Allie

I wish I had liked this more. I loved A Lesson Before Dying, and so I was predisposed to like Gaines' (fictional) Autobiography too, but alas. The premise is awesome! The story of a woman born into slavery who lives through 110 years of history, including some of the Civil War, Emancipation and its aftermath, a whole bunch of wars that are mentioned but not in-depth, and the start of the Civil Rights movement.

So it pains me to say that it should be good stuff, because that would be a fascinating life! The first half was excellent and interesting. But I felt like after the first, say, 50 years of Miss Jane's life, there was not enough focus to make it compelling - especially since she lived in the same town of Samson, “Luzana” for the entirety of the next 60 years. The last half of the book dragged; she continued to work on the land or in the house of the white people. Other people who worked there over the years are mentioned a time or two, then never again. The last part with the boy chosen to be “The One” to save them bothered me a lot, mostly because he had all this expectation on him, but no one ever communicated their expectations of this kid, and were just disappointed with him all the time for not living up to what they thought he should be.

Otherwise, Jane just lives on her little slice of land and farms her little garden and listens to baseball on the radio, which sorry, is dull.

I'm bummed that I am not more enthused. Hopefully this will make for a good book discussion next week.

I don't normally get into paranormal books, but I found this one really interesting and enjoyable.

The cover on this one is misleading, because this is one effed up book. Dorothea is a sheltered young woman — literally, her father kept her and her brother Jimmy in a “sanctuary” away from the rest of the world in order to “protect” them after their mother's tragic death. But when Jimmy runs away to Missouri and their father falls ill, Dorothea makes it her goal to find Jimmy and bring him back home. Upon arriving at the bus station, Dorothea meets Stephen, a doctor-turned-cab driver who is attempting to get over the loss of his wife and daughter. Their friendship helps her to get used to the strange world she had never experienced, and helps to uncover the secrets that her father would have done anything to keep his children from finding out.

Such a fun novella! April falls into her neighbor's pond trying to retrieve her pet swan, and her dashing neighbor Leo rescues her and they have sex in his bathtub pretty much immediately. Their banter and dynamic was so playful and wonderful - it was a delight to see the inherent silliness of sex on-page (the sexiness is there too), and it's nice to see characters who don't take themselves too seriously, even if they have serious pursuits and passions outside of the relationship.

The swans are not as big a plot point as the description makes them sound, which for me was a plus. I don't especially care about birds, except the barn swallows I can see out my front window, which I am surprisingly SUPER invested in. There's four baby birds! They are HUNGRY MOM.

Don't be fooled by my middle-of-the-road rating. This book was chock-full of gossip, tidbits and stories about old-timey royals' sex lives, intrigue and sexual politics, and it was a DELIGHT to read. I read some passages aloud to my husband because they were just too ridiculous to not share with someone, and it was such a fun experience.

The reason I'm only giving it three stars is because the organization of the book was kind of terrible. It was arranged around various themes, such as King's Bastards, Mistresses and Queens, The Husbands That The Mistresses Had to Abandon Randomly to Boink The King, etc. (I don't remember specifically what they were called, but that's the gist.) In the process, the book was constantly jumping from king to king, country to country, time period to time period, with the result that none of the mistresses — who were FASCINATING, by the way — ever really got “fleshed out” into a real character/person for me.

It was too hard to keep straight who was who, when they lived, which mistresses came in what order, what happened to them, the trouble they got into ... and it just turned into a series of anecdotes and fun stories for me, without giving me a better understanding of any one of them in particular. That was kind of disappointing, as I would have liked to have come away with some kind of knowledge about the individuals; beside the themes that were covered in general, I didn't come away with much knowledge about any one mistress, because I couldn't distinguish between, say, Madame du Barry, Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Pompadour.

I borrowed “48 Days” from a friend when I was just starting to pull together my own business. It discusses discovering the places where your passions and your skills meet, and then reaching for positions that utilize both in order to do work that you find meaningful and satisfying. Basically, if you're doing work you love, you're guaranteed to succeed at it — a sentiment that I really appreciated. I'd say this is a very helpful book if you're looking to switch fields or positions, as it talks a lot about transferrable skills, setting goals for yourself and interview and resume techniques that improve your chances of getting the positions that you are excited about.

I have a distinct memory of one of the English classes at my high school being required to read this, though not mine. I remember one of my best friends complaining about how boring it was.

