Allie

The speed limit on Texas highways can easily get up to 75, 80, 85 mph, depending on how straight the road is, how much nothing there is nearby, and whether or not it's a toll road. Now, I don't know your life, but if someone is driving a convertible, say 15-20 mph OVER that, there's no way in hell I'd be masturbating in the passenger seat. I'd be holding on for DEAR LIFE.

A merry band of thieves steal from the rich to ... I dunno, they're clearly not giving to the poor. But the only steal from people who are so wealthy that they won't miss their Jaguar going missing and whatnot, and also they do this in the midst of giant galas and fundraisers so there's so many people around that it deflects suspicion. Also this is barely a plot point. Grand Theft N.Y.E. is about Cleo and Robert going nuts on each other, in detail, and honestly it sounds kind of painful the amount of time they spend boinking each other, and thinking about boinking each other while declaring they have been RUINED for other people.

It needed an edit (lot of spelling errors) but this was on KU so I guess I expect less there? It also didn't need the epilogue, which I felt was awkward because NO BUSINESS ASSOCIATES WOULD EVER BEHAVE LIKE THIS even if they were married and hot for their assistant.

So ultimately, it was fine. I'll give it a 2.5.

Meh.

I never really got a sense of what Nora wanted out of life. The ending is very much, Look at all the potential my life has, I just couldn't see it! Which was annoying and trite, because Nora is portrayed as having depression, which is an illness, and you don't just “get over” being depressed because you no longer have regrets. That's not how brain chemicals work.

I don't know. I don't get why this book is so popular. It felt cliche, predictable. I didn't hate it, nor did I like it. The prose was fine, the reading experience pleasant enough, I guess. This has the feel of a book that I will forget immediately.

I did wonder if Nora screwed up her brother's happily ever after in her root life by knowing too much about his husband, and pushing him so heartily toward that relationship because she knew he was happy in other versions of HER life.

This audiobook lived in my head rent free for several days, so it's got that going for it. Despite being a completely unrealistic YA mystery novel, it was definitely engaging. It was compared to Knives Out, which I loved. That said, I thought this was a standalone when I picked it up, but it turns out it's a trilogy and the third one isn't even out yet and I am for sure not invested enough in these characters to bother.

Anyway. This is unrealistic in almost every way. Kazillionaire Tobias Hawthorne lives in a mansion somewhere in the middle of Texas with like a 50,000-room house because he can't stop renovating and adding secret passageways and hiding clues in secret compartments all over the freaking house, which has like 6 libraries in it. So he dies after a short illness, but only after being super weird and hard on his grandsons for their whole lives and making sure they are experts on like everything, because if you're enormously rich there's nothing more important than also being the absolute best at, say, building Rube Goldberg machines or looking pained while wearing suits. He decided to give all his \(\)\(\)$$ to charity (big middle fingers, family!) except then something mysterious happens and instead he decides to give everything to this girl Avery who lives in her car, who he's been spying on for years like a big ol' weirdo.

Cue family outrage. How daaaaare you not give billions of dollars to people who don't like you and whom you don't like, when you can play games and make everyone's lives miserable while making them jump through hoops you engineered before your demise! Cue pained expressions!

The four Hawthorne brothers were virtually interchangeable, with a few personality hints brought up often in case you can't remember which one is which. Xander likes scones! Jameson will always call Avery a condescending nickname despite her asking him not to! Grayson has gray eyes lol! and Nash is older and hardly factors in at all. Every boy is a love interest, except Nash, primarily because he is Old. Like, 22 or something! Also you HAVE to have sexual tension with a whole bunch of boys whose inheritance you've just scooped. It's like, the law.

The audiobook would have been fine except the narrator gave every Hawthorne an annoying draaaawwwwl.

Entertaining enough, but ready to move on. 2.5.

