Lisa
I read the Great Plains trilogy out of order, having finished My Antonia last year not even realizing it was part of a larger work. This is the first volume.
This is a really beautiful, sad book about life on the Nebraska prairie at the turn of the 20th century. The characterization is well devleoped and it's so succinct. I have read so, so many overly long books that it's a pleasure to read something where nothing written seemed superfluous.
I will say that is has a fairly puritanical moral compass, so if that's not something you jive with, the ending of this book might give you pause. However, I think it's very in keeping with the attitudes of when this was written.
This has almost no citations. Maybe that flew back in the 50s but any person could make bunch of broad generalizations and spin them into a book. There are enough rattled off ideas that this becomes a sort cherry pick a quote for your needs. I think no book of this kind had been written at the time of publication, hence its enduring popularity. I'd like to revisit the topic with better scholarship.
This is a terrific read. I actually did not know anything about Jim Thorpe other than that he was a Native American athlete. This is a wonderful introduction (aimed at a YA audience) to his education at the Carlisle school and their heralded football team. Again, I'd never read anything about the Carlisle school but it definitely echos the terrible era of residential schooling in Canada. A large portion of the book centers around Jim Thorpe's relationship with Pop Warner, and the sad situation surrounding Thorpe surrendering his Olympic medals.
I'd recommend this if you or a younger reader is interested in the history of football or Native American life at the turn of the 20th century.
This was a very challenging first half. I am not sure why the first half was so dense compared to the first but half way through the plot resolution and pace really picked up. The first half took me the better part of a week, the second half took me an afternoon.
I appreciated all the backstory around the Sri Lankan civil war. It's a country/time period I knew nothing about.
The characterization is very good in this book but I also think this book suffers from having too many characters. May just be my personal preference.
This book reads very acerbic. For having an extremely dark, graphically violent backdrop, there are some gallows humor moments.
I'd heard a snippet about Madeline Pollard on a podcast and Nisba Breckinridge was mentioned in the same breath. I wonder now if the host had read this book. Maybe Encyclopedia Womanica? I digress.
This is an excellent overview of the Pollard v. Breckinridge case from the 1890s. Over a hundred years before the #metoo movement was even a thought, one woman dared to have her name ruined to put her much older, much more powerful abuser on trial. She was a young Kentuckian of minimal importance and he was one of the most powerful politicians of his day. The case was a sensation at the time and I feel like it's not talked about enough today, if at all.
I'd recommend this book if you're interested in the sufferage movement or Gilded Age politics. It also has a dual function as a very kind if slim biography of Nisba Breckinridge, the accused's daughter who was a remarkable woman in her own right.
This quote really stuck with me. This is recounting a conversation with the nun running the asylum where one of their out of wedlock children was taken.
Butterworth moved to the Norwood Foundling Asylum, asking if it was true that Sister Agnes had told her she was a bad woman. “She said to me ‘Why on earth do you want to ruin that poor old man in his old age?'” Madeline said. “I asked her why should that poor old man have wanted to ruin me in my youth?” She said Sister Agnes pleaded with her to consider Breckinridge's daughters. “I said he did not consider me, and I was somebody's daughter, and that he did not consider the little daughter of his and mine whom he had compelled me to give away,” she said, the words now coming in a torrent like some long-dammed stream had burst. “I said there was such a thing as justice, and it should be done. He should have his share and I should have my share, and I believed there was a principle involved as to whether a man had a right to do as he chooses without suffering the consequences, while the woman must be bowed down with her shame. I said I believed the time would come when there would be a change of feeling on that part, and I said the time was near and it must come.”
This first half of this book was so inscrutable I almost gave up. It is very worth sticking with. I'd read Looking For Alibrandi years ago so I knew there was potential, the plot is just very obfuscated here. In the vaguest terms, this is a book about a teenage girl in Australia with a troubled past who is attending a boarding school in a remote part of the country. The boarding school has a turf war with what I presume is some sort of Australian ROTC equivalent. The book is about how the main character resolves this turf war and learns about her past along the way.
Anyway, it's a great read. The resolution of the plot reminded a lot of Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me. If you liked that, I wager you'd like this.
The first third of this novel with Harker in Transylvania was very engaging. Once the plot took a right turn and got bogged down with all the Lucy Westernra “who should I marry” drama I checked out big time. It rebounded a bit but I'd still lost interest. I felt like this book had too many characters. Like all the suitors, I don't even know why all of them were relevant. Just have one dude. You need Van Helsing, absolutely. You need Mina Harker, sure. But all those other random dudes, I feel like they muddled the plot. The zookeeper's cockney accent annoyed me.
