Allie

2.5 stars. It kinda dragged in the middle and it took some effort to finish...

This was almost more like a vignette than a novel - not a lot of linear plot like [b:Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood 9516 Persepolis The Story of a Childhood (Persepolis, #1) Marjane Satrapi https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1425871473s/9516.jpg 3303888] (which I LOVED). More of a brief glimpse into the lives of the women in Satrapi's family, sitting around drinking tea and talking about their former lovers, terrible marriages, good sex, bad men, and assumed innocence. A fascinating look into the secrets of one Iranian family, with some absolutely unbelievable stories.

Another entry in the Children's Books I Didn't Read as a Child list, and I've gotta say most of the time when I read middle-grade type stuff, I come away much more impressed than I do with a lot of “grown-up” literature. I won't summarize, you can find that elsewhere; I liked Kit as a narrator, and her naivete (or optimism, I prefer!) reminded me a lot of how I thought as a somewhat immature 16-year-old, wanting to make the most of things, “bloom where I was planted” so to speak, fall in love, be accepted despite the weirdo things about me. (Gasp, I can both read and swim! lol) I worried that it was going to take a darker turn there towards the end, with the witch trials and the rumblings of war with England, but I thought it wrapped up perfectly. Speare didn't shy away from showing how things would have been, doing so in an age-appropriate manner while still getting to the heart of the history, and I always appreciate that in children's lit.

I listened to the audiobook, which was very good.

I don't really have an excuse for taking 8 days to read a 255-page book that really is written at a pretty breakneck pace once the meat of the story starts. Actually that's a lie; my excuse is that I had two job offers this week and so I spent a lot of this week vibrating with anxiety, finding myself literally unable to sit still and read over my lunch break like I usually do. (I did finally accept one of them and put in my notice; now the anxiety tremor is slightly more manageable, and I finished this, so.)

Mattie is a pretty badass character, very headstrong and really judgmental; she's the kind of young lady that if she can't find someone to do her bidding, she'll threaten and pay off and cajole you until you give in to what she wants, or she'll do the damn thing herself. I read the first part where she's negotiating the return of her recently-perished father's recently-acquired ponies, and she's basically demanding what she wants, absolutely no shame. And I thought, I could learn a lot from this girl, especially in light of said job offers. I'll admit, I want people to like me and don't want to rock the boat unless there's a really good reason to do so. Mattie does not give two shits if people like her, she finds some dudes who want to capture the guy who shot her father and they ride off west to capture him, and ... shenanigans ensue (except that it's very rugged and outdoorsy and Wild West, so “shenanigans” doesn't really capture the vibe). It's very violent, lots of people get shot, lots of pieces of people get amputated.

This was for book club; I would not have picked it up otherwise. I liked it, didn't love it. I definitely skimmed a little bit when there were big chunks where Rooster was talking about his service during the Civil War, but I find people talking about their military service kind of dull.

“Fried Green Tomatoes” was one of my favorite movies growing up. In fact, when I started listening to this book, I asked “my other half” if he'd ever seen it, and when he said no I immediately planned to force him to sit through it once I was done, even though he probably won't like it anywhere near as much as I do.

The book was cute, and I enjoyed it a lot, but it doesn't hold a candle to the movie. Nostalgia factor, I'm sure. The movie has a tighter narrative, while the book definitely has a more languid feel to it; there's a lot more about the cafe, the citizens of Whistle Stop, what was goin' on around town, and all that, in addition to being Idgie/Ruth's and Evelyn/Ninny's stories.

For the last eight days, all my thoughts have been in an Alabama-Southern accent.

Just not for me. Got about an hour and a half into the audio book, and found it was a bit too violent for my liking.

I really enjoyed this mystery novel, though I found the ending a little ridiculous. I found it quick and engaging, if not a quite tangled story. Sir John Farnleigh is a wealthy man with an inherited estate and a good life, until another man shows up claiming to be the real John Farnleigh, and accuses the former of being an imposter. His former childhood tutor has the fingerprints of the real John, and subjects the two of them to a fingerprint test, but before the results can be discovered, the fingerprint evidence is stolen and one of the John Farnleighs is found with his throat slashed. But which John Farnleigh is dead — the real one or the imposter? And was it a guilty suicide or a malicious murder?

TW: eating disorders

I've always been fascinated by psychology — why people think the things they think and do the things they do. I don't always understand, but I'm always interested in the thought process. I also love reading celebrity memoirs. So when I heard that Portia de Rossi had written one, I wanted to read it. I think she's a fabulous actress; I loved her on Arrested Development and one of the best, most-underrated shows to ever get canceled too soon, Better Off Ted.

