Random Song: “Holy” Justin Bieber

Yet another song I found by listening to the Daily Download while doing early grocery shopping on Saturday morning. Carson Daily suggested I watch the video, which he called “very moving,” and so I did that too.

It’s definitely a song that sticks in my head.

My views of famous and wealthy underaged children has been evolving. I think Justin Bieber has done a lot of stupid things in his life. But I also think getting famous is hard for adults with fully formed personalities, and so I think we have entirely unreasonable expectations that a minor could navigate that situation with grace and class.

Bieber’s publicity (because how does one separate the person from the machine that made him?) is going full tilt on his new phase. The songs I’ve heard from the album feel very much like he’s processing his rich and famous youth. He’s gone the path of Christianity and marriage. Both of those eventually might not be the saviors he seems to think they are, but according to the glowing Vanity Fair profile I read, have done a lot to smooth out a lot of the not-so-flattering things that have been published about him in the last few years.

This song is repetitive, because those are the kinds of songs that kids today make, but I like his repetition of the word holy, and I enjoy the bridge that seems to be a response to the criticism of the short engagement period and his relative youth when he married.

They say we’re too young and
The pimps and the players say, “Don’t go crushin'”
Wise men say, “Fools rush in”
But I don’t know 

I also tip my hat to the rhyme of “crushin” with “fools rush in.”

Justin Bieber has thousands of bad choices behind him, some of which are probably harder to forgive than others (like his treatment of the women in his life.) He probably has one million stupid choices in front of us, just like the rest of us who aren’t millionaires have thousands of bad choices in front of us. But hopefully he’s on the upswing and finding a life that isn’t so extreme.

In further Justin Bieber news, I greatly enjoy this song.

80’s Blast From the Past: Crash

Not the “Crash” sung by Dave Matthews Band (which I also like) but this fun one, that I’m a little sad disappeared from the airwaves.

I think I might have heard this on KINK’s perfect playlist? I love radio stations that throw in the outliers now and then. I was driving to WinCo for Friday night grocery shopping, because that’s what my 40s are all about.

Have a listen.

One of the YouTube comments: The worst thing about this song it is ends.

True that!

Books Read in March 2022

Picture books

Nigel and the Moon
Antwan Eady and Gracey Zhang
Read for Librarian Book Group

Nigel dreams of a bright and varied future, but he doesn’t feel comfortable sharing those dreams in the daytime

Middle Grade

Almost Flying
Jake Maia Arlow
Read for Librarian Book Group

Feelings about rollercoasters are great for expressing feelings about a father’s sudden relationship, feelings about friendship, and feelings about crushes.

However, I feel like the main character was transported from the 1980s to a contemporary setting. Surely Long Island would have had enough gay people that she would have vocabulary to pull from.

Those Kids From Fawn Creek
Erin Entrada Kelly
Read for Librarian Book Group

Erin Entrada Kelly is great at diving into feelings and writing solid middle grade books, and this is no exception. I admired how she juggled her many characters in a small town and how their lives were upended when a new girl appears one day.

Young Adult

Somewhere Between Bitter & Sweet
Laekan Zea Kemp
Read for Librarian Book Group

Pen and Xander’s life transitions are worthy of your time.

Sidelined
Kara Bietz

The building blocks of the plot have to make sense for the whole thing to work. I didn’t believe that a teenage pregnancy in a small town would escape anyone’s notice for three years, even if the teenager and her family left town before anyone could find out. There’s this thing called social media.

I further didn’t believe that one person and one person only (the captain of the football team) would be in charge of thinking up the senior prank. Thus, this didn’t hold together for me.

The Last Words We Said
Leah Scheier
Read for Librarian Book Group

A rather dramatic first page is then followed by an interesting premise involving a boyfriend who is visible to the main character and no one else. It’s also an interesting window into Orthodox Jewish culture, for anyone who might be standing outside that particular house.

Icebreaker
A.L. Graziadei

Icebreaker is a very fun hockey story about the two potential Number 1 draft picks and their first year at college together. I always appreciate when athletes get to step outside their golden boy boxes and we can see the warts and all. In this case, the warts are depression and anxiety.

