Allie

I wanna stand outside the room where it happensThe room where it happens, the room where it happens...

Heh.

The Remains of the Day took me a long time to get into. I thought the pacing was so slow, and while reading the first half, every time I picked it up I started to fall asleep. I get why it was told in its way, but I wanted to get a feeling – ANY feeling! – from Stevens. He wanted to spend his life chasing dignity and serving great men, but never questioned whether the men he served were worthy of his reverence. His life made me sad; he couldn't spare an emotion for anyone, even when his own father died, and instead of thinking about what that meant, I started thinking about how we would diagnose Stevens 100 years after the setting of this book.

I liked Miss Kenton, and I think that's when it started picking up for me, when she became a larger part of the narrative. She at least had some kind of passion/feeling, even if Stevens couldn't really express it (and Remains is entirely told through his perspective). I knew Ishiguro was not going to suddenly turn this stilted, proper English story into a bodice-ripper, but I picked up immediately that there was something between Miss Kenton and Stevens, even if it was mutual frustration with each other. (And of course, I was right, what with Stevens meeting Miss Kenton nee Mrs. Benn all those years later, and her wondering what could have been if she had spent her life with him instead of marrying her husband.) But compared to other reviews, I don't know that I really believe that anything changed for Stevens after that final meeting - I don't really think Stevens had some big revelation, other than he's getting old. The world changes, and he doesn't, or maybe he will consider changing, maybe.

He is frustrating to me because he is both so simple and surprisingly complicated at the same time, but it's all interior and hard to describe.

So anyway, I read it, I definitely liked the second half better than the first, and this was good but I didn't especially enjoy it. 3.5 stars.

“It's impossible to be unarmed when your Blackness is the weapon they fear.”
- The Hate U Give (film)

I learned so much from The Second. It's short but dense (it reads a touch academic) but please do not let that put you off reading it. It is devastating, and at times I had to set it aside for minutes or days. Anderson reframes the history of the Second Amendment, and posits that this amendment was intended only to keep Black slaves and free Black people subjugated. She then proceeds over the next 160 pages to delve into that history, and oh goodness was this fascinating and horrifying. I absolutely recommend this to everyone.

I came across this while searching at B&N for a book to give to my two-year-old niece for her birthday, because I'm That Auntie. Sulwe is a sweet picture book on colorism and learning to love yourself and the magic of both light and dark being necessary for the world. It was lovely.

Well, that's that for the time being, since I've officially reached the end of the published works. I enjoyed this installment, but was disappointed that it was back to novella length and that there was no ART. Some of the fast action confused me toward the end, in regard to the planet the refugees were from and what was going on with attempting to smuggle them to safety. But Murderbot gets the baddie and saves the day, like you know it will, with the help of its guns-for-arms and continual sarcasm.

Cute romance. Smart independent heroine with a good group of friends. They could have done without the breakup. And there was far too much winking and licking of lips, but still this was fun. Nothing groundbreaking, but hey.

I don't know what to say about this that hasn't already been said. My instinct is to try to share some of Smith's words, but even excerpts don't feel like they get far enough into the meat of this collection. It is sadness, and memory, and rage, but with moments of levity. (I mean, there's a brilliant poem called dogs! - woof woof motherfuckaaaaa!)

And this:
i braved the stupidest ocean. a man.i waded in his stupid waters.i took his stupid salt & let itbrine my skin ...it was stupid. silly really. i knew nothingthat easy to get & good to feelisn't also trying to eat you.
from “sometimes i wish i felt the side effects”

Favorites:
- “my poems” because of its use of the written word as literal weapon
- the frustration, yet optimism of “what was said at the bus stop”
- “fall poem” - because of the way it considers those who you don't see in your neighborhood anymore, and it is so unexpected in its phrasing:
... no onewants to hear a poem about fall; much prefer the fallen body, something easy to mourn, body cut out of the lightbody lit up with bullets. see how easy it is to bring up bullets?is it possible to ban guns? even from this poem?

I liked Don't Call Us Dead better, but it's Danez Smith, so you know you're getting something fantastic no matter what.

I unabashedly loved this for the first half. You've got a one-night stand occurring on page 1, and lots of pining when it turns out the H/h are going to be co-stars on a Game of Thrones type TV show, lots of good side characters and humor and adorable grumpy/sunshine-ness.

