pammab's 2020 challenge

Here comes 2020!

My challenge this year is to complete 5-in-a-row on my own personalized Bingo card. I love the Bingo games here, and creating my own Bingo card gives me room to both set ambitious goals that will push me where I'd like to be pushed, while also leaving me freedom to take a path of least resistance. I developed categories based on books and themes that I'd be delighted to check off either a lifetime or a 2020 bucket list, and then I randomized the locations of those squares on my grid.

--

Despite the best of intentions, I find myself ebbing and flowing in LT (and general internet) activity -- especially this past year, as I struggle to focus on books of length or substance -- so please don't be offended if I disappear for a stint! I still think of people here often, and I'm always wishing you the best.

I tend to read a lot of speculative fiction, just about anything except high fantasy/magical realism/grit or edgy settings, and a lot of famous fiction that I'm only getting to now, especially prize winners and bestsellers from the last decade or so. I've been steering far away from darkness, depression, and such, and putting down books that aren't either light or completely engrossing, and I try to track what I put aside as well. I particularly love engagement with (all) religion, education, social identity, and culture.

Ratings:
I rate according to this scale:
1 - Eek! Methinks not.
2 - Meh. I've experienced better.
3 - A-OK.
4 - Yay! I'm a fan.
5 - Woohoo! As good as it gets!

Two stars don't mean I hated it! It just means the book wasn't especially shiny when I read it. In fact, when I'm not screening tightly, I tend to end up with a bimodal distribution, with a small peak around 2 and a larger peak around 4.

The card...



with the background reflecting an old profile picture I used (Rothko?).

Books used:
To Be Taught, If Fortunate
rare-for-me: Ride the Wind (Western)
donate-able: Children of Time
Dickens: The Annotated Christmas Carol
morally salutary: The Science of Trust
religion-related: Conclave
off-the-shelves: Silence of the Girls
book club: Exhalation
racism awareness: How to be an Antiracist
Austen: Persuasion (abandoned)
FORTUITY: Divergent
Walton: Farthing
non-Anglo author: Sapiens
A Memory Called Empire
YA: Bitterblue
Ishiguro: The Buried Giant
rare-for-me: The Spy Wore Red (thriller/crime)
Heller: Catch-22 (abandoned)
recommended: Circe
Vonnegut: Cat's Cradle
non-white author: Tomorrow's Tomorrow

Completed books

★★★★★
2. Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore (January SFFKIT: What you didn't get to last year)
10. The Kid by Dan Savage
46. Farthing by Jo Walton (October MysteryKIT: Let’s discover a new-to-you author)

★★★★½
16. Conclave by Richard Harris
17. Ride the Wind by Lucia St. Clair Robson
31. How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
40. Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
44. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
51. Justice by Michael J. Sandel
57. Into the Wilderness by Sara Donati

★★★★
4. Circe by Madeline Miller
8. The Spy Wore Red by Aline, Countess of Romanones
11. Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense by Ellyn Satter
14. La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
20. Cetaganda by Lois McMaster Bujold
21. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold
22. Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
23. Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold
24. A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold
25. "Winterfair Gifts" by Lois McMaster Bujold
26. Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold
27. The Flowers of Vashnoi by Lois McMaster Bujold
28. Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold
29. To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
34. Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
42. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin
43. Tamsin by Peter S. Beagle
45. Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher
47. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
52. Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson
53. A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, and The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote
55. The Annotated Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
56. To Die But Once by Jacqueline Winspear

★★★ and ★★★½
1. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
3. Divergent by Veronica Roth
6. The Quiet Place by Peter David
7. The Bitter Side of Sweet by Tara Sullivan
9. Dark Allies by Peter David
12. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
13. Requiem by Peter David
15. Renaissance by Peter David
18. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff
19. Restoration by Peter David
30. The Cruel Prince by Holly Black
33. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
35. Tomorrow's Tomorrow by Joyce Ladner
36. Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell
37. Lumberjanes Volume 1: Beware the Kitten Holy by Noelle Stevenson
38. The Science of Trust by John M. Gottman
39. Raja-Yoga by Swami Vivekananda
41. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (attempted September group read)
48. Exhalation by Ted Chiang

★★ and ★★½
32. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
49. Skipping Toward Gomorrah by Dan Savage
50. The Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon
54. Knife by R. J. Anderson

½ and ★ and ★½
5. Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child by Marc Weissbluth

Options (books that have caught my eye recently -- potential TBR)

Spec fic/science fiction/fantasy
-- Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
-- Time and Again (via DeltaQueen50, whitewavedarling)
-- And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker (mathgirl40's choice over All Systems Red) -- at https://uncannymagazine.com/article/and-then-there-were-n-one/
-- The Wrong Stars - Great found-family light-hearted science fiction, with an interesting set-up, and tropey but satisfying alien adventures! (Arifel, santathing 2019)
-- Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear - I think this is her most "levelled up" work, a fantastic space opera with a lot to say about mental health and some really great galactic adventures. (Arifel and AurumCalendula, santathing 2019)
-- Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer - near-ish future utopias that I think might work for you. (Arifel, santathing 2019)
-- Infomocracy by Malka Older - near-ish future utopias that I think might work for you. (Arifel, santathing 2019)
-- Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells (AurumCalendula, santathing 2019)
-- The Wheel of the Infinite by Martha Wells (AurumCalendula, santathing 2019)
-- Lathe of Heaven by LeGuin (chlorine, more like Dick than LeGuin) (in progress)
-- Planetfall -- colonists, religion, first contact, biology, relateable characters (mathgirl and JayneCM)
-- Stealing Worlds -- new future, lots of thoughts and tech (mathgirl)
-- The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (time travel closed room mystery)
-- The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders (language, politics, environment, characters; mathgirl40)
-- Station Eleven
-- A Deadly Education by Novik (susanna.fraser)

