A BRIGHT RAY OF DARKNESS (Ethan Hawke) - February 21/21

 Meh. I didn't hate this, I guess, but damn is Hawke pretty pretentious. I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes play stuff and the main character is kind of interesting and vivid, but the book is packed with so many stretches in which characters pontificate in as artificial a way as you could imagine. ** out of ****

ANXIOUS PEOPLE (Fredrik Backman) - February 13/21

 Read as part of the Lexis book club, I definitely enjoyed this one. It's much, much longer than it needs to be, but Backman has packed it with endearing, sympathetic characters. I liked how everything connected and the proliferation of twists throughout. *** out of ****

NEWS OF THE WORLD (Paulette Jiles) - February 6/21

 This erratic yet ultimately rewarding book admittedly did test my patience here and there, as Jiles' Cormac McCarthy-like prose is occasionally a little on the impenetrable side. (There are some egregiously descriptive passages here, for sure.) But the author does a solid job of establishing the central characters and their increasingly compelling bond, and it's clear, too, that there are a handful of genuinely exciting/tense sequences. I even got a little choked up after Kidd took Johanna back from her adoptive family and eventually gave her away to be married. (The Six Feet Under-like final stretch is quite well done, certainly.) *** out of ****