Becca

I consider myself a pretty sizable Batman fan. I've seen all of the movies...well, all of the good ones, anyway; I consider myself above Batman vs. Superman. But I'm not much of a comic geek. I find comic books nearly impenetrable with the layers upon layers of necessary backstory. Which is why a history of the lives and times of the batman and how they fit among the surrounding cultural milieu was pretty interesting to me. I found bits overly pedantic, or a little unmoored from the greater history, and there were times that I wished Weldon would offer more speculation as to why, for instance, there's been a huge resurgence of super-hero culture, but overall, I appreciated this serious and thorough take on one of the biggest cultural icons of American history.

Every year, I hit a book that I really struggle to review and as a result, my reviews taper off. It's still early, but I'm pretty sure that All the Birds in the Sky is that book for 2017. To quote a friend, it's just really less than the sum of its parts, and that makes it really hard to discuss.

The first part was truly brilliant: a boy builds a two second time machine (only forwards, not backwards, of course) and a girl discovers that she can talk to birds and together they fight crime commiserate about being stuck in the wrong genre. In this part, the magical elements are so small, and brought into contrast with larger than life reality – super strict parents, super out-of-touch teachers, a guidance counselor/assassin – and together it's just really a special conversation about what it is that we're discussing when we write and read and reread coming of age teen magician books. I loved that they weren't like each other, but they clung to each other because neither of them was like anyone else. In a lot of key ways, it reminded me of my own relationship with my own best friend.

I liked the decision to skip over both of them coming into their own and go right to them as independent young adults. I thought it was brave to leave out any details of the Special Secret School for Witches. The tone of the next part lost some of the contrast of small magic/big life/quirky offshoots that are funny but not overpowering, but it was still riding on the strength of the beginning. Some of the ideas introduced were really clever (like the guy who turns into nature once he leaves his bookshop) and others fell a little flat for me (like the way witches were totally obsessed with not becoming too arrogant), but overall, I really liked the central tension between saving the world and saving humanity and found that compelling.

Then, holy non-sequitur, Batman! We enter a massive time jump, to stop one month in to have 1.5 pages of Patricia and Lawrence having sex, their social falling out and Lawrence's girlfriend both having been erased during the time jump. But no sooner do we turn the page, then there's another several months of time jump. If you have to stop your time jump in the middle to show your readers coitus, you're doing something wrong. But I probably should have just walked away, because after this, I felt that the characterization completely fell apart and a lot of the storytelling hinged on deus ex machinae and false dilemmas.

So, strong start, I'd like to see Anders' next work, but I probably won't reread this; at least not all of the way through.

Being Jewish is a fundamental part of my identity, but being raised in a small midwestern city with no Orthodox community outside of a single Lubavitch family, I had very little insight into the yawning divide between me, what Leah Vincent refers to as a “Lox-and-bagels, my son the doctor, Woody Allen Jew” (except I hate Woody Allen) and Charedi (Ultra-orthodox) Jews. I kind of always assumed that Charedim were like me, just more. Yes, more synagogue, more Kosher, more Shabbat observing, but also more of the cultural tropes of American Jewry: highly educated, wealthy, liberal.

So, if you've ever actually met a Charedi Jew, you'll know that I was in for a surprise when I moved to Philadelphia for medical training and joined the pediatric hospital that provides care for the children of Lakewood, NJ. I realized that the gulf between me and the Orthodoxy wasn't a matter of degree, but was a true cultural divide. I was fascinated by the commitment to making Judaism the sole, core identity, avoiding secular books, TV and education in many cases. And I was stunned by families that avoided ever visiting their children with genetic diseases, in case the rumor got out in their community that they had a genetic disease in the family. My bosses had to explain first the entire concept of Shidduch (Jewish matchmaking) and then that the presence of a genetic disease in the family would affect Shidduch for all of the siblings, even though we knew that they weren't carriers.

What I'm saying is that I had the context to understand why Leah's family cut her off when she started to slide off the derech. Nonetheless, her tale is heart-wrenching. I would find myself getting frustrated with her decisions and then she'd slip in a note about her age. Most of the book takes place over the course of her teen years: she leaves her family home around 15 to go to England, gets sent to live independently in Israel at 16 and then is expected to be completely independent, including financially independent in NYC at 17. To the secular world that summary alone is startling.

