Becca

There has never been a book more aptly judged by its cover: everything about Paperback Crush invoked a certain type of book from my childhood. Speaking of covers, I was not expecting this book to be formatted by picturing the (similar) covers of every book included, so let's start there. Originally, I was weirded out by the choice to include such heavy graphics but (A) I think it was necessary for the amount of discussion about cover art and how it changed over time and (B) Paperback Crush is about a certain type of book. Not the books that your parents bought you, or that you read for an assignment in middle school, but the books that you read guiltily during silent reading time at school when you should have been reading something “better” or gulped down lying on the floor in someone else's bedroom during a slumber party while everyone else was asleep. And therefore, with very few exceptions, I recognized the covers without really remembering the titles. (Okay, yes, by “you”, I mean “me”.)I grew to love having the covers for a third reason: seeing them again, most of them literally photographs of a cover, often with creases or discoloration, really provided a nostalgia hit. And ultimately, that's what Paperback Crush is about: nostalgia for these certain types of books. I didn't really consider how much my view on the world was influenced by coming of age in the land of aspirational fiction – a world in which fictional characters rarely had problems, and when they did they were outlandishly large – rather than ten years prior, the world of “problem” fiction about divorce and drugs or ten years later, the world of paranormal romance. I'd considered the BSC (babysitters club) and SVH (sweet valley high) to be canonical tween fiction, the same way that the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew were canonical tween mystery books. Thinking about the way that fiction of a particular time influences that generation was one of the most interesting parts of the book.I was hoping for a truly literary analysis of YA literature, but Moss has a lighter touch, mostly creating a taxonomy system and cataloguing examples in each category. Sometimes this goes deeper, like reviewing how rare characters of color are in 80's YA lit and exploring YA books written specifically for the African American community (I found myself wishing she'd done something similar for Jewish YA lit, besides name-checking BY Times. I hadn't known that my [b:Atonement of Mindy Wise 4655575 Atonement of Mindy Wise Marilyn Kaye https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png 4705932]-[b:Anastasia Krupnik 116494 Anastasia Krupnik (Anastasia Krupnik, #1) Lois Lowry https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1476942137s/116494.jpg 827585]-reading-youth where all characters celebrated Hanukkah, had embarrassing Old Country relatives and parents who dropped Yiddish casually was cultivated.) Mostly, this is light but fun: did you know that they hired actresses to pose for all of the BSC covers? There's an interview or two, as well. On the other extreme, sometimes Moss dips into her own personal childhood memories of particular books (like the universal confusion about Claudia's wardrobe.)On the other hand, mostly Moss stays away from either personal woolgathering or in-depth literary analysis. And while I would have liked either one to be a little deeper, it left plenty of room for my own reminiscing. So, on that note, there was a profound nostalgic joy in discovering books and associated memories long-forgotten. It felt like a picture album from my childhood, and I'm pretty sure it has a long life ahead of it as a great coffee-table-conversation-starter.(I received a free copy in exchange for my unbiased review)

On the one hand, Gladstone has created something entirely unique, here: a magico-legal thriller about apotheosis set in a steampunk theocracy. So far, so good. I love a lot of the little touches: the Seril/Justice story in particular is extremely well-done, as is his handling of the workings of magic. I found the wry humor in several parts charming. Gladstone's characters are a little thin, but well-loved and the ensemble cast overall works well. On the one hand, the ruse of “character X is so naive, I have to tell them about setting point Y” is over-used and very obvious; on the other, it gets the reader up to speed quickly on the (really lovely) world-building.

However, there are some books one can only get through on a plane. This is one of them. Gladstone shifts perspectives approximately once every 2-3 pages and it's completely jarring. This is especially true because there is so much world-building that the reader has to keep in mind, that to remember “OK, she's using the Craft for which she needs her special knife and blah-glyph and there are clouds, so it will be less powerful” for long enough to get back to the scene where that information is relevant is difficult.

I might read more books from the series, but only if the perspective-shifting is substantially better – it's too bad, because it does overwhelm the otherwise good writing.

