lottpoet's 2022 reading

I'm back after a few years away from the 75 Books Challenge. I don't know that I've ever kept a thread going to the bitter end of the year. I usually fall off because I'm too darned perfectionistic! I'd like to take some of the pressure off myself going into 2022's thread by telling you all to expect less in depth reviews/comments on the individual books I read. I am telling you this, but I don't know if I can hold myself to it.

In my time away, I've fallen hard for romance. So now, I would say I mostly read fantasy & science fiction, romance, and literary fiction. I am a poet and lately I've written very little poetry, probably because I've been reading so little of it. I'd like to read more poetry. I've also started watching some anime (my favorites were Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Princess Tutu, and Vinland Saga); they give me such big feelings. I've tried a few manga but I haven't hit on what I like yet. So, I'm grabbing them somewhat at random from the library and trying a bunch out. So far, I've liked Ouran High School Host Club a lot and Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You. I'm also determined to read through all of The Divine Comedy. I have three translations I'm reading concurrently, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Clive James, and Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. I really liked Inferno (it was my fourth time reading it), got on less well with Purgatorio (can't get the touchstone to work), and am bored and confused by Paradiso. I really like the notes for each canto by the Hollanders. I think I'm halfway through Paradiso; I really want to be done with this project this year.

What else? I'm in a book club for the first time ever. I'm just so picky about what I read that I'm often resentful of the books picked. I was also concerned that the book talk wouldn't happen (more socializing than anything) or that it wouldn't be smart book talk. My book club isn't like that. We read books mainly by women and people of color, and we read a good variety of genres. Also, everyone is so smart and thoughtful about the books. Now, if I could figure out how to more consistently finish the books before book club meets, that would be lovely. I usually read a bit over 100 books a year. I've gotten really good at picking books that work for me so my favorites list for 2021 is out of control. I loved so many books.

Favorite reads 2021

1. His Quiet Agent by Ada Maria Soto
2. Agnes Moor's Wild Knight by Alyssa Cole
3. All Kinds of Tied Down by Mary Calmes
4. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
5. Be Mine by Savannah J. Frierson
6. A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
7. Delicious by Sherry Thomas
8. A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson
9. Every Body Yoga by Jessamyn Stanley
10. Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert
11. Mama Day by Gloria Naylor
12. The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin
13. The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans
14. Wild Sign by Patricia Briggs
15. The Wizard's Dilemma by Diane Duane
16. You Are Your Best Thing edited by Tarana Burke

2019's thread
2016's thread
2015's thread
2014's thread

Favorite reads 2020

1. All the Rage by Courtney Summers
2. Ask Me about My Uterus by Abby Norman
3. Dark Space by Lisa Henry
4. Gifting Me to His Best Friend by Katee Robert
5. Grave Importance by Vivian Shaw
6. The Hating Game by Sally Thorne
7. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander, Jean Hollander
8. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
9. The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel
10. Rites of Passage by Joy N. Hensley
11. Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather
12. So We Can Glow by Leesa Cross-Smith
13. Tell Me How You Really Feel by Aminah Mae Safi
14. The White City by Elizabeth Bear

Favorite reads 2019

1. Trade Me by Courtney Milan
2. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
3. The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
4. Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones
5. Gone Crazy in Alabama by Rita Williams-Garcia
6. Grumpy Fake Boyfriend by Jackie Lau
7. Hold Me by Courtney Milan
8. The Magpie Lord by K.J. Charles
9. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris
10. Sister Emily's Lightship and Other Stories by Jane Yolen
11. The Third Squad by V. Sanjay Kumar
12. A True Novel by Minae Mizumura
13. True Pretenses by Rose Lerner
14. Unmasked by the Marquess by Cat Sebastian

Books I've completed Jan.-June 2022 (favorites are bolded):

1. Voodoo Season by Jewell Parker Rhodes, audio, 1/4/2022
2. Monster, Volume 1: Herr Dr. Tenma by Naoki Urasawa, trans. Satch Watanabe, paper, 1/9/2022
3. The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor, paper, 1/12/2022
4. Grumpy Jake by Melissa Blue, ebook, 1/18/2022
5. What's Mine and Yours by Naima Coster, audio, mytbr, 1/30/2022
6. Wizard's Holiday by Diane Duane, audio, Mark Reads, 1/30/2022
7. A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, paper, re-read, 2/1/2022
8. Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz, paper, 2/2/2022
9. Playlist for the Apocalypse by Rita Dove, paper, 2/4/2022
10. The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison, audio, 2/4/2022
11. Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline, audio, book club, 2/7/2022
12. The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray, audio, 2/8/2022
13. Not So Pure and Simple by Lamar Giles, audio, 2/11/2022
14. Wanting a Witch by Lauren Connolly, ebook, 2/14/2022
15. Skin: An Erotic Monster Romance by Aveda Vice, ebook, 2/24/2022
16. My Broken Language by Quiara Alegria Hudes, audio, book club, 2/27/2022
17. The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson, audio, book club, 2/27/2022
18. The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri, audio, book club, 2/28/2022
19. Human Enough by E.S. Yu, ebook, 3/2/2022
20. Fairy Tail 1 by Hiro Mashima, trans. William Flanagan, paper, 3/7/2022
21. My Life in Transition by Julia Kaye, paper, 3/21/2022
22. Wizards at War by Diane Duane, audio, Mark Reads, 3/27/2022
23. Body of Render by Felicia Zamora, paper, mytbr, 4/3/2022
24. March, Book One by John Lewis, paper, 4/12/2022
25. Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith, audio & paper, book club 4/14/2022
26. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, audio & paper, 4/18/2022
27. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, trans. Clive James, audio & paper, 4/18/2022
28. Paradiso by Dante Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander, Jean Hollander, paper, 4/18/2022
29. Euphoria by Lily King, audio, 4/20/2022
30. Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness, audio, re-read, 4/21/2022
31. Sacrifice by Katee Robert, ebook, 4/30/2022
32. Heir by Katee Robert, ebook, 4/30/2022
33. Office Hours by Katrina Jackson, audio, 5/11/2022
34. Mack's Rousing Ghoulish Highland Adventure by A.J. Sherwood, ebook, 6/9/2022
35. The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness, audio, re-read, 6/10/2022
36. How to Hack a Hacker by A.J. Sherwood, ebook, 6/11/2022
37. All about Love by bell hooks, ebook, 6/11/2022
38. Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery, audio, 6/11/2022
39. Bird Brother by Rodney Stotts, audio, mytbr, 6/12/2022
40. The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances-White, audio, mytbr, 6/12/2022
41. Niccolo Rising by Dorothy Dunnett, ebook, 6/12/2022
42. Underland by Robert Macfarlane, audio, 6/16/2022
43. Good Seeds by Thomas Pecore Weso, ebook, 6/28/2022
44. Dear Black Girl by Tamara Winfrey Harris, audio, 6/30/2022

Books I've completed July-Dec. 2022 (favorites are bolded):

45. The Chimera Code by Wayne Santos, audio, 7/3/2022
46. Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) by Carol Tavris, audio, 7/4/2022
47. The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson, paper, 7/7/2022
48. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, audio, 7/11/2022
49. How to Be Human by Jory Fleming, audio, 7/22/2022
50. From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty, audio, 7/24/2022
51. The Orphan Sky by Ella Leya, ebook, 7/30/2022
52. Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris, ebook, 7/30/2022
53. In Skates Trouble by Kate Meader, ebook, 8/3/2022
54. How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, audio, 8/4/2022
55. Marxism: Philosophy and Economics by Thomas Sowell, audio, 8/6/2022
56. The Human Factor by Kim Vicente, ebook, 8/13/2022
57. The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, audio, 9/2/2022
58. I'm Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya, audio, 9/2/2022
59. Merlin in the Library by Ada Maria Soto, ebook, 9/17/2022
60. Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, audio, 9/22/2022
61. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib, audio, 9/26/2022
62. The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty, audio, 10/5/2022
63. The Companion by E.E. Ottoman, ebook, 10/8/2022
64. Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, audio, 10/8/2022
65. The Hour of Land by Terry Tempest Williams, audio, 10/12/2022
66. The Mask Falling by Samantha Shannon, audio/paper, 10/17/2022
67. Spineless by Juli Berwald, audio, 10/23/2022
68. No Way Home by Tyler Wetherall, audio, 10/24/2022
69. The E.T. Guy by V.C. Lancaster, ebook, 10/27/2022
70. Gravemould and Ectoplasm by Barbara Hambly, ebook, 10/27/2022
71. Executed on a Technicality by David R. Dow, paper, 10/27/2022
72. Five Flavors of Dumb by Antony John, ebook, 10/29/2022
73. Tales from the Loop by Simon Stalenhag, paper, 10/30/2022
74. Strong Female Protagonist, Book One by Brennan Lee Mulligan, paper, 11/1/2022
75. Frieren: Beyond Journey's End 1 by Tsukasa Abe, paper, 11/3/2022
76. Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez, audio, 11/3/2022
77. Slam, Vol. 1 by Pamela Ribon, paper, 11/4/2022
78. Lies by Kylie Scott, paper, 11/6/2022
79. Dracula by Bram Stoker, email: Dracula Daily, 11/7/2022
80. They Can't Kill Us until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib, ebook, 11/10/2022
81. Agents of Winter by Ada Maria Soto, ebook, 11/12/2022
82. The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, audio, re-read, 11/13/2022
83. Cerulean Sins by Laurell K. Hamilton, audio, re-read, 11/16/2022
84. Dragon of Ash & Stars by H. Leighton Dickson, ebook, 11/22/2022
85. We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride, audio, book club, 11/26/2022
86. If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin, audio, 12/4/2022
87. Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa, audio, mytbr, 12/9/2022
88. In the Midst of Winter by Isabel Allende, audio, book club, 12/19/2022
89. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, audio, book club, 12/23/2022
90. Astray by Emma Donoghue, audio, 12/31/2022
91. On Basilisk Station by David Weber, ebook, 12/31/2022

Books I'm reading right now

Deal with the Devil by Kit Rocha

Welcome back, April, happy reading in 2022!

The Divine Comedy is on my list for this year.

Welcome back, April!

Have you heard of 100 Days of Dante? They’ve set up short videos commenting on each canto - 3 a week. More info: https://100daysofdante.com/

Welcome back to the group, April.

>1 lottpoet: >2 lottpoet: >3 lottpoet: Thanks for sharing your "best of" reads from previous years. I love checking out everyone's lists!

>7 FAMeulstee: Thanks! Hope you enjoy The Divine Comedy.
>8 drneutron: Thank you. What! No, I did not know about that project. Eeee! That looks so good! Maybe it'll help me finish this year. :-D
>9 PaulCranswick: Thanks!
>10 alcottacre: I love seeing people's book lists as well.

1. Voodoo Season by Jewell Parker Rhodes
audio

This was pretty good. Turned out it was the second book in a series. I do that sort of thing all the time, start later in the series, but I actually thought this was a standalone book. I think the first book is historical, following Marie Laveau, the ancestor of the main character of this book. What hooked me at first were the scenes in the ER: what it's like to work there, and all the people she worked with. I became interested in the way these characters started coming together in their prickly way, but that they also had each other's back. I found the main character tough to get along with mainly for her stubborn refusal of the call. She just couldn't accept that Marie Laveau's power has been passed to/through her, but she had no other plan or way to deal with the dark powers arrayed against her. She kept running into danger without forethought or backup and mouthing off to really bad people. Things coming to a good spot in the end felt like it happened despite her. In the end the true 'evil' was the accepted degradation of Laveau's line, the descendants rolling around in the muck of back-stabbing and infighting, in the end allowing a man, no relation to Laveau & with no powers of his own, to assume control and enact extreme brutalities.

4/5 stars

Readalike:
Murder on the Red River by Marcie Rendon. I found a lot of similarities in the main characters of both books: young women who are survivors of the foster care system and both strive to be connected to their culture and heritage as much as they are able but because of family circumstances (and the structural oppression that got their families there) they don't know as much as they would like, especially about their own relatives. They also both make questionable and sometimes infuriating choices but you still find yourself wanting things to turn out well for them. I also think the resolution of the mystery/crime was not quite as satisfying in both books as I would have wanted, but I still consider reading further books in the series because I did like the characters and the things the author was exploring about the legacy of racism, slavery, genocide.

Edited to add a readalike.