And then you get to what you think would be the HEA and ... there's still 30% of the book left. At which point, I started mentally deducting stars, because it kept dragging on and on, and you think these characters would be better at communicating what they need from each other since they've done a decent job to that point, but then the conclusions Maria jumped to were just ... like, not okay? (Which she eventually does come to realize, they both make changes and come back for HEA #2, but like, I was happy with HEA #1!) And that was a bummer because to that point, Maria had been a badass boss bitch who was like, yo TV dudes this is a fantasy show, I do not need to lose weight and I will WALK if you try to make me, and then basically just turned into a puddle of insecurity when she didn't get absolutely everything she thought she wanted, when the entire development of her character had been so confident in herself and her choices, and I didn't love that.

Still a good time, but it went on far too long.

A satisfying “mystery” about a former Belgian saboteur for the Allies during World Wars I and II. Elinor has tried to live a quiet life after a whole lot of wartime trauma, but her instincts to protect her neighbors — a young couple with a small daughter — get amped up when the husband's Crime Mob family comes calling. I'd read and enjoyed previous Winspear books (quite a few of the Maisie Dobbs books before I fell off that wagon), and when this one was picked for my neighborhood book club, I thought sure! Why not!

So Elinor and Maisie have some overlap, even though Elinor is not a detective per se — she developed a friendship with a detective when they were both stationed with an organization during the Second World War, and so she works with him trying to learn more the Crime Mob family, but he keeps kinda brushing her off, so what's a former spy to do but do all the legwork herself?

Satisfying in that it all wrapped up in a little bow, and that Elinor was able to set boundaries for herself about who she would and would not be seeing again after releasing the wartime memories, but not necessarily from a bad-guy-goes-to-jail perspective.

Thank goodness that's done. I wanted to DNF this several times, but I kept coming back because Matt got such meaning out of it a few years ago when he read it. I started skimming towards the end (after the garbage chapter on gender), but I'm not a very good skimmer, so I essentially just read the sections that Matt had thought it important to underline or comment on.

I don't want to get into all the ways the Kellers and I differ in terms of theology, because it's not important to this review, but let's just say they come at this topic from a very complementarian perspective, and I am more of an egalitarian.

That said, it was frustrating because despite this clear complementarian view towards gender, gender roles and the way the Kellers' marriage operates, I got the sense that they really didn't want to turn people off to their message, so they tried to be, essentially, all things to all people. It kind of muddied up some of their points.

Which is chiefly my biggest complaint: the writing style was hard for me to follow and understand. Now, I'm an educated person, and I read a whole heck of a lot. My comprehension is fine. So when I get to the end of a section and am not sure what the point was - that's a problem, either with the writing or the editing. I also wish there had been more examples to demonstrate their ideas, besides those of the authors' marriage. (Because, not all marriages are the same! I am never going to be one that smashes the dishes because my husband isn't being a good leader. DISHES COST MONEY YO.)

I imagine this would have been a fantastic sermon series though, as that is the form this content originally took.

Things I DID like:
- At one point I laughed out loud because Tim said the only time in the creation story when God says something is NOT good - it's about Adam being alone. Everything else He made He declares good! But nope, Adam by himself - not good.
- I did appreciate the emphasis on friendship within a marriage, and the idea that romantic love can fluctuate over long years but friendship-love is a good strong basis even in the rough times.
- The idea of servant-love/submission being required of BOTH spouses, despite the Biblical “husbands, love your wives” / “wives, submit to your husbands.” (Colossians 3) (But we've established that Paul and I don't see eye to eye on lots of things.

I wish I had liked this more. I loved A Lesson Before Dying, and so I was predisposed to like Gaines' (fictional) Autobiography too, but alas. The premise is awesome! The story of a woman born into slavery who lives through 110 years of history, including some of the Civil War, Emancipation and its aftermath, a whole bunch of wars that are mentioned but not in-depth, and the start of the Civil Rights movement.

So it pains me to say that it should be good stuff, because that would be a fascinating life! The first half was excellent and interesting. But I felt like after the first, say, 50 years of Miss Jane's life, there was not enough focus to make it compelling - especially since she lived in the same town of Samson, “Luzana” for the entirety of the next 60 years. The last half of the book dragged; she continued to work on the land or in the house of the white people. Other people who worked there over the years are mentioned a time or two, then never again. The last part with the boy chosen to be “The One” to save them bothered me a lot, mostly because he had all this expectation on him, but no one ever communicated their expectations of this kid, and were just disappointed with him all the time for not living up to what they thought he should be.

