Back To Shore

This has been a bit of a so-so month book wise. I was positively surprised by some and on the other hand felt let down by others. I sold some of the latter already, so I can’t share a photo of the ones I’ve read. Here are the stats of the last 28 days.

Here are some thoughts (aka my reviews on Storygraph) on the six books, starting with the ones I enjoyed the most to the ones that left me a bit underwhelmed.

The Sun is also a Star, Nicola Yoon, 2016
I loved this much more than I expected. What a wonderful story of two young people who meet by chance (or fate) in NYC and fall in love on the day, when she (daughter of undocumented immigrants) is supposed to be deported. The story is told in short chapters, alternating from their different points of view and on occasion the side characters are taking over the narrators voice. It worked very well here and it helped to give the whole plot and story more colour. It also highlighted how much in our lives is determined by chance. Or is it fate after all? A great story and I’m happy to have ended the month on this one.

Cassandra in Reverse, Holly Smale, 2023
I might add more elaborate thoughts to this in a while [scatterbrain that I am, probably not though]. I really enjoyed this one. I like the unique way of time-travelling and could relate to Cassie much more than I thought and more than I might like to admit in public. I sometimes feel like my personality includes various neurodivergent aspects, but I shy away from self-diagonsis. But the comforting routines, staying inside my comfort zone, feeling like I’m not sharing my authentic / real person self with the world, if that makes sense. I loved the (hidden) message in this plot and found it inspiring and encouraging: People in general are kind and lovely and not in general hostile or dismissive and it’s worth the “risk” to be more open about stuff. And myself.

Ugh, I segue into self-therapy-talk, back to the book. I figured out the mystery of the letter writer about halfway through, I think the final revelation about Cassandra’s mum felt a bit too much and on the nose so to speak, but all in all I really, really enjoyed the being invited into this section of Cassandra’s life. Let’s end with positivity: The writing was great, the right variety of fun and emotions and I especially love the intro / finale about “what’s the beginning of a story anyway”.

Thees Uhlmann über die Toten Hosen, Thees Uhlmann 2019
[Audiobook] One of my favourite German singer/songwriters reads his book about the most successful German punkband Die Toten Hosen. Very entertaining, very relatable and beautifully written.

The Last Devil to Die, Richard Osman, 2023
Another enjoyable and this time also quite sad story from the Thursday Murder Club. The plot and how those seniors and the police act and react is quite unrealistic, I know, but that is sort of the fun of it. (15 July 2024)

The Scent of Death, Simon Beckett 2019
This story kept me hooked for the last few days, even though I realized I’m not as comfortable with grisly thriller plots as I used to be. Thus I’m not sure if I’ll read the next one in this series. I thought the plot was well constructed and I had no idea who the killer was until it was revealed, which is always a good thing for a thriller plot. I also mostly enjoyed the variety of side characters and in some cases felt really bad about what happened to them. The subplot of someone from previous stories who (still) wants to kill Dr. Hunter felt a bit too far-fetched for me.

Standard Deviation, Katherine Heiny, 2017
I sort of enjoyed the actual writing in this book and to be fair it’s the only thing that kept me reading till the end. There wasn’t much of a plot and even though I don’t mind a story which tells only snap-shots in lives of some people, at least make these snapshots interesting. For me this dragged and meandered on and on.

Here are a few thoughts on the books I read in form of the often short and possibly not very substantial reviews on Storygraph. Even if I don’t rate book as such anymore, I’ll here share them in order of how much I enjoyed reading them. Favourite first, obviously.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin, 2014
If I still rated books, this would have gotten 5 stars. Such a lovely story about real people and their lives, misfortunes and mistakes but also their joys and achievements. It’s also about books and why we love and need them. Sooooo good. This has been the 3rd book I read from Zevin and I enjoyed all of them. They’ve all been unique in their plot, which I also liked a lot because it shows how good a writer she is. I’ll definitely try to read more of her.

No Time Like The Past (The Chronicles of St Mary’s #05), Jodi Taylor, 2015
Another entertaining story from St. Mary’s. There is always so much going and again they are a whirl-wind through history, that I sometimes wish they’d slow down a bit. I mean they do in the plot, but it’s not noticeable in the storytelling as such. I just sometimes feel like I’m loosing track of who’s where/when and what’s happening to whom and all. But maybe that’s just me.

The Edge of Lost, Kristina McMorris, 2015
The summary mentioned “skillfully weaving these two stories” and I found that misleading, because it wasn’t really two stories, was it? I don’t know. I kind of enjoyed the story, but it was such a slow burn and sadly enough I didn’t manage to care about neither the main nor some of the side characters all that much. The end comes with a few surprises at least, but by that time I had already almost lost interest.

The Lighthouse Library, Rachael Lucas, 2024
I enjoyed most of the previous Applemore books, but didn’t know this would be a standalone in the series. It was nice enough, but to me it tried to hard to be educational about environment and poverty and all that stuff. It would have needed more substance for me to have any impact, to me this felt a bit performative.

The Wake-Up Call, Beth O’Leary, 2023
I enjoyed previous works from Beth O’Leary, but this just didn’t quite land with me. The writing was fine and the plot idea as such okay for me. I liked the competition angle and miscommunication as a trope often enough works for me, but at least halfway through the story I wanted to knock some sense into the female lead and force her to address what upset her last Christmas. Ugh! The actual reason for the not / wrongly delivered reason was so lame IMHO. All in all… just no cup of tea sadly.

The Guncle Abroad, Steven Rowley, 2024
I guess after how much I enjoyed “The Guncle” a sequel had a lot to live up to. For me this story sadly didn’t deliver as much as I had hoped. Parts of it felt too much like a travel advert for Europe, parts were just a bit silly. I didn’t understand either why Greg and Livia had to marry right now and neither why Patrick had ended things with Emory. I tore through it on a weekend, but if I’m honest a lot of that had to do with me wanting to get it over with.

