Lisa

I didn't love all the poems in this collection, but there were a few real gems. America and Argentina are terrific, and I see them reprinted fairly often. I loved this one, there were two great poems about November in this collection.

Catechism for November

In the movie theater one night, you whispered,
‘It is easier to watch than to live,'
and on the street outside, you thought,'
If this was a book, I would skip this part.'

Remember when you opened the fortune cookie in March?
It said, ‘Ideology is bad for you.'
Remember when you called Anabelle
‘an encyclopedia of self-perpetuating pain?'

On Tuesday you said, ‘I'm a small wooden boat,
adrift in the space between storms,'
and on Wednesday you said, ‘I should go to the park more often.'

Then you killed the spider with the heel of your shoe,
and said, ‘I can't take care of all sentient beings!'

But when the girl with pink hair brought her sniffles to class,
you found a Kleenex in your purse for her.

This is how it happens: one at a time,
the minutes come out of the box where they were hidden:
the witty ones with yellow feathers;
the thick gray ones with no horizon.

But once you swore, ‘I want to see it all, unsentimentally.'
Once you wrote in your green notebook,
‘Let me start in the middle, again.'

This is a pretty good short novel about a doomed relationship between a British doctor and a German dancer.

For a collection of primary sources, this was extremely engaging. This collection of songs, testimony, and elegies recollect the fall of Mexico at the hands of Cortes. It's pretty upsetting to read but León-Portilla weaves a thread of hope into the end as he reflects on the resilience of the Nahuatl, that they lived to tell their tale.

This is a really thought provoking, complex short book about the nature of war. How war affects civilians and how violence is internalized over a lifetime. The book begins in Holland at the very end of World War II. There are a lot of mediocre books written about WW2, I did not find this to be one of them.

It's extremely well written, the plot seems simple but has more turns than one would expect.

I'd recommend it if you enjoy fiction with a philosophical bent.

The tone and structure of this reminded me a lot of The Hate U Give. I'd recommend this highly if you were invested in that story. the book is inspired by a real, horrific event that has been repurposed to talk about the Islamophobia that is upsettingly still so prevalent in the US.

Listened to the audio for this. The narration was wonderful. The story itself is very dark, but I was pretty invested. Not my typical kind of book but I thought the characterization of the two main characters was very well done.

I think this is a good reach for people who are interested but intimidated by the original document that is the 9/11 commission report. That being said, it's intensely wordy and the Americans featured in the book are not labeled very well. At the date of publication this may not have been much of an issue but reading through the graphic novel today I found myself wondering who a lot of them were.

The graphic novel format functions the best establishing the timeline of the attacks and the background that lead to them.

The recommendations section was a miss for me. It also had a slightly jingoistic feel even though like the original report it lays bare how many gaps the US had in its approach to foreign terrorism.

The first portion of this book is very reminiscent of The Microbe Hunters if you have by chance read that. Past that, this is a very engaging look at medical and pharmacological breakthroughs that have happened accidentally. I enjoyed it!

Very good horror comic. Gruesome, like the backstory that's being filled in. Will definitely continue reading. I think this has been optioned for TV!

This reads like the author just discovered how metaphors work. It was tedious. On a perfunctory level, I did appreciate the growth of the main character.

I must be reading something different. Entirely too long, wants for editing. It was tedious as hell and I was seemingly never in the right frame of mind to read it even after sitting down expressly to read. So disappointing because I wanted to love it. I'll try her short fiction at some point.

An excellent book that functions both as an autobiography of the author and her accounting of some of more harrowing assignments she's had covering extremism post 9-11.

Even more than that, Mekhennet contextualizes the motivations behind the sects/movements of the extremists and jihadists she interviews. She's got the right bona fides for this because she has both Sunni and Shia parents, something she touches on repeatedly.

I'd recommend this if you're interested in the politics of the Middle East or journalism in general.

What a great read. I didn't realize how allegorical this was until I was about half-way through.

Couldn't put it down.

This was a fascinating look at the female descendants of Genghis Khan and how they shaped Mongolia and the larger world. It's fairly readable but there are of course a million complicated names and places. I didn't know anything about Mongolia and I enjoyed learning. Apparently the author has another book about Genghis Khan which I should probably have read first!

I'd recommend it if you're interested in far eastern history or medieval history of a different bent.

This is such a goofy (is that the right word) travelogue about an early 1980s foray into the heart of Borneo.

Borneo is serious business: snakes, leeches, more insects than I'd ever care to see. And yet the writing style of this book treats the journey as a somewhat irreverent romp. I wish there were more pictures. However, it was apparently hell to photograph due to all the humidity.

I'd recommend it if you like Bill Bryson type books.

I'm sure this is problematic in some ways I can't really grasp but I enjoyed it. It's a dated look at some Navajo origin tales interwoven into a coming of age story about a young boy destined to be a medicine man.

This is a really great documentary style read about a fictional late 70s rock band. It felt very Fleetwood Mac / Little Feat + Linda Ronstadt. I'm sure I'm far from the first person to make those comparisons. The world the author builds is very convincing. I had some minor quibbles with some of the characterizations, but overall, it was really engrossing, couldn't put it down. Hope the show does it justice. 4.5

This book functions as an overview of cults and let's say cult adjacent communities and how they use language to entice and then insulate followers.

Its worth three stars alone for introducing me to the concept of “thought terminating cliches” which the author did not first identify but the naming of them is new to me nonetheless. One of the things that's fascinated me about talking to people who don't share the same belief system is you is how quickly they'll throw one of these bombs out to destroy a conversation. “Well everything happens for a reason.” “No one wants to work anymore.” “Someone has it worse than you.” It kills discourse and silences the person who asks why.

But this concept has of course existed and was posited by other scholars earlier and the book is actually kind of a mess.

I'd read it if you've never read anything about a cult before. But I have because I have a small obsession, lol.

This was a very interesting look a massaging data in medical and nutritional studies. In addition to that, shoddy journalism reporting on those studies is covered. I enjoyed it but it was dense at times.

It's difficult to judge classics because so many other books have been based on their concepts. So this seemed pretty perfunctory but I can appreciate just ingenious it must have been in the late 19th century.

This was good, but very redundant. It's also not the newest book so if you've read any non-fiction book that touches on criminology or behavioral profiling I would think you've already heard every salient point this book makes. I'm sure it was novel in its time though.

This book is an emotional roller coaster. Horrifically, it's inspired by a real court case.

10/10

Beautifully written book about street basketball in Brooklyn during the 1970s.

Very accessible biography of the political life of James Madison. I felt like I got a good sense of Madison's contributions to the Federalist papers (interesting to see the contrast with Chernow's Hamilton), his feelings on the Jefferson embargo, and of course, how the war of 1812 was handled.

This is one of the best books about sports I've ever read. Of course, it's about far more than sports. The justifications we make for them. The toxicity of fans. It's a dark book in many ways. But it's very worth reading.