It was NOT boring, though I can see why a high schooler wouldn't “get” this book. It's not fast-paced, but rather it's LANGUID. It's small-town gossip, back when there were barely even telephones and indoor plumbing was still a novelty.

The slower pace made it perfect reading for when we went camping, where we literally had nothing we had to do except eat, sleep and hop in the lake when it got too hot to live.

I enjoyed it a lot, and also there are some quite dark things here, so as such: CW for racism, classism, suicide; rape, incest and pregnancy loss all occur off-page.

ABOUT TIME.

It's a shame this book was so interesting, because it was WAY too long. I know it's supposed to be the first in a series, but even at like 75% of the way through, new characters were still being introduced that were never mentioned again!

But I did enjoy the Kaladin and Shallan storylines. One of the first times I've quite liked a fantasy novel.

A slim but rich slice of life. I first wanted to read this because years ago, I once read it was one of Zoe Saldana's favorite books, and at the time I was super interested in what celebrities had on their bookshelves? But even after that phase passed, the synopsis still intrigued me, so I knew I'd get around to it eventually.

Lucy is 19 and has just crossed the ocean from her home in the West Indies (assuming Antigua, since that's where Kincaid is from), in order to be a live-in nanny for a young family in New York. She's simultaneously so young and so world-weary, in the ways she thinks about herself, her mother, the world she knew and hated, the world she now knows but sees with skepticism. She says she loves her employer, Mariah, but I was never sure if this was meant with truth or sarcasm, honesty or what she felt she could get out of the relationship. Lucy seems generally unhappy, content to keep her distance, but it's never explained why, really, she is this way, other than generally blaming her mother; the book is too short to really be much of a character study, but she is interesting nonetheless. 3.5 stars.

For such a small book, this was pretty dense! Even though I read the occasional book about Christianity and other religious topics, I don't read much serious theology, preferring to stick to the self-help, feel-good type stuff. So this was a whole new thing for me. I did enjoy this book, even though I had to focus very closely to follow it. (It's pretty old, and I'm not great at classics.)

It's easy, I think, when you have grown up within religion, to take its teachings for granted. I mean, I've struggled over the years with what my religion claims about various things, but I've rarely delved into the What Actually Happened in the Bible Historically, generally preferring the And How Does This Affect Me Personally, What Can I Do To Be a Better Person books. I found “On the Incarnation” to be an interesting, compelling discussion about Jesus, his ministry, his purpose, humanity's need for a savior, and all the ways historically that we've aimed to dismiss all of the above. It gave me new perspective on some of the New Testament Scriptures, and basically just gave me a jumping-off point for thinking deeper about the meaning behind my beliefs.

I also thought it was interesting that, to the best of my memory, Jesus was never actually called by name in the book - he was generally called “The Word of God.” Interesting because I had always taken The Word to mean the Holy Spirit; but to be honest, I've never been 100% confident in anything regarding that third incarnation of God. The Father and the Son are easier to grasp than the Holy Ghost.

(A friend started a theological book club, which is why I read this. Turns out I won't be able to go to the meeting, which is a bummer because I definitely think I would benefit from talking about this book more with people who are smarter than I am.)

Another book club pick. I know a lot of people that love Jodi Picoult books and a lot of people that dislike them. Personally, I'm not a fan of her constant font-changing depending on which character is narrating, but I like how she is able to take controversial topics and make them interesting and relatable to people who might never experience the things she writes about. In “House Rules,” Jacob is an 18-year-old with Asperger's syndrome. Fascinated by crime scenes and forensics, he takes to listening to his police scanner and sneaking out of his mother's house at night to try to solve the cases before the detectives can. The detectives don't seem to mind, until Jacob's tutor is found dead — and Jacob is the prime suspect. I don't think it's spoiler-y to say this, but I was very unsatisfied with the way it ended. And I kept thinking about it for a few days after I finished, and I think I've come to the conclusion that, no matter how many different ways it could have possibly ended, I don't think I would have been satisfied with any of them. (That said, it's good. Go read it.)

I've never liked GR's ratings system, and authors like Toni Morrison are one of the reasons why. For many books, an “I really liked it” or “I loved it” is not sufficient. Many books are not meant to be liked, they're meant to dig into your bones and make you uncomfortable, or teach something you can never experience for yourself; they may be fantastically written but to say “I loved it” would be incorrect, inaccurate, and beside the point.

