Julia

I didn't love this *quite* as much as Erdich's The Night Watchman until near the very the end, when I gasped. The quote from a New York Times review on the front cover of my copy talks about family, but I actually think this book is equally about ride-or-die friendship. I'm also not sure if Erdich gets enough credit for how funny she is, even amidst the darkest topics. The plot starts with a violent sex crime committed against an Indigenous woman in an uncertain jurisdictional location (a nightmarish blend of attempted physical and bureaucratic genocide). Erdich also infused the story with the comedic banter of deeply loyal teenage boys, two elders recalling past sexual adventures, and an athletic Catholic priest who levels cutting insults at the "wayward youth" without cursing at all. A deft balance of heavy and light.

I've loved Havrilesky's advice column, Ask Polly, for a long time, and was further intrigued about Foreverland when it kicked up a shitstorm of misogyny on the internet (https://www.romper.com/entertainment/heather-havrilesky-foreverland-the-view). It's a great example of how people can take an excerpt and basically willfully misinterpret the entire, much larger and more nuance work based on the excerpt to suit their own devices. ANYWAY, Foreverland is extremely funny, self-reflective, brave, and ultimately very romantic.

This was my 3rd pick from Book of the Month. As an aside, if I wasn't in another book club and a frequent buyer from my local bookstore, I'd totally stick with BoTM beyond my gift subscription. Good variety, very easy to use. Plus great covers! ANYWAY, I enjoyed Hart's debut effort. I think it could leaned into the witchery/magic realism more, honestly, there were elements across the three Weyward women's stories that felt too repetitious as opposed to harmonious echoes, and there was a missed opportunity for a more fleshed-out queer love story. But, it was nicely paced, with moments of real suspense, and is a beautiful ode to the natural world.

My bestie recommended this back to me when it came out, and I have no idea why I didn't just read it immediately! She and I are literary "twin flames" (thanks, Megan Fox, for the parlance), so she was 100% accurate in her educated guess I would love this. 10/10; no notes. Read the last third really slowly because I didn't want it to end!! Epic, intimate, searing.

I don't think this quote from the final pages can be captured in its full glory out of context, but it was rattling around in my head for days afterward and came up in another book club when someone was talking about the tightrope between nihilistic despair and hope: "A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations.... How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom?.... Circe, he says, it will be alright.... He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive."

I'm so glad this exists. Dover lived a long and extraordinary life, from surviving the Tulalip Indian School to participating in the long legal battle to restore salmon fishing rights to the coast Salish tribes. Her attention is sweeping and unsparing: we hear about everything from the "drifting, deep fog or mist" that partially obscures prehistory from modern awareness to the boarding school uniforms made of blue wool serge, "the heaviest, scratchiest material that was ever invented on the earth." The book feels less like a book than the series of conversations that it was, and anyone interested in the history and ongoing issues in the Pacific Northwest would benefit from hearing Dover's story.

Just finished this today and am still processing it, but there was so much to love. March is the anniversary of my dad's birth and death, so this was really thematically resonant with me, and George is so incisive about grief, how family can support and abandon, workplace inanity, microaggressions, the perils of googling, friendship, and bad sex. Not all parts were successful: the texts between the protagonist and her mother were very funny and also painful, whereas the perils of googling could have been more succinctly pointed to in just one example of a google search, not many. George's beautiful acknowledgments at the end make explicitly clear what I felt the whole way through: this novel is a love letter to family, chosen and otherwise.

This is now my 3rd Laurens, and now I'm sure I wouldn't buy them as opposed to picking them up as lending library fines. I do think she has skill at weaving romance and intrigue plots together, but this one ran long (over 450 pages), had some very very nicely paced sections with some much slower ones, a bit too much "I will badger you into marrying me" energy (I appreciated a slightly too late point from the hero's female friend about sacrifices he was also making), and sometimes the euphemistic language is just too much: "They gave themselves up and it took them. Lifted them high, filled them with glory, fractured and claimed them, then, like warmed husks tossed on the wind, left them to drift slowly back to earth, to the soft sheets of her bed, to the warmth of each other's arms." I just...it's not my jam.

