Portable Magic
Reading, for me, is entertainment and an escape from the real world. But it can also inform and stretch the boundaries of the life I live.
Currently reading
Joplin's Ghost ★★★★☆
I had a wildly uneven experience with this book. It has some of the same problems that I have with most novels that try to tell two interconnected stories, one historical, one contemporary. The historical story was easy to fall into, but I kept losing interest during the contemporary timeline. That might be all me, rather than the book, as I have very little interest in 1990's pop music or the lives of fictional 90's pop stars. I was also a little uncomfortable with (the mercifully few) explicit sex scenes and some dubious consent issues. The payoff toward the end was worth persevering for, though, and the prose lifted the story a little.
I think it was the audio performance by Lizan Mitchell that really made this book for me - her pace, her voices, her emotion, even the way she changed the whole persona of the narrator based on who's POV is being revealed - were all outstanding.
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