This book was simply delicious in every way possible. I loved the first book in the series, but felt hesitant about the rest of the series: sometimes a great first book is every good idea that the author had, and the rest of the series merely tries to scramble along on the coat tails. Moreover, one of the things that I loved about [b:The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making 9591398 The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Fairyland, #1) Catherynne M. Valente https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388179691s/9591398.jpg 6749837] was its depiction of childhood, and I worried it couldn't be continued in a sustainable way and also have the heroine grow. I should have put more faith in [a:Catherynne M. Valente 338705 Catherynne M. Valente https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1220999852p2/338705.jpg]. First of all: I am insane with jealousy over her imagination. Every page of The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland... was just as inventive as the page before, and it all seemed to flow effortlessly. We met characters that I never would have thought of: a beautifully inventive family of coffee and tea people, and turquoise kangaroos that wear their memories in pouches, and allusions to classic mythology that seem Just Right, only no one's ever thought of them before, like Valente's take on the minotaur, and what seems like it will one day be classic mythology, like Queer, Questing and Quiet Physicks and in between are beautifully depicted characters, who are neither deeply inventive, nor cleverly allusive so much as they are wonderfully depicted, almost real people, who are flawed, and brave and everything else I could ever ask for.One of the things I love about Valente, as mentioned above, is her depiction of childhood. Her depiction of young adulthood/early teen years is just as spot on. She treats it with Valente whimsy, talking about how September has a Heart, but it is new and raw. And underneath the whimsy she is just so spot-on about the ways that Right and Wrong feel so intense in those early years, and how raw betrayal feels, because you aren't emotionally scarred down from years of them same yet. It's a magical combination of lovely prose and deep insight. I love how it flows clearly from her depiction of child September.I can't review this book properly without talking about the shadows. I loved this plot: that Fairyland needed its shadows in order to have magic, but the shadows needed to be free and not have to do the bidding of their person. I felt the moral tug in both directions, and I loved that September felt equally torn. I won't give away the ending, but I will say that I worried that it was going to end uncomfortably: I felt like Valente had set up an unsolvable quandary and that any solution would either be morally offensive or seem like a deus ex machina to the beautifully set up puzzle. Again, I need to learn to have faith: Valente did not disappoint. Although these are young adult books, they are challenging in terms of the morals they present, both in the world-savingly large, and in the romantically-inclined small and they examine teen-years in a way that I'm not sure I would have tolerated from up-close. I think that they are books that absolutely should be read in adult years, but I think there is probably much to be enjoyed here by young readers as well. I know I plan on reading them to my daughter early and often. But before that: must read book #3. Preferably right now.

I adored Sam Kean's [b:The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements 7247854 The Disappearing Spoon And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements Sam Kean https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1438018063s/7247854.jpg 8246153] – it was quirky, educational, fast-paced and filled with both big concepts and tiny little stories of chemistry. So even though genetics is my day job, I figured The Violinist's Thumb was worth a look. And I readily admit that after all, this is what I do all day, every day and the resultant luster loss may bias my opinion. But the Violinst's Thumb lacked the pizzazz of the Disappearing Spoon for me. It hit the genetic high points: The Human Genome Project, Cloning, etc. But what I wanted were the tiny stories; the things that add color and interest to the big stories. There were a couple (yes, I know about DNA and RNA, but not the tons of other *NAs that are not just possible, but exist.) But overall, I found the book a drag to get through. I wish I'd enjoyed it more, but it might be me, not the book.

So, I was in a bookstore in San Francisco and Abby really wanted to recommend a book to me, but nothing really sounded good. I bought the Rook more out of a sense of wanting to buy a book in that particular moment rather than any hope that this specific book would speak to me. And then, it happened to be in my backpack when I found myself caught on a bus without the book I was reading. I got to “The body you're wearing used to be mine” and found myself completely unable to put the book down for the next 450+ pages.

This is really true perfection: a spy novel-y romp of deception and double-crossing, with some lovely world building (on the heavy side of expository, but well-explained by the protagonist's amnesia) and a female character that's nuanced and has agency and kicks butt and takes names. The sort of book that's like a warm cup of spicy cinnamon tea in my hierarchy of comfort.

I also had many lovely existential conversations prompted by the Rook: Is present Myfanwy the same as past Myfanwy? Just without trauma? Is she a totally new person? What does identity mean, anyway?

I'm so in for the series, but I think the framing device of amnesia really made this book shine, not sure how it'll keep up in the future.

Let's start with the good: I thought that Wonder was an amazing and nuanced view of the social intricacies from late elementary school to early high school. By introducing multiple perspectives, RJ Palacio has written one of the most insightful pieces about how people inadvertently become bullies, alienate their friends or switch social groups. It rang very true, and more informed than a lot of the non-fiction references about bullying.

