Allie

This book is not a comfortable read/listen, but absolutely do NOT let that put you off it. I took a lot of notes as I listened, including things I still need to accept/internalize, different perspectives on things I already thought I knew, and white lady feels that I need to work on in order to move forward.

DiAngelo is great at sharing her own experiences and mistakes, sharing how the work is never done even if you spend your life working at it, and providing ideas for next steps for digging out racism in one's own life in order to move forward with the work. She also provides lots of uncomfortably familiar examples of how white people avoid talking about race, code conversations about race, or center ourselves in conversations in ways that prevent others from moving the subject forward. Even how we convince ourselves we've learned everything we need to know about race! Which is frustrating for this reader, because I'm always learning about all sorts of things, and I'm so thankful that the learning is never done!

The audio was excellent. Highly, highly recommend.

Look, I just wanted to know how to get my toddler to stop laughing hysterically and running away every time I ask him to do something. There was one (potentially) useful chapter on changing your language so your kids understand how their actions affect you as the parent, but mostly this was a book about being mindful and meditating, and look, I have nothing against any of that, but it's not what I was looking for. I should have read the title more thoroughly. (I ended up heavily skimming most of the book.)

But also, almost everything in my life is happening while multi-tasking right now. This is the nature of having children and working full time and trying to keep your life balls up in the air. I listen to podcasts while getting ready for the day. I read while eating lunch. I listen to music while I'm working. I talk to my kid while I clean up after dinner. Do I wish I could do one thing at a time? Yes, but who has TIME to eat your one raisin mindfully (one of the first exercises in the book). The fact that I don't yell MUCH is a win sometimes.

This just isn't for me. I was really excited for this one, but I've been thinking about DNFing since page 2, and I got past page 50, and it's time.

Sci-fi, especially sci-fi with aliens in it, is really not my thing, but I test the waters every few years ‘cause you know, tastes change? I liked Binti's journey of going to school, but this was not a complete story by any means, since it ends as she arrives at the school. I also liked her ties to her culture and how important maintaining those ties was to her but didn't necessarily buy that those roots are what save/heal the Meduse.

I suspect I'm just the wrong audience, and that people who are more into sci-fi will be more receptive to this quick novella.

I read a few stories before bed every night (some are only a page, some are a bit longer), and I enjoyed many of them. They encompassed a relatively wide range of countries (from Europe to the Middle East to East Asia, a few from the African continent, a few from the Caribbean), though it seems an oversight that there was only one (ONE!) from the entire continent of South America. You can't tell me they don't have folktales in South America!

Thanks in part to spending a lot of 2019 reading authors of color and books from non-US perspectives, I also discovered I have a new pet peeve: the stories from Africa are simply labeled as “Africa,” and occasionally had the tribe from which it originated in parenthesis. But like, Africa is made up of 50-some-odd countries (I don't want to be specific because this was originally compiled/edited in the '80s and I don't know how many countries there were at the time). We were able to get specific stories from like, Haiti and Vietnam and Scotland and other smallish countries, so I don't believe you when you say something is simply “African.” Africa is HUGE. WHERE in Africa? What country did it originate in? Because although I know some of the indigenous tribes in the United States, I don't know the tribes in Africa, and I have no frame of reference because you DIDN'T INCLUDE THE AFRICAN COUNTRY SO I COULD EVEN HAVE A SENSE OF THE GEOGRAPHY!

Anyway. Because of the way the stories were grouped by theme, I did find it interesting that people in many countries are told similar versions of some of these folktales despite being quite far apart geographically. Change a few of the details, but there are stories from all over about the devil being tricked by farmers; by men following their magical lovers only to discover that in only three days, 300 years have passed; about kings using their daughter's hand in marriage to get men to do dangerous things.

I'm glad this book exists, overall, and I bet this would be fun for parents to read to older kids.

Narrator was excellent, Rosie's story sucked me in right from the beginning with her ER doctoring and Penn only slightly annoyed me as the book went on (he was like the Wise, Moral-Teaching Parent, ALWAYS, and Rosie started to become that too right at the very end). But overall this family was beautiful in the way they loved and cared for each other, and it felt like a realistic chaos of having five! children!, and also Poppy and her friends were sweet and I wish the world was easier for kids that are different.