2. Monster, Volume 1: Herr Dr. Tenma by Naoki Urasawa
paper, random manga from the library

This was ok. There's a doctor (Tenma) from Japan who admires the research of a doctor in Germany. That German doctor is so pleased with how complimentary Dr. Tenma was that he invited him to come to Germany to work in his hospital. Of course, the German doctor is just wanting to exploit Dr. Tenma, refusing to let him do his own research, having Dr. Tenma write the German doctor's papers, he's even orchestrated a relationship between his daughter and Dr. Tenma so they can keep it all in the family. That's where the manga opens. Dr. Tenma feels stuck in Germany because he needs the job, his family's medical practice at home not able to support both him and his brother as doctors. I say he feels stuck but he mostly ignores any misgivings he has and politely accepts all of the limitations placed upon him. He is a brilliant neurosurgeon, and the hospital starts directing him to work on particular cases over others to maintain political and financial support of the hospital. One day, Dr. Tenma stands up to them when he they try to pull him off of a case of a boy (a twin of a catatonic girl) with a bullet in a tricky spot in his brain to work on the mayor. He continues to work on the boy and saves his life. The twins are the only survivors of a strange murder-spree where their parents were killed. Taking this stand costs Dr. Tenma everything: his standing in the hospital, his relationship with the doctor mentor/exploiter, his romantic relationship with the German doctor's daughter. He does get to keep his job but gets worked ragged and moved from case to case without any say on his part. But then something strangely horrific happens and things start to look up for him, suspiciously so.

I felt a little manipulated by the story with its incredibly slow journey to the final reveal (who's responsible for all the horrific and strange things that have been happening and why). The story in this first volume actually happens over the course of nine years, but that wasn't really clear at first in how it was laid out on the page, it would take characters after many pages suddenly saying, 'It's been nine year, Dr. Tenma,' and I'd be like, Wait, what? I did like that the final reveal of the monster gave us the opportunity to think about monstrousness broadly. I mean, plenty of people in the book you could describe that way. Lots of the administrators and clinic-administrators (is that a thing? high-ranking doctors who were being leaned on by board-members or the CEO to do things a certain way to keep certain sorts of supports in place) make very self-serving, harsh decisions without even the veneer of doing it to be able to better serve patients. The doctor who invited Dr. Tenma to Germany so he could exploit him gives his daughter to the next 'star' protegee doctor he chooses, and his philosophy of medicine and society seems very close to maybe fascism, certainly a very disturbing social Darwinism. It's unclear how much the daughter acts out of loyalty to her father (she definitely gives the vibe that she's a true believer in her father's philosophy and strategies but I don't doubt she's also being heavily manipulated by him) but she also very clearly wants status and power and is willing to go to great lengths to get and keep it. The twins' parents were asylees from East Germany and in the brief mentions (snippets of news stories on television and in newspapers) the East German government is painted as monstrous, and the West German government is implied to be so because of the way they seem to be hoping to squeeze useful information out of this clearly shell-shocked family. And then there's Dr. Tenma.

I have this idea we were supposed to see Dr. Tenma as monstrous because his unthinking wish for the death of those who wronged him caused the monstrous act of the twin boy, and, very basically, he literally saved the life of a monster. He certainly seems to feel that once he cottons to what's going on. I think he's an interesting character because he seems to have this really simplified vision of how the world works. It's extraordinarily black and white. He starts the book thinking that people are well-intentioned and trustworthy, any signs to the contrary (and there are plenty, lots of panels of his stunned face with '...' for his speech bubble) he seems to take as his own misunderstanding or confusion or lack of cultural reference. But then when his mentor turns his back on him, he realizes he should have stood up for what was right all along, and the newly dedicated Dr. Tenma, the one who doesn't mind that he's being overworked and never credited for all of the lives he's saving with his practically miraculous surgery skills, that Dr. Tenma sees himself as the only one with integrity and passion; he's noble in the purity of his dedication. It makes him a kind of frustrating character because he misses all the clues of what's really happening. Like, why is that one doctor constantly trying to give him unwanted career advice, the one whose own career seems to rise and fall stressing the fact that he hasn't quite gotten down how to advance a career either. What's in it for him? What's he really after? Dr. Tenma should be more worried by the German version of the FBI: at first by how much suspicioun naturally falls on him and then later that they'll use him to get to the monster in question. Dr. Tenma misses all the interesting stories that are going on around him because he still sees everything too simplistically. It's an interesting effect.

This was my first adult manga, I think, pretty sure the other ones I've tried, certainly the ones I've finished, have been ones for teen girls. I liked the realistic art work and the medical jargon that made it feel like Dr. Tenma was doing amazing neurosurgery. I'm curious where the story will go next, but maybe not enough to pick it up.

4/5 stars

>12 lottpoet: You enjoyed it more for not knowing it was part of the series - and not the first part. Done that myself and gone on to read the series afterwards in order. Sometimes ignorance is really bliss!

>14 PaulCranswick: Indeed!

3. The Body Is Not an Apology, Second Edition: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor
paper

This is a tough one to review. The book is so delightful: thoughtful and thought-provoking, smart and emotional, full of hard truths and kindness. I'm having Ancillary Justice-syndrome, where I just want to sigh contentedly after finishing the book, a goofy smile on my face, my heart swelling with love and awe, and my brain swirling with new ideas. I'm going to attempt something more than this heart emoticons. I hope you will appreciate the effort.

I first watched a recording of an hour-long talk/Q&A put on by the publisher (well, it was a live Zoom event, but I watched the recording after the fact) about radical self-love in the workplace. I couldn't quite wrap my head around what she was suggesting, it was a bit slippery, but I was intrigued enough to want to read more about this concept of radical self-love. I made a note to order the book when I had some money to spare. One of the things she said that I came back to again and again in the months after I watched the talk, was that eventually with the practice of radical self-love we would be good at weeding out the 'outside' voices that dominate our thinking and would be able to hear our true ('inside') voice. She got a question about what can we do in the meantime, if we're not quite that far along in our journey. She said sometimes when it gets all muddled in her head, when she loses that inside voice, she plays a game she calls Name that oppression. Identifying the oppression can often give one the distance between the thoughts and the self to put things more in perspective. That was sooo helpful to me day to day.

Some months later (well, maybe a year later), I bought the book. The cover is gorgeous although somewhat provocative, which goes perfectly with the title of the book. I had to be brought around to the idea of radical self-love and how embodied it is, how much you have to love all the parts of your physical body. This will be tough to explicate, but I'll give it a whirl. The argument early in the book is situated very firmly in an anti-fat-phobic space that feels familiar and expected. If you're going to talk about loving your body, you're going to have to counter all the fat-shaming that is still very acceptable in society today. Right. Then you inch out from there to talk about diet culture. Makes sense. But then, next thing I knew, not like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz movie opening the door into a technicolor world over the rainbow--ha, ha, ha! nothing that pedestrianly mind-blowing--no, we get the moment when small people with strange hairstyles and outlandish clothing start talking about witches like they're real and start yammering about a yellow brick road like it's everything, I'm in a world that is a world but is enough off-kilter that I just have to follow the instructions I'm given and hope to be able to find my way home again. My friends, I'm talking about the chapter that lays out all the ways governments use judgments about our bodies to control things as fundamental as our livelihoods, our freedom and our lives, think anti-sodomy laws, access to abortion, forced sterilization, institutionalization, labor exploitation, mass incarceration. Until I read this book, I mostly thought about body positivity (which she says radical self-love is bigger than) as being happy with where you are, say with your chubby belly or your big thighs, and that you should stop shaming fat people and assuming they're unhealthy lack self-discipline. I didn't at all think about how the right sort of body is extraordinarily narrow, so the wrong sort of body includes LGBTQ+, race, color, sex, class. She calls it body terrorism and it does not sound like hyperbole once she lays it all out.

And that's just the part to convince us that radical self-love is a place we want to move towards, all the reasons (way more than I've listed) we have felt for so long that we have to apologize for our bodies, for our selves. I spent the most time with that section of the book because it was recontextualizing things I thought I understood about the world and myself. Then we spend time talking about why we might be resistant to radical self-love. It's fear (of what we'll find we really think or believe about ourselves and others), shame (about how we've been duped, controlled, manipulated), and discomfort (having to face the ways we've been complicit in the oppression of others and with internalized oppression). Because, the scariest part of all, is that it's not radical self-love without communalism. We have to risk trusting others and being close and allying as action. Yikes! It's a lot. I'm still in the reclaiming my own thinking part of the journey, which probably means I'm ripe for the workbook.

I thought the writer did a really good job of balancing the hard truths and the tough mandates with empathy, cheerleading and understanding. As she says towards the end, she's been with us this whole time. I especially like the last chapter where she gave us some examples from her life and some pointers for how to work on fat-phobia, racism, LGBTQ+-issues, etc. I don't know that I've made the book sound appealing or if I just sound like I've been indoctrinated, but I like to think big thoughts and think critically about society and, especially after the murder of George Floyd and the uprisings, I can feel hopeful about the power of people coming together for justice and feel frustrated about what disrupts that, what holds us back. I had so many new thoughts on the macro-level (about communities and society) and the micro-level (how can I live my biggest and best life despite societal hindrances/roadblocks.

That's what I got. Ever since I finished the book a few days ago, I've been carrying it from room to room in my house, because I love it so much I'm not ready to put it on a bookshelf yet. I re-read certain portions and think about what my next steps are, including what would be a good follow-up book to pick up, I mean besides the workbook. I was thinking Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.

4.5/5 stars

4. Grumpy Jake by Melissa Blue
ebook

I was taken with this book from the very first page. I love a romance with a grumpy hero and I'm often intrigued by romances that feature parents (I haven't read many of them). However, by the end, I felt very strongly that this was a novella that would have been better served by being a novel, even if it ended up being a shorter novel. The whole thing felt a bit thin, like I had to handle everything (character moments, backstory, romantic development) I was given very delicately because it could so easily tear. It's not like what sometimes happens for me with novellas, like those of J. Emery where I love what I'm getting go much that I want a whole lot more. Here, I wasn't quite satisfied with how the story was laid out, I think. There were times where there was plot summation where I wanted to linger and there were parts we lingered where I felt underprepared for those moments, like they were not properly set up by what came before. I did like the writing itself. I'll probably try another by her.

4/5 stars

5. What's Mine and Yours by Naima Coster
audio, mytbr.co rec

Wow--what an ending! Me and this book had a rocky start. I really liked the stuff at the start with G's father figure. I thought I was going to get a sort of unconventional couple a la Hetty & Benjy from The Conductors: a little prickly, but they make it work (they were my favorite part of The Conductors). Instead I got a multivalenced intergenerational story across time a la Celeste Ng or Brit Bennett. That's a tough sort of story to keep track of via audio: so many people, so many timeframes. I did end up liking it quite a bit. There was so much to think about. The parallels between the two families, each lacking a male partner/father because of the legacy of the intersection of race and class, and each having a neighbor/mother-figure who helps out both the remaining mothers and their children. The novel overwhelmingly follows women and girls but orbits the question of what can you hold men to, what can you allow, where do you stand firm while being understanding of circumstances. The women are mothers and draw their lines in the sand at different points--they have more than themselves to think about. Each of the girls has to decide how they fit/don't fit with their fathers and father figures and that leads to how they'll, once grown, try to fit or not with men in relation to their own planned children. I'm looking forward to reading more by the author.

4/5 stars

Readalike:
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng for a similar, if in a bit of smaller scope, look at the legacy of racism, classism, sexism on a family.

Edited to pull out a non sequitur sentence I forgot to delete.

6. Wizard's Holiday by Diane Duane
audio, Mark Reads

I don't really want to talk about this book. I had been liking the Young Wizards books all along but then I really liked The Wizard's Dilemma. But then the next book, even with its rewrites was highly ableist, and this one was just not for me. I've seen too many Star Trek episodes where a perfect society must be destroyed because it is stagnant and people were meant to struggle. That *could* be true, but I haven't seen it deployed in a nuanced or effective way. This book was decently persuasive about it, but I just don't like the trope. I'm worried about the title of the next book (Wizards at War). And we still don't know what Nita's Dad and the senior wizard were talking about, where all the senior wizards were, and what was interfering with Dairine understanding the sun.

