Allie

I'm not sure what I'm missing that everyone else seems to love about this book. Yes, Vuong's writing is unbelievably beautiful. I listened to the audio, in which he narrates it himself, and I was glad to hear the cadence of the prose the way he intended it to be. However, many times it felt almost poetic to a point where it was a detriment to what narrative there was. It was also quite disjointed; if I found myself zoning out while listening even for a moment, I was completely lost and felt myself missing story threads.

The most evocative moments, and likely the ones that I will remember, are the ones related to Little Dog's work on the tobacco farm and his relationship with Trevor.

Strong Eleanor Oliphant vibes. This was a pleasant read, but I will probably forget it.

Made it through 200 pages before giving up. I just can't with these people.

This book was ridiculous. Edward is ridiculous. Bella is ridiculous. The writing is pretty bad. I still kinda enjoyed it.

I didn't really want to put this down for things like working and driving and sleeping, but alas. It was a quick and engaging read, though I think it might have been mismarketed to call it a thriller, as I wouldn't say there were many twists or turns. It was a quiet simmer of resentment over a toxic friendship that inevitably boiled over. I actually finished it on Friday and sat with it for a few days, turning it over in my mind, wondering if I wished it had ended differently or taken a different turn. The one big twist kind of felt like it came out of nowhere, since the beginning part of the book was so mellow. But after a few days of contemplation, I'm deciding to shrug it off, declare I'm cool with it because this was really good anyway, and besides, there was a lot that was left unsaid, so who's to say the beginning parts in Violet's head are actually trustworthy? I realize that makes this sound more sinister than I mean it to be, but Violet recognizes this, which was pretty terrifying in and of itself; that you never know what's going to make someone snap until they do.

(I picked this from Book of the Month solely because that cover is so prettyyyyyyy.)

Sexy, delightful romance about a black surgeon/single mother getting taken care of by a hunky man who also happens to be her adorable and wonderful live-in nanny for her twin daughters. More representations of hot men in traditionally “feminine” roles, please! This was my first Weatherspoon, but won't be my last.

I like birds just fine, but I don't know that I really am particularly interested in birds. So I don't know why I was so drawn to Field Guide.

The impression I get from this book — correct or not — is of someone who fell into bird-watching, realized it was boring and terrible but kept doing it and had all this bird knowledge to share even though they think the whole endeavor is stupid. And that made for some pretty fun reading, wherein I snickered aloud a lot at the snarky, rude humor. It was a perfect bedside table book, since every page is a good stopping point.

Earlier this weekend, I learned that my friend Parry has an uncle in Maine whose entire life philosophy is “birding in the morning, sailing in the afternoon,” and she doesn't particularly have any interest in birding either, so I'm going to give her my copy.

Dec. 10, 2020: I bought this at my local bookstore this weekend (huzzah Blacksburg Books!) and the cashier told me it was far and away their number one bestseller. XD

This was written long enough ago that it was, I believe, meant to be a near-future-within-our-lifetimes dystopia, but since I'm reading it a good 15+ years after it was published, it's set less than 10 years in the actual future, which was an interesting change of pace.

As dystopians have gotten ridiculously popular in the last decade, I've read my fair share of them. Some of them made sense with actual potential real world events (Station Eleven, The Circle), some of them were set presumably far enough in the future that it's possible to suspend some belief (The Hunger Games), and some of them I couldn't see how this dystopia would ever have happened based on how the actual real world works (Divergent, The Selection).

What I liked about Parable of the Sower is that it wasn't too far a stretch to see how things got so bad in this California future: Climate change reduces supply of things like water and food, demand drives up costs, people can't find jobs that pay, people have very limited senses of their own safety, poverty and desperation make people do violent, terrible, and also stupid things to stay alive. Overall I liked the main character, Lauren, and her desire to read and learn how to save herself and her attempts to get her family to take this seriously. I liked most of the cast of characters Lauren ends up traveling with too. There was a lot of interaction in learning who could be trusted, in using your instincts to determine the truths and the lies people tell in trying to stay alive.

I was really wrapped up in this world. The only thing I wasn't crazy about, honestly, was the religion/belief system that Lauren was “discovering”/divining. To me, it felt like it could have been plucked out and replaced with literally any religion or cult system, and it would have felt exactly the same. The only urgency in the religion came from Lauren, and I never got the sense that anyone else believed in it the same way she did. They didn't need to, in order to still be part of her community!

