Becca

Wow, this was terrible. I read this because I was on maternity leave, and too exhausted at the beginning to even go upstairs to the bookcase to find something better, and one of my friends gave me this book, so it was sitting in my living room. It was so bad, I can't even. Girl meets boy. Girl has baby. Boy leaves girl. Girl meets another boy. The end. What happened to the baby? Girl neglects baby for the entirety of the book except when convenient to the plot. Let me tell you how angry that made me to read about while trying very hard to be able to ignore my own newborn for 30 seconds so I could brush my teeth.

This is a very well-written book, but since I share the same job as Dr. Marion, it really just felt like a slice of my life. The cases designed to highlight extraordinary, rare diseases are very much part of my daily life. I was hoping for a little more insight into how our job shapes our lives and reflections regarding taking care of a population of patients that is almost entirely children with disabilities.

I'm a Michael Cunningham fan girl. It's impossible for me to be unbiased about anything Michael Cunningham writes. I have a sneaking suspicion that I have some amount of cognitive dissonance about By Nightfall - a book that I've wanted for over a year; that I picked up and lingered over every time I was in a bookstore; that I scoured every used bookstore for; that I finally paid full price in a physical bookstore for a new copy because I wanted it that badly (paperback; I haven't lost my mind); that I derailed a vacation for in order to see Cunningham speak about at the national book fair. So, I'm a little obsessed. And I have a suspicion that I read the book that I wanted to read, rather than the book Cunningham wrote.

I loved the introspective pieces of this book. The interstitial portions where characters ordered coffee and went on train rides were Cunningham at his best - he describes the mundanity of the human condition in a way that is both honest and profound and is completely unparalleled.

I loved the concepts in this book - that we, as humans, are in love with beauty, in love with art, in love with the profound and constantly disappointed in the inability of reality to produce concrete things that live up to the expectations in our imaginations. That we cultivate the relationships that exist in our life for their symbolism, and for their reflection on ourselves and for the concepts that they engender moreso than for the actually people in them. That the people we are when we are honestly alone – mentally, physically alone – is not ever the person that we can be to others.

I did not love the actual plot of this book. I was bored, rather than enthralled by Mizzy. I felt that at times, the symbolism was too on the nose (seriously, a character named “The Mistake”) and other times the mundanity was, well, mundane. Perhaps those feelings are apropos, given the context – Cunningham is one of the artists he describes, striving to find beauty, to unsettle, to provoke and coming up just a little short.

Nussbaum succeeds at her goal here: to write a book about characters with disabilities, who have personalities beyond their disabilities, interact with each other and with characters who are able-bodied. The characters are fully fleshed out and interesting, realistic characters.

But this absolutely comes off as a political piece. It is certainly enjoyable in its own right, but it is impossible to read without thinking of it as a piece about disability-rights, criticizing institutions (which, I agree with in spirit, but also agree that there are nuances to the discussion not fully elucidated here.) and discussing discrimination, over-utilization of intelligence and personality testing and casting a cynical eye over seemingly all parties involved in providing care to those with disabilities.

Perhaps the best part of the book is that Nussbaum portrays even most of her villains as human, simply ignorant or over-worked or otherwise preoccupied. She does have a few truly irredeemable characters, but by and large, especially for a piece trying to make a statement, this is done well – an invitation to dialogue.

At times, this was a truly moving narrative. I found the alternation of narrative between Henry Day and the changeling Aniday one of the most compelling portions of the book. Henry and Aniday made great foils, speaking to what makes the human experience truly important and how social relationships, creativity and introspection each have integral roles. On the other hand, the book feels underdeveloped. Plot threads, characters, even themes are dropped completely, without a backward glance. At times the plot overwhelms any thematic development and inversely, especially at the end of the book, the reader is asked to endure some extremely contrived plots in servitude to hammered imagery.

It's very rare for me to read books knowing nothing about them, and even rarer for me to buy books I've never heard of. But I was walking home from taking my pediatrics boards (which I passed, by the way...) and I passed by a used bookstore. So I thought to myself: “I deserve to go poke around the bookstore. I just took a huge test.” And then I saw this book, and the cover drew me in, so I, of course, decided that I deserved to buy a book, too. I'm really glad I did – this book is excellent!

