Allie

Read Harder task #23: Read a collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love.

I liked the idea of reading some Japanese poetry for this task, because I work with a few Japanese guys for a subsidiary of a Japanese company that, last October, sent me over to Japan for a few days for a company meeting. That's essentially my entire background with the Japanese culture, other than a childhood love for the Sailor Moon TV show and an ongoing love for that stuff we call sushi (which my coworkers refuse to eat).

I found out Are You an Echo? was at my public library. It is a beautifully illustrated children's book with poetry by a Japanese children's writer who died sometime around 1930, as best as I can tell. The first half of the book is a biography of the poet, Misuzu Kaneko, interspersed with her poetry, and the second half is a collection of her poems side-by-side in English and Japanese. I thought this was really neat to see, and I enjoyed the biography a lot (though I'm not sure how kid-friendly it actually is ... girl had some rough stuff happen in her short life). Overall the poems were very sweet. I can see why her work is so popular in Japan, as even in English it would probably be a good introduction to poetry for kids.

This book had some really compelling arguments regarding how gender roles are represented and perceived in the church, and argued that a lot of hierarchical gender roles are prescribed to the biblical texts instead of prescribed BY the biblical texts. It's just a shame that it's written so heavily in the style of a doctoral dissertation, and therefore it was so dense that it took me a long time to slog through.

I had forgotten I downloaded this one, and found it on my Kindle right before I boarded a plane back home after Thanksgiving. Didn't put it down until the plane landed. It sucked me into this woman's life, and all the fear, exhaustion, paranoia and anxiety that comes from being in an emotionally abusive relationship was so vividly drawn.

Written by a good friend of mine, “God's Not Stupid” is a first-hand account into reconciling God's love with teachings from other world religions and attitudes, specifically Buddhism and meditation as a means of acquiring greater understanding about self and God. It was deeply personal and specific to his own journey through life, but his attitude toward each person's unique experiences — and what that means for humanity in relation to God — was quite refreshing. Although Rice identifies himself as a Christian within the pages, he also challenges the Christian mindset of a “one true” religion, accepting that one person's truth is not a universal truth, even among those in the same religion. A good book on tolerance, acceptance and bettering oneself.

This P.I. novel was written by a local author, and was my book club's choice for September. I thought it was a quick, fun read, though for a detective, investigator Val didn't seem to have a very good grip on what she should be doing at any given point. She made up for it in snappy quips and general badassery, so I liked reading about her. Anyway, Val is hired by Brian Macgruder, a lawyer who has taken on a case in which his client, Jean, has hidden away her teenage son Nathan. Jean claims that her ex-husband abused the boy, and also that she does not know where he is hidden so she can't be forced to turn him over. It's Val's job to find and protect Nathan, amidst death threats and murder attempts. In the process, she uncovers a host of angry Macgruders, who value their money and success more than the truth, and who want nothing more than for Nathan to remain missing forever.

For our anniversary in May, Matt and I decided to gift each other books to fit into the first-year “paper” theme. As part of my gift, he got me this vampire romance novel, and as he gave it to me, he commented, “This looked like a winner.” (I have a long history of enjoying stupid dracula romance novels. In college, a few friends and I would buy the really poorly written ones and annotate them for giggles.) Well, for a “winner,” I'm a little embarrassed that I really, really enjoyed reading this book. The plot was entertaining, the writing was decent and it didn't have annoyingly passive female leads. There's lots of drama and terrible nicknames and marriage proposals and backstabbery (har har). Megan works the late shift at a high-end celebrity retail boutique, and one night 500-year-old vampire Rhys enters the store and basically falls in love with her on sight. But Rhys can't devote his full attention to her, because there's a dracula even older than he is that is killing humans and other vampires all over the country, and is headed toward Rhys' territory.

Written by a local author, this was my book club's pick for January. I was under the impression — based on the first chapter — that it was supposed to be a murder mystery set in Austin, but it wasn't until about the last 15 pages or so that the characters actually had anything to do with figuring out who the killer was. The journey to get to the ending was interesting enough, but then the story wrapped up so fast and without sufficient explanation that it lost a lot of steam right when it was supposed to be getting good. Also, it had more metaphors in its pages than probably every other book I've ever read. Combined.