But everything in the book was before those two shows ever landed on her resume. “Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain” instead focuses on the time in the late 1990s when she got her first job as an actress on Ally McBeal.

As a teen model, Portia's youth was spent focused on being thin; she and her mother would work together to stay focused on their diets, her mother even going so far as to give her dieting tips at an age as young as 12. After years of her weight jumping up and down — starving herself before photo shoots then celebrating afterward by bingeing at McDonald's — Portia finds herself in her 20s, a closeted homosexual terrified of ruining her career by admitting her sexuality, and unsatisfied with the weight her body naturally wants to be. After an emotional moment on the set of Ally McBeal when she realizes the sample-size clothes won't fit over her thighs, she decides that she is going to win at dieting, and that she will never again have a costume designer call for larger sizes. In her mind, that will make people love her and will prevent anyone from knowing that she's gay.

Thus begins a year in which secrecy, lies and consuming as few calories as humanly possible are the friends she clings to. She refuses to eat anything but the few foods she has deemed acceptable — and in carefully measured and weighed portions. Even after consuming so little, she feels convinced she will gain weight if she doesn't work off every calorie. But she never admits that she has a problem. She claims she's “not skinny enough” to be an anorexic, even as she dips below 90 pounds.

Reading this book was heartbreaking. But it was wonderfully written. Every time Portia started to feel manic, anxious — I felt that right along with her. But it was so hard to see her punishing her body for being what it was, hating herself for perceived body flaws, and getting angry when others were concerned about her instead of being proud of her “hard work.”

When she finally accepts help, you can feel her calm. I hope she still feels that.

I love being in a book club, because it makes me pick up books I wouldn't normally read on my own. After reading the book jacket and seeing that this one was about scientists in the Amazon researching a new drug, I really didn't think it was going to be my cup of tea. You know, since I don't like thinking about illness or medicine. But I really really liked this one.

Dr. Marina Singh travels into the Brazilian jungle not only to find out the truth of what happened to her co-worker — who passed away during his own trip into the Amazon — but to also check on the progress of the new fertility drug that her boss is funding. This drug is meant to allow women to put off having children indefinitely, while still allowing them to reproduce naturally into their 60s and 70s. It was very interesting reading about Marina's journey and self-discovery. I almost wanted to go to Brazil myself.

Read Harder 2017: Read a book set in Central or South America, written by a Central or South American author.

Note: I grew up in Texas, and always considered Mexico to be Central America, so I'm going to go with that.

As a folk tale, I liked this story. This was, I think, my first brush with magical realism, which helped to make it work as a folk tale - such exaggerations in the story, with Tita being able to make people fall in love or be sick from sadness based on how she felt while she was cooking. It was interesting the way the recipes were woven into the story.

But as a romance, I felt Tita got the short end of the stick. I told Matt, “the main character was in love with this boy, but her mom wouldn't let her marry him (because Tita's job is to stay unmarried and take care of her mother until the day she dies), so he married her sister so he could be close to her anyway.” “That's sad,” he said. She spent the whole book pining over her sister's husband, Pedro, who wasn't even a very nice or good man, and who had some sketchy issues with consent. And then finally when there was a love interest worthy of Tita, she threw it all away so she could keep meeting Pedro in secret behind her sister's back!

Gertrudis was pretty awesome though. She does what she wants! She leads an army! She marries who she loves!

This whole thing is creepy, you don't know what's real and what isn't, no one is reliable. I don't know if I'd really describe this as fun, but I finished the last half in one sitting, because I was riveted. I felt like it was a good horror story for people like me who don't really do horror, but can handle underlying dread, knowing nothing's going to pop out at you.

I didn't especially buy all that stuff about the townspeople bringing food at the end, as they spent the entire book terrorizing Constance and Mary Katherine. I know Mary Katherine says at the beginning she's 18, but she felt like a MUCH younger character to me, and I kept imagining her as a precocious, if somewhat psychotic, tween. But what a great twist in the middle, with Uncle Julian telling Cousin Charles that Merricat was dead! I spent the rest of the book trying to figure out if she was a ghost or a living person. I'm ... pretty sure she was still alive??