Short story collections are always difficult to review, but for real, I'm over here thinking, how on earth does one review this collection?? Keret is an Israeli author, and this was translated into English, and I feel like I need to give props to the translators because I think this was pretty magnificent, if not a bit messed up.

The problem for reviewing (but a wonderful thing for reading) is that these stories kind of take you where you don't expect them to go, and so I kind of don't want to go into too much detail for fear of ruining the individual stories for someone else. They're just unexpected, and many are quite dark, and they have these little twists or turns of phrase where it's not something you're looking for, but then you're putting the book down on your lap, going “huh” and stopping to think for a few minutes before picking it back up.

Standout stories for me:
- The titular piece, and the first story in the collection, which gave me chills right off the bat, as a man tries to protect his son from witnessing a stranger's suicide.
- Tabula Rasa. Oh this one was wonderfully written and so very fucked up. I can't tell you anything about it.
- Car Concentrate, about a guy who has his father's old crushed-up convertible as a conversation piece in his living room. It's also messed up.
- Windows, about a man named Mickey who has trouble remembering things and is in what seems like assisted living, but who is helping whom?
- Yad Vashem, which I had to sit with for a while after I finished. About a couple visiting Israel, and their trip to a Holocaust museum. The juxtaposition of the children who were killed, and that the woman had recently had an abortion.
- Also the one that's not really titled, other than I guess “Glitch at the Edge of the Galaxy” query, which isn't so much a story as it is a series of emails throughout the book back and forth between a guy who is the manager of an escape room and a patron who wants to visit it on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

... which I guess is a lot of stories I thought were impressive for a short collection.

Anyway, despite it being weird and messed up and dark and dry in tone, I thought it was exceptional. 4.5 stars.

Really liked this and probably will revisit the summary at the end as needed. I appreciated that this was not about making your kids be different than they already are, but rather in noticing what things set you off, what you can do about it, and then making decisions about what you can do for yourself to diminish the likelihood of freaking out at your kids. Like, I know that being constantly interrupted while I'm having a conversation with another grown-up is really frustrating to me and makes it hard for me to focus, and so what can I do to make that not such a hot button when E inevitably does interrupt me six times while I'm trying to figure out where his music class is? And then doing things ahead of time to try to mitigate the triggers that you know are going to send you into a frustrated rage.

Naumburg seems to have a similar sense of humor and pop culture frame of reference as I do, which you probably need if you're going to read a book with “sh*t” in the title. But also I told my pastor I was reading this, so you know, I'm never gonna be perfect, and that's cool.

Historical pirate romance, with a female ship captain whose business is sailing around the Caribbean hijacking slave ships and rescuing those in captivity. I didn't know until I read the author's note that some of these characters were based on real historical figures, and that in the years before Florida was a state, that slaves often escaped southward into the islands of the “West Indies” and not just toward freedom in the north. Great chemistry between the two leads, Oliver and Mattie, and a parrot that thinks he's a cat; the historical setting maybe felt a leeeetle heavy considering the lightness of the romance, but still a good read.

Enemies-to-lovers romance set at a summer Renaissance Faire. It was really sweet but also great because it didn't hinge on misunderstandings - instead it hinged on very real things of legacies and grief, finding your way home, and how to let go in a way that still honors loved ones but doesn't leave you drained. Simon was a wonderfully drawn character, even though you're not supposed to like him for a while. And a lovely cast of friendships.

(Got this in advance of pub date through Book of the Month.)

I'm chalking this up to the wrong book at the wrong time. I loved The Start of Me and You, and I usually relate really well to Lord's protags - they're smart teen girls who struggle and try and fail and pick themselves back up again, and often her books deal with anxiety and grief, and OMG WHY didn't this book resonate with me?!

I think it's simply because ... there's enough anxiety and struggle happening in the real world right now, and watching Paige freak out about choosing a college and maintaining her relationship with Max without basing all her choices around him ... those are such valid worries and I absolutely worried about those things when I was a teen (and still worry and cry and panic about every single life change!) ... but I felt like ugh, there's a pandemic happening, this fictional character's choice of college is irrelevant because she'd be sheltering at home and doing online classes, and not seeing her friends except over video chat anyway, and as such her anxiety about everything was suffocating.