This is the first full-length Murderbot novel, and it's a tiny bit tonally different. The previous installments had such low page-counts that Wells almost had to rush through at breakneck speed just to get the whole story in, and the longer length allowed for more time with Murderbot getting to interact with the humans in its crew and solving un-murderable problems, and made for a more complicated adventure story with a slightly less breakneck pace. Plus much more with ART as its real self, and Murderbot having to handle the fact that it is not a lone wolf, and handle the problems with its and ART's relationship. I really appreciated the longer length, and this is my favorite installment so far, even though WHOA did this get complicated at the end, and I sometimes had to flip back to make sure I had the story straight. (These stories have typically been told from Murderbot's POV, but at one point it cloned itself as software, and then convinced another bot to go rogue, and then there were three POVs and two of them were Murderbot?)

And the next book promises more ART and Murderbot, so that's what I'll be doing...

Pretty intense and melancholy for a romance, but I enjoyed it and I liked Highsmith's style of not explaining every action the characters took. A lot is left to the reader to interpret, and that was interesting.

SO GREAT! Loved this will-they-won't-they-of-course-they-will coworkers romance but also Secret Identity and Strong Female Friendships and Smart Ambitious Leads. Also Trendsetters sounds simultaneously like an awesome and exhausting place to work. Also! Set in AUSTIN! With lots of references to places I know! That was fun.

DNF at page 75.I LOVED Winfrey's first book, which I read in 2021, so naturally I remember nothing about it.Do you know what yacht rock is? I didn't, and the main character (Chloe) talks about it all the time, so this morning when I started working I pulled up an Apple Music yacht rock playlist. It's basically '70s Easy Listening but only the super mellow stuff. Not really my thing.And that's maybe the easiest way to put it? Something about this just wasn't my thing. I kept comparing this to Helen Hoang's wonderful book [b:The Heart Principle 50056075 The Heart Principle (The Kiss Quotient, #3) Helen Hoang https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1634059904l/50056075.SX50.jpg 68489545], which also dealt with the slow decline of a parent from a terminal illness. Hoang's book was perfect, and NLTM just wasn't hitting the mark for me. There wasn't enough build-up between the two MCs, unless it was supposed to be in the previous book and I just can't remember it. The Alzheimer's storyline didn't feel authentic either - I mean, Chloe's twin brother comes back to town for reasons, but basically never asks about their dad or how Chloe's doing with being his sole caretaker or goes to visit or anything. It almost feels like Winfrey needed to have a reason for Chloe's life to be stalled, and just plugged in Alzheimer's, and that feels icky. However, A+ representation in the pages I did read.

This whole book is bleak bleak bleak, so you've gotta be in the right headspace for that. That said, it wasn't until the last 150 pages or so until I started reading with a furrow in my brow, because of the horrificness of everything that has happened to Ishvar and Om. Does that make me heartless, that their previous pain registered as awful, but not painful to me personally? Until it was? I hope not. And the stories of Dina and Maneck lightened the reading experience of the pain of the other two considerably, until it didn't.

And despite that, I could not put this down toward the end? And I want to pick up more of Mistry's work?

TW for basically everything, but off the top of my head: caste violence, religious discrimination (against several different groups throughout), poverty, homelessness, physical violence, dismemberment, forced labor, sexual assault, government at war, suicide, reproductive violence

I love Rachel Bloom and I love Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and prior to writing this review I started re-watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend music videos on Youtube before remembering I have approximately 20 minutes to do everything I need to do before the kid gets home, and maybe Youtube isn't the best use of that time. I did the audio, as is right and proper with all celebrities' books, and she sings and does voices! I wish it had been longer, and I wish it had included more CEG because I waaaant it allllll. Most of her stories (the ones not involving poop) were heartfelt and funny and relatable and I enjoyed the book very much.

