Category: Books

I feel like I’m in some sort of reading slump.  I read.  I find the book to be okay. Repeat.  I hope this slump ends soon.  I want to be excited about what I’m reading.  There will not be many recommendations this month.

Young Adult:  Summer Days and Summer Nights
Young Nonfiction:  Woosh!: Lonnie Johnson’s Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions

I am Pan
Mordicai Gerstein
Read for librarian book group
Pan’s kind of a stinker and so was this book in places.  Some pages I couldn’t follow the narrative set before me.  The art was frenetic in a way that I didn’t much care for, but fit well with the subject matter.  I think part of my tepid response stems from my resistance to Greek and Roman mythology in general and thus is no fault of the book itself.  If I had children who needed introduction to this world, I would indeed choose this book.

The Airport Book
Lisa Brown
Read for librarian book group
Good information about how the whole airport thing goes. Includes some fun side stories via picture.

There is a Tribe of Kids
Lane Smith
Read for librarian book group
My “exact words” nature spent a lot of time wondering at the word choices.  Most children would not be so picky and would just roll with it.  The illustrations were divine.

It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel
Firoozah Duman
Read for librarian book group
There were a lot of good and interesting details about being a late-70s temporary resident to the USA and then even more good and interesting details about being a temporary resident from Iran living in the USA during Khomeini’s takeover and the hostage crisis.  Those details kept me reading.  It wasn’t terribly plot-driven, and thus I wasn’t super compelled to keep reading, but I enjoyed the reading while it was happening.

Summer Days and Summer Nights
Edited by Stephanie Perkins
The first and the last stories were my favorite. In “Head, Scales Tongue, Tail” Leigh Bardugo takes a pretty normal summer romance story and switches things up at the end.  Lev Grossman uses the concept made famous in the movie Groundhog Day–living the same day repeatedly–and pushes it in a different direction in “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things.”  I also greatly enjoyed the powerful voice of Francesca Lia Block’s confessional-style memory of the summer before she and her friends left for college in “Sick Pleasure.”  There was one clinker in the bunch, but there always must be in such a collection.  As was the previous collection of stories edited by Ms. Perkins, (My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories) this is a seasonal delight that can be read year round.

The Summer of Chasing Mermaids
Sarah Okler
There were some glaring errors in this set-in-Oregon novel, the worst being the mention of sales tax.  Oregon does not have a sales tax.  While these regular errors detracted from a full enjoyment of the story, it was otherwise a goodly tale of the loss of voice (an actual, not metaphorical loss due to damage to vocal chords) and of finding a new way.  Plus, you know, some romance.  I also appreciate there was a tastefully-written female masturbation scene, as those are incredibly rare.  The bad characters were not super complex, but the family dynamics were.  Overall, a so-so experience, but one that kept me reading.

The Steep & Thorny Way
Cat Winters
The tale of Hamlet, retold.  Set in 1920s Washington County, Oregon, this Hamlet is the daughter of an African American father and a white mother.  Winters manages to expertly recreate the 1920’s setting, weave in dueling stories of discrimination (Hannalee’s mixed race, Joe Adder’s homosexuality) and the workings of the Klu Klux Klan in a town that accepts and welcomes their efforts.  (“They’re mostly a fundraising organization” seems to be the belief of the majority of the county.)

I have a great appreciate not only for Winter’s complex storytelling, but also the way she can combine historical fact so well with the appearance of ghosts.

The Outsiders
S. E. Hinton
My re-reading of this ended in sad feelings, but they were different than the sad feelings of my teenage years.  My adult self found this book to be terribly clunky in its narrative, so much so that I feel for the swaths of school children who now read this as a required text.  Sorry kids.  My generation really liked it, but it hasn’t held up so well.  I’m going to do my best to forget this reading and return to the squishy feelings of joy when thinking of Ponyboy and Sodapop and all of the other greasers.

You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen
Carole Boston Weatherford and Jeffrey Boston Weatherford
Read for librarian book group
The tale of the Tuskegee Airmen via verse, rather than prose.  Poems were solid, illustrations fit the bill.  Nicely done.

Woosh!: Lonnie Johnson’s Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions
Barton/Tate
Read for librarian book group
The story of the guy who invented the Super Soaker water gun told via good text and illustrations.  It also encourages kids to take things apart and tinker with them.