I wish Vincent had spent more time on the relationship between her and her parents, her and Judaism, and her life prior to leaving the Charedi community. The bulk of the book is a very awkward series of, at best, semi-consensual sexual encounters written full of uncomfortable details. These depictions are sad, but ultimately (and sadly) redundant. I think most people reading this book are like me: deeply curious about Charedi life and looking for reflections from the inside. I appreciate that Vincent has instead crafted a book that is more of a memoir for her, but it feels a little like a waste to me. She has written numerous articles that are much more reflective pieces and discuss her relationship with the Charedi community now, and her relationship with Judaism. I think more of that incorporated into Cut Me Loose would have made for a more complete book.

I tend to think of classic SciFi being super hard scifi filled with impenetrable words and implausibly humanoid alien species. Chocky is, if anything, the opposite: in fact, it's at least equal part 1950's British domestic comedy. This short novella is fascinating if nothing else as a piece of history. Chocky herself – an alien that my goodreads notes say Margaret Atwood compared favorably to ET, is a very benign domestic spirit, interested in binary math, drawing, swimming and sustainable energy.

Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of Chocky is that Matthew, the child actually faced with the supernatural being, is definitely not the protagonist. Rather the story focuses on his father's reaction to and coping with Chocky's presence. I think it compares quite favorably to the Riverman, a more modern novel vaunted for the same technique.

Still, 150 mass market paperback pages don't give a lot of space to have much there. Now that scifi has been tread as a path many times in the intervening years, I don't think Chocky aged as well as it could have. It's fun, but not particularly novel or profound any more.

The fact that I have now read all of the linguistic books written by Margalit Fox is a little sad. She is a complete master. In Talking Hands, Fox manages to ingratiate herself into a sign language linguistic group studying Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). Her depictions of Bedouin life in Al-Sayyid are, in and of themselves, worthy of a book. But Fox chooses to use alternate chapters to explore the history of signed languages and sign language linguistics. Her writing is never obtuse, but she manages to go more deeply into the subject than I thought possible in a book for the layreader. I had always known that ASL is a “true language” and “not English,” through working with Deaf activists, but I never really had insight into what that meant. Fox exhaustively presents the evidence that ASL is a language (and ABSL and ISL and dozens of other sign languages) and then expands into exploring the consistent phenotypes between sign languages (they all have three types of verbs: agreeing verbs, moving verbs and plain verbs! They all have symmetry in their movements if both hands are used. They all constrain hand shapes.)

She then takes the whole thing a step further to explain what the study of sign languages in general, and village signs in specific, mean to our understanding about language. She talks about Chomsky and the discovery of language as an innate human skill, that will inevitably develop. She talks about the maturation of language over time (did you know that different languages have variable numbers of colors identifiable? And that, for instance, if there are three color words they will always mean white, black and red?)

Fox is scientifically thorough and thoroughly entertaining. I learned so much from this book and enjoyed every minute.

I wish I hadn't gone into this book on false pretenses. Jon told me that it was one of his favorite books from 2016 and that “A girl either lives in a fantasy book and it's not clear which.” Only to me, there was absolutely no ambiguity. At all. Yes, Alistair, the ostensible protagonist, thought it might be that she was being abused, but his narratives of how that might make sense of the situation were at least three times more far-fetched than just taking Fiona's story at face value. In fact, if not outright told that there was supposed to be ambiguity, I would have taken for granted that it was a fantasy novel.

And honestly, once I got over being annoyed at the lack of ambiguity, it's a fine fantasy novel. It's a little cliche in parts, but there is something really unique about reading a fantasy novel from a point of view other than that of the clear protagonist. What is it like to bear witness to someone else's story? To be an outsider to time passing in non-linear ways? These are really interesting questions and place a new spin on the time-worn tale of Girl Finds a Fantasy World and Can Stay There Indefinitely, While Time is Paused in the “Real World,” But the Fantasy World is Threatened and Only She Can Save it. Starmer also takes a really morally grey, dark tone with the real world and it infuses the whole atmosphere of the book with a kind of creepy overtone, which plays well with the duality of the narratives that he intended, even if it wasn't fully realized.