I didn't have to read this one in high school, which was probably a good thing. I don't know that I would have appreciated it then, the way I can now. This was really, really excellent. The last chapter in particular gutted me, but also the unexpected chapter from Jefferson's notebook. The characters were vivid, particularly teacher Grant, deputy Paul, and Sheriff Guidry, not to mention Jefferson himself, on death row for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I love that there's room for questioning God, His existence, and also there's visible strength in the faith for those who do choose to believe. That neither Grant nor the preacher were willing to be something they weren't, nor do something they didn't believe in, but as foils for each other. That so many of the characters, even outside Jefferson, could see bigger things, wanted more, but knew they likely weren't going to get it, for reasons both within and outside of their control, and their resignation to that.

This was a perfect holiday romance novella!

It's set in Toronto! A place I just visited this summer and keep talking about because the food was amazing. And there's lots of eating of food and talking about food and joking about food! (I mean, it's a Thanksgiving book, but that's not even the half of it. I'm not even sure what soup dumplings are, but I want some now.) And awkward family setups resulting in great dialogue!

And the best thing of all ... having conversations with each other instead of big conflicts!!!

A-plus!

This was SO GOOD. Read it. Read it now! The characters are brilliantly drawn and frustrating and beautiful. I love a good story that stretches over decades and flip-flops the POV voice. This was like nothing I've read before, and it was great.

The older I get, the more I find myself reading the acknowledgments at the end of books. At the end of The New Jim Crow, Alexander thanks her husband for reviewing her work, which is not exceptional in and of itself, but she notes that as a federal prosecutor, he disagrees with her assessment of the criminal justice system (she is a public defender). I find this very interesting, but also can see why they would differ on their opinions based on the ways they approach the law.

I wasn't alive yet for the start of the War on Drugs in the late '70s, but I remember the rhetoric as my parents described it: crack was everywhere, all the babies were addicted to crack, when I was born they were very worried that I was not going to be able to grow up and get married because everyone but me would be addicted to crack. It was not sound logic. And yet I can absolutely see how this was made into a nationwide panic that “required” heavy-handed solutions, and how we got to the place we are.

I just didn't realize the extent of how many people are swept into the prison system on massive charges for even first-time offenses of way less insidious drugs than crack, and how frequently people were convinced to plead guilty even if they were innocent, and how those systems resulted in millions of people who were unable to participate in society forever-after due to all the ways we as a country legally discriminate against felons (housing discrimination, welfare discrimination, employment discrimination, etc.).

And then you add the layer of what it means to be “criminal” on top of that, what “those people” look like, who and what neighborhoods get targeted by police for suspected drug use, and WOOF. It's so much. So so much.

Well-researched (EXTENSIVE notes at the end) and fascinating and horrifying, even if it did take me the better part of a month to read. The downside is that the “solution” to the problem of mass incarceration is the overhaul of like 17 systems to eliminate overt and covert racism and rethink how we talk about poverty (for black and white people), and figure out how to get people drug treatment when needed instead of criminalizing people. That even systems designed to be thought of as good (like the now-defunct affirmative action) were not designed to lift up ALL people so much as an exceptional few (rising tide lifting all boats rhetoric giving way in which most boats drown while a few are raised up).

It's giving me a lot to think about. Would recommend.

Buddy read with Jeananne, and I believe we're going to do Caste by Isabel Wilkerson next, which should segue perfectly from this.

I'm back at the office, so between losing my commute time and having a tiny human who needs to be on me every second that I'm home, my time has just gotten a lot tighter. I'll try to keep this short.

This was an excellent collection of stories, most of them, in a roundabout way (if not plainly) about sex/sexuality and the hypocrisy of Good Christian Folks around it. Not a weak link here; my favorites were “Not-Daniel” and “Peach Cobbler” (and the surprise throwback to the “Peach Cobbler” daughter in “Instructions for Married Christian Husbands” even though it wasn't a favorite story). I wasn't crazy about “Jael,” but I listened to the audio and was like halfway into the story before I realized that there were two narrators, so I think I probably missed what Philyaw was trying to do there. Some grief and heartbreak around losing loved ones, to death and to dementia, handled with care. Lot of infidelity here, multiple instances of second families, if that's not something you're cool with reading.