Ruby
Francesca Lia Block & Carmen Stanton
I enjoyed Francesca Lia Block’s short story in Summer Days and Summer Nights and went searching for another of her books.  This was the result.  It’s fragmented it its telling, its prose is dense–yet short, and by the time I got to the end enough clues had been set out that I found the reveal cliche rather than amazing.  I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either.

Holy cats, Batman, I read two adult fiction books, plus a nonfiction.  What is going on?

Young Adult:  The Smell of Other People’s Houses
Grownup Nonfiction:  Spark Joy
Adult Fiction:  Eligible.  I can also recommend Eligible.

The White Cat and the Monk
Bogart/Smith
Read for librarian book group
There is apparently a poem a monk wrote about the white cat who came into his cell and their mutual search for things?  I’d never heard of this poem and wouldn’t have minded some form of it being reprinted in full at the end of the book.  The illustrations were too simple for the majority of the book–the rendering of the cat I found particularly unfortunate–though they shined on the illuminated manuscript pages.

Booked
Kwame Alexander
Read for librarian book group
Mr. Alexander brings us another book about a boy interested in sports (this time soccer) told in poetry form.  I love that about Kwame Alexander.  The book contains a solid middle-grade story with age-appropriate challenges (family, school, soccer, love). I enjoyed reading it, but found that two weeks later I couldn’t remember the plot.

Raymie Nightingale
Kate DiCamillo
Read for librarian book group
There was a lot of gushing love for this story by the librarians.  I did not feel the same.  The setting seemed to be a small town, yet Raymie Nightingale was unaware of many elements in her small town.  Nearly all of the characters were turned just the slightest bit too high on the quirky/unique scale and the narrative didn’t grab me and pull me in.  I felt fairly disconnected from the entire story.  I appreciated the illustration of magical thinking (I can fix a problem by doing something unrelated) that was so prevalent during my own childhood.

The Smell of Other People’s Houses
Bonnie Sue Hitchock
Read for librarian book group
This is in the running for Book with the Best Title, and the book itself was quite strong.  The narrative included multiple perspectives from several Alaskan teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s.  For such a slim book, it packed a lot of story.

Wink, Poppy, Midnight
April Genevieve Tucholke
Read for librarian book group
I liked the title and yet it gave me no clues what to expect.  It turns out that those words in the title are names of the three characters, who all take turns narrating.  This was an intriguing and enjoyable story that kept me guessing, and while it was tense in moments, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a “psychological thriller,” as someone does on the book jacket.

Spark Joy
Marie Kondo
About this time last year I “tidied” following the KonMarie Method as outlined in The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  And it has been very much a life-changing year.  This book is positioned as a “master class” in tidying and it gave me another shot of success, mostly in the clothes folding arena, which I thought I understood from the first book.  However, the illustrations illuminated just how much more tidier my clothes could be. And now they are.

p.s. The historian in me still needs to go on record as to the importance of saving letters you receive.  I do not agree with Marie Kondo at all.

Eligible
Curtis Sittenfeld
I’m a casual admirer of Pride & Prejudice, and a rabid fan of Curtis Sittenfeld.  That mean I was eager to read her adaptation of the classic Jane Austin novel. And what fun it  was!  All of the characters you love (or love to hate) find their contemporary doppelgängers in an adaptation that is as witty, frustrating and romantic as the original. (Yet so much easier to read.)  As usual, Sittenfeld has a wonderful way of writing, so no fewer than four quotes from the book made their way to my Goodreads Quotes page.  This was also quite discussable.

Eligible
Curtis Sittenfeld
(And then I read it all over again five days later)

The Love Song of Jonny Valentine
Teddy Wayne
Have you ever had a conversation with an 11-year-old boy who is really, really into something?  Maybe that something is something you don’t know anything about, so at first what he’s telling you is interesting. So it’s fun at first.  But then he just keeps going, because he’s super into his thing and maybe hasn’t matured enough to pick up on the social cues of when it’s time to wrap it up. And suddenly you’re feeling trapped and slightly panicked because, when exactly, will he stop talking?

That was this book.  If you want to be inside the head of an 11-year-old boy who has been groomed for pop stardom since he became a 9-year-old YouTube sensation, this is your book.  It’s full of details like his obsession with “chub” (his own and everyone else’s) his thoughts about what it takes to be a true star, his obsession with when exactly he will hit puberty, and what kind of clothing everyone is wearing.