3/5 stars

7. A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
paper, re-read

A friend was binge-watching the tv show and decided to start reading the books. I loved the books and didn't see the need for a tv show. She told me it was worth seeing both because they were enough alike to appeal and enough different to hold your interest. Now, I'm hooked on the tv show! And back in love with the books. I decided to re-read them as I watch. I might be loving the books even more this second time around because now that I know the shape of the story as a whole, its interweaving and weight, I don't get quite so irritated in slower parts. I also--I blush to admit it--realized that I have some tendencies the writer has toward excessive worldbuilding. Although, her book is set in our world, so maybe we don't need to describe a sun salutation in exquisite detail? Who am I kidding? I love worldbuilding so I relish all the details, if there are enough other things (big feelings, wit, suspense, etc.) to keep me engaged. The first time around this book struck me as having a very saggy middle. This time around, I didn't quite feel that, I think it is a very muddled middle. I knew what was going on because I'd already been there once before but I still had to flip back and re-read to keep track of what exactly was going on, why people were doing the things they were doing. All I want to do now is get a trial to Sundance so I can binge-watch and read some more. The 2nd book is my favorite and it's killing me to wait! However, the 3rd season is not finished yet and is being released on a weekly basis, so the smart thing to do, to maximize bingeability, is to wait until its complete. Also, the Olympics(!!) is starting up. I won't have time to make good use of my trial. But, Gallowglass! I need him!

4.5/5 stars for the book
4.5/5 stars for the tv show (realizing I haven't talked much about the show; more to come)

7a. A Discovery of Witches, the tv show
Season 1

The way I watched the show was I would watch an episode and then re-read the book till I mostly caught up (some things don't happen in the order they're revealed in the book or in the same manner). It was so much fun! I really like the actor who plays Matthew. I don't think he looks like what the book describes but I think he looks somewhat alien-like, as we'd expect vampires to look; I also think he's very good at presenting a kind of alien facade/demeanor. So far, the tv show seems more diverse than the book which I appreciate as well. I found Diana way less irksome on the show than in the book, but we're also not in her head in the tv show so that may have helped. One interesting thing is that the tv show so far really downplays Matthew's moodiness/rages. It's such an odd choice because they're pretty key to what will be revealed by The Book of Life. Maybe they have plans to do something with it in the second season? Also, I'm surprised by how often they have time to do long lingering looks or montages of scenes from earlier in the show (it has eight episodes, not sure that makes for much of a past yet!). Some things I thought worked really well onscreen: the combining of witch wind with Matthew calming her anxiety (that looks pretty different in the book, but I prefer the tv show's version of the witch wind scene), when they're practicing time walking and go back to their first evening at Sept Tours and Matthew dances with his Mom again, less yoga scenes (I don't remember any, actually). I also found the reveal at her home of what really happened with Diana's parents when they left for Africa affecting, that they all got to witness it and how the ghostly scenes played out, but it's an unexplained/unidentified type of magic that doesn't really fit with what has come before--it just feels too convenient a deployment. Things I'm not so fond of with the tv show versus the book: I like the idea of doing more with Satu earlier, but they don't do much, she's very ciphery so far on the show and then it feels like wasted time; similar thoughts about Juliette being overexposed, actually to the detriment of the show because she begins to feel very tragic mulatto, but also just comes across as confusing; not feeling all the portentous stuff with the Congregation, mainly where they stand around trading meaningful looks with each other and then go through a thing with the 3 different keys to unlock the door simultaneously (over and over again; I just wanted to throw those keys in the canal). I think that's what I got. Really looking forward to Season 2.

Dropping by to wish you a great weekend.

>22 PaulCranswick: Thanks! Hope your weekend is going well. I had a rough, stressful week at work, lots of nights of not enough sleep. I'm making up for it this weekend so far, and I'm on vacation/staycation next week. Every time I sit down to read or watch something, I find myself needing to lie down, and then next thing I know, I'm asleep. :-D

8. Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz
paper

I loved this book so much. Lots of food for thought. I thought about all the information, studies, history and ideas all the time, and I talked about them. I can't remember how the book got on my radar but for sure it was in the days when I didn't have a good sense of what my tendencies were. I've been well aware for a few years now that I have an unholy terror of being wrong (like a good portion of humanity, according to this book). Of course, oppression feeds into that: we hold some people to account when they're wrong much more forcefully than others. The book talks about how we're always caught out when we're wrong, that we expect we'd know if we were wrong but that being wrong feels no different than being right. The thing is, I've known that for a long time, that's why I can doubt myself at the slightest perceived push/question from someone, because I know how easy it is to be wrong. This book talks about error in various situations and fields (science, the arts, about politics, religion) and sizes, and in how people react to being wrong. The chapter about being wrong as an eyewitness wrecked me. I was literally on the edge of my seat, palms sweaty, heart pounding, but also squirming at the amount of discomfort in the goings on. I cried a lot during that chapter--there was so much at stake on all sides of the situations presented, even the author at the end talked candidly about thinking of scrapping the chapter and writing something about it/following a case that was more tidy, that was not getting wrong what she envisioned when she planned out that chapter. I'm still thinking a lot about the book. I will definitely re-read it.

4.5/5 stars

9. Playlist for the Apocalypse by Rita Dove
paper

These poems were very Rita Dove-ish, clever and witty and playing with tone (crude, cruel, sassy, affronted, etc.). I still prefer her earlier poems (especially Museum and Thomas and Beulah) which were a little tighter & more... restrained? I feel weird saying that because the poems I write now are nothing like the poems I wrote, say, in grad school or shortly after. Of course, I want writers to grow and their writing to evolve, in theory anyway. It's the tension with any writer where I kind of want them to re-write my favorite book of theirs over and over again, the same but not the same. I mean, I still wish I was writing the types of poems I wrote back then, but I can't. I remember my first semester teaching in grad school, I used Museum as one of my books and the students were a bit antagonistic towards it. They were kind of mad at me for picking it. I told Rita (she was one of my MFA professors) how disappointed I was that they didn't like it more and she said she got where the students were coming from because it was a very chilly book. Anyway, back to this one. I liked the poems talking about 'ghetto'--its origins, etymology, anti-Semitism, classism, anti-Black oppression. I also liked the cricket ones that snarked about Negritude. I might re-read individual poems or sections but I probably wouldn't read it again cover to cover.

4/5 stars

10. The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison
audio

I struggled for a long time with this book. I liked the main character well enough, but I had a hard time figuring out what was tying everything together. It made me think of The Angel of the Crows where there were multiple crime cases/mysteries that were hard for me to follow because I didn't care so much about them, but I loved the detecting duo and how they interacted. Here we only have Celehar and he's such a reserved loner. So, now that I'm done, I think this is a story about the very first steps of someone who's been hurt and isolated rediscovering their worth, flirting with forgiveness (of self & others), and opening up to the possibility of companionship. I can appreciate that. I sound kind of lukewarm about it, but I think I would read another book about him. I would also read more books set in this world.

4/5 stars

P.S. When I said I would read another book featuring Celehar, I did not realize one was coming! I'm off to preorder it; I hope the audiobook has the same narrator because he's got Celehar's voice down.

Edited to fix formatting
Edited to add the postscript

11. Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline
audio, book club

This book features an extended Metis family that is menaced by a rougarou, a werewolf creature. When it opens, you don't quite know that, what you do know is that there are legends of the rougarou passed around the community; Joan's husband disappeared about a year ago or so; most of the family has given up hope on the return of the husband (Victor), assuming he left her either because she was hard to live with or he was no-good; the mining in the community is a source of tension (they're wrecking the land but they're paying well and consistently). Joan is the guardian of her sister's son, Zeus, who is twelve. They make a good caring team for each other. One day, she stumbles upon a tent revival led by Preacher Wolf who is really Victor, only he claims not to know who she is or that he is named Victor. Oh, and Joan did encounter a rougarou when she was twelve or so. She thinks she is one of the few who know it's not just a story to scare children. Joan has quite a journey ahead of her to learn more about the rougarou, what her family *really* knows about fighting the creature, and how any of that will help her get her husband back. She has to keep her faith in the face of varying levels of disbelief and pity in her community.

I really liked Joan's family and friends. They were funny, supportive and understanding, even when they didn't agree with Joan or were convinced she was delusional. I can also really identify with the community dynamics class-wise. The reader has to sort out, along with Joan, what a rougarou is, how to identify them, and what's really at stake. The writing is really powerful. I was caught out by the horror ending: the monster can never truly be defeated, only momentarily. Not sure why since the book has horror tropes throughout: everyone talks themselves out of the evidence of evil right in front of them, one family has a special monster-fighting ability, the monster seems unbeatable, there are creepy uses of religion to prop up the evil/pacify the masses, and there is a WEREWOLF! But the ending left me a bit unsatisfied, not in the sense of most of my book club where they felt it begged for a sequel, I just don't get on with the backbone of horror (as I see it): the world being fundamentally inimical to us and our only hope is to save ourselves or fight until you fall in battle.

4/5 stars

12. The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray
audio

This book was recommended as good for those who liked An American Marriage. It does feature a family fracturing under the strain of the incarceration of family members. The thing is this family was already in a pretty rough place, multigenerationally. There are thee rotating POVs, all sisters, Althea, Lilian, and Viola. Althea is the oldest and has raised or partially raised all of her younger siblings (the other 2 sisters and a brother). She is the one in prison at the start of the story, she and her husband, Proctor. Althea is understandably resentful of being put in charge of her siblings when she was not much older than them, still a child herself, when their mother died. Their father was an itinerant evangelical preacher, something like that, and we only know him after his wife's death when he's violent, easily enraged, but also mostly absent because of his job/calling. Althea married Proctor somewhat in gratitude for a release from her childhood home and for him being kind and human with her, and she brought her siblings to live with them. Althea and Proctor have twin daughters who are being raised by the youngest sister, Lilian, the 2nd POV character. The twins have a fraught relationship with their mother. She is often absent, like her own father was, putting all her efforts into the business (restaurant she and Proctor started), but when she is around she favors one child, Baby Vi, over the other, being cruel and hectoring to Kim. Lilian is the youngest child and was given back over to her father (her and her older brother) once he settles more in town/does less traveling for his work (although he's still gone quite a bit) when she was a young teen. Lilian has a lot of anxiety and secret, self-calming, repetitive behavior. She is caring not only for the twins, but also for her dead husband's mother, in the family home. The last POV is Viola, the second oldest child. She has an eating disorder (binging/purging; CW: there is a pretty graphic depiction in a scene in the book) and has recently split from her long-time partner. She wants to be supportive of the family during this difficult time, but is falling apart herself and doesn't know how to make real connections with her family members. She makes a lot of missteps. Each POV has their own narrator. Viola is voiced by January LaVoy and I really liked her. January is so good at getting across nuanced, tough feelings--I don't think I could have gotten through the binging scene without her--also the writer wrote it well, of course, but January really delivered it. Right now, I just want January LaVoy to be reading me books with big feelings where she breaks my heart over and over again. This book, surprisingly, had a bit more hope than An American Marriage. Also, the main trauma here isn't systemic--I mean, that plays a part (the parents got a higher sentencing than anticipated, the patriarchy leaving those children at the mercy of their father and mostly to fend for themselves during his absences, the punishment of the lone boy of the family by sending him into the military). This incarceration of Althea and Proctor and the ruining of their standing in the community, gives a chance for the family to work through some longheld hurts and trauma, get help, help each other, and try very hard to move into the future differently, hopefully better, but not so mired in the past. I don't think I've gotten across how much this is a book about mothers and daughters, their resentments and misunderstandings, yearnings and fears, about themselves and about each other.

4.5/5 stars

Readalikes:
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, for another story of incarceration wreaking havoc with a family.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, for a mother having an unfavored child and how that toxic relationship destabilizes the family.
The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly by Stephanie Oakes, for a look inside a female correctional facility with lots of tales of the inmates and all the ways they got to where they are, very little of it having to do with personal decisions and quite a lot of it having to do with inadequate supports, resources, and/or with the weight of oppression. I didn't talk about the scenes with Althea in jail while waiting to get transferred to a prison after her sentencing, but they were some of my favorite sections: getting to know her companions and their stories, and Althea starting to do some reflecting on her own story out of necessity, because she's determined not to sleep her time away like her cellmate.