I'm the worst book reviewer.
Absolutely beautiful biography by Maryse Conde of her grandmother. At some point during the past year Conde's Segu was on a list of books I wanted to check out. It wasn't available but Victoire was. Read on a whim because I needed a one word title for a book challenge and I'm so glad I did. This takes place in the Caribbean at the turn of the 20th century. While it's a semi factual biography of the author's grandmother, there is also so much history of the islands, labor movement politics, race relations, and above all else, culinary revelry.
This was very inspiring. The passage about Tedy expecting his wife to make him dinner sucked. But no one's perfect. He's done a tremendous amount for stroke symptom awareness and that is commendable. He is also very honest about his shortcomings, which is refreshing to see and sorely lacking in some other memoirs I've read this year.
This was an interesting, readable look at the history of (chiefly) American incarceration. It's fairly old now (2002), so some of the content on the War on Drugs seems dated, but in general still feels very relevant. I found the chapters on gendered incarceration particularly good. I'd recommend it if you're interested in sociology.
It might seem goofy to rate a children's book about animal life cycles and poop 5 stars, but 5 stars is all Goodreads gives me to work with, so there you go. I am rating this on how much my children have enjoyed this book, which is to say: a tremendous amount.
We have checked this out from the library 3 separate times.
I have one son who is an avid reader and one son who is a somewhat reluctant reader. They have both asked for this book to be re-checked out (somewhat unheard of). On the second time we checked it out, my reluctant reader son said, “Can we re-read some of the Secret Diary pages again?” I didn't even remember that the book was divided up that way, but there you go. It really made an impression on him.
The illustrations in this are so cute. I'd really recommend it if you have kids interested in life sciences and nature. But who knows, you might capture some unexpected attention just because of how irreverent and fun it is.
Definitely one of the weirder Newbery winners. This book is about Miguel, one of many sons in a New Mexico shepherding family. Miguel is 12 and really wants to be a vital member of his working family but struggles with recognition and validation from his father.
I'm here for the unusual plot. Definitely enjoyed the locale, not sure I'd ever read a book about Taos before. The dad in this book was a dismissive prick and it was hard to read through those scenes at times. But this book was written in 1953 so I'm hardly surprised.
if you're reading this book, you're probably an adult reading through every Newbery winner like me, but I'd be hard pressed to find an 11-12 year old whose attention was held by this.
I hadn't read a McCarthy book since The Road years and years ago and this was terrific. I always thought this was some sort of soapy western based on the the movie adaptation, which I admittedly have not seen. There's a romance aspect to this, and it is indeed a novel with a romantic heart. However, this is a novel more about the love of the West than interpersonal romance.
Great dialog. I'd recommend it if you're already a fan of Westerns.
Great book about intertwining lives in Appalachia. I didn't love the first chapter but stuck with it. Barbara Kingsolver is just great at character development. A lot of characters in this book won me over with them and it's very satisfying how they all grow together. I'd recommend it if you're a fan of her writing in general or nature fiction.
I saw this title recommended on a piece I was reading about Hypernormalization and the US. This work also lent to the Adam Curtis documentary also called Hypernormalization, published 2016 (haven't watched it, seems far more out there than this scholarly work).
The crux of the idea is this: That people are aware that the society/rules/regulations that dictate their life aren't working but have to endure them away because to do away with that scaffolding would be unfathomable. Alternatives that buck the mold are rejected because they subvert tradition. Tradition loses all meaning because it is an echo of an echo of an echo. If you wrap this sociological blanket around life at the end of the Soviet Union, it's not a stretch at all.
Yurchak gets heavy into semiotics with regard to communist meetings and how the language couldn't change, was edited in a group setting, the personal voice was lost. And so everything grew to have two layers of meaning, the sort of described spirit of the word meaning, and then the signifier of what it had come to represent by the late 1970s-1980s. I honestly hadn't thought much about semiotics since college. These chapters in particular remind me so much of ad word copyrighting. Plugging in different phrases where the only goal is page rank and the intelligible content is an afterthought.
This book is not written for a casual reader and it is not particularly digestible. It's dense and the aha moments are difficult to come by. I wish I could say I enjoyed it more, it was a challenge to read and I read a lot of non-fiction. I wish a more accessible book would be written on this topic because it's something I'm fascinated by as an American in this crumbling moment.