This was meditative and lovely, punctuated by moments when McDermott really captures the cruel shocks of life and our various bumbling responses to them. Like this (and, despite this quote, the novel wasn't depressing!): "The air was a wall. The heat was a reminder of what I had glimpsed when my father was dying, but had, without plan or even intention, managed to forget: that the ordinary days were a veil, a swath of thin cloth that distorted the eye. Brushed aside, in moments such as these, all that was brittle and terrible and unchanging was made clear. My father would not return to earth, my eyes would not heal, I would never step out of my skin or marry Walter Hartnett in the pretty church. And since this was true for me, it was true, in its own way, for everyone. My brother and I greeted the people we knew walking by, neighborhood women, shopkeepers in doorways trying to catch a breeze. Each one of them, it seemed to me now that the veil was briefly parted, hollow-eyed with disappointment or failure or some solitary grief."

I take back what I said about an earlier Laurens novel! Actually, I don't, but I am chastened to recognize that if you've written a million books, they can't all be great - but this one was! Funny/moving battle of wits/will between the romantic duo, lots of sexy sexy sex scenes, and a murder mystery subplot that was well-integrated and extra fun. I briefly worried there was going to be a "the Roma gardener did it" plot thunk, but (small spoiler), the Roma gardener was entirely blameless, and Laurens pointed out that bigotry is the only reason he was suspect in the first place. I'm actually reading a 3rd Laurens novel now to keep letting data shape my opinion :)

Great, great, great! Nearly perfect. I'm a psychologist, and I think I might actually like this even better for the general public than The Body Keeps the Score. Perry & Winfrey's conversational format could have been hokey, but instead it feels fluid and engaging, and there's a fantastic mix of anecdotes (both clinical from Perry's work and Winfrey's interviews, and personal from Winfrey's life), neuroscience, and application. I might change this to a full 5 stars, but for now, I found myself wanting a bit more practical/policy stuff at the end. Still, would recommend this without reservations for anyone who wants to understand trauma, and already have, both to several therapy clients and to multiple colleagues practicing in spaces where trauma-informedness is central.

This was a lending library find, but clearly I'm a Kleypas fan, so I was happy! I think I like her historical romances better - just a little more transporting? Although the San Juan Island setting of this one is charming. My main quibble is that I could have done without the magic; regular romance is just fine. Might still pick up the rest of the series? As is usual for her, good female friendships, this time complicated by sisterly angst.

Might be my favorite of the 5 in the Hathaways series?? In part because by now the rest of the Hathaways are beloved family members, even when we only get glimpses of them. Good spice, though, Beatrix is a female Dr. Doolittle if ever there was one, and who doesn't love a romance that starts with some good, old-fashioned love letters? I will also begrudgingly admit that I now know more about the original Crimean war (your typical geopolitical battle of egos/tragedy/travesty, when will we ever learn) than I ever suspected I would.

I don't think I've read anything by Banerjee Divakurani since pre-goodreads day (2006?), but this was a pleasurable, although heart-rending, return. My bestie got me 3 months of Book of the Month for Christmas, and this was my January pick. Calling this historical fiction feels like typecasting it a bit. The title is a reference to both India's independence and that of the three sisters the plot follows, but I think the most powerful themes are really about interdependence within families: how to find ways back to relationships after deep betrayals, grieve losses, and move forward with love and integrity. This was a 3-star for me until about the middle, when everything just clicked in to place and I was enthralled for the later portion.

This was sweet. Definitely romance, with only the most brief/euphemistic moments of eroticism, but I appreciated that Major is transparent about believing that happy endings are worth both writing and reading, and the central couple has a nice rapport. This is also a romance novel that handily passes the Bechdel test as the protagonist builds a successful business with female partnerships/friendships in addition to the romance. I don't know if the overall vibe is as sexy as I like my romance to be, although I could see myself returning to the author if I knew I wanted an uplifting ending I can read my way to peaceably in a few hours.