All that to say, as always Ms. Morrison is excellent, this book is difficult in subject while being just a shade heavier than breezy in its tone, much of it told by Claudia, a young girl who could not be expected to understand all the heartbreak around her. Pecola, barely older than Claudia, who only wants to be loved and seen as beautiful, but who has instead been impregnated by her own father and subjected to the scorn of the town. Broken characters all over this book, almost all of them dealing with trauma of some kind. Not much else to say. There's no uplift, and still this is a very good book.

TW: incest, rape/sexual abuse of minors, other sexual assaults, child loss, racism

When one goes on (an actual, non-camping) vacation and goes into a famous bookstore, one doesn't want to buy all the stuff one already has on their TBR. (Just me? Okay.) And so after picking out two other books (one of which I was never going to get from the library on time for book club, and one in my preferred genre, romance), I started wandering around aimlessly in search of something that caught my eye. Well, this cover features my favorite color (the hottest pink imaginable), the title was funny, and I flipped to the middle and started reading and it was entertaining enough that I was cool with buying and reading it immediately. As a vacation book, this is the exact opposite vibe of Cold Sassy Tree. It is fast-paced verging on breakneck. There is no shortage of plot. It did not matter one bit that this was the third book in the series and that I had never heard of this author or series before. It is slightly futuristic, and absurd, but not so absurd that you don't recognize this reality. It did its job. I snort-laughed a few times.The downside is that I'm hard-pressed to remember all the plot points - I just re-read the description and was like, “there was a crime? Oh RIGHT, there WAS a crime...” and the mayoral election is played up in a lot of ways that resemble a national one, and also one of the candidates was a thinly veiled caricature of That Guy Who Was Our Most Recent Past-President, and that made the election stuff less fun, even if it was still well-written.CW for the stuff I can remember off the top of my head: kidnapping, staging one's own murder, staging other people's murders, MALE GENITALIA BEING LOPPED OFF BY PSYCHOPATHS, people being fed through woodchippers, physical/psychological abuse of sex workers, ridiculous stunts, body-shaming/fat-shaming. It was entertaining, absolutely, but I'm not in a hurry to pick up any of the others in the series. Though apparently it's being adapted for TV and I could maybe be into that, depending on which streamer it lands on.Powell's, in Portland

A few weeks ago Matt and I were driving to North Carolina and I was having a bit of a meltdown about how not one single thing in our country is okay and everything is terrible and all the things are interconnected so how on earth are we going to be able to sort out this giant mess.

Matt said, you can't think of a single thing that we're doing well here? I said I was having a hard time thinking of anything, and he said, well, we've made great strides in cancer research, it's not always a death sentence anymore.

I agreed with him, but mostly to get him to stop talking. Because yes, I know it's not always a death sentence, but it seems like most of the treatments are still fairly terrible and also ... I don't know any scientists, most of the people I'm around regularly are engineers of various spots, and so how many people could actually be scientists doing cancer research, it couldn't possibly be that many.

Matt and I were having a coffee date yesterday, and I was reading this book, and at one point I looked up at him and said, remember that conversation about cancer research? I didn't believe you, that this was as big an industry as it is, that scientists worldwide are working on this. And he was like, uh yeah this is a multi-billion dollar industry! And I'm like yeah yeah I didn't believe you knew what you were talking about, but I do now.

Of course, there are lots of ethical problems with how we've made those strides... and I'm going to be thinking about that for a while. I'm glad Skloot also included stories of other people trying to sue for their tissue rights, and about the complicated ethics of tissue storage from normal people. The legal issues were fascinating.

This book taught me a lot of things about a lot of things I didn't know, and I'm glad I read it. Skloot wrote in a straightforward and engaging manner that helped me to understand subjects I had never heard of before, and helped me to not mix up a huge cast of characters. An excellent book.

An enjoyable continuation of this series. There were a few times that I found myself confused about what was happening, especially in regard to Murderbot's memory of itself being damaged/corrupted - I felt like that could have been fleshed out more or eliminated, there wasn't much THERE there. But I still liked this installment. I probably should have re-read the previous book, because it took me a while to get up to speed here.

