Allie

Buddy read with Jeananne. This was an interesting book, focusing on Paul's letters. Borg & Crossan's specific argument is that, of Paul's New Testament letters, some of them are “authentic” aka written literally by Paul, some are unclear as to whether historically they were written by him (“pastoral” letters), and some were absolutely not written by him (“disputed” letters). The authors focus on the so-called authentic letters (Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon), discussing various subjects like slavery, patriarchy, sacrifice, justice/sanctification using Paul's historical perspective as a lens.Overall it gave me a lot to think about - retributive vs restorative/distributive justice; radical Paul vs conservative Paul vs reactionary Paul - but also this book is so slim and doesn't have a lot of endnotes/sources, and I wanted more from it and also more application. (What am I supposed to DO with the fact that this made me like Potentially Real Paul better, but that the other maybe-Pauline letters are still biblical?)Made for a good discussion, and as always much more reading to do.Turns out these were already my faves of the Pauline letters HMMM. The extensive look at Philemon in particular was excellent, as I had never given that one as much attention as some of the bigger names.

I got this as one of those Load Your Kindle with All the Romance!! giveaways, and the fact that it didn't get deleted within the first chapter is a point in its favor! Am I into romantasy or shapeshifters or anything supernatural? Nope. Did I utter the words, “if this human woman fucks a bear, I'm out”? YES, YES I DID.

So this chick Allie (cool name btw) owns a bakery and it's a chaos monster because she's dealing with damage from a raccoon invasion and water damage and other chaos, but it's cool cool because this hot ripped dude Dax shows up and he's like I'll fix it all while not wearing a shirt and also I'll pay for all the repairs and also I'd like 1000 bacon cupcakes and oh by the way you're my mate and I have 3 days to find a Forever Mate or I lose the ability to have cubs and have to be Alone Forever. Which sure, except Allie has been burned before by a shitty shapeshifter boyfriend, and it's all Too Fast! And also she's very busy dealing with this crazy* lady who's trying to put Allie out of business by being a general asshole and also trying to seduce Allie's father by being a crazy lady.

There's a lot of gross mentions of mating and needing to have cubs which is weird because it's never clear if Allie is expected to have like ... human babies or shapeshifters or literal bear cubs, and it's all just ick the way Dax's family keeps talking about her as a Cub Receptacle. He transforms into a bear exactly twice, and never during sexy times THANK GOODNESS. The bear is for violence and letting out aggression, apparently! I don't understand.

2.5 stars. It was entertaining, but I won't be continuing the series. Could have used a little bit of editing, but nothing too egregious or anything.

TW: verbal and physical abuse by a former intimate partner, gaslighting, pregnancy

*I don't generally use the word crazy as a descriptor, but I literally can't think of any other way to describe her. She is a mustache-twirling villain, if mustache-villains threw fancy parties, and showed up at people's houses in trenchcoats with nothing on under them, and happened to have a mouse vendor for setting vermin loose in bakeries.

With few exceptions, I am a firm believer that one should never read the comments section. This collection of erasure poetry was essentially being forced to read the comments so that you could see what Baer was doing with the erasure. Sure, some of the poems resonated, but in general her work is just not for me. I don't need things to be happy all the time, but I do need to maintain my sanity as a woman in this, The Year of Our Lord 2023, and many of the original comment content is stuff I try to avoid every day. More of the poetry in this slim collection made me feel worse about humanity instead of better, even with the attempted tongue-in-cheek response. YMMV.

A graphic memoir by a survivor of a community-college shooting in Oregon, and the years immediately after, when she went to art school, a March For Our Lives Event in D.C., and conceived of this book as she finally got enough distance to recognize that she needed to get help.

Maybe this is ridiculous of me, but I hadn't conceived of the experience of having been on campus during a shooting but not having been in literal sight of the shooter, and how of course being anywhere near an experience such as that would be so hard. This is the experience Neely presents.

