Reading Recs — Books I’ve Loved Feb 2022
Having only 28 days in a month seems to make everything harder, including book reading. I only finished one book in February, but that’s partly because I had bad lucks with books — started a couple that was really awful. Pro-tip if you want to stay an active reader, do not torture yourself with books that you cannot bring yourself to pick it up again, or you would easily lose your reading streak.
Despite all that, I still have five books to recommend, 4 books are from a series that I started reading for a second time recently.
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI — David Grann
This is the one book I finished in February, which tells you how good it is. It tells the story of how members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, the tribe that became rich due to oil discovered beneath their land, were mysteriously being killed one by one.
The local police and investigators that took up the case either could not solve the mystery or were also being killed. The newly created FBI took up the case and made a name for them through ‘solving’ the mystery.
Other than the engaging plot, it really makes you wonder about the price of being rich, the hardship of being in a minority group even in a country with a well-developed legal system, and why the FBI should exist.
The Neapolitan Quartet — Elena Ferrante
If you’ve heard of the HBO series, my brilliant friend, the Neapolitan Quartet are the four books the TV series is based on. Calling it my favorite book series is an understatement. The series depicts the friendship and life of two Italian girls through their childhood, education, family, marriage, the social context, their convergence and divergence, their up and downs. The stories are special because they are being told in a brutally honest way, not a single bit of extra of pretentious fluff that is easily spotted in fiction.
They are written by Elena Ferrante, an Italian writer that managed to stay anonymous from the public for the past 20 years, which I think contributes to her brilliance as a writer. Ferrante said that with her writing, she wants to ‘tell the truth as only literacy fiction can dare to tell it’. She favors experiences that often seem ‘difficult, elusive, embarrassing, unsayable, and too intimate’ for other authors. Knowing that she will not appear in public gives the absolute creative freedom she needs to “find words for those parts of her experience that are hidden and silent”.
The four books seem daunting to read, but trust me, once you start you won’t put it down.