The author’s point comes through clearly.  I walked away from this book frustrated with the way Jonny Valentine was being used to further various adult goals, and I felt sad that he will never have any normal interactions with children his own age.  But I also walked away frustrated because I couldn’t wait to be done with the book because his narration was relentless and unchanging and left me trapped and panicked.  I’ve spent the time sense wondering if it would have been a more successful book had it been written from multiple perspectives rather than Jonny’s singular, unrelenting one.

Somewhat of a lighter month for reading, probably because things were so busy. (Also not a month in which I’m head-over-heels about much of what I’ve read.)

Picture Books:  Are We There Yet? (and not because it’s the only contender)
Young Adult: A Thousand Nights
Young Nonfiction: Wet Cement

Are We There Yet?
Dan Santant
Read for Librarian Book Group
Perhaps my favorite picture book so far this year, and so good I read it out loud to Matt.  We had fun scanning the QR codes and finding all the details.  Quite well done!

A Thousand Nights
E.K. Johnston
Johnston applies knowledge gained during several summers spent in the desert in this retelling of One Thousand and One Nights. While the narrative skipped right along, Johnston also included a ton of detail about village and palace life.  At times it reminded me of my enjoyment while reading the Red Tent.

The Great American Whatever
Tim Federle
Great title.  And cover design.  Good coming of age story about a boy, Quinn, who is mourning the death of his sister (and partner in movie-making crime).

Essential Maps for the Lost
Deb Caletti
The voice of the omniscient narrator did not work at all for me.  What did work was the portrayal of depression as the subtle sneaky bastard that it is.  Very nicely done Ms. Caletti.  Also, thanks for a reminder that it’s been too many years since I read From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

When Green Becomes Tomatoes
Julie Fogliono
Read for Librarian Book Group
Quite good poems about the changes in the seasons, that also doesn’t go for the cliche parts of the season.

Wet Cement
Bob Raczka
Read for Librarian Book Group
If you are only going to buy one poetry book this year, this is the one!  Wonderfully inventive use of words.  Incredibly clever.

Guess Who Haiku
Caswell/Shea
Read for Librarian Book Group
I did not find these haiku as amazing or creative as the author implied in the author note.  Illustrations were fine.

Fearless Flyer
Lang/Colon
Read for Librarian Book Group
“Oh! I hope there’s a picture of Ruth Law at the end!  I hope, I hope, I hope!”  And there was!  Gripping tale (in picture book form) of an early pilot trying to set a long distance record.  The illustrations were softer than I would have preferred for the subject matter, but still effective.The Shameless Hour
Sarina Bowen
Moving right along in the Ivy Series we step away from the hockey players, and instead follow Bella, the manager of the hockey team, and Rafe, a soccer player.  In this installment, we finally leave behind the F/inexperienced M/experienced trope for the slow-burn romance between the very experienced F and the very inexperienced M.  Uncomfortable stuff happens to Bella early on, which means there isn’t a lot of hot sex in this book.  There’s other good stuff, though.

On December 6, 2007, I joined Goodreads.  I’m not sure on which day I posted my first review, (of Tom Perrotta’s The Wishbones) but since that time I’ve written 1067 reviews.  And that’s actually writing reviews, not just doling out stars and continuing on my merry way.

Would you like to see a graph of all my books on Goodreads by publication date?  I thought you would.  Can you guess what all those dots down around 1600 are?

Did you guess Shakespeare?  You are correct!  The three in the 1800s are Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre.  And that diagonal cluster of mid-twentieth century books on the right are the Betsy-Tacy series.

Isn’t data fun?

If you would like to be my friend on Goodreads, search my name.  You’ll find me.

Ah picture books.  Boosting the Number of Books Read (NBR) of readers around the world.  If you are falling down on your reading goal, go find some picture books. Possibly even the ones I list here as it was a pretty good month for picture books.  Also, my favorite Smart Smut author Amy Jo Cousins released two more books in her Bend or Break series.  And she recommended another author who had a free book on Amazon and I got sucked into that one and the sequel and then the free bonus book.   It was a great month of book reading, but I missed a few newspaper days.