There is very little imagery of weapons or death - this is more about the processing of having survived, only to witness the thing that traumatized you repeatedly happening again in other places.

It made me cry, and I flew through it.

CW: mass shootings, suicidal thoughts/attempt, PTSD, anxiety, panic attacks

Sings I will never be satisfiiiiied! One of my biggest irritants with romance novels (and you know, people in general) is lack of communication, but when the romance in question has no communication problems and everything gets hashed out constantly ... I'm still not happy!

This was fine. The rep is great: fat black FMC with anxiety, white MMC with PTSD and anxiety due to his father's drug addiction problems when he was a child. Both are in therapy, so they have learned that it's better to talk about things. Yes!

It was also VERY steamy! There's a sex pact! They do it in public places! They are both ahem SATISFIIIIIIED.

I don't know why I can't muster up more enthusiasm for this!

(Listened to the audio, which was fine but it seemed better suited to Aja's voice. I did not like the tone/cadence the reader selected for Walker.)

This made me so happy and I loved these characters so much!!!

I wonder if people who have lived through traumatic periods of history ever truly want to read about that history, unprompted. Like, survivors of the Blitz when the first post-WWII books started coming out, or people who fought in Vietnam. Because while the good first half of this took place in the Before Covid Times, the second half was about George Floyd, and protests for BLM, and washing down one's groceries, and loved ones being on ventilators, and there being protocols that prevent you from being in the hospital with those or any other loved ones. And I can't decide if it's just too soon for me, or if I will ever be interested in truly revisiting 2020. I ask because I felt very detached from the second half of the book, in a way that I don't think I would have if this was ancient history, perhaps.

Maybe this was Erdrich's need to process, but we all have our own ways to process and reading another person's experience of a thing I'm also still experiencing was ... not my favorite. But I appreciated Tookie's story of her theft and incarceration, and I liked her relationships with her family and the bookstore and her coworkers, even if the ghost thing didn't make perfect sense to me. I liked the first half, focusing on all that stuff, way more than the second.

Also, I have not encountered this much in my reading, I don't think, but it totally threw me off to realize that Erdrich wrote herself into her book - it made me wonder how much of this was truly fiction and whether Tookie was indeed a real person, and and and.

Anyway, this makes it sound like all I have is complaints, but this WAS a compelling read, and I have another Erdrich already on my nightstand, so obviously it's not going to turn me off her as a writer or anything.

This was SO wonderful. The banter, especially via text messaging, is fabulous. This is a friends-to-lovers, but the two of them as friends are fab, and they don't even get around to declaring love/kissing+ until like 75% of the way through. But I don't even care. It was delightful!

Dani is going through a divorce and has sworn off men, of course, and Max is the unwilling baron of a fictitious European country, of course. It's academia-adjacent, swoony (this guy clearly adores Dani even when they're just BFF), there's some New York at Christmas vibes, and it includes a Love Actually plotline that's way better than any of the actual-movie plotlines. (I say this with love. I actually really like Love Actually and watch it every year, even though a lot of the plot is objectively stupid.)

Other than the Diwali episode of The Office in which Michael Scott is cringe-y and tells people, incorrectly, that Diwali is Indian Halloween, I did not really know much about the holiday. Turns out Diwali was at the beginning of November, so what better time to read a Diwali romance!?

You can read the description, but the short version is, girl gets laid off, goes to India for a friend's wedding, decides to have a fling with a hot musician, which fails spectacularly. Because lurve.

This one is verrrry chaste, not even any fade-to-black hanky-panky between our two MCs. The banter and flirting between Niki and Sam is cute, the way she jumps to conclusions about their entire romance and its viability (as well as her career and living situation) without having a conversation with him is really not. At times the writing felt a tad preachy, but overall it was fun to read about a holiday and a range of cultural events and identities that I am not the most familiar with.

