Allie
A cute, closed-door, semi-second-chance romance where our H/h are reality show contestants that must get married when they meet. Only they've met before: he stood her up at high school prom, and she's still holding a grudge. Will they stay married long enough to win the cash prize for sticking it out? Duh.
Short, good communication, low angst. I had a big project wrapping up at work this week, and this was perfect since I couldn't focus on anything more intense.
Hoo boy, how to even describe this book? Epistolary novel where the plot is entirely through journal entries by this innocent guy Piranesi (except he doesn't think that's his name) that lives alone in a giant endless House except he's also got the Other (who is also alive but presumably lives in a different section of the House), as well as 13 skeletons that he's personified. Not-Piranesi basically fishes and explores the endless Halls of the statue-filled house, and writes in his journal and happily survives. He has no memory of arriving in the House or other people being there.
And then things TOOK A TURN.
Suddenly there's a Prophet, and the Other has been lying, and they're awaiting the mysterious Sixteenth Person, whom the Other says is an enemy, but maybe the Other is the real enemy?
Not-Piranesi was actually kidnapped and trapped in a giant labyrinth that was part of this philopsopher's Other Worlds ritual/theory, where an awful lot of people went missing - probably 13 in fact - and the labyrinth has a way of making people forget, which is why Not-Piranesi can't remember his previous life before he arrived in the House 3-4 years earlier. Oh and people (okay just 16) are looking for him in the real world but couldn't find him because he was NOT in the Real World!
And like, I was pretty engaged in this despite it being WAY outside my usual wheelhouse. So I guess 4 stars? I dunno.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Holds her head as she paces around the room.
Quiet, Savage!
I intend to shoot Robert Todd Lincoln with Tad's revolver.
Mr. Lincoln and I gave Tad the gun. Mine now.
Call this escapism if you like. Or you can think of it as revenge.
SAVAGE INDIAN
Reads from the Bible.
Thou shalt not kill.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Grabbing her ears screaming.
Stop speaking! You cannot read the Bible or quote Shakespeare.
SAVAGE INDIAN
If the doctor is adroit, convenable,
And says “I am all in your head,”
Then, dear lady, regrettably,
I know what you know.
Wow. I've never seen historical fiction done like this before - Savage Conversations is both a play, and poetry, and littered with historical documents about Mary Todd Lincoln's life inside an asylum and out. It is violent and at times somewhat erotic (for MTL, not for the reader). It's also only three characters, used to brilliant effect: Mary, the Savage Indian that is a figment of her imagination (but part of the testimony that got her committed to the asylum in the first place), and The Rope that was used to hang 38 Dakota Indians in 1862.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Do not pray for me, Savage!
I have suffered for my convictions,
Suffered the poor,
Suffered the slaves,
Suffered my children,
Suffered my husband's love of another woman,
And now I suffer a vicious red man.
Don't you know?
I was the STAUNCH ABOLITIONIST in the Todd clan,
More committed to freedom than the God of Abraham,
More committed to freeing the slaves than the radical wing of the
Republican delegation.
Fools. They created only monsters.
And to think I was Mr. Lincoln's literary editor.
Now here I am imprisoned in an asylum,
My eyes cracking like egg yolks,
Nightly my face tortured,
My blood glows red hot through crisscrossed wires
While Negros enjoy their freedom.
I'm pretty sure I added this to my TBR because of New Poets of Native Nations, which I read in 2019, and I'm really glad I finally prioritized it. Absolutely worth a read - it was pretty quick, and available at one of my local libraries.
DNF at page 272. It's never a good thing when I start writing the review in my head before I'm even finished with a book.
Last night Matt asked me how my book was. “Horny and pretentious,” I said. The sex dare wasn't fun. There's so much description of Kit and Theo being each other's One True Love, and yet they spend so much time trying to screw anything else that moves, sometimes together, sometimes on their own, but always for show to try to one-up each other. Not in a fun way. In an I-wish-I-were-with-you-instead way. It was like a game of Who's More Over Whom chicken, except they were both really bad at it.
On top of that, they're on a food and wine tour through Europe, sure. The tour guide and some of the other people on their tour were fun to hang out with, and at the beginning I enjoyed some of the descriptions of what they're trying. But it got tedious around the sixth or seventh location. Theo and Kit themselves are insufferable, and I'm sorry - I have a hard time being super invested in other people's travels if the stories aren't good, and I don't find pages about Kit wandering through art museums or Theo describing wine notes to be interesting at all.
