by Jen Moyers (@jen.loves.books)
As we enter the final third of 2024, I'm focusing even more on finishing my reading challenges. If you've joined us for this year's Unabridged Podcast Reading Challenge and are looking to complete those last categories, here are some ideas!
(One other tip: If you navigate to our Reading Challenge page in Storygraph, you can see the books that other challenge participants have selected for each category! Here are the books I've logged.)
Doreen Cunningham's Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales: A Memoir (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Categories: Book about travel, Book about climate change, Audiobook read by the author
Soundings is a fascinating memoir that weaves together two connected experiences in Cunningham's life: her time living with an Iñupiaq in Alaska and her journey, years later, with her two-year-old son Max, following the grey whale migration from Mexico and back to Alaska.
Cunningham's voice is the real star here (and that's emphasized in the audiobook), highlighting the joy and vulnerability she feels while jumping into a journey that centers both her motherhood and her attempts to reconnect with the way she once saw herself. She takes on so much: the ways that climate change has affected intertwined ecosystems—including the Iñupiaq's way of life; the impact of her toxic relationship with Max's father on her self-concept; the day-to-day logistics of traveling with a toddler. It's an incredible memoir that somehow balances gritty detail with a panoramic view.
Elif Shafak's There Are Rivers in the Sky (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Categories: Book about travel, Book about climate change, Book with an unusual point of view
Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky features the elements that I’ve loved in so many of her books: a touch of magic, multiple generations and eras, and different threads that ultimately weave together.
The novel begins with a drop of rain and King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, a cruel king whose legacy affects the lives of many, including Arthur, born in a sewer in Victorian England; Narin, a Yazidi girl in Turkey with a disorder causing deafness; and Zaleekah, a hydrologist whose crumbled marriage leads her to take a new life direction.
As the narrative shifts between their stories, Shafak explores the impacts of climate change, of poverty and inequity, of ignorance. Her writing is simply gorgeous, both on the sentence level and in the ways it peels back the layers of the characters’ connections.
There were moments when the whimsy of the raindrop didn’t work for me, occasions when I felt as if the pace of the narrative could have been a little faster. Ultimately, though, this one ranks in the top half of Shafak’s books for me, driven by her exploration of the cycles that spin through human history.
Leif Unger's I Cheerfully Refuse (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Categories: Book about travel, Book about climate change, Book recommended on a podcast (The Popcast)
I absolutely loved Leif Enger's I Cheerfully Refuse. I thought it would be tough to beat his novel Peace Like a River, which I read last year, but I think this one topped it. What did I love?
Rainy is a fantastic protagonist: from page one, we know that he's totally in love with his wife, devoting himself completely to their relationship (which sets up the rest of the novel beautifully).
It features fantastic, postapocalyptic/dystopian world building that's just far enough in the future to give some perspective but is close enough to feel scary.
There's a book (I Cheerfully Refuse) at its center. I love a book within a book.
An amazing and precocious child does make an appearance. (No spoilers.)
There's the perfect amount of fantasy (built onto the speculative realism of this bleak world).
The villain is so discomfiting.
GORGEOUS writing.
So many emotional highs and lows.
This is one of those books that deserves alllll the hype.
Henry Hoke's Open Throat (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Categories: Book about climate change, Book recommend on a podcast (Unabridged!), Book with an unusual point of view
Just in case you missed our discussion in season 7—or you hadn't thought about double-dipping categories!—I'd be remiss not to mention Open Throat again. You can find our episode here.
Danica Nava's The Truth According to Ember (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Categories: Romance by an indigenous author
Though this novel only checks one category box, I'd be remiss not to highlight it: I've seen reporting that this is the first adult romance about indigenous people written by an indigenous author to be picked up by a major publishing house. My gut reaction is that this detail is hard to believe . . . but it also connects all too perfectly with Nava's book.
I listened to this one thanks to Libro.fm for the ALC of Danica Nava's The Truth According to Ember, and I highly recommend the audiobook. I thoroughly enjoyed this romance, which is the perfect balance of fun and thoughtful.
Because of a series of circumstances that have left her both in dire need of money and without a college degree, Ember Lee Cardinal has been having trouble getting ahead. When the perfect job opportunity arises, Ember is worried that her Chickasaw heritage might take her out of the running, something she's experienced in the past. So, she lies on her resume . . . about a few things. And she gets the job.
Then, she meets Danuwoa Colson and finds out that he's the IT guy at her new company. Everything seems to be coming together, but in a way that leaves her grasping to hold all of her half-truths and outright lies together.
There were a few times that I was screaming in my head at Ember to just tell the truth(!), but overall, I thought that Nava did a beautiful job developing Ember as a flawed, likable character who just needs a few things to break her way, and Danuwoa is such a fantastic male lead that I loved listening to their story. I also appreciated Nava's note at the end of the book, explaining her own experiences, which led to so many of the book's events.
(A note to our readers: click on the hashtags above to see our other blog posts with the same hashtag.)
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