Otherwise, Jane just lives on her little slice of land and farms her little garden and listens to baseball on the radio, which sorry, is dull.

I'm bummed that I am not more enthused. Hopefully this will make for a good book discussion next week.

Romance novella where our heroine Kiki has just gotten dumped over the holidays by her richie rich girlfriend, who gifted her with a day of skiing and then just totally disappeared, and Kiki's panicked decision to try skiing anyway with the help of hot trans skiing goddess and total stranger Maya. The whole thing takes place on a blue circle slope, and it was adorable and fun, and leaves open the possibility for more, which you definitely want for Kiki since her stupid ex left her in a Swiss ski chalet for four days, and also Maya confirmed that Kiki should just boink a bunch of hot people THAT'LL SHOW HER.

This is the first full-length Murderbot novel, and it's a tiny bit tonally different. The previous installments had such low page-counts that Wells almost had to rush through at breakneck speed just to get the whole story in, and the longer length allowed for more time with Murderbot getting to interact with the humans in its crew and solving un-murderable problems, and made for a more complicated adventure story with a slightly less breakneck pace. Plus much more with ART as its real self, and Murderbot having to handle the fact that it is not a lone wolf, and handle the problems with its and ART's relationship. I really appreciated the longer length, and this is my favorite installment so far, even though WHOA did this get complicated at the end, and I sometimes had to flip back to make sure I had the story straight. (These stories have typically been told from Murderbot's POV, but at one point it cloned itself as software, and then convinced another bot to go rogue, and then there were three POVs and two of them were Murderbot?)

And the next book promises more ART and Murderbot, so that's what I'll be doing...

DNF @ 79%

I was trying to figure out why this premise bothered me so much, and I finally got it - wedding planner Daphne is called in to plan a wedding last minute because the bride fell in love with their first wedding planner (Hot Dude Planner), okay cool cool. But Daphne was hired by the groom (Corporate Bro), who she says is her “friend” but absolutely nothing about their interactions indicates real friendship. In fact, Daphne and Corporate Bro seem to have nothing but disdain for each other. She and Hot Dude Planner have good chemistry, but it's totally not clear why they fall into bed with each other, other than #romance and also Corporate Bro sneered at Daphne that of course they would end up hooking up with each other (‘cause that's profesh eyeroll). I don't like Corporate Bro, and I don't want him to get married, and I don't want two wedding planners to have to spend another second in his presence. So I'm cutting my losses and going back to Murderbot.

YES I KNOW THEY'RE FICTIONAL SHUT UP.

For book club. This was not on my radar at all, and I ended up enjoying it. It contains a lot of topics that would be considered difficult (incarceration of a parent, eating disorders, violence, physical/emotional/verbal abuse, runaway teenager, etc.), but doesn't dig too far into anything, making this a book that's easy to breeze through in spite of it all. It told a compelling story of a complicated family, but I probably will not retain it for much longer than it takes to discuss it. (Not to say it's forgettable, but I know me, and my brain is Swiss cheese.)

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how I felt about this one. When that happens, my instinct is to just start writing and see if something comes through the fog.

This is a big ambitious novel, with a pretty giant scope - a family saga of three generations, and then the political coup brutally overthrowing the (presumably Chilean, but never specified) government and turning it into a dictatorship. It's pretty dark, even before the government overthrow stuff (the patriarch Esteban Trueba spends most of the early part of the book raping anything with legs and being generally angry/violent at the state of everything). Caste stuff and serfdom stuff and government corruption stuff, and Trueba cutting off people's fingers in fits of rage. The women are the real heart of this novel, especially Trueba's granddaughter Alba, but of course she stands for everything he hates and is mostly a pretty decent character/human. But unfortunately, other than Clara the matriarch, most of the women are seen mostly through Trueba's eyes.

And okay I am mad about the ending. I understand that rape is one of the spoils of war, sure. But in Alba's epilogue, she talks about how her grandfather raped a woman named Pancha, whose grandson Esteban Garcia was part of the new government, who raped Alba. And while this is not glorified in and of itself, Alba says that maybe someday her grandson will rape Garcia's granddaughter and the cycle will perpetuate itself ... and my head might have exploded a little bit because THAT IS NOT OKAY, why would even thinking that be okay! and maybe teach your children that that violence not an acceptable means of dealing with anger??? And then I'm also mad because so much of her life was full of violence and so how can we expect people who only know violence to do any different, but RAWR.