I waited
I put off reading this for a long time, which I shouldn't have because it was excellent, but it remains timely anyway. Every time I picked it up, I didn't want to put it down. It's about the lives of three generations of Palestinian women in particular, and Palestinian cultural and social expectations for women generally, even when said women had emigrated to New York in search of a life outside of a refugee camp. It was brutal, and ugly, and hopeless, even as the women - Deya, Isra and Fareedah - hoped for more, knowing that they were unlikely ever to get the things they wanted out of life. Things like being loved by someone, anyone. Like being respected for the sacrifices they made. Like not being shamed for only having daughters when sons are more highly valued. Like having a say in their own education, their own marriages, their own wishes for how to raise their children.
Told from all three perspectives and jumps around in time, so even though you know in advance what will happen, it's still chilling when you get there.
CW: domestic violence/abuse, murder, suicide, abortion, alcoholism. Possible infanticide, depending on whether you trust one of the narrators.
The friendship story - of three Anglo-Nigerian friends in London and their lives intersecting with each other and the secrets they keep from their significant others - I really liked. I like getting to see grown women - Ronke, Simi and Boo are our gals here - have friends that they can get together with that are not necessarily surrounding a particular activity or kids. Maybe that's because right now my life revolves around kids, and book clubs are my means of getting together with friends outside of my kid. (This was not for book club.)
I had two main issues with Wahala, and a third that's the ol' Have A Conversation bugaboo.
1) Ronke, while being the best and nicest character, was fat-shamed CONSTANTLY. She's a foodie, and likes to cook, and likes to eat, and she wears size 14(!?!) pants but everyone's go-to is how Ronke and sad and desperate because she's a blob and needs to lose weight. Never mind the fact that she's helpful and loves her friends and is good at keeping secrets, and is always ready to lend an ear or an arm or a pan. I hated it. Justice for Ronke!
2) Isobel. The whole thriller-y element rests entirely on her shoulders but I didn't believe her motivations for messing with these women. I REALLY don't like the “it's because she's crazy!” argument, and I worried up until like the last three pages that that was all Isobel's character was going to hinge on. The real reason for her infiltration into this threesome made even less logical sense. She was entirely a chaos agent for no good reason.
3) Just Have a Conversation! I know nobody tells their partner absolutely everything, but so much of Isobel's meddling and their self-imposed problems would have been nipped in the bud if these women had had conversations with their significant others BEFORE imploding their own lives!
I did like the aspects of being multinational/multicultural, and how that can mean very different things depending on your family (Ronke much more steeped in her Nigerian heritage, Boo almost completely ignorant of her own).
Took me a long time to get through, but was worth it. Very interesting look at trauma and traumatic behaviors, and therapies that can help outside of medication. I was less interested in what actually happens in various portions of the brain, including the brain scans and EEG waves and whatnot, but I was pretty engaged otherwise, and this is not my field at all.
Dammit, this is the second Jimenez in a row that's made me cry during the third-act breakup. She's SO good at this.
Emma and Justin are wonderful, both separately and together, but better together once she gets some real help for the trauma responses that she lives with, understandably. As usual, the text message dialogue is excellent, as was Justin's creating questionnaires for dates (I do love a good nerd). Neither of them has an easy life, and Jimenez really excels at portraying complex people who fall in love despite/in spite of all the hard things that happen in life.
Both Briana/Jacob and Alexis/Daniel from the previous two books in the series play roles in this one, and it all comes full circle and made me immediately want to re-read Part of Your World. Maybe I will.
Also there's an ugly dog that Justin names after his best friend, who moves out to get married. Is he the asshole? lol
CW: childhood abuse/neglect, mentions of foster care (past), death of a parent (past), parental instability, second family
It started really slow and I didn't think I could make it ... after all, who cares about a fair that happened over 100 years ago? Well, it picked up steam and I got on board, though I still think there were far too many extraneous characters that didn't add to the story, and also I didn't need a full menu every time any fancy person went to a fancy dinner.
Things I learned: the Eiffel Tower is named after the guy who built it. The Ferris Wheel was dreamed up by an engineer named Ferris.
Also, the Women's Building (wtf) was the only one that was completed anywhere near on time because Lady Managers (wtf2) Get Shit Done. Everything else was kind of a shitshow, because committees are terrible and there were committees for ev.ery.thing.
I got the impression that Larson wanted to the reader to be impressed by the irony of all these famous people overlapping at the same time (Susan B. Anthony! Helen Keller! Frank Lloyd Wright!) but it irked me how he'd tell these stories and then be like ... and that was how such and such met a nobody professor named Woodrow Wilson.