I just found out this is the first of two books, so maybe they explain more of this in the next one. I'll probably pick it up later, to see what happens.

TW: rape (including child rape), sexual abuse, incest, physical violence (including against children), slavery, drug abuse.

Living in this story was just delightful. A balm for a tired soul in the year of our Lord 2019. Let's call this an alternate history, shall we!? We've got our first woman president! Who is divorced and remarried, and has biracial children! One of whom is bisexual! They are snarky and funny and tight-knit and beautiful, and open to handling issues together and talking things out and being as honest as they can with each other. They're from TEXAS! There is so much Texas in here.

Alex and Henry's relationship was adorable and messy and swoony and adorable again. Enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, but also SECRET RELATIONSHIP! Again, just delightful.

There's “but private email server!” hand-wringing because OF COURSE there is, but even though I knew that it was going to have to blow up at some point because this is post-2016, I didn't mind - I gave a good eye-roll - but also the stakes felt more legitimate in this context than they did in the real world?? The entire political aspect of this book was just great; so much of the focus was on helping others in the best ways you can, and leaving a legacy of good.

I read the first two books in the series first, and Penny was not my favorite character in either of them - she never seemed as fleshed out as the other characters, in my recollection at least - so for a long time I didn't think I was going to bother with this book. I am so glad that I changed my mind and that I was wrong. Penny is such a wonderful woman, commanding in her own quiet way and asking for exactly what she wants; Gabriel had some predictable childhood trauma that took him a long time to get over, but the way he treated Penny (and her many pets) was just so swoony. The sex scenes were HOT. I'm glad there's another one in this series because these women and their men (introduced in the previous books) are delightful.

TW: molestation/childhood sexual assault (in the past)

After more than a year, I finally went back to my beloved Barnes and Noble with the sole intention of just browsing for a little while. I missed doing this so much! When I started down the romance aisle (SIGH, yes, they've reduced it to a single aisle sometime in the past year) this caught my eye - it's been a long time since I've read something just because it looked fun and was there. Serendipitous reading, I think I heard it called recently.

So the main character, Annie, is ridic obsessed with '90s rom-coms, is writing a screenplay, and idolizes Nora Ephron. You'd think that she's waiting for her metaphorical Tom Hanks, that it's about a feeling rather than literal fictional character traits, but then she asks a blind date if he owns a houseboat, and is pumped when a different date reveals he has a teenaged child, and it's like, oh you literally want a Tom Hanks character. That's ... something. (Annie does eventually evolve beyond this, but it takes a while.)

But you know what, I loved this, ridiculousness and all. It was really fun to read, the characters were great, their evolution felt true, the love story was great, and I'm gonna get the sequel too.

Considering I was teenager during the Iraq War, I feel like I should have known something (anything!) about what the war was like. As I read, I kept being surprised by the country, the culture, the landscape of it all and wondering, how did I miss this whole thing so badly?

Babylon's Ark showed me a lot of the things I missed - what it was like under the Hussein regime, the horrors of Saddam and his son Uday and how they treated both their people and their animals, and what had to be done to survive in an active war-zone.

In addition to teaching me a lot, the book also kept me really entertained and engaged, and Anthony was a good storyteller, though I think it could have used a tighter edit (a lot of punctuation issues, which hindered readability in places). Anthony's passion for animals came through from page one, and his descriptions of life on the ground in Baghdad were vivid. His optimism was relentless (even when he felt so out of his depth with how much work needed to be done), and that was inspiring. The zoo managed to get water, food, materials, funding, EVERYTHING - essentially - on a wing and a prayer and a heck of a lot of luck and good will from the relationships Anthony built while there, with American soldiers, war-zone photographers, and various wildlife agencies outside Iraq.

Anthony emphasized that the work was always for the animals, as he worked closely with the zoo administrators and staff to obtain necessary supplies and protect the zoo against looters; he also emphasized the intent was always to leave the Iraqis in control of the renovated zoo, as they worked together to rescue abused and injured animals. (Admittedly I only have experience as a white semi-Jewish American and not as a white Zulu South African, and therefore I did feel a few moments that I wondered if they were too white savior-y, but ... using your privilege to help others? I have some things bouncing around in my head to think about.)

Ultimately, an engaging and educational read. I'd recommend it if you like to hear about rescuing animals or want to learn more about the Iraq War from a “neutral” perspective.