YA
-- In Other Lands (Brennan)
-- Out of Salem - spec fic zombie YA trans novel (kjgormley)
-- Homesick by Jean Fritz (scaifea, autobiography of being a kid in china in the 1920s)
-- Pet by Awaeke Emezi (interesting edges of utopia/dystopia, scaifea, Newbery)
-- Interim Errantry by Diane Duane
-- The Thief by Turner

General adult
-- Nine Perfect Strangers (light chick flick, access)
-- Your House Will Pay (RidgewayGirl, racism awareness)
-- Where the Crawdads Sing (AeshaMali as on par with Song of Achilles and Power of One)
-- Girl, Woman, Other (Booker Prize, Ridgeway Girl)
-- Never Let Me Go
-- Empire of Wild (RidgewayGirl, Métis, parallel land rights and plot)
-- Midwife of Hope River (DeltaQueen50, uplifting, interesting setting)
-- Nervous Condition (japaul22, Rhodesia, Booker, women in '60s)
-- Wee Free Men by Pratchett (susanna.fraser, if pratchett is a like but not love)
-- True Story by Petty (literary investigation of truth vs believability, using genre conventions to comment on genres and tell a good story; RidgewayGirl)
-- Whiskey when we're dry (new western, deltaqueen50, kindly prostitutes, booze, lgbtq)
-- Upright Women Wanted badass libraries (JayneCM)
-- My Year of Meats by Ozeki (Buddhist fiction)

Historical fiction
-- A Thousand Splendid Suns (via lkernagh)
-- Hard Times (scaifea)
-- Into the Wilderness (American Outlander; tess_schoolmarm, supported by SouthernKiwi as a favorite author) (in progress)
-- Terra Nullius -- Claire Coleman for fiction colonization of Australia, PICK UP BLIND; via JayneCM)
-- Empire of the Summer Moon via tess_schoolmarm
-- Moloka'i via LittleTaiko (Hawaii, leprosy)

Other formats
-- America Chavez comic series by Gabby Rivera (owned)
-- C. P. Cavafy (poetry)

Short stories
-- Paper Menagerie (owned)
-- Strange Weather: Four Short Novels by Joe Hill (rec from mathgirl40)
-- Not For Use In Navigation: Thirteen Stories by Iona Datt Sharma (AurumCalendula, santathing 2019)
-- Incomplete Solutions - One of my favourite collections of 2019, bringing together a range of short work from Nigerian speculative fiction writer Wole Talabi. I particularly loved some of the longer SF pieces, including the title novella "Incomplete Solutions". (Arifel, santathing 2019) (owned)
-- Dreams and Swords by Katherine V. Forrest

Non-fiction
-- Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain
-- The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within (scaifea)
-- The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein - one of the few non-fiction works I've read recently, this is a memoir from a white anti-apartheid activist whose husband was arrested and later acquitted as part of the Rivona trial - a really interesting part of history that I didn't know much about, and a very tense and ultimately quite heartbreaking read. (Arifel, santathing 2019)
-- Discerning Religious Life (christina_reads) - discernment of religious vocation, Catholic, questions to reflect on and the meaning of that choice in daily life
-- The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Mealtime (scaifea)
-- Real Vegetarian Thai from wisemetis
-- Neither Wolf Nor Dog (susanna.fraser)
-- Local is our future (JayneCM)
-- We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (chlorine)
-- Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
-- The Inconvenient Indian (rabbitprincess)
-- Tell me how it ends (RidgewayGirl)
-- Family Pride (access)
-- Raised by Unicorns (access)
-- Unconditional Parenting
-- Bayesian Data Analysis (Gelman)
-- Bill Bryson
-- Cool Beans by Joe Yonan
-- No Visible Bruises
-- Gods of the Upper Air
-- Nicholas and Alexandra by Massie for Russian history, recommended by DeltaQueen50 in prep for approaching Russians as part of suggestion by Tess_W of getting more appreciation with more history
-- Slavery by another name by Blackmon (threadnsong)
-- Jesus and John Wayne by Du Mez (threadnsong)
-- A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Elliott
-- The Face: A Time Code by Ozeki (memoir)

Religion/philosophy
-- Why Religion (Pagels)
-- God in search of man
-- Christianity and Culture by T.S. Eliot (avoid the kindle edition)
-- The Grammar of God (markon)

Education
-- Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools by Diane Ravitch
-- Illiberal Education by D'Souza
-- Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel by Adams
-- Classroom Instruction That Works
-- Never Work Harder Than Your Students
-- Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School

Interpersonal/professional/self-help/etc. development
-- Influencer (owned)
-- Crucial Accountability
-- Impro
-- Conversationally Speaking (access)
-- No Hard Feelings by Fosslien and Duffy (rabbitprincess)
-- Not Light, but Fire by Matthew Kay
-- Resilient Management by Hogan
-- The Purpose of Power by Garza
-- Covering by Yoshino
-- Rebel Ideas by Syed
-- Radical Candor by Scott
-- How we show up by Birdsong
-- Antisocial by Marantz
-- A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide by Harrell
-- The Culture Code by Coyle

auf Deutsch
-- Inkheart (owned)
-- Der Vorleser (Schlink)
-- Die Verwandlung (Kafka) (owned)

Welcome back! I love this setup and hope it brings you lots of great books :)

Inkheart in the original German - fabulous! I love Inkheart and wish my German was up to speed. I am going to try in 2020 to relearn some of the German I have forgotten from lack of use.