I came across this while searching at B&N for a book to give to my two-year-old niece for her birthday, because I'm That Auntie. Sulwe is a sweet picture book on colorism and learning to love yourself and the magic of both light and dark being necessary for the world. It was lovely.

We've been dealing with various stomach bugs and general daycare crud on and off for weeks. Ethan has been home more days than he's actually been at daycare this month. It's driving me bananas, and means that when I inevitably got what he had (thanks, dude, for coughing directly into my face constantly!), I got to stay home to rest WHILE taking care of him while he was staying home to rest.

I have it hard in basically no ways, and this month has been so challenging for me.

I would have been fired from every single one of the jobs Guendelsberger mentions in about 30 seconds flat. And yet, because I am a salaried employee, I spend a lot of time worrying about how much work I'm missing, while still having ample vacation/sick and family leave days.

I don't have the book in front of me right this sec to quote exactly, but Guendelsberger describes this whole system as sickeningly, disastrously, painfully, outrageously unfair. It absolutely is.

On the Clock has been hailed as an updated Nickel and Dimed, focusing on the advancement of technology in the workplace to give employers more control and workers less. I never read N&D, so I can't speak to what came before, but I do know that this was NOTHING like my experience when I worked in retail (a grocery store chain and the better of the big box mart stores) even 15 years ago. Technology has come a long way, in what seems like mostly good only for the big companies, because it seems next to impossible to ever get along (let alone get ahead) in one of these jobs unless your life is just miraculously devoid of things like sick kids and illness.

Fascinating read, highly recommend.

The dialogue between Rosalind and Celia was delightful, but this was not one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, overall.

Beautifully told and beautifully rendered. I'm familiar with George Takei as an internet personality more than for anything else, as Star Trek was never my thing, but have always been impressed with his storytelling, and this stands true in his graphic memoir about his family's internment during World War II as Japanese Americans. Absolutely wonderful book about a horrible injustice in U.S. history, and I appreciate Takei's implications (through graphic representation) and outright statements (through court cases) that we as a country have absolutely not learned any kind of lesson from his experience, or those of the other 120,000 Japanese Americans that were affected. (I guess one plus is that those who were interred got reparations, just 40+ years after the fact.)

Plowed through The Wedding Party pretty darn fast, since I needed a break from reading heavy, dark-subjected books. It was enjoyable, but I'm ready for Guillory to leave this set of characters behind now and move on to some new ones, I think.

First of all, this book coincides in time with many of the storylines from both The Wedding Date and The Proposal, both of which are better books than The Wedding Party, so there is a lot of crossover action from books I've read before and have seen some of these storylines from different characters' perspectives already. Sometimes I loved that (Drew and Alexa wedding planning) and sometimes I felt it was very unnecessary (most of the time Carlos was around, with the exception of Alexa's engagement party).

Second of all, I never for a second believed that Theo actually hated Maddie, and even though a lot of the book is from his perspective, he didn't feel fleshed out enough. Like, his whole deal with universal pre-K that he was working on — I never got a sense that this was of value to him beyond just I Am Man, Look at Me Getting Ahead — whereas Maddie's motivations (and obvious disdain for Theo) were much more fleshed out.

Third ... sigh. We get it, these characters like pizza, we don't need to see them order it 40 times. We get it, Theo has a little brother, who is described as his little brother about 4000 times, even though once you're adults in your 30s, the relative age of your siblings literally is nothing anymore.

But even with these complaints, this book was fun, and the ending with Alexa's wedding day was SO DAMN GOOD, it made up for lots of the things I wasn't thrilled about.