Did you think Carolyn Keene was a real person? I did – I remember fighting with my mother about it when I was a kid. Maybe you're less naive than I and realized that even if Carolyn Keene was a person, she wasn't still writing the Nancy Drew books. But it turns out, that not only was Carolyn Keene never a real person, she, Laura Lee Hope, Franklin Dixon and dozens of others were all the figments of the imagination of the same man, Edward Stratemeyer.

This is the story of Edward Stratemeyer and the evolution of pulp fiction for children. Wonderfully, this is also the story of Edward's oldest daughter, Harriet, who took over his estate, as well as the story of Mildred Wirt, the main ghostwriter for the Nancy Drew books. Why is this such a wonderful happenstance? Because this always this book to also be the story of how two strong-willed independent women went to college and held down serious jobs long before that was acceptable. Rehak explores the state of education for women in the 1920's and follows the growth and turns of these two women and their relationship from their college years to their deaths in their 90's.

Rehak is talented no matter her scope – her minute details are precise and fascinating, but she is not afraid to expand out to big concepts like feminism, literature for children, gendering of children's literature, etc. and she manages to maintain my interest at each level.

I take it back: [a:Lydia Netzer 4886414 Lydia Netzer https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1384708162p2/4886414.jpg] apparently has more than one book in her. This is not a book about a quirky astronomy-obsessed person and their equally quirky love interest! Who knew (full disclosure: I will read that book as many times as Lydia Netzer cares to write it.) Nonetheless, the concept really allows Netzer's true talent of inventing infinite ultra-quirky characters to shine. You see, there's this baby, and its parents, and then all of its kickstarter backers, each of whom has their own reason for getting involved. The parents, Jenna and Billy, are each well-written and their relationship feels realistic, with the conflict being compelling rather than over-the-top. I thought that the take on crowdsourcing was a little cliche, and perhaps a little on the nose given the GoFundMes for fertility that now exist in real life, but it has been two years since it was written, so there is that. Nonetheless, it's a fun exploration of how the more grassroots part of the internet affects us.

I'm not sure why this book gets such terrible reviews. I found the writing alone, lyrical and mesmerizing, worth the reading. The characters are sharply drawn and vivid, with the nearly titular Mason looming the largest. I liked the tension that Hegi managed in making Mason's relationship with Annie both warm and nostalgic and terrifying and abusive.

The meditative first quarter, with talk radio hosts intermingling with imagination and contemplation was by far the strongest and the last quarter, with political protests tacked on in weak parallels dimmed by comparison, but on the whole, I enjoyed it and I'll seek out Hegi's other works.

Finally, I can't help saying this: the inability of modern writers to write deep, intense and platonic relationships never fails to disappoint me.

I think the biggest driver of how I felt about The Boy Detective is that it's billed as being the autobiographical story of a man who was an (imaginary) detective as a kid, and I wanted to read the heck out of that book. Bad news: After I read The Boy Detective, I still want to read the heck out of that book, but this isn't it.

Instead, The Boy Detective is the meandering musings of Roger Rosenblatt as he reflects back on his life. It's not really about anything, per se, and previous reviews that have referred to it as a series of essays are erroneous: it is more snippets of thoughts, half-poems, and imaginary situations. The idea is that Rosenblatt is literally going on a walk and allowing his mind to wander, as it does. At times, this is kind of fun – at his best, Rosenblatt has a lot of interesting and insightful things to say about the interiority of the self, the persistence of the childhood self (for him, exemplified by the Detective), how perception of self changes with age and autobiographical writing. He has some less interesting thoughts about his family and New York City in general. Some of the vignettes are simultaneously beyond bizarre and droll such as a hypothetical conversation with Hitler. Overall, because of the choppy and disjointed organization, I found reading the book to be more of a chore than anything else. Some of the paragraphs harken back to earlier passages, so its best enjoyed in longer sittings. Had I not read it on vacation, I'm not sure I would have found it readable. The saving grace is that even in the boring parts, Rosenblatt is a master of language and I found his English so lyrical that it compensates for the content.

