StoryGraph

Early last year, I finally caved and created a Goodreads account. At the time, I thought I would find many likeminded readers there, especially fellow alumni of English Literature, to list and exchange book ideas. As it turned out, several friends used Goodreads, but more of them used StoryGraph. As soon as I'd created a Goodreads account, I was asked why I wouldn't join StoryGraph instead. Now, after a year of Goodreads, I moved over and joined StoryGraph.

But why is StoryGraph any better than Goodreads? They're both sites/apps that let you record the books you've read, file reviews, and get recommendations. How much more can there be to it?

Well, one of the biggest draws can be found on the bottom of StoryGraph's homepage, where it says "A fully-featured Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads". Goodreads is owned by Amazon. This means it generally only contains books you can buy on Amazon (which does not include a lot of the Dutch non-fiction I read last year). Also, in the 'recommendations' list, I've never found a book I was actually interested in reading or that was even close to my interests. Instead, the 'recommendations' lists are full of currently popular titles, especially BookTok trends, that Amazon is interested in selling. They use Goodreads to push their sales, not to point readers towards a hidden gem they might find in a second-hand bookstore.

StoryGraph is different in a couple of ways. One of my favourite things is that I as a user can add editions of a book, or change details. So when I wanted to add the pretty obscure Dutch cheese-making book I'd read, I realised there was no page count or publisher information available yet. I was able to edit this myself, adding to a more complete database. These are publications details, but you can also add reviews to a book that go beyond the standard 1-5 stars and written text. All users can enter the 'moods' of books (for example; adventurous, dark, funny, mysterious), whether it is fast or slow-paced, plot or character-driven, etcetera. The app will tell you the percentages, so for Astonish me, 77% found it 'emotional', 22% 'dark' and just 1% 'relaxing'. 55% thinks the book is character-driven, just 5% think it is plot-driven (myself included) and the rest think it's a mix. When you're looking for a particular type of book to read, these stats can come in pretty handy.

Furtheremore, based on these reviews, the recommentations on there are actually recommendations. I answered a short survey on my likes and dislikes, which generated a list of 20 titles the StoryGraph algorithm thought I might like. 18 of those books I'd already read. StoryGraph couldn't know that of course, since my historical reading data is only from 2023 and 2024, but it only goes to show that the recommendations acutally fit my preferences and also include books that were published decades ago and are not currently hip and happening. 

Finally, as the name already tells you, StoryGraph is full of graphs. And stats. And they're free to use, not hidden behind a 'plus' pay wall like on Goodreads. The stats will tell you the basics; how many books and how many pages, but also fiction/non-fiction, genres, languages, particular writers, and much more. Below is the overview of the books and pages I read in various months of 2023, with the November dip due to NaNoWriMo clearly visible. 

Books and pages read in 2023.

This will make my end-of-year overviews so much easier to compile!

So overall, I am much happier on StoryGraph than I ever was on Goodreads. It's already led me to some books I'd never thought to read before and it made me look afresh at books I have already read. The app does have some unexpected quirks and does not always work the way you'd expect, but there are probably only a handful of people working on it, rather than the hundreds Amazon can throw at Goodreads. 

In short, I am very happy to have made the switch and hope to find many more friends and books there in the future!

Astonish Me

Astonish Me is the third book I read by Maggie Shipstead. After the joy of reading Great Circle, which quickly became my favourite book of 2023, I was somewhat disappointed by her short story collection You have a friend in 10A. Since Astonish Me was published before both of these, I was curious to see how I liked it.

Unfortunately, despite the title, this novel did not astonish me all that much. The book centers on Joan, who is a ballet dancer in New York in the seventies, turns housewife in California in the eighties, but returns to the ballet world in the nineties when her son turns out to be a ballet prodigy. While she was young, she played a role in the defection of a Russian dancer; she drove his getaway car and had a short relationship with him. But her ballet skills were not up to par and she returns to her high school boyfriend, to let him take her into a world of domesticity. This, in a nutshell, is the entire story.

If you love ballet, you will probably love this book. There are long descriptions of ballet class, of dance design, of differences in styles between French, Russian or American dancers, of entire performances even. Joan is always stretching her muscles or refusing to eat, two stereotypical images one has of a ballet dancer. This could have easily turned into a caricature, but it is clear that Maggie Shipstead really loves ballet and probably cannot imagine that anyone could tire from reading about plies and fourth or fifth positions for page upon page.

But the characters were nice, both Joan and her husband, her best friend, who sticks with ballet dancing, and later on her son, with some outside views thrown in by their neighbours and their daughter. They are nothing special, but they have a personality, a will of their own. I was not really rooting for them, but I enjoyed spending time with them.

Structure-wise, the book is set in a mix of chronology. We first meet Joan as she decides to stop following her ballet dream and leaves the company. Then we jump back in time to meet her as a young girl learn about her formative time in Paris and her relationship with the Russian. Then we jump forward in time again, to meet her young family, with a son growing up and discovering ballet for himself. Then we jump back in time some more, and forward again. In my opinion, these time jumps are unnecessary; telling the story in a normal time order would have been just as fine (but more on that later).

But that was not the thing that annoyed me the most. Towards the end of the book, with the second jump backwards, we get a 'big reveal'. You somehow know this plot twist is coming, as the convoluted structure seems to exist only to create some confusion, to keep something hidden, so you just feel something is up. But the thing is, when the big reveal is revealed, it is as if we should have known about this all along. The book continues as if it is nothing special, nothing new. Added to that, most of the characters turn out to know all along. But we, as readers, had no chance. There was no way we could logically have thought about this, given all the information the book gave us. 