Last night I accidentally left my purse at a friend's house after we left her birthday party, and I didn't notice until I got back home. Not only did I not have my phone or my wallet, but I also didn't have my audiobook (which was on my phone) or the paperback I've been carrying around. I was, quite frankly, not sure what to do — because I tend to get overwhelmed if I have too many books going at a time.

I had gotten this adorable graphic novel for myself for Christmas (it's a long story), and since I can generally breeze through comics in one sitting, it was the perfect opportunity! It's not a very deep story — BFFs seize the day on their last day working in the pumpkin patch before heading off to college — but it was cute and the artwork was great, and I liked both Deja and Josiah, so they were fun to hang out with for a little while. There's not much else to it. I do wish it hadn't turned into a romance right at the very end, but no one asked me.

Don't worry, my purse has been safely returned.

Delightful little book that I read in little spurts as I was eating breakfast in the morning and winding down at night. Also a good companion read alongside My Year of Rest and Relaxation so that things didn't get too too heavy. Gmorning, Gnight was like a warm cup of coffee, a cuddly blanket.

Probably closer to a 4 star in actuality, but I was SO excited for this book and I have never been so convinced that I needed to read something immediately. It's a series of short stories about living in Houston and growing up black and coming out and dealing with immigration and gentrification, by a guy from Houston, and all the stories are named after suburbs and streets and neighborhoods of Houston.

This book made me so homesick for Texas, and I never even lived in Houston (the closest I lived was two hours west, in College Station, while Matt was in grad school). Kolaches and Whataburger and drinking Shiner. Harvey and Rita. The Galleria, Minute Maid Park, Rice, Katz's. But this stuff is never more than a reference; you know it or you don't, and I worry that this is going to be a turnoff for some people, that there's no further explanation. It breathes Texas. One of the reasons I loved it.

It's a somewhat dark collection. Not especially hopeful. A slice of life for most of the people in the stories, though half the stories are interconnected with the same characters and from the same point of view. Not all of these stories and these lives were familiar to me, and it was a beautiful read.

DNF page 79. Wrong book at the wrong time for sure, though I don't know if there will ever be a right time with this one. I got this from my Bookcase Club romance box - and I know there's some debate whether Sparks actually qualifies as a romance writer - but so far this is not so much a romance as a painful story of two people who are painfully bad at being married and who are on their way to a painful divorce. And look, I just wanted some happy - I'm not currently in my own home, my son is in the NICU (he's doing fine, was just premature, though his long stay is taking its toll on me), and I want to get through the day with as little emotional distress as possible. Maybe when I don't have to drive 20 minutes, get my temperature taken, go to the 14th floor and make a phone call in order to see my baby, I'll be interested in fictional characters doing things other than falling in love.

I heard about this from the #RomanceSparksJoy book club. I've been pleasantly surprised by how their picks have pulled me out of my comfort zone.

I don't even know how to describe this book, other than it was different than anything else I've ever read and if you like cozy stories and fantasy elements and good pacing, you should check this out. It kind of defies categorization.

It's got a big mystery plot, and there's fantasy elements and romance elements, and magic and witches. But it's set in a fictionalized steampunk French-Canadian city where things are mostly normal but the representation is way better than IRL. Also witches are treated as an oppressed class, so they (a big corporation and some of the government) are trying to harness the witches' power using nefarious means.

The main characters are 1) a cop named Adele, who is asthmatic and demisexual. She is trying to arrest 2) Claire, who broke into her house. Claire is a super-strong magic badass by night, homey baker named Claude by day, who owns Adele's favorite bakery, and he is genderfluid as well as aromantic.

One of the really neat things about this book is how it treats representation as normal and doesn't require explanation. Characters have disabilities; characters are of many races; characters use a variety of pronouns and are open about sharing them (I learned a little about French pronouns from wikipedia); characters have a wide range of abilities and sexualities and gender identities and romantic spectrums. Characters are fat, and nothing more is made of it.

And, despite being a romance novel, there are no sex scenes. It's like reading the buildup to Adele and Claude/Claire's relationship; they're really sweet together. There's conversation about making their relationship fit their lives, not trying to fit into some prescribed relationship that makes other people understand it.

It doesn't fit any of my preconceived notions of romance novels, but I think it's worth seeing other types of relationships that don't fit into the “mold.” And this one was quite a well-done story, in addition to the relationship.

