Allie

Such a fun novella! April falls into her neighbor's pond trying to retrieve her pet swan, and her dashing neighbor Leo rescues her and they have sex in his bathtub pretty much immediately. Their banter and dynamic was so playful and wonderful - it was a delight to see the inherent silliness of sex on-page (the sexiness is there too), and it's nice to see characters who don't take themselves too seriously, even if they have serious pursuits and passions outside of the relationship.

The swans are not as big a plot point as the description makes them sound, which for me was a plus. I don't especially care about birds, except the barn swallows I can see out my front window, which I am surprisingly SUPER invested in. There's four baby birds! They are HUNGRY MOM.

NOPE. Nope nope nope. DNF @ 46%. I don't do stories about possession. NOPING right out of here.

This book is Definitely Not For Allie:
mention of infant death
there was a map in the beginning
made-up fantasy language
war that makes no sense
they've spent most of the story lost in the woods (may or may not be a construct)
aforementioned possession of an irrelevant character made the MMC like, wildly horny?? HELL NOPE.

Buddy read with Jeananne. I went into this expecting that I wouldn't like it - after all, Clarence Thomas and I are basically on opposite ends of the political spectrum, and I'm a RBG girlie. Also I am not in the best headspace regarding politics these days, and I really don't know anyone who is like Politics! What Fun! right now.

Turns out I knew basically nothing about Thomas' career prior to the Supreme Court? And also, this should not have been a surprise BUT IT WAS ... that a trained lawyer and judge would be a REALLY GOOD WRITER??

I found myself pretty invested in the narrative and his lifelong quest for racial justice, through the use of practical solutions, and his slow shift from young activist to career Republican at the EEOC, as he realized how few liberal politicians were actually interested in real hands-on problem-solving, or working with him at all when he tried to help his own people in concrete ways that didn't involve government intervention.

I know politics has always been polarized - and that neither side is inherently trustworthy - and this was a good reminder of that. I also acknowledge that the last 8 years have really messed me up, and Matt and I have been talking about that lately - my lack of trust in people that I don't actually have any reason to distrust, based only on assumptions in their politics, and what they should or shouldn't stand for. Politics scares me, and I can't turn away even when I know it's hurting me, and being able to turn away is a privilege anyway - but people don't scare me in and of themselves - and there goes the spaghetti in my head, getting all tangled up again.

I appreciated that Thomas came to the judiciary with the goal of doing the best he could as an impartial judge of each case, even if he comes at it from a different perspective than me. I respected his perspective here - he's human, not a bogeyman determined to destroy everything I hold dear (even if his judgments have kind of resulted in that sort of stuff happening...). But I absolutely do not understand accepting various judicial positions - including to the Supreme Court! - when one does not even want the job! It seemed like a lot of pain to go through for something he didn't want to do.

This book was good. My head is complicated. The end.

“Avoid dust, see stars.”

A middle-grade novel about a Mars rover, Resilience, loosely based on the Perseverance rover. Res is highly anthropomorphized, has an adorable drone buddy named Fly, and is very attached to his “hazmat” humans back at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. He reminded me a lot of WALL-E, in the way he reacted and thought about things, though you get to see the entire story through Res' point of view.

Even though this is for children, I did appreciate getting a broad strokes timeline in how long it takes rovers to launch, traverse over another planet's terrain, etc. Res talks about it taking months to rove from the place they landed on the red planet to another, offline rover they want to try to bring back online, and about years passing from the start of the mission until it eventually concludes and he is brought back to earth. (Some of this is also explored through letters that scientist Rania's daughter writes – addressed to Res – as she gets to experience the launch in the sixth grade, and the things she experiences as she grows up, goes to high school and then college, experiences highs and lows while he remains on Mars.)

I am not exactly science-minded, but I am feelings-minded, and for a book about essentially a robot, it managed to get me in the feels. It was very good.

I cried. Even though I knew Vanessa couldn't possibly die because that would ruin the point of a romance novel.

