Allie

Beautiful. Devastating. Read it.

So many things to pull out of this collection, but I'll just say, impressive how much meaning can come from four hand-signs in succession.

MARY TODD LINCOLN
Holds her head as she paces around the room.
Quiet, Savage!
I intend to shoot Robert Todd Lincoln with Tad's revolver.
Mr. Lincoln and I gave Tad the gun. Mine now.
Call this escapism if you like. Or you can think of it as revenge.

SAVAGE INDIAN
Reads from the Bible.
Thou shalt not kill.

MARY TODD LINCOLN
Grabbing her ears screaming.
Stop speaking! You cannot read the Bible or quote Shakespeare.

SAVAGE INDIAN
If the doctor is adroit, convenable,
And says “I am all in your head,”
Then, dear lady, regrettably,
I know what you know.

Wow. I've never seen historical fiction done like this before - Savage Conversations is both a play, and poetry, and littered with historical documents about Mary Todd Lincoln's life inside an asylum and out. It is violent and at times somewhat erotic (for MTL, not for the reader). It's also only three characters, used to brilliant effect: Mary, the Savage Indian that is a figment of her imagination (but part of the testimony that got her committed to the asylum in the first place), and The Rope that was used to hang 38 Dakota Indians in 1862.

MARY TODD LINCOLN
Do not pray for me, Savage!
I have suffered for my convictions,
Suffered the poor,
Suffered the slaves,
Suffered my children,
Suffered my husband's love of another woman,
And now I suffer a vicious red man.
Don't you know?
I was the STAUNCH ABOLITIONIST in the Todd clan,
More committed to freedom than the God of Abraham,
More committed to freeing the slaves than the radical wing of the
Republican delegation.
Fools. They created only monsters.
And to think I was Mr. Lincoln's literary editor.
Now here I am imprisoned in an asylum,
My eyes cracking like egg yolks,
Nightly my face tortured,
My blood glows red hot through crisscrossed wires
While Negros enjoy their freedom.

I'm pretty sure I added this to my TBR because of New Poets of Native Nations, which I read in 2019, and I'm really glad I finally prioritized it. Absolutely worth a read - it was pretty quick, and available at one of my local libraries.

3.5 stars

I really, really enjoyed this book; it was full of interesting folklore and complicated relationships and death and the specter of tigers that might just as easily eat your dog off its leash as rip a human woman in half. There are mystery aspects and twists that took the story in a different direction than I expected, and I appreciated the heroine's feministy ideas (which I felt like worked reasonably well with the time period it was supposed to be set in). There are so many characters that you don't know if you can trust.

I wasn't crazy about ... well, any of the romance storylines. I REALLLLLY didn't like the premise that, as long as you're in love with someone, it's totally within your right to get rid of any potential partners for that person SUPER SPOILER (either by convincing them to get lost or OUT AND OUT MURDERING THEM). A perspective that was cool with more than one character! Um which did make for some good drama, though, but still, like multiple characters think this is okay?! I felt like the story was a bit slow in the middle, but otherwise I've got no complaints. The ending got real fast and real good, and it rushed up on me and by the time I got there I wasn't ready to stop yet!

I also appreciated the author's end notes about the Chinese and Confucian superstitions. I found it all really interesting even though I didn't totally buy into the idea that for the five virtues there needed to be five people in tandem or whatever.

CW: spousal abuse, miscarriages

puffy heart eyes I just love Rhiannon and Samson's relationship so much.

Whew, it only took me a month to finish this behemoth! Yeah, it probably could have been shorter, but every time I picked it up, I was completely immersed in the lives of Joe and Sammy and Rosa, and attempts to get Joe's family out of Nazi-occupied Prague, and Joe's escapist tendencies and thirst for revenge, and the comics industry that served as a backdrop for it all. And sure, Chabon occasionally irritated me with his vocabulary, but I mostly got over that within a few pages of getting suckered back into the story. 4.5 stars.

It started really slow and I didn't think I could make it ... after all, who cares about a fair that happened over 100 years ago? Well, it picked up steam and I got on board, though I still think there were far too many extraneous characters that didn't add to the story, and also I didn't need a full menu every time any fancy person went to a fancy dinner.