I haven't decided yet whether I'll continue on with this series. My concern is that all of the innovation is done in Riverman and the future books will only have the tired tropes of fantasyland to play with. But ultimately, while Riverman wasn't the book I thought it would be, I'm glad I read it.

I don't know what it says about me that I found Bonk much more cringeworthy gross than Stiff or Gulp. But it's true. I found myself crossing my legs and making uncomfortable faces more than laughing guiltily through it, like I did through Mary Roach's other work. Perhaps part of that is that the lurid fascination with sex in society meant that a lot of her insights were less novel than in her other books. Perhaps Roach had not yet found her narrative voice. Perhaps I wasn't in the right mood.

Nonetheless, Bonk is a decent book and would perhaps be even more well-liked by those new to Roach's work, with preset high standards. Roach certainly knows no limits in taking an active role in journalism, going so far as participating in a study on 3-D ultrasounds during intercourse. But I agree with my goodreads friends, who felt like Bonk had fewer “Wow!” moments than Roach's other works.

I love Veronica Mars more than probably any other TV show in the history of TV. It's certainly the only show I ever donated to the kickstarter of. The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line reads exactly like a Veronica Mars episode – the pacing's the same, the visuals are the same, the mandatory cameos of the season regulars are the same – to the point that I could imagine the commercial breaks. And it's fun. It has Rob Thomas' characteristic wit and depending on how fast you read you might, like me, find that it's in fact less of a time commitment than watching an episode.

Downsides? Maybe I just don't have Veronica momentum any more. This just didn't really stick with me. It didn't have the context that a VM episode did, so it mostly felt like a filler one-off episode. I want wry class commentary, anti-hero feminism and friendly camaraderie. Oh, Veronica, we used to be friends, a long time ago, but I have yet to see a high school show that makes the transition to post-high school and retains its je ne sais quoi.

My first real rotation after I moved to Philadelphia for residency nearly 7 years ago was the well-baby nursery. Every morning, we'd present about 30 new babies born the previous day, and another 30-40 that were 2-3 days old and the South Philly-native attending would nod along. Every once in awhile, something about a baby would strike her as unusual and she'd respond to the presentation with “Call Noro.” Eventually, it was my turn to get the instruction: “Call Noro.” I looked Noro up in our paging system only to find that there was no Dr. Noro. This still didn't strike me as unusual, since the nursery was in the adult hospital and we (the residents and the paging system) were part of the pediatric hospital, I figured Noro must be a pediatrician on staff for the adult hospital to cover just the nursery. So I found one of my co-residents who had gone to med school at our program and asked her how to call Noro. She gave me a strange look, pulled up the pager system and typed “Neurology” into the service field. “Oh,” I said, “I didn't realize that Dr. Noro is a neurologist.” She laughed and said, “No, not Dr. Noro, neuro.” As a midwesterner, neuro, to me shares a first sound with “nerve.” Similarly, I don't pronounce water “wooder”, and I find the word hoagie to sound vaguely dirty, rather than a generic word for sandwich. It was a hard first year.

So that's basically this book. Who says what how and what does it mean to them, displayed as a series of heat maps. It was fun to pick up my childhood town, Madison, WI, as largely an isolated bubble on most of the maps, reflecting the imported nature of most of the people there. It was sometimes hilarious to read about what things are called elsewhere. This was a webpage awhile ago and I had played with it then, but Katz has fleshed it out for the book. The result is both entertaining casual browsing and decently aesthetically appealing for a coffee table.

Well, that was a huge chore. Shulevitz ostensible set out to explore the history of Shabbat and whether it still has meaning in the modern age. I would still read the heck out of that book, if anyone would like to write it.