Also it's kind of a miracle that detectives actually found any of Holmes' victims, because dude knew how to cover his tracks, and also he could not have gotten away with any of that in the modern age. And also ... I don't get what Holmes' whole deal was (other than he was a psychopath), since his main priority was murdering young single women after getting them to fall in love with him and/or marry him. Murdering one of his business partners for the life insurance money (sure, that tracks), but then also murdering three of the partner's young children? That didn't track for me.
My big takeaway is it seems pointless to build a whole bunch of beautiful things at GREAT expense only to tear them down or let them fall into disrepair six months later when they have stopped being useful. It's so wasteful! I am not good at capitalism.
Sorry this review is disjointed, but I think it reflects the book. It was fine, engaging enough, I skimmed a little bit when stuff got dull, and I hope it will make for a good discussion.
Heard about on the Fated Mates podcast and downloaded it SO FAST. Yes it's August, I don't care. This was my first age-gap, Daddy/baby romance. I didn't mind the age gap thing, nor the role-playing between consensual adults, but there were some elements that kind of pushed this into creepiness for me (he watched her grow up, even if they didn't touch each other until she was 19). The whole I'm-going-to-get-you-pregnant thing is not sexy to me unless both parties are 1000% on board, but good on you if that's your thing - it's just not for me.
It was
Well this was just delightful. The banter was top-notch. The utter ruination of the virginal Guy by rake Phillip was freaking hot. Guy's sister Amanda and her wish to write novels, and damn the gossip that has plagued their family for decades. The unfolding of all the relationships, slowly and surely was very satisfying, and standing up to their aunt in the end and telling her off and refusing to marry for forgiveness was chef's kiss.
I mayyyyyybe didn't love the whole polyamory aspect, but everyone was consenting adults and seemed to be cool with it, so that might just be a me thing. And there were maybe a few too many extraneous characters. But overall this was great fun.
Not my usual genre. I don't even know what to say about this complicated book. It was quite engaging, but also all my usual complaints about leaving investigation to the professionals, and I ESPECIALLY didn't love the true-crime-fanatacism element. At one point I thought we were going to devolve into a conspiracy, so I'm glad that one didn't play out the way I thought it might.
It was okay.
I liked the FBI investigator, Annette, especially when her work intersected with the MC, Alex, instead of the scumbag judge and his scumbag kid.
CW: rape, sexual assault of minors, human trafficking (off page), mentions of suicides, stalking, media harassment, vigilante murder, murder of a child.
New-to-me author. This was fine. Helen, a neurologist who is a panicky mess about brain injuries because her father's faculties are slowly disappearing after boxing in his youth, and Adam, an older hockey player for a team that's not very good, who has a lot of insecurities about what he'll do when he's forced to retire from a game he's not sure he even likes anymore. And you know, hockey can be a violent sport, thus their meet-cute. It was described as enemies-to-lovers but it was more like verbally sparring rivals who bang, and otherwise have nothing in common. There's a rich Russian billionaire guy who's a terrible caricature of a person, who happens to own Adam's team, but it's never clear why, because he has absolutely no interest in anything that's happening in hockey or in the city his team is in?
So. It was fine. I suspect I will not remember it in a few weeks.
Beautifully told and beautifully rendered. I'm familiar with George Takei as an internet personality more than for anything else, as Star Trek was never my thing, but have always been impressed with his storytelling, and this stands true in his graphic memoir about his family's internment during World War II as Japanese Americans. Absolutely wonderful book about a horrible injustice in U.S. history, and I appreciate Takei's implications (through graphic representation) and outright statements (through court cases) that we as a country have absolutely not learned any kind of lesson from his experience, or those of the other 120,000 Japanese Americans that were affected. (I guess one plus is that those who were interred got reparations, just 40+ years after the fact.)
