stop writing any characters that we do not see reflected in us because good art should only reflect us which is leading to artists making albums that are essentially tabloids of their lives.

All I demand from my books is that that character exists. I don’t care if I’m able to relate to that character, I just want the character to exist. Do I relate to Abbott and his arguments? Do I agree with him? Absolutely not. But you cannot argue that men like him exists. You only have to go to a woman’s page on Instagram and read the comments and you will find plenty of men like Abbott.

“Placebos work better when they cost more; it’s science”

I read this book after I wrote our best and worst books of the year, but this is hands down the best book I read this year. I even hesitate to say this because this is not the best written book or the most literary, but I think it’s the book that most struck me and delighted me. I read this book in one sitting. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to do that. Do I think it completely fell apart in the end and the author did not know how to keep up the momentum? Of course, but I still gave this book 5 stars on Goodreads.

Leggy

Uncategorized

Our 2025 Reading Goals

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Leggy:

Happy New Year! I hope everybody enjoyed their holidays because I definitely did! I was off from the 23rd to the 2nd of January and I had such a good time relaxing and reading. When we wrote our best and worst books of 2024, I was still behind on my Goodreads challenge of reading 70 books, so I spent all my off times in coffee shops and bars just reading. It was honestly the best way to spend my time off.

I had an absolutely awful 2024 so I’m surprised that I still managed to hit my reading goals. I also read so much literary fiction in 2024 which is surprising because I usually read way more fantasy, but I guess I wanted to be grounded in reality in 2024. I also realized that the wave of Romantasy sweeping the world via social media is just not for me. I love traditional fantasy where the goal is the world building and the characters, not to figure out a way to fall in love during war time.

I read a book from every section of the categories of the Goodreads books of the year and that made me so proud. I really enjoy reading diversely and I want to keep that going this 2025. I have set my Goodreads challenge to 70 books like always, so we’ll see where this year takes us. We are going to be posting a lot on Instagram this year so please follow us on @nightstands2.

Wishing everyone a good reading year!

Taynement:

2024 was a good reading year until the last quarter where I had to DNF a lot of books (funny enough, I did not DNF what would have been my worst book of the year which was One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon).

When the year started, my reading was dictated by the winners of the Goodreads awards. I went through the literary fiction and added the winners to my TBR and went through them and most deserved their wins and noms. I plan to do that again this year and find some gems I missed from last year. I go to bookstores and take pictures of the display and then I see what’s available in my library and hope for the best.

Like Leggy, I keep my numbers the same every year but I have a Kindle now and I think it helps with my reading (and my eyes!). I hope to do the same this year in that, since my genres aren’t diverse, I like to keep my authors diverse. I did keep to my goal of reading The Fourth Wing so we will see what the lucky book this year will be.

Ultimately, my goal is to enjoy my reading, find titles that bring me joy and expand my world and I hope you have a great reading year as well!

Taynement and Leggy

Best & Worst, Black Authors, celebrity memoir, Fiction, literary fiction, Memoirs, romance

Our Best and Worst Books of 2024

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Another year of reading is coming to a close and as always, we share with you what our best and worst books of the year were.

Taynement’s Best:

“I think of Constance’s hushed voice whenever we were cleaning together. Once some things get dirty they can never be clean again and once some things are broken they can never be fixed.”

I stumbled upon this book randomly. I sometimes go to the bookstore just for a happy high and I take pictures of the featured book display and go down the list to see what is available in my library. Sugar, Baby was and from the moment I read this book it has not left my mind and that’s why it is my favorite read. I couldn’t stop gushing about it to Leggy. I love books that remind you that life isn’t black and white. I don’t think enough promo was done for this but here is my review. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Some other faves:

  • Hold My Girl by Charlene Carr (another underpromoted book, I couldn’t even find it at the bookstore. The book asks the question “What defines a mother?”. Full review here)
  • Here One Moment by Lianne Moriarty (I never thought I would have a Moriarty book on my “best of” list but here we are. Full review here)
  • How To Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair (What a memoir. Full review here)
  • A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo (Enjoyed these collection of short stories)
  • Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi (Listen, I am just as surprised as you are to see this here)

Leggy’s Best:

“In the rare hopeful hour, I tell myself this darkness has a purpose: to help me recognize light if I ever find it again.”

I heard such good things about this book when it was released in 2023 but I never got around to reading it. Finally, I cracked it open in 2024 and I understood why it was recommended so much to me. Read my full review of this one here.

Some other favorites:

  • The Wedding People by Alison Espach. I read this last month and really, really liked it. I feel like everything might have been wrapped up too neatly but I still really enjoyed my reading experience. This will probably be my first review of the new year.
  • Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Rich people being badly behaved will always have my heart in literature. You can read my review here.
  • James by Percival Everett . You can read my review here.
  • Summer Fridays by Suzanne Rindell. I think this is my favorite romance of the year.

Taynement’s Worst:

I tried but I couldn’t get over the premise. Maybe it is possible, but it’s hard for me to imagine that someone would fall for the identical twin brother of the person who raped and impregnated her and have that child have an Uncle/Dad relationship? I know I say life isn’t black and white but this was not it at all.

