Danielle

I think Erik Larson is a fantastic non-fiction author; the way he folds quotes from primary sources (in this case, mostly diaries and recorded speeches) and dramatically structures scenes makes it read like fiction. Churchill has been biographied/written about ad nauseam, but this is an interesting take that focused just as much on the cast of characters surrounding Churchill as the man himself; it is at once a family drama and a war drama. The book begins as Churchill is announced PM, and goes all the way through the US enters the war. I personally have not read many Britain-centric WWII content, so it was interesting hearing about civilian life during the bombings, the new war technologies and tactics (though I found that bit less interesting than the more humanistic angles), the long persuasion of the US to join the war, and a bit about certain characters from the German side (pilots, high-ranking officials). However, it is a long book, and did start losing my interest by the middle/end.

Informative! Good tips for quickly establishing yourself as pack leader. Because of this book, I can confidently say my dog is way better on a leash! Also, Cesar's story as a Mexican immigrant coming to the US speaking no English, with no money, then working his way up to being the most famous dog trainer in the world, just through word of mouth – pretty incredible!

Solid YA. This was heavy, but good. I appreciate seeing more representation in YA lit.

This is a quick read that will pump you full of military-based fun facts (and some rather disturbing ones). I found the chapter on smells/stink bombs most hilarious/fascinating, but there are other cool sections on innovations in fabrics, shark-repellents, submarine duty, preparation for medical care in a war zone, etc. I liked the writer's style more than the subject matter (I've never been too interested in anything relating to war...) so I'll probably check out some of her other books.

I'm really glad I read this in preparation of Carina's arrival (aside: COULD NOT BE MORE EXCITED): it's been so long since I've had a dog and I want to be sure I'm the best dog mom I can be, and that we don't run into any behavioral issues. This book is a great overview explaining why dogs act the way we do (vs the anthropomorphic way we'd expect), and simple training tricks to meet them where they are. Definitely recommend this for current/future dog owners!

I wavered between two and three stars because while this is a much needed exposition of the green eggs and ham of voter suppression, it reads like a textbook. It's laden with the same kind of tight-rope tone of any politician's book. I learned some stuff, but it's a boring read. I also felt like the “what we can do” section was abysmally small — maybe a couple pages?

Anyways... get out and vote!!!

I love when I come across a book that thwarts my expectation of fiction. This book paints portraits of twelve Black women in verse as opposed to prose, often forgoing punctuation and capitals such that there's an openness and fluidity to the narrative that is special to read. I also love how human the characters are, experiencing everyday struggles and major crises and despair – but each tale manages to end optimistically. Not in a happily-ever-after way, but in a it-will-be-okay kind of way. I don't know how to explain it other than both it's challenging and comforting and a different kind of experience to read.

These poems contain a lot: violence, softness, darkness, and light rinse through the pages in an emotional dirge. They deal with trauma experienced and inherited, a burning of homeland and a loss of place, a struggle with identity, loss, physicality, and love. There were some beautiful lines that I will keep with me, e.g.: “Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven – waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just long enough to slip through”; “How sweet. That rain. How something that lives to fall can be nothing but sweet.” But, there weren't any full poems that really knocked me out, just moments.

This is one of the better essay collections I've read in a long while; it's a blade of sharp feminist commentary with edges of laugh-out-loud humor that just gauges misogyny. West is unapologetic and completely vulnerable yet so so funny in a way that, combined together, is true tour de force. She touches on fat acceptance as a feminist issue, the male dominance of the comedy world, and facing a daily deluge of the most boorish variety of internet trolls. Her writing is similar to what I aspire mine to be, and #motherfuckinggirlpower, so this was such an empowering read for me. I can see why this inspired so many podcast segments and a Hulu series (which, by the way, is also the bomb).