Picture books: Jazz Day
Middle grade: The Turn of the Tide
Young adult: Exit, Pursued by a Bear
Young nonfiction: The Borden Murders
Grownup nonfiction: Basic Map and Compass Skills
Smart Smut: Hard Candy

Freedom in Congo Square
Weatherford
Read for librarian book group.
There was an entire page of introductory text and then the word choices in the book skewed to the complex.  The art was good, but this is a book to be read to children, not for children to read.

The Secret Subway
Corey
Read for librarian book group.
I appreciated the unique form of illustration, while also not really liking the art itself.  I was very interested in this secret subway as I am a fan of pneumatic tubes.

Emma & Julia Love Ballet
McClintock
Read for librarian book group.
Great illustrations.  Cute story.  A hell of a lot of pink.

Jazz Day
Orgill
Read for librarian book group.
I was all in, because I love that picture of  “A Great Day in Harlem,” and I’m a sucker for behind-the-scenes information.  And then the story was told in poetry!  And it was good poetry!  This is one of the books I would have spent a lot of time looking at as a child.

Ida, Always
Levis
Read for librarian book group.
Sweet story about loss, in this case, the loss of a polar bear companion.  It made me teary, though, so perhaps a pre-read is in order before plunging into it with a child.

The Night Gardener
The Fan Brothers
Read for librarian book group
It was very fun to see what shapes the Night Gardener pruned the trees of the town into.  And I also read this book with a growing sense of horror at what sort of permanent damage was caused by some random dude who came through town and hacked up the trees. Pruning like that takes follow-up and who is going to keep up the maintenance? Also, if someone turned my tree into an owl without asking me first, I would not be thrilled. However, most children will not have spent much time pruning trees, and will not be so unsettled.

(Early graphic novel-type picture book:)
The Great Pet Escape
Victoria Jamison
Read for librarian book group.
Many chuckles abounded.

The Turn of the Tide
Roseanne Parry
Read for librarian book group.
Yet another quality middle-grade fiction book!  Set in Astoria, this is the story of a girl who longs to be a bar pilot and her cousin, who is spending the summer in Astoria after a Tsunami kills his grandparents and devastates his town.  There is sailing, adventure and tough choices.

Bramblehart
Henry Cole
Read for librarian book group.
Talking animals aren’t usually my thing, and so it was for this novel. Also, an adversary suddenly became an ally with no explanation.  How did that get by the people who are supposed to be putting out quality books?

The Boy in the Black Suit
Jason Reynolds
The is the second book by Reynolds I’ve read that completely disregards the adage that a YA story must be All About Plot.  Unlike the knitting one, I did not get bored and enjoyed wandering through these character’s lives, and especially liked attending so many interesting funerals.

Unbecoming
Jenny Downham
Read for Librarian Book Group
I shall begin by discussing the thing that distracted me throughout the entire novel:  the timeline.  The grandmother gave birth to the mother in 1954.  And the mother’s daughter is a contemporary teenager.  Wait.  What?  Really?  And there is also a younger brother?  How old was she when she gave birth?

I can’t tell you how many times I counted forward from 1954 trying to make the timeline sensible.  A sixteen-year-old today would have to have been born in 1999 or 2000 which would make her mother forty five?  And forty seven when she had the younger brother?  You could maybe subtract five years and have the story set in 2011–but probably not many more than that due to phone technology–but even being a forty-two-year-old first-time mother might bring up some commentary very early on during the book.  For instance, would her daughter attribute the mother’s insistence on safety and sensible choices to the fact that she was so old* when she became a mother?  If there had been just one sentence early on–“my mother was so much older than all the other mothers”–I could have stopped my endless counting.  The age thing is finally addressed near the end of the book, but by then I’d exhausted myself with different decade permutations.

Setting aside the (rather large) issue of timeline, I loved the stories of these three women.  The grandmother’s memory loss was terrifying to read about, but such a good way to tell her story.  And the mother and the daughter’s stories were also compelling.

*Note that I realize there are women who are first-time mothers in their forties (though forty-five and forty-seven is unusual) and I don’t think forty itself is old.

