Karen

I really enjoyed reading this book, but when I came to the end I was unsatisfied. When all was said and done, it seemed that the two main characters, Ifemelu and Obinze, had just taken a years long and ocean-spanning detour, only to end up where they meant to be all along. The detour involved a lot of interesting observations about race and racism in America and England, descriptions of hairstyling for kinky hair, and some fascinating but underdeveloped characters (Ifemelu's boyfriends, mostly, but what was the deal with Blaine's sister, Shan?), but did it involve any growth? I learned some things about a non-American black woman's experiences of America, but what did Ifemelu and Obinze learn?

Some other Goodreads reviewers have said that they found Ifemelu unlikeable. She certainly is outspoken, somewhat demanding, brutally honest at times when maybe a lighter touch would make things go more smoothly. I actually had no complaint with this–it made me like her, root for her to succeed, in fact. My question at the end was whether coming back to Nigeria and rekindling her love with Obinze was enough of a success. My heart says no.

I had a hard time settling into this novel about the lives of the English servants at an Irish estate during World War II.

The story takes place in a threatening atmosphere: the servants are English, worried about the safety of their families being bombed in the Blitz, about whether they'd be drafted if they tried to go back home, and also about the possibility of Ireland being invaded by the Germans. Closer to home, they worry about the hidden threat of the IRA, rumored to be as close as the local deliverymen, the insurance agent who comes to investigate a claim, and even one of the property caretakers who speaks with an Irish accent so thick (or is he speaking Irish?) that only one of the English girls can understand him. They are inconvenienced and appalled by the actions of their employers, but their own behavior is pretty capricious– mischievous, playful, wilfully deceptive, selfish. There's a lot of comedy in this book. A Midsummer Night's Dream came to my mind–there's no actual enchantment, but the players are wandering around an old, empty estate that has an air of suspended animation about it.

At first I struggled to keep track of who was who, because a couple of the servants were called by the names of their predecessors, presumably because it was too hard for the employing family to remember new names. One of these servants was about to become the new butler, where he would be called by his real name, provoking discussion among the other servants and confusing me as to why Charley was being called Arthur but would henceforth be called Mr. Raunce. Also, there are two Mrs. Tennants in the employing family, the matriarch and her daughter in law. There is action in fits and starts, but it is represented more by dialogue than by description.

Once I settled in, I enjoyed reading this, but the ending came as a shock and caused me to question whether I had really understood what I was reading. I'm still wondering about that. A challenging read.

Read this for the Luther Seminary book club. Some of us liked it and some of us hated it. The story did not go in any of the directions I expected, which was a good thing. I was impressed with how fully Kunstler had imagined the post-industrial-collapse world and with how the losses and difficulties popped up all through the story, so that I was constantly thinking, “Oh, I hadn't thought about THAT.” There wasn't much to the story itself, but those details made it interesting. I enjoyed it, but probably won't read the rest of the trilogy.

This book tells the stories of three women living by Lake Superior, hundreds of years apart, of different cultures, and yet connected by their connection to the lake. The lake itself has a persona that we glimpse, through the dreams of the women, through the stories that the characters tell about it, through the bodies (both flesh and stone) that are found there. I enjoyed reading this, but I felt the least interest in the character that the book spent the most time with–I would have liked her connection to the others to be stronger, or for the book to have spent more time with the other characters. Still, a really good read, especially for anyone interested in the history of Lake Superior.

I read this book for the “Community” read at the ACRL 2015 conference. Discussion will be later this morning. I had no prior knowledge of the author (although now I can connect her with the stories I'd read about Ms. Marvel, the Pakistani-American, Muslim superhero) or the subject of the book. I found it to be a really moving account of finding community in a place far from “home,” in a religion and culture far from the author's upbringing. I particularly resonated with the author's account of her conversion to Islam–my experience of converting to Christianity as an adult was similar in many ways, from finding to my surprise that I already believed many of the central tenets of a religion I had always thought was incompatible with my most deeply held beliefs to reassuring my atheist family that I was still the same person.

Another compelling part of this book is the author's recognition of the difficulty of communicating the value and beauty she sees in the cultures of Muslim countries to American audiences, who don't have an open mindset toward that topic at this moment. I saw G. Willow Wilson speak last night at the opening of ACRL2015–she is a vibrant speaker, so I am looking forward to the discussion this morning.

I read this book to help me get into the mood to travel–I have a conference to go to in another state but I am a notorious homebody who would usually prefer to stay in my familiar city. Or, if I have to go somewhere new, I want to be able to get home in time for dinner. Rebecca Solnit's book fit the bill perfectly. She presented me with people who were lost for so long that even though they never got back home, they ceased to be lost. And with the myth of a woman who disappeared into the prairie on her way West to meet her husband after immigrating from her home country (it turns out, the real story of her disappearance is different and far less beautiful). Each essay approaches the concept of being lost in a different way, and each essay contains threads of other stories that are connected to lostness in surprising ways. These essays are intricate, beautiful and worth contemplating. I had never read Solnit before, but I am now a big fan.