I also liked having a book about someone with a craniofacial anomaly. Too often disability characters in YA are completely sanitized: “normal person in a wheelchair!” style. Auggie was a great and honest portrayal of a kid with Treacher Collins. I know many kids like Auggie in real life, and I think this is the first book that they get about them. I liked that she pulled no punches in describing his surgeries, and his difficulty eating and articulating and also no punches in giving him a personality that went beyond his disability with his love for Star Wars, sense of humor and insight into people's ways of thinking.

But, I didn't love it. Perhaps because I've spent a lot of time with kids with craniofacial anomalies, it didn't have the same newness to me as to a lot of other readers. Or because, as a professional geneticist, I got really distracted by the fact that he has biallelic TCOF1 mutations, or that he has both a new, previously unknown recessive form of Treacher Collins and OAV spectrum. (I'm not sure in what universe someone would make a diagnosis of OAVS, a clinical diagnosis, in a kid with molecularly confirmed TCS, who doesn't have any facial asymmetry, but.) Or that they didn't use the words “Treacher Collins” in the whole book? I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: authors who want a geneticist consultant, I'm for hire! Pay me in books.

But honestly, I had two other huge concerns: the first is Auggie winning the community service award at the end. I found this super frustrating and shallow compared to the more nuanced take in the rest of the book. Auggie didn't do any community service just by existing. The “point” of people with disabilities is not to be a fable for children without disabilities to learn from. He's an actual human being who should actually do some community service to get a community service award. That dehumanization really undermined a huge portion of the book for me, and made me feel hesitant to recommend it to children with disabilities.

My other concern is unfair for a book review, but stick with me: they chose a child without a craniofacial anomaly to portray Auggie in the movie? In a world that has thousands of actual children with craniofacial anomalies, who will never ever have a chance to play a protagonist in basically any other movie, and they took a typical kid and put him in disability drag? Overall, that choice, combined with the ending of the book made me really concerned that RJ Palacio doesn't really believe that atypical children are human beings with their own personhood and reason for being, rather than a tool for her to write moralistic novels.

I guess the best thing I can say about Divergent is that it's not quite as dumb as I thought it would be. In conclusion, not everyone is only Brave, Smart, Kind, Selfless OR Honest, it's just that everyone agrees that only one of those choices is the highest priority, except for Mary Sue Tris (and Her mother, her boyfriend and a bunch of other random people) who wants to be selfless and brave. Also, these are very narrowly defined, so if you want to be Selfless, you have to be so selfless that you don't even look at yourself in a mirror or wear anything other than gray and if you want to be brave you have to engage in physical combat, live in a compound built of precarious ledges, jump on to moving trains and get tattoos. There is no other way to be brave. Also, apparently society fractured this way to prevent violence and murder never exists anymore because...reasons.

So, yes, super dumb premise. I did like the idea of people self-segregating into value-based societies that are more important than vertical relationships, though. It was kind of fun to explore and I wish it had been filled out a little more to discuss in parallel the way that the internet and class distinction is segregating people by political belief in actual real life.

Also, the book was readable and fast-paced, even though kind of nothing happened. But I won't be moving on to the next book (unless I also find that for $2 at the used bookstore): I found none of the characters to be more than caricatures and I don't have a lot of faith that the world building isn't going to sucl.

So the first major thing to say is that both the blurb on the back of the book and the cover illustration of this edition spoiled the major plot twist, so I spent the first 70 pages wondering how I was supposed to react, and how I would have reacted had I not known that Fern was a chimp, not a girl. Once that was over, though, I found the book to be a solid family drama with relatable main characters. It's hard to more thoroughly review without massive spoilers, and I tend to think that spoiler-y reviews are not helpful, so suffice to say that I found Rosemary, Harlow and Lowell particularly to be fascinating, unique characters and I found Rosemary's journey from loquacious youngest sibling to recalcitrant only child to be interesting.

Two major downsides: one is that the animal rights stuff got a little heavy-handed to the point of detracting from the main plot. (A major side plot seemed to be: “You, too, can join the ALF. Here is how. Don't feel bad, they're not really terrorists – they don't hurt people, they just set back life-saving research by years, but that doesn't really count.”) The other downside is that the last 20% of the book feels really weak. It mostly is just tying up loose ends and has completely lost the momentum of the first portion.