This a quick YA read, situated in the fictitious neighborhood of Garden Heights, a generic “ghetto” neighborhood in an American city. The narrator, a teenage girl named Starr, is witness to a police shooting. The rest of the book explores her dealing with the subsequent grief while also grappling with her role as a young black woman straddling the worlds of a poor neighborhood, her family, her middle-to-upper-class school friends, and burgeoning activism. The narrative progresses nicely to allows the reader to understand the forces at play in poor, predominantly black neighborhoods, and empathize with those situations. However, I felt like some of the sections of lazy dialogue that hit the reader over the head with messages, versus letting that play out more subtly. But maybe that speaks more to my tolerance of YA as a genre than the book itself. I still think it's a good book for young readers to pick up, as it well illustrates an all-too-common American narrative.

This book was recommended to me by a mentor as a means of helping me with business forecasts for new products. In that sense, it was modestly helpful; it's a solid guide to bridging early markets to mainstream ones. However I erroneously purchased an old edition published in the early aughts, so the case studies were embarrassingly old. I did appreciate the author was kind of funny/more charismatic than most business writers but at the end of the day, it's still a business book and therefore pretty dry.

I've been a fan of Jen Lancaster's books since a friend introduced me to them in high school. Her books are like having a conversation with one of your best funny friends; witty, colloquial, filled with personal anecdote and plenty of jokes, and reflective. I love her writing style (few writers can make me laugh out loud, and she's one of them) and this book is no exception. It has more of a journalistic/informative/cultural commentary take than her others, which I think she navigated pretty successfully, though I wouldn't say I learned anything or got any new perspectives. An enjoyably light read.

This is a sprawling and large collection of poems that explores nature, divorce, travel, translation, poetry, sex, family, philosophy, and wow everything I guess? I like the varied structure and lengths of poems, and I quite enjoyed the prose poetry as it challenges what a poem is, really. The expansiveness of the collection and the raw honesty and visceral verse made me feel like I was actually experiencing the world through the poet's eyes... which admittedly got a little tiring, as the poet is an older white male, but interesting nonetheless. While there were very few poems that I loved in their entirety, there were so many clever and funny and beautiful lines that kept me smirking and sighing the whole way.

First, have to say that I actually won this as part of a Goodreads Giveaway, the likes of which I have been entering for YEARS. It was for the Kindle edition, which is admittedly a bit less satisfying (especially for books of poems) but still, I won something and that feels preeetttyyy special.

Now, onto the book itself – I liked it. I didn't love it, but I think that's because these poems aren't really “for” me in that they don't dial into my experience of culture and language. That being said, this is a powerful collection that demands attention to language: which, sure, all poetry does – but this plays out differently... like a search for a mother-tongue that examines white supremacy, Black culture, the power of names, love and loss along the way. Marshall demands attention and respect for AAVE, which has typically been seen as non-academic, even uneducated. His poems are at once a lament for a lack of ancestral land and cultural ties and a paean for the language and culture that grew despite that lack.

The attention to sound is this collection is beyond superb. I highlighted some sections that I read over and over again because the word play is just too good. If you do nothing else, just read this line and take in the delight of it yourself:

“we deciphering the phrases through our slurs we slurring like we ain't sure until we murmur a sure vow. whole time we blur the whole thing we make shambles of their standards we stand on them & fashion an abolition in diction.”

I mean CMON right??? So good.

Unfortunately, I think the way I read this one stymied my enjoyment of it... between returning to the city, apartment hunting, moving, travelling... it was a fractured reading experience that prevented me from being able to truly immerse myself. Gaiman is an entertaining and assuredly imaginative writer, so it's a fun read. Not sure what genre to put this in... fantasy/sci-fi with a bit of a mystery twist? The concept is interesting, at a high level: that the gods our ancestors brought over from various cultures are eventually subsumed by the new deities of TV, computers, etc. But I think the message was a bit heavy-handed at times. Curious to watch the TV show, as I could see how it would lend itself well to the screen (is there irony there?).

The thesis of this book is an important one: that radical self-love and acceptance of our own bodies is a critical part of accepting other bodies, and not subjecting others to the harmful body terrorism that is all too common in our white-supremacist, diet-culture dominated society. Body positivism is necessary for social justice, period.