Happy reading in 2020 - look forward to following along.

>5 rabbitprincess: Thanks, and happy 2020 to you!
>6 JayneCM: My German is also quite rusty. I'm hoping the way to get it back is to use it! There are a lot of books that I could read in their original forms if I set my mind to it, I think.... I hope your endeavor goes well in 2020!

I'm happy to see The Spy Wore Red on your list of possibles -- hope you enjoy it if/when you get to it! I also adored Speak Easy, Speak Love.

I love the idea of a personalized bingo card and several of your squares are intriguing. I'm working on the "auf Deutsch" square now and finding that it's easier than I had anticipated.

>8 christina_reads: Walking through my list of potential books to filter down for 2020, I found myself extra intrigued by The Spy Wore Red -- if I recall correctly the library doesn't have it, but perhaps it will magically come to me by Audible.... *bwahaha*

>9 RidgewayGirl: I'm trying to thread the needle between "pushing myself" and "reading whatever hits my fancy" with a Bingo card. I'm hoping I can read with few restrictions, but also be incentivized to read a couple (or more) specific books that would be stretches without a structured challenge. We'll see if it actually works out that way. I'm looking forward to hearing about your German reading!

Nice set up Pammab, from your list of possibilities I suspect I'll pick up some book bullets here. I see you have Into the Wilderness as an option, Donati/Lippi is one of my favourite authors and an automatic read for me, I hope you enjoy this one

What a fascinating setup! Happy reading!

Wishing you a wonderful year of reading!

Love your setup and look forward to seeing you fill in those squares.

Have fun with your reading this year.

>11 SouthernKiwi:
>12 MissWatson:
>13 lkernagh:
>14 DeltaQueen50:
>15 hailelib:
Thank you!

>11 SouthernKiwi: Thanks for the support for Into the Wilderness! A favorite author is a strong recommendation.

(I am still working through The Buried Giant, which has been less intriguing now that I know more about the world, and Circe is phenomenal but I haven't had audiobook time this past week. Soon to have a book completed in 2020, though, I hope! Especially as more and more holds come in and stack up...)

Happy 2020 reading and good luck on your own Bingo card!

>17 thornton37814: Thank you! Happy reading to you as well.

1. The Buried Giant
Kazuo Ishiguro
2020.01.05 / ★★★½ / review

An elderly couple in ancient Britain have only fleeting memories of their past together, but they are still very much in love. The mists steal their past and their community takes the candle for their home, so they decide to visit their son, whom they barely remember and who they seem to recall lives a few days' journey away. Their journey, over the course of which their memories return, is delectable and epic, allegorical and steeped in mythology.

The atmosphere in this book is phenomenal; I am incredibly impressed with Ishiguro. I was both surprised and not at all surprised to learn that he is a recent Nobel recipient. His craft lent a vague and unavoidable delightful unease for the first quarter of the book. Then, as the (shallow) plot picked up and the world fell into place, I unfortunately found myself less excited. The book became more clearly allegorical as the storyline befitting a fable unfolded, which I found a bit too wordy given the thinness of the plot and characterization. Even so, I adored the final chapter and the artful handling of love and maturity and the role of pruning our memories in peace. Overall I'm torn on this book, but I'd recommend it without reservation to fans of literary fiction or gorgeously created settings.

2. Bitterblue
Kristin Cashore
2020.01.08 / ★★★★★ / review

I adored this YA book about a young queen trying to rule while facing troublemakers and unknowables on every side. As the third book set in Cashore's world, Bitterblue grows the setting and the characters while wrapped up in a tight plot. I think it's my favorite in the series, because it doesn't focus too much on romance, it ties up its loose ends, it shows characters from new perspectives, and it is yet another strong female lead. The only piece that didn't quite ring true to me was the introduction of yet another queer pairing in the background -- not that the pairing felt wrong, but that the rate is awfully high for straight rich folks to be friends with even today, much less in quasi-medieval Europe. Regardless, I was absolutely unable to put this book down. The plot and tensions rock. I highly recommend this series for folks who enjoy YA fantasy.

3. Divergent
Veronica Roth
2020.01.09 / ★★★ / review

In a future Chicago in which everyone is sorted into one of five independent factions based on their virtues, Beatrice is "Divergent" -- she fits none of the factions fully. She chooses one regardless, goes through the initiation, and then foils a plot.