This was an incredibly satisfying epic novel. It was the kind of read I'm always hoping to find–long, with a wide ranging story and a deep emotional hook, with some danger and discomfort, but at last a resolution of the central problem. I'm so sad it's over.

I'm not big on “American sports team demonstrates the superiority of American society by beating sports team of fascist/communist country” stories, but I enjoyed this book. It focuses on the personal stories of a few of the characters while giving a really interesting social history of the sport of rowing. It delves a bit into the concern some Americans felt about participating in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the propaganda machine that Germany put in place to present themselves in a good light to the rest of the world. A more prominent focus of this book, though, is the assumption that most people had that the best rowing teams were elite, Eastern sons of bankers and senators, and the condescension that the Washington team faced as Western sons of fisherman, farmers and lumberjacks. Even though I knew the conclusion of the story, the journey to get there was gripping.

I don't know how to characterize this book succinctly. Set in 1930's Italy under Fascism, a revolutionary comes back from exile to try to organize his former compatriots, but because of ill health ends up hiding out in a remote village disguised as a priest. As he had studied in a Catholic school and had thought of joining the priesthood, this role has some resonance for him, but it's also uncomfortable because he has rejected religion. For such a grim setting, with such grinding poverty and fatalism everywhere in the novel, there is a surprising amount of humor, too. But side by side with the humor are awful stories of what has happened to the revolutionary's former associates under the fascist regime, and what continues to happen as the story progresses. So, there is a mixture of humor and awfulness in this book that kept me off balance, and that I haven't figured out how to reconcile with a symbolic thread that is also present.

This was not the type of book I usually choose–it was given to me as a gift–but the revolutionary/priest character was so interesting (simultaneously crotchety and sympathetic) that once I was introduced to him, I wanted to find out what he was going to do next. I enjoyed reading this and have spent quite a bit of time thinking about it since I finished.

This is a really great teen novel, told from multiple perspectives, about the shooting of a young black man by a white man and the aftermath for the community where the shooting took place. On the face of it, it's a simple story told through the experiences of the people affected by the shooting. The author does a beautiful job of showing how the effects of the shooting ripple out from the immediate community to touch people surprisingly far away, and she creates voices for her characters that feel authentic, however likable or unlikable they may be. The result is a deep and painfully human story that doesn't offer any easy answers for the problems it depicts, but offers hope in the resilience of some of its characters.

This book was chosen for the Saint Paul Public Library's 2015 Read Brave program, a community reading/teen reading program. The Luther Seminary Book Club read and discussed it in January, and some of the participants expressed interest in attending author events in February.

The right book at the right time. This was a fun, absorbing read. It falters a bit at times, but overall it is a great retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses fairy tale.

This is a haunting story about a young woman, Fan, who sets out from her relatively safe home in what used to be Baltimore in search of her boyfriend, who has disappeared. The dystopia she moves in is highly structured in its settled areas, but pretty much a free-for-all in the “counties” between settlements. The story is about both Fan's journey and the after effects of her departure on the psyches of people in B-Mor, told by an enigmatic, anonymous narrator in B-Mor. There are themes of safety and security vs. vulnerability to harm, integrity in relationships between people, and what conditions people will accept to ensure stability in their lives.

I have more to say but will have to try to fill out this review later.

This book delivers just what it promises, in a well-written, gently humorous package. Oliver Burkeman uses Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, as well as sober thinking about failure, safety and death, to explore a way of being happy without lying to ourselves about how hard life can be.

Gorgeous. That is all.
I am going to have to re-read Gilead.

This was a good weekend read. I wish it didn't have “The female Cormac McCarthy!” emblazoned on its cover. The story is harsh but beautiful in the way that some Cormac McCarthy novels are, but it has a different kind of heart. Also, I didn't know before I read it, but it is the fictionalized account of the life of a real person, Jessie Hickman, a female outlaw. If I had to compare this book to any other, it would be Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. Anyway, I recommend it, but don't read it while eating.

A lot of this was over my head, as it is a kind of philosophy I'm not familiar with, with a history I don't know. However, the outline of the story of the Yoga Sutra is fascinating in a shadowy way, and the methods historians use to deduce facts that are hidden are interesting to read about. There are also centuries of colorful characters involved in the story of the Yoga Sutra, leading up to the luminaries of the 20th century, Krishnamacharya, B.K.S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois. The book is written in an approachable style and I enjoyed reading it on lunch breaks, on the bus, and before bed.

I like this book so much I read it twice. It is a retelling of the Aeneid from the point of view of Lavinia, the king's daughter whom Aeneas marries when he arrives in Italy. However, unlike Marion Zimmer Bradley's disappointing retellings of famous stories, this is a rich book in its own right. It thinks about the relationship of the storyteller to his characters and how famous stories shape the people who know and live with them. It also thinks about the society that Aeneas came to, how it was similar to the Greek society he had left, and how it was different in important ways. I highly recommend.