I still really want to read that other, nonexistent book, though.

This was an extremely nuanced take of the current foster care system and its highs and lows. From the perspective of a woman who had been a homeless teen after a mentally ill mother kicked her out of the house as well as an (unofficial) foster mother herself, Beam comes largely as an outsider to the system, curious about why it is the way it is. I thought that perspective was very helpful, because the writing was very accessible and unbiased. Beam explores the dynamic laws influencing the foster care system and the political winds that have driven it both towards and away from removal of children from the biological home. Throughout the book she largely sticks with one foster family, Bruce and Alyson Green and their foster kids and explores the issues raised in their family, although she also touches on other families and a therapeutic/group home.

I thought the biggest strength of the book was that Beam is unbiased, and even though she's often writing about her friends, she pulls no punches. She explores the best and the worst about each situation/agency/philosophy/housing situation. By the end of the book it's clear that there are no easy answers, that even the most well-meaning of adults have caused secondary casualties and that even the most protected children don't come out psychically unharmed. I spent a lot of the book alternating between feeling like everyone should sign up to foster and that there was no solution for foster families. That dilemma was not resolved, but I learned a lot in the process.

This is a short book about how things become trends. Some of the ideas are really interesting, such as late v. early adopters and who tends to be in which group. But overall, I found the book poorly organized, with a concept being explained very abstractly, alternating with examples without demonstrating how the example fit the concept, rather than really using examples to illustrate the concept.

I also found that the book didn't age well, in part because Vejlgaard was really concrete in some parts. For instance, he names the people who tend to be trendsetters: e.g. artists, gay men, rather than why some groups are trendsetters. But also, I suspect Vejlgaard is himself a late adopter: despite a heavy focus in the book on social networks and media to spread trends, the internet isn't mentioned until the epilogue, on page 200, and even then Vejlgaard says “the speed of media has changed [from newspapers and magazines], but the type of media has not.” Even in 2006, this was abundantly untrue and in 2018, it's laughable to think about discussing trends without invoking social media.

Strange Creations, by Donna Kossy, self-proclaimed expert of Kookology purports itself as a tome dedicated to the strangest ideas about human origin – something I was so down for. I was drawn in by promises of aquatic ape theory (delivered) and expected that to set the tone of the book (not-delivered.) Instead, Kossy spends the majority of the book discussing racial overtones in the ways in which people have thought about the origin of the human species. The chapter entirely on race (focused on polygenesis – the idea that the ethnic groups are literally separately originating species – vs. monogenesis), to me felt interesting and in-bounds. However, the subsequent chapter on eugenics, which isn't really a human origin idea, felt like too much. Also, based on the billed description, I read this mostly on vacation and in the mood for a fun read and eugenics...isn't. And that's before the focus on race in the section on devolution as well.

Even if a book about racial tensions in the history of science and pseudoscience wasn't what I signed up for, it would have been interesting, but Kossy manages to fall into the Uncanny Valley of pop science writing: she is neither comprehensive or systematic like a scientific approach would be (and frequently interjects her own opinions, including her complete disdain for creationists but deep respect for the Heaven's Gate cult, which I found discordant), but she's also not approachable like a more literary approach would be. Instead, she is very detail-oriented about single people or topics in a story that she explores in depth and then abandons related context. It really felt like a no-forest-only-trees writing approach. As a result of the combination of unexpectedly heavy and off-topic material and this strange writing style, I found the book quite dry and a chore to read.

The first and last chapter were by far and away the best – the first focusing on the ancient astronaut theory and the last aquatic ape, Heaven's Gate and other weirdness. Bizarre and breezy, that's what I signed up for.

Eric Fair's writing is spare. Almost telegraphically so. It adds a layer of harshness to his narrative about how he fell into his role as an interrogator in Iraq. We all know how this story is supposed to go: a perfectly ordinary person gets in over his head, then realizes it, pulls out and writes an apologetic memoir. But while the core beats of the narrative may be the same, Fair refuses to write that book. Instead, he writes the book of how his insecurities overwhelmed him and he avoided the moral high ground at every turn. His writing pulls absolutely no punches from that. The result is that his memoir is haunting and a terrifying tale of how easily a whole country can be pulled into a dark place, especially once for-profit companies join a war.