I'd already recommended this book to quite a few colleagues even before finishing it. Blume's articulation of an Indigenous American Psychological Paradigm is incisive and visionary. There is so much to process over time in his work: from the assumptions of colonialism that have created the “relational psychopathology” that much of modern psychology misconceptualizes (at times willfully!) as individual issues, to how psychologists might move from dispassion to compassion in using the wisdom of behavioral science to further the well-being of all, not just humans. I could go on, but really just read the book. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the work of decolonizing psychology, and I would argue also a must-read for anyone interested in the longevity of psychology as a field at all (which, as Blume makes clear, is only really a worthy goal if psychology can be more expansive in what we mean by well-being and to whose well-being we attend).

Read this for a book club with a colleague who does mental health consulting work in Hawai'i, and is feeling increasingly conflicted about her presence there - what exactly can a colonial modality of healing practiced in an illegally occupied place do for greater wellness? Anyway, I'm very grateful to have read this. I read slowly, because Osorio approaches the sticky (to put it mildly) issue of translation with “rigorous paraphrase” (I really appreciated her explication of this approach), but I enjoyed the frequent stops to look up Hawaiian words she leaves untranslated to see both how I could understand them in part through Osorio's context, and also feel hints of the ways that I might not be grasping the meaning and resonance they have when they are fully embedded in the language and worldview of their creation. My 4-star rating is related to my fit as a reader of this work, not its quality or power: Osorio notes that readers unfamiliar with more than the basics of Hawaiian history and culture may be best served getting more introductory context elsewhere, which I'm sure is true, and it is a little challenging to read books that include chapters that were dissertations, because dissertations are challenging to read! But back to the book: it's hard to summarize what Osorio has accomplished, except to say that I experienced it as an ‘upena of poetry, legend, Indigenous activism, and queer theory that speaks movingly to Native Hawaiians' love of and reciprocal obligation to the land and each other, and what understanding intimacy in this context might mean for Hawai'i's future and decolonial movements in other areas of the world, as well.

Side note: Osorio is, as a poet, also a very powerful speaker, and there are several great All My Relations episodes in which she and other nonviolent activists share their resistance work related to safeguarding Mauna Kea that I highly recommend.

This was beautiful and tragicomic and reminded me that reading graphic novels (in this case, a novella) is meditative in a way reading regular novels is not. Finished this in one short sitting, and then immediately re-read it. There is so much conveyed in the space between words.

This is not really a book one likes, per se, so the 3 stars reflect that I learned a lot while reading it, and am grateful for that. It came recommended by the curator of the Quinault Cultural Center and Museum because it is a (the only?) comprehensive Quinault ethnography, and much of the book is direct quotes from the Quinault members interviewed for the project. In that sense, the book is invaluable. The stuff I could do without is Olson's 1936 worldview, frankly. It shows up in everything from remarks on Quinault work ethic because there were times that, once subsistence needs for the year were met and surpassed, people didn't always continue to work (Hah! Imagine that!), and some comments that didn't even hold water within the text itself: like saying that Quinault language didn't have words for a calendar, when in fact it had two sets that Olson then describes, one based on a year starting in the fall and going roughly by the lunar cycle, and another that was anchored by seasonal changes. So, no, there wasn't a 12-month calendar, but there were two others I imagine worked quite well! None of that is surprising, and I know there is utility in seeing such a clear example of bias that is often implicit but still insidious. I am grateful to the Quinault members who shared their lives and experiences in this format, and am sure I will return to their words as a reference.

I was suitably entertained, although I preferred Quick's “Close Up” in this same series for being more explicitly feminist. My quibbles are that the syndicated crime plot was more complicated than entertaining, and the “hero with special powers” bit would be better if it either didn't exist at all, or Quick (really Jayne Ann Krentz) more fully committed to the magical realism. Still, I like her smart heroines and egalitarian action.

Okay, my spate of 2-star romance novel reviews tells me I actually need to step away from the genre! Or buy some as opposed to relying on the lending libraries, hah. I inexplicably read this despite already having started “A Memory Called Empire,” which is fantastic at just 65 pages in, so I need to do some good hard reflection on my life and my choices regarding fiction. In all seriousness, I do think my leaning toward romance, even when mediocre, reflects the amount of trauma-focused therapy I'm doing at work right now, but I can still be more intentional about my escapism!