Coming off of Graceling, which was widely heralded in YA fantasy a number of years back and that I adored when I got to it, I was really looking forward to Divergent, which I'd considered to be part of the same beloved YA fantasy wave. But Divergent felt extremely... adolescent, for lack of a better word. I didn't find it particularly relateable. The story is there, but it's predictable (bad guys emerge, kids overthrow them). The themes are predictable and useful for kids but maybe overdone for adults (you can be your full self even if power doesn't want you to, being smart isn't all it's cracked up to be, it's a virtue to be brave and selfless). The plot devices are distasteful and too easy (deaths of family members, who give the ultimate sacrifice for their kids! it's like death-of-pet as plot device, only worse). The romance is pat. The simulation mechanism is somewhat interesting but ultimately just technobabble, and it seems to reflect a general fear of technological advancement. The core-characters-being-unique trope is very strong. The evil characters are not fleshed out well at all. The book just felt uninspired to me -- a series of cliches strung together.

I did like the handful of references to being a religious family -- that felt pretty awesome. It's rare to see active religion in any books just as background information. I also like attention to the fear of intimacy as a core fear. Actually, the connection of fear to love more generally is an interesting and remarkable theme; it doesn't seem to get much attention in general YA literature.

As I reflect more, I wonder if part of my "meh" reaction is that Roth was trying deliberately for evangelical Christian allegory and themes. I didn't see it at the time, but as I reflect in this review, that idea seems to explain both what I liked and what I didn't like. The lack of novelty in echoing The Core Story of Western literature might also explain my overall "me, it's entertaining, but it isn't outstanding" reaction.

4. Circe
Madeline Miller
2020.01.10 / ★★★★ / review

Lyrical feminist retelling of the mythology of Circe. Beautiful language, high drama story. I love how Circe became increasingly arrogant as she lived longer, just like the gods she despises, but doesn't seem self-aware enough to notice. Wonderful.

As a side note, the audiobook reader was fantastic. Even so, I think I would have preferred to read this one myself to get the full majesty of language. Reading the snippets I've seen, I appreciate craft of voice and telling even more than I did listening to the wonderful narrator and production.

>20 pammab:-22 Oh I loved Graceling series when I read them, and might be due a re-read since your review makes me realise how many details I've forgotten! I also loved Circe :-) Interesting to to see your comments on Divergent, I've gone to buy it a couple of times and walked away. Given it doesn't stack up against other YA fantasy maybe I'll just let this one pass me by.

>23 SouthernKiwi:
Yes, I have a feeling that the details of the Graceling series will quickly escape me too! I already can't tell you much about the plot of Fire, and I finished it only about a month ago and loved it too. But that's okay, because the process of reading the series the first time was so addictive that I'd be okay rereading over and over again. ;)

I feel a bit conflicted if it's my fault you steer away from Divergent because so many people do quite like it. I am positive my expectations around innovation and independence were much too high coming off of Bitterblue. Divergent is very easy to read and entertaining, and if someone is looking for just another YA fantasy yarn for escapism, it would do quite nicely! (A not-great side effect of writing reflections in a stream of consciousness is that I don't spend time polishing the words to make sure they leave an impression that reflects my overall reaction. Oops.)

5. Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child
Marc Weissbluth
2020.01.11 / ★ / review

I picked Weissbluth's book up and I couldn't get past the negative tone -- every explanation and diagnosis is about "parental failure to X". I suspect there is useful information here, especially for people at the end of their rope, but it is couched in surprisingly dismissive language. I thought it was universally known to people involved in childrearing and with power over adults that narrating and normalizing positive replacement behaviors you want to see is more effective than focusing attention on misbehavior, but apparently that is less universal than I had thought. Not finishing this one.

>19 pammab: I have only read a couple of Ishiguro's books so far, but have loved both of the ones I've read. The Remains of the Day was my top read last year. I imagine I'll get to this one at some point!

I'm glad to see some of my favourites from 2019 made it onto your potential TBR list. I've certainly taken BBs from you (including Circe, from above) and expect to receive more in 2020. :)

>25 pammab: So agree! Someone gave me this book when my second child was born. I was glad that I knew enough to ignore it! I would hate to think that first parents use this book and think that they should follow the information in it.

>26 cbl_tn: The Buried Giant was a SantaThing recommendation to me from saroz in 2017 and I had never heard of Ishiguro at that point. I was surprised to find he is not only famous, but that he is Famous. I have the impression that The Remains of Day shows off everything I adored and even more of his artistry -- I'm excited that you loved it for when I get to it.

>27 mathgirl40: I love hearing about good books from all quarters, but yours tend to be particularly fruitful for me! ;-)

>28 JayneCM: I am continually astonished by the different approaches people have for trying to be helpful. More science and more positivity definitely are the factors that attract me. I am also reminded of an anthropologist's remark in A Death in the Rainforest that what people attribute to their preverbal children is a very fast way to understand their cultural values -- that rings very true (and it was an excellent book to boot).

>29 pammab: That is definitely true. I have read that elsewhere too, that you can tell the values of a culture by looking at the youngest children (before they know about hiding their true thoughts and feelings!)

>30 JayneCM: Also very true!

6. The Quiet Place
Peter David
2020.01.11 / ★★★½ / review

In which we meet Xyon and Riella, the Redeemers and the Dogs of War, and figure out what the Quiet Place is.

I think The Quiet Place is my favorite in the series so far, for the same reason that it's not as beloved by hardcore Star Trek: New Frontier fans -- it focuses on entirely new characters who are mostly incidental to the USS Excalibur, and it tells a complete adventure story with a beginning, middle and end. Most of the other books have been clearly part of a series, where readers' enjoyment comes primarily from the serial nature and the genre nods to the TV series, but this book benefits from the series background while also standing alone.