Jeffrey Toobin is rapidly becoming one of my favorite nonfiction authors: his narrative flows clearly, he has swathes of original research and his analysis is understated but clear. Relatedly, I really liked American Heiress. I'm too young to have a personal memory of the Patty Hearst saga, so like many my age all I knew Patty Hearst was kidnapped, got Stocklholm syndrome, something, something, guest starred in Veronica Mars that one time. The tale as Toobin tells it is more complex.

This is a wide-ranging tale (over 18 months long) that includes the birth and death of the San Francisco counter-culture, the terrorist-style activism unique to the 1970's, tension with the evolving face of feminism, turf wars between the FBI and other branches of government and widespread distrust in the government due to the scandalous actions of the president. Reading through the “best books of the year” in 2018 so many of them are about These Dark Times in America. Toobin reminds us that other Dark Times have come before – in a lot of ways the 70's were worse because Nixon was without precedent. Anyway, the scene and context are set well by the time Toobin introduces us to Patricia Hearst (who hated being called “Patty.”)

Toobin then attempts to recreate all of the events from the formation of the Symbionese Liberation Army – which he paints as alternatingly bumbling and terrifying – the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, her involvement in the bank robbery...and then, instead of the story ending there, like I always thought it did, there are months of generally hiding out, followed by all of her SLA captors being killed by the police, Hearst hanging out with the remainder of the SLA who futilely try to send her back to whence she came, a cross country trek, more bank robbing and finally an arrest. Toobin then outlines Hearst's legal strategy and her ultimate conviction and sentencing. All of this, the footnotes make clear, is done on the basis of reams of contemporary notes and interviews. Toobin is meticulous about making clear when any events are at all in doubt.

The story is fascinating in and of itself. Does it speak to something bigger? Well, it ends with a a certain FBI Director Robert Mueller, III sending a pointed letter to then President Clinton arguing that Hearst should not be pardoned because people should be treated the same regardless of their personal wealth or family background.

Look, I have a to-read list that realistically, I already won't finish in my lifetime unless the singularity occurs, and that's without adding any impulse reading to the list. But I was in the bookstore Bern train station, looking down the barrel of 12 hours of travel to get back home, all of my books AND all of my library ebooks that I'd brought with me already read and this was the only English language book that they had I'd ever heard of.

So. I didn't really have high expectations. And, you know, it kept me occupied for most of my flight, so that's a plus. But it's DUMB. So, so dumb. First of all, Clinton should not have written a book with a focal point of an impeachment scandal. Especially in which the impeachment scandal is apparently caused by the president trying to be a national hero. Also, the monologuing. So much monologuing. Most of which I ideologically agree with, but, still.

All of which would be forgivable if the action/adventure part of this show were good. Or lukewarm. It's 12 hours of travel time – good is unnecessary. But it wasn't. It was dumb: first of all, there was very little action. Second of all the Surprise!Traitor was so obvious I called it 500 pages in advance. No exaggeration.

So, I guess, in conclusion, if you too have nothing to read and half a day of travel time and this is the only English language book you can find, go for it! In any less extenuating circumstances, do yourself a favor and find something else.

I initially only read Sagittarius, which was published online, and I found it haunting: a beautiful parable about the tension of having children that are atypical and the joy that they can bring. It was a perfect short story in pacing, in spare but beautiful prose and in rapidly drawn, immediately sympathetic characters.



I liked Sagittarius so much that I bought the collection. Sagittarius is certainly the best, closely followed by the ending story, Bereavement. Both use speculative elements sparingly to highlight unspeakable but universal human experiences.

Otherwise, I thought the stories were pretty good, and since I'm not a short story reader, that's honestly pretty high praise. I think Hbrek really understands the form: short stories are literary playground to pull out the weird stuff that you can't support for a full novel. Some of them are stuffed full of the sort of luxurious prose that would be too obfuscating to use for more than a dozen pages. Others employ literary hijinks, like non-chronologic storytelling that add a twist and a punch to a 40 page chapter. Hbrek also links his stories – not just characters, but also themes, to good effect. As a result, there's something very satisfying about finishing the work. It felt like the emotional payoff for finishing a novel – like I'd really gone through the normal emotional sequence of reading a book, despite the disparate themes, tones and genres. Overall, I'll keep an eye out for Hbrek in the future.