My South American history is pretty much crap, so it shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did that there was political strife resulting in dictatorship and people being thrown in concentration camps and being killed for literally any association whatsoever with the rival government faction. If anyone has any other recommendations for reading about this history, I'm open to hearing about it!

This has been compared in other reviews to Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, which I have not read, but I have read Marquez's other honker, Love in the Time of Cholera, and ... let's just say I wasn't impressed. So House of the Spirits doesn't exactly make me want to revisit Marquez's work. I'm glad I read this book, even if I didn't particularly enjoy it.

All the trigger warnings on this one.

A mostly satisfying conclusion to this novella series, wherein Murderbot gets back together with the band, so to speak, takes out the baddies once and for all, and almost gets wiped out completely, only to recover and take some time to figure out what comes next. Action-packed as the previous novellas, and I like these original clients quite a bit, so I'm glad to spend more time with them.

I was a little sad that this was the end of these books, but then I looked it up and it turns out there are two existing full-length novels featuring Murderbot and ART, and another novel on the way, so maybe after I finish a few book club reads I'm overdue on, will check the next one out.

3 stars for the actual story, but I really am enjoying this series a lot more than my rating indicates. I just thought this one was a little rushed.

(I know Murderbot is neither male nor female, but I kind of picture them as a semi-organic Lisbeth Salander. It's fitting, I think.)

A day late and a dollar short, but whatcha gonna do? Most of the women in our group are not Catholic, and I had never heard of St. Therese before; she had written her own memoirs prior to her death in 1897, and Day excerpted a lot of Therese's own words, which usually irritates me - because why would I want to read Day telling me about Therese's writing if I can just read Therese in her own words? We collectively agreed that this maybe wasn't the best introduction to the saint, though one of our members who had read Therese's memoir said that it doesn't include much about her family and early life, so I dunno.

It took a long time to get into this because you don't actually start hearing about Therese herself until like 40% in, because there's so much about her family (her mother and father originally wanted to become a nun and a monk, but were rejected by the convent and monastery, so instead got married and had a whole bunch of daughters, all of whom ended up becoming nuns). I'm torn because, some of this was interesting, and then I'd look at the percentage on my Kindle and go, we're 30% in and Therese hasn't even been BORN? and then the end also felt really rushed, considering she died of TB at like age 24. So I alternated between being really into it and being bored and skimming sections that were just Day expounding on Therese's own words.

So I don't know if I'm glad I read it, necessarily, but I'm glad it was a good discussion. 2.5 stars.

I loved every second of reading this. It wasn't perfect (some of the Reasons We Can't Be Together got a little repetitive, as did the Reasons We Should Be Together later), but the premise of being on a Dancing With The Stars-style reality show was so fun, and most of the characters were fantastically drawn (with the exception of Lauren - never really got what her deal was supposed to be other than Mean Girl Who Wants to Win, which ended up being kind of a caricature). Stone and Gina were HOT, lots of open door sexy times. Will definitely be checking out more of Daria's books.

CW: sexual assault (groping), language

I didn't think this one was quite as good as the first two, but also it ended on an intriguing, not-quite-a-cliffhanger note...

Rogue Protocol didn't have nearly as much humor as the previous installments, and the action started to feel a little repetitive. I suppose you could argue that it's because I've powered through these basically one after another, but that's for memory's sake more than anything else. I did enjoy the Pet Bot Miki, especially since Murderbot got so annoyed with it over its general personality.

If this hadn't been a library book, I would have highlighted like, half the book. Instead, I had to make do with taking pictures of the passages I wanted to remember.

I love the compassion with which Evans wrote about tough topics. Lately I've been wrestling with the idea that so many people can have such vastly different, deeply-held beliefs of what the Bible says, in exact opposition to others' deeply-held beliefs. It makes me crazy, a little bit.

This book was like Evans wrapping her arm around my shoulders, with a calming shhhh, and telling me it's okay and let's look at all the hard parts, and sure let's roll our eyes at Paul a little bit before we start reading his mail to other people, and let's talk about what good news actually is and who it's for.

There's so much goodness in here, and I think the biggest takeaway I need to remember from this is that context matters. The Bible is a library of books in a variety of genres, and the authors had different reasons for telling the stories the way they did. Divinely inspired does not have to mean literally true, or literally historical.

