Rachel Baack

Summary: After receiving a troubling letter from her recently married cousin Catalina, Noemí Taboada travels to Catalina’s new home in the mountains of the Mexican countryside to offer her help and try to discover the source of Catalina’s distress. Upon her arrival, Noemí is introduced to her new in-laws, a once-wealthy English family who Noemí finds to be extremely rigid. Not only does Noemí chafe under the limiting rules and regressive beliefs of Doyle family, but she also begins to experience disturbing dreams and sense that there is something sinister about the house itself.

Summary: This second prequel to The Hunger Games series follows Haymitch as he faces his own reaping and experience training for and participating in the 50th Hunger Games. As the result of his attempts to protect his girlfriend, Lenore Dove, Haymitch is illegitimately chosen as the second male tribute from District 12 who will participate in the second Quarter Quell, a Hunger Games that doubles the number of tributes required to participate. After being taken from his family and forced to endure anguish of all kinds in the days leading up to the Games, Haymitch determines to make a stand against the Capitol and the institution of the Hunger Games.

The authors of this book argue for the establishment of social norms and structures under which everyone engages in part-time work and part-time care. They argue that this organization of work and care is vital to creating a society in which care and caregivers are valued and humans are able to thrive. The book is well researched, providing explanations of studies and real-world examples that support the authors’ claims. The authors’ arguments provide excellent food for both independent thought and interpersonal conversation.

Tolkien, writing in an alliterative verse style modeled after the source material, synthesizes several sources on Old Norse mythological tales to construct two poems that tell the tale of a line of Norse heroic figures. Published after Tolkien’s death, the text contains extensive notes from Christopher Tolkien providing context and explanations where they are necessary and/or helpful.

Summary: Al Gore lays out the realities surrounding the climate crisis as of 2017, interspersing this information with stories of climate activists, and ending with practical advice for how ordinary people can get involved in fighting for a healthier planet. Throughout the book, the author makes a point to emphasize the necessity of hope.

This book is at once highly accessible, uncomfortable, and necessary.

Summary: Pasha is a Ukrainian language teacher who has seen (but attempted to distance himself from the reality of) the impacts of the war going on in his homeland. Now, as battle lines shift, Pasha must travel into the heart of the fighting to retrieve his thirteen-year-old nephew, Sasha, from the orphanage in a now-occupied city.

This novel takes place over the course of just three days as Pasha and the other civilians with whom he finds himself traveling face dangers of every kind on their journeys, and it provides excellent insight into the impacts of war—at turns heartbreakingly predictable and utterly shocking—on a country’s civilian population.

Summary: This reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is told through the perspective of Jim, Huck’s travelling companion who escaped slavery. Jim’s narration gives voice to his depth of character and feeling, his intelligence, his anger and compassion, and his enduring spirit.

The book is not a one-to-one parallel to Huck Finn and does not claim to be; it is set a little later in time and adds and changes some scenes, but I think those differences strengthen the story. The chapters are also very short, which is helpful because this is a book that invites frequent pausing to process and reflect.

Summary: As a teenager, the narrator of this tale falls in love with a girl who tells him about a city with high walls where people live without shadows alongside unicorns. Then, she disappears. For years, the narrator wonders what happened to her and longs to see her again, that is until he finds his way to the strange city the girl told him about. This work, which many might classify as magical realism but the author would not, chronicles the life of this narrator from adolescence through adulthood as he several times, often inexplicably, crosses the boundary between the world readers will recognize as their own and the city with his high walls.

In this collection of poems, Brandon Som shares the stories of his parents and grandparents—one side descended from Chinese immigrants and the other from Mexican immigrants—and explores what it means for an individual to hold multiple identities, for a family to relate to one another, and for a people to experience injustice and hardship at the hands of racism.

This is a very intellectually challenging collection to read; you’ll definitely want to have Google translate handy. My favorite poems in the collection were “Teléfono Roto,” “Twin Plant,” “My Father’s Perm,” and “Super Mercado Lee Hou.”

Summary: When author Amanda Bailey starts research for a book about a cult that ended in a mass suicide event eighteen years earlier, she begins to notice holes in the story that the public has been told about the case. According to the press at the time, a group of four men claiming to be angels roped two teenagers into their cult and then convinced them that their baby was the Anti-Christ who must be killed to save the world. The teenage mother of the baby reportedly broke free from the cult’s control and saved her infant, which caused the adult members to despair so deeply that they engaged in a mass suicide, with only one man surviving (and subsequently landing in prison for his involvement in the cult and his conviction for a separate murder). This official story, however, begins to unravel as Amanda dives into her research, and she finds that her digging may just put her in more danger than she bargained for.

I thought that the book was quite compelling, but I was disappointed with the ending.

I have read ch. III of On Liberty and a short excerpt from On the Subjection of Women. What follows is my review of each:

• “Of Individuality” (from On Liberty): This chapter by John Stewart Mill argues in favor of personal liberty and freedom to express one’s individuality. Mill gives several reasons that freedom and individuality should be allowed to flourish. Rating: 3/5
• "On the Equality of the Sexes": John Stuart Mill explains the negative effects that male-domination have had on the expression of female thought and character. Rating: 3.5/5

Summary: In this collection of short essays, SG Huerta processes and shares their experiences of racism, queerphobia, abuse, mental illness, and trauma.