7. The Bitter Side of Sweet
Tara Sullivan
2020.01.19 / ★★★½ / review

Child slaves working chocolate plantations today, omg. Disturbing. This YA book ran fairly obviously, especially in the first half, but as soon as we started to know more about the mysterious girl who spurs the escape attempt, I was held rapt. The conclusion felt solid to boot -- not impossibly perfect, but still a reasonably feel-good ending. Recommended, especially for YA audiences. And I'm extra careful to look for Fair Trade labels on my chocolate now.... (BB credit due to DeltaQueen50 -- thanks Judy!)

>33 pammab: I'm glad you enjoyed The Bitter Side of Sweet. I see Ghana and the Ivory Coast have been in the news lately as the cocoa growers are banding together into a cartel in order to fix prices for chocolate. It's a valuable commodity!

>34 DeltaQueen50: I don't know any of the details, but that strikes me as more than fair. At least, I am happy to pay another 25c per bar or whatever it will end up coming to. Chocolate is delicious and a luxury; the ethical calculus is pretty convincing to me (though perhaps this is just ignorance on my part).

>35 pammab: My only concern is that they are passing a percentage of their profits to their workers and giving up the practise of child labor. Paying extra for a luxury item would be ok if they stick to the agreements of fair trade.

I'm enjoying your reviews. I also didn't care much for Divergent though I love YA, but then Graceling didn't quite do it for me either.

Looking at your tags I see you use a Becdel test win tag and may steal this idea for my categories.

>36 DeltaQueen50: Completely. I don't know how they enforce the Fair Trade label (is there actually any meaningful oversight?). It all reminds me of one of the seasons of The Good Place, which I won't spoil for anyone who hasn't seen them.

>37 chlorine: There's definitely a component of the right-book-at-the-right-time in a lot of this, too. I haven't used the "Bechdel test win" tag in a couple years (too hard to keep it in mind throughout an entire book!) but I would love if it or a variant took off so I could get some sense from tags before reading what I was getting into!

8. The Spy Wore Red
Aline, Countess of Romanones
2020.02.01 / ★★★★ / review

A WWII spy thriller, billed as a memoir of a socialite who played a silent but instrumental role in the Allied victory.

Absolutely delectable, though with some pacing flaws that I was willing to chalk up to real life not always having the perfect pacing of fiction -- until I saw most people believe that this book is a highly embroidered version of fact that emerged from years of retellings at parties and an awareness that no one is in a position to fact check any of it. Now I'm a bit more disappointed, though the tale is still a fantastic and enjoyable one that portrays a wonderful sense of classy 1940s Spain.

The audiobook narrator Grace Conlin is particularly wonderful -- this is a highly professional audiobook produced in the mid-1990s heyday of production quality.

(this one by way of christina_reads -- thanks!)

I also put aside Ross Poldark on January 27th, after finishing about a third and accepting that I still wasn't enjoying it (too many characters intermingling for me, without enough of a plot to prop up their relationships). I had hoped to participate in the group read, but apparently that is not in my stars with this book!

>39 pammab: Glad you enjoyed it! :) You're reminding me that I still need to pick up the sequels.

>41 christina_reads: I think I've been spoiled for reading the sequels with my eyes after listening to the first with my ears!

9. Dark Allies
Peter David
2020.02.03 / ★★★½ / review

If you're a Redeemer, what do you do when the Black Mass threatens your home? You hold an innocent planet hostage to incentivize Captain Calhoun to take action on your behalf. And in the background the reader gets to enjoy a teenage love affair where the parental figure disapproves, and some more love story development for both soap opera pairings (the parted lovers who still work together, and the couple who created a kid but not an ongoing commitment).

One of the more entertaining and self-contained stories in this universe so far, though completely whacky as usual. The highlight of this book for me was the silly Redeemer voices we've been using as part of reading it aloud. (They're a short race, so the Knights Who Say Ni voices struck me as ideal, and I'll defend that choice even while doubled over in hysterics listening to these menacing figures pontificate.)

10. The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant
Dan Savage
2020.02.07 / ★★★★★ / review

Dan Savage reflects on the process of adopting his son.

Dan Savage is a funny guy, but as I got older, I found his column increasingly a one-trick pony of edgy crass humor and advice -- I thought I'd outgrown him, or he was chafing against his pigeon hole after nearly 30 years inside it, or the format of a sex advice column mocking-become-real was too limiting, or something. I decide to come to this book only because it gets great reviews. After reading The Kid (published back in 1999), I have a new appreciation for Dan Savage. His experience of adopting has extra oomph from being (a) an early gay adoption, (b) an early open adoption, (c) written for laughs, (d) in a very self-aware way. He handles a lot of emotionally charged subjects extremely well, with nuance and appreciation, he treats seriously the pain of open adoption as well as the joy, and the book is chock-full of entertaining and interesting asides. There also isn't much crass sex talk, although he is direct about his orientation, preferences and choices; he doesn't pull punches in being judgmental, but he owns that judgmentalness with self-aware jabs as well. He also treats his issues with fat people (at length!). I thought the huge amount of discussion on this topic was Dan Savage telling his side of his fight with Lindy West (a la this), but it turns out this book was written way before Lindy West used the controversy to establish herself -- he's just obsessed with weight, perhaps in the way that only being majorly identified with subculture that values people for looks above all else can make someone.