Well that was entertaining. There were several strips that described certain characteristics of my own coworkers and office perfectly, and it would be awesome to cut them out and stick them up, but since this is Matt's book and not mine, I'll refrain.

I don't normally review kids books because let's face it, like most parents I read the same 20-30 books over and over and over and over and ...

But I bought this one the other day because I wanted to read it because I was once a little Worrysaurus (and now sometimes am a Grown-Up Worrysaurus). Worrysaurus has a pouch of items that make him happy and that help distract him from his worries, and it reminded me that I should probably review my own coping mechanisms. It is adorable and the artwork is lush and beautiful and it made me happy to read it to Ethan while he fell asleep on Dada.

A fun little romance. I alternated between loving the main character and being irritated at her for having such poor self-esteem, and I started to pick up on the author's repetition in some of Callie's interactions with Ralston (not even the steamy scenes either), but overall I liked the story and it was just a fun read. I listened to the audio book and the narrator was quite good.

I'm not standing in this long line for bread and milk.I'm standing here to turn over my language.Everything gets lighter when it crosses the border.I'm standing here to be translated.
- from section VI, “The Poem”

This was a very difficult collection of poetry for me, so I'm not going to give it a rating, as there are entire pages where I absolutely did not understand what Emadi was trying to say. Though the prose was beautiful when I did understand it! How much more would I have appreciated this if I were better at poetry and metaphor (I went in knowing it was about the author's exile from Iran, and basically nothing else, so the repeated symbols of snow, horses, kisses, and the poem-as-object are largely lost on me).

So look into my eyesas you pack your bagsand say your goodbyes.Without regretyou will carry the joy of your last cigaretteuntil the train starts to leave,because truth is the child of regretand I don't want to be your truth.
- from “The moon always shines in vain”

I would recommend it if you enjoy reading poetry! These are a few of the verses that jumped out at me; there was still plenty to like even if the collection as a whole was a little over my head.

On your planet, an apple falls from the treeand Newton discovers the laws of gravity.On my planet, the telephone rings.Newton picks up the receiver,is hurled into the air,and gets stuck in the branches of a tree.I prefer to siton the principles of natural philosophyand bitefloating apples —which is to say,I want to weep a little.
- part I, “Laws of Gravity”

A friends-to-lovers historical romance/mystery. The mystery was really fun, and got things going much faster, because in the beginning I felt like both Alethea and Declan were kind of flat as characters, though they had really great sexual tension.

There's a lot going on in this book. The titular scandal, of the Declan's father being framed for swindling business deals. The potential scandal of Alethea falling in love with him since Alethea's father was Declan's father's business partner. Figuring out who murdered Declan's brother and why. Alethea trying to prevent herself from getting married off, and trying to prevent her twin brother from losing everything by falling in love with a man her father hates. Whoo boy. Once it got going, it was pretty action-packed.

Each chapter begins with a diary entry, but you don't know whose diary it is until most of the way through the book, and it started to wear on me before it began to make sense, and I don't know that I liked that device. I didn't need snippets of the entries, at least in the format they were in.

Read for #RomanceSparksJoy.

CW: mentions of previous stillbirth and miscarriages.

TW: sexual violence

A short comic that packs a powerful, violent and disturbing — and simultaneously empowering — punch. I had not heard of the Deer Woman before (I have not read nearly enough by or about indigenous people); like many “superhero” comics, it includes the Deer Woman's origin story, and her desire to protect women from those who would attempt to violate them, and the gruesome lengths to which she will go to do so. It's about re-claiming what's yours. It also includes a brief primer on self-defense at the end.

TBR - read about on NPR - Pandemic Poetry - https://www.npr.org/2021/12/10/1062818363/a-different-distance-marilyn-hacker-karthika-nair-pandemic-poetry

A great bedside table book - the kind you pick up after you get in bed, read a few sections of, then fall asleep. Matt read this book first, of course, and I kind of scoffed when he told me I'd enjoy it. But then, the first story was about a Pepsi advertising campaign foiled by math, so. I guess he wins. Reading about math fails was more fun than I thought it would be - but there are also some really heartbreaking stories about people who died when bridges collapsed, when there were errors in the medical field, etc.