13. Not So Pure and Simple by Lamar Giles
audio

This was great! It started out very Christopher Paul Curtis-like--which I don't mind--funny, kind of over-the-top in the antics of the boys (high-school age boys in this case). But pretty quickly (within a few chapters), it became clear there was a lot more going on. I liked how the story deepened and showed how thematically interconnected it all was as we went along. There's the Purity Club he 'accidentally' signs up for at church (to get a girl), the Health Living Class (sex ed) at school (whose syllabus is strangely paralleled in the Purity Club syllabus), the Baby-Getter's Club, his father's pressure to have him do the teen equivalent of womanize. And at heart what the boy seems to want is what his parents have: a deeply committed, supportive *relationship*, not a fling. I did get frustrated at his self-centered pursuit of the girl--like she's an object or trophy or his due. It's especially so because he has many human moments in the story, often showing up the adults and other teens around him. Such a strange but real tension. As we go on, the story more explicitly talks about 'nice guys' and how problematic and dangerous that rage of entitlement can be when a guy feels he does everything right (he's one of the few good guys out there) and doesn't get recognized (lauded) as he thinks he should. I definitely want to read all the Lamar Giles book now. I love rich, multi-layered stories like this--so satisfying.

4/5 stars

Readalike:
The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis, for another funny/snarky boy narrator of a story full of hijinks but also dealing with difficult topics, here it's racism.
Trouble Is a Friend of Mine by Stephanie Tromly, for a boy coming up with convoluted schemes to get what seems like simple things done.
All the Rage by Courtney Summers, for the female perspective on what happens when male privilege is pointed at you and we all behave poorly, no matter our gender (because we swim in the water of the patriarchy). CW: rape and its aftermath are what the story is about

14. Wanting a Witch by Lauren Connolly
ebook

This was such a sweet romance. It was recommended to me because I was looking for a romance between a human and a vampire that reads like a typical romance (so not urban fantasy) where they meet, get to know each, decide they like each other, moved towards a HFN or HEA. No fated mates. I've had a tough time finding this except for a couple of novellas by J. Emery. This one is a witch and a vampire. The witch saved the vampire's life (after being attacked and fed on by multiple vampires), keeping her alive magically long enough to get her vampire friend to come and turn her. This is a world where ordinary humans don't typically know about witches and vampires. Much later, the newish vampire comes to thank the ER nurse witch who saved her life. I don't know if I loved the witch and the vampire as a couple but I did like them on the same team and I really liked the vampire (she's the one we spend the most page time with). She was born to witches but had no power and they treated her abusively using that as an excuse. This was a novella so there's not a lot of room for lots of drama, the main through-line of the book seemed to be getting more information about how the vampire character got attacked to start with and why she has had a difficult time with witches.

4/5 stars

15. Skin: An Erotic Monster Romance by Aveda Vice
ebook

This longish short story was an erotic romance. I liked the glimmers of worldbuilding. The woman was somehow caught between life and death, whether that was because of her power or whether that condition is what led to her power, I couldn't tell. Her power was knowing everything about a person or thing from her skin touching it. She rarely touches people and makes her living helping to find things or people or find out things about people from touching objects. She works with a gargoyle as her bodyguard. We come into the story in the middle of a case that implodes and she accidentally touches her bodyguard. Well, this is a romance, so it turns out that she now knows that he has feelings for her. She's not used to wanting anybody because it's too painful and complicated, but she figures out that she wants him, too. Then there's one extensive sex scene. This is definitely a HFN romance as they're still figuring their relationship out but they've agreed they want one. I wasn't keen on how much real estate the sex took up in the story which is a weird complaint of an erotic romance, but I could have stood to have a scene or two more buildup before consummation. As it was, we were *told* so much stuff about their partnership and her feelings and hesistancies and I would have rather seen more of that. This is supposedly the prequel to what will be a novella or novel about this couple. I would totally read that.

4/5 stars

>31 lottpoet: Someone called Vice is writing erotica?!

>32 PaulCranswick: Ha! It seems. Or maybe it's a pen name? There are some outrageous ones in the romance/erotica field.

16. My Broken Language by Quiara Alegria Hudes
audio, prior book club selection

This was our book club book from last August. See, what had happened was... If you don't finish the book club book in time for the meeting, but you like the book, it gets backburnered because of the new book club book. It's been at least a year of me mostly trying to stay on top of our selections and actually have a book completed *before* we meet. February's book I finished, with some cramming, 2 minutes before our Zoom call. This book is a memoir by a North Philly Latina. I loved the mixed of kinds of language and registers (Spanish, Spanglish, street English, a more poetic English). It’s fun to hear Philly stuff, although she’s a little more east than I had been. I could also relate to having an age gap with a younger sister and how much of her world her sister is. I feel like my sister (ten years younger than me) saved my life: she was just the presence I needed in a really tough time. It was so hard going away to college and grad school and leaving her behind, similar experience as the author, but after my schooling, I think I saved her life by becoming her guardian and giving her a stable home life. Similar to the author, I also had a music awakening, although I was older, having gone to a college with a conservatory (I took a year of music theory for fun!). Anyway, I did like this memoir a lot. I loved the last scene where she’s working on a play and she was scared by what she wrote. What her teacher wrote to her about that experience was moving, and I like how the scene echoes over the book because it, too, is something she is writing.

4/5 stars

17. The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson
audio, book club November 2021

This has an intergenerational triadic storyline. One follows the main character, a Native woman, in the present after some sort of tragedy, trying to come to terms with it. (There are signs of PTSD & grief.) One follows the main character as a teen, moving forward in time to eventually catch us up to the present where we find why she is grieving. The other follows the main character's ancestor (great-grandmother?) as a girl into adulthood, starting with the 'Sioux uprising' and ending with her children taken to an Indian boarding school without her permission. There is just a sprinkling of the older timeline but the scenes are heart-wrenching, full of deprivation, brutality and dehumanization. That's what was so hard for me with the second storyline. The main character's white husband seemed to be trying to get her to understand his heritage/culture but doesn't try to see/honor her perspective. He says she's easily offended or that she has to make allowances (not in a malicious way but a clueless way), always expecting her to accommodate. The ending is very moving without unrealistically fixing everything. It is the start of a healing journey.

4.5/5 stars

Readalike:
The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox for a similar spiral or circular narrative structure and for a story of community with realistically complex and complicated characters and relationships.

18. The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri
audio, book club February 2022

This is a beautifully written book. A year or two before the pandemic, the Oscar nominated short documentaries were all about Syria (except for the one that was about the Holocaust & an inner city arts school). That was a good grounding in many things I would encounter in this book. I knew how rubbly Syria was (the little boy in the book wonders if the houses in England are not broken). I knew about the refugees being picked up by the coast guards of the various islands of Greece. I understood about how the narrator and his wife were presenting: PTSD, shell-shocked, devastated. Time seemed very fluid (not sure if this was partly an effect of listening to it with time shifts being harder to track in an audiobook versus on the page) and even space (where they were when) ended up feeling floaty and indistinct. It made for a nice merging of inner and outer states for the two main characters. The narrator is unreliable (not just because of his long-term hallucination of a refugee child as a sub in for his lost child): he makes himself sound way more put together than he actually is (keeps pointing to his wife's struggles), but he definitely loses time, he's not sleeping and when he is he's possibly sleepwalking, and time and place are even murkier for him than the narration external to him. I have to say it was particularly difficult to have him be so frequently scornful and harsh towards his wife. It makes sense viewed through the lens of trauma, but it was still so heavy on the page. I appreciated that the end of the novel was not miraculous/and then they lived happily ever after. I also really liked all the stuff about bees throughout--I'm always here for that. My main concern with the book--and it was almost impossible for me to get past it--is that I really wanted this to be an ownvoices novel. I tried to google something to read after this & I couldn't find anything. But, right, if the people are not ready to tell their story or this isn't the one they can/want/need to tell in this moment--that's an important point; we shouldn't just go marching past it. That's why it was nice to have the documentaries. I know films have a whole infrastructure around them that makes it almost impossible to say they are ownvoices, but documentaries (at least the ones I like) do tend to have a more narrowed, individual perspective. One of those documentary shorts I saw followed the one captain from the coast guard of Lesbos. Another followed one girl of a family in Syria whose patriarch was a 'rebel'--it's limited to her particular POV/story. There was just something I thought I was missing in this book about the particularity of this couple's/family's story. In trying to figure out what I'd prefer, I come up with ownvoices, but maybe there are other things that could bridge that gap for me. I've read novels about refugees and wars and I didn't get much in this story that felt distinct or different, besides the beekeeping.

Readalike:
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak for intense real-world circumstances finessed for the sake of art (sounds disdainful, but I did fall under the spell of The Book Thief, which I attribute partly to the distance of time (historical fiction)).

Edited: to fix formatting of spoiler

19. Human Enough by E.S. Yu
ebook

This is the 2nd book recommended for me for a more traditional romance between a human and a vampire. This one features a vampire and a (human) vampire hunter. It was just the sort of thing I was looking for. This book stressed me out so much. It's a past-present/then-now story where the present timeline was like a romantic suspense with the emphasis on the suspense. You figure out pretty quickly that there's some kind of conspiracy at the hunters' headquarters. It also follows that the vampire love interest will be at risk (I mean, they were already having to keep their relationship a secret because of the hunter's job). This is a world where vampires have been outed, there are manufactured blood capsules for them to take, and there's a mandatory vaccine making humans immune to being turned into vampires. The hunters go after vampires who attack and kill humans instead of taking their nice blood pills. Someone has been tampering with evidence presented to the hunter teams and it's both probably targeted innocent vampires and created situations where more humans have been endangered, including the hunter teams. Which is how the hunter ends up held captive by the vampire who is the boyfriend of the vampire who will be his love interest in the present-time story. I thought the two timelines played off each other very well. We already know the couple is together so we wonder how that happened. We know they had bad intel in the past so we watch for further developments in the present. It was very satisfying if over too abruptly/quickly for my liking. I was looking on the author's website to see if there were plans for a sequel. They said they wrote it to stand along but have the possibility of a sequel. However, it sounds like the sequel has bogged down/probably won't be a thing. The author does have an agent now so that's good. I put their other novel (Eidolon) on my tbr because I saw it tagged 'assassin' and 'asexual,' and I said, sold!

4/5 stars

20. Fairy Tail 1 by Hiro Mashima
paper

I felt like I came in in the middle of things. It is a *long* series but I'm not sure how because it's very thin. I suppose there's always a quest and maybe after a while you start to care about the characters and in that way care about the quests. The world seemed pretty generic. The main conceit so far seemed to be that these heroes wreck everyplace they come to and the municipalities are sick of it. That's kind of funny and meta. Except, it's drawn out for way too long without much being done with it, just lampshaded. The quests were somewhat interesting but they were not well-integrated. They mainly served to highlight the quirky characters who are too busy being quirky with each other. Eventually they accidentally save the day and have a few earnest seeming feelings about the messed up situation (they feel sad or rail against the injustice, but they still find time in that to razz each other). I sound like I hated it. I didn't. I was sorely disappointed. But, it did read quickly.

3.5/5 stars

Edited to add 'readalike'

Readalike:
Overlord anime for similar meta level of what's really going on in these gaming-style fantasy quests (collateral damage, shifting sides) with still a base of the fun of it (great boss battles in the anime; dubious 'fan service' in both).

21. My Life in Transition by Julia Kaye
paper

This was a book of comics (standard 3-panel strips) of day-to-day life of the six months of the author's life being out and trans post-transition. Some of the things portrayed are somewhat mundane (having a bad day, catching a cold, moving house), others are more serial and interior (about relationships, say, or self-worth). Some of the things are more trans-related (misgendering, hormones, dysphoria). There was one comic strip for most days of the time period. It was fine.

3.5/5 stars.

22. Wizards at War by Diane Duane
audio, Mark Reads

It was very good to have such an enjoyable one after two that did not work for me. I had so many feelings while reading this book. Shit was real with the Seniors losing their powers imminently. I loved seeing the wizards work together (Filif, Roshaun, Nita, Dairene, Kit, and Sker'ret). I loved the developing vibe between Dairene & Roshaun.

4.5/5 stars

23. Body of Render by Felicia Zamora
paper, mytbr

I found these poems to be have a pretty limited palette: from diction to structure to subject matter. I prefer more variety in a full-length poetry collection (versus a chapbook).

3.5/4 stars

24. March, Book One by John Lewis
paper

I wasn't fond of the artwork on its own, but it did seem to add a certain gravitas or weight to the text. I liked getting to learn about John Lewis' childhood and adolescence in particular and about what it was like at that time under Jim Crow and at the start of the Civil Rights Movement. I will always remember his love of the chickens they raised on the farm. That's what I mean about the artwork. That should have seemed so ridiculous & it was funny, but also real. I found it all moving: the small stuff, the personal stuff, and the broader historical context. Can't wait to get to the next two volumes.

