March 2020 books

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The standard for any book about Chernobyl is probably: can it dumb down nuclear physics well enough for you to understand what happened, and how, and what the consequences were? This book passes with flying colors. It helps that I watched the excellent Chernobyl TV series last summer (and yes, I DID look up the show's imdb page so I could match names to actors and remember oh yeah, THAT guy (it is almost always a guy)), but even without those visuals to put to the complicated events, I would have been able to follow what was going on here. It's a terrible story but also a strange and even funny one, and Higginbotham does a good job teasing out the ludicrous so we can have a moment to laugh every now and then. I mean, this is a book where it's the Soviet Union, so construction is shoddy and mistakes happen, etc., but also, after the horrible thing happens, you can make ONE phone call and demand all of the, say, borium in the entire Union and it will all be on a truck heading to where you need it THE NEXT DAY. But then the truck breaks down. But then you make one MORE phone call and say the drivers will be shot unless they figure out a way to get it there by nightfall, and they do. I'm conflating two different events here but you really could not make this story up. Absolutely spellbinding and I looked forward to reading this book every chance I got.

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A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An interesting look at the multiple 'discoveries' of the New World by various Europeans, but more unflinching than, say, your average elementary school or even high school textbook. It's a bit meandering - at times (especially during the American Southwest chapters) I found myself wondering "wait, why are we still here, what are we looking for again" but guess what, CORDOBA WAS WONDERING THE SAME THING! So it works.

The Roanoke/Jamestown chapters perk things right up, though. If Horwitz (God rest his soul) were alive to write an update chapter, I would love to see what he would maybe include about DNA research since that field has advanced so much in the 12 years since this book was published. Not that it would change anything about the way we view these periods of history, but the added layer of information would be a good fit in the chapters where he talks about lineage and blood and ancestry and what it all means for present-day Americans.

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A Terrible Beauty by Tasha Alexander
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another perfectly enjoyable Lady Emily mystery!

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American Royals by Katharine McGee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was fine! It was fun! I read that the author has actually carried out academic research examining the idea of how an American monarchy would have developed in the 18th century, and I would have liked to see more of those details explored in the actual book. There are glimpses here and there but otherwise this story doesn't really have to be in America - you could imagine it's present-day England and it would work. I did like the fact that many plot points were winks and nods toward actual royal family drama that has happened in different countries over the years. In that sense it was fun to see what this book imagined happened behind the scenes in those instances. No spoilers, but I bet one conversation between Beatrice and her father is preeeetttty close to one that has happened in real life in recent years in a certain European country.

This is also one of those books where if people would just Talk To Each Other then it would be only a few pages long, and it sometimes felt like people broke up/got together one too many times, but still: it was fine. It was fun. Reminded me of The Selection with a dash of One of Us Is Lying.

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Caging Skies by Christine Leunens
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Oooooh I really didn't like this one! This is the book Jojo Rabbit is based on and I was really excited to read it and see where all the quirkiness and joy amid Nazi-WW2-Germany horrors came from. Well, as it turns out, everything good about Jojo Rabbit came from Taika Waititi, not this book. About one-fourth of the way into reading the book I thought, well, I'm a little disappointed it's not the SAME as the movie but I can enjoy it as its own thing, I guess.

But nope, didn't like it on that level, either, and it just got worse as it went on! It's dark and weird and unsettling and more than anything joyful or quirky or inspiring, it reminded me of Stolen: A Letter to My Captor. I also checked about five times to see if the author was really a woman, because the prose reads very male-gaze-y. I mean it IS a male (Johannes) narrating but there were a lot of parts that would have fit right in on a Men Writing Women Twitter thread (stuff like, "she was emaciated, but she still had large breasts!!!").

My plan: watch Jojo Rabbit again and forget this book exists. And the movie will be doubly good since I now know the challenges it had to overcome with its source material! Taika Waititi deserves every bit of that Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar!

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