Review: Bonfire

Bonfire by Krysten Ritter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got this book from Book of the Month, and for a quick read, and a first novel by an actress, it was surprisingly good! It is about a woman who returns to her childhood small town after becoming a lawyer to investigate an environmental charge against the town's largest employer, a chemical company. Replete with old boyfriends, high school drama revisited, and juicy characters, it kept me up late at night. A really fun read.

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Review: Dinner: A Love Story: It All Begins at the Family Table

Dinner: A Love Story: It All Begins at the Family Table by Jenny Rosenstrach
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love love loved this book. I discovered Rosenstrach when she wrote a column for Bon Appetit about the things she has learned about feeding kids, and when I posted that on Facebook, several friends turned me on to the fact that she has a cookbook, blog, and empire! This book was sweet - it was a memoir about her life before marriage, upon marriage, and upon kids, with recipes for each stage of life. And the recipes are delicious!! I loved hearing her stories, and really enjoyed getting a "professional" opinion on what is and isn't reasonable for toddlers and preschoolers to do at the dinner table, and to eat. A must-read for parents!

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Review: The Sympathizer

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a book that made me feel kind of dumb, or uncultured, or too impatient. It won the Pulitzer. It is considered groundbreaking and all that. And I didn't feel like I really "got" it. It was about a Communist spy embedded in Vietnam. Parts of the book were about his life, his escape from Vietnam in the last days before the fall of Saigon, and about his lifelong friendship with two boys, one Communist, and one not. But the structure of the book (a confession), the climax (the revision of the confession), and the denouement (not completely even clear to me) were confusing. I enjoyed reading about the narrator's life and story, but the ending got too theoretical and fantastical for me.

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Review: Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation by John Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This might be one of those, "if you only read one book this year" books - in that it truly captures what is going on in America today. Not my America, of $5 lattes, but of people struggling to make ends meet, facing deep questions about identity, and many other important things taking place right now. I noticed this book in Denver's Tattered Cover bookstore, and seeing that it included writing by Ann Patchett, Roxane Gay, and Rebecca Solnit was enough to convince me. After reading it, I found many, many more wonderful authors sharing their stories and those of others, and I learned a lot.

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Review: The Sisters Chase

The Sisters Chase by Sarah Healy
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Oy. This book had promise - it was about a set of sisters whose mother dies, and the elder takes on raising the younger. The motel their family owns ends up owing too much in back taxes to be worth anything, so they go on the run, which begins with their distant (and filthy rich) cousins, and continues for several decades. I did not enjoy the writing, the plotting, or the characters. The characters were mostly archetypes, not well-developed, and the major twists were all thin and predictable. I did not enjoy this one at all.

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Review: The Nix

The Nix by Nathan Hill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was great - Lisa kept recommending it to me, and when I finally got started I could tell why. The story is nominally about a young man who, when faced with an overdue manuscript for his publisher, agrees to investigate his estranged mother, whom he learns is a radical from the 1960's. However, the book is so much more than that - Hill is a master at characterization, from the main characters to minor people, he paints such a clear picture of who they are, that it seems as if you know them. While the plot of this book was interesting enough, it was the characters that really made it great. Thanks, Lisa!

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Review: Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers by Anne Lamott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While I love Annie, I mean, REALLY love Annie, this book was just ok. I typically lose myself in her writing, invite myself into her anecdotes, and come out of reading her feeling like I have the power to be a better person. This book, not so much. It didn't have enough of her charming stories or self-deprecating encouragement for my taste - it was too straightforward without enough personality. I did like the idea of their being three categories of prayer (which, coincidentally was covered in my daughter's Hebrew School class the same week I was reading this), but didn't find that illuminating enough to carry the book.

I'll definitely read more of Annie's books, and hope they are more like her others than like this one.

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Review: The Girl with All the Gifts

The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a creepy book - one that I had seen twice at Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver this year (and I don't live in Denver!) - that I requested at the library. It is about a girl, who at the outset seems like a lovely and curious pre-teen imprisoned in an institution that is part mental hospital and part prison. Over the course of the book, however, we learn that some sort of apocalyptical event occurred and this girl (and others like her) may be very dangerous.

Part psycho-thriller, part post-apocalyptic story, and part a story about humans connecting to each other, with a dose of The Passage, this was thoroughly enjoyable, if you're into that kind of thing. And I am.