But not Shulevitz. I will never read anything she writes ever again. I've read a lot of bad books, but rarely finished a book with such a strong antipathy for an author. It's not just Shulevitz's writing style, although there's certainly a lot to complain about there:
the prose is disorganized and often self-contradictory (some examples: in one portion Christians celebrating Sabbath on Sunday were considered anti-Shabbat, and in another the same activity is considered Sabbatizing; Christians don't celebrate a Sabbath in the Roman world because it's too hard when you're a minority group, but in the previous chapter, being a minority group is given as a reason that Jews persisted in celebrating Shabbat); the topic selection is eclectic enough to be completely dismissive of the reader – pages of quoting Wordsworth because he once wrote a poem in which a single line references the Sabbath? An entire section on the author's experience in a talmud study group with no discussion of Shabbat at all? Why not, I guess...
*the completely undeserved authoritative tone. At one point Shulevitz quotes several rabbis saying one thing and then follows that up with “but I think [the complete opposite]”, without any reason, then continues on as though her point of view is clearly the correct one. In another, following several pages of quotes from the New Testament about Jesus breaking the Sabbath she says “Obviously, the historic Jesus observed Shabbat.” Really, obviously? We'll just take it as a given that Jesus was shomer shabbat in face of all available evidence because...Shulevitz says so?

But also, the slim autobiographical sections displayed the same personality. In writing about her mother becoming a rabbi in her 50's (P.S. I would totally read that autobiography), Shulevitz relays that because no congregation would accept a female rabbi, her mother became a hospital chaplain. She then dismisses reports that her mother got extremely good feedback on her bedside manner by saying “my mother never had patience for the sick.” Then follows that up with the most offensive statement I've ever read in a modern book: “she was basically a glorified nurse”. Yes, that's right, chaplains? Glorified nurses. As someone who works alongside both chaplains and nurses, I struggled to decide on whose behalf I was more horrified. She then states that the whole situation was so troubling to Shulevitz (Why? Unclear.) that she had to go to psychoanalysis.

As an aside, Shulevitz loves psychoanalysis. She starts the intro by comparing Shabbat to psychoanalysis, because they both are considered antiquated, but are valuable. Or, I mean, psychoanalysis is a completely debunked form of pseudoscience, but whatever. She then spends the first chapter writing about Jewish psychoanalytics, including Freud, and speaks extensively and lovingly about Freud in the conclusion.

More evidence that Shulevitz is exactly as she portrays herself: A hilarious passage in which she says that she was frequently asked if she was going to become a Rabbi, since she knew scripture so well. She appears to have no insight into the fact that her knowledge of scripture, consisting of a single adult Talmud class, is quite lean.

Beyond my antipathy towards Shulevitz, the book was also frustratingly not any one thing. She never even articulates what a standard Shabbat would look like to an Orthodox family, instead strictly equating “Sabbath” with “free time” except for one confused passage where she tries to distinguish different types of Sabbaths, but puts Dickens' Sabbath in as contrasting subtypes “romantic” and “scientific” in different paragraphs. She seems to have done no research at all, which she excuses by calling this book an “autobiography”. And yet, for an autobiography, there's really not much there, either. I know that Shulevitz was raised Jewish and didn't like religion. She went to a Jewish overnight camp, where she felt the least educated in Judaism. Then she went on one date with an orthodox guy. Then she went to the synagogue that was the set for the Melanie Griffith/orthodox movie, because it was the movie set, but kept going back and crying in the back. Then she went to an adult talmud class, where she developed a crush on the rabbi. Then she stopped going to synagogue. Then she started going to synagogue again, because she got married. Now she tries to keep Shabbat, but mostly fails. Her children go to Jewish day school, but don't believe in G-d. That is literally the entirety of the autobiographical information in the book, with no more exploration into why these things have happened or what they mean to her.

I almost gave back a star for the admittedly interesting study of the Sabbatarian sects of Christianity, including the Anabaptist schism and the heaving Judaized Christianity of Transylvania. That was cool and novel to me. But less than 10% of the book, and given her error-prone statements in the parts of the book where I had background knowledge, I just can't trust anything she says.

This was a cute little pro-reading book for kids. The core messages: work together and read books, were a little heavy-handed for an adult reader. The puzzles were cute, but relatively slim (the characters solved any of the puzzles quite quickly, so the reader didn't have a lot of time to puzzle through.) It's hard to tell as an adult reader whether this will hold up to true classics of the genre, such as the Westing Game, but I'll definitely get it for my daughter when she's old enough.

I found Dietland an easy and compelling read, but I'm still a little unsure how I feel about it in terms of who its intended audience is and what it was designed to do.