Now I love a book with a plot twist. Great Circle contains one of the best plot twist I've read in a while. But in that story, we find out what is going on before the characters do. We have some extra bits of information, so that we understand a hidden message in a letter way before the characters know. The book does not assume we have this extra knowledge and we can slowly enjoy the other characters coming to grips with the big reveal we already knew. It makes you feel smart, it makes you feel involved, and it makes the process the characters go through recognisable.

With Astonish Me, the process was exactly the other way around. It was as if all the characters were sitting on this piece of information and at the moment it was convenient for the plot, the author threw it in our face. It was not so much a twist, as a hugh bit of exposition. Combined with the forced structure, it was more like reading an instruction manual that had to get a bit of background out of the way, than slowly getting to meet a new part of a character.

Now Astonish Me is mostly a book about ballet. There isn't much of a story there. The plot isn't the point, the characters aren't the point, the writing style isn't the point, it is an ode to ballet, to techniques and historical events, to people committing themselves to an art form, to dedicating their lives and their bodies to something greater than themselves. As such, it is a good read. But as a work of literature, it unfortunately disappointed me once again. 

The Whalebone Theatre

In my overview of books I read in 2023 I mentioned that I might be reading the best book I would read all year at the turn of the year again, just as I did last year with The Great Circle. Now that I have actually finished said book, I do hope that this prediction will not come true, as that would mean a lot of less-than-great books in the year to come.
So the book I was reading was The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn. And I liked it, I liked it a lot. I just think it was not everything it could have been.

The book centers on a country house in the south of England, where a mixed bunch of characters convene from around the middle of the First to the end of the Second World War. Now if this smells a lot like the Cazalet stories of Elizabeth Jane Howard to you, you would be very right. With the main difference that I still feel like I know some of the Cazalets, I could recognise them on the street and understand how their emotions work, whereas all the Seagraves from Chilcomb remained mysteries to me throughout the story.

As the story opens there are only Jasper and Christabel, father and daughter, with the mother quite recently desceased. Jasper remarries to Rosalind, who is to produce an heir. This is all set during the First World War, with Jasper unable to go to the front because of an old injury. His brother Willoughby is off fighting but manages to be home just at the time Rosalind gives birth. And this is where our troubles begin. I mean, naming the younger brother Willoughby will already give anyone with any literary knowledge an idea of what the fellow will be up to (read up on your Austen if you don't). Inevitably, Rosalind gives birth to a girl (meaning no heir), Jasper dies and Rosalind marries Willoughby to finally produce the male child the estate needs; Digsby. 

Now the above is just the first of five parts to the book, laying the foundations for the rest of the plot. A confused family of five, three children who grow up as siblings but are actually mostly cousins, with a lot of hanger-on characters in the shape of Willoughby's old war pals, the staff, random Russian painters who set up shop in a cottage, and a further rabble of children. None of these characters really do seem to like, let alone care about each other, with the great exception of Christabel, who thinks she has willed Digsby into being by wanting a brother so badly and thus feels solely responsible for his wellbeing. Which is good, for the children are left entirely to their own devices by their parents or step parents.

At some point, the theatre from the title is constructed from the bones of a washed-up whale. Somehow, the theatrics are managed by the children, with the adults taking part but leaving the main operation to three characters hardly older than 10. Any suspension of disbelief that may have lingered, went at that point. I mean, the whole setting just felt so artificial, and these characters were behaving in ways no sane adult would do, especially in the 1920s.

Then follows the start of the Second World War, which clears out the estate as all the characters go off to fight or help out in other ways. This War seems to take up most of the book but is also somehow suddenly over. We find ourselves in the thick of the action with the liberation of Paris, and then suddenly back home at the estate, where the future of the home is set out in broad strokes before the book comes to an end. I finished reading it almost a week ago but in the back of my mind there is still something expecting that there will be more to the story, waiting for it to end, waiting for the outcome of both the war and several characters, who we somehow never see again.

So the plot is, to put it mildly, unbelievable. The characters, as mentioned before, I did not really care for. I enjoyed Christabel's fierceness, but she is not likeable. I enjoyed Flossie's character development into a confident young woman, until that fell flat and she married the most convenient George ever to set foot in the estate. I still don't know Digsby, even though he was the only one all the other characters appeared to like.

So with all that, why did I still like this book? 

For one, the writing is very immersive. There is a bit at the beginning, when Jasper dies, that I could almost see happening in front of my eyes. It was one of the very few parts that really cut to the quick, but it showed the promise of what this book could have been. There are other parts too, especially when Christabel is in France, or when Flossie has German POWs working on the estate, that were captivating to read. As this is Joanna Quinn's debut novel, there certainly is promise in her writing style, if she can find an editor who will help her bring some life into her characters and cut back on all the exposition. 

With the beautiful language come some great thoughts, again mainly from Christabel and Flossie, on the meaning of life, on acting, on friendship. There really are some great ideas in this book, but it is as if the characters, like their author, are not fully equipped to express them. Finally, there were some nice surprises in style; the maid's diary, in poorly written English, reflected on the goings-on and characters in a new light, and there were letters and newspaper clippings and exposition guides to show what was going on in the intermissions between chapters or parts. This is the kind of writing she should have employed far more: show, don't tell.

All in all, not the best read of 2024 (I hope). But somehow, I can't help liking it despite myself. I hope Joanna Quinn will quickly write another novel, to see whether the promise she shows here is really there.