This book is about some of the ways that the uniqueness of England's culture and landscape is being homogenized by economic policies that favor large corporate interests over small, local interests. Kingsnorth looks at the replacement of pubs that reflect local character with chain “pubs” that market themselves to certain populations instead of serving as a gathering place for a community, the loss of family farms to agribusiness, the loss of unique, locally owned stores in towns and villages across England to large out-of-town supermarkets and chain stores. The book is focused on England, but what Kingsnorth is pointing out can be found here in America, too. Everywhere you go, you find the same stores with the same merchandise–to an extent that was not the case when I was a kid. In some ways it's reassuring to know that when you go to Wichita, KS you'll be able to find the restaurants and drugstores you're used to, but it's disappointing, too. Traveling somewhere new is far less of an adventure. I've noticed this for a long time, so finding this book was gratifying, because it doesn't seem like something that people find worth talking about–beyond occasional news about a plucky town that successfully fights off a new Walmart.

Kingsnorth has plenty of examples of English uniqueness being destroyed by powerful corporate interests, but he also has a few heartening examples of people or communities who have been able to preserve their pub or store or farm. As I read, I was encouraged to be able to think of all the unique businesses, communities, institutions that make Twin Cities and Minnesota culture distinctive. Kingsnorth makes some interesting arguments about needing to develop a sense of Englishness that is based on geography or place rather than biology so that people can find English culture worth defending without fear of being called racist or xenophobic. Although the book is focused only on England (and not Great Britain), its points are easily translatable to other contexts. Kingsnorth is an engaging writer and I heartily recommend Real England.

A quick, engrossing read about a young girl, the child of a Nigerian mother and an English father, who causes trouble for her family, teachers and schoolmates because of her sensitivity. Her parents take her to Nigeria to meet the African side of her family, but her troubles take a frightening turn when she befriends a mysterious girl about her own age named Titiola.

This story has a supernatural element to it. Thankfully it has not been made into a movie–if it were, it would probably become a horror movie, but there is more to the story than that. I enjoyed the book and it only took a couple of hours to read.

Nancy Koester tells the story of Harriet Beecher Stowe's life in a readable and compelling style. She emphasizes Harriet's spiritual growth over the course of her life, which was a central factor in her writing Uncle Tom's Cabin as well as her many other books. I enjoyed reading this and gained a new appreciation for the character of Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the history of New England Calvinism, the abolition movement and the fledgling women's rights movement.

I read this for the book club at work. The book club read it because the author is coming to our institution next week to read from and talk about her book. Looking forward to it.

I'm not rating this because I only got to p. 73. I'm not tough enough to read this book, although I would like to be able to. The narrator, Dr. Aue, is a fascinating character who has enough self awareness to describe his getting involved with the Nazis as being drawn in by the Devil, but who also deceives himself about his ability to cope with the atrocities he has committed. However, I can't cope with reading in harrowing detail about the atrocities, so I will leave this book for others to review.

Goodreads' description is a little over the top, but this is definitely a dark book with many layers. Unsettling and alarming things start happening to the main character. He sets out to try to understand what is going on, but in a secretive way that seems designed to make things worse. His thinking is skewed. More alarming things happen and things do get worse. The world in this book is a barren, wet, polluted place. I liked that there was no big reveal at the end, like in old-fashioned mysteries where all the perplexing details get explained to the mystified innocents.

I'm bowled over by the beauty of this memoir. Kao Kalia Yang writes the history of her family with such simplicity, but it's a story of hardship and endurance at least as much as a story of family love. These two sentences, from near the end of the book, bring to bear much of the emotional weight of the story: “My grandmother's death (in 2003) was the first natural death in our family since 1975. It was the outcome we had been struggling so long for: a chance to die naturally, of old age, after a full life.” Tales of genocide in Laos and overcrowding in the refugee camp in Thailand to grinding poverty in the United States are stark, but they are told with such love for the people in them, even people the author knew only through the stories heard from others, that they shine.

I'm so glad to be done with this book! It is full of interesting information but disappointing to read because of its meandering (lack of) organization and its glibness about assessing the strength of various movements or arguments in the history of atheism. I am coming away from the book with a sense that atheism has often been thought to be a stance on the source of moral or political authority. However, the 20th century, with its authoritarian regimes seeking (and failing) to stamp out religion in favor of a scientific world view has changed the conversation somewhat. The last chapter in the book was intriguing in its critique of what it called the New Atheism–Christopher Hitchens and others painting all religious belief as adherence to a set of historical/factual propositions (as in Christian fundamentalism) and thus worthy of ridicule–but Spencer doesn't do enough to fill out his arguments. My main source of enjoyment in reading this book was in the amusing anecdotes about characters in the history of atheism. Unfortunately, they were not enough to make this a satisfying read.

A lovely, wistful story of a young woman sent from her town in Ireland to New York in the 1950's in order to find work. The things the characters know or understand about each other but never speak about leads to a kind of heartbreak, but also make a new life possible. This one will stay with me for a while.