Maybe it's because I'm over-saturated on anti-racist literature at the moment, but I didn't read much here I hadn't read before, and the reflective journaling prompts felt pretty repetitive. That being said, it was still a good experience to work through the book and actually write out the responses to the prompts, as it made me face some uncomfortable truths about myself; we'll each struggle with different parts of our anti racist journeys, and after journaling through this book I realized, for me, it's mostly white silence. I struggle to call people in/out, whether they are strangers or friends or coworkers. I somehow feel like that's not my place, or just wish to avoid conflict and discomfort. I struggle to find a balance between wanting to be supportive of, and elevate, black voices/artists, and to do what I can to publicly reflect on my white privilege, white supremacy in society etc while not wanting to be performative. And tbh I have not found a balance, but I'm striving towards it and am committing to challenging my racist dialogues, in and outside my head, every day.

An easy read, and modestly enjoyable, but mostly cliche and a bit problematic in ways that are not egregious enough for me to expound upon here. My mom said it was like reading Sheldon from Big Bang in a cutesy romance novel and that sums it up pretty perfectly.

Dang. This one socked me hard. I'm still reeling. Trying to sleep after reading this book, especially towards the end, is like trying to sleep with a rock lodged in your throat: heavy and full and sad, and demanding your attention to the heaviness, the fullness, the sadness. The language is wonderfully poetic, the story painfully tragic, and the crescendo of magical realism (if that's what you'd call it?) is downright powerful. It feels at once historical and contemporary in a way that's especially poignant at this moment. It reminds me of Toni Morrison, but not in way that feels derivative. A good book, through and through – but the kind I need to recover from.

I was drawn into this book, as I assume many will be, by the title; we live in a time that celebrates and rewards untenable levels of productivity (think: Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, that guy you know from college who works as a data scientist and is a published poet and travels the world taking photos for National Geographic in his “spare time”). To not spend every moment of the day working towards some sort of meaningful or profit-driven goal is to waste time, and to waste time is to be a failure, and to be a failure is to be a loser, and left behind. I may be exaggerating but what I'm saying is our work days have grown to far surpass the standard 40-hour work week AND we're expected to have all sorts of “productive” hobbies to boot.

Odell's book is a treatise on how the attention economy is damaging our environment, our sense of self and ability to connect with others, and ultimately our ability to be the best version of ourselves/the most genuinely productive we can be. But don't let that make you think this is some kind of self-help book, for it certainly is not. If anything, it's a bit of a meandering, academic, artful piece of writing that never quite crystallizes into a clear thesis (such that when trying to describe it to friends afterwards, I sound a bit confused, or perhaps just vapid). But to follow a clear structure, to sit neatly between defined lines of an argument, would almost be antithetical to the author's desire to inhabit spaces that are “blobby” and resist clear definition.

That being said, I think I would boil this down as follows:
A) the majority of us participating in the attention economy (i.e. social media, digital devices, mass media) feel the crushing expectations of productivity, the addictive natures of technology, the emotional detachment of the digital world, and the resulting negativity spiral B) to resist this economy as a means of healing what can start to feel like a sickness, our instinct is to retreat entirely – be that via deleting social media, silent retreats (cough Jared Leto), long hiking trips in remote mountains, or even dreams of leaving it altogether to live alone in a remote cabin in the woods or join a counter-culture commune but that C) retreating doesn't fix much, now does it? so D) to live most purposefully we must find ways to participate purposefully in the attention economy: engaging critically with content by contextualizing, slowing down the pace of information to avoid reacting purely based on emotions or immediate reactions, paying attention to the physical world around us – people, plant life, sounds, smells, art, architecture.... and being open to what we can learn from those people/things to continuously contextualize and recontextualize.

Even in writing I struggle to concisely capture her argument without dumbing it down. Regardless, this book has is well-written and full of interesting ties to philosophy, history, literature, flora and fauna, and – of particular interest to me – modern art/performance art. So if any of those things and a bit of a scholarly ramble tickles your fancy, I say pick it up and give it a read.