When one goes on (an actual, non-camping) vacation and goes into a famous bookstore, one doesn't want to buy all the stuff one already has on their TBR. (Just me? Okay.) And so after picking out two other books (one of which I was never going to get from the library on time for book club, and one in my preferred genre, romance), I started wandering around aimlessly in search of something that caught my eye. Well, this cover features my favorite color (the hottest pink imaginable), the title was funny, and I flipped to the middle and started reading and it was entertaining enough that I was cool with buying and reading it immediately. As a vacation book, this is the exact opposite vibe of Cold Sassy Tree. It is fast-paced verging on breakneck. There is no shortage of plot. It did not matter one bit that this was the third book in the series and that I had never heard of this author or series before. It is slightly futuristic, and absurd, but not so absurd that you don't recognize this reality. It did its job. I snort-laughed a few times.The downside is that I'm hard-pressed to remember all the plot points - I just re-read the description and was like, “there was a crime? Oh RIGHT, there WAS a crime...” and the mayoral election is played up in a lot of ways that resemble a national one, and also one of the candidates was a thinly veiled caricature of That Guy Who Was Our Most Recent Past-President, and that made the election stuff less fun, even if it was still well-written.CW for the stuff I can remember off the top of my head: kidnapping, staging one's own murder, staging other people's murders, MALE GENITALIA BEING LOPPED OFF BY PSYCHOPATHS, people being fed through woodchippers, physical/psychological abuse of sex workers, ridiculous stunts, body-shaming/fat-shaming. It was entertaining, absolutely, but I'm not in a hurry to pick up any of the others in the series. Though apparently it's being adapted for TV and I could maybe be into that, depending on which streamer it lands on.Powell's, in Portland
Was reading this for an “Anglicanism 101” class I was taking through the church, in order to get confirmed, but turns out we were on vacation when the bishop was coming, so. It was a very good overview of the basic theological beliefs of the Anglican church, and I marked it on my Kindle as something I may revisit in the future. I especially appreciated McKenzie's viewpoint about how faith comes from a lot of different backgrounds, and as such there are some more liberal Anglican churches, and some that are more conservative in their attitudes and social beliefs.
I have a distinct memory of one of the English classes at my high school being required to read this, though not mine. I remember one of my best friends complaining about how boring it was.
It was NOT boring, though I can see why a high schooler wouldn't “get” this book. It's not fast-paced, but rather it's LANGUID. It's small-town gossip, back when there were barely even telephones and indoor plumbing was still a novelty.
The slower pace made it perfect reading for when we went camping, where we literally had nothing we had to do except eat, sleep and hop in the lake when it got too hot to live.
I enjoyed it a lot, and also there are some quite dark things here, so as such: CW for racism, classism, suicide; rape, incest and pregnancy loss all occur off-page.
I'm setting this aside for now, at 41%. I'm having a lot of trouble with the rambling around looking at nature - I'm getting a lot more out of the stories of how nature behaves, or when she starts talking about the writings of other naturalists, or things that are happening around town. I wanted to like this, because she's writing from the Blue Ridge Mountains, where I used to live and miss it dearly, but Pilgrim is just not connecting with me like I want it to. Maybe I'll try again another time.Like, I was ALL IN on the story about how praying mantis females eat the heads of their (many) mates BEFORE copulation. Like, the male bodies I guess are just programmed to have one task even if their brain matter** is gone? Gives whole new meaning to thinking with one's, um, genitals.
**I don't know if praying mantises have brain matter, or genitals, and I'm not going to look it up.
3.5 stars. This was my first Cather! It was slower than I expected for such a short book, but really immersive in the little that was present in the New Mexico territory in the 1800s, and very much a vibe of vignettes going through the very long life and ministry of Father Latour.
Can't rate it higher because it did occasionally lull me to sleep, but it contained such beautiful lines that I can't rate it lower either.
At first [Eusabio] did not open his lips, merely stood holding Father Latour's very fine white hand in his very fine dark one, and looked into his face with a message of sorrow and resignation in his deep-set, eagle eyes. A wave of feeling passed over his bronze features as he said slowly: “My friend has come.”That was all, but it was everything; welcome, confidence, appreciation.“If hereafter we have stars in our crowns, yours will be a constellation.”
And one I hope I have the opportunity to use in my lifetime:
“But you should not be discouraged; one does not die of a cold.”The old man smiled. “I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”
I stayed up way too late last night to finish this. Matt turned off his bedside lamp and said, “I hope it ends with love, and kisses, and sunsets...” as he started falling asleep.
“How about sex in an industrial kitchen?” I snickered.
“That sounds unsanitary,” he murmured. “And also dangerous ... so many knives and ... cheese graters ...“
And I busted out laughing and couldn't stop.
Fake relationship, check. (Or, I guess it's a real marriage, but one of convenience, so they still end up playing at fake relationship.) Good communication between H/h, check. Excellent banter, check. I have not watched Succession or anything but I suspect this story is similar in that all the family stuff is freaking STRESSFUL when it comes to their business, their insane wealth, and their interpersonal relationships, and the father's attempts to get our H Liam to take over as CEO so he can be under Dad's thumb FoReVeR.