4.5/5 stars

25. Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith
audio & paper, book club April 2022

I started out in audio but got the paper copy to follow along, partly because I knew I'd need to talk about it at book club so I'd need to have more attention for it, but also I was not fond of Tracy's delivery--it made it hard to get the structure/layout of the poems; she really doesn't make much of line breaks in her reading. These poems were ok. I really liked a couple of poems later in the book about her daughter--the telling details wowed me--and the pantoum. I'm always here for pantoums.

4/5 stars

26. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
audio & paper
27. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, trans. Clive James
audio & paper
28. Paradiso by Dante Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander, Jean Hollander
paper

I finally finished!! With the help of 100 Days of Dante. Thanks, Jim, for the heads up about it. I subscribed to the podcast version. They started in September with Inferno and finished up Paradiso on Easter. I was partway through Paradiso, but I listened to all the prior episodes till I was current (somewhere in March). I was determined to finish this year, but that project was a boost, partly because I felt like I was doing it with company. Although, it was intense to finish by Easter, partly because they started doing more than 3 episodes per week in the last week or two (to finish in time, I guess?). I started reading The Divine Comedy in February of 2020 according to GoodReads. Instead of being bummed it took me years to get through, I want to give myself props for reading three translations concurrently with copious endnotes during a pandemic. Go, me! I haven't been in the 75 group during any of that time, so I think I'll go book by book with my thoughts and then what I thought overall.

Looks like I didn't keep a paper writing journal between spring 2013 and the tail end of 2020, so I'll have to reconstruct what I thought of Inferno. I originally read a translation/interpretation by Mary Jo Bang in 2013. I think it was on the ALA Notable Books list for that year. It caught my eye because I've been taken with her poetry when I've come across it in literary journals. That translation had some modern touches, like Cartman from South Park being Ciacco the Pig for Gluttony, which was nice (& fun) for someone like me who was completely new to Inferno. I remember that first time around being puzzled about how the punishments fit the crime and feeling affronted by some of the things considered sins. As a non-believer, it definitely left me feeling like just your living your life was walking through a minefield of potential sin. I enjoyed Inferno a lot. We had monsters and monstrous punishments. I liked Virgil and I sometimes felt sorry for the character Dante. There was a lot of action and spectacle. I know I re-read Inferno because I wanted to tackle the Clive James translation (can't remember how I heard about it; ran across an article about it, I think). In his translation he does not use terza rima because of rhyming constraints in English. He moves to mostly quatrains with a more typical abab rhyming scheme with a closing couplet with masculine rhymes for each canto. I started it in 2014 but I had to return it to the library before I got very far. I did like the translation. Then I got the Longfellow translation for SantaThing in 2014, so I read that in spring of 2015. It was pretty challenging because of all the SAT words and the inversions and the like because of the form and rhyme considerations, but it was pretty. I often read it out loud. I bought my own copy of the Clive James and finished the Inferno portion. It was clearer but I did I miss the more traditional lyricism of the Longfellow translation.

I found Purgatorio way less gripping than Inferno. I couldn't keep track of the sins they were expiating and how the punishment fit the crime, but I also couldn't keep that straight in Inferno, but here there was not much else to distract me. The angels were kind of 'eh' and the 'punishments', of course, were way less outrageous. I did like Beatrice taking Dante to task towards the end. She's so much better at it than wordy Virgil. I also liked the part after he drank from both waters and was ready to go to the stars at the end. The endnotes talk about how modern readers are spoiled about each book ending with stars but that that was a very powerful discovery for contemporaneous readers. I was that unspoiled reader because having spread the reading out so much I had forgotten Inferno ended that way until I was reminded by the notes. I found this ending moving and very powerful.

The last book of The Divine Comedy really tough going for me. Lots of yammering and philosophy, not enough spectacle to keep me entertained. Lots of lights: climbing ladders, reeling, pulsing, laureating. The only interesting one (besides the end) was when the lights made an eagle and spoke with one voice through the eagle's throat (or sometimes didn't)--it was so strange. I did like the canto where they reach the penultimate sphere with the fixed stars. I suppose there was more action: Jesus & Mary were there with others from the Empyrean, but then Jesus was too dazzling and had to recede back up so that Dante could see everyone else. Then Jesus was like, why don't I just go back to the Empyrean. And then his light is like a ray through the clouds, and then Mary gets assumed (again!) and everyone left in that sphere holds their hands up after her like she has gravitational pull! It was all pretty glorious and emotional until dunderhead Dante blinded himself by trying to see John's body within his light. I did like the last canto, especially the end, which I found quite moving, once I parsed what was happening: it was all lights again (but with Dante with better sight), but the confusion and paradoxical images were thematically resonant, because of course God is bigger than our understanding (plus the whole triune thing).

The Hollander translation was the easiest to understand of the three I read, but it was also the prosiest. I decided to keep the Hollander and James translations for potential re-read, but I'm done with the Longfellow. In this reading of the three translations, I had audio book versions that I listened to while following along in the text. The Hollander translation only had an audio book version for Inferno. The second time I tackled Inferno (2014 & 2015), I had intended to read the whole Divine Comedy but I just kept bouncing off the start of Purgatorio. I'm really glad I did finally read the whole thing. I probably won't do so again (well, unless an interesting translation catches my eye). I would probably re-read Inferno, again though, it'd have to be a different translation (and then I'd probably read it concurrently with either the James or Hollander, but probably not both--three was one too many).

4.5/5 stars for Inferno
4/5 stars for Purgatorio
3.5/5 stars for Paradiso

4/5 stars for The Divine Comedy

29. Euphoria by Lily King
audio

I came into this expecting one sort of book, but ended up getting another. I was expecting to see a woman working competently on a thing she really cares about. I just don't think we get to see enough women in stories being good at their job, all the ins and outs of it, the way we do with men. And, sure, I get this lone(ly) anthropologist dude as the narrator and I really like his voice on the page and in audio (Simon Vance!). And I feel sorry for him in his struggles, his desperation. So, ok, I can tell pretty early on this will be a story where he latches on the main anthropologist couple in his passively needy way. But he adores her so I guess I'll still get to see her work because he will describe her work lovingly as a proxy to his feelings for her romantically and bodily. Well, he sort of does, but more in the way of--wow, she awakens something in me with her awesome smarts; keeps shining your sun on me, lady, that's how I know it's love! Ugh. Nell definitely has the more interesting story and I could see how it would be difficult to have the guys just shut up and let her tell it because she'd be too busy being competent and obsessive to bother with narrative niceties. We do get terse excerpts from her notebook(s). Kind of difficult to make a more traditional easy flowing narrative out of that sort of thing, but it's not impossible to craft a good story with that material, I don't think. (Nell's got a good voice too, on the page (yay, King!) and on audio (Xe Sands!).) It's clear to me, in her talking about how she met and ended up marrying her husband and in the narration about how the relationship develops between the lone anthropologist and her, that she craves collegial and intellectual companionship. Too bad her choices are so limited (by societal expectation of allowable relationships, demographics of her field, and a kind of intellectual torpor that can happen when you're a member of a highly privileged group (mediocre white man syndrome, I guess)). Unsatisfying, mostly because I'm convinced it didn't have to be.

3.5/4 stars

30. Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
audio, re-read
30a. A Discovery of Witches, the tv show
Season 2

I went with the audiobook (opting to spend one of my precious libro.fm credits on it because the library had too long a waiting list) for my re-reads going forward because I wanted to be able to multi-task while reading it. This was the trickiest season to try to alternate watching the show and re-reading the book: the tv show really mixes up the order of things vs. the book. I still really enjoyed both. I don't know that I have much to say about the book so I'll probably focus on the tv show. The first time around, I was a little frustrated with all the comings and goings and the sort of historical cosplaying that was going on in the book when they went back for two particular things: to get the manuscript and to get Diana connected to more powerful witches so she can cultivate her powers. It often felt like I was the only one who felt the pressure, the sort of ticking clock. This time, I didn't mind so much, probably 'cause I know how it'll all sort out at the end.

The tv show made an interesting choice to spend a bit more time in the present time than the book did. I think it was a good move although, again, I'm not sure the tv show makers (not sure if it's a scripting issue or a directing issue or some combination) know how best to make use of the extra time/attention they afford themselves. I definitely didn't need sooo much of the Phoebe/Marcus courtship/introduction to the world of creatures. Nothing was bad about it (except the part where he's trying to convince her that he's a vampire--it's not hard to show her evidence besides old pictures that look like him, I mean later he goes to get her ice cream from the store before she finishes a sentence) but it didn't strike me as a smart way to use the extra present time scenes. Ditto for a lot of the Gerbert/Domenico stuff around the bloodrage murders and how they're going to finally take down the de Clermonts because of it--very drawn out to little effect. I was sure the show had tipped its hand about who the murderer was, especially in how it intercut scenes around the murder, but my friend said it was still shocking to find out who it was in season 3.

I found the historical scenes in the second season (the majority of the season) always a bit unsatisfying. I felt the loss of the extra time spent in the present. I can't fault trimming down the cast a bit and the locations. But I never felt the sense of historical difference or aliennness in most of the scenes in the past. Partly the locations felt pinched and really empty (even of background people), especially Sept Tours and Bohemia (which they moved to a hunting lodge/winter court location, so a smaller physical space, but it still felt really empty). Partly they did away with many of the little difficulties of a modern person being in that time: how to curtsy, working on her handwriting, how to refer to people (sieur, etc.), learning how to manage a household and preside over a meal. I mean, I think those things were happening, we just didn't get to see them. Another thing I thought didn't work very well was how little time they spent developing Jack when he has a big role to play in the series. I thought the actor who played Philippe did a very good job. I also think he comes across pretty differently on the screen than he does on the page. Definitely he warms to Diana much quicker. I thought the screen version of Philippe seemed more measured and pragmatic, but on the page he comes off way more coldly calculating but also passionately loyal.

I liked the 2nd season well enough, not as much as I liked the 1st season. One thing I will note in terms of diverse casting--it can be difficult when it results in you killing off your characters of color (Em was added to Juliet from the first season).

4.5/5 stars for the book
4/5 stars for the tv show

31. 33. Office Hours by Katrina Jackson
audio

This book made me a Katrina Jackson fan. I liked Grand Theft N.Y.E. and now this. I like that the guy supports her and doesn't try to change her but then that support/care allows the woman to do some reflection and decide for herself that she might want something different for her life. I loved the setting of academia for this one. It felt like one of the best representations of it I've seen in fiction.

4/5 stars

Edited to fix formatting
Edited to correct numbering (I left out two quick reads)

>44 lottpoet: I am very impressed you got through all those together. The difference between the communicator James and the lyric Longfellow was very interesting to me and emphasises that the translator is extremely important not to our understanding but to our enjoyment of a particular work of literature.

>48 PaulCranswick: I like how I kept trying to say, never again, but kept hedging around future new-to-me translations. Ha! (I tried to make an emoticon heart but it didn't work: you'll have to imagine it, friend.)

I've been away for a bit. I helped lead a 6-week study group on anti-Semitism. That's mainly what kept me away from reading like I would want.

Have you all heard of Dracula Daily? They send you (through email) sections of the book based on what the month and day is matched with the actual month and day. (Not sure why I'm struggling to describe what they do.) So, on May 9 of this year, they sent us the portion early in the book (Jonathan's journal) that takes place on May 9. I'm hoping to actually finally finish the book. I've started many, many times and not gotten very far at all. I do know a goodly portion of the story because of, you know, the zeitgeist. Also, I love vampire stories, and that means there are so many references in film and novels and short stories to the goings on in the book, even if that particular story doesn't feature Dracula. I like it a lot so far this time around. I'm definitely more invested in finishing this time (and curious about particulars) because of A Dowry of Blood. Seriously, reading this after reading and seeing all the things that came after, is like, I don't know, dvd extras: oh, here are some vampire book titles I recognize; ha, love how Jonathan keep referencing death and dead things before he even knows what he's in for; ooo, the description of the Count sounds a lot like what Nosferatu looks like (minus the mustache) in the movies.