It's hard to take Dietland out of the context of its author – Sarai Walker has a PhD in gender studies, with a thesis focusing on how body weight policing intersects with feminism. Dietland clearly arose out of that interest and is done with an extremely scholarly bent.

There are two intertwining narratives: Plum (Alicia)'s self-discovery narrative, where she emerges from a spiral of self-hate, yoyo dieting and living in the future. This part is beautifully done – even as a woman who has never been overweight, I'm embarrassed to admit how much Plum's hoard of clothing that didn't fit (yet) and delay of activities until she could be her ideal (thin) self resonated. I think everyone puts off things until the time is right/they are better people/there is more money, but for women, the synonymy of ideal self and thinner self seems persistent. I felt that this was a really important area to explore. The narrative especially focuses on Plum's use of the “Baptist” diet plan (a thinly veiled Jenny Craig clone) and the way that this diet plan keeps women addicted and prevents them from really slimming down. Verena Baptist, the daughter of the founder of the Baptist plan is a health at every size advocate who shows Plum that she can be her “real self” while being fat. In the meantime, she also inducts Plum into a feminist collective.

The second narrative is about a group of female vigilantes who retaliate against sex criminals and the sexualization of women. Many people seem to feel repulsed by this part of the narrative, but Walker's main focus seems to be the thought experiment about if people were truly punished for the objectification of women, would that then empower women to speak out? In the process, Walker highlights the many daily ways in which women are degraded. Although I consider myself a staunch feminist, I was shocked about the things to which I've become enured: the commercialization of making women feel self-conscious about their bodies and the double standard of the use of the female body for advertising in particular.

My uncertainty is this: Walker, it seems, set out to write an Important Feminist Novel. Dietland is also fun and easy to read. However, I'm not sure it has much of a voice beyond the feminist community, where it's kind of preaching to the choir. It's hard to imagine someone who didn't already identify with Walker's message getting through even the first 100 pages of Dietland. Perhaps it will hit home to “choice feminists.”
In addition, I thought the fictionalization of the Baptist Plan really trivialized the many important criticisms of the weight loss fascination in America. I wish that Walker had used a real example (as she did with the lingerie store V—— S—–). In particular, I was really disappointed that in the “suggested reading” section Walker listed many fictional resources, but no non-fiction ones.

Aw, this was cute. Yes, all of the characters had their moments of idiocy, which were painful to read about, but accurate to adolescence. I thought the handling of trans issues was done well. This would be a good introductory book to trans issues for a teen or parent of a teen, but didn't come off as overly didactic.

This book about the ways in which being over-driven, over-ambitious and over-scheduled is sucking the life out of teenagers may have been novel when it was published, but to my ear it has all been discussed to death already in many other fora. What set this book apart was the individual case studies that Robbins did of students at her Alma Mater, Walt Whitman. Although she refers to them as “Overachievers,” it was honestly my opinion that with a couple of exceptions, they were pretty average students, with a small handful of extracurriculars and GPAs in the high 3's. Nonetheless, I found myself drawn to them and their stories.

The researched portions felt pretty redundant and Robbins didn't have much novel to add in them. Also, I found her breathless scare tactics a little dated, given that it's my experience that now that the overachievers are old enough to have kids of our own, it's a huge status symbol to underschedule your kids, put them in play-based preschools or opt out of preschool entirely and not pressure them. Who knows if that'll stick as our kids get older, but certainly the horrors of Baby Einstein and Baby Galileo are remnants of a past era.

I also found that there were some parts that stuck out – that in the drive to make a point, Robbins just put in everything that sounded like it fit, whether or not it was a good idea. For instance, she complains about summer homework. Summer homework and summer curriculae are the best evidence-based interventions to bridge the gap between lower and upper class students that develops over summers. Similarly, she decries full-day kindergarten, which I see as a necessary invention in the women's liberation movement. I also wish she had talked more about the effects of burnout on long-term career success, which scored only a glancing mention at the end.

Still, I found it a kind of fun and easy to read what was essentially a rant about a topic on which I mostly share the same view.