I have read several books in this series, all out of order, but luckily you can read them out of sequence and still get a good, contained story. I like Grafton's novels because they're serious in tone, quick reads, and don't give away every detail of the cases that main character Kinsey Millhone solves, so you can't figure out what the outcome is going to be halfway through the book. In “D,” private investigator Millhone is approached by John Daggett, who has just gotten out on parole after being convicted of vehicular manslaughter. Daggett is looking for the teen whose family was killed in the car crash that put him in prison, to make amends with a large sum of money. However, before Millhone can find the teenager, Daggett washes up dead on the shore of the marina. Although the autopsy determines the cause of death to be accidental, Millhone can't let go of her client's task that easily and seeks to complete the job set before her — even if it means getting caught up in a case of murder.

Last night, I finished the third tale, and commented that so far these stories aren't much fun. I slept on it, and have decided that this book isn't worth finishing for me. I know Chaucer's collective Canterbury Tales are supposed to be this Big Important Piece of Literature, and perhaps something of the poetry was lost in the translation (I was never gonna read it in old English anyway), but so far I have not been impressed. I have fallen asleep while reading it a few times, and there have been so many flatulence jokes and casual references to the hilariousness of sexual assault that I'm not even interested in any of it anymore.

Back in 2013, when the TV show Orange is the New Black first came out, I found myself at a bookstore with my mom. I wanted to buy the book the TV show was based on, and my mom asked me if that meant I planned to go to prison because obviously, mom. She is not a reader, and yet while we were browsing, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky caught her eye, and she said she would buy me TWO books, if I got this one. I doubt she remembers this, or remembers why she liked the look of it, but TWO books is better than ONE book, so I agreed.

Then it sat on my bookshelf for the next five years collecting dust. I had no clue what it was supposed to be about, though if I'd paid like, the tiniest bit of attention to the title or cover art, I probably could have figured it out. (It's about a biracial girl who survives falling nine stories from the top of her family's Chicago apartment building, and her life afterwards.) There's a big tangle of perspectives and racial identity and cultural identity and growing up into who you are even if what you start from is tragedy. It's played perfectly and the writing is lovely, gritty without being harsh, and goodhearted without veering into virtuous.

Thanks, Mom. This was really good and I'm glad I read it.

A few months ago while visiting my parents, my mom and I decided to browse in Barnes and Noble. She had a gift card, so she said I could get a book. I talked her into two. :) My second pick was “Orange Is The New Black” by Piper Kerman. When I showed the book to my mom, she asked me if I was planning on going to jail.

No, Mom.

So I had this book, and it was sitting on my nightstand, and then the “Orange Is The New Black” TV show came out and it was fantastic and everyone was raving about it, so I figured the book had to be good, right? I mean, books are always better than their movie counterparts, so I figured the same had to be true about TV shows.

Except that it wasn't. All the things I loved about the TV show — the drama, the fights, the unlikely friendships and relationships, the wit — none of them were in the book. Book Piper did her time and kept it pretty drama-free. There was no time spent in solitary confinement. No one hated her or wanted to get revenge on her. No one tried to hook up with her or kill her. There was nothing particularly exciting or terrible about it. For all the “hardships” she had to endure, she basically had a pretty cushy life for prison; people constantly sent her mail and books, she had more than enough commissary money for anything she could ever want to buy, she requested a job change so she could work outside by a pretty lake. It was kind of annoying to listen to her complain about it and then admit that she had it much better than most of the other inmates.

But I think my biggest problem with the book was that Kerman was just not a very descriptive writer. I got a lot of the characters mixed up because there weren't enough details or information about any of them to distinguish them from one another, whether they were guards, inmates, counselors or other authority figures. (It didn't help that all of the characters in the book had different names than they did in the TV show, and some of the characters in the show didn't exist in the book. I was all kinds of confused as to who was who the whole time.) Even exciting occurrences — for example, the screwdriver incident from the show — were downplayed and details scarce. I felt no passion from Book Piper about her experience or her desire to make changes for the better, despite knowing that she actually does, in real life, work to improve the prison system. I felt like this book could have been just amazing, but that justice had not been served.

I'd say, if you're going to read the book, do so before you watch the show. Because otherwise it's just disappointing.

A sweet, clean, low-angst historical romance. Emily is a mail-order bride escaping from Virginia for reasons that aren't important at all, set to marry a man in Nebraska. Oh but oops, she falls in love with his brother instead! Luckily her intended had no interest in getting married. Zero stakes, no third-act breakup, just domesticity and men running a ranch, and a homestead wedding at the end. Delightful!