31. Sacrifice by Katee Robert
ebook

This was my first reverse harem romance. I loved Katee Robert's Gifting Me to His Best Friend and I wanted to try a reverse harem so I decided to put myself in the hands of a writer I trusted. My interest was piqued for reverse harems by Ouran High School Host Club (which I found out after I read the first volume that it gets labeled as such) and Be Mine (which gave me some vibes of what I thought a reverse harm could be (it was recommended to me for polyamory romance)). I had bounced off this when it was the next Katee Robert I tried. I don't think I knew it was a reverse harem but I did suspect that Robert comes down on the erotic side of romance. This one opens with a pretty graphic sex scene with dubious consent (lots of asking but the woman is not in a position (prisoner, hostage, vampire bite forces a physiological reaction) for her yeses to mean much). I will say things settle down some after that first scene. He made some assumptions about how she was there (maybe she didn't volunteer, but she understands duty) and about what she knows about how things work in their/his world. So they play a game of, I'll do everything short of penetrative sex until I get actual consent. Which is really splitting hairs. I liked the men we collect and how they're introduced. I really liked a lot what I got of the worldbuilding, but I wanted needed more (a la J. Emery's books). We get some worldbuilding reasons for why they might be drawn to her (her mother was a very powerful supernatural creature slaughtered because they couldn't help but become tyrannical with their power; it was so long ago that even many of the vampires don't remember). We get some adoration & protection of her. And we get lots and lots of sex. I forgot to mention that she's a dhampir (half-human, half-vampire) and the men are all vampires. This fit pretty well my recent yearning for more vampire-human romances. Success for my first reverse harem.

So, having only read the one and based on what was recommended to me for others, this is what I think a reverse harem romance is. I was told (by the internet) that it's an interchangeable term with polyamory, but I don't think that's necessarily true. Reverse harems seem to have a very strong component of intense care/adoration and protection, so a whole set of characters absolutely devoted (often in a very over-protective way) to the main character. I've read several polyamory romances and I haven't typically had that vibe: they've tended to feel more like a relationship of, I don't know, mutuality, not a group in service to one individual. I will say, there's usually world-building reasons for the ultra-protectiveness (a very naive/unworldly character and/or a very valuable (heir, last of their kind) character). I'm very interested in reverse harems that don't fit my preconceived notion of what they are. Bring on the recs if you have them. I can't settle on what my next one should be because it sounds too similar to what I describe here.

4/5 stars

32. Heir by Katee Robert
ebook

This is the second in the trilogy that is a reverse harem romance. This one opens several weeks (months?) after the big revelation and prison break via the magic of sex of the last book. She feels guilty about unintentionally tying the men to her metaphysically. They feel physical pain when they get a certain distance away or spend enough time away from her. The one man who is the most reluctant member of the group is the cruelest in his treatment of her. They are now on the run from her father who had been keeping the first man she partners with hostage. There's guilt sex and angry sex and sulky sex and sex out of obligation. I can't remember where along the way the plan became for her to get pregnant (ugh! I hate that storyline, in general) and become the heir to her father's family so that they can stop running and right some wrongs. Her father *is* awful. He had been coming after the other vampire family leaders one by one and trying to incapacitate them in some way or get them in his thrall so that he can, I don't know, consolidate his power. Eventually, the four of them come to some sort of equilibrium/understanding. Of course that's when her father surrounds them and manages to capture all three men. She's the only one to escape. She runs into the woman whose compound they were staying at. She's human, but she's some sort of paramilitary survivalist type. They decide to pair up to track and then help free the men. Oh, and she's pregnant! I like these romances where we get to follow the same love interests for more than one book. I like all the little things about how they work out how to be together and deepen their connection to each other. It makes me swoony. However, I'm not keen on pregnancy or pregnancy scares being the things that causes complications. (That happens in Rule of Three also.) I will read the final book at some point--I just don't like when the group is being kept apart.

4/5 stars

34. Mack's Rousing Ghoulish Highland Adventure by A.J. Sherwood
ebook

I don't like this series as well as Jon's Mysteries, though I think I should like it more because it features ghosts. I think it feels like the anchor is the main character for this series, versus the psychic being the main character for the Jon series. Also the Jon series has more of a team to follow. In this series they don't have an official team but they do get to work with interesting-seeming people, I just don't get to know any of them as well as I yearn to. I was excited to pickup this book because I thought they'd get to work with the throuple from the 2nd book (they do!) and I wanted to see them deepen their friendship and get to work together again. This book has them called into Scotland, so, we get to see various local ghost expert/anchor pairings and the special expert they call in at the end. But, it's just so frustrating: the characterization for everyone, including the two main characters, feels so shallow or thin. Also, Mack is Creole and I've always been bothered by how his culture is portrayed in the books. It feels very stereotypical, full of verbal-tics and random phrases, to me. Boy, I was not prepared for how poorly the dialogue is done while they're in Scotland. These books have glimmers of things I like a lot, but I just wish we spent our time more wisely. We gotta get to really know the people (spend page count on quality characterization) or (sure would love to use an 'and' here 'cause I'm greedy that way) we gotta get more of the real ins and outs of the ghost-world (not the law enforcement bureaucracy around it). Of course, I'll read another, because hope springs eternal for me.

4/5 stars

35. The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
audio, re-read
35a. A Discovery of Witches, the tv show
Season 3

I'm mostly going to talk about the tv show. My friend got bogged down in her read of the trilogy in the 2nd book. She found the third season of the tv show somewhat unsatisfying and was asking me lots of questions about how things were handled in the book (before I had gotten to see with my own eyes how they were different in the tv show). Mainly things for her felt underdeveloped or not satisfactorily wrapped up. I think some of it is how the tv show after the first season really scrambled how they presented the story, not just when they *showed* a thing happening on the screen but also literally things would happen at a different point in the story's timeline than they did in the book. I've complained how it made it difficult to read and watch concurrently but I also found that it emphasized some things over others, undercutting the drama and muddying the central thrust of the story. I mean, I think you can totally fuss with the timeline for the adaptation to the screen, but not if you're not really clear where you're going/why or where you want to diverge from key beats in the book.

First off, I want to say, I really liked the casting for some of the newer characters. Grown-up Jack looks pretty but odd (somewhat in the manner of Matthew) and like a grown-up version of the little boy we saw in Season 2. He also looks very young (more like a teen than a grown-up), which I think externalizes his youthful spirit or exuberance (and makes a dramatic picture for his blood rage). And he was young when he turned into a vampire. Fernando is gorgeous but grossly underutilized in the tv show in a really bizarre way because he's so key in the whole book. (Sarah also had very little to do this season which I give a big thumbs down to. I will say Sarah & Fernando end up being real buddies, so I'm sure Sarah being sidelined had to do with Fernando being cut out of the story for the most part.) They recast Matthew's brother because of scheduling conflicts, I think. I thought he captured the arrogance of him better than the first actor did and, surprisingly (because it's not really shown in the book), the weight of family obligations/de Clermont legacy/not having the regard of the patriarch. He was not able to get across the pettiness, meanness, and sheer physical viciousness of the character. I couldn't at all believe, with this actor, that he was able to hang onto the council seat for the long period of time he did.

All the things I worried about in the first two seasons were the chickens who came home to roost in the third season. The overall arc about how the creatures (and humans) were all interconnected and how it answered all the long-standing questions and worries the different groups were dealing with, it just didn't have the power (or was even really clearly laid out, maybe; my friend didn't seem to understand some key things about what the Book of Life (Ashmole) really revealed). Since the blood rage was downplayed and, for some strange reason, was really, in the tv show, tightly yoked to Matthew's family in particular, we didn't have a good feel for how anything would change about that moving forward. I also don't think it was clear that the witch lineage had real struggles in the modern era or demons. I mean, except for bigotry/prejudice between 'species.' I was pretty uncomfortable with the whole Louisiana portion (trying to get Marcus' family to make an alliance with Matthew who had spent centuries slaughtering their loved ones because of their blood rage or the potential for them having blood rage). It was the most brown people we've seen on screen and the tone of the scenes seemed to me to be showing that they were being unreasonable and petty and short-sighted & it focused almost exclusively on Matthew's pain at having had to murder all those people. The book, wisely mostly distances us from Matthew's POV during this American sojourn, partly because he's having a difficult time being separated from Diana because of the blood rage (you wouldn't know that from the tv show--that he mainly can't be separated from her, even by being in a different room). Fernando played a key role here in the book but we didn't get to see it in the tv show.

There were some things that were different in the tv show that I liked. I was surprised at how much time they spent on Gallowglass' unrequited love for Diana. It's very sublimated in the book--it's there but dealt with minimally. When it's brought out in the open in the tv show, I appreciated how they talk about it like adults and there was some nice emoting in that scene & some follow-up ones. That was a good use of shifted emphasis, I thought. I also really liked the birthing scene. It may be one of the best ones I've scene in a tv show or movie. It mainly hews to how actual births really go, especially with twins, but also doesn't veer so much into how 'crabby' the birthing mom is and unreasonable to all those around here. I mean it's there (& that's realistic!) but also mainly in visual medium it's overplayed (and sometimes played for laughs). It was interestingly filmed & edited (because births take a long time so you can't show it in real time) and allowed space for several different emotional beats and some great points of narrative development. I really felt how momentous this was for all the different members of the family, especially considering how impossible this whole pregnancy was. I got some of the allegorical (?) stuff about the two different beings coming together to create a new thing (like the alchemical wedding).

I think I would watch the first season again, but I might then just switch to reading the 2nd & 3rd book? I don't know that I would need to see the last two seasons again or would have the patient for them. I will definitely re-read the series again at some point. I'd love to read something else like it, but when I look at readalikes, they're all about the witches or the time-walking, but I want something that is about the big feelings the characters have for each other, how they figure out how to come together across societal divisions, and how the universe (in the book(s)) is setup (the world-building) such that diversity and communion are what make the world go 'round.

4/5 stars for the book
4/5 stars for the tv show

Edited to fix formatting

36. How to Hack a Hacker by A.J. Sherwood
ebook

I wasn't so sure I wanted to read a book from Kyou's perspective. He struck me, in the previous two books of the trilogy, as immature or emotionally stunted. I just couldn't picture him in a romantic relationship. I did end up enjoying this romance, maybe best of all. I like Ari the most of the protagonists (first book), but I like the love interest in this book the best. I liked seeding the team in action & supporting each other. I wish the women and girls in these books were referenced less stereotypically (women, who can fathom what makes them tick, am I right?). Trixie in particular throughout the series, no matter what man's head we're in, gay or straight, is referred to as a bombshell. And there's something weird going on with Ari's adopted daughter, Remi, where she's constantly taking care of all the men emotionally--that's really poor adult-child boundaries. I'd love to get a Trixie book, but that won't happen. I'm pretty satisfied with the trilogy overall.

4/5 stars

37. All about Love by bell hooks
ebook, book club August 2022

This is my first bell hooks book & it's a good one, hitting at the right time for me. I'm trying to face my fears, figure out connection (cathexis?) and love, and get past embarrassment and shame. I definitely want to move towards nurturing my own spiritual growth. I highlighted a bunch of stuff in the ebook I got from the library. I have to get my own probably paper copy. The only chapter that did nothing for me was Romantic Love. I already know I'm asexual, I wonder if I'm aromantic? That whole chapter felt like it was written in a foreign tongue. I was so pleased to be reading a book by a smart Black woman. This was the first non-fiction book I read that felt like the sort of thing I could write (I'm a poet and fiction writer but so far not much non-fiction).

4.5/5 stars

Edited to correct star rating

38. Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery
audio

This book is about gender and sex bias in medicine. I already knew some of the issues, but it was enraging to hear it covered so thoroughly and unrelentingly, including how much worse it was than I knew. I had no idea how research subjects were wholly or overwhelmingly male (even for studying hormone replacement therapy for menopause!) into the 90's!

4/5 stars

Edited to add that I listened to it on audio

39. Bird Brother by Rodney Stotts
audio, mytbr

This book gave me so many feelings. Falconry is pretty interesting. Loved learning about the different raptors. I also loved hearing his life story. I felt such Black pride for/about him. He grew up so rough and now he's a master falconer. That's hopeful and beautiful.

4.5/5 stars

Edited to add readalike:

This readalike is actually a watch-alike. I'm recommending the movie Concrete Cowboy which is about Black horsemen in Philadelphia. Another look at an area of passion that tends to get whitewashed.

40. The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances-White
audio

This book is, like, Feminism 101 (or 100), which was totally my speed. I consider myself a feminist, but I often think of capital F Feminism as being for/about white women. I got a lot of good counter arguments for sexist BS from this book. Also, it's funny! The writer is, literally, a comedian. As I understand it, there's a podcast called The Guilty Feminist where Deborah Frances-White interviews and interacts with various feminists. The only off thing is that the interviews interspersed with the narration are narrated by Adjoa Andoh (who I love), instead of using the actual interview recordings. Maybe it was a rights issue. It just feels kind of fraught all around. I would've preferred to just get excerpts or quotes and just keep moving forward with the text.