For a 450 book in which pretty much nothing happens, The Goblin Emperor sure is a fast read. Nearly all plot is sacrificed for Addison to explore the character development of the new emperor, Maia, and even more than that to build her setting. The political intrigue is nuanced and intricate, without ever feeling too difficult to follow (although I will say that the naming conventions are hard to keep track of and it took me 250 pages to realize that there was a reference index at the back.)

Jon tells me that the book borrows wholesale from the Ottoman Empire, but my own world history is too weak to appreciate the parallels. Nonetheless, I found it perfectly enjoyable without understanding the allusions. Instead, I really enjoyed Addison's world, which felt totally self-sufficient and detailed, with a consistent language, multiple related religions and customs.

I really wanted to like this book, a lot. It has had so much fantastic press, and I've read a lot of great fiction and nonfiction set in the Amazon lately. However, the set up was just so disorganized. Grann tries to interweave the narratives of Percy Fawcett, the great Amazon explorer; subsequent expeditions looking for Fawcett and his own journey to the Amazon. This intertwining dilutes all three of the stories and is confusing to jump among. In addition, he discusses precise locations in the Amazon, but none of them are actually labelled on the map in the frontispiece.

The whole thing was so frustrating, because there actually is a really interesting story about survival, exploration and the age in which we knew so little about the world and had so few resources, but human curiosity drove us to investigate anyway. I wish that Grann had avoided the overdone move of going on his own Amazon expedition – it really didn't add to the story and the “denouement” in which he discovered “Z” was really him just meeting up with an archeologist from the University of Florida, who shared his research, which had already been published, anyway.

I did enjoy reading about the different Amazonian tribes and their beliefs, but wish that this book had been written by any actual expert (perhaps said Florida archeologist?) rather than a twee amateur.

My original note said “Connie Willis wrote a new novel! It's about telepathy and our overcommunicated world! “ It's also about helicopter mothers, social media, Joan of Arc, sugared cereals, Bridey Murphy, online dating, zombie movies, Victorian novels, and those annoying songs you get stuck in your head and can't get rid of!” I want it RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” So, let's be clear: I think it was literally impossible for any book to match how high my expectations got.

And it is a good book: Connie Willis at her Connie Willis-est: using some soft sci-fi, comedy of manners and a heavy dose of rom-com to develop a pointed parable on Issues of Our Time (in this case, cellphones and over-connectivity.) And it's fun, but perhaps because I've read basically everything she's ever written, it felt like re-reading a Willis novel, rather than its own brand new thing. I knew the beats, I could predict what would happen at each turn. And it was warm and cozy and fun, but not new.

Also, the genetics were crap. That's not what recessive means and the telepathic pedigrees definitely weren't compatible with an AR gene. Next time, go for autosomal dominant with incomplete penetrance – great for most hand-wavy situations. Even better, Connie, next time you want to write a novel on the genetics of telepathy? Call me! I still love you!

My preordered copy came in the day before Rosh Hashanah. On the second day, after services were over (my synagogue runs short and under-populated on the second day), the house quiet without electricity and my toddler at daycare, the idea of just reading a little was unbelievably tempting, albeit borderline sacrilegious. And of course, once I started, Tana French's writing was addictive.

I remember very little of the “central” mystery. What I remember about is the creeping, burning embarrassment of self-recognition reading about how Antoinette Conway nearly let a mystery go unsolved because she was so caught up in how others saw her. Many mystery novels have the “stupid plot” error, where an idiot could solve the mystery if they simply followed the obvious clues, and so the writers have to make the brilliant detective look over the one clear next step to prevent the novel from early closure. In this case, there's no inconsistency: French's novel is literally about the narrative that Conway tells about herself of being an isolated loner. The mystery is window-dressing for the consequences of letting yourself be seduced into such a narrative, and the hard climb back out.

So in the end, it was pretty apropos of the holiday – I'm definitely guilty of perpetuating negative self-narratives, and choosing to fail rather than challenge them. And I felt inspired by French to try to do better this year.

I didn't expect to learn much from this book – vitamins are pretty much my day job. I (think) I know every biochemical reaction relevant to human metabolism that requires a vitamin or mineral cofactor. If someone has been prescribed vitamins to actually help them, rather than act as a placebo, it's a pretty high chance that it was prescribed by me or one of my colleagues. So, vitamins, I know them. And like most people who actually understand vitamin biochemistry, I also have a deep skeptical place in my heart for the use of vitamins as pseudoscience. So much so that during my pregnancy, I took pure folic acid rather than a prenatal multi-vitamin.