I suggested this for my book club. None of us finished it by the time we met last week. This just didn't work for me - there were too many characters and I couldn't keep everyone straight, and it took me too long to get through it so I kept forgetting who people were or what their deal is. McBride is clearly a very good writer at a sentence level, so I would give his work another shot, but otherwise I'm thinking I just might be the wrong reader.

Nope. I can't. I ended up skipping over most of the prologue because it kept putting me to sleep, and then after four or five pages where Vanauken exclusively talked about how his relationship with Davy was the most Special Relationship That Ever Specialed, I debated skipping the rest of chapter one as well. That tells me that I should just go ahead and set it down, which I did around page 30. I have nothing against relationships! But this took what could have been a great start to a romance (their meet-cute was kind of great) and made it DULL! (Part of this was Vanauken's writing style, which I did not like. There was so much useless information in every sentence, and the commas-per-sentence ratio was quite high.)

I don't even care that this is a book club book. I will happily go and sip my wine in silence while other people talk about it.

This was cute. Anthropomorphized veggies that are very scared when a vampire moves into their neighborhood, and the little Garlic bulb that gets voluntold to go scare him away, but Garlic and Count end up bonding over their love of gardening.

This is really silly, but maybe for the last month or so, after Ethan goes down for the night, we've been watching episodes of “Deal or No Deal” from like, 2006. It's a show of low stakes disguised as high stakes, and also did you know that Meghan Markle used to be a case model before she was the Duchess of Sussex?? Anyway, I mention this because halfway through Bicycles there's a poem called “Deal or No Deal,” and I had to read it to Matt even though he probably didn't care. :)

My class is not sureThat I should apply toDeal or No DealThey think I am luckyAfter allI am teachingThem
- excerpt

Nikki Giovanni is a local author and a professor at Virginia Tech, and I picked up this book because we just! got! a local bookstore! and it had a big display with lots of local authors, and I'd been meaning to check out more of Giovanni's work after I really enjoyed Chasing Utopia.

Unfortunately, while I still found plenty to like in Bicycles, I didn't love it anywhere near as much as Chasing Utopia. In that one, so many pieces resonated with me, and in this one, I'd laugh over a turn of phrase or think something was clever, but nothing really HIT me and stayed with me. This is a bummer, particularly because there are two lovely tribute pieces to Virginia Tech after the 2007 campus shooting - we just didn't happen to live here yet, and so don't have that same personal connection that someone that was here, then, would have.

A sweet and STEAMY f/f novella about baking with GBBS vibes, set in an old Scottish castle with only one bed. This is my first Herrera, but won't be my last — girl can write some seriously good dirty talk.

Really loved living in Michelle and Gabe's world for a brief moment. Childhood friends-to-lovers, he's always been in love with her, they had an almost-hookup right before he left for college on the other side of the country, but then he left and didn't talk to any of them for years and years ... and suddenly they're working together on a marketing campaign for Gabe's gym. ‘Cause of course he's freaking giant and ripped. And they decide to get the sexual tension out of their systems so they can focus on work. Oops! That doesn't work. And sneaking around because remember childhood best friends? Her parents' house is next door to his parents' house, and they're staying at her parents' for Reasons, and he has Issues with his parents. But OOPS, Gabe's dad had no idea he was in town and discovers this ... while Gabe is at the drugstore holding boxes of Magnums. Because OF COURSE.

Really, this was perfect.

Hell of a Book is a wry and very meta book, with wonderful and fully-drawn characters. (Even though you don't know the names of them most of the time, unless they are named Kelly.) It's very much about reality and truth, and how grief can distort both, and how that grief is deep in the bones of black Americans before they're even born. And Mott tells it in such an amusing way that will make you smile and then also punch you in the head when you're not expecting it (much like one of the Kellys).

I thought I had it figured out, but it turns out, “figuring it out” matters not at all? Mott had me, the reader, figured out first.

It's a hell of a feat, what he's done. Fantastic book.