So here's the deal, the women in her family have tended to get a genetically passed-down disease (ALS) that tends to claim them in a very short period of time. She watched her sister and her mother both die of this before age 30, with and without treatment attempts, and decided that she would experience everything she could, with the expectation that she likely wouldn't be around for the long-term. Which is then complicated when her half-sister Annabel drops her infant off at Vanessa's house and disappears.

That whole side of the family is REALLY damaged, from all the death and the unpredictability of this illness. There's a lot of unhealthy coping all around.

But then Adrian comes into the picture! He's like, all stability all the time. They become friends. But ONLY friends, because Vanessa doesn't want a relationship on the basis that she could be dead like any minute.

[Sure Jan gif]

I love that Abby Jimenez puts in the work to get her characters' jobs right. However. The baby, Grace. Other than in Vanessa and Adrian's meet-cute, having an infant doesn't seem to interfere with their lives like at ALL?? They're always feeding her and changing her and putting her in the swing or letting her sleep, but otherwise Grace sometimes felt like a Plot Device. Infants require other things too! Sometimes they scream for no reason! Sometimes they need tummy time and peekaboo and stories! I know this is a romance novel and therefore maybe the stuff happening with the baby didn't need to be on-page all the time, but I kept going, okay but where's Grace?

The issue here isn't one of lack of communication, but rather a misunderstanding based on communication that seems very reasonable to me. I wasn't mad at it at all.

The ending felt a little rushed. I could have done with more of Adrian's therapy/recovery from the shock of learning the extent of Vanessa's family history.

Overall, I really liked it, just not nearly as much as the other one I just read.

CW: fatal illness (anxiety over it, lack of treatment options, family members who have died of it), medical trauma, addiction and how the medical establishment treats addicts, anxiety/panic attacks, hoarding, mental illness, adoption, end 0f life preparation, abandonment, cheating (not by main characters)

• Am I glad I read it? Yes.
  - Did it have enough math in it? No.
  - Would I have been interested if it had more math in it? Probably not.
  - Did the Weapons of Math Destruction feature much in this book? Not really. (I think she just liked the title, created a definition based off the title, and tried to worm it in where she could.)
  - How about Big Data? Oh yes. Much more about algorithms and lack of justice in data input/proxies, and this was good.
  - Do I wish for an updated version, since this one came out in ‘16? OBVIOUSLY. I can only imagine the systems have gotten worse.
  - Is it well-reasoned? Mostly.
  - Is it likely that people are going to just start being better/creating better data inputs with no incentive to do so when it's $$$ vs. human goodness? HA.
  - Did Matt (a professor) know what I was talking about when I was telling him about the algorithmic U.S. News College Rankings? Yes, and he was like this system is the WORST.
  - Would I give him this book to read? Likely not. Like I said, not enough math. (This is a catch-22! It needed more, but based on the type of book, more would have likely turned off readers! Including me!)
  - Was it interesting? Quite.

A bit of a slow start, because the narrator Josef started out by being wishy-washy about how to start the story, and where in time to start since this book is not perfectly linear, and also one of the things that drove me bananas about this book was that the story frequently switches from first to third person, even though the only POV character is Josef.

And yet Josef redeems himself by being a beautifully quiet storyteller, and once I got past the halfway mark, I flew through this.

The description of this book covers most of the plot points - due to an illness when they are due to leave Austria due to the encroach of WWII, Josef and his wife and child are not able to stay together, escaping to opposite sides of the world (America for him, China for them), thanks to the help of his gentile friend Friedrich, who joins the Nazi party to keep up appearances while also secretly hiding Josef's distant cousin in his attic crawlspace.

And the content warnings below lay out the rest of the story, but none of it was a surprise to me.

I appreciated how one of the things he did in his spare time was care for two Jewish cemeteries, bearing witness to people he never knew and doing his best to hold their memories.

For a Holocaust book, it was quite different than anything I'd read before, and it was good.

CW: the Holocaust (antisemitism, death [mostly off-page], Nazis), statutory rape, stillbirth, suicide

I think Abby Jimenez just became an auto-buy author for me. I TORE through Yours Truly. I five-starred the first book in this series two years ago, but somehow missed this one until book 3 came out (which I will now have to buy, thems the rules).