Things I learned: the Eiffel Tower is named after the guy who built it. The Ferris Wheel was dreamed up by an engineer named Ferris.

Also, the Women's Building (wtf) was the only one that was completed anywhere near on time because Lady Managers (wtf2) Get Shit Done. Everything else was kind of a shitshow, because committees are terrible and there were committees for ev.ery.thing.

I got the impression that Larson wanted to the reader to be impressed by the irony of all these famous people overlapping at the same time (Susan B. Anthony! Helen Keller! Frank Lloyd Wright!) but it irked me how he'd tell these stories and then be like ... and that was how such and such met a nobody professor named Woodrow Wilson.

Also it's kind of a miracle that detectives actually found any of Holmes' victims, because dude knew how to cover his tracks, and also he could not have gotten away with any of that in the modern age. And also ... I don't get what Holmes' whole deal was (other than he was a psychopath), since his main priority was murdering young single women after getting them to fall in love with him and/or marry him. Murdering one of his business partners for the life insurance money (sure, that tracks), but then also murdering three of the partner's young children? That didn't track for me.

My big takeaway is it seems pointless to build a whole bunch of beautiful things at GREAT expense only to tear them down or let them fall into disrepair six months later when they have stopped being useful. It's so wasteful! I am not good at capitalism.

Sorry this review is disjointed, but I think it reflects the book. It was fine, engaging enough, I skimmed a little bit when stuff got dull, and I hope it will make for a good discussion.

For book club. This was not on my radar at all, and I ended up enjoying it. It contains a lot of topics that would be considered difficult (incarceration of a parent, eating disorders, violence, physical/emotional/verbal abuse, runaway teenager, etc.), but doesn't dig too far into anything, making this a book that's easy to breeze through in spite of it all. It told a compelling story of a complicated family, but I probably will not retain it for much longer than it takes to discuss it. (Not to say it's forgettable, but I know me, and my brain is Swiss cheese.)

If you do not have at least a little bit of knowledge about or passing interest in Friends, this book isn't going to be for you. But if you, like me, still watch the show* or liked it in the past, and are interested in a retrospective cultural analysis of it, you're gonna love this.

I came late to the Friends phenomenon. I was in high school when the final seasons aired, and my parents hadn't been that big on us watching much TV. I don't think I really got into the show until it had ended, and I was in college. My younger sister acquired all 10 seasons on DVD and we shared custody of them despite living in adjacent states. My roommate and I would watch the seasons we had, and then every time I went home, I'd swap them out for new ones that we'd binge. Later, she worked in a used-video-game and DVD store and bought her own copy of the DVDs, and then we didn't need to borrow my sister's anymore (and when my roommate moved to another country after graduation, she let me keep them). I still watch the show when I need something mindless, or just need a comfortable and familiar laugh. I've probably watched the show the whole way through at least three or four times, and the episodes in seasons 5 and 6 (I agree with the author that this was the peak of the show) probably a dozen extra times each.

Even as a “die-hard,” there were quite a few tidbits about the show and the writers and the actors themselves that I didn't know. I found the analyses to be fascinating - looking at the show through the lens of its whiteness, its lack of racial diversity in its fictionalized New York, its homophobia and transphobia and how the country has evolved and left the show stuck in its particular time and place ... and why it's still a beloved phenomenon regardless, despite having all these issues, even among some of the minority groups it doesn't represent. I didn't know how early its #MeToo story started. I didn't know how the show changed amidst the changing landscape that was post-9/11 America. I didn't realize how big a Thing it was outside the U.S. too.

I feel kind of silly about my rating, but I stand by it just because I loved revisiting this show with a more critical eye, and that knock on wood it's remained this sort of time capsule that, amidst all the reboots of 2018, seems to be in a place where the actors are not interested in revisiting it. And that's more than okay with me.

*on DVD when I get annoyed with Netflix because even after Netflix spent all that money to acquire the rights to it and digitally remastered it THEY ONLY HAVE THE EDITED SYNDICATED VERSION AVAILABLE INSTEAD OF THE FULL EPISODES AND THEY LEFT OUT SO MANY GOOD JOKES AND I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL GAAAAAAH.