Battle of the Bands
Lauren Gibaldi and Eric Smith, editors.

Interwoven stories for the win! I love this new (to me, at least) trend in short stories. All stories relate to a high school battle of the bands contest. I like how some of the stories varied the angle of their focus away from the battle itself. We didn’t hear from all the bands on the roster, and that worked for me.

Whistle
E Lockhart and Manuel Preitano
Read for Librarian Book Group

This graphic novel about a new superhero came off as too comic-bookey for this particular reader. The story was good, though, and the illustrations were solid, just not a thing for me.

We Were Liars
E. Lockheart

A reread in anticipation of the prequal. Knowing the ending lessens the punch significantly, but there are still things to look for.

Bend in the Road
Sara Biren

A son of a famous musician (and famous in his own right) escapes to the family farm. There, things proceed about how you might think in this two-narrator romance. I found the number of names hard to navigate at the beginning of the novel. You might want to make a list.

Kneel
Candace Buford

Russell is hoping football will get him out of his small Louisiana town, but systematic racism and a few racists in particular are making it hard. This book a great illustration of the corners that people can be backed into.

Cold
Mariko Tamaki
Read for Librarian Book Group

A short book full of sparkling sentences like this one:

Mark Walker had terrible handwriting. Each letter crawled, gasping for breath, across the page to the end of every raggedly disjointed sentence.

This is a bit of a mystery with the murdered kid acting as one narrator and a random girl as the other. It’s full of a lot of adolescent feelings.

Young Nonfiction

Brave Face
Shaun David Hutchinson

This memoir gets across one point very well: that when the only depictions of a segment of population (in this case gay men) is very narrow and you don’t fit those narrow constraints it makes it difficult to accept that one might be a part of that group. The author makes this point again and again throughout the book.

While he describes that topic extensively, he doesn’t dig deep in other areas and I was left with a lot of questions.

Really great cover art.

Because Claudette
Tracey Baptiste and Tonya Engel
Read for Librarian Book Group

Using a framework of “Because…” we learn the story of a teenager who didn’t give up her seat on the bus before Rosa Parks took her historic sit. The “Because…” framework falls down at times in a distracting way.

Sweet Justice: Georgia Gilmore and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
Mara Rockliff and R. Gregory Christine
Read for Librarian Book Group

A picture book bio of a woman who used what skills she had to help the Montgomery Bus Boycott. That skill was cooking! I loved the centering of an “ordinary” person’s contributions to the Civil Rights Movement.

Star Child: A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler
Ibi Zoboi
Read for Librarian Book Group

Poems, quotes from Octavia Butler, and prose combine into a brief biography. Having all three of those things grouped around particular subjects made the prose parts seem especially repetitive, alas.

Grownup Nonfiction

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in Silicon Valley
John Carryrou

A milestone-by-milestone book about Elizabeth Holmes’s journey from 19-year-old college dropout to billionaire tech person to disgraced CEO. It was fascinating to see the way money is thrown around in Silicon Valley.

SKS: B&W Humboldt

Sara certainly has moved to an area with a lot of local postcards! This one reminds me of clip art montages, but fancier.

Sara reports that it’s gray and rainy and overcast (a thing that happens in Portland a lot too!) and she reports that it’s also Oscar Sunday and she’s excited to see my picks for the win. She writes that she plans on recording the ceremony and catching up later.

I can tell you from the future that she ended up watching in real time, so she saw the famous slap. We discussed via text and both were frowny face about the whole thing.

Another Speedweve-Style Creation

Because I have white sheets on my bed, I like to put a little something in one corner, so I can easily tell which corner goes where. I used my new loom (and followed a pattern I bought off Etsy) to mark one corner.

I’m quite liking the result:

This was the first time I used embroidery thread instead of sashiko thread. It’s very shiny. Here’s what it looks like after the ends are pulled through.

Since this wasn’t a darn and I wasn’t going to walk on the final result, I experimented with tying the knots off instead of weaving them in. This was slightly tedious, but no more so than threading my needle multiple times.