I don't have much to say about this – nothing novel. If you've gone to medical school in the last 10-20 years or read ANYTHING on the practice of clinical medicine in the same time frame, you probably know all of this already. Lots of peds isn't supported by science, but when there are is science we should follow it, rather than doing what saves us time or money. Duh.

Most notable for being the first ebook that I've read using the kindle app (on a combination of on my laptop and on my phone.) I'd prefer a physical copy, but it hasn't been physically published. Didn't love the ereader, but I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would have.

This was bland. Like “there was no there there.” No substance.

I'm a little concerned that, as this was my feeling for every book I've read on my Droid to date that it's my criticism of the medium, rather than the book. I like REAL books. I like the way pages feel. I like how cheap books are. I like the aesthetics of rows and rows of books in my library. I do NOT like ebooks. I don't like that I can click over without a second thought to something else. I don't like that they need electricity (I'm usually too absent minded to charge anything smaller than my laptop.) I don't like how they feel in my hand. And it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm almost NEVER without a real book, so if I'm reading an eBook it means either a) I finished my book and I still have time to kill, or more likely b) I found myself with time to read and I didn't bring a book, which is usually a result of having a ten or fifteen minute time bubble between activities. So most eBooks I read have to be dirt cheap, have to be short, and have to be frivolous enough that they're worth reading for only five minutes.

As a result, all three eBooks that I've finished have been self-published memoirs of emergency medicine physicians. And they've all read almost exactly the same. This is no exception. And honestly, I think if I'm seriously concerned that the delivery medium was a major factor in my opinion of the book that pretty much clenches the allegation that the book was without true substance.

This feels like someone strung together all of the posts in a mediocre blog. There's just...nothing. She's a perfectionist. Sometimes patients appreciate her. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they're sick. Sometimes they're not so sick. Sometimes work-life balance is hard. Welcome to Being a Doctor 101. Also, 50% of the download is “samples” of Dr. Yuan-Innes' mystery novel starring a thinly-veiled self-insert character (who shares Dr. Yuan-Innes' hometown, training hospital, medical specialty and ethnicity) and her poetry, which reads like something I wrote in 9th grade.

Final Exam is a beautiful, moving piece of non-fiction. Both scholarly and intensely personal, Dr. Chen's first book is a concise but thorough description of her own experiences with death and dying throughout her medical training and the effect it has had on her professional and personal relationships with the dying. Her experiences are largely universal – her descriptions of her first patient whose death she felt responsible for echoed – and she backs them up with citations from the medial literature about the exposures trainees have to death and their reactions.

Despite the fact that I am well-versed in the palliative literature and had read many of the articles Dr. Chen cited her personal experiences lend a depth and character to the discussion that is priceless. Dr. Chen's strength is that she is brutally honest. She describes unflinchingly her avoidance of patients that were dying and her regret of being too terse at times. She discusses events that other medical non-fiction would gloss over.

My only grievances with the book is the end-notes. The book is rife with them (at one point there are three end notes corresponding to a single sentence) and they are not marked at all in the main text, although they are designed to refer to particular sentences in the main text. The end notes are written in a different style than the main narrative, and detract from the flow. By and large they fall into three categories: those that are essential to the text and directly related to the main text; those that are essential to the text, but not directly related to the main text and those that are not essential. The first two categories should have been integrated into the narrative and the third should have been eliminated.

An entomologist writes about his life collecting hoverflies and in general being a biologist and collecting stuff

The best thing about the Privileges, far and away, is the opening scene (which lasts for about the first 20% of the book, so not trivial) Dee opens on the wedding between two relatively normal people with big ambitions and focuses on their interactions with each other, their friends, their parents and their siblings. In this microcosm of their relationship, each character is nuanced and each interaction is deftly painted: the overbearing mother, the chronically late spoiled rich kid, the “alternative” step-sister who is SO over this. It's funny and relatable. (This scene deserves all the stars, so I'm going to keep this a three star review, instead of two, which is what the rest of the book deserves.)