But Vitaminia was fun anyway. Price spends a lot of time focusing on the history of nutritionalism: how we understood that food was made of of molecules, identified what they were and realized that they were necessary. The experiments along the way to prove that. Price also explores food and vitamin safety regulations over the years, and the absence of supplement safety regulation in the modern era. I found this a fun and fast read.

I usually am pretty opposed to short stories. They tail off just as things get interesting. But Kelly Link is different. Kelly Link doesn't really write stories – short or otherwise – her work is something completely different. She operates outside of the usual logic of narrative. Although, to be fair, perhaps my favorite of her works is the most conventional: The Specialists Hat, which I've read in other collections, is just so undeniably spooky. The atmosphere of dread is palpable, and Link sets it up perfectly, you read it thinking that everything might just turn out fine (even though I've read it before) and she gets you just at the last moment.

Her other works in this collection are more atmospheric riddles than stories, per se, but she does them well, with rich atmospheres and a sense of a consistent mythology just beyond the reader's grasp. There's just something really nice about reading someone who's doing something no one else is.

I take it back: [a:Lydia Netzer 4886414 Lydia Netzer https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1384708162p2/4886414.jpg] apparently has more than one book in her. This is not a book about a quirky astronomy-obsessed person and their equally quirky love interest! Who knew (full disclosure: I will read that book as many times as Lydia Netzer cares to write it.) Nonetheless, the concept really allows Netzer's true talent of inventing infinite ultra-quirky characters to shine. You see, there's this baby, and its parents, and then all of its kickstarter backers, each of whom has their own reason for getting involved. The parents, Jenna and Billy, are each well-written and their relationship feels realistic, with the conflict being compelling rather than over-the-top. I thought that the take on crowdsourcing was a little cliche, and perhaps a little on the nose given the GoFundMes for fertility that now exist in real life, but it has been two years since it was written, so there is that. Nonetheless, it's a fun exploration of how the more grassroots part of the internet affects us.

Space is fascinating. Space is fascinating because it is big and because it's filled with unknown stuff and it is fascinating because it is profoundly isolating. Most sci-fi can only handle at most two of those things. In fact, most sci-fi focuses on disposing of the isolation of space as quickly as possible. In contrast, The Martian dials up isolation and down exploration. This shouldn't work, but it does and it's awesome.

The whole book reads kind of like a merge of an escape the room game and an episode of MacGyver, except set on Mars. The entire first sequence is Mark trying to do the algebra and botany to figure out how to create a farm from his own stool and the provisions in his emergency kit. The utter solitude of Mark on Mars is omnipresent for the first third of the book, and I really enjoyed contemplating that. If your speed is more space opera, this runs slow and technical. There's a lot of math and a lot of science and a lot of facts about Mars.

It's also really novel and deeply enjoyable to read a book where the conflicts are people versus the environment. All of the characters in this book (and eventually, there is more than one) get along and work as a team. On the one hand, Weir cares little for his characters and most of them read flat, on the other hand, it really optimizes the exploration of what really smart people, working together at their best can accomplish. I have no freaking clue how they made this into an enjoyable movie, BTW, maybe watching that should go on to my to-do list.

I think this book may be better titled “Harry Potter is a Terrible Dad,” but that would break the grammar of the titles, I suppose.

That being said, this was the right book for this time in my life and my current relationship with Harry Potter. I'm a little younger/older than Harry – Harry himself was born two years before I was, but the series didn't become widely available in the US until I was 17, so 6 years older than Harry. Nonetheless, I mostly felt about the same age and facing the same trials and tribulations – I read about OWLS and NEWTS in between college finals, and rooted for Ron and Hermione around my own engagement. And as a teen, the exploratory world-building was right up my alley.

And on the flipside, a book focused on an older, more harried, Harry is right for me right now. The more introspective tone about setting priorities and how much to force people to live the life you wish they would was also right for me right now. Yes, I wanted the nostalgia of a real Harry Potter book, but this was good.