I laughed out loud. I literally cried. I did not care one bit that the miscommunication could have been solved way earlier. The longing was SO GOOD. The pining after each other and falling in love was so wonderful. Fantastic banter, Jacob was such a wonderful H. I keep coming back to this word, gooey - like not saccharine, but like a lava cake, where you feel melty and sweet and also that the edges are strong enough to hold the whole thing up.

He and Briana didn't even kiss until like 75% of the way through but but but the longing! The family interactions! The conversations about their hypothetical daughter named Xfinity and other ridiculous hypotheticals.

CW: mention of miscarriage, multiple characters with normal pregnancies, cheating (past), divorce, depression, anxiety/panic attacks; both H/h work as ER doctors so also - wounds, blood, stitches, kidney failure, dialysis, organ donation

The whole time I was reading this, I had one famous line that kept running through my head: “We have always been at war with Eurasia.” No, really. LITERALLY in thousands of years of history, there have only been brief years where these poor Ukrainians were not being killed, joining resistances that would lead to their deaths, being starved by their own government due to preventable famines, being shot at random, experiencing pogroms, being terrorized by Nazis, being terrorized by the Kremlin, dealing with nuclear fallout, and basically having a shitty quality of life if they managed to not die from all that.

I'm not even completely sure how to rate this. Did I enjoy it? For the most part, not really. It's very dense and pretty dry, and - up until the last half when historical events started ringing some bells -kind of hard to keep track of all the shifting cities and borders, and who was at war with whom and why. (Because they'd always been at war with the Ottoman Empire, or Poland, or other Soviet territories, or Austria-Hungary, or Germany, or or or.)

Did it do what it set out to do? The author is a history professor, who specializes in this subject, and as his goal was to write a history of Ukraine since the beginning of time immemorial, yeah I think he did his job. I imagine it would be an interesting class over a semester. And for that, I want to give it a decent amount of stars. Because it IS a really good overview - broad but not especially deep - and maybe I just shouldn't have tried to read a textbook like it was a novel. Am I the problem? Maybe.

I did learn a lot, even if I doubt I'll retain everything. Particularly the Holocaust stuff - I feel pretty well-versed in the subject, but I never knew particulars about the Ukrainian Jewry, or the fighting over the borders between the Nazis and the Soviet Red Army, and how the people could be on one side of the war one minute and on the other side the next because of shifting boundaries and occupations, and you just kind of had to ... live with yourself for anything you did or didn't do.

From reading other reviews it sounds like there has been an update after the version I got from the library, which came out in 2015, since Ukraine is once again at war with Russia. (They've only been independent for like 30 minutes, you can leave them alone for just a sec, Putin!)

I don't know what else to say.

3.5 stars. Steamy and a fun read, but it was really, really long for a romance novel. I liked the community and dynamics of the hockey players and the “found family” aspect for both Stassi and Nate, since they were both a long way (distance or emotionally) from their real families. No lack of communication here, that was one thing that was done truly excellently - Stassi had been in therapy for a long time and was quite adept at telling people what she needed and what was what, without being preachy and while still having things she needed to work on herself.

Do I believe at all that hockey-player Nate could be a figure skating partner while Stassi's actual skating partner was injured? Absolutely not, but romance reasons. Their dynamic was cute, she was the grumpy one, a kinda-one-night-stand-turned-more.

It's not super super clear from the description, but also this is a book set in a college town and all the characters are college students, if that's not your thing.

CW: gaslighting, unwanted kissing, disordered eating, parental death (past), epilogue pregnancy

I'm not sure what the point of this book was. Nobody should have such wealth that they can futz around doing nothing and not going to class and dining and gossiping about nothing, and also it was quite obtuse. Like, for the first half the book I was just thinking, Charles and Sebastian should just hurry up and bang, and then they never* did even though they were together constantly and only wanted to be together in their apartment or whatever.

and when I say never did, I mean Waugh was never explicit about what their deal was, so it's possible I guess.And then it took a turn in the second half where Sebastian became a raging alcoholic and I was like WHEW thank goodness they never banged because this is a MESS.