A day late and a dollar short, but whatcha gonna do? Most of the women in our group are not Catholic, and I had never heard of St. Therese before; she had written her own memoirs prior to her death in 1897, and Day excerpted a lot of Therese's own words, which usually irritates me - because why would I want to read Day telling me about Therese's writing if I can just read Therese in her own words? We collectively agreed that this maybe wasn't the best introduction to the saint, though one of our members who had read Therese's memoir said that it doesn't include much about her family and early life, so I dunno.

It took a long time to get into this because you don't actually start hearing about Therese herself until like 40% in, because there's so much about her family (her mother and father originally wanted to become a nun and a monk, but were rejected by the convent and monastery, so instead got married and had a whole bunch of daughters, all of whom ended up becoming nuns). I'm torn because, some of this was interesting, and then I'd look at the percentage on my Kindle and go, we're 30% in and Therese hasn't even been BORN? and then the end also felt really rushed, considering she died of TB at like age 24. So I alternated between being really into it and being bored and skimming sections that were just Day expounding on Therese's own words.

So I don't know if I'm glad I read it, necessarily, but I'm glad it was a good discussion. 2.5 stars.

Audio is the way to go here. I sometimes have a hard time getting satire, but that's not true at all when every word is read by the author and drips with humor and sarcasm. I laughed out loud several times, and I appreciated Hughley's callbacks to previous jokes he'd made. Especially the stuff about “not fitting the profile” and making sure your neighbors know who you are, and a whole extended bit about how black people should get rescue dogs that use doggy wheelchairs so white people will think, “oh I know that black guy, that's my neighbor with his sad dog.”

I could have used less Trump stuff (this is an evergreen opinion), but that was the time in which “How Not to Get Shot” was written.

Regardless, it is still timely and relevant, and Hughley made some really interesting points re: black people not being able to forget about race and its traumatic history, and the idea of the “race card.”

I went to a book discussion with some friends when I was out of town, and so I read the pertinent chapters. I asked a good friend of mine what she thought of this because I didn't think it was that great (I've read a lot of excellent things about race in the last few years); she commented that she thought it was a good starting point for churchgoing folk who don't believe that colorblindness is a problem, and therefore are unlikely to pick up other books on race. I can absolutely see that.

I only read part 1, and returned it to the library. Some of the chapters felt very heavy-handed, and I hated the device of Adams inventing a Black man to be killed by police as an impetus for all these conversations.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how I felt about this one. When that happens, my instinct is to just start writing and see if something comes through the fog.

This is a big ambitious novel, with a pretty giant scope - a family saga of three generations, and then the political coup brutally overthrowing the (presumably Chilean, but never specified) government and turning it into a dictatorship. It's pretty dark, even before the government overthrow stuff (the patriarch Esteban Trueba spends most of the early part of the book raping anything with legs and being generally angry/violent at the state of everything). Caste stuff and serfdom stuff and government corruption stuff, and Trueba cutting off people's fingers in fits of rage. The women are the real heart of this novel, especially Trueba's granddaughter Alba, but of course she stands for everything he hates and is mostly a pretty decent character/human. But unfortunately, other than Clara the matriarch, most of the women are seen mostly through Trueba's eyes.

And okay I am mad about the ending. I understand that rape is one of the spoils of war, sure. But in Alba's epilogue, she talks about how her grandfather raped a woman named Pancha, whose grandson Esteban Garcia was part of the new government, who raped Alba. And while this is not glorified in and of itself, Alba says that maybe someday her grandson will rape Garcia's granddaughter and the cycle will perpetuate itself ... and my head might have exploded a little bit because THAT IS NOT OKAY, why would even thinking that be okay! and maybe teach your children that that violence not an acceptable means of dealing with anger??? And then I'm also mad because so much of her life was full of violence and so how can we expect people who only know violence to do any different, but RAWR.

My South American history is pretty much crap, so it shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did that there was political strife resulting in dictatorship and people being thrown in concentration camps and being killed for literally any association whatsoever with the rival government faction. If anyone has any other recommendations for reading about this history, I'm open to hearing about it!