American Panda, Gloria Chao, 2018
For some reason this book wasn’t for me. I found the writing a bit boring, didn’t find it in me to care all that much about the main character and all in all neither the plot.

It’s in my nature to be too often and too easily

paralysed by decisions

and overwhelmed by perfectionism (and no ‘perfectionism’ actually is not a positive character trait). While I thought I should write a review of the whole album, because that’s what I did for all the previous ones. There were a few songs on that album I have lots to say about and others just very little. How on earth would I be able to reconcile those two aspects? So I didn’t even try. Until the penny dropped and I realized that I do not have to write a post about the whole album, just because I did that for all the previous 9. I do not have to write about all those songs in one go. Duh!

It needed a trip to the mall yesterday to finally sit down and start typing.

But I didn’t use to be this agoraphobic

I had to pick up something at a store at that mall and while I expected Saturday shoppers, I obviously underestimated the amount of people out and about. When I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people around me, I was reminded of how since March 2020 any kind of crowd made me quite anxious for a long time.

This might need some context: I’ve always been easily anxious and worried about things. Due to a chronic neurological illness (Multiple Sclerosis) I’ve also been and still am part of the high-risk group for a COVID infection. Anxiety prone and especially vulnerable to a potentially deadly disease? Of course that would affect my mental health! I didn’t realize that for a long time though.

Panic attacks in the dentist car park,
Losing my temper in a Jersey sports bar –
Safe to say the twenties have been weird.

There were so many moments in 2020 / 2021 where I got anxious about and also pissed off at people. Back in the very early days when we thought every close contact even outdoors could be dangerous and we didn’t have the “several minutes / indoors” risk assessment yet, I always got so angry at all the runners who passed me without a wide berth when I was out walking on the rail path. In hindsight I know I was overreacting, but in that moment, I felt vulnerable and I was angry about the lack of consideration from other people.

I’ve got similar memories of trips to the supermarket, where I once got angry at a guy who I thought was pushing his cart to close into my path. Outrage when the pizza delivery staff didn’t just put the box on the stairwell as I had asked them to with my order, but rang the doorbell to hand the box over. In hindsight I know (again) that I was overcautious and not at any risk by that behaviour. But we didn’t know that in the early days, did we? And it made me so anxious and angry.

It’s not just you and it’s not just me
That has pandemic PTSD.

Post traumatic stress disorder
Is characterised by persistent trauma
Caused by severe psychological shock or else physical injury.

I know in general PTSD is more used for “Big T traumas” like having been in a war, accident, abuse of any kind. And I probably wouldn’t call my experience of the pandemic years PTSD as such. But the pandemic sure did a number on me to some degree. Many experiences but also the strangeness of these past years are still somehow seared into my brain and still pop up quite often when I return to some locations. Up until late 2022 / early 2023 those flashbacks to previous experiences were accompanied with the visceral reaction of feeling anxious. The latter lessened over time by now, but the memories as such still pop up from time to time even now another year later. Often just little things like being in this one particular mega store, where the checkout queue at one point went all the way to the back of the shop (40 metres or so). The checkout in another supermarket I regularly frequent is next to the entrance to the pharmacy where I had to get my first vaccination registered in my vaccination card in spring 2021. Returning to department stores which you were only allowed to enter when you had current proof of a negative COVID test. So many snapshots, which have quite faded by now but have not disappeared from my memory yet. I sometimes wonder if they ever will. And will I mind if they don’t?

Until it’s OK to admit that I don’t know how to feel
About the shit that we just lived through – it was kind of a big deal.

And one day it seemed like everybody decided
They were tired of trying and bored of hiding it,
Ready for the next adventure, next news cycle, next catastrophe. [….]

As you can gather from what I wrote so far it definitely was a big deal for me! It didn’t help my mental health that there was other negative stuff going on in my life in 2021. But I also was baffled and disappointed and pissed off how so many people wanted to move on from this very traumatic experience too soon for my taste. Moving on in the quite practical sense of not wearing masks and not keeping a distance anymore right away when any rules about it were lifted. Of not being considerate to take a test / stay home when they feel sick. Not to mention the blatant disregard of potential long term risk of repeated infections or the many, many people already suffering from Long COVID. I just recently read a magazine feature about two women (early 30s and early 40s) whose lives shut down because of that and about their struggle to get any kind of decent care and support. It’s horrific!

And we stood in the wreckage trying not to claim
That we had more than our fair share of the pain,

Part of the wreckage I stood in obviously was my anxiety gone through the roof due to my own personal health situation. The other part was, how I lost quite a bit of faith in my fellow human beings. Faith that most people in general are decent and have some common sense and empathy for others. My outlook on society might have been a bit naive / optimistic before that, but something definitely broke for me in 2020/2021. I’m aware that society has started to be more divisive even before that (culture wars and all), but I didn’t expect it to go as far as it has been during the pandemic years and since. I was baffled / shocked how people with a university degree (in science!) and especially health professionals decided to blatantly ignore science and instead shared misinformation and conspiracy theories. How toxic and violent the whole debate quickly turned online and offline. How ordinary people ignored rules and advice, because they either didn’t believe COVID was serious or because they just didn’t care. How our government and we as society so easily brushed over what 2 years of distant learning and contact restriction did to a huge part of children, teenagers, young adults.

I don’t have a solution for any of those things, which have been broken. I still struggle with the mental health side of it sometimes. But at least now I’ve got a song I can scream along to when my frustration with it all gets too overwhelming. And at any other time as well, because it’s a great song in general!