Allie
This was fantastic. I'm really glad I read this (almost) back-to-back with [b:Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth 56181019 Israel A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth Noa Tishby https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617549909l/56181019.SX50.jpg 87515093], as I feel like together they gave me a reasonably nuanced portrait of how both Israel and Palestine understand the problems in the middle east, and how their disparate goals cannot ever align without some sorts of compromise.Yousef, as the title says, is the son of one of the founding members of Hamas (Sheikh Hassan Yousef) - though at the time it was founded, it was not necessarily intended to be a terrorist group, but rather a political arm during a time when Palestine was occupied by Israel. But you know, movements evolve whether or not the original founders approve, especially without some kind of centralized leadership, which at the time Hamas did not have. And so when Yousef and his father are talking about getting financial assistance from the organization after the two of them have been in and out of prison for years, and Hassan indicates that he doesn't know who is in charge of the organization of Hamas, that was shocking to his son (and to this westerner as well). (That is explored later.)And I found it really interesting that, despite his father being a founder, Hassan was never interested in killing anyone, preferring to remain a very devout Muslim that people respected as a religious leader, though unfortunately looking the other way as the organization became more and more radical and violent. (And turns out, using his image to get Hamas elected into the government, even though he himself had no intention of being in office.)A lot about Islam and Allah and the Qu'ran, and how the ladder of Islam leads to violence the higher up you go (which I am not especially familiar with, I don't know if this is a universal truth within Islam), and his discovery of the love of the Christian God/Jesus as he began to secretly work with the Israelis as a spy on the inside of Hamas after a stint in prison. The change of heart here was very interesting, how he went from wanting to work with the Israelis as a double-agent so he could destroy them from the inside, despite never being particularly interested in violence himself, to actually building genuine friendships and trust with his handlers and respecting them as people. Doing his best to stop the endless deaths and suicide bombings with their help.Buddy read with Jeananne. We're going to have a lot to talk about. I highly recommend this.
A sweet, clean, low-angst historical romance. Emily is a mail-order bride escaping from Virginia for reasons that aren't important at all, set to marry a man in Nebraska. Oh but oops, she falls in love with his brother instead! Luckily her intended had no interest in getting married. Zero stakes, no third-act breakup, just domesticity and men running a ranch, and a homestead wedding at the end. Delightful!
A sweet graphic novel about a seamstress who wants to be a clothing designer and the prince that hires her. Prince Sebastian sometimes feels like a prince, and sometimes (to his shame) feels like Lady Crystallia, and seamstress Frances designs for both - and you see her career skyrocket as people begin knocking off her designs and she becomes in higher and higher demand. We watch their friendship grow and change, and the way Sebastian tries to keep his secret before his eventually being outed as Crystallia. It wraps up neatly with everyone (that matters, at least) accepting him for who he is, and Frances getting to design her own collections. The art is lovely, and clearly this book has been well-loved because my library copy was pretty close to falling apart. Lovely.
An enjoyable continuation of this series. There were a few times that I found myself confused about what was happening, especially in regard to Murderbot's memory of itself being damaged/corrupted - I felt like that could have been fleshed out more or eliminated, there wasn't much THERE there. But I still liked this installment. I probably should have re-read the previous book, because it took me a while to get up to speed here.
This was a fantastic primer on Israel, and you can tell how hard Tishby tried to present the material with an even hand. My friend and I are having our final discussion about this book tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to reading more about this region of the world, perhaps from a Palestinian and/or Arab perspective next.
One thing though, she describes that sometimes when Israel is attacked, she hits back too hard, and to that I say YA THINK. This was published in 2021, and as such Tishby couldn't have known about the Oct. 7 attack of Hamas on Israel, and the massive retaliation Israel would rain down on Gaza.
I keep trying to think of other things to say about this book but I'm at a loss at the moment. Maybe more later after we discuss.
Listened to the audio, which was read by the author. A relatively quick read, just under 6 hours.
Oooh, the last line was chilling - after 30-some-odd years of being undocumented in the United States, with no obvious path forward - Vargas' mom was like, maybe it's time to come back to the Philippines*? (I have to assume he said no, since he'd had so many opportunities to leave over those years, knowing he might not be able to make it back to the only life he knows. And also as he mentioned, Philippines leadership wasn't exactly gung-ho about gay men.) *Vargas' mom put him on a plane when he was a tween with the intention of following him later, but per the book was never legally able to make her own way to the U.S.