Not my usual genre. I don't even know what to say about this complicated book. It was quite engaging, but also all my usual complaints about leaving investigation to the professionals, and I ESPECIALLY didn't love the true-crime-fanatacism element. At one point I thought we were going to devolve into a conspiracy, so I'm glad that one didn't play out the way I thought it might.

It was okay.

I liked the FBI investigator, Annette, especially when her work intersected with the MC, Alex, instead of the scumbag judge and his scumbag kid.

CW: rape, sexual assault of minors, human trafficking (off page), mentions of suicides, stalking, media harassment, vigilante murder, murder of a child.

I was prepared to love this. Harris starts out with a story about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a show I adore, which doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere anymore FOR SHAME.

I knew Harris's voice from Pop Culture Happy Hour (where she is one of the four main hosts), and she reads her own audiobook as well, but as I was listening I realized I didn't actually know anything about her. This book was part personal essay, part cultural criticism, part discussion of race as it applies to the pop culture we're raised on.

Harris and I are of the same generation, and have a lot of the same cultural touchstones (except that she's a pop culture critic and I've missed a lot of the TV shows and movies that have come along in the last five years). I generally like her dry, wry humor. And so I was enjoying Wannabe with its discussions about The Lion King, and The Babysitters' Club, and the one Black friend in every teen romcom from the '90s.

But the further I got into the book, the more annoyed I felt. There's a chapter about the rehashing of intellectual property and how nobody has new ideas anymore (which is true and also we all already know this). There's an essay about how Harris as a 30-something doesn't want kids, and how pop culture makes parenting seem awful, rife with examples about how kids ruin everything. (You do you, but I don't care, and I don't need to hear people shitting on being a parent - just experiencing it is hard enough.) Megyn Kelly shows up in an essay about there being more people of color and women in re-imaginations of existing IP, and how white has always been the default, and how white people can't or won't tolerate non-white people being centered in things. Yes, AND ... if you know anything about cultural criticism already, none of this is NEW.

The best parts were where she was applying things to her own life, like how her white middle school friends always expected Harris to be Scary Spice when they pretended, how she thought she was named after a Stevie Wonder song, and how her dad didn't want her to have white dolls growing up but she was desperate to play Ariel from the Little Mermaid (the ‘89 version), with ridiculous results.

I'll still enjoy Harris' work when she's on PCHH, but this was only okay.

I still love this book so much and also I made Jeananne read it (she's not a romance reader) and I told her if she doesn't love it then I'll probably maybe still be her friend.

I listened to the audio. I quite liked the narrator for Flavia; she had a childlike and mischievous voice that was playful and interesting. (Which ended up fine even when I cranked the speed up to 1.7x to get through it faster.) Flavia was a bit of a hoot. I don't know a lot about child development, so I don't know if I totally buy all that stuff about chemistry being her primary hobby and knowing all the alchemical and medical stuff, but sure, we'll go with it. The conclusion was very satisfying, and her antagonistic relationships with her sisters was funny and realistic.

However, there was one issue that really reduced my enjoyment. This book was not published that long ago (in 2009, though set in 1950s), so the frequent casual racism used to infer that characters were sneaky and uncivilized felt like lazy writing and did absolutely nothing to further the story. It was jarring, and because of it, I don't think I'll be continuing this series.

I think Abby Jimenez just became an auto-buy author for me. I TORE through Yours Truly. I five-starred the first book in this series two years ago, but somehow missed this one until book 3 came out (which I will now have to buy, thems the rules).

I laughed out loud. I literally cried. I did not care one bit that the miscommunication could have been solved way earlier. The longing was SO GOOD. The pining after each other and falling in love was so wonderful. Fantastic banter, Jacob was such a wonderful H. I keep coming back to this word, gooey - like not saccharine, but like a lava cake, where you feel melty and sweet and also that the edges are strong enough to hold the whole thing up.

He and Briana didn't even kiss until like 75% of the way through but but but the longing! The family interactions! The conversations about their hypothetical daughter named Xfinity and other ridiculous hypotheticals.

CW: mention of miscarriage, multiple characters with normal pregnancies, cheating (past), divorce, depression, anxiety/panic attacks; both H/h work as ER doctors so also - wounds, blood, stitches, kidney failure, dialysis, organ donation