Overall, I found this book compulsive reading. I had to know what happened to Fern and Lowell, and then what Rosemary was going to do. The characters were done beautifully and Fowler succeeded at something that so much contemporary literature fails at: an actually unique story.

Alif the Unseen is something truly unique – an urban fantasy spin on djinns and the Arabian Nights from a Muslim author, set in the the modern Middle East/Arab world. It sits on the edge between the genres of urban fantasy and cyberpunk in a delightful way, with computer code invoking imagery of the worlds of djinn and fantastical creatures. Like good speculative fiction, Wilson uses the speculative elements to cast a light on aspects of “real life” in the modern world, namely surveillance and suppression of the populace as the true scourge of the Arab world, oppressive to both the religious and the secular.

In the praise column here is also Wilson's beautiful, nuanced, discussion of religion, belief and faith. She contrasts the beliefs of several characters who do and don't believe in religion and/or djinn to various degrees of literalism. This exploration is fascinating. Many of the ideas, such as how to believe in the fantastic are generalizable across religions. It also was fascinating as a discourse on Islam.

Usually, any truly unique book on my shelf gets four stars, and this is truly unique and well-done. However, there is a major drawback that I would feel remise if I didn't address, which is the female characters. I know that Wilson is much believed for her work on the Miss Marvel series, which I had not read. However, there is not a shred of evidence of feminism in this book. The female characters have no agency at all and exist largely to be sexualized/romanticized by the male characters who do have agency. No book needs to be perfect in every respect, but the extent to which female characters exist only for male gaze here is beyond just failing the Bechdel test and borders on disturbing.

I didn't expect to learn much from this book – vitamins are pretty much my day job. I (think) I know every biochemical reaction relevant to human metabolism that requires a vitamin or mineral cofactor. If someone has been prescribed vitamins to actually help them, rather than act as a placebo, it's a pretty high chance that it was prescribed by me or one of my colleagues. So, vitamins, I know them. And like most people who actually understand vitamin biochemistry, I also have a deep skeptical place in my heart for the use of vitamins as pseudoscience. So much so that during my pregnancy, I took pure folic acid rather than a prenatal multi-vitamin.

But Vitaminia was fun anyway. Price spends a lot of time focusing on the history of nutritionalism: how we understood that food was made of of molecules, identified what they were and realized that they were necessary. The experiments along the way to prove that. Price also explores food and vitamin safety regulations over the years, and the absence of supplement safety regulation in the modern era. I found this a fun and fast read.

This was an unexpected delight. The love story of a man, Maxon, who uses pseudocode to define his verbal and emotional responses to the world and his wife, Sunny, born with complete alopecia in Burma. The real heart of the novel is the tension between Sunny's desire to fit in with the world as it is, and hide her baldness, as a metaphor for the things that make us different from others, coming to terms with wanting to be the hero of a world of one's own making, with those who are different from us being the outsiders.

The writing is gorgeous. The story beneath the story, of Maxon going to help colonize the moon is interesting and numerous backstories flesh out both characters as full, flawed people, not just subject to the plot.

A Desolation Called Peace continues Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series about: where do the boundaries of culture/community and individuality get drawn? What does it mean to be a member of a community. Those themes are much more deeply explored in a Desolation Called Peace with the addition of the ring aliens and a deeper focus on life on Lsel station.

However, it lacks the central focus of a Memory called Empire – Teixcalaan culture is just so richly developed. A Memory Called Empire was brilliant in part because the best parts of the world, the philosophical questions it raised and the most compelling central character was all bound up in a central mystery about Lysander. A desolation steps away from that singularity of focus, and also includes multiple substories and the book really suffers from this diffusion.

Nonetheless, Arkady Martine realizes alien cultures with a depth like no one else, and a Desolation is one of the best science fiction books I've ever read, it just pales in comparison to its predecessor.

If you read enough (and if you're reading this, you probably do), books become fascinating independent of the stories they tell. Blatt takes a math-y approach to this, quantitating a number of variables to answer different literary questions, such as the percentage of co-written books actually written by the more famous author, the difference between “literary” and genre fiction and the difference in word choice over time. There's some mission creep as chapters also reflect on how male versus female authors write the different genders and what that means, and also an introduction about who really wrote the Federalist Papers. It's mostly just fun – can you deduce from an unbiased statistical approach that Nabakov was obsessed with colors, probably because he was a synesthete? – and pretty light on the math. I'm pretty opposed to frequentist statistics, but it was still pretty bizarre to me to not have a p-value, or really any numbers at all, in a statistics book. Nonetheless, reading about reading is always extra fun and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I've lost too many patients in the last year. I love them, and I lose them and I feel like I keep losing little pieces of my soul. I don't know how long I can keep doing this. I tell myself my love for them matters, and my care matters even if they die, but I don't know if I still believe it.