I appreciated Vargas' story a lot, especially because it provided a different perspective than the ones we see most often from the southern borders. Especially as he became a journalist as an adult - I loved hearing about the newsrooms and his career at WaPo and his technology writing back when it was The Facebook. He talked about his “coming out” as undocumented and all the ways he was forced to lie to survive (getting a job, getting a license, etc.) once he found out he was not in the U.S. legally (and DACA hadn't been invented yet). The descriptions of his travel around the country and speaking to people of all walks of life about the experiences of being undocumented and what undocumented people actually want and need from their adopted homeland, and the policies that came in and out over the years that somehow never applied to him, leaving him in a perpetual state of limbo.
And ohhhhh the stuff about the Texas border and his being detained in Brownsville/McAllen. I mean, I know the Powers That Be in Texas have basically never done anything good for our neighbors to the south, but Vargas could have been in way worse trouble if he didn't have journalist and ambassador friends in high places from all his years of reporting.
I'd recommend. I didn't wholeheartedly love it, but it was very good.
I won this in a giveaway from Go Fug Yourself checks notes last winter. Thanks to the Fug Girls for sending it to me.
Ya'll, I like the IDEA of mysteries and thrillers, but I almost never buy into the central premise. I'm not a conspiracy person. I don't believe in This Day And Age so many people are going around with fake names and identities. That seems like a bureaucratic nightmare. I REALLY don't like civilians trying to investigate stuff on their own (though credit where it's due - Katrina did try to talk to the cops and they didn't believe her because mEnTaL hEaLtH and two glasses of wine). At multiple points after the halfway point, I rolled my eyes and said aloud to the empty living room, “No. Nope. No way.” But I did finish it! So clearly I was entertained enough to keep going.
So here's the deal - Katrina likely has OCD and some kind of schizophrenia/delusions. She doesn't always know what's real and what's not. That's all well and good - it sounds like the author inserted a lot of herself into this book, and we always need mental health rep in stories. Katrina often “escapes” into a world she read about in a children's story and uses it as kind of a litmus test for what's happening in the real world. (Those excerpts were part of the book, and I did not think they were necessary or interesting - and also did not seem developmentally appropriate for a children's book.)
Liar Dreamer Thief is real complicated, involving internet crimes and embezzlement from a bunch of old people's retirement funds and again, fake identities and stalking and revenge suicide, culminating in one giant conspiracy, and sometimes I got lost in the plot. It was fine. I finished it. I don't know that this genre will ever be my bag, but doesn't hurt to branch out on occasion.
Mama: Don't carry around the hurtful words that others say. Drop them. They are not yours to keep.
Beautiful and beautifully illustrated book. Told from the perspective of a little girl, Faizah, whose big sister, Asiya, is wearing hijab for the first day of sixth grade. All the ways Faizah looks up to, and looks for validation from, Asiya, and how beautiful she thinks her sister's scarf is. A really sweet picture book.
First book of 2024! Mae Harden is a new-to-me author (that's gotta be a pen name, right?) and I had this on my Kindle probably from the last time I did that whole Stuff Your Kindle thing. I will definitely be checking out some of her other work, because Stripped Down was THE perfect combo of sweet and smutty.
The only reasons this wasn't a complete 5 stars for me are two-fold, and both completely personal preferences: 1) even in romance, which gets away with a lot, I don't love it when the hero is overly possessive; and 2) the tiny-baby-woman (even if she's described as curvy) and giant-hulking-man thing. (See also: Ali Hazelwood.)
Other than knowing this was a historical romance, I didn't look to see what this was about before I downloaded it in anticipation of reading fluff for a few days over Christmas, so it was a fun surprise that the romance (set in early 1900s) had a pretty significant mystery element. Our hero Curtis is a disabled war vet, discharged after being disabled when his gun exploded in battle, and love interest Da Silva is a Jewish man who turns out is a spy. They're spending a holiday at a posh country estate, whose owner is a Big Bad Rich Man who may or may not have profited from the exploding guns and also has an extensive blackmailing scheme that Da Silva is trying to bring to light. Curtis and Da Silva are both sneaking around and keep running into each other, and to cover their bad behavior they also do some stuff that may count as sexual assault against each other, but it's basically hand-waved away - in the name of the good of their country and whatnot! There's also some antisemitism and homophobia thrown at Da Silva, and it's kind of questionable that Curtis literally never questioned his sexuality until arriving at this estate, but sure. The good guys are good, the bad guys get their comeuppance, there's bureaucracy, HEA, the end. I had fun reading it.