This has been compared in other reviews to Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, which I have not read, but I have read Marquez's other honker, Love in the Time of Cholera, and ... let's just say I wasn't impressed. So House of the Spirits doesn't exactly make me want to revisit Marquez's work. I'm glad I read this book, even if I didn't particularly enjoy it.

All the trigger warnings on this one.

This was a fascinating look at a very interesting, empowered and powerful woman, and I enjoyed it a lot! It included some of the political cartoons that ran during Albright's tenure as Secretary of State, and that was really fun; also included several sections of photographs.

I was a kid in the '90s, so a lot of the names of world leaders and cultural moments that were talked about in this book in-depth were things that I remember being in the fringes of my middle-school brainspace - stuff that was on the news or that my parents talked about - but that I was too young to have broader context for, at the time. I'm glad I got to revisit this time and look at it again from a leadership perspective.

And damn I learned a lot about the U.S. government. I had no idea we were this involved when it comes to brokering peace between other countries, though I know that if other parts of the world are having problems, it also affects us... but I had never seen it like this. (Matt said this morning, “the U.S. is involved in everything, for better or worse, but you also don't always know if it's going to be better or worse until it's over.” Truth.) And truthfully, I didn't even really know what the Secretary of State's job was before I read this, and I don't even remember why I added it to my TBR a few years ago. But I'm glad I did. (Edit: Oh. Right. ... It was November 2016.)

It did get a little bogged down in describing negotiations in some of the later chapters, and it took me a while to get through it, but it was all good, and Albright writes clearly and effectively.

I can't find the source now, but last week I saw an image on Facebook that read something along these lines:
It doesn't matter if the shelves are empty, if you can't afford to buy what was on them.It doesn't matter if the hospitals are full, if you don't have health insurance or transportation to get there.It doesn't matter if you're told to stay at home, if you don't have a home to stay in.

I was thinking about that a lot as I read this book, and thinking about how the people within these pages would have responded to COVID-19 - because the fact is, little would change in their lives, because they couldn't afford (literally) to shelter in place or social distance. Not the woman who runs a business out of her house in Mississippi, nor the single mother in Chicago that's always trying to find work and scrape together necessities while staying in a shelter.

It's an immense privilege to be able to not only stay home, but to work from home, as I am doing, and my eyes are opened to that more and more the longer this goes on. And the ones who can least afford to be infected are the ones that often are, because of the impossibility of these measures for them.

Very glad I read this. 4.5 stars (I would have liked a little more depth, and also some aspects already felt a bit dated).

We have different sensibilities and different senses of humor, but I'm glad this book exists.

Cute romance. Smart independent heroine with a good group of friends. They could have done without the breakup. And there was far too much winking and licking of lips, but still this was fun. Nothing groundbreaking, but hey.

Much Ado About Nothing is my favorite Shakespeare, and this current-day retelling was a lot of fun. I found the banter between Bee and Ben delightful.

The only thing that would have made it better would be if Moat deviated from the original play and had Imogen girl-power dump Will's ass for calling her a whore and leaving her at the altar. KILL CLAUDIO indeed. *Grinchy "wonderful, awful idea" grin.* I mean, I know we don't do that with Shakespeare, but Will was just so awful to Imogen, and I can't imagine in the 2010s that anyone would be super gung-ho about getting re-engaged to a guy who did that to you. But I guess that's on Shakespeare and not this author.

Shenanigans!

DNF @ 79%

I was trying to figure out why this premise bothered me so much, and I finally got it - wedding planner Daphne is called in to plan a wedding last minute because the bride fell in love with their first wedding planner (Hot Dude Planner), okay cool cool. But Daphne was hired by the groom (Corporate Bro), who she says is her “friend” but absolutely nothing about their interactions indicates real friendship. In fact, Daphne and Corporate Bro seem to have nothing but disdain for each other. She and Hot Dude Planner have good chemistry, but it's totally not clear why they fall into bed with each other, other than #romance and also Corporate Bro sneered at Daphne that of course they would end up hooking up with each other (‘cause that's profesh eyeroll). I don't like Corporate Bro, and I don't want him to get married, and I don't want two wedding planners to have to spend another second in his presence. So I'm cutting my losses and going back to Murderbot.

YES I KNOW THEY'RE FICTIONAL SHUT UP.