WickedGirl's Book Notes

Rainbow Rowell's beloved YA novel about two misfit teenagers who fall in love on the school bus in 1986 Omaha. A tender, painful story about first love, abuse, racism, and finding someone who sees you - praised for representation but not without controversy.

In 184 CE the Yellow Turban Rebellion broke the Han dynasty, and the next hundred years of warlord chaos resolved into three rival kingdoms - Cao Cao's Wei in the north, Liu Bei's Shu-Han in the west, Sun Quan's Wu in the south - before the Sima family quietly inherited everything and reunified China as the Jin dynasty in 280 CE; more than a thousand years later, in the 14th century, Luo Guanzhong took the long accumulation of historical chronicle, opera, and storytellers' embellishment around that century and produced one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, which Moss Roberts has rendered into 2,300-plus unabridged English pages featuring the Oath of the Peach Garden between Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei; the strategist Zhuge Liang treated as something close to a demigod; the Battle of Red Cliffs as the inflection point; and hundreds of warlords, surrenders, sieges, and stratagems any modern Western reader is going to have to commit to in a way most modern novels do not ask for.

Norman Paperman - a middle-aged Broadway press agent who has just had a heart attack and decided he is done with New York - flies to the fictional Caribbean island of Amerigo (which the people who live there still call by its old British name, Kinja) with his millionaire friend Lester Atlas, buys a faltering resort called the Gull Reef Club, leaves his wife Henny and daughter Hazel back home while he tries to make a go of it, nearly drowns on his first day and is rescued by a Navy frogman named Bob Cohn, takes up with a former actress named Iris Tramm who lives at the club, watches the hotel's water and electrical systems fail in sequence, watches Atlas fire his irreplaceable handyman Hippolyte while he is briefly off-island, and ends the novel agreeing with Henny to sell the hotel and go home. Herman Wouk's 1965 comic novel, drawn from the six years he and his wife actually spent running a small hotel in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Nick - the only straight member of a New York queercore band, working through his breakup with the complicated Tris by making her mix CDs she throws away - is at a Lower East Side club for a show when he sees Tris walk in with another guy, panics, and asks the nearest girl to pretend to be his girlfriend for five minutes; the girl turns out to be Norah, daughter of a well-known music producer, a classmate of Tris's at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, and the person who has been retrieving Nick's discarded mix CDs from Tris's trash and loving them without knowing he made them; the kiss they share to sell the cover is the first event in a single Manhattan night that will involve Norah's drunk friend Caroline, Norah's complicated ex Tal, and a citywide search for the secret late-night show of their favorite band, Where's Fluffy. Rachel Cohn and David Levithan's 2006 YA collaboration, with Cohn writing Norah's chapters and Levithan writing Nick's, told in alternating first-person POV over the course of a single night.

Tom Sawyer - a clever, talkative, frequently dishonest small-town Missouri boy living with his Aunt Polly and his brother Sid in the fictional St. Petersburg, modeled on Mark Twain's own boyhood Hannibal - whitewashes a fence by selling the right to whitewash it, falls for the new judge's daughter Becky Thatcher, witnesses the murder of Dr. Robinson by Injun Joe one midnight in the graveyard with his friend Huckleberry Finn, swears a blood oath of silence and breaks it on the witness stand at the wrong man's trial, runs away with Huck and Joe Harper to Jackson's Island and returns in time to attend his own funeral, gets lost with Becky in McDougal's Cave on a school picnic, and ends the novel splitting twelve thousand dollars in buried gold with Huck. Mark Twain's 1876 boyhood novel, set on the 1830s-1840s Mississippi, and read for a century and a half as the canonical version of American childhood - alongside racial content that still requires the reader to do the work.

Edwin Rutledge, owner of the Babylon Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, has shut down his keno lounge because his IT lead Nick Chen has discovered that consumer-grade quantum computers have made the casino's pseudo-random-number generator retroactively crackable; the fix is a quantum random-number generator, which a sales rep named Prashant Singh is in town to install; what Prashant does not know is that his wife Sumi - a polymath who is the actual story of this story - has at home a second quantum unit entangled with the one her husband is installing, has used it to choose her winning keno numbers in advance, and is using a single trip to the Babylon to set up a long con on Las Vegas itself. Andy Weir's contribution to the Amazon Original Stories Forward Collection (2019), narrated in audio by Janina Gavankar.