TW (in addition to what I listed above): murder, suicide, blackmail, hidden cameras, torture, war flashbacks
Loved this story! Gavin rock star and ex-junkie, Marisol 3rd year law student, a chance meeting at one of Gavin's concerts, and his management team deciding he needs a fake relationship to prove to the press he's staying clean. What can go wrong!
I didn't love the implication that when someone does you wrong it's the permission you need to fall back into old habits, but I suspect that is a truthful depiction of living with addiction or loving someone who is. (Thankfully I do not have first-hand experience of this.) I also was so annoyed at his management team for specifying date by date how intimate Gavin and Marisol needed to be for the cameras. Very ick.
V. v. steamy, great banter, real stakes, good boundaries for the most part, good communication for the most part.
TW: addiction, drinking, drugs, physical violence
Also P.S. if you go to Roxie Noir's website you can get a free digital Christmas novella and yes I already downloaded it, because I'mma need some stuff to read over the holiday break, assuming that I get a holiday break, which is seeming less and less likely since Matt came down with a fever yesterday and we're supposed to drive to his parents' tonight, and also I don't want to be a jerk but I NEED this, I CANNOT deal with a week straight of being the sole caretaker of a 3-year-old who does nothing but scream NO at me with no daycare and no grandparents to give me a break, I will go BANANAS, and yes I'm catastrophizing, he was up screaming at 4 a.m., but Matt promised he'd finally be healthy again in 20-30 years. So. Yes. Christmas novella.
This whole book is bleak bleak bleak, so you've gotta be in the right headspace for that. That said, it wasn't until the last 150 pages or so until I started reading with a furrow in my brow, because of the horrificness of everything that has happened to Ishvar and Om. Does that make me heartless, that their previous pain registered as awful, but not painful to me personally? Until it was? I hope not. And the stories of Dina and Maneck lightened the reading experience of the pain of the other two considerably, until it didn't.
And despite that, I could not put this down toward the end? And I want to pick up more of Mistry's work?
TW for basically everything, but off the top of my head: caste violence, religious discrimination (against several different groups throughout), poverty, homelessness, physical violence, dismemberment, forced labor, sexual assault, government at war, suicide, reproductive violence
Listened to the audio for church book club - barely over an hour and 15 minutes, and entirely epistolary. Main takeaway was that it's pointless to feel guilt for the time NOT spent with God, or guilt for being distracted during prayer, but rather that any time you can spend will be a delight to God, who is always near. Looking forward to hearing what book club thinks.
This was SO wonderful. The banter, especially via text messaging, is fabulous. This is a friends-to-lovers, but the two of them as friends are fab, and they don't even get around to declaring love/kissing+ until like 75% of the way through. But I don't even care. It was delightful!
Dani is going through a divorce and has sworn off men, of course, and Max is the unwilling baron of a fictitious European country, of course. It's academia-adjacent, swoony (this guy clearly adores Dani even when they're just BFF), there's some New York at Christmas vibes, and it includes a Love Actually plotline that's way better than any of the actual-movie plotlines. (I say this with love. I actually really like Love Actually and watch it every year, even though a lot of the plot is objectively stupid.)
I'm disappointed that I'm not going to make it to book club tonight, because this would have been really interesting to discuss. (Stupid weather changing/daycare germs.) I don't even really know what to think - normally when I read short stories, I like to write mini reviews and then aggregate my star ratings, but I realized almost immediately that I couldn't do that with this collection - some of the pieces were so short (A Summer Night's Kiss - 2 pages, The Time of The Large Star - 3 pages), abrupt, and so ... bizarre (Poochie, Lover on the Breeze, Puzzle) ... that I wasn't even sure what to really say about them, let alone how to rate them.
This is definitely light horror, in that it's meant to be grotesque, and also there's a kind of distance here. Sometimes almost imagining alternative futures, in which everything about the current way of life is no longer a viable option, whether due to loss of population (Life Ceremony), technological advances (The Time of the Large Star), or an attempt to go back to the way things used to be (Eating the City).
Did I enjoy Murata's creativity in this collection? Absolutely. Did I always enjoy the way it was told/translated? Not always (especially re: the remove of the author from the reader).
Favorite pieces:
- Life Ceremony - life on earth (/in Japan?) has dwindled dramatically, so when someone dies, their loved ones hold a Life Ceremony, in which the body is cooked and served followed by mass copulation, in which the goal is Insemination to further the species. One woman's colleague died, and he had planned all the recipes he wanted made of his body. Especially interesting ideas re: births as merely propagating the species and the idea of not necessarily having ties to your offspring after birth.