I wasn't expecting this, but I will probably seek out other books by Dan Savage. I'm very curious if my renewed appreciation of his writing is a function of going back in time 20 years to when he was less jaded, or whether it's a function of the memoir format giving Dan Savage a chance to stretch his writing muscles after having answered literally every relevant sex advice question in the universe what must be hundreds or thousands of times. Either way, I'd love to read more by the thoughtful and reflective voice who wrote this humorous memoir.

Still behind on reviews! A few more coming when I next get a few minutes -- including, soon, my first Vonnegut! I also have Conclave sitting on my shelf, which is a Catholic church thriller and outside all my usual genres but that I'm very excited to start... hopefully soon.

11. Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense
Ellyn Satter
2020.02.10 / ★★★★ / review

A classic on feeding from infancy through preschool. As a book from 2000, it felt dated in quite a few spots, but I found it to be a mostly-positive and pretty self-aware resource with a lot of useful ways to frame feeding, and very easy to skim.

Her thesis is that stress in the parent and bad eating skills/habits in the child come from the parent putting more work into feeding than the child puts into eating. She suggests the way to success is to divide the task ownership unflinchingly: the parent determines what and when of feeding, and the child determines whether and how much to eat. Crossing those lines leads to dragons. Key to the success of this strategy from both perspectives is regular snacktimes.

12. Cat's Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut
2020.02.19 / ★★★ / review

Our narrator starts out writing one history book and finds himself increasingly wrapped up with a set of people that lead him on another path entirely. He moves from New York to a Caribbean island, adopts a new religion, and lives through an apocalypse.

I was so excited to read my first Vonnegut, and this was not what I expected! It's absurd and disjointed and ironic and meandering and humorous. It's also not dated (or equivalently, I read the parts that are dated as just as much satire). Perhaps my hopes were too high, but I'm actually underwhelmed in the Thinkiness of the book (it's a literary argument that science is dangerous, religion is useful even if it's divorced from truth, and related ideas, and the science of the science fiction had a Jasper Fforde ridiculous vibe to me). I also found the plot and characters hard to get a handle on. Even so, I did enjoy the wry lilt of the prose and the Bokononist teachings. I've not read anything quite like it, so I expect it will stay with me -- but I didn't find myself enamored of Vonnegut the way I thought I might be.

Got all the hearts on the hunt! I was very excited to have a chance to participate in this season's LT hunt -- the last few, I haven't had time to actually dig into and figure out how to even collect them! It's fun to stretch this way.

>48 pammab: Congrats on your hunting success! I love those.

>47 pammab: The only Vonnegut I read is Slaughterhouse 5 and it really made an impression on me. So if you ever want to read another one by him I'd recommend that.

>47 pammab: I have similar feelings about Vonnegut. I admire his writing and I can understand why he has such dedicated fans, but his style of satire just doesn't appeal to me all that much.

I enjoyed catching up on your thread. Love your personalized bingo card. And took BBs for The Buried Giant (love Kazuo Ishiguro - have you read Never Let Me Go? and while I have a few of his books to read at home, somehow missed this one!), The Bitter Side of Sweet and The Kid.

>51 mathgirl40: I think I might need to read at least one more Vonnegut to be sure I've got a handle on his style. I think I'd gone in expecting an absurdist romp rather than depth that I might have been in love.

>52 LisaMorr: Hope those books deliver for you! I haven't read Never Let Me Go but the description on the book page is extremely intriguing -- I'll add it to the list.

---

My free time has shrank considerably between getting busy at work and being surrounded by family 24/7 for this stay-at-home order -- and that coincided with getting deep into a 30-hour audiobook with no car time. I've got 30 more minutes on the doorstop audiobook and maybe an hour of free time now, so it's time to post some reviews and hopefully read (skim?) some threads if I have any time remaining before my free time disappears again. :)

I hope everyone is doing really well. (I'm actually a bit worried to check in on peoples' threads because there was so much ill health just a couple months ago and now there are lurking external dangers as well.) You all have been in my thoughts.

13. Requiem
Peter David
2020.03.09 / ★★★ / review

The ship blows up and everyone scatters. I only really followed that Calhoun is gone (presumably going to come back at a dramatic moment and re-convene some subset of the crew) and that Soleta meets her biological father and it's full of emotion and drama. I'm drifting fast on this series and I'd have put it down long ago if it were entirely up to me.

14. La Belle Sauvage
Philip Pullman
2020.03.22 / ★★★★ / review

A prequel series to Pullman's most famous series, His Dark Materials. Malcolm is a boy who works at his family pub near the nunnery where our hero Lyra is dropped off as a baby, only a few months into her life. The world gradually becomes fascist, he is at the center of a number of important people, and in the midst of a massive flood, he and a scullery maid save their own and Lyra's life.

This book is quite an engaging YA adventure. It lacks thematic depth but it stands well as a heart-racing adventure. At one point I nearly covered my eyes to peek through to see what would happen next, which I don't know if any book has ever driven me to. It's not chewy, but it is delicious. I would recommend it in a heartbeat to anyone who reads YA fantasy adventure, and I'm waiting for the next installment.