That's how I opened my spiritual check-in this year. The rabbi nodded, and then said: “Read Tiny Beautiful Things.” He handed me a copy to browse. “Can I borrow it?” I asked. “No, I need it too often.” I found the advice perplexing and a little out of left field. But, sure, why not.

Reader, it was good advice. Very good advice. Cheryl Strayed knows bad things happen. She knows bad things happen to good people and we have to keep on living and loving, anyway. And she loves us all and calls us Sweet Pea when we're hurt or burning out. This is that book. I cried reading the letters about the ways in which the world was bad to people and was salved by Strayed's radical empathy. I've never read Dear Sugar. I don't know if these letters are representative. What I do know is through them, Strayed (ironically operating under a nom de plume) is not just radically empathetic, but also radically honest. She talks about her own life, her mom's death, the dissolution of her first marriage, the times that she couldn't be the person she wanted to be. She has a way of talking about herself as a means to make other people feel seen and more human.

Reading it was profoundly cathartic. I felt the protective shell I'd built up dissolving. I felt returned to the person I wanted to be. People came to me with the stories of the way the world had been bad to them and I felt ready again to be there with them, holding the badness, and then moving forward.

You can't borrow my copy. I'm going to need it too often.

I apparently need a shelf for things I read because it turns out that I need more books than I can carry for two weeks in Europe and there's no English language bookstores in the Swiss Alps and my library app limits what I can download internationally.

This book is utter crap. Complete and utter crap. Paper thin characters. The least mysterious mystery. I'm not totally sure Megan Abbott was ever a teenage girl, but, wow, that is NOT what it's like. Also, it reads super slowly. I seriously considered DNF'ing it despite having literally no reading alternative. Not really any redeeming features.

The wooden dialogue, totally cliche black-or-white characters and obvious self-insertion overrode any attempt at plot.

As someone named Rebecca, people always asked me “like the book” all the time and all I knew about the book was (a) it is old, (b) Rebecca was dead from the beginning (c) the narrator was unnamed and (d) it was gothic

For a book pushing 100, it holds up decently well. The unnamed protagonist, the looming atmosphere of Rebecca both are deeply evocative literary choices. The pacing is decent, although the protagonist's flights of fancy (social anxiety?) got a little old. I liked having a narrator who was as unfamiliar with high society at the time as the modern reader was.

Overall, this was an extremely provocative collection of short-stories. The underlying theme is the goals and dreams that we set for ourselves and how we can be both confined and freed by them. The way that Morris plays with dreams – both too lofty and not lofty enough – being captors of the dreamer was a unique take to me, and one I found very compelling.

Many of the stories share features in common aside from the theme: a male, disaffected main character with a distant relationship with his wife and/or kids, a fugue of some sort and occasionally surreal elements. In my opinion, where Morris really soars is his most mundane stories. My favorite in the collection, Camel Light, is merely about a man finding a cigarette in his kitchen. But Morris' honest take on the thought process and the minute ways we fail ourselves was so poignant and truthful. The most surreal stories are also excellent – some, such as Tired Heart and Cyclist, which start out mundane, but slide increasingly into surrealism are captivating and the theme shines in them. Rockier are some of the stories in the middle, both physically in the middle of the book and in the middle such that they are neither truly realistic, in the most mundane sense, nor fantastical.

By far, the majority of the stories are readable, an interesting and novel take on the theme of dreams and goals and beautifully written.

The entire first part of this book was completely fascinating. I was completely in love with the first significant chunk - about a man who loses his hippocampi in a traumatic accident, but still manages to go for walks around the block, make food and hold conversations about computers, all without being able to remember such details as where he lives or how old he is or what year it is. A Oliver Sacks-worthy story illustrating the power of habit in determining how we live.

Duhigg goes on from there to illustrate, using animal experiments in rodents and monkeys how habits are formed and how we can form good habits and extinguish bad ones. He perfectly balances practicality with intriguing science and anecdotes.

The latter two halves of the book spiral off in a multitude of directions. How is having willpower a habit? I'm not really sold. Some of his anecdotes read like they would belong better in Blink or the Tipping Point and it undermines the strong, consistent definition of a habit from the first third.