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Review: A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life

A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life by Ayelet Waldman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was really interesting. I noticed it on the shelf at the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, then requested it at the library. Waldman is an author (herself married to author Michael Chabon), known for both her books as well as a controversial Modern Love column where she proclaimed loving her husband more than her children.

The book is part memoir (of her life with mental illness: Depression, Bipolar, and PMDD), part medical log (of her month micro-dosing with LSD rather than traditional psychiatric drugs), and part history (of drugs in the United States, both medicinal and illegal). She has a very unique point of view, both as a patient and as a former attorney, and she is meticulous in how she wields those personas throughout the book. She is generous and brave and honest in her writing, and I learned a lot reading her book.

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Review: Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As an avid reader, it is of some embarrassment to me that along the way, I missed reading anything by Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters. When I Facebook-confessed this, I was led to this book. It was a fun read. I found myself staying up late to find out what would happen in certain chapters, and laughing out loud at times. Like the experience of watching Downton Abbey, I found this to be more relatable than I expected, and the characters more complex than I gave them credit for at first blush. While I'm not sure I'd subsist on a diet exclusively of old English literature, I will certainly pick up another Austin (or Bronte) in the future.

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Review: The House of the Spirits

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a truly amazing book. Every time I read something by Allende, I'm reminded not to be intimidated, rather to feel invited, for she is such a gifted writer. This book is a saga about a family who is touched by the supernatural, but in the magical realism way that great Latin American authors seem able to introduce without distraction. The patriarch is a large landowner who provides both a great and terrible life for those who serve him. He marries a women whom he loves his entire life, though she can't forgive him for certain things during their marriage. Their daughter and granddaughter are equally enthralling characters, and introduce modernity into the family, ultimately making revolutionary changes to its structure, and to the world around them. What a great read!

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Review: The Buried Giant

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was a very strange book, and I have a hard time giving it a star rating. It starts with an older couple, living in England - sort of - in a fairyland time, but amongst some historical figures. There is a mysterious mist that removes people's memories, and they have only a hazy sense that they had a son, and no real memory of how or where to find him. Nevertheless they set off to his village, encountering soldiers, goats, mountains, dragons, and descendants of King Arthur's Court on their journey. The story was quaint at times, and horrifying at other times, and some reviews I read said it was not just an adult fairy tale, but a meditation on memory and loss. Sorry, I didn't get there with it - I found the book a bit of a slog and was unsurprised at some of the most important plot turns.

Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for Literature while I was reading this, so I'm willing to bet I missed the point of this book, not that it was bad, but as a reader I can't say I enjoyed reading it.

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Review: Dark Matter

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was good, and not what I expected. It starts when a man goes out one evening to meet a friend for a quick drink, and soon after, wakes up in a lab, being told that he has succeeded in a bold quantum physics experiment. He doesn't know what to believe - which life is his "real" life, and risks everything to get back to his happy life with his beloved wife and son.

This book played on traditional sci-fi themes around multi-verses and alternate realities, but did it while portraying a character who was flawed, relatable, and emotional. There were ways in which it reminded me of The Hike, although this was less surreal and more traditionally science fiction. The ending will also stay with me for a long time.

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Review: Seveneves

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was amazing. I love reading Stephenson, and this was no exception. The story starts with an astronomical event that scientists soon figure out mean that the earth will be destroyed and nobody will survive. Representatives from different countries and cultures and with different skill sets are sent up to space to represent the future of humankind. The book follows what happens to those people, and the generations that come after them. It's part space science, part sociology, and part adventure.

Not only was this book obviously meticulously researched, but it was well-written, smartly plotted, and filled with rich characters. The book is long, like most of his works are, and it is great fun to see seeds sown early in the book grow into critical plot points later. Thoroughly engrossing and enjoying.

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Review: One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Both Lindy West and Jessica Valenti have blurbs on the back of this book, so it was kind of an obvious choice. It is a series of essays by Koul, an Indian-Canadian author who writes for BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and The New Yorker, among other outlets.

At first, I was disappointed. The first few essays were more Mindy Kaling than Arundathi Roy. I found the humor distracting; it undermined her message for me. However, either I got used to her, or her later essays were more serious, because by the end of the book I was enjoying it a lot. Her commentary on race was well-illustrated through her own experience, and that of her young niece, her father, and many other people in her life.

I need to read more intersectional feminists. This was a great start.

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