The Ministry of Time

 

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, 352 pages

If Candace Bushnell wrote a romance book about time travel, it would look something like this. I don't say this often, but I really hated this book. I won't spoil any endings here, but I found the writing lazy, the plot disjointed and ludicrous--it's generally just overmarketed as some kind of unique time travel/spy novel when it's really nothing of the sort--it's just a relationship book. Nothing happens for about 200 pages and then all of a sudden you realize you're in some kind of romance novel that still takes forever to wrap up. And then, after all that time, there's a threshold the author crosses and everything happens all at once in about the last third of the book--all the plot and characters and exposition go tumbling downhill to it's inevitable and boring conclusion.

The Number Ones

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits that Reveal the History of Pop Music by Tom Breihan, 342 pages

This reads like a book of non-fiction short stories. Like a VH1 Behind The Music episode for the literary crowd. Each chapter focuses on a seminal single from the Billboard Hot 100, which began in 1958 and still continues today. Every single is an outlier; a song that came from nowhere to dominate the charts and influence the culture. Breihan, senior editor at the music blog Stereogum, dives briefly into the backstory of hit songs like Chubby Checker's The Twist, Prince's When Doves Cry--all the way up to Korean pop phenomenon BTS and their hit "Dynamite." As with most behind-the-scenes stories, there are so many interesting anecdotes and trivia-like bits of information that really help inform the popularity of a song. Some notable surprises for me included Vanilla Ice inadvertently funding the label Death Row Records, Brian Wilson spending $13,000 to record "Good Vibrations," (at the time the most expensive single ever made), and the  runaway success of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" finally forcing MTV to play more African-American music. You can follow along with Breihan as he continues to blog about every #1 Billboard hit in history, but this book is a really fun dive into some songs we all know and love.