Leggy’s Worst:

This book was just badly written and just bad. This was also the only book that I gave one star this year soooo it earned its place.

Thank you so much for sticking with us this year. Let us know your best and worst books of the year in the comments. Happy Holidays, everybody!

Taynement & Leggy

Fiction, Historical, literary fiction, Mystery

Book Review: The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

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“Rich people, thought Judy—she thought this then, and she thinks it now—generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.”

It’s early morning, August 1975 and Barbara Van Laar has gone missing. She’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished 14 years ago, never to be found. As a search begins, we find ourselves chasing down the secrets of the Van Laar family, their history, the 14-year-old stone cold case and the blue-collar community working in the shadow of this powerful family.

“It was funny, she thought, how many relationships one could have with the same man, over the course of a lifetime together.”

Liz Moore is the writer of Long Bright River which was a huge hit during the pandemic. I remember being the odd man out on that book because I did not like it and gave it 2 stars. I also realized that I had read her 2016 novel, The Unseen World, which I frankly have no recollection of reading, but Goodreads tells me I gave this book 4 stars. Anyway, I wasn’t going to read this book because it was getting so much hype, and I remembered my experience of her previous book and was going to stay away until I saw her on Obama’s list. I was intrigued that a mystery novel made it on there, so I decided to finally pick it up and was not disappointed.

“This is one of the few sheer pleasures Louise knows in life: the near-otherworldly feeling of touching another human’s body with your own body in a way that, for the first time, transcends mere friendliness. These are the times in her life that Louise has felt most acutely the animal nature of her humanity, and therefore they have been the most comforting. To be a human is complex, and often painful; to be an animal is comfortingly simple and good.”

This book is a master class in well written prose. I thought the descriptions and the turn of phrases were fantastic. This story is told through multiple perspectives taking us on a history journey through the Van Laar family. We get Tracy, a young meek girl who is suffering from her parents’ divorce and is sent to this camp by her father for the summer to avoid actually spending time with her. Alice, mother of the missing Barbara who also lost her son 14 years ago and is addicted to pills having never gotten over the disappearance of her son. Louise, a 26 year old camp counselor who is “engaged” to a boy from a wealthy family and wonders if this will be her ticket out of poverty until she encounters what it’s like to become a scapegoat to a family that finds you expendable and Judy, the first female investigator in the state at 26 who is smart, observant and very good at her job.

“she also believed that part of a mother’s duty was to be her daughter’s first, best critic; to fortify her during her childhood, so that in womanhood she could gracefully withstand any assault or insult launched in her direction. This was the method her own mother had used upon her. She hadn’t liked it at the time, but now she understood it.”

This book was a 5-star read for me till the end when I deducted a star because it was the worst ending. The author takes us through the book and dangles multiple suspects at us only to completely drop all of them for an ending that I found so unrealistic and ridiculous. I can’t believe her editor let her keep that ending. It just did not work for me at all. I gave this book 4 stars because I did not think the ending lived up to the entire work for me, but I still recommend it for the journey.

Have you read this one? Let me know in the comments.

Leggy

Fiction, literary fiction, women's fiction

Book Review: Here One Moment by Lianne Moriarty

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“I have noticed that even people who claim everything is predestined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road”

It was supposed to be a short, domestic, uneventful flight from Hobart to Sydney. We meet the passengers boarding the plance and get a short description of various characters. All of a sudden mid-flight, an older lady starts walking through the aisles, pointing at passengers and telling them their cause of death and the age at which they will die.

Some had long life predictions (we’re talking over a 100) and some had predictions that were round the corner. No one was spared because even the little baby got a drowning prediction in a few years. It was all a joke to everyone as the woman seemed to be in a dream like state and when she got back to her seat and asked for water, it seemed like a case of dehydration till a few month later, the first prediction comes true…exactly as she said it.

“You won’t necessarily win against fate, but you should at least put up a fight”

Once the lady, whose name is Cherry by the way, started giving the predictions, my anxiety shot all the way up because I imagined being trapped in the air and someone giving me unsolicited information about how and when I will die but once the first prediction happened, I was hooked. And was hooked to the very end. In the Moriarty books I’ve read, it usually takes her a while to get us to the point so having the premise from the get go was a welcome pleasant surprise.

“Everyone loves a particular version of you, and when that person is gone, that version goes with them.”

Moriarty did her big one here because the development of the story was great. We go back in and learn about Cherry, who is the main character and we learn about her upbringing and her life till the moment on the plane. Her mother being a clairvoyant was definitely an interesting tid bit. At the same time, we get to know a couple of characters who were also on the plane. We get to know more about their life and to make it even sweeter, Moriarty drops little easter eggs here and there that show connections among the characters.

“La vita va veloce: this life goes fast, much faster than time”

Part of getting to know the other characters involves how they react once the predictions start coming true. It was interesting to see how some were still cavalier about the whole thing while others took it very seriously and went over the edge convincing themselves that they could control their fate. I liked the balance of light and breezy and thought provoking because some story lines explore what could have been with certain life choices chosen or not chosen.

I always say Moriarty is an overrated writer and I can’t believe it but I enjoyed thisone and I would recommend. Because it’s quite intriguing, the pages go by fast. If you have read this one, what did you think?

Taynement