CW: There are some horrifying elements related to the witch oppression, and there's description of bigotry and mistreatment.

This still stands: Some dude has a conversation with a gorilla. That's it. That's the book.Except is it really a conversation if the gorilla lectures the dude, and the dude just says things like “Yes, I see”? No. It's boring. There are some interesting ideas in the lecturing, but also there are lots of holes that are never explored because the dude just agrees with the gorilla at every turn.

And I'm left wondering at the end — if the gorilla's teachings are really supposed to save the world, as he claims, by convincing people to go back to the way humanity behaved for millions of years prior — how?? Have the dude lecture people one at a time the same way Ishmael did for him? Yeah, the human race will have died out before this could ever hope to be a success. Ishmael claims to have already had four “failed” students, but it's not clear WHY he “failed” at teaching them when he is “successful” at teaching narrator dude. Because they didn't think it would be possible to convince anyone of Ishmael's message? Because they knew this method had no hope of being realistic? Because they dared to disagree with him on some point or another?

Also, I read this idea once upon a time, but when people talk of “saving the world,” they really mean saving our own skins, making sure the world won't catch fire on our watch. Except the world has been around long before we were, and will be here long after we are, so now that phrasing irks me. And I really am an optimist! I believe in recycling and avoiding war when possible and not polluting the oceans and producing less — but I am NOT a person that's like, meh if we just don't feed starving people then the world's population will control itself.

We needed a female character. One other than the “nurturing” “Mother Culture” (barfing emoji). Someone that would be willing to argue some of the finer points.

I have more thoughts regarding sacrilege, but I haven't figured out how to articulate them, so maybe I'll come back later. Or maybe I'll decide to put this out of my head entirely the moment after book club ends.

Another one that took me more than halfway to really get into it. (Starting to wonder if that's just a pregnancy brain thing...)

I spent my first 17 years living in the Dallas suburbs, and five more after college in a university town halfway between Austin and Houston, but this was a new Texas to me, and one I didn't immediately recognize. I kept wanting to scooch the story further into the past — where tiny towns like Lark seem to fit in my brain — and then references to President Obama and modern technology would hurl me back into the present.

There's a lot of environment-building, family history, historical setup in the beginning. This is very much a story about race resentment wrapped up in a thriller, but the thriller part came way later. I'm not entirely sure I needed Randie as a character, and up until the end I might have said that about Greg too — but I've been learning about how white people (like myself) take advantage of the friendship of POC, and thinking about whether or not POC actually need or want more white people as friends, and there was this perfectly written moment near the end when Darren realizes that his lifelong friend cares more about getting ahead at work on Darren's back than he does about actual flesh-and-blood Darren, and it really hammered home that message that we have to be careful about what our impact is on the people around us (because our intent doesn't matter when it comes to someone else's hurt).

Once we got into the meat of the mystery — two murders, a black man and a white woman, both thrown into the same bayou behind a roadside cafe owned by a black family, and the local police force only wants to investigate the woman's murder, and Ranger Darren's investigation of both because he's convinced they're connected — it got real good, and fast-paced, and complicated. I didn't see the ending coming, and everything gets wrapped up pretty nicely, EXCEPT ... then the last sentence leaves it open-ended for a sequel and/or series, and the way it wrapped made me shudder. Family is so complicated, ya'll.

And it's complicated because I was raised to see the world without color, and that means most of the time giving other people that are like myself the benefit of the doubt over people who have different life experiences than I do, and you see undercurrents of that throughout the local law-enforcement: the sheriff seeing the intent behind the actions of people he's known his whole life and assuming good, and writing off other viewpoints as crazy because they don't fit a picture of how the world should work.

Sorry this review is kind of disjointed. The book made me think a lot, and I enjoyed the story and the setting, and I'll probably pick up the next book when it's published.

Color me surprised that I really enjoyed this book. I like music, but I REALLY do not care about the process of making music, so the fact that this kept me invested in the process of songwriting and composing music and touring ... well, it was a pleasant surprise.

It took me a bit to get into it, but once the groundwork was laid for the nuclear reactors and Soviet mindset, this book was FASCINATING. And HORRIFYING. And I want to ask how did I not know anything about this, but really I'm frustrated and horrified that even the people living in the area around Chernobyl, who were experiencing increased levels of radiation, didn't even know anything about the disaster because of all the bureaucratic secret-keeping and misinformation and propaganda.