3.5 stars. A cute, quick novella featuring main characters with disabilities (her a wheelchair user, it's implied that he is on the autism spectrum) who fall in love over the internet and then in real life too. I didn't really feel like the Portia side-storyline was fleshed out enough to make sense to me (Can't Escape Love is kind of happening concurrently with Duke by Default as far as I can tell, and I haven't read Duke yet), and though the misunderstandings before the big HEA made sense for what was going on inside Gus' head, it felt rushed and I still don't like misunderstandings as the foil for the relationship. But yeah. Not mad at it by any means. :)

I made the mistake of listening to this one instead of getting it in print. The audiobook is fine! It's read by the author! But I kept wishing that I had it in front of me, because this should not have been as difficult for me to get through as it ended up being. I officially stalled out in chapter 7, “Hasn't Science Disproved Christianity?” I don't love science stuff anyway, and it's gotta be REAL interesting to hold my attention, and I couldn't make myself keep going after that.

Though I do have to say, I learned a LOT in the chapter “Doesn't Religion Cause Violence?” especially as related to Nazi Germany - I had no idea (but maybe should have guessed) that the Nazis of course distorted Christianity to suit their needs. Including creating their own version of the Bible, in which they replaced Jesus with the Fuhrer and the entire Old Testament was removed so as to erase all reference to Jews being God's chosen people, among other things.

Basically, if this topic sounds interesting to you, give it a try. This was a personal failing, not a failing on the part of the book. Maybe I'll try again in print another time.

It took me a long time to fall asleep last night. I had gotten through the first of each of the Maggie, Lina and Sloane chapters.

I am not interested in judging women for what they want, who they want to sleep with, what sex acts they're cool with. I actually love talking to other women about sex. What bothered me was that, in these first few chapters, nothing was about what any of these women wanted.

And so, less than 20% into the book, I'm asking myself ... who was clamoring for this book? Why this “research”? For eight years of research or whatever she did, why was this the result?

Taddeo has a way of writing that makes me not believe what she's telling me. It's like it was written to be both titillating and give you a sensual-floaty feeling in your brain in the way she writes, but I'm really uncomfortable, at page 58, with all three of these stories, as well as Taddeo's own story of her mother. She victim-blames her own mother! And then asks if maybe her mother actually liked being followed home by a masturbating creeper every single day!

I am disturbed by the idea that Lina's gang rape is not called out as rape, just because her inner monologue is that she wants people to like her and she's been too heavily drugged to remember much of the experience.

I am trying to articulate how much Sloane's story bothered me, because it kind of snuck up on me. And like I said, I am not judging what she wants at all. What really messed with my head was what she obviously didn't want, and that was for her husband to actually have sex with someone else.

...suddenly Sloane's husband was behind this other woman ... and something inside Sloane stopped. ... She could feel it, her actual soul melt out and skitter from the room. ... Sloan was confused; it had been a fantasy of hers to watch her husband fuck another woman, one she'd never quite expressed out loud ... . Suddenly now it felt terrifically wrong. In the near future, she would fantasize about Richard fucking the girl and it would turn her on, but for now she felt she was leaking out from the inside. ... There was no going back. Even in the most complex of conjured realms, Sloane could not imagine a time machine convincing enough to take them back from this.

And I'm just ... not comfortable with this at all. Because even though Richard stopped to make sure his wife was okay, and she clearly wasn't, they didn't stop what they were doing. During sex is not the best time to set boundaries, so I wish that he'd stopped and sent the girl away so they could talk about it. That's the only way I can imagine this third of the story having anything to do with what Sloane herself actually desires.

I'm unsettled.
I didn't want to keep reading after that.
I don't need to be reading this.

I don't have anything to say about this book that someone else probably hasn't said better. I loved the device Machado used for examining her story; her writing is gorgeous and tense, leaving me feeling a sense of dread through much of it; and she caused me to think about a few things I thought I knew in a different light. Absolutely excellent.

Ooof. I have THOUGHTS.

This was my first Danielle Steel, and it's only from 2019, and I really hope that at some point her writing was better than this, because I can't imagine how this got past an editor, other than perhaps she's just so prolific that, like Stephen King, no one bothers to tell her to rework stuff anymore.

First off, it was so, so ridiculously repetitive. Maddie thinks something, then tells her adult children that thought, then she thinks it again a few pages later. She tells the same damn stories over and over in her own mind and to her children, and then to her love interest too. This book could have been half the length, and it was less than 300 pages in the first place. It still probably would have been too long though, because ...