I originally wasn't going to pick up this book. I read Hyperbole and a Half The Book, and it was fine, but I found that what I loved about Brosh's work — the weirdness, the silliness, the seriousness — it all seemed to work better in the blog format, where I wasn't just reading post after post. There was a break between each of the blog posts, and you had to WAIT, and that made every reading experience magical. So I expected that would happen going into this one too, until I read the chapter of this book she posted on her blog as a teaser, and it made me laugh until I cried.

And sure, Solutions had those moments at the beginning where I wondered if I wouldn't enjoy this more in blog form, but then. Oh. I can see why this needed to be a book and not a series of stories on the internet, and why it took so long for this book to come to fruition. This is HEAVY with grief and loss, and depression, and struggling to find meaning, and yet somehow Brosh still made me laugh until I cried at several points; at her stories about buying bananas with her ex-husband, and the little neighbor girl who desperately wanted Brosh to come over to see her room??

And sometimes we just need to laugh until we cry.

I just love Washington's storytelling. I don't think I would have described Memorial as a “funny, sexy dramedy” like the book description does. It's not comic nor particularly titillating, nor do I think it's really trying to be either of those; it's a quiet story of two people who have been intertwined for a long time and are not sure why they remain that way, and who both need things that have been hard to verbalize — particularly due to the complicated relations that both Mike and Ben feel to their families. There's no neat ending, but that's okay because little about their relationship is neat, and it provides hope that one day, with or without each other, each of these men could be happy. A lovely book.

Tagline: “One Juror Changed the Verdict. What if She Was Wrong?”
... Yes, that's how the jury system works, that's fine with me.

The Holdout kept me entertained during a really stressful few days, but I think maybe I just don't like thrillers all that much. I mean, it was a fine way to pass the time, but I don't like having to suspend so much belief; I hate it when the protagonist finds herself in the midst of a crime scene and decides to Solve Everything Herself (even if, for once, as a defense attorney, she may be qualified to do some digging for herself, but NO because her lawyer/boss told her to not do anything stupid so of course she has to do fifteen stupid things immediately). There is no way any of this would have worked out as it did. The whole time I was reading, I kept thinking, “Your plot is full of holes!”

I'm also not sure how I feel about some of the Diversity Lessons that were thrown around. I can appreciate a white author trying to say stuff about not all POC being on the same side for the same reasons, and I can still feel weird about the fact that the only people who actually had to face any on-page consequences were Black or Latinx.

So. It was only okay. The longer I keep writing about it, the fewer stars I want to give it, so I'll stop here.

Buddy read with Jeananne. We had to break it up into three different discussions, because it was just too heavy to deal with all at once. That said, Wilkerson is clearly brilliant, her thesis and argument about race vs. caste and the hierarchies we're entrenched in (unless we intentionally break out of them) make a lot of sense, and also despite her focus on one caste system that has been entirely dismantled (Nazi Germany), I can't see how, within my lifetime at least, the American caste system would be able to eradicated. It took 60 years after the Civil Rights movement for it to evolve into the place it's at now - which is still not great. And I was ENTIRELY unfamiliar with India's caste system. I learned so much, and the personal storytelling brought it to life. I was always engaged, even if it took me a month and a half to read.

As I predicted, this was a fantastic follow up to our previous buddy read, The New Jim Crow. I think it's my turn to pick next, so what weighty, harrowing tome should I choose?! (I mean, I'm kind of kidding but not entirely.)

This took me way too long to finish, but that was because I wanted to be able to sit and read an entire short story in one sitting, to let it wash over me, and apparently I don't sit down and read for long anymore. #sad

But I absolutely loved most of these stories, they took traditional myths and stories from a whole bunch of different places (Persia, Greece, Nigeria, Lesotho, Senegal ... and that's just off the top of my head) and reimagined them so they were love stories, mostly in modern times, and where the women had agency! There were also some original stories at the end of the book.