TW: police shootings of black bodies, mental illness

I enjoyed immersing myself in this story a lot. It is introspective and interior, quiet but full of feeling. The writing is sharp, the descriptions spare but enough. I did not know anything about the Hague going in, nor about the International Criminal Court, but it was really interesting being in the unnamed narrator's head as she went about her interpreting work in the Court; and of course, her friendships with the few people she knew in a place that never quite felt like home, including the sister of a man who had been robbed and beaten outside another friend's apartment. The narrator's reactions to things were so visceral and snap-judgmental, and in that I related a lot to her. (I've been pretty judgy myself lately, call it a reaction to the world “opening back up” and realizing that Covid has really screwed up how I feel about myself, and about supposedly “normal” social situations. I'm working on it; the first step towards fixing a problem is admitting you've got one, eh?) I didn't think I would, but I liked where it ended.

Somehow I wound up with two copies of this book. That should have been a clue that I needed to read it, but it sat on my shelf for about a year and a half before I picked it up. (I blame the cover art.) This historical fiction novel had dual storylines, chronicling the lives of both an 10-year-old girl in the 1940s and a present-day, middle-aged American, both living in Paris. Ten-year-old Sarah's family is Jewish, and the French police have come to arrest her entire family and 13,000 other Jews in the area to take them to the Vélodrome d'Hiver, a stadium used as a holding place before the Jews were transferred to concentration camps in both France and Poland. Sarah does not understand the implications of the police's arrival at her door, and hides her 4-year-old brother by locking him in a cupboard, promising to return for him. In 2002, journalist Julia Jarmond is living in Paris, working on a piece commemorating the 60th anniversary of what has become known as the Vél' d' Hiv' roundup. She is shocked at how little she knew about the city she had been residing in for 25 years, and even more shocked that the French people want to completely forget any responsibility they had in the roundup. In her research, Julia discovers Sarah's family, and — haunted by their story — determines to find out what happened to the little girl that disappeared from the historical records.

Great British Bake-Off + single mama of a hilarious eight-year-old + love triangle + bi representation = love? Mostly?

Things I loved:
• Amelie, Rosaline's kid. She was very curious, and I hate to use the word precocious because that doesn't feel quite right. But rather, her mom was trying to figure out her life, and Amelie was pushing at some minor boundaries in a way that felt just a teensy bit exasperating, but in that way that parenthood is sometimes, rather than in an obnoxious look-how-cute-this-kid-is way.
• That Rosaline stands up for herself as a bisexual woman even when people are jerks about it, and that she seems to have mostly good boundaries around herself.
• Rosaline grows a lot in this book, and I always like growth arcs
• GBBS! It's such a delightful show IRL, and Hall really captures what one can imagine as the behind-the-scenes stuff of the fictitious version, Bake Expectations.
• The Bake Expectations cast. Most everyone was lovely and fun, and I especially loved Anvita. (She is “excellent and sexy!”)
• The dialogue was fantastic.
• Even that of the potty-mouthed-is-too-clean-a-word-to-use producer who never stopped cussing at people to stop ruining her wonderful show. It made me chuckle.
• I did laugh out loud a lot.

Things I hated:
• OK hate is kind of a strong word, but it bothered me that I never knew how to pronounce Rosaline's name. She said to someone that she was named after a Shakespearean nun, and I don't remember having read whatever play that was, but I do remember a Rosalind from a different play, so then I couldn't figure out if it was “rose-a-leen” or “roz-a-lyn” and I drove myself crazy using them interchangeably in my head the whole time.
• Rosaline's parents. I get it, you put all these expectations on your kid based on your own life experiences, but despite their love for their granddaughter, they treated Rosaline mostly like shit. They were rude and cruel to Rosaline's friends, discounted her sexuality, and never listened to what she really wanted in life. And of course, I have complicated feelings about that because they were also bankrolling Rosaline's life, since our heroine only worked part time, and it seemed like she just had never gotten onto her feet in the eight years since she'd had a child? Which doesn't make any of the parents' behavior better, but at least I ... understand? I hate that!