But then suddenly Charles is married with two kids and he's never met one of them because he's very very busy painting in South America and his convenient wife is very busy throwing parties WHO IS WATCHING THESE CHILDREN, and they're both cheating on each other, but it's again, very obtuse. And he just CANNOT leave the people in Sebastian's family alone.

Anyway, I finished just in the nick of time for book club, and it'll make for a good discussion, based on the fact that a friend and I stood and talked about it in disbelief for a good 10 minutes the other day before either of us had finished.

CW: stillbirth (off-page, but mentioned several times)

Two words: penis piercing.

HE THINKS HE CAN LEAVE MEby leaving me,but even nowI walkburningthrough the empty streetsof his mind.

I really thought I had read other Saeed Jones poetry before, but I guess I was mistaken, as I didn't have any of his other books on my “Read” shelf. I love listening to him occasionally read poetry (his and others') on the podcast Vibe Check - he's got such a lovely voice for it.

That said, I think this collection might not have been for me? Not in that I didn't like it, but that it was not written with me (cishet white woman) as the target. I found it difficult to understand generally, though still beautiful.

I stole his tongue; now he can't say no.
His yes is mine to keep, mine to answer my own questions with like:Now that I've mined you, are you mine?
- from Secondhand (Smoke)

My absolute favorite from this collection is a longer-form story-poem, “History, According to Boy” about a boy growing into his teen and adult years, into his queerness, and the rage his father feels towards him in relation to it. Oh it's awful, violent but also lovely?? It makes me so sad that any child would grow up in an environment where his parents would rather have a dead child than a queer one, and that does not make any sense at all to me.

From that poem, about going to the shooting range with his father every week:
Boy was so busy concentrating, he only took one note: The black paper body shuddered, then offered up its throat.
“Here,” the body said.Boy made a perfect shot. Boy's father called over the other fathers to look at the perfect little hole in the black paper body.Boy made note of how many times his father looked at him and smiled. Three.

CW: homophobia, homophobic slurs

Oops. I finished four days after our buddy read discussion. Matt tells me that Jeananne will unfriend me immediately. What a nice husband he is.

Instead of finishing The Age of Walls for my buddy read tomorrow, I read this smutty short story with sexy literary banter. I regret nothing!!!

This was so messed up, in the best way, and I laughed out loud several times. And I finished in under 24 hours, which is saying something these days. (I mean, it's written entirely in Slack conversations, so it's a quick read too, but it was just really ENJOYABLE. I wanted to keep sitting and keep reading.)

Focused on the constant Slack conversations of a small office and its staff, who are dealing with a client that's going through a PR crisis, when one of the employees get slurped into the Slack app. And his body is just like, THERE, atrophying until someone is like, maybe we should check on this guy who claims he's stuck in Slack? Like many offices, it's highly dysfunctional, with a cast of characters who are altogether much too up-in-each-others' business. I suppose it could also be considered a little bit horror-lite, but more in an absurdist suspense way than actual scary stuff-that-could-happen-to-you kind of way.

It was a lot of fun. Recommend!!

I started a new job this week, and as it's a bigger company with Systems in place, I can't log on to Goodreads all the time like I did at the last place. On the other hand, while I was waiting for the Systems to do things like get me the software I need to do my job, I managed to get through a big chunk of this book today. So.

I had this on my Kindle, and I mistakenly thought it was a capital-R Romance novel, and while it does feature a friends-to-lovers romance, this is not the main focus of the book. Our heroine Angie is a third-year medical student doing hospital rotations and such, and so there's a lot of her friends, and family, and school stuff, and oh yes there's a very hot painter guy who she falls in love with but it is complicated because she builds this relationship up in her mind, and breaks it down in her mind, and is super wishy-washy about basically everything that isn't Becoming A Doctor. (Have a conversation! I say. Except they DO eventually and it doesn't make it better! It's confusing why these two can't just Be Happy!!)