In Shawshank Prison, Red is serving three consecutive life terms for killing his wife and two of his neighbors. While he's serving his time, banker Andy Dufresne is charged and convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, despite his claimed innocence. The brutality of prison life wears plenty of men down, but over the years Andy figures out how to manipulate the warden, the guards and the other inmates and exacts his revenge. The book was fantastic.

I realized pretty quickly that this is not a book I could passively listen to as I worked or went about my day - I really had to focus on what was happening in the story or find myself at a total loss as to who these characters were and what was going on. (This is not a fault of the audio narrator, who was excellent; rather, the structure of the book is non-linear, and set up in vignettes that focus on individual characters, building the story of this extended Omani family over the whole of the book.)

I have never read anything set in Oman, and did enjoy hearing about this family against the background of the disintegrating-then-abolished slave trade in Oman, of family and expectations for their grown children (in that way it reminded me a bit of Good Girls Marry Doctors, though those expectations showed up differently for almost every person, male and female, in the story), and the women did appear to have some agency in choosing their partners, careers, children's names, etc., even if their families (and sometimes even their own selves) were not pleased about any of it.

From reading other reviews I see the print copy had a family tree at the beginning, which obviously the audio didn't have, but I did glance over the free page of this study guide whenever I needed help remembering the characters' relationships to each other and a short summary of what was going on, and found it helpful.

Well this was just delightful. The banter was top-notch. The utter ruination of the virginal Guy by rake Phillip was freaking hot. Guy's sister Amanda and her wish to write novels, and damn the gossip that has plagued their family for decades. The unfolding of all the relationships, slowly and surely was very satisfying, and standing up to their aunt in the end and telling her off and refusing to marry for forgiveness was chef's kiss.

I mayyyyyybe didn't love the whole polyamory aspect, but everyone was consenting adults and seemed to be cool with it, so that might just be a me thing. And there were maybe a few too many extraneous characters. But overall this was great fun.

I didn't love this one quiiiiiite as much as I loved Kiss Quotient, but it was still really fun and sweet and Esme is a badass, and I wish there had been an extra chapter from Khai's perspective before the wedding but after Khai realized that he could feel love because he was cute when he was being moony and also because it seemed to wrap up super fast. Also glad we got to see Michael and Stella again!! The family dynamics of these books are also so real and great and I just puffy-heart-eyes love them. 4.5 stars.

Like a 2.5. There were some good points and the conversational tone would probably be good for people just getting into feminism, but I found parts of it to be condescending and kind of against the whole right-for-you-not-for-me thing that I find so great about feminism.

To be honest, I went into this considering it as a regular thriller, because satire often doesn't land for me. But I had SO MUCH FUN reading this. Reading others' reviews after I finished helped me understand the multiple dimensions of this story, especially the implications of the satire, but no matter how I look at it, I loved it. I went in believing that I could trust the narrator, Korede, and didn't consider that you can read her as a reliable or an unreliable narrator based on how you want to read it. (Whether you believe she killed first or not.) This book was sharp, left a lot up to the reader.

I loved this book. It was like chatting with a wise older friend about her life experiences (and I only read the words on the pages - if I can hear her this well through paper, I imagine hearing her perform the audio would be absolutely fantastic). She and her husband were so busy, and did so many things in such a short period of time. I'm always amazed by this when I learn more about presidencies.

What I actually want to say about this book though, is that Michelle writes so beautifully about grief. Obviously, this is not a book about grief, but there are so many moments - in between her writing about her family growing up on the South Side of Chicago, and about overcoming self-doubt, and working her way through two Ivy League universities and a law firm before swerving, and the exhausting behind-the-scenes of being a First Family - where you feel this undercurrent of grief. Her personal grief (and that of her mother and brother) at the loss of her father, who had MS that went untreated for many years; the end to his suffering and that feeling of living in a vacuum, going through the motions because nothing, nothing makes any sense. Grief for herself and her husband as she talks about the struggle for the birth of her daughters and the miscarriage that preceded them. Grief for the country - for children who did not survive school shootings, for children who were gunned down in the streets of Chicago, for black lives lost to senseless violence, for the racism our country continues to carry.