15. Renaissance
Peter David
2020.04.06 / ★★★ / review

I was more engaged than I expected in this story, the bulk of which is Selar and Burgoyne at odds with each other trying to figure out how to raise their half-Vulcan, half-Hermat son Xyon. A trip to Risa is also amusing.

16. Conclave
Robert Harris
2020.04.12 / ★★★★½ / review

A thriller set during the choosing of a new Pope by cardinals cloistered from the outside world. I don't often read thrillers but I do adore religion, and this book was excellent for my taste. It had me guessing to the end, it felt very respectful to Catholicism throughout, it was built on increasing evidence, and it introduced me to a culture and a world that I'm not closely familiar with. To boot, the book ends on a deep question.

I learned about this book from Vivienne, and I'm grateful to have gotten to enjoy it.

17. Ride the Wind
Lucia St. Clair Robson
2020.04.26 / ★★★★½ / review

Fictionalized telling of the life of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was captured by Comanches as a child and spent all her life among them until she and her young daughter were captured and sold back to her white family around the time the Civil War began, intermingled with the story of the wearing down and eventual penning up of a proud and free people.

I found this story very compelling -- compelling enough for me to persist through extremely grisly violence -- and the story felt well-researched and like stereotypes were applied with an even brush to all the groups. Westerns make me a bit hesitant because social expectations have changed so much since their heyday, but this one didn't feel dated at all. The depth of portrayal here is highly recommended.

>58 pammab: Ride the Wind is one of my favorite books, I often recommend it, but the grisly violence does tend to turn people off sometimes and cause people to look at me strangely for saying what an excellent read it was.

Glad to see that you are keeping well, even if it is now hard to find the time for that audiobook! Like you, I am just adapting to this new normal and taking things as they come.

>59 DeltaQueen50: But it is an excellent read! No doubt about that for me.

>60 lkernagh: I hope things are a bit more stable for you these days, as we have gotten deeper into our, eh, newly isolated and clean lifestyles. They have settled a bit more for me, now that each day is the same as the one before again.

I owe some more Star Trek book reviews as well as a review for Fire and Fury: Inside the Triump White House, which I read out of a dearth of other material. I an expecting a lot of short review for those.

Mostly I was picking up books and not getting far, Then I realized, I am stressed, perhaps I should read something easy and comfortable -- and found my way back to Bujold's Vorkosigan series one evening. Over the past couple weeks, I reread:
- 20. Cetaganda
- 21. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen
- 22. Memory
- 23. Komarr
- 24. A Civil Campaign
- 25. "Winterfair Gifts"
- 26. Diplomatic Immunity
- 27. The Flowers of Vashnoi
- 28. Cryoburn

And then I ran out of steam, because starting over again at the beginning didn't appeal at all. Probably says something about me, though. (I do suspect I would have read Cordelia's Honor as part of this set if I had had it on hand, though.)

This time through I found myself deeply impressed by Bujold's finesse and artistry in these books. Within each book, characters are set up as foils for each other. Across books, the books play similar roles for each other. Themes get picked up and revisited with new perspectives, and the books are in dialogue with each other in ways I hadn't previously realized. (Of course, I generally tried to space my reading out to savor the world. But now there is nothing left; I don't have anything but rereads left to savor.)

Anyway. Stress reading. Apparently that is a thing I do now. Never found myself one for rereads before...

Hope all is well with all of you, and that it continues so.

>62 pammab: Stress reading has been a thing for me too. I've re-read more books than usual, and I've been bingeing on British Library Crime Classics.

>63 rabbitprincess: Yeah, it's a funny thing. Maybe something about the mental effort required to read something new?

As part of an effort from an organization I'm involved with, there's a lot of race-related books coming my way in the next few weeks-to-months. I've started How to be an Antiracist and it's quite thought-provoking; I'm never sure with best-sellers, and after my racial awareness expanded in the late aughts, I've often felt like racial nonfiction is just rehashing what I already feel to be true. (Fiction now, fiction can be powerful.) But this book is new, and I think that's because it's articulating the next generation of racial thinking, one step beyond where I landed around 2010. I need to cogitate some more and really discuss it, probably in a non-written format; I find myself wishing for high quality liberal arts education environments for adults more and more. :)

18. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
Michael Wolff
2020.06.13 / ★★★ / review

Picked up because it was literally the last item of any interest in a shared Audible account. I try to mostly stay out of Politics these days. This book was enlightening as to the factionalism going on in the White House and truth in the narrative that the Media Do Not Like Trump, and I actually got to look up a quite useful word used in it (myrmidon). Beyond that, it's slightly stale, though I'd still recommend it to folks interested in the Trump presidency and/or American politics.

19. Restoration
Peter David
2020.07.03 / ★★★ / review

Calhoun is still alive and trapped on a planet, engaged with Rheela and her son Moke. Shelby comes into her own captainship. Pretty long tale, a few side diversions. If you've read the 10 previous books, you'll likely read and enjoy this one as well.

29. To Be Taught, If Fortunate
Becky Chambers
2020.07.15 / ★★★★ / review

A particularly science-y sci-fi novella by Becky Chambers, couched as an expedition log of a four-person team dispatched by a citizen-funded space exploration corporation to four planets located 14 light years from Earth.