- Hatchling - a woman realizes that she has no personality, rather adapting to every scenario in her life through a handful of personas that allow her to be neutrally well-liked, and what happens when she confesses this to her fiance, when he no longer feels like he needs to mask his own true personality.
- Two's Family - two platonic friends who never married, but created a family of their own with children and a life, and are looking back now that they are in their 70s and one is in the hospital for cancer treatments. One of the least creepy of this collection.
Ultimately coming down around 3 stars.
I really liked this, but I out-and-out LOVED [b:The True Love Experiment 62361081 The True Love Experiment Christina Lauren https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1677786623l/62361081.SY75.jpg 98186716], so I was expecting this one to be absolutely fantastic too. And it was good, but I just wanted more. The conflict was completely different than what I expected the conflict to be (People magazine figuring out that Jess was being paid to hang out with River, but nope that was never mentioned again; instead it was about two of the guys in the company forging River and Jess' genetic data so they'd be a Diamond Match), which was fine but the implications for the company were more serious than the implications for the relationship. More more more! More what? I don't know, but give me more!Fizzy continued to be the best character, and Juno was also pretty awesome, and it was neat to see a romance with a single mom.
Buddy read with Jeananne. We had to break it up into three different discussions, because it was just too heavy to deal with all at once. That said, Wilkerson is clearly brilliant, her thesis and argument about race vs. caste and the hierarchies we're entrenched in (unless we intentionally break out of them) make a lot of sense, and also despite her focus on one caste system that has been entirely dismantled (Nazi Germany), I can't see how, within my lifetime at least, the American caste system would be able to eradicated. It took 60 years after the Civil Rights movement for it to evolve into the place it's at now - which is still not great. And I was ENTIRELY unfamiliar with India's caste system. I learned so much, and the personal storytelling brought it to life. I was always engaged, even if it took me a month and a half to read.
As I predicted, this was a fantastic follow up to our previous buddy read, The New Jim Crow. I think it's my turn to pick next, so what weighty, harrowing tome should I choose?! (I mean, I'm kind of kidding but not entirely.)
I got this as one of those Load Your Kindle with All the Romance!! giveaways, and the fact that it didn't get deleted within the first chapter is a point in its favor! Am I into romantasy or shapeshifters or anything supernatural? Nope. Did I utter the words, “if this human woman fucks a bear, I'm out”? YES, YES I DID.
So this chick Allie (cool name btw) owns a bakery and it's a chaos monster because she's dealing with damage from a raccoon invasion and water damage and other chaos, but it's cool cool because this hot ripped dude Dax shows up and he's like I'll fix it all while not wearing a shirt and also I'll pay for all the repairs and also I'd like 1000 bacon cupcakes and oh by the way you're my mate and I have 3 days to find a Forever Mate or I lose the ability to have cubs and have to be Alone Forever. Which sure, except Allie has been burned before by a shitty shapeshifter boyfriend, and it's all Too Fast! And also she's very busy dealing with this crazy* lady who's trying to put Allie out of business by being a general asshole and also trying to seduce Allie's father by being a crazy lady.
There's a lot of gross mentions of mating and needing to have cubs which is weird because it's never clear if Allie is expected to have like ... human babies or shapeshifters or literal bear cubs, and it's all just ick the way Dax's family keeps talking about her as a Cub Receptacle. He transforms into a bear exactly twice, and never during sexy times THANK GOODNESS. The bear is for violence and letting out aggression, apparently! I don't understand.
2.5 stars. It was entertaining, but I won't be continuing the series. Could have used a little bit of editing, but nothing too egregious or anything.
TW: verbal and physical abuse by a former intimate partner, gaslighting, pregnancy
*I don't generally use the word crazy as a descriptor, but I literally can't think of any other way to describe her. She is a mustache-twirling villain, if mustache-villains threw fancy parties, and showed up at people's houses in trenchcoats with nothing on under them, and happened to have a mouse vendor for setting vermin loose in bakeries.
With few exceptions, I am a firm believer that one should never read the comments section. This collection of erasure poetry was essentially being forced to read the comments so that you could see what Baer was doing with the erasure. Sure, some of the poems resonated, but in general her work is just not for me. I don't need things to be happy all the time, but I do need to maintain my sanity as a woman in this, The Year of Our Lord 2023, and many of the original comment content is stuff I try to avoid every day. More of the poetry in this slim collection made me feel worse about humanity instead of better, even with the attempted tongue-in-cheek response. YMMV.
A conversation I had with Matt immediately upon finishing this last night:
A: This was a Frankenstein retelling.