Her writing made me feel a little better about this place I'm in, though she doesn't mince words. But she also writes so beautifully about hope. There's always a lens of optimism, even through her dread of what her husband's being president would do to their family - optimism about what they could do better to help others reach their full potential and to serve people who need a hand, and to give kids opportunities through learning and feeling like the people around them care about their success. I am never going to be a high-powered career woman, but her life is an inspiration to me - that there are people who dream of making the world better, and then do it, knowing that change takes time, and choosing to take those incremental steps.

This is a YA romance featuring a Muslim heroine who wears a headscarf, named Shirin. She meets Ocean, a white boy, in her biology class, and they strike up a hesitant relationship in which Shirin doesn't want to fall in love and wants to protect herself because her family is constantly moving around and people everywhere are awful to her. Not really a spoiler, since it's a romance... she falls in love anyway, but not without a lot of pushing and pulling on both sides.

things I loved about this book
Shirin was a realistic teenage girl with rough edges - there was no skimming over the awful shit she had to go through everyday, and her constant anger was understandable, and I could even understand the reasons for trying to keep her distance from Ocean.

Shirin's relationships with her brother and his friends as they worked together to learn breakdancing was just the best. Their rapport was sweet, and honest, and the closest thing we see to actual friendship in Shirin's life.

Shirin's willingness, with certain people, to have conversations about variations of faith, and what her scarf means for her, and how it's different than for Amna, the other Muslim girl in the story that Shirin meets.

Also breakdancing is really cool.

At least within the context of this book, Shirin was not willing to be the person who educates others on why racism is not okay. She stood up for herself as best she could.

Its realistic portrayal of the awfulness and short-sightedness of high school.

things I didn't love about this book
I love romance and strong heroines, and I know this is YA, and I remember being in love in high school ... but it bugged me that her relationship with Ocean seemed to be so all-consuming for both of them. I know she had her breakdancing thing and Ocean was on the basketball team, but he didn't seem to have any friends he ever hung out with, and she was notorious about not getting involved in school stuff, and so it seemed like they didn't really DO anything but Relationship Intensely. I wish it had included way more about the breakdancing or like, her family, in addition to being a love story.

Was I just naive in high school, or are people really skipping school this much? Like, leaving campus ALL THE TIME.

CW: racism, Islamophobia

Five stars for Atwood's writing, but I can't say I really enjoyed re-reading this.

I first read The Handmaid's Tale in college. We were assigned it in an English class called Propaganda & Rhetoric. I was an advertising major, and yet I hated that class.

I need to look and see if I still have any notes or essays from it though, because I'm curious now what Past Allie thought of this book. I don't remember. I don't remember being as disturbed by it then as I was during this reading. (And that's not even because of hysterics like IT COULD HAPPEN HERE or SCARY IN THIS POLITICAL CLIMATE, etc., because frankly, it did have some gaping holes.)

EDIT: I found a short essay I wrote during that semester. Damn, College Allie, you did not GET this book AT ALL. You did not GET how harrowing an experience this would have been, or how easily humans can betray and hurt and destroy each other, in the name of religion, in order to save your own skin, or for no reason at all. You had no concept of feminism or the history of fighting for basic human rights. Talking about joy and victory in Offred's story?! SERIOUSLY?? You were so naive, it's frankly embarrassing.

I wonder if I took that class today how I would feel about it. I am now doubting the things I remember hating about it, because clearly College Allie was an idiot.

I am not the intended audience for this book. It seems like the people who ARE the intended audience LOVED it. I stayed interested, but at one point I got to what felt like the logical conclusion and there was still like 30% of the book to go. Overly long. A lot a lot a lot of drama - baby mama drama, baby daddy drama, celebrity drama, rapper drama - basically no one ever actually got over their exes and that was major roadblocking the HEA. Really steamy, but a lot (a LOT) of getting down in public at the last minute before things like award shows and whatnot, and I didn't love that.

CW: revenge porn, suicide, abandonment of a partner during pregnancy, single parenthood, physical violence

First things first: yes, this is a very white, upper-class version of the South, and it does sit pretty close to the surface as far as what “Southern” means (I mean, Dolly Parton yes, and like six ways to say “bless your heart” with different inflections and have it mean different things, sure, but none of this is new).