Quite a feat of reporting. I'm not the greatest with Russian names (so many people named Alexander and Leonid and Valery!) but Higginbotham did a good job of including titles and attempting to differentiate the individuals from each other as they popped up throughout the book.

I love Linda Holmes, I love Pop Culture Happy Hour, and I love that this is a romance featuring characters who are in their 30s and imperfect and are not interested in playing relationship games. There's still misunderstandings and secrets to work through, but seeing people behave like, well, people in a relationship was quite refreshing. I thought this book was sweet and lovely, with great friendships.

CW: spousal death (not a spoiler, it's in the prologue), emotional abuse (past tense, with some elements that could be considered moving toward physical abuse).

I've GOT to get better about reading novellas in one sitting.

This was sweet - took place in the Hamilton Cinematic Universe (which is how I described it to Matt, only for him to look at me in disbelief that there could be such a thing), so I liked getting to spend time with Angelicaaaaa and Eliiiiizaaaa again. I loved Andromeda as a character and how she wanted to run her own businesses and took action to do so. Mercy ... I didn't love this character, she let herself be devoid of personality in an attempt to Never Be Hurt Again, and she was super judgy about everyone around her. Fade-to-black hanky-panky. I liked it, but I've liked some of Cole's other novels more.

I downloaded the audiobook to listen to as my mom and I drove across the country, moving my family back to Texas. She likes true crime about murders; I enjoy true crime about anything weird, especially if it has nothing to do with murder. I downloaded it with that in mind, and not unexpectedly, my mom grew bored of it within the first hour.

And to be fair, I did think this would have more of a criminal element to it. It's about a music scam! But I guess tricking people out of money isn't technically illegal if they hand it over willingly, so there are no criminal consequences for either the author or the mysterious Composer. The overall tone was much lighter than I had expected.

I enjoyed Hindman's storytelling a lot, and that she read the audio so I could hear it in her own voice, with a heavy Appalachian accent. I was a little surprised at the end when she says she has become a creative writing professor - because although engaging, I would not have said the writing was exceptional or anything. It was fun to listen to while unpacking and driving around looking for the Target.

TW: anxiety, Islamophobia (from side character, related to 9/11), drug use

This is an interesting one to review. Lost and Wanted is not going to be for everyone - it is quite science-heavy, it's kind of about grief, it's mostly a remembrance of a friendship after Helen's college roommate and BFF Charlie dies (by complications from lupus or assisted suicide, depending on which state you live in). I'll try to break this down with those three things in mind.

1. You don't actually have to know anything about science, or really even follow some of the stuff Helen's talking about, in order to read this book. Which is maybe both one of its strengths AND weaknesses: it's really cool to see a woman in a STEM career (physicist and professor at MIT) that clearly loves what she does, is good at it, and has worked hard to get to where she is; because Helen has a young child, she does a reasonably good job explaining concepts in a way that makes sense to non-STEM brains. The downside is that, as a person who struggled in science and really only understood the algebraic stuff in the one college physics class I took, a lot of the conversations between Helen and Neel (her former boyfriend and current coworker, whom she spends a lot of time collaborating with [and that's not a euphemism]) are so high-tier as to almost be more philosophical. I still really don't understand the significance of gravitational wave measurement or kilonovas or the difference between a brain and a mind as Einstein would have argued or whatever, or why I am supposed to care about those things.

2. There are elements of grief here; Charlie has just died, and her parents, her husband and her daughter Simmi all play relatively big roles in the novel. You see how each of them deals with the loss in bits, anger and denial and depression, but because it's from Helen's perspective — and Helen and Charlie had kind of drifted over the years as Charlie got sicker and they lived on opposite coasts — you really only see fragments of grief, but there is an undercurrent throughout, of death and grappling with it.

3. Overall, this story is really more of Helen looking back on her and Charlie's friendship, through flashbacks in their shared past: Visiting each other across the country during conferences or family visits, taking road trips in college, helping each other when a grad school professor becomes creepy and menacing. I wouldn't say it's a fantastic portrait of a friendship — I do wonder why these two would have wound up as close as they were — but there is a lot about their past and it feels a lot like Helen processing Charlie's death and life.

There is plot, but it felt more like it worked well as a character study, if that's your thing, though I don't know if it's more a character study of Charlie or Helen.

I enjoyed it for the most part, once I got used to the flow of the science stuff, but I don't think I'll pick it up again.