There is absolutely no character development, for any of the characters. Maddie has no interior life, she just wants to revisit the “ones that got away,” even though they were caught and released for reasons that didn't need to be revisited at all. It's all, she loves her work as a photographer, loves her renovated fire station home, repeat ad nauseum. Nothing ever goes any deeper, and I never had a good reason to relate to or connect to Maddie. There was nothing interesting about her, and there COULD have been.

Plus, I found a better story halfway through, when I realized that I didn't trust Maddie as the narrator of her own story. Her daughter, Milagra, had been afraid to introduce her partner of EIGHT YEARS to her mother, or to let her mother visit her in California. Why? This was not explored at all! What had happened in the past to make Milagra not trust her mother? There's a much more interesting story here that we aren't getting! Same with her son's wife and her other daughter, who is unnecessarily cruel to Maddie. WHAT is going on with this family! Make the setting darker and you've got a story rife for some closet-skeletons!

I also didn't believe Maddie's relationship with William. For most of the beginning of their relationship, she keeps describing their time together as pleasant, and with “interesting topics of conversation” for them both, but we get basically none of the conversations or why either of them is interested in the other. There was so much telling, and absolutely NO showing anywhere in this book.

And finally, it had some weird colonization/racist undertones. As a photographer, Maddie travels all over the world to take photos, but when describing places like India and Pakistan, characters describe them as “uncivilized” and “awful,” and then the big will-they-won't-they story has to do with Maddie's hotel in Pakistan being bombed with absolutely no context as to what is supposed to be going on there at the time, and that bothered me, even though Google news sites indicate that bombings in Islamabad wouldn't have been out of character for the country at the time. But the fact that this useless book flexed that way in order to characterize some assignments as dangerous and others as safe really irritated me.

If this is how all of Steel's books are, then I probably won't read any more of them.

I got this one from my Bookcase Club romance box. (So far I'm 3/3 for disliking the books I got from there.)

Romance Sparks Joy read-along. I hadn't heard of the author before this, but this was a cute, quick novella with good characters (I especially liked when Georgie and Jamie are just hanging out and talking and being adorable together) and good chemistry. I wish some stakes had been introduced for the two of them before halfway through the book, and felt like the rebound relationship moved a leeeeeetle too fast considering Georgie had just run away from her wedding, but I get that Malone had to do a lot of development in a short time due to the length, and I can't really complain. It was a sweet book.

I got this book for Matt for Christmas. He loved it, and laughed out loud a lot, and read passages to me, and told me I needed to read it when he was done. So I did. I'm such a good wife. :)

I don't think I appreciated it nearly as much as he did, but I'm not a physics-head, and you really have to be in the right headspace for this book because a lot of it is, to use the phrase from the cover, absurd. That said, I also laughed out loud way more than I thought I would.

Favorite chapters:
• How to Play the Piano - something about extending a keyboard to include notes that are only discernible if you're playing music for bats and elephants really appealed to me?
• How to Move - because the comics were funny and I've been on highways next to houses that are being moved in their Oversized Load trucks, and seeing other (absurd) ways of moving a house was funny (as was the idea of just putting all your boxes on the ground and using a truck to push them to the new location).
• How to Play Football - yeah I don't even care about football or Lord of the Rings, but if the whole point of the chapter is how to score a touchdown and then throw the football into Mordor ... I'm on board.
• How to Play Tag - because Munroe pitted the two fastest runners in the world for distance and sprints against each other and then determined how they would or would not win at tag. The only things is, he forgot about the No Tagbacks rule.
• How to Win an Election - because dear God at least something election-related is funny and doesn't involve You-Know-Who.

I was reading the end of this book on my phone in the doctor's office this morning and trying not to sob. I'm wearing my bookshelf earrings today, so the doc asked what I was reading, and I mentioned that I've read most of Jimenez's books and also that she's the worst because she breaks your heart and makes you cry, then fixes it and makes you cry AGAIN when everything is better.

I did not see the third act of this coming AT ALL, and it was DEVASTATING.