4.5/5 stars

41. Niccolo Rising by Dorothy Dunnett
ebook

This book. It took me a long time to get into it (almost half-way through). What caught my attention was the worldbuilding (historical detail) even when I didn't always understand it. I also liked the narrative tone: a little arch, but not too frivolous or playful. I was a little disappointed at how much time we spent with Claes (me not knowing he was Niccolo) because he's such a trouble magnet yet he's so... philosophical about it. It's like spending so much time with a kind of manchild but we're supposed to be ok with that because he has such a sincere core/heart. Mainly I felt so concerned with how harsh people were with him when I wondered if he was, say, neurodivergent or developmentally disabled. Although it was understandable that Claes was around so much since he was around all the major players. When we get to the point where he marries the widow, I was blown away, by the development, by the way it played out, by watching it unfold. Talk about hurting your characters. That is like Octavia Butler-levels of hurting them. I had so many feelings. I'm kind of mad that all the people who heard me go on and on about Wolf Hall didn't send me to Dunnett.

Great historical detail. There are a million characters and so many countries. We do mostly stay out of the characters' interiors, which I miss and also is part of the reason it's so hard to keep everyone straight and track the machinations properly. Lots of political intrigue. This book definitely made me think of Daniel Abraham's economic fantasies (The Long Price and The Dagger and the Coin). I do wish I could better follow the machinations, the shifting alliances, manipulation of various parties, etc. It took me a really, really long time to warm to Felix, and I felt like his death was teased for a long time. Then just when I became intrigued by him slowly maturing, bam! he's dead. Damn you, book! Dunnett!

P.S. I also got a lot of Firethorn/Wildfire energy in the battle/jousting/fighting setups and scenes. Also, the anime Vinland Saga.

4.5/5 stars

42. Underland by Robert Macfarlane
audio

I loved this book. It was completely my sort of thing. There is the subject/theme, Underland, and then there are all kinds of different things that fit it. There are the catacombs of Paris, the Wood Wide Web (mycelium network under trees), mines (and the person listening for dark matter there so that there's less 'noise' from all the surface things), cave paintings, icebergs in the Arctic (under the ocean). And they're all things effected by or effecting climate change. I learned a lot, but I also appreciated the author's curiosity and adventurousness.

4.5/5 stars

43. Good Seeds by Thomas Pecore Weso
ebook

This is a memoir (with recipes) of an indigenous elder (Menominee). He reminisces. He talks about subsistence, where you only take (hunt/fish/gather) what you need. The springboard for the various memories is food.

4/5 stars

44. Dear Black Girl by Tamara Winfrey Harris
audio

Seems this started as an internet project: Black women writing to Black girls notes of affirmation, understanding, and care. This book collects some of those letters. My inner Black girl cried throughout. I liked the structure of the book. Each chapter had the letter with some commentary around it (before and/or after) by the author, the author's letter to her younger self, a prompt for the reader to write about, and defining terms and acronyms.

4.5/5 stars

45. The Chimera Code by Wayne Santos
audio

This was a fun read. I think it got recommended by StoryGraph because I wanted to read about gender. There is a character who is agender. They were fussed with in the womb to be neuter. This was cyberpunk but with an ecological bent. There was a really solid team which is a think I love. The team members were uber-competent and kind of mavericky. The villain was a bit mustache-twirly, but he was not on the page very much. I was hoping there would be sequels because there are loose threads and we can always get the band back together.

4.5/5 stars

Readalikes:

How to Hack a Hacker by A.J. Sherwood, for all the surveillance & hacking, although this book is a romance.
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, for the non-embodied living, and also for the magic-feeling science of the main characters (like the techno-mages from Babylon 5).
The Space between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson, for a young woman in dire socioeconomic circumstances getting in with the 'haves' and 'making something of herself.'

Edited to add star rating

46. Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) by Carol Tavris
audio

This book was thought-provoking. It showed many different instances, big and small, of people being mistaken and then refusing to admit it. The book asks why it is so difficult to acknowledge our fallibility in general and our mistakes in particular. The biggest thing seemed to be cognitive dissonance. And that seemed to naturally follow from painting mistakes as moral failings. Another thing the book spends time on is how there are often little ways we bend or compromise our integrity until we're in the middle of a big mistake. And by that point, we're committed. This book was very helpful to me in thinking about how people can't seem to extricate themselves from their errors. It's a nice companion book to Being Wrong.

4/5 stars

47. The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson
paper

I loved this book. It was recommended to me on StoryGraph when I wanted to read about nature. It is in conversation with Borges' The Book of Imaginary Beings. This is a bestiary of earth creatures. Some of them are extinct, some are on their way there, most of them are very strange. Each entry shows the creature's endangered status, its scientific name and class. There is an illustration. Then the text of the entry talks about something unique or interesting about the creature. There is also usually something about human use of or misunderstanding of, which then can (& usually does) segue into direct comments about climate change. I learned so much. I really enjoyed the digressions, following where the author's mind took him.

4.5/5 stars

48. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
audio

This book was depressing. It just moved from field to field talking, each time, about the multiple ways that the default setting of male has caused injury to women and/or put their lives at stakes (including through death threats, bullying, isolation, and victim blaming, when women, just by their presence, threaten the unvoiced status quo of all male all the time). I mean, the book was good and I learned a lot. It was just so frustrating to have men again and again sneer at women's 'weak efforts' in a field they clearly didn't belong in. And, even when the men could see there was a problem, the main remedy was to toughen up/strengthen women, instead of changing the biased system. This was a good companion to Doing Harm and The Guilty Feminist.

4/5 stars

49. How to Be Human by Jory Fleming
audio

This book was a bit mediated by the person who helped write the book. So much of the time I wanted her to talk less and stop telling me what Jory feels or thinks or says or what he seems like to her. Let him tell me himself. Her intrusiveness was especially strong in the first third of the book. It did take me some time to get used to his narration style (I listened to the audiobook) and how he laid out an argument. But it didn't take me long to get on his wavelength. I learned a lot about his thought processes and philosophy.

4/5 stars

50. From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty
audio

Some of the adventures the author had around how death is handled in other countries didn't hold my interest, but the overarching concern about us in the West, particularly in the U.S., needing to have a better relationship/communion/ritual with the dead, that part was very interesting and powerful to me. It was hopeful to me about how I could handle things once my mom passes--that there are options and a certain level of care with/of the body that I didn't think was possible or even know to want. Also, ugh about how powerful the mortuary lobby is in the U.S.

4/5 stars

51. The Orphan Sky by Ella Leya
ebook

This was recommended by StoryGraph when I wanted to read more about music. Music is very important to the story. The main character is a gifted classical piano student growing up in Soviet Azerbaijan. Her parents are party officials so she leads a sheltered, comfortable life. Her best friend is of lower status but gets some residual shine from the company she keeps. The main character is given an assignment as a youth party member to gather information on a suspected traitor to the party: a young man who owns a music shop. It is there she has her eyes opened, slowly, to the corruption within the party, the inequities in their society, the lies told to the people, and the propaganda. The guy in the music store first has her listen to classical music not on the approved list for student recitals or competitions, played in a manner that makes the music sound fresh and alive. He also introduces her to Nina Simone, to jazz. At first she gets into tussles with him over his version of Soviet Azerbaijan and her version. Then she falls in love with the new music and wants to incorporate it into her playing. Then falls in love with him as she realizes he has a more correct view of their country than she does. He was already an enemy to the party before she knew him. Her assignment a bit of a setup for both of them (a loyalty test for her). His crime was being born into a decadent, westernized family that the Soviet machinery has been chewing up one by one. The main character grows more and more disillusioned by her family, the party & her country. She does eventually betray him, partly for the bitterness of him having been in the right about her country, her parents, her party. He gets sent to fight (& die) in Afghanistan. She comes up with a convoluted scheme to find him so they can defect together. She eventually defects on her own after an accelerated decline in her standing. I like this book a lot. I also learned a lot about these further out Soviet countries and the continuation of the struggle between Russia and the U.S. for Asia. The rise of the Ayatollah of Iran was definitely recontextualized for me. I was not fond of the ending--its happy reunion feeling unearned for me and not well set up.

4/5 stars

Readalike:
Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa for a romantic relationship amidst oppression where rebellion big and small is necessary but warps the relationship to some extent.

Edited to add readalike for #51.
Edited to fix touchstone for readalike.

Thank you as always for books, thank you for this group and thanks for you. Have a lovely day, April.

Aw, thanks! Happy Thanksgiving!

52. Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris
ebook

This was ok. There were some tense moments (when the maenad attacks her, when the anti-vampire fundamentalists kidnap her). I don't really care for Bill. I don't really care for Eric either, but I think she might end up with him. I think I'm spoiled for this series, in that I think she ends up with someone different than Bill, so I keep waiting to see if this is the book where that happens.

4/5 stars

53. In Skates Trouble by Kate Meader
ebook
This opened with a steamy but sweet scene. Lots of potential there. But then they meet in real life and they can't keep their hands off each other. It's really tough for me when the relationship in a romance is very physical before there seems to be any other sort of connection. Another thing that really bothered me was that when they got together he made decisions that effected her without involving her or even giving her a heads up. She's upset but she forgives him/understands pretty quickly.

3.5/5 stars

54. How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
audio

I like this a lot. More than I thought. I liked thinking about our attention as being valuable & something companies work to capture. But also we can think about out attention as something that can't be monetized or assigned a value. We can allow space for serendipity and casual gazing. And we can opt to withhold our attention: for a breather, for rest, to allow space for more intentionality. That's what I got from it.

4.5/5 stars

55. Marxism: Philosophy and Economics by Thomas Sowell
audio

Soon after I finished The Orphan Sky, I saw this book listed on StoryGraph as something someone had recently read. I was thinking a lot about how I didn't know much about the founding of Soviet Russia or even about communism. I knew how Trotsky died from seeing the play All in the Timing. I knew a bit about Trotsky & his wife in Mexico from The Lacuna. And, with the help of Goodle, I learned a bit about the major players at the start of Soviet Russia from Animal Farm. (Yes, this is how I accumulate knowledge: from plays, operas, tv shows, fiction.) This book's author has a bone pick with most Marxistst and critiquers of Marxist theory. He contends that they are following or repudiating stuff that is steps removed from what Marx said. Most of the book is him presenting what Marx actually said in his book(s) with a smattering of how it's been misrepresented. I was able to actually follow most of this. That takes up about 80% of the book. Then we get a biography of Marx (and Engels). And then the final chapter is a critique of Marx and how his ideas met real-world situations at the start of the Soviet Union. I didn't agree with all of his critiques in that last chapter, but they were interesting. Also, can I say that Marx did not behave like a very good human being. I spent a lot of time in the biography chapter wondering why Engels stuck with him. I think Engels really like Marx's brain and wanted to help get his thinking out there. Engels was the one to push Marx to finish the ms. to get published. He also led Marx to more audience-friendly structures for his big ideas. Marx had put-downs for most other intellectuals or academics who tried to engage with him. But he seemed to find Engels at least near his equal in understanding. He talked with Engels in depth about his ideas and listened to Engels' thoughts & refinement, something he didn't do with anyone else. This book was an excellent read. I felt smart while reading it.

4/5 stars

56. The Human Factor by Kim Vicente
ebook

The subtitle is Revolutionizing the Way People Live with Technology. This book talks about how so many objects and processes are not made so that humans can optimally work with them. This failing cuts across all parts of society. He gives a lot of examples, showing how there's a gap between the people designing the thing/process and the actual product/process. Sometimes there's a misunderstanding of what is wanted/needed, sometimes there is a confused objective, and sometimes it's about how wide that gap is: literally, say, in how many people touch it between idea & end product (a bit like a game of telephone), or knowledge-wise, so the people who have the knowledge to make the thing don't always have the knowledge of about all the nuances of the way people will use or it or how it fits in with all the other things they need to do. He also talked about how the designers want to make a flashy/fun thing, and thinking about usability is not the part that interests them (people will figure it out). He talks about how so many people think it's their fault when they can't figure out how to do it or how to integrate it with all the parts of what they do. When he talked about healthcare and all the ways obviously known human limitations (like making making mistakes because of lack of sleep or finding it hard to keep track of things in stressful situations) as well as poor design of equipment entangling with capitalism (if you have a contract with a manufacturer, they don't have much incentive to change their problematically designed tech, instead you will fault the human workers who do it 'wrong')--that was frightening & frustrating.