Things I liked until I hated them:
• Alain. Alain Alain Alain. They had such great banter in the beginning, and he seemed like a great guy if a bit pretentious, until he turned into a colossal douche-a-saur. And their mediocre relationship went on WAYYYYYY too long.
• I was prepared to give Liv the benefit of the doubt even though I got weird feelings about her and Alain the whole time. I should have trusted those feelings.

CW: biphobia, sexual assault, gaslighting, language

This is my first paranormal romance (for grown-ups, anyway, Twilight doesn't count). How do you know if a subgenre is your thing or not? I'm not much of a fantasy reader overall, because world-building can feel tedious to me, and there's usually some suspension of belief that's necessary in order to get immersed, and I dunno, it's rare that a fantasy novel captures me.

That said, once the setup was done, this novella was kind of adorable and also pretty hot (and also if it had been a full-length novel it might have lost me near the beginning). The banter between Luke and Chastity was great once she was done trying to kill him (he's a werewolf, see, and her family are werewolf hunters, except she's not one and she's kind of really bitter about it), and them playfully chasing each other through the woods was the sweetest. The whole you're-my-mate-even-though-you-don't-know-me/imprinting thing feels kind of squicky to me (see also: Twilight), but also great consent scenes here, which kind of made it feel less squicky? I dunno. I liked a lot of things about it while still not being that into Werewolves as Romantic Partners, so I don't know how to rate this.

“About the difficulties of Texas: Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one's affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can't be of real service to the hopes we have for places - and people, ourselves included - without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses. That often demands a willingness to be critical, sometimes deeply so. How that is done matters, of course. Striking the right balance can be exceedingly hard.”
- Annette Gordon-Reed

The older I get, the more I've found myself disappointed in Texas. That was an easier feeling to deal with when I wasn't living here. Disappointment from afar, and heartache for the friends and family still there. Now that I'm back in this state, presumably permanently, this quote in particular gives me hope - that being uncritical is not necessarily loving, and being critical doesn't mean you can't love the thing.

Similar to the author, and maybe all public-school-educated Texans, I took Texas history in probably fourth and seventh grades. I say probably because I don't especially remember much about fourth grade. It was right before we moved to a different part of Dallas-Fort Worth, one that hadn't yet been swallowed whole by the sprawl of the Metroplex.

What I remember most about my schooling on this subject does not have anything to do specifically with Texas history. It has to do with my fifth grade social studies teacher, and her teachings on the Civil War. She fucking LOVED Robert E. Lee - spoke of him with reverence and practically was a heart-eyes emoji, had that been a thing in 1997. And of course, I was a little white kid in a school full of other little white kids, and didn't understand until much, much later how fucked up that sentiment was.

I am like, 98% positive the subject of the end of the Civil War (as it pertains to Texas) and Emancipation in Texas never came up, in any of my K-12 history classes. Maybe not even in my college history requirements.

Despite recognizing a lot of the historical names in On Juneteenth, it has been far too long since I learned anything about Texas history. Gordon-Reed did a fantastic job of blending historical and autobiographical concepts in this slim book of six essays. There was a lot, particularly regarding indigenous history, that was completely unfamiliar to me, including entire tribes that I had never heard of that occupied this land.

I'm left questioning if I really did learn anything in those two long-ago Texas history classes.

I loved Gordon-Reed's writing, her childhood ideas and grown-up realizations, the way she integrated her own story - and that of other Texans - into a more fleshed-out historical narrative. Of course, as she mentions, no history is ever complete, but now more of the picture is filled in for this Texan.

I absolutely, unreservedly recommend On Juneteenth. I will be seeking out more of Gordon-Reed's work.

I'm pretty sure this is my first reading experience that features a nonbinary character; it admittedly took me a bit to get the hang of the singular they pronoun. This also might have been the first romance I've read where one of the MCs is divorced.