I'm going to be lazy by quoting the Goodreads description and agreeing with it: “Americanah meets Bridget Jones Diary” is a super apt description for this book. Queenie is at once so relatable in the mid-late 20s anxieties of work life, dating, and struggling with anxiety and not relatable (but certainly informative) in being a Black woman in London from a different ethnic/cultural background. It was a fun read and the actual text message bubbles and formatted email chains, which could have veered into tacky, worked well here. An enjoyable read overall.

Having just made the switch from the publishing industry to the tech industry last year, this one hit home (granted, I am in a very different kind of tech – but still). Weiner takes the jargon and conventions of the tech industry (which I'm afraid I have adopted in my day-to-day), and holds it up to the light to show how empty that language is – and how empty emotionally, and maybe ethically, startup culture can be. Reading more like a really long essay in the New Yorker, this has less of the usual intimacies of a memoir, which makes that subtitle feel like a misnomer. Truly, this is a journalistic expose of the machismo driving the explosive development of Silicon Valley, and how that un-tempered, white-male energy has created what one should conclude are some pretty hefty ethical and societal problems. It is poginant, well-written, and troubling. I'd certainly recommend it, especially for anyone in tech.

This book starts with an incident in which Emira, a young black woman, is accused of having stolen the white toddler she babysits, Briar, in a grocery-store confrontation. The tone is set immediately to examine inherent racial biases, but less so these explicit moments of racism, and more how even “good white people” exploit black women in subtle, but nefarious ways.

The story follows Emira, a young black woman who, as with many twenty-somethings, is in a bit of a crisis regarding what to do with her life. She falls into a babysitting gig because it pays well, and ends up falling in love with the toddler she cares for, Briar, ostensibly appreciating not only the uncomplicated nature of children, but also a certain flavor of neglect that Briar feels as her upper-class mother is too worried about exteriors to be the best mother she can be. It's not hard to extrapolate out that neglect to upper-class white women generally (cough, myself included, which lent to some uncomfortable moments of introspection): the book asks us to question: how many of our “good intentions” are ultimately self-serving?

At the same time, Emira is developing a relationship with a white man, who fetishizes black bodies and black culture, exclusively dating black women: favorably, this can be interpreted as coincidence, or narrow attraction; less favorably, as black women as commodities (admittedly, a harsh interpretation, and one I would not go quite so far as to take – but gets you thinking).

All in all, I think the book plays on this idea of white people centering themselves in any American narrative as protagonists, including those, like Emira's, that are explicitly not theirs.

I suppose for a prequel, this wasn't terrible. It was kind of interesting learning more about the war and the early days of the Hunger Games and what made President Snow what he is... but I have a hard time with books where the protagonist is hard to root for. I also thought the relationships were weakly established, so I wasn't drawn in by that, either. And it was about a third too long. But it was still enjoyable to be transported back to that world.

This book follows the lives of two twins born black, but exceptionally light-skinned; one twin lives her life as a black woman, marrying a black man and having a “blue-black” child; the other lives passing as a white woman, marrying into WASP-y aristocracy and having a white child. The book unfolds as a fascinating meditation on identity, the social construct of race in America, and the inescapable bonds of family and history. Bennett paints a clear picture of the catch-22 black women face in America: to live life unencumbered by racism – to be truly free – a black woman must conform to whiteness; but in “playing” white, she is shackled by denying her identity, her culture, and her history, such that she will never truly be free.

I enjoyed this book both for the concept and the way it was executed; it was hard to put down. The writing is clean and while not lyrical, I found myself struck by the imagery and simile. I love that the cast of characters includes a trans man; not enough trans people are given this kind of real estate in fiction. In that same vein, I love that this book celebrates different, non-traditional loves: the love between a black woman and white trans man; the love of a man and woman together long-term, but never truly cohabiting or marrying; the love between sisters and daughters and mothers; the love for friends and protectors; and the love we feel purely out of transference. All in all, this is a quality work of fiction in all senses – plot, character development, concept, writing – and I would definitely recommend it, with a heavy side dose of thought and reflection on traditional thinking of race & relationships in America.