Once again we have my quarterly reading update! These past few months have been a bit slower for my book intake, but with my show ending and school finishing up, I’m back at it. 

I read Girl, Interrupted almost immediately after reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and I’m so glad that I was able to. Sylvia Plath and Susanna Kaysen were both patients at the same mental health facility, though in very different time periods. This memoir was sharp, and Kaysen did not shy away from giving an exact account of her experiences. Her gorgeous metaphors are woven into memories of the awful things that she and the other girls admitted to the facility had to endure to be “cured.” My personal favorite line from the memoir:  “Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.” 

This novel sounded absolutely perfect for me when I first saw it. It’s a retelling of Bluebeard with gothic elements, haunted jewelry, and murdered wives set on revenge. An element that I adored about The House Saphir was that the world the book is set in is based on French culture. Every creature, name, and even features of the architecture draw inspiration from historical France–with magic woven into the plot. I loved how vivid Marissa Meyer’s imagery was, and I always love ghosts with hidden backstories, especially ones bent on revenge. 

The movie for Project Hail Mary came out earlier this year, and I wanted to read it before going to see the movie in theatres. And I’m so glad I did. Project Hail Mary is one of my new favorite movies, and I love the book even more. Andy Weir is a master of writing multilayered characters. Ryland Grace, the main character, doesn’t remember who he is for the first part of the story, and so he creates this version of himself as bits and pieces of his memory come back to him. It’s not just a space survival story like The Martian though. Rocky the alien is the other main character of this novel, which also makes Project Hail Mary a story of unlikely friendships, and navigating barriers in language and culture so far-flung from what either Rocky or Grace had previously known. 

Starter Villain is probably the funniest and strangest book in this quarter’s batch. There are intelligent cats, secret villain lairs with volcanoes, and a middle-aged divorced substitute teacher dropped right into the middle of it all. This book was incredibly amusing, but the thing I enjoyed the most about this book is that John Scalzi cleverly has the professionals in the novel use sophisticated economics and business jargon that has to be explained to the main character. It’s fast-paced once you get into it, and for people who enjoy comedy set in an unexpectedly business-oriented world for a novel about a world-class villain. 

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is the most nonsensical novel I think I have ever read. The cities in this book’s world are named with singular letters, the mythical creatures have silly names (ex. Butt the mechanical Hoopee), and the characters all seem to know something that Haroun, the twelve year old boy who is our main character, does not. As nonsensical and silly as this book was, it also has a powerful hidden message about censorship in writing. Haroun travels to a moon named Kahani to stop the poisoning of the Sea of Stories by a man named Kattam-Shud, who represents silence and censorship. It was an interesting novel, and I loved the worldbuilding. It felt at once ridiculously simple and mind-bogglingly complex. 

Honorable Mentions: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, and The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

This is my last blog post of freshman year, but stay tuned for when Cabinet of Curiosities picks up again in August with my summer reading recap!