4/5 stars

57. The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan
audio

This was a dense, challenging set of essays about who in our societies has the 'right to sex' and what effect that has on the sex trade (pornography, prostitution), including who gets prosecuted for what and why. There was a lot to chew on here. I also really appreciated the structure of the individual essays and the way they hooked up (bleeding into/building on each other) to make the whole of the book. I also thought the writing at the sentence level was intriguing, a big poetry-like I thought (a little slippery; saying multiple things; pretty, but also devastating).

4/5 stars

58. I'm Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya
audio

This is a brief book with some hard (but true) things to say about how the playing out of masculinity seems to require hurting everyone: boys and men who aren't being boys and men in exactly the right way, boys and men who have 'forsaken' being boys and men to cross over to the other side to be girls and women, girls and women who opt to not respect boys and men in any way, and anyone who dares behave in a way that acts like there are more options than boy/girl, man/woman. There are plenty of reasons to be afraid of men. This book talks about colluding with a person's internal oppression, being a bystander for the small things as well as the big things, and about building new boxes for those who don't fit in the old boxes and enacting a similar sort of violence on those who don't fit. I had some new thoughts while reading this. It seemed a little muddled and unfocused to me, but I was glad I read it.

3.5/5 stars

59. Merlin in the Library by Ada Maria Soto
ebook

I was re-reading His Quiet Agent as a comfort read. I could totally see the clever crafting that I missed the first time when I racing through the book to make sure my odd couple were going to be ok (of course they were, it's a romance, but still). This short story takes place a few weeks after the end of the novel. It's so great! I loved watching this couple figuring out what that looks like for them. It was more a slice of life than a complete story, but I loved it.

4.5/5 stars

60. Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
audio

I loved this book. It talks about our economy in an interesting way. He defines bullshit job, making a distinction between bullshit jobs and shit jobs. Then he categorizes them: box checkers, flunkies, goons, duct tapers, taskmasters. Part of the definition of a bullshit job is that it could disappear and it wouldn't make a difference to the world and might actually be a boon. People who work bullshit jobs know it--that's part of the definition, too. I think of my job as a bullshit job (probably a mix of box checker and duct-taper). This book was helpful because it had me admitting that to myself and then realizing that that's what made it difficult for me to feel excited about data justice. To me data justice felt like another way of duct-taping, a whole lot of effort about collecting data in a different way when I think the fact that we collect data at all is the bigger part of the problem. I haven't resolved anything yet around data justice, yet, but I am willing to actually take a look at what's out there and see if I can get it to be less duct-taping.

Why are these jobs happening in a capitalist free-market? Why are so many people being paid do little work or little work that is necessary or meaningful? There's a long chain the author follows which, especially when thinking of flunkies, gets up to us moving more and more to economic feudalism where a manager or director is deemed successful by the number of employees and how much money they manage, but it doesn't matter what the people do or that the money is funneled through more and more cycles of fees and charges. (Under this system you get more taskmaster, the layer of managers under the ones getting credit for their large stable of workers.) Universities are particularly called out here, but it's definitely in other areas, including the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (where I've always worked).

The author investigates why so many people in bullshit jobs are unhappy. He talks about the human need for efficacy. That was enlightening for me. There was also a long discussion about how those of us who work bullshit jobs are bitter & envious of those who have jobs where they have meaningful work. So it becomes acceptable to pay those people very little because the love of their work is payment enough. The author also touches on the idea in society that people are fundamentally lazy slackers. No one would work unless they were forced to. So workweeks or workdays are not shortened (what could seem to be the possibility with greater automation and the efficiencies the market is supposed to reward). And people are kept in their bullshit jobs by being kept in debt (a key one being student loans, as jobs change little (only mostly in the way of becoming more and more bullshit) but keep requiring more education to work it). There was an interesting exploration towards the end of the book about Universal Basic Income that was intriguing. It was the first I had heard of it.

I was pushing this book on everyone while I was reading it. I had a great (if depressing) time thinking big picture about why work is the way it is.

4.5/5 stars

61. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib
audio, mytbr

I loved this book so much! It was recommended to me by mytbr.co when I wanted books about music & it's a perfect rec. It's, like, more than I even knew to ask for, so smart and allusive. Also, it's read by one of my very favorite narrators, J.D. Jackson. (He read Kiese Laymon's essay in You Are Your Best Thing.) The essays are beautiful and powerful and interconnected and real. I had so many feelings reading it.

4.5/5 stars

62. The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty
audio

This is about the roots of Southern cuisine which are African and Indigenous but are often whitewashed. The author explores these roots alongside his own. He uses family story and history, talking about his childhood ideas and reactions to the food he was served or helped to cook in his family. He also hired a genealogist. It necessarily becomes conjecture-y, fragmented, and whispery before 1870 (the first U.S. census where the formerly enslaved were counted singly by name), which only enriches the variety of food he learns to prepare. He travels to the places where his family have been, including parts of Africa, to find vestiges of his family and to learn to cook in the tradition of these places. I learned things, like enslaved cooks being send to France to learn French cooking. I got lost in the recitations of foods known by different names as people brought their cooking with them as they traveled or were moved from place to place. I also couldn't keep track of all the branches of his family. I do appreciate him talking plainly about Whites being lauded for learning about, using, and telling others about 'World' cuisine, but when the people of that cuisine do the same they are fact-checked and nitpicked and bonafided constantly. This was a good read & I'm glad I sought it out.

4/5 stars

readalike:
The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis for the adventures of a young black boy and the tonal shifts as the real world intrudes to a greater of lesser extent.

63. The Companion by E.E. Ottoman
ebook, mytbr

The main character of this historical romance is a writer. She has left New York City at the start of the story to be a live-in companion for a reclusive popular writer in upstate New York in the mid-twentieth century. Their 'next-door' neighbor is his ex. It's a very quiet story with seasonal touches (apples or berries to pick, canning days). The main character talks about rationing-style cooking--in general, the meals seem odd, definitely of a different era. I think part of the aim of the story is to provide a difference from the hectic New York City literary scene where the main character had not been treated well as a trans woman who didn't want to be fetishized. As she leans into the slower, quieter pace, she starts to write something she really care about, something that reflects more of who she is. At the same time, she explores a romantic (her first) connection with both the writer she lives with and the neighbor/ex. The writer she lives with has opted to write to a formula that sells, but he also starts working on a passion project. They find a sort of balance between them, this polyamory romance being a sweet HFN.

4/5 stars

Edited to show book 63 was also a rec from mytbr.

64. Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
audio

This was a good one to read with my nature books. The narrator did an excellent job with the tone of Edward Abbey--kind of snide, maybe irascible, so done with humans, but also able to laugh at himself (as a fellow human, especially one who's often grumpy). He had funny things to say and smart things to say.

He worked for some months for Arches National Park in Utah. He lived in a trailer and helped people find their way, checked in with them, answered their questions, picked up their litter, found them when they were lost. He had a lot of downtime, hence the thoughts recorded in what would be this book. He also had some side adventures (driving cattle, visiting some hard to access nature spots) with different characters.

He does take some time to talk about Native Americans and it's pretty wince-y and victim-blaming even though he's pretty sympathetic and doesn't sugar coat what's happened to them. He also has a lot to say about the drive to make the national parks more accessible. He's pretty ableist, even allowing for this being a different time (50's, I think). It sometimes seemed to me he was being willfully obtuse about what is meant by accessibility, thus being sure to add ageism and body-shaming to the ableism.

I did enjoy this book quiet a bit because of Edward Abbey. I like grumpy folk and I found him often intentionally funny. And, I mean, I think a person can't help but be grumpy if they love nature and they see again and again the degradation of it by human activity. I think the nature stuff was nice & why I came to the book, and there were lots of small moments that were new to me and interesting. But you have to like him enough to stay, because you're getting lots of him. That's the lens here.

4/5 stars

Edited to fix spelling errors

65. The Hour of Land by Terry Tempest Williams
audio

This was a good one to read while finishing up Desert Solitaire (there is even a mention early on about Arches National Park). Early on when I was ambivalent about continuing to read, I looked at some reviews on GoodReads that took the writer to task for despoiling their nature with political blather. Political stuff was what I wanted so I continued to read. Overall, I thought the book was kind of all over the place. There were things I liked a lot. I like some of the really personal stuff (like stuff about her brother), even when I didn't necessarily have enough context to really get it. The chapter on the oil spills and 'clean-up' was good. And I liked her recounting of being caught in a wildfire. I also, as a poet, was drawn to the more poetic passages and interludes. It's tough because the book also has stuff mixed in (mostly earlier in the book) that isn't political enough for my liking. I hear I missed some good photos from the print book. I'll probably get a copy at some point and read from that. I don't know that I'll ever read it again all the way through, but I was glad to have read it because the good stuff was very good. I am curious to read more of her writing.

4.5/5 stars

Readalikes:
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey for another mix of the personal and political thoughts on nature.
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell for another way to organize one's trip around the U.S.

Edited to add readalikes.

66. The Mask Falling by Samantha Shannon
audio & paper

I bought it in hardback so it would match the copies on my shelf, but I also bought an audio copy because that's how I read books now, whenever possible. I thought the narrator did a good job--loved her Irish accent for Paige (& now I know how to pronounce Mahoney) and how she made Warden sound alien. There were some great Warden-Paige moments, especially the first quarter or so of the book before the political intrigue picked up. I found Paige pretty frustrating (her unrelenting recklessness and refusal to care for her illnesses/injuries) and a lot of it was too tense for me. I will probably finish the series because I want to know the why & what of the worldbuilding. I also want things to work out well for Warden.

3.5/5 stars

67. Spineless by Juli Berwald
audio

This book wasn't quite what I expected. I did learn some things about jellyfish, but I had to learn it alongside the author, and she's just not as interesting as jellyfish. I felt frustrated by the way she expected other people to figure stuff out for her (how to cook jellyfish, which beach are the jellyfish at, etc.) when she could have googled or done more research. I think a better writer could have made a more artful mix of the personal and the science. I also wish she had presented herself as a scientist better, even if this particular field is not her specialty.

4/5 stars

68. No Way Home by Tyler Wetherall
audio

For most of the author's childhood, her father was a fugitive. The family moved around a lot and took on different names. I had a lot of feelings reading this. Having also had a peripatetic childhood (homelessness), I was a big envious of how the father worked so hard to parent from afar (over the phone) and in what visits they were able to arrange. He knew a lot about his children and really wanted to be able to stay in their lives. Of course, as the book went on, I realized what the cost was to his family (harassment by the authorities, living a life of secrets, and in general the psychological strain on the family). Then he began to seem selfish or childish: prioritizing the way he wants to parent over what would be best for the parented children.

I found the book most gripping in the first half, when the author is younger and it's more of an adventure to her. Once the father is caught and the reader learns what his crime was, the book still had me, partly to figure out what was left of the story to tell. I just felt so sorry for the children and their mother: really being able to see the cost because at that point Tyler is old enough to see what's happening and to be able to talk more directly about it. At first, I wasn't sure about the more meta-level, the more present-day scenes about the writing of the book and fact-checking and re-thinking how to focus the story, but it ended up being a rich addendum (chronologically) to what the story is, the point of it.

I loved the sister relationship in the book. They're a couple of years apart and mainly only have each other in the traveling around (in the process becoming aware of a whole network of children of fugitives traveling for Easter or Summer) to be with their father.

4/5 stars

69. The E.T. Guy by V.C. Lancaster
ebook

I liked the worldbuilding I got here, although I wanted more. There seems to be an interstellar war with two alien super powers. The inhabitants of the contested planets (or just the ones caught in the crossfire) become refugees who find homes on the planets of other powers out there, including Earth. The main character, a human woman, works for a governmental agency on Earth that processes refugees when they first arrive on planet. In particular, her job is to provide an orientation to the planet and their status before passing them over to the refugee camp. The love interest, as this is a cross-species romance, is an alien refugee from an earlier arrival. He is the I.T. guy at her job. She's upset because she thinks he's rude to her, exclusively, and that makes him unprofessional. This is a workplace romance, but I also think it might be a mild grumpy/sunshine one where she is the sunshine. Otherwise, I don't quite get the depth of her antipathy towards his brusqueness/taciturness. I mean, really, I kept thinking it was something cultural. My main issue with the book was with her. She seemed to operate with a lot of unchecked privilege and definitely not enough cultural humility. Once they start dating, she seemed to expect him to bend and assimilate, or work to understand her culture's courtship. I wasn't so sure about them as a couple, although I did like him. I would read more in the series, mainly because of the worldbuilding.

4/5 stars

Finally, here's my 2023 thread.