Jane Eyre's Husband - The Life of Edward Rochester by Tara Bradley
War and Peace* by Leo Tolstoy
Raging Heat by Richard Castle
Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
The Miniaturist by Jesse Burton
The thriving cottage industry of Jane Austen (etc) re-tellings isn’t a genre I generally engage with, but I did enjoy this soapy romance take on telling Rochester’s side of Jane Eyre. I think it works a little too hard to absolve him of some of his douchier behaviors, though. Rochester is a bad man. He gaslights Jane and manipulates her and is a wee bit emotionally abusive, and none of that can be explained away by being duped into getting into a bad relationship.
Motherfucking War and Peace. I cannot make any headway in this thing. I need like a murder board with photos of each character and all the variations on their names to keep everything straight as I read. I’ve been told that once you get into it, it’s a good book, but I can’t get into it.
I have no memory whatsoever of reading Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan, but it ticks all the boxes for things I should love. Apparently, it’s the story of a strong, independent American woman’s affair with Robert Louis Stevenson, but it made absolutely no impression on me.
I must have decided to re-read the Hunger Games trilogy in advance of one of the movie’s release dates. Never a bad choice.
The Miniaturist by Jesse Burton is an interesting novel. I liked it and was engrossed with the setting and the mystery, but there were some issues. I feel like the ending was rushed, and all of the threads weren’t adequately tied up at the end. I find it fascinating that it was a NaNoWriMo novel, of sorts. The author worked on it over several years during NaNo.