Obuobi is very clearly well-versed in the medical world and provided helpful footnotes for some things that I didn't already know from watching Scrubs. And also, Angie is Ghanaian-American, so I liked getting those peeks into a different culture. I didn't love the extensive use of the footnotes outside of these, though - sometimes they felt distracting, and so I started skipping over them unless it was about a term I didn't know or something.

Overall, I enjoyed it, didn't love it.

CW: racism, death (including that of a teen), drug addiction (off-page), accidental pregnancy

Book clubbbb.

So there's this girl Signa, and it turns out she is impervious to poison and also can see ghosts, and also can see Death himself. She's really hot for Death, but remember kids this is a YA romantasy. (There's more sexytimes than there should be, considering you know, Death, but it's YA sexytimes.) Oh and also all the people who are Signa's guardians end up magically dead. Didn't I just read this book?

Signa moves into this old creepy house with some cousins, and it turns out the matriarch Lillian has just died but her ghost is still here and she is REAL MAD, and also these incompetent doctors could not figure out that she was being poisoned, and now her daughter is also being poisoned and the stupid doctors are like

Stories can actually rearrange continents if they're told long enough. It's actually in the Bible. Matthew 15:6-7 states, “If you only had the faith of mustard seeds and stories - we could move mountains and the location of gas stations.”

This was the last book I bought at Blacksburg Books before we moved out of Virginia. (If you're in the area, go check it out! I miss that bookstore.) I mostly bought it for the title, if I'm being honest.

Set in West Virginia, and mostly a memoir? Ish? Another reviewer called this “autofiction” and that feels apt, because it's definitely mostly nonfic, but McClanahan clearly took some liberties (which he explains extensively in the afterword). The writing is melancholic, sometimes sarcastic, often pretending not to care about what's going on around him. Still, many of the short chapters end with searing clarity.

The first half, mostly about his extended family in Danese, WV, definitely feels stronger than the second half. It almost turns more stream-of-consciousness in its delivery in the second half, where it focuses on McClanahan moving in with his high-school buddy. I definitely was more interested in the family stuff than the crap of teenage boys.

CW: infant death/miscarriage (in the past; mention of tiny graves), suicide/suicidal ideation, obsessive-compulsive disorder, ableism, homophobia.

It was fine! Quite dramatic and there's a LOT happening here - both H/h are the products of unplanned teen pregnancies, MMC is a professional hockey player with a wild family story, the FMC has dropped out of like 30 colleges (not literally, but it's mentioned a lot that she didn't finish for Reasons) and is now working as her dad's assistant, there's golddigger drama, tabloid drama, All My Exes Live In Texas drama. It's not a very relaxing book. Very high anxiety even though the MMC projects like a beacon of calm. But he's also very like, I gotta protect my woman and keep an eye on her, which I never love. I was also irritated by the names - Kingston and Queenie, which is punned on a lot - and some of King's teammates were called Bishop and Rook and har har har yeah we get it.

So I enjoyed it while I was reading, and probably it will fall out of my head momentarily.

If I'm like, really really honest with myself (and the rest of the internet), the three little girls in this book (ages 7-10) are totally what I thought having kids would be like. Actually most of the stories I've read about orphaned little girls are what I thought parenting would be like. Turns out not at all, silly Past Allie.

This was cute and SO cozy, the little girls are witches and need to learn to control their magic (enter Mika, an unmoored witch that answers the Craigslist ad, basically), there's wonderful found family, a little light romance and some attempted matchmaking, a safe place for people of color and queer relationships. I saw the ending coming from a mile away, but I did NOT expect the twist near the end.

TW: apparently every witch gets orphaned? So all the parents are dead. None of the deaths are on-page.

Really liked this and probably will revisit the summary at the end as needed. I appreciated that this was not about making your kids be different than they already are, but rather in noticing what things set you off, what you can do about it, and then making decisions about what you can do for yourself to diminish the likelihood of freaking out at your kids. Like, I know that being constantly interrupted while I'm having a conversation with another grown-up is really frustrating to me and makes it hard for me to focus, and so what can I do to make that not such a hot button when E inevitably does interrupt me six times while I'm trying to figure out where his music class is? And then doing things ahead of time to try to mitigate the triggers that you know are going to send you into a frustrated rage.