Apparently “The Alchemist” is really popular among celebrities, according to the introduction. It's a simple story of a boy searching for his Personal Legend. The boy has chosen to forego his education for a life of travel as a shepherd. He travels back and forth across Spain with his flock to sell wool, and has recurring dreams about finding treasure in the Egyptian Pyramids. On one of his trips, he encounters an old king, who encourages him to follow the omens and find his treasure, as everyone has a Personal Legend they must fulfill. But once he sets off on his journey, he encounters many obstacles that threaten to prevent him from completing his Personal Legend, and wonders if it's worth finding the treasure and leaving the comfort of the life he knows.

This book was perfect.
It's a YA/middle grade book — written in verse — telling the story of a 10-year-old girl and her family leaving Saigon during the Vietnam War and emigrating to America.
I can't recommend this one highly enough, and thank you very much to Bonnie for recommending it. It was wonderful, and I loved it.

I finished this with a very skeptical look on my face. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. Engaging, sure, hence the three stars; I enjoyed reading it. But Poirot made some wild assumptions that made me give him the side-eye on more than one occasion. (I wanted to know why M. Bouc and Dr. Constantine escaped suspicion, in Poirot's eyes, given the limited number of people it could have been.) Am I allowed to say I just don't care for him as a detective much? The conclusion was not very satisfying, even though I didn't know whodunnit until the end.

I think if I were 20-30 years older, I would have appreciated this even more, as many of the stories about famous people she had met were people I'd never heard of. Still, Ephron is a witty writer that knows how to turn a wicked phrase, and I especially liked her stories of being a women in journalism before that was really “a thing.”

It took me about a month to read, and luckily Jeananne wasn't available to meet when we had originally planned to discuss this, because I was only halfway through at the time!

The Sisterhood was not the kind of book I could sit down and immerse myself in for very long. It was very interesting, and I enjoyed the reading experience, but it was NOT an easy read for me. There's so many names and jobs and time periods and countries going through turmoil that the women were working in, and some of the big names kept being referred back to, and it was challenging to keep up even though I think Mundy did a good job of attempting to differentiate the main players she focused on.

I also get that you gotta market a book in order to get buyers for it, but other than a few groups of women that remained close over the course of their lives through their work and after leaving the CIA, I never got a sense that the women were very all-in on “Women in CIA!” They just were working for their own individual reasons, and they all had their own experiences in it (some better than others), and some saw other women as competition and did everything to keep them down while others saw that rising tides lift all boats.

Also I knew, I KNEW even then, in 2001, as a freshman in high school, that it made ZERO sense to fight the Iraq War. Personal vindication lies here - the female analysts doing counterterrorism told people again and again that there was going to be an attack from al-Qaeda, that Afghanistan was where bin Laden was, and the Powers That Be also wanted to take out Saddam Hussein and so kept asking said analysts to run again and again scenarios in which it might make sense to attack there ... and of course there wasn't but you can't prove a negative. These last few sections were a) really strong, and b) really hard to revisit because I was aware of a lot of what was happening in the world, whereas I had a lot more remove from the earlier parts of the book (during the 1960s, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, etc.).

If Mundy's goal was to introduce people to women doing excellent work in their chosen fields, she succeeded. The Sisterhood didn't make me see the CIA or other intelligence agencies in a better light - I've got some feelings about why it's legal to do illegal things if it's in the name of catching bad guys - but I never got the sense that that was what Mundy wanted to do.

If you're interested in women doing cool shit while the Man tries to keep them down and also get into their skirts, this one's for you.

I would have LOVED this had I read it when I was a child. I did like it significantly better once I ditched the audio; the way the narrator voiced both Anne and Matthew drove me bananas, but I didn't mind Anne's long-winded monologuing so much when I could read at my own pace instead of in someone else's frantic-little-girl voice.

This book was definitely a product of its time in some respects, such as the way it treated adoption, but in other ways I can absolutely see why it's a beloved classic. Imagination is a beautiful thing; well-drawn characters in Marilla and Anne and their loving and maternal relationship; and growing up and life continually changing being universal themes. However, I did feel like it was a bit overly long, and I'm shocked that there are so many books in this series, because this one was only supposed to cover five years, but it sounded like Marilla and Matthew's lives wore much longer in those short years.

I wish I had loved it as much as many others do, but I'm glad I've read it.

Beautiful on a sentence level, but I don't know that I get what Eliot was trying to do.

I'd been waiting to read this for months. It is told from the perspective of 5-year-old Jack. Everything in the world is in Room, where Jack and Ma live, and outside Room is outer space. But to Ma, Room is the soundproof cell she has been trapped in for seven years after she was kidnapped by a man they call Old Nick. Room is where they watch TV and learn and live, but Ma has grown weary of life in Room, and has been planning their escape. But Jack doesn't want to leave Room, because he's convinced there is no Outside their four walls. While I really enjoyed the book, after a little while it was tiresome for my brain to read the abrupt thoughts of a very young child; but even though there are not sections from Ma's point of view, there are still enough things going on that paint a picture of Ma's life before Room and while in Room. Overall an excellent read.