I did take photos of some of the recipes, since I have to give this back to my mom and there were a few I'd like to try. And I did like the glimpses of Witherspoon's grandparents and the lessons they taught her. The photos were pretty, the decor was pretty, her outfits were pretty. And um, damn it seems like white upper-class Southern ladies throw a lot of parties?

I think I've mentioned this in other reviews, but I don't need authors to harp on atrocities that have nothing to do with their book subjects, and I at least appreciated that Witherspoon at least seems to be aware of her level of privilege, but it would have been nice if she had mentioned at all, in any way, that her version of the South is idealized, and could not exist if not for the institution of slavery. She does mention a few books by black authors, and focuses briefly on black beauty parlors in the chapter on hot-rollering one's hair. So she's not unaware, it just feels like it's not really part of her life. (I'm trying to decide then, was it worth including at all, if there's no acknowledgement of history?)

I liked it well enough to talk to my mom about it, which is about what I expected.

Taylor Swift released a new album last week. I still download all her new stuff, though I'm a bigger fan of the middling albums than I am of her newer albums. Anyway, the first line of her new song Anti Hero is: “I get older but just never wiser.”

That sums up Tony, our narrator. There's no character growth, just increasing unreliability. Veronica doesn't grow either, despite the passing of 40 years. She doesn't behave like a normal human woman would. Like, if you don't want to see this old flame, just delete his emails. Don't sit in silence being weird and inscrutable and then blame him for having no understanding of something that happened 40 years ago. I never got the sense that it was worth my time to care about what happened to any of these characters, and so I didn't.

Also it should not have taken me a whole week to read a novella.

Barnes can write beautifully, so that's why I've rated this as high as I have.

I understand why Veronica had to burn Adrian's diary, what with his affair with her mother.

DNF at 75%. I think I read enough of this that I can reasonably discuss its themes with my book club. (My only question is - does anything ever come of the historical society with that damn falling-down house?)

So here's the thing: I make it a point of not arguing with people on the internet. In fact, I really hate arguing on the internet, or seeing others argue with each other on the internet. (It's why I'm not really on Facebook anymore, outside of a select few groups.) This book — in both story lines — feels a lot like arguing on the internet. There's a parallelism here: with the arguments people have (within the pages of this book and online), there's no room for nuance. No one is looking to learn anything, they're just looking to yell the loudest, convinced their viewpoint is the only right one. And that's exactly what I try to avoid. So I reached the point in the book where I got tired of listening to people argue. It took a while! I tried!

I enjoyed the non-arguing parts of the stories, mostly. I liked Mary and Thatcher's conversations and trips to look at plants and bugs, which surprised me because I don't really care about plants or bugs. I felt like Willa really needed to set some boundaries with her kids, and it was really shitty that Zeke had basically no interest in raising his baby, but I don't need to like the characters to like a book.

Content warnings for the parts I got to: miscarriage, suicide, racism, professors having affairs with their students (hi, professor's wife here).

Ahhhh, our favorite road trip author! Kept us highly entertained on the drive back home from visiting family in Texas. Kinsey does all the predictable things we know she will based on all the previous (out of sequence) Alphabet books we've consumed on road trips, and this one was pretty fun - finding out what happened to a doctor with a history of disappearing, getting tangled up with two brothers with wicked tempers who don't know what overbearing really means, and a conclusion that, while satisfying, leaves just a whisper of a question about what actually happened. Liked this one a lot, and Judy Kaye, as always, does a great job reading Kinsey.

Sigh. After reading this book on and off for four months, I'm finally conceding, with 58% of the book finished. It really is quite well-researched, the back stories for each of the six candidates featured from the 1988 primaries (Bush Sr., Dole, Hart, Dukakis, Gephardt and Biden) are entertaining, and all the various scandals that befell them all were juicy election gossip, but it just got to be too long and too much. I probably picked a bad time to start it too, and I got too burnt out on politics. It's really a shame because I liked what I read of this one overall, but I think I just have to admit that I'm probably not going to pick it up again.