Anyway, this was fine. Fine, fine, fine. There were a few funny choices, like how the protagonist is a widow, and therefore has more freedom than a never-married woman would, but also conveniently had a first husband with erectile dysfunction, so still has “virginal” vibes.... But there's some interesting inner monologuing about the choices available to her, and some nice connections between her and the young American women (i.e., heathens) for whom she is chaperoning. The hero is charming but vapid, and his growth arc from superficial party boy to serious adult is just that he doesn't let his brother's estate go to rack and ruin in his absence. I wasn't captivated, but I didn't dislike it, either. And now I'm going back to what Ann Leckie calls “an absolutely brilliant space opera,” which I suspect is 100% true.

Perhaps this is silly, but because someone who I really love and admire lent me her copy, I wanted to really love this book. And then...didn't. It was good, at times very good, but also at times not very interesting, or even all that insightful. The problem was this: while the author obviously gained a tremendous amount from her year+ in India, she was not always as compelling a communicator of her experience as, say, the author of “[b:Eat Pray Love 19501 Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1269870432s/19501.jpg 3352398].” Chalk it up to writing skills? I dunno. At any rate, this would be a good vacation read, and only furthered my feeling that I need to get my ass to the Indian subcontinent in my lifetime.

I just loved everything about this. Taylor's approach to this history (and present importance) of the Combahee River Collective through interviews with its founding members as well as Alicia Garza & Barbara Ransby was just such a powerful way to usher readers into the issues they raised and fought for that are just as critical now as they were then. I realized I really didn't have good context for understanding how closely Black and socialist feminism were aligned at the time, and how deeply other progressives (ahem White feminism ahem) failed in recognizing the full potential and necessity of coalition building. The interviews were a fantastic medium for getting a really powerful blend of theory, advocacy, and personal history, and there is so much wisdom in this little book. I would strongly recommend this for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of why Black feminism and intersectionality matter for us all.

Hmf. I feel mildly resentful I read this. The main characters are both likeable, and I like the friendship their romantic relationship is built upon, but MY GOD are the sex scenes euphemistic to the point of ridiculousness. During such passages, Laurens overutilizes techniques like alliteration or even rhyme with so much repetition that it adds a Seussian feel I highly doubt was what she was going for. Here's a quote another goodreads reviewer excerpted that captures the absurdity nicely:

“Reassuring, restating, revisiting, and reiterating, they dived in again, plunged in again, seized and surrendered and shared the scintillating delights once again.”

WUT. Stop the madness! Plus, it's also a murder mystery, except there's less suspense-building, and more “let's have as many characters as possible in the large Cynster family discuss the actual logistics of how they might catch the criminal,” which was boring. On the upside, one of the lending libraries I frequent is full of Laurens' other novels, and now I know to steer clear unless desperately bored.

Huh. I don't know that I have much to compare this book to...I don't usually read memoirs of a life spent having group sex combined with contemporary art criticism.

On the one hand, Millet failed to convince me that she has a healthy amount of self-esteem. On the other hand, who does, and who am I to judge? So, despite being skeeved out by some of the more graphic images (what a t-shirt that would make...this is your snatch after twenty guys who didn't use condoms...YUCK), she held my attention with some of her musings on masturbation, how childhood affects adult sexuality, and how our feelings of corporeality (is that a word?) relate to sex.

I'd only recommend it if you're feeling adventurous.

Fantastic! Tiefer is as formidable a feminist theorist as she is a psychologist, plus funny to boot. This is a fascinating book exploring how sexuality is socially constructed in contemporary American culture and how medicalization and the pharmaceutical industry are doggedly at work to erase the contexts that make sexuality as complicated and nuanced as it really is. This would be an easy and accessible read even if you have no background in sex research or feminist theory, but incredibly insightful nonetheless. Tiefer is who I want to be when I grow up, combined with Sue Johanson from “Talk Sex.” I wish I could make everyone read this book.