Their writing is honest, demonstrating both vulnerability and strength in the face of great difficulty. My favorite pieces from this collection were “I Text My Partner i love being beholden to the delicate feelings of white ppl! At Least Once A Week” and “Post Traumatic Interlude featuring La Llorona.”

Summary: Walter Pater claims that classicism and romanticism are not as opposed to each other as people might say. He goes on to define romanticism as a mixture of curiosity and beauty that makes use of strangeness and the grotesque and is present in all ages.

From this opera, I have read "Bunthorne's Song: The Aesthete." What follows is a review of that song:

This poem pokes fun at “men of culture” who speak and act in ways that are so ridiculous that they’re mistaken for being marks of culture. Rating: 4.5/5

Summary: When a man turns up dead in her tea shop one morning, Vera Wong decides that she—being much more fastidious and insightful than the police—will investigate the case. Very quickly, she identifies four suspects and begins trying to uncover any secrets they might be hiding. The problem, however, is that Vera starts to really like this group of suspects-turned-friends.

I really enjoyed this book, but I found the solution to the mystery to be somewhat unsatisfying.

Summary: After Justyce McAllister is—to his shock—handcuffed and treated unjustly by a police officer when he is trying to help a friend, he begins writing letters to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to try to process what is happening to and around him. As the year goes on, Justyce continues to write these letters, detailing his experiences navigating being a Black student in a predominantly white prep school and confronting the realities of racism and police brutality on both a personal and national scale.

Summary: Caitlin Doughty has worked close to death in various capacities for years, and, in this memoir, the relates her experiences and reflections upon working with the dead and the living who tend to them. She shares a behind-the-scenes look at the current practices of death work in America and offers her thoughts on the ways that those practices—mostly focused on distancing the average person from the realities of death—are socially and emotionally damaging. She leaves readers with some ideas about how we might engage with death in healthier ways as a society.

Summary: In the 1930s, wealthy businessman Albert Ellingham opened Ellingham Academy, a school for gifted students where learning was seen as a game and students were given a high degree of autonomy with regards to their education. Shortly after the school opened, Albert Ellingham’s wife and daughter were kidnapped. His wife was killed, his daughter never found, and the case never solved.

Now, decades later, Stevie Bell has been admitted to Ellingham Academy upon the basis of her interest in and thorough research into the case. She is determined to figure out what really happened all those years ago, and she continues digging into the case as soon as she arrives on Ellingham grounds, all while adjusting to her new school and forming bonds with her housemates. Then, to everyone’s shock, a death occurs on campus, and Stevie can’t help but wonder if it is somehow connected to the Ellingham case.

Summary: Mortician Caitlin Doughty relays her first-hand learning about the customs and beliefs surrounding death in various places and cultures around the world, and she explores the ways in which the American death industry might adapt its practices in order to allow mourners to more meaningfully grieve and process the deaths of their loved ones.

Summary: Despite having (kind of) solved the mystery surrounding the death of her classmate, Stevie Bell has been pulled out of Ellingham Academy by her parents, greatly hindering her ability to continue her research into the decades-old Ellingham kidnapping cold case. It is not until Edward King, the deeply unpleasant politician for whom Stevie’s parents work, steps in that the Bells allow Stevie to return to Ellingham. His seeming kindness, however, comes with strings attached, and Stevie must balance meeting his expectations while continuing her investigation into the Ellingham case as well as the continued mysterious happenings on Ellingham’s campus.

Summary: Stevie Bell thinks she has finally solved the decades-old mystery surrounding the kidnapping of the wife and daughter of her school’s founder, Albert Ellingham. The problem, however, is that danger continues to lurk on the Ellingham campus. Since Stevie has arrived at Ellingham, death and danger have seemed to stalk the campus and those connected to it. Stevie suspects that it’s all somehow tied to the Ellingham case, and she is determined to figure out how.

Summary: Lexicographer Kory Stamper engagingly reveals to readers the history and current process of creating dictionaries, explaining along the way the ways in which language evolves and is perceived, described, and argued over.

Summary: Victoria, the daughter of wealthy parents in 1909 London, has gotten herself into some hot water after posing nude for an art class. Vicky wants nothing more than to be an artist, but, following the scandal, her parents have determined to marry her off and see to it that she lives as a respectable woman of society. Not to be deterred, however, Vicky determines to secretly apply to art college, and, as she attempts to build her portfolio, she finds herself becoming entangled with London’s suffrage movement and a working-class boy.

Summary: When a stranger misunderstands an overheard conversation between murder mystery writer Finlay Donovan and her agent, she attempts to hire Finlay, who she mistakes for a hitwoman, to kill her husband. Finlay is of course shocked, but she can’t help being curious, and she soon finds herself more deeply involved in the world of true crime than she ever intended to be.

Summary: When a man turns up dead in an otherwise quiet retirement village, the Thursday Murder Club, formed by four members of a retirement village to do conduct armchair investigations into cold cases, decides to do some real-life sleuthing.