I'm docking a star because Kristen's refusal to Have a Conversation went on and on and on and on. It's not even that the Conversation would have solved things, necessarily, but I'm always on the side of more conversations. And then at least she and Josh would have been on the same page.

CW: infertility and treatment related to infertility, obsessive compulsive disorder, medical trauma, death, alcohol, grief, pregnancy (uneventful)

My mom used to be a big fan of an old TV show, Forensic Files, that she got me and Matt hooked on when it came to Netflix a few years back. From it, we learned a lot about the types of forensic DNA thingies that can be gleaned from crime scenes, and that, if someone you know takes out a life insurance policy on you, you are gonna get murdered. There's ALWAYS a life insurance policy, in the world of Forensic Files, and in lots of other story-lore.

So, this story, of a black preacher in Alabama whose relatives and people around him kept mysteriously turning up dead in similar ways along similar stretches of highway, and whom he had life insurance policies on (sometimes up to 17 different policies!), but no one can get a conviction to stick to him?! That is a great story. Everyone in town is worried they might be next, because no telling who else might be covered by insurance policies about which they have no knowledge, and Rev. Maxwell's lawyer is getting rich fighting for these insurance claims for his client and fighting any whiff of a notion that Rev. Maxwell might be guilty of murder, until, at the Reverend's step-daughter's funeral (it is assumed he murdered her), Robert Burns shoots Maxwell at point blank three times in front of 300 witnesses.

As I was telling Matt this whole story, he thought it was a work of fiction. Hoo boy, it is NOT. The chapters about the murders, the Rev. Maxwell and the women he convinced to marry him EVEN THOUGH HIS WIVES DIDN'T TEND TO LIVE LONG, the whole town being afraid of him because they thought he was doing voodoo since they couldn't prove he murdered any of his victims; then the subsequent shooting and Burns' murder trial ... all that was GREAT. A riveting story, full of drama and lies and lawyers yelling over each other.

The part for me, where it fell apart, was in the third section of the book, where it turned focus to Harper Lee.

Other than attending the trial of Mr. Burns and wanting to write a nonfiction book of this whole thing, Lee really doesn't have any involvement in this story. Which doesn't make sense when the Lee section took a whole 53 percent of the book. If Cep wanted to write a biography of Lee, she should have just done so, because as it was, the Lee section (HALF THE DAMN BOOK) draaaaaagged.

The biggest problem was that, if there was a tangent to be had, Cep took it. I didn't mind this quite so much in the early sections, but by the end, I was skimming big chunks of Lee's life story. Considering there are only 276 pages of actual content in this book, it was way too long. (And a very small and weird complaint: the pages were really thick, which kept making me think about the construction of the book instead of the story!)

We ended up getting the entire life story of every character, including most everyone that ever came in contact with Harper Lee. We take a tangent about her neighbors in her New York apartment building! About her friend and childhood neighbor Truman Capote's entire life, including college, drug habits, sexual partners, novels he wrote — or wanted to write, and didn't — and writers he knew, his eventual estrangement from Lee, and his death. About how much Lee didn't like the liberties Capote took with In Cold Blood, when she had helped him report the story. About Lee's correspondence with every person under the sun. About how hard it was to spend 10 years not writing a book but traveling back and forth from New York to Alabama because every person she knows is in ailing health. About how much she hated fame. About her drinking habits. About how many famous people she knew even though she tried to shy away from spotlights, interviews, and anything else of interest after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird. And then we get to her own ailments, decline into ill health, and death.

WHICH! Basically none of this is relevant to the fact that she wanted to write a nonfiction book, but the subject about which she wanted to write was light on facts and heavy on rumor!!! She is not an important character in this story, and it was BORING. It shouldn't have been! The reporting part could have been good! The cover tells me I'm getting murder, fraud and a trial. But like 40 years pass after the trial and we're still hanging out with Lee and waiting for this book that we know is never going to come, until finally — FINALLY — she gives up, and passes the materials of her research back to the lawyers' family.

During the first two sections about the pastor and the lawyer, I was convinced this was going to be a four-star book. It let itself down in the last section/half. 2.5 stars.