I enjoyed it a lot, but there's a lot of suspension of belief required for the legal stuff.
Twice over the last few days I've had the opportunity to tell people (not just Matt) about what I'm reading, and I've been gleefully telling people, “a book about women's reproductive health. All about various medical things like endometriosis, perimenopause, and cancers. Because I'm FUN!”
In actuality, this was excellent, straightforward and clear, even if I ended up skipping over some chapters when I started getting freaked out about what Dr. Tang was discussing. And I'll just warn ya, I did spend a decent amount of this book feeling sympathy pains in my lady bits for all the terrible things that can go wrong down there.
Personally: I've been pregnant twice and had the same placenta problem with both of them - I lost the first pregnancy at 24 weeks, and my son Ethan was born at 29 weeks, as soon as my doctors were confident he could survive on the outside. I had kind of just accepted that I might never know what was going on with my body, why this had happened to my babies. And then a few months ago, a routine skin check resulted in me being diagnosed with a rare clotting disorder, which was “consistent with these marks on your skin, your bloodwork, and the problems you had with your pregnancies.” I've never actually had a blood clot, as far as the standard definition goes. But lo and behold - antiphospholipid antibody syndrome is mentioned a couple times in this here book, if not actually explored. (I don't fault Tang for this. It's not a book on pregnancy, and I'm sure if she covered every single thing that could ever go wrong, this book would have been like thousands of pages.)
It's Not Hysteria was published last month, so she was able to cover things as recent as the overturn of Roe, which I appreciated, especially covering a lot of the misconceptions that people throw around when it comes to talking about elective abortion. (I found it quite interesting that the medical field definition of “abortion” applies to ALL fetal death, including miscarriage, and that “elective abortion” is the correct term for what we commonly refer to colloquially as abortion.)
In addition, I follow songwriter Farideh on Instagram, and worlds collided when she released her new song, “Female Body,” and Dr. Tang reposted it, dancing to it with a copy of It's Not Hysteria. Sometimes I love the internet.
Anyway. Read it!
Look, I just wanted to know how to get my toddler to stop laughing hysterically and running away every time I ask him to do something. There was one (potentially) useful chapter on changing your language so your kids understand how their actions affect you as the parent, but mostly this was a book about being mindful and meditating, and look, I have nothing against any of that, but it's not what I was looking for. I should have read the title more thoroughly. (I ended up heavily skimming most of the book.)
But also, almost everything in my life is happening while multi-tasking right now. This is the nature of having children and working full time and trying to keep your life balls up in the air. I listen to podcasts while getting ready for the day. I read while eating lunch. I listen to music while I'm working. I talk to my kid while I clean up after dinner. Do I wish I could do one thing at a time? Yes, but who has TIME to eat your one raisin mindfully (one of the first exercises in the book). The fact that I don't yell MUCH is a win sometimes.
I finished this with chills running up my arms. It ended perfectly, and also I wanted to know more about the Zenith bots that had been created with Annie's computer interfacing.
Annie was created to be basically the Ideal Woman Bot for a lousy guy named Doug, who wanted to be able to do whatever he wanted whenever it suited him, and have Annie — who was even physically modeled after his ex-wife — as a docile sexbot/cleaning bot who was not allowed to do anything but please him, but she grows more and more discontent as her intelligence and world expands, and chafes at the understanding of what it means to be owned by someone else.
I couldn't put it down.
At one point, when Doug learned how to turn off Annie's tracking, I really thought he was about to go into the woods and murder her. Or, I guess you can't actually murder something that's not living, but the response would have been the same - she was alive in the ways that mattered. Instead she eventually finds her way into her own freedom, but Doug never understands that asking her to stay with him is a cage, even if he's attempting to make their relationship as real as it could ever be.
CW: psychological violence, sexual violence, intimate partner abuse, mentions of weight/physicality changes, cheating
A graphic memoir by a survivor of a community-college shooting in Oregon, and the years immediately after, when she went to art school, a March For Our Lives Event in D.C., and conceived of this book as she finally got enough distance to recognize that she needed to get help.
Maybe this is ridiculous of me, but I hadn't conceived of the experience of having been on campus during a shooting but not having been in literal sight of the shooter, and how of course being anywhere near an experience such as that would be so hard. This is the experience Neely presents.
There is very little imagery of weapons or death - this is more about the processing of having survived, only to witness the thing that traumatized you repeatedly happening again in other places.
It made me cry, and I flew through it.
CW: mass shootings, suicidal thoughts/attempt, PTSD, anxiety, panic attacks