I felt less certain about the return of the time-turners – Rowling herself has said their inclusion was a mistake in the initial series and was quite adamant that they were all destroyed. On the other hand, if they had to come back this was the right time and the right purpose. I liked that the use of the time-turner helped highlight all of the additional possible futures in the face of years of internet speculation of what the future of the potterverse may hold.

I loved [b:Shine Shine Shine 13167199 Shine Shine Shine Lydia Netzer https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1325702786s/13167199.jpg 16422717], so I jumped on this when I found it in our local little library. In conclusion, I think Lydia Netzer basically can only write one book. Also, I'm pretty sure I will happily read that book as many different ways as she would like to write it. The book is this: quirky and star-obsessed scientist(s) – in Shine Shine Shine an astronomer; here a pair of astrophysicists – face obstacles in their love for each other, but are just too quirky to really integrate with the rest of society. The conclusion is a light, but deep-hearted, geeky romantic comedy formula that seems to be just my speed.I was worried the premise of the mothers setting up their children to be soul-mates would turn out to be twee, but the twists it took from the back cover saved it, in addition to the other plot elements. I liked that Irene and George were full characters with personalities and goals beyond their romance and the quirkiness. This isn't a perfect novel – George and Irene's respective initial significant others are pretty one-dimensional and seem to exist for comic relief alone. A bizarre narwhal-filled interlude is cute but unharmonious with the rest of the novel. It's clear it was Netzer's pet scene (and she says as much in the afterword) and she couldn't quite pull it out even when it was clear it wasn't working. Lydia Netzer may only write one book, but, in my foray into literary fiction I've learned that 90% of literary fiction is the same retread “modern novel” over and over and it's very dull. So I'll take her repetitive, but geeky, quirky and fresh novel as many different ways as she wants to write it.

Man, this book was overwritten. I think Horn must have intended it to be exclusively read by high school freshman literature classes. In fact, I believe that to such an extent, I feel a little bad about not writing this review as a five-paragraph essay. “How could that be a bad thing?” You might ask. Here's an example: Horn wanted to do a modern retelling of the story of Joseph and Judah. Great, fine. Classic stories have meaning in our time and all that jazz. But Horn worried that we might not get how clever she was being. So she named her Joseph character “Josephine” and her Judah character “Judith” and had them literally go to Egypt. The Tamar stand-in? “Itamar,” of course. We're too stupid to catch anything less on-the-nose. (By the way, this lead to a hilarious and bizarre passage in which we were supposed to believe that a character whose last name is “Ashkenazi” – to contrast her husband, Mr. Mizrahi, of course – convinced an entire room of people that she wasn't Jewish, without pulling out a fake name.)

At times, it seemed that Horn was so hellbent on literary cleverness that I completely lost track of what she was even trying to accomplish. The Mizrahi/Ashkenazi naming quirk mentioned above, for instance, or why asthma is a recurring theme.

The central concept of the book – do literal memories help us, or simply accumulate like sacred trash in a Genizah, was possibly interesting, but again dealt with in such a heavy handed way. The computer program to accumulate memories is called genizah, leaving no doubt to the reader what Horn what the reader's opinion to be and then layered with the additional stories of Rambam and Solomon Schecter and their interactions with the Cairo Genizah.

All in all, the extremely clumsy writing was so distracting that I got barely anything out of this book, but for the group that sent it to me, the PJ Library, a charity encouraging the modern Jewry to retain ties to their Jewish roots, that's probably right up their alley. I was shocked when I realized it actually was picked up by a formal publishing group outside of the Jewish world; I have no idea who else would read it.

Finally, I feel the need to be consistent in my complaining about the use of non-English languages, even though in this case, my Hebrew comprehension is good enough that it didn't personally affect me. Non-English languages should be used in English books only to set tone. If important information is conveyed it should be translated into English. Obnoxiously Horn walked all over that opinion: she both had important conversations carried out in transliterated Hebrew (which also, ugh! Those of us who understand Hebrew understand, so if you're going to be that obnoxious, go all the way and just use Hebrew characters) and then totally banal things unnecessarily translated, like “‘sweetie', he called to her in Hebrew”