Also, some of my favorite parts of the book - the febreze model and the target/pregnancy story are available online on NPR & NYTimes magazine and excerpted on lifehacker. (I had read them prior to this and hoped that the rest of the book would be the same quality)

Professor Ekman is attempting several things with one book: an introduction to the evolutionary basis for emotions and emotional expression; a definition for “emotion”; identification of the indivisible, fundemental emotions and a primer in how to read the emotions of others. Somehow, despite this book's short length (especially given that it is liberally peppered with photographs), he achieves all of these things. Emotions Revealed is fascinating and useful.

I'm having trouble squaring the goodreads reviews with the book I just read, and I've concluded that speculative fiction has come a long way in the last decade. Seraphina, to me, is derivative of every high fantasy novel ever written, with a vaguely Middle Ages European setting with saints and whatnot and a Strong Female Main Character who has really no defining characteristics except her Dark Secret and her Cunning Intellect like...every other fantasy novel ever written in the 2010s. I found the novel poorly paced and all of the twists utterly predictable. It was fine overall. I think my ten year old who is young enough to have not read every fantasy novel ever written will enjoy it, but mostly for me, it helped remind me how amazing, diverse and creative the field is now, and I'm thrilled we're free of the 2010s.

While unique in concept, there are so many things that bothered me about this book, I hardly know where to start.

First and foremost, while Sebold achieved great commercial success with this freshman novel, it still reads as a freshman novel. The schtick is clearly the only part of the book thought through and exists to cover the lack of other literary elements.

The first person, omnipresent narrative is clunky and not well explained (if the narrator knows what people are thinking show her figuring out that she knows!) and leads to a very much told, rather than shown, storyline.

The historical setting is both unnecessary and goes unmentioned for several hundred pages, so when reminded 200 pages in that the date is 1977, it is very confusing.

There are a plethora of characters, all of whom seem minor, since not enough time is spent on any for them to be more of a cliche.

The pacing is deplorable – several years will pass over the course of two pages and then 50 pages will be spent on a single day or two, with the years that pass without mention covering such important events as everyone coming to believe the main character's father on the identity of the killer, while the time that we focus on covers the sexual explorations of the main character's little sister. The payload of the book, as it were, comes in the last 20 pages, with no harbinger and no evidence that this was the intended ending.

The intended audience is also unclear. The writing style is clearly too juvenile for a larger adult/older teen audience, and the literary foibles are difficult to overlook, even for the audience of adults/older teens who read young adult fiction. At the same time, the focus on the book being rape and murder and several explicit sexual passages make this book at best uncomfortable reading for young teens.

This was fun. Most of his points were interesting and by and large well-researched, albeit some better than others. The main positive characteristic of Freakonomics is the way that he goes through his methodology. By and large, it is really a book about encouraging the lay public to question and to think quantitatively and that's a really, really positive characteristic.

The next most positive thing to say about Freakonomics is that it's well written. Having a co-author that is a writer was a major boon. Although each chapter was adapted from work published in peer-reviewed journals, the chapters have similar voices and lengths and flow into the next chapter.

The detractors are the unevenness of evidence for some claims versus others (for instance, the entire chapter on names, while interesting, lacks the evidence to reach any sort of conclusion.) The other major problem with Freakonomics is the excerpts of the article on Levitt that preface each chapter. These laudatory pieces are very off-putting in a book that is co-authored by Levitt – toot your horn somewhere else!

Even by the point that I wasn't feeling female spies in the world wars any more, I still really enjoyed this. What stuck with me were the strong and nuanced female characters and their deep friendship.

I maybe read this too hot on the heels of [b:The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There 13538708 The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (Fairyland, #2) Catherynne M. Valente https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1334547766s/13538708.jpg 14556391]. I was desperate for my Valente, and it turns out that this book is available as a free ebook (from Tor), so of course, I moved straight into it. But it lacked the delight of the full length books of the series. Maybe more deprivation in between would have helped me appreciate it more.Yes, it is quite inventive: with carriageless horses and many types of magic. Yes, there is some interesting central plot about Fairyland stealing tithes from other worlds. There is a simply lovely introduction about the concept of history.But I was hoping for more backstory on Mallow, maybe even dating back to the Maud days, and overall, I just don't think that the short story format is well-suited for fairyland, which I enjoy because of the perception of a vast, rich world.