This is a collection of 15 of Dr. King's sermons, which were originally published in 1963. I swear, almost all of them could have been written today, and they would still be just as relevant, just as applicable. Here was an amazing man with an amazing point of view, who was passionate about justice and loving towards others, and who didn't need to scream the loudest in order to make a difference. Brilliant work. I had never heard any of his sermons or speeches before, besides the “I Have a Dream” speech, so it was an honor to be able to experience more of his work.

This was fantastic. I'm really glad I read this (almost) back-to-back with [b:Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth 56181019 Israel A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth Noa Tishby https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617549909l/56181019.SX50.jpg 87515093], as I feel like together they gave me a reasonably nuanced portrait of how both Israel and Palestine understand the problems in the middle east, and how their disparate goals cannot ever align without some sorts of compromise.Yousef, as the title says, is the son of one of the founding members of Hamas (Sheikh Hassan Yousef) - though at the time it was founded, it was not necessarily intended to be a terrorist group, but rather a political arm during a time when Palestine was occupied by Israel. But you know, movements evolve whether or not the original founders approve, especially without some kind of centralized leadership, which at the time Hamas did not have. And so when Yousef and his father are talking about getting financial assistance from the organization after the two of them have been in and out of prison for years, and Hassan indicates that he doesn't know who is in charge of the organization of Hamas, that was shocking to his son (and to this westerner as well). (That is explored later.)And I found it really interesting that, despite his father being a founder, Hassan was never interested in killing anyone, preferring to remain a very devout Muslim that people respected as a religious leader, though unfortunately looking the other way as the organization became more and more radical and violent. (And turns out, using his image to get Hamas elected into the government, even though he himself had no intention of being in office.)A lot about Islam and Allah and the Qu'ran, and how the ladder of Islam leads to violence the higher up you go (which I am not especially familiar with, I don't know if this is a universal truth within Islam), and his discovery of the love of the Christian God/Jesus as he began to secretly work with the Israelis as a spy on the inside of Hamas after a stint in prison. The change of heart here was very interesting, how he went from wanting to work with the Israelis as a double-agent so he could destroy them from the inside, despite never being particularly interested in violence himself, to actually building genuine friendships and trust with his handlers and respecting them as people. Doing his best to stop the endless deaths and suicide bombings with their help.Buddy read with Jeananne. We're going to have a lot to talk about. I highly recommend this.

Matt just finished listening to the audio of The Girl on the Train (which I have not read). He described it as “full of horrible people who can't stop meddling in other people's business.”

In return, I described Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant to him as “full of semi-horrible people who are all related to each other and keep doing horrible things to intentionally hurt each other.”

That pretty much sums it up...

I've owned this one for an insanely long time and never read it because ... well, both the cover and the title are super boring and neither are really representative of the content within. While it centers on a murder trial, its heart is much more of a character study of the people who lived on San Piedro Island in the 1950s, and the prejudices they hold against the Japanese immigrants that lived on the island before (and after) World War II. It's slow and languid and descriptive (perhaps a tad overly so), and it's got some super irritating moments of sexist micro aggression – rankling me the most: 1) a woman was described as “31 and still graceful,” and 2) a main character's mother's “face looked bland and old with no mascara, for which she asked [her son's] forgiveness,” which was irrelevant, and also what?? – but I still found the characters and the trial compelling enough to keep going. I actually enjoyed it more than this review is letting on, but those irritations are keeping me from rating it higher.

I felt so, so sad the entire time I was reading this book; it was like my heart was just crumbling from page one. Amir and Hassan are best friends; at least, as much as they can be, as Hassan and his father work for Amir's Baba in Afghanistan. Hassan would do anything to make Amir happy, but Amir proves repeatedly that he is not worthy of Hassan's friendship. After witnessing a vicious attack on Hassan — and doing nothing to stop it — Amir tries to silence his guilt and pretend nothing has happened. But their friendship is never the same, and Amir's ghosts will continue to return over the course of three decades, until he can atone for and forgive himself for his transgressions.

Even darker than the first one, if that's possible, but I did enjoy reading this series a lot. Especially once I followed the advice of another reviewer and skipped over all the Earthseed verses in bold or italics. I don't think I missed anything.

CW: rape, torture, human trafficking/slavery