I can't get enough of the Theranos story. I gleefully devoured this trainwreck, only wishing that it was longer and included more about Elizabeth, more about Sunny, more about the pending lawsuits (maybe I wish it had been published after all that had been concluded, but I get why it was now instead). I am obsessed. In fact, as I was reading this, I listened to NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour episode about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and learned that there is also a documentary and a podcast (neither of which is related to Carreyrou or this book as far as I know), not to mention the Jennifer Lawrence movie about Holmes and the Hulu series in the works. You can bet I will watch/listen/slurp up every single one of those eventually because I must have it alllll give it to me nowwwwww. (On a secondary note, my real question is, why was Yael Grobglas not tapped to play Elizabeth in something? Every time I see the Theranos founder's photo, I see Jane the Virgin's Petra.)

One of my biggest bookish pet peeves is journalists inserting themselves into their stories. Most of the time, it's not necessary and makes me mad, so I was just a liiiiiittle bit torn here – because getting the details of how the story broke and dealing with Theranos' lawyers' harassment is compelling stuff, and I couldn't figure out how Carreyrou could have told that portion of the story without including his own actions. A small dilemma, but how quickly I throw my journalistic principles out the window when it's as juicy as this was!

1
I really, really liked The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, so it kind of pains me that this one feels so much weaker. It shouldn't be. Felicity was a badass young lady-doctor in TGGTVV, and it did not translate over to this book.

2
I enjoyed Felicity's perspective for maybe about half the book. At first I liked this book and her a lot. She is fighting for the same right to go to medical school as men are given! She shouts about menstruation in a room full of men! She deserves this just as much as they do!

3
But then she said that about 600 times. So much so that I've already returned the audiobook but I can hear the narrator chirping “You are Felicity Montague! You deserve to be here!” for the umpteenth time in my brain.

4
This book was SO MUCH LONGER than it needed to be.

5
I lost interest about 3/4 of the way in. I especially lost interest when it pivoted entirely from historical fiction into a fantasy novel. (There's dragons!)

6
Up to this point, I could kind of get on board, I guess, because we're being historically accurate and all. Women have no rights. Felicity is traveling with a woman named Sim, who is Muslim and whose family are pirates (because Felicity and Monty met the pirates in the previous book, so this makes sense). Felicity doesn't exactly treat Sim great, doesn't trust her, continues to waver back and forth about whether Sim is trustworthy or trying to rob Felicity who wanted to sail with Sim in the first place for not-noble reasons related to Felicity trying to get a job with a man she's idolized forever who also happens to be marrying Felicity's childhood former-friend, Johanna also for not-noble reasons.

7
Which spins off into capers related to escaping from Former Idol Man because of Convenient Marriage Power Transfer because ack! a woman owning things! Sim helps them escape to Algiers for reasons, but then because Felicity is a wanna-be doctor, and Johanna is a wanna-be naturalist, they decide they can bring samples of the dragons! back to England and basically decide they can be wanna-be colonizers too!

8
But oh no! Former Idol Man also wants to colonize the waters the dragons! are living in. That's terrible. Why would he do that. Why on earth would Felicity and Johanna only decide colonization is bad when they're not the ones doing it? Eyeroll

9
Felicity and Johanna have a plan and they save all the African pirates from their ship being sunk by a giant dragon! and also because they have a map that ... well, it's gonna take a long time to explain the map thing. Hooray for white saviors!

10
Obviously, because Sim is a woman, she obviously wants all the same things as the two white women she's with. This book BEATS YOU OVER THE HEAD with feminist ideas, conveniently forgetting that one of them is that WOMEN DON'T ALL HAVE TO WANT THE SAME THINGS. (Apparently this is only important in Felicity's storyline, because she doesn't wanna get married and also doesn't want to kiss people and also looks down on everyone for liking stuff that isn't medical textbooks.)

11
For all its shouting about feminism, it really sucks at intersectionalism.

12
Because of these issues I don't know how to feel. I was enjoying it, then I was enraged or bored for the rest of it. But I also didn't know whether this book wanted to be historical or if it wanted to make up everything as it went, so I don't know whether the colonialism aspect worked with it historically or if it didn't work at all because fantasy novel. It could probably have benefitted from a sensitivity reader.

13
Disappointing.