Naumburg seems to have a similar sense of humor and pop culture frame of reference as I do, which you probably need if you're going to read a book with “sh*t” in the title. But also I told my pastor I was reading this, so you know, I'm never gonna be perfect, and that's cool.

I don't really have an excuse for taking 8 days to read a 255-page book that really is written at a pretty breakneck pace once the meat of the story starts. Actually that's a lie; my excuse is that I had two job offers this week and so I spent a lot of this week vibrating with anxiety, finding myself literally unable to sit still and read over my lunch break like I usually do. (I did finally accept one of them and put in my notice; now the anxiety tremor is slightly more manageable, and I finished this, so.)

Mattie is a pretty badass character, very headstrong and really judgmental; she's the kind of young lady that if she can't find someone to do her bidding, she'll threaten and pay off and cajole you until you give in to what she wants, or she'll do the damn thing herself. I read the first part where she's negotiating the return of her recently-perished father's recently-acquired ponies, and she's basically demanding what she wants, absolutely no shame. And I thought, I could learn a lot from this girl, especially in light of said job offers. I'll admit, I want people to like me and don't want to rock the boat unless there's a really good reason to do so. Mattie does not give two shits if people like her, she finds some dudes who want to capture the guy who shot her father and they ride off west to capture him, and ... shenanigans ensue (except that it's very rugged and outdoorsy and Wild West, so “shenanigans” doesn't really capture the vibe). It's very violent, lots of people get shot, lots of pieces of people get amputated.

This was for book club; I would not have picked it up otherwise. I liked it, didn't love it. I definitely skimmed a little bit when there were big chunks where Rooster was talking about his service during the Civil War, but I find people talking about their military service kind of dull.

Book club pick. (So stop reading Sydney!) I'm just going to start typing and hopefully will form some coherent thoughts about this along the way.

The story/romance between Ellie and Jack was engaging even if the writing was only decent. I can see why this is getting comparisons to The Notebook, even though I thought this was way less sappy than any Sparks.

My big complaint to Matt when I was finished? The romance was too realistic. I KNOW. Long distance is hard! Having different goals in life than your partner is hard! Being a grown up and making grown-up decisions is hard! There were no fake relationships or secret dukes!

Turner describes himself in his author bio as an author of romance novels, but romance novels as a genre have requirements, which he did not meet. If he had lopped off the first and last chapters and just let it be set in the 1950s and 60s, it would have met them. I don't know why he thought we needed to know in the last chapter that Ellie died in the early days of Covid, though Covid is not mentioned at all. It took the previous chapter's satisfactory ending, and instead made my face do this:

I can't keep up with my son's obsessions. For a little while, it was superheroes. Sometimes it still is superheroes? But also it's robots, and Aladdin.

I've had “Lucia the Luchadora” on my TBR since well before he was born, and this weekend at the library (while looking for robot books, natch) I saw it and snatched it up. I told Ethan I wanted to check it out, and he told me it wasn't about robots. But he allowed me to read it to him anyway, and then we brought it home. (Along with like six robot books.)

See Lucia wants to play superheroes, and run around the playground, and is just as good at BAM and KA-POW as the boys, even as those boys tell her that girls can't be superheroes. Lucia's abuela shows her her own luchadora costume from her girlhood, complete with shiny mask and cape, and so Lucia goes back to the playground in her lucha libre costume, and eventually more masked luchadores show up, and it's not until Lucia unveils herself that she realizes that many of the other costumed kids are also girls who just want to play superheroes without those boys taunting them.

And I hope this is a good message for Ethan. I had a conversation with him when he was much younger, about how both boys and girls can play with cars, after he tried to tell me that only boys can play with them. He still tells me every once in a while, “boys and girls can play with cars!” so I can only hope that, with the help of books like this (and watching “Spidey and His Amazing Friends” all the time, which features Ghost Spider/Gwen Stacy), that he knows that boys AND girls can do all sorts of things.