Hour of the Bees
Lindsay Eager
Read for librarian book group.
After a while the story that grandfather was telling seemed like a ham-fisted respect-the-planet kind of environmental tale.  This didn’t trouble me overly.  It’s a first novel and it’s a long one and something has to get a little out of control.  I thought the capture of emotions was very well done and it was kind of fun to see a bratty older teenager through the eyes of her younger sister.  I feel like there isn’t enough of that in the fiction I come across.  Probably because I mostly read books from the bratty older sister’s perspective.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear
E.K. Johnston
Read for librarian book group.
This has become top book of the year.  Is there nothing E.K. Johnston can’t do?  The repeated unfairness of the situation drove me crazy and kept me reading as things worked their way back to the new normal.  As usual, the prose was excellent.  Three quotes from the book have made their way to my quotes page.

I also greatly enjoyed the couple of pages of chatter about which Canadian University people were attending. Especially because I had no idea what was going on.

The Borden Murders
Sarah Miller
Read for librarian book group.
I have two main problems with this book.  The first is that the author sets us up by saying that what we know about Lizzie Borden–for most of us gleaned from the rhyme–is wrong.  Then she does nothing to prove that the rhyme is wrong.  With the evidence Miller presents, I’m convinced that Lizzie Borden was the person giving the whacks.

Secondly, Lizzie Borden was thirty years old and unmarried at the time of the murder.  Her spinster status must have been something people commented on, and regularly, yet Miller never unpacks anything about what it meant to be an unmarried woman at that time.  I see this as a large oversight.

Though I was constantly irritated by the above two things, this was a very readable (though the prose was sometimes clunky) engrossing book.  I enjoyed Miller’s inclusion of the way the three (three!) different Fall River newspapers covered the sensational event, as well as the coverage in the national press.

Basic Essentials: Map and Compass
Cliff Jacobsen
Read for librarian book group.
Exactly what the title says it is.

Love me like a rock
Amy Jo Cousins
We continue to work our way through the rowers of the Ivy League-like college.  First there were Tom and Reese, then Tom’s friend Cash and after that came Cash’s cousin Denny, which lead us to Raffi and here we have Raffi’s roommate Austin.  I could draw you a schema, but really you should just go read the series, because Ms. Cousins knows how to write good characters.

So Austin has this friends-with-benefits thing with roommate Vinne, and it’s working okay.  But then, there’s a life drawing class and this very hirsute model named Sean catches Austin’s eye.  Things progress from there.  Unlike other books in the series, there isn’t much keeping Austin and Sean apart–Austin’s fairly trauma-free.  But it’s fun to watch someone who has always been on the sidelines find himself front and center of someone’s attention.  Plus, the Austin/Sean relationship upends things with Vinnie, which leads us right into the next book in the series, Hard Candy.

Hard Candy
Amy Jo Cousins
There’s something about watching an uptight person learn to chill out.  And when Vinnie, Austin and Raffi’s uptight out-but-straight-and-narrow roommate, finds himself in the path of very flamboyant Bryan things get interesting.

I’m hoping we haven’t exhausted all our characters in this series, but aside from straight roommate Bob, there doesn’t seem to be anyone left.  Which would be a shame, although I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy whatever Amy Jo Cousins thinks up next.

The Year We Fell Down
Sarina Brown
Amy Jo Cousins recommended this author and the book was free via Kindle promotion, and thus I read it.  I found the repeated references to the “hope fairy” (or whatever it was) really annoying and this was yet another M/F romance where the M is experienced and the F is not at all.

Aside from that, I found that both characters were dealing with new disabilities (one temporary, one permanent) interesting and not often a topic explored.  And I couldn’t put it down, so that’s saying something.

The Year We Hid Away
Sarina Brown
Book Two brings us back to a secondary character from The Year We Fell Down–Bridger McCaulley, massive slut and good guy.  He’s got a different plan this year, which is thrown asunder when he meets Scarlet Crowley, new freshman hiding from her father’s misdeeds.  Good examination of the complexities of hiding things.  Again we have a M/F romance with the very experienced M and the not at all experienced F.

Blonde Date
Sarina Brown
This novella was free when I subscribed to Sarina Brown’s newsletter.  One of my favorite things about it was that it is the first in the series to have a M/F romance with the F having substantially more experience than the M.  Finally!

HOWEVER.  I think it’s important to state that if a person consents to a sex act, and doesn’t know the other person involved in the sex act has set it up so people could watch said sex act she has not consented and she should turn those motherfuckers in.  The workaround solution in this book was all well and good, but it doesn’t take away from the fact she didn’t give consent.  Which is creepy and gross and needs to be dealt with, possibly legally.