M: Did she create a monster? (I'm assuming it's a “she.”)
A: It is a she, and yes, she did create a monster. Actually, Mary and her husband and this crappy dude were paleontologists and were trying to re-create a prehistoric dinosaur even though they didn't entirely know what it was supposed to look like since they had incomplete fossil records.
M: Did they learn NOTHING from Jurassic Park?!
A: Well considering this was set in the 1850s, it would be another 150 years before Jurassic Park would come out.
M: Michael Crichton could have warned them! They were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't think whether they should!
—–
I had a lot of fun reading this. Was Mary kind of written out of her time frame? Probably. Girl was a pretty radical feminist, and wanted a divorce from her lousy gambling husband in A Time When That Didn't Happen, and also might have been a lesbian, or at the very least bisexual. Did we all see it coming from a mile away that nothing good comes of trying to bring living things back from the dead and there was no way this was going to bring Acclaim on Both Their Houses? Obviously. Did I adore the Creature like Mary did? No, but I could see why she loved it so, as history repeated itself (the original Victor Frankenstein was her great-uncle in this iteration). So ultimately, this was a book I wouldn't have picked up if not for book club, and I ended up being really invested in it.
TW: many internal conversations about the loss of a baby (unclear whether it was a late neonatal loss or a loss just after birth), grief, sexism, racism, a bit of gore related to the assembling of the Creature
I am not Catholic, I had not read any writings by any popes before, and I'm not sure why I've been just slightly more curious about Pope Francis than any of his predecessors. So color me kind of surprised that I really enjoyed this, and that WHOA the Pope is way more radical than I expected. And it was pretty concise - the audio was only 3 hours.
You get the point of this interview/essays from the title - about God's mercy and how Jesus enacts that mercy. It gave me several new ways to think about forgiveness and mercy and love, especially in light of the way us ‘Mericans tend to treat people who are “other.”
Definitely worth checking out if this is of interest to you! I mean, what else are you doing for three hours.
Notes I very carefully took while at stoplights (KIDS DON'T BE ON YOUR PHONE AT STOPLIGHTS):
- even if you can't absolve someone, you can still give them a blessing
Sings I will never be satisfiiiiied! One of my biggest irritants with romance novels (and you know, people in general) is lack of communication, but when the romance in question has no communication problems and everything gets hashed out constantly ... I'm still not happy!
This was fine. The rep is great: fat black FMC with anxiety, white MMC with PTSD and anxiety due to his father's drug addiction problems when he was a child. Both are in therapy, so they have learned that it's better to talk about things. Yes!
It was also VERY steamy! There's a sex pact! They do it in public places! They are both ahem SATISFIIIIIIED.
I don't know why I can't muster up more enthusiasm for this!
(Listened to the audio, which was fine but it seemed better suited to Aja's voice. I did not like the tone/cadence the reader selected for Walker.)
I flew through this book and enjoyed it a lot. I liked Elizabeth as a character, loved the interplay of Elizabeth and Miss Frask especially as the book went on. Loved Harriet and the few friends that Elizabeth/Mad managed to cobble together especially as the book went on. Loved how Elizabeth treated the cooking show, as an extension of chemistry even though she wasn't able to work in a lab, and how that resonated with her audience of women wanting to be taken seriously.
Got irritated because I couldn't figure out how old Mad was supposed to be. I get that she's supposed to be brilliant, but if she is truly supposed to be four, there is no way she's understanding The Sound and the Fury. One of my favorite childhood movies was Matilda, but even that seemed more realistic, as a very serious six-and-a-half year old who loves to read. Now I have a couple of six-year-old niblings, so maybe Matilda wasn't exactly a realistic portrayal either, but it made more sense to me than this. And I didn't dislike Mad at all! I just wanted ... some element of her character that didn't read like a pretentious 32-year-old. And that ended up extending to Six-Thirty as well. Dogs are smart yes, but you can't know how many words your dog knows and understands. He's allowed to just have an internal dialogue without having a measuring stick to prove he's smart.
I found the ending a little bit confusing, it all felt kind of rushed with Elizabeth meeting the Parker Foundation people and Calvin's relatives and all that ... I didn't need it to wrap up so neatly, especially since so little of Elizabeth's life had been easy or neat.
So, I liked it, didn't love it.
TW: sexism, rape, adoption, trauma by religious institutions (specifically thinking about the women's home lying to Calvin's mother about her son being stillborn, and when she found out it was a lie, lying to her that her son was dead again; similarly, lying to Calvin that his mother had died in childbirth)