———-

On war stories: “God save me from the day when stories of violence, rape and ethnic cleansing inspire within me anything other than revulsion. I don't want to become a person who is unbothered by these texts, and if Jesus is who he says he is, then I don't think he wants me to be either. There are parts of the Bible that inspire, parts that perplex, and parts that leave you with an open wound. I'm still wrestling, and like Jacob, I will wrestle until I am blessed. God hasn't let go of me yet.” - page 79

“Job's friends make the mistake of assuming that what is true in one context must be true in every context - a common error among modern Bible readers who like to trawl the text for universal answers. Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar said some ‘biblical' things in their remarks to Job, and yet in that context, those things weren't true. We should be wary then, of grand pronouncements that begin ‘The Bible says.' Where? To whom? In what context? Why?” - page 98

The gospel writers using storytelling to talk about Jesus: “Sometimes those gospel stories step on your toes. Sometimes they challenge or annoy. Sometimes they force you to confront your privilege, your pride, or your lack of imagination for just how reckless and wild and indiscriminate the Holy Spirit can be.” - page 155

When talking about Jesus' miracles and how he went out among historically “unclean” people: “The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget - that what makes the gospel offensive isn't who it keeps out, but who it lets in.” - page 186

I don't know what it is about this series but I really like it, and it's getting more complicated, and I like the addition of ART (the Asshole Research Transport that Murderbot befriends).

On to book 3! WHO AM I.

On the first page, I had a thought that I didn't think this was for me ... and then when I got up to make dinner, somehow I was halfway through the book? And now I'm waiting to get the second one from the library? I am not a sci-fi gal, but if you strip away the whole being-on-another-planet-with-humanoid-robots thing, it's a familiar story of a group of people just trying to do their work and escape another group that wants them dead. And the narrator is a semi-organic unit that just wants to watch TV and be left alone, and who refers to itself as Murderbot, and also has some thoughts about whether humanoids deserve autonomy in the wider world.

I'm not doing a good job of selling it. I enjoyed it, and to be honest I was feeling real bummed about the fact that I'd gotten halfway way through February before finishing a single flippin book, so the fact that I finished All Systems Red in two days was a bonus.

So here's the thing. My memory sucks. It wasn't great before I had Ethan, but now it's like a black hole where I forget whether I actually verbalized the thought I had twenty seconds ago. It's a tiny bit better when I'm not being interrupted constantly by a small human that just screams “YOYO” (“yogurt”) over and over with nary a “please” in sight, but not by a lot.

However, I do tend to remember weird things when they happen. Like, when a hero is having sex with the heroine for the first time and his monster penis doesn't fit. Deja vu - from the previous Hazelwood novel I read.

And look, I know romance is formulaic; that's kind of the whole point. I'm not mad at it, but I don't want identical story beats either?

So ultimately - I love all the NASA stuff, Rocio's whole goth-academic thing, queer representation, girls in STEM and in leadership roles. I very, very much do not like the giant-burly-man-teeny-baby-woman thing. If you are an adult woman with a Ph.D. and a professional job, I don't care if you CAN technically still fit into clothing from middle school, you shouldn't because you are a grown-ass woman. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Whoa does this woman have a way with words. I would have been highlighting with reckless abandon except for the fact I read this on Kindle, and tapping sentences to save them just doesn't have the same effect.

That said, this was ... not a difficult read, really, just one that you had to really pay attention to in order to understand what Mailhot was trying to say. She talks to “you” (her eventual husband, Casey) a lot, the timeline jumps all over the place, and she talks a lot about the ghosts that haunt her, and it's easy to get lost. She's had a hard life, but also struggles with thinking that she is too much, that her suffering is not worth what she feels it is, that other people don't value her because she's so irredeemably broken. I don't think that's a self-esteem issue – because she's clearly a talented writer – so much as that her life has crushed and pulverized her such that she feels worthless. That's so hard to read.

3.5 stars

TW: depression, suicidal ideation, sexual assault, pregnancy

Audio is the way to go here. I sometimes have a hard time getting satire, but that's not true at all when every word is read by the author and drips with humor and sarcasm. I laughed out loud several times, and I appreciated Hughley's callbacks to previous jokes he'd made. Especially the stuff about “not fitting the profile” and making sure your neighbors know who you are, and a whole extended bit about how black people should get rescue dogs that use doggy wheelchairs so white people will think, “oh I know that black guy, that's my neighbor with his sad dog.”

I could have used less Trump stuff (this is an evergreen opinion), but that was the time in which “How Not to Get Shot” was written.

Regardless, it is still timely and relevant, and Hughley made some really interesting points re: black people not being able to forget about race and its traumatic history, and the idea of the “race card.”