In flipping back through, I realized that almost all of these women's stories was completely memorable in the telling. An exceptional feat, especially because ... well, the first sentence of this review. Plus, I finished several of these with a big smile on my face.

I think my favorites were Orin, Naleli, Thisbe, and Nefertiti, but I don't think there was a weak story in this collection.

I've read two other CLo books recently, and the thing that I love about them is how they make you fall in love with the heroine, so you only want amazing things for them, and then you fall in love with the person your heroine falls in love with, because they are amazing and are wonderful to each other.

I'm setting this aside around the halfway mark. It's FINE. I don't have an issue with the Groundhog's Day thing; rather I think there are too many characters and so it's hard to get to know/love any of them the way our FMC Maelyn does. (And also I'm still not especially invested in Maelyn either.) She goes to a cabin with close family friends every year for Christmas, has since she was a child, but there are so many people that it's hard to distinguish them from one another. The love interest, Andrew, has literally never considered her a love interest to this point (but Maelyn's had a crush on him for like 10 years!), and I'm not sure why we're supposed to love him other than he looks sexy when he's out in the snow with flushed cheeks. We basically know nothing else about him.

I just finished a holiday romance that I enjoyed way more than I'm enjoying this, so I'm dropping it like it's hot. YMMV. Got too many other books I want to get to this month.

Yeahhhhh ... um. Okay?

I kept wanting to pick it up, but the last half was stupid, unbelievable, and over-the-top violent in a way that was also stupid and unbelievable.

OK, so almost everything from my previous review still stands, but I found I enjoyed this much more in print than in the audio, so I'm bumping it up a star. I could appreciate Henry much more this time around, and since he was the only one who remembered Addie, I can't fault her for wanting the connection. (Especially because he was essentially a good guy. If he had been a garbage human, I would have judged much more harshly.)

I still don't think the revised deal was as good as Addie seemed to think it was, for all the previously mentioned reasons.

—–

Original Review, 3/25/21
So I forget, what color are Luc's eyes again? ... snickers

Every time Schwab called him the Darkness, I got this song from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend stuck in my head. (“He's handsome for a metaphor!”)

The audiobook was great, and kept me engaged, and I did enjoy this for the most part. The stakes ramped up a lot in the last quarter, but I don't know that I really liked the ending. Addie feels so superior when she's like haha, I WILL have the last word in this and Luc will REGRET ever making a deal with me! Except ... nothing has changed, except the wording of the deal? Why would he get tired of her if he's already put up with her for 300+ years? Also, I ... didn't think Henry was worth it, even if Addie had Reasons. (OK, just one reason. Still.)

But I guess I gotta give it credit for not falling too far into the trap of “this person lived for a super long time so obviously they must encounter every famous person that ever lived in every location” AHEM How to Stop Time - as far as I can recollect, Addie only witnesses Beethoven and Sinatra from a distance, and is more interested in being immortalized in pieces of art than rubbing elbows with famous artists.

An absolute joy to read the stories of these women and the dishes they love to make. They talk about these recipes as representing their countries well while also being easy to prepare, which is exactly the kind of cooking I have the capacity for right now. I got my copy from the library, but when we get to our new place, I'm going to buy a copy.

Listened to the audio for church book club - barely over an hour and 15 minutes, and entirely epistolary. Main takeaway was that it's pointless to feel guilt for the time NOT spent with God, or guilt for being distracted during prayer, but rather that any time you can spend will be a delight to God, who is always near. Looking forward to hearing what book club thinks.

I mean, you know they're gonna fall in love because she's like no you can't fall in love with meee but okay #fakerelationship. Also Zafir is just the best. Everything about him is the best.

But you can't tell me a 28-year-old Ph.D. student and a 31-year-old former pro-athlete don't know how Twitter works. #lies