I used to watch Top Chef and Master Chef and I still watch the Great British Baking Show, so I loved the behind-the-scenes details of a fictitious reality cooking show, but I wish there had been a little more about the foooooood. I like foooood. I like hearing about foood! I like romance too (and btw the foodie sex was awesomely written), but a lot of the actual reality show parts seemed very much to be secondary to the friends-to-lovers getting to know each other and mostly eschewing the other contestants on the show.

Mostly this worked well and didn't annoy me because Dahlia and London treated each other like grownups who could handle the truth even when things were rough, even though of course there's tension when (not a spoiler, true of every reality show) There Can Only Be One Winner.

I appreciated their familial relationships as well, for both characters. Several good (to my mind) representations of trans/queer folks, and the people who love them. (Folx? I keep seeing it spelled with an X, but I'm not sure why, since the regular spelling isn't binary.) Yes, there is some transphobia, but it is hinted at while still maintaining the characters' chosen pronouns, and that was a thoughtful touch.

I tore through this in two days, which might be the fastest I've read anything in months, so there's that.

You should know that I'm not a person that generally writes in my books, so when I start highlighting and underlining with abandon, I feel like that means something? Like, maybe that a thought about long-term love was really resonating with me, or that I want to remember little zingers about millennial ennui. A pleasant surprise, since I didn't love Beach Read; but this is why I should stop writing authors off based on one book, because I really, really liked this one. I don't even love traveling, even in non-Covid times, but I like the IDEA of traveling, of all the little adventures you can find along the way. I appreciated that Henry commented in the notes at the end about hoping this book could be a glimmer of that amongst the pandemic awfulness - I don't need all my escapist fiction to harp on it or anything, but the fact that this lovely book about loving the feel of being somewhere new, with new people, was published at a time where no one was going anywhere or meeting anyone ... it just couldn't go unmentioned.

I loved the way Alex thought, and his and Poppy's friendship, and that any misunderstandings eventually became clear. I don't know that I've ever read a friends-to-lovers romance before this one, but it won't be my last.

4.5 stars rounded up. (I'm being petty and knocking off a half star because it took me a few days to read this and I couldn't always remember what year the various trips were supposed to be happening in.)

TW: mentions of a woman dying from complications due to childbirth (in the past)

Science in general is really not my strong suit, and while this was quite biology- and genetics-heavy, Isaacson writes in a way that I can generally understand. This also had a ton of relevance to our current times, in the way it talked about the development of the Covid vaccines using the mRNA and CRISPR technology, that was quite interesting. It was not entirely a biography of Jennifer Doudna; it included enough of the other scientist players and technologies that they were racing to discover, and their pettiness in trying to get published and filing patents ahead of each other (which, pettiness is entertaining to me in any field), and the ethics of using vs. not using the technology once it was created. The book also has the benefit of reminding me how fast scientific advances happen, which I am prone to forgetting since I don't personally know very many scientists. (Obviously if it's not happening in my own personal sphere, it must not be happening anywhere! /s)

Beautiful writing, but I suspect this is a case of mis-marketing. I was expecting there to be much more about Ford's father and how his incarceration affected her in big and small ways, and that was a much smaller focus of the book; so when she wrote frequently about her insecurities and desperation to feel loved as her body developed and she grew afraid of men and boys, I expected that to carry through, though as she moved up the job-and-moving-cities ladder, that kind of fell off too. How did she overcome that insecurity, as she got closer to her now-husband Kelly? A seemingly better relationship with her mother is something to be glad of, yes, but not the end-all-be-all of overcoming insecurity. And ... maybe this wasn't for the reader to be privy to (but it's a memoir!!), but after Ford's anguish about what her dad was in prison for, I expected that the conversation (or at least its ramifications) would occur on-page? I don't know, there's no good way to that conversation to occur, and no good answer that could come of it anyway, but it seemed framed to go that way and then didn't.

I still enjoyed reading this, even though it did not take the turns I expected. 3.5 stars.

TW: stillbirth, physical abuse/child abuse, rape