And then...it's like when you meet someone and you have this great conversation with them and you have so much in common and you imagine this entire friendship spreading out before you, but then the next time you get together they spout vaguely offensive views and only want to talk about football and you realize you don't actually have anything in common? The first amazing scene is what makes the rest of the lackluster book hurt so much. Because everything else is lackluster. It's not bad, certainly, but it's just boring. Flat as paper characters wander around their super rich life, with their super perfect marriage to each other. And as much as there's no characterization, there's not really plot either. Yes, things happen, but they aren't related to each other and they result in no change upon the flimsy characters. Dee is trying to make a point about wealth and all of his characters and plot are servants to his point.

This book is basically a fable about wealth, but it's not even clear to me what point about wealth Dee is trying to make. There's the disaffected rich girl and the boy who's rich but want's to be a Trustafarian and then the rich woman who devotes her time to charities, but apparently earnestly so, and the rich man who maybe cheated the system to get rich, but then the book implies later that he continued to get rich even after he stopped insider-trading. And there's a very short bit about the hypocrisy of supporting charities while getting rich off of factories in China, which was interesting, but only lasted about two paragraphs.


Finally, the last 20% made me want to tear my hair out. For no good reason that I can understand, Dee decides to intercut three different threads, for over 50 pages. Intercutting is a literary technique that can drive me crazy at the best of times, but intercutting that many scenes, which were totally unrelated for that long was a special sort of obnoxious. The intercuts came quickly enough that it was hard to get into any scene, and since there were three other stories to cut into, you lost all emotional resonance with the first one by the time you got back to it. (For the record, just to help emphasize the bizarreness, the threads were:

-the son becomes takes an art class, becomes involved with his TA, who is into outsider art; he becomes fascinated by outsider art; he eventually tries to meet an artist; he gets kidnapped; he escapes)
-the daughter goes to a nightclub and gets drunk. She gets picked up by some “EuroTrash” guys. They crash her parents beach house. They party and wreck the house. They drive home and get into a car crash. Her parents punish her by making her dad take her with him on his business trip to China. They go to China. They visit a factory and she thinks it's hypocritical that her dad invests in a factory in China (even though none of the real problems with Chinese labor are actually on view here – it seems to be a factory staffed exclusively by adults and teenagers, without any apparent bad labor conditions.)
-The mother's father is dying in a hospice. She's called by the father's girlfriend, whom she didn't know existed. She flies to Florida, where he is. She sits at his bedside. She pays the father's girlfriend to go away. The father eventually dies.

Now imagine reading those plots 3 to 4 pages at a time, separated by 10 pages of other stuff.

I tend to think of classic SciFi being super hard scifi filled with impenetrable words and implausibly humanoid alien species. Chocky is, if anything, the opposite: in fact, it's at least equal part 1950's British domestic comedy. This short novella is fascinating if nothing else as a piece of history. Chocky herself – an alien that my goodreads notes say Margaret Atwood compared favorably to ET, is a very benign domestic spirit, interested in binary math, drawing, swimming and sustainable energy.

Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of Chocky is that Matthew, the child actually faced with the supernatural being, is definitely not the protagonist. Rather the story focuses on his father's reaction to and coping with Chocky's presence. I think it compares quite favorably to the Riverman, a more modern novel vaunted for the same technique.

Still, 150 mass market paperback pages don't give a lot of space to have much there. Now that scifi has been tread as a path many times in the intervening years, I don't think Chocky aged as well as it could have. It's fun, but not particularly novel or profound any more.

This is a super sweet book. The illustrations are cute, with bright colors, but overall the best part is the message: I love you, even if I have to go to work, or you need discipline or it's bedtime. I can imagine it's a particular hit with twos and threes who have lots of tantrums and need to the reminder that no matter what, they're still loved.

This is a cute book - fun o read with a baby, with lots of opportunities to make sound effects and kiss the baby. Who could ask for more?

I prefer the humu series - both better illustrated and the words scan better, but this is a cute short story with Hawaiian words and bright colors.