Where Record of a Spaceborn Few deals with death and the numinous and A Closed and Common Orbit deals with trans identity and queer found family, To Be Taught, If Fortunate deals with the relationship of humanity to science and space.

Becky Chambers writes soft characters. I enjoy soft characters; just like how I'm comfortable with how no one seems concerned in cozy mystery series how many deaths are happening around them, I'm willing to actively suspend disbelief of how preternaturally kind the characters are to each other after being cooped up for decades with only 3 others in a small habitat. Art displaying positive relationships is out of sync with current media trends, of course, and those media trends in turn are just reflective of how people see their world -- so this isn't a style that works for everyone. But it's the type of characterization one expects (hopes for?) from Chambers.

What I didn't expect was how simultaneously dark the themes could be even within a world in which only strongly supportive relationships exist. About halfway through I was struck by a passage reflecting on how we're on a trajectory and we can't get off it -- as a metaphor for the earth and climate chaos, well, yikes. It's gently done, but it's not a gentle message. And even so, the themes of climate change and the difficulty of being far from home and even the permanence of corporations are somewhat common fare in modern sci-fi. They're used to good effect here, but they aren't earthshattering.

Where this book really shines is where Chambers always shines: in the humanistic light that throws into relief obvious-in-hindsight ideas that you never realized were missing from other sci-fi. The insights and asides she incorporates into this novella, I don't want to spoil for you -- but they're worthwhile, and you will emerge with at least a few newly transformed expectations of spaceflight. Recommended.

>62 pammab: I'd already done a reread of all the Vorkosigan books a few years ago, but I can envision doing another reread at some time in the future. As you mention, there is a lot of complexity in the relationships of the characters and interesting connections to explore among the books.

>68 pammab: Great review of this book. I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment. I also especially like the way Chambers portrays science and the motivations of scientists.

>69 mathgirl40: On Bujold, there's a level of craft within each book and in the ways the Vorkosigan books talk to each other that is actually much more than I was expecting. I generally slot them right into "series escapist fluff", but it made me reflect on whether there's similar artistry in all the other books that I've classified that way, and it made me appreciate rereading more than I ever really have.

On To Be Taught, If Fortunate, I particularly liked a passage where the main character was asking, "is this interesting to you? is this meaningful? is this thing that I've literally dedicated my life to of any meaning to most people?" Pretty poignant.

30. The Cruel Prince
Holly Black
2020.07.25 / ★★★½ / review

Excellent example of YA faerie fantasy, more violent than most. At a young age, three girls (two human, one of the Folk) witness their parents murdered by the fairy-ex-husband of their mother; being a responsibly traditional sort, the murderer brings the children home and raises them as his own. As a teenager, our main character's personal drama plus an adventure commences that keeps giving for future books.

Good YA themes here on long-term implications of trauma, of belonging, of the meaning of family. Good adventure story. Good romance (obviously born from practicing fannish tropes).

Downsides come mostly from being YA -- it's written in present tense (sigh), it's painfully clearly set up as the first book of a series, the romances and relationships are So Full Of Drama, the plot twists are stereotypical for high court intrigue, the main character can somehow beat many of the Folk at their own games. More than most YA, it's also quite violent -- more than I generally like, though to its immense credit the violence does affect the mental health of the characters.

Highly recommended to fans of darker YA fantasy. Personally I wasn't as taken with it as I was taken by Black's very creepy middle-grade book Doll Bones, but I found it highly engaging despite not closely fitting the target audience.

31. How to be an Antiracist
Ibram X. Kendi
2020.08.02 / ★★★★½ / review

Ibram X. Kendi interweaves his own many-years journey from unrealized racism into a less-racist self with historical evidence, modern data, and a thoughtful set of definitions and prescriptions for action that diverge strikingly from current race canon. Two major departures: although Kendi's racism is still inherently about power, he rejects the notion that racism is definitionally only available to White people, and his call to action writes off the role of education in driving change. In his view, racism is driven by the self-interest of the parties in power, what is "common sense" changes only after public policies have changed, and education/donations/demonstrations are ways to lull individuals into feeling better in the same world and will never drive societal improvements.

The personal framing device helps humanize and lower the barrier to the undertaking, and while I disagree with some particulars and the underlying frame of strong dichotomies and definitions, the thrust of his argument is highly coherent and it rings true to me. Four main reactions:

1) Kendi's reading of racism and its interrelationship with power is shockingly queer. These are arguments that I've never seen raised in discussions of race, but are extremely familiar from queer criticisms of capitalism. (There's absolutely synergy here. There's also likely a couple excellent papers available in the unpacking of why these criticisms seem so new, why they're resonating now, and the origin of their strength.)

2) I loved him tying everything back to in-group/out-group bias. People attributing the bad actions of their out-groups as a characteristic of the group and positive actions of the out-group as a characteristic of the individual person (and the inverse for in-groups) is key to all sorts of group dynamics.

3) I find many layers of irony in how many sources are sending the message to White folks that they should start by educating themselves before jumping into practice, and suggesting this book as a possible place to start, when the final conclusion of this book is that while education might drive local change for individuals, it won't actually drive major or particularly useful change. And at the same time, Kendi wrote a book, which is not exactly a way to say "hey, I believe that helping educate individuals is a poor way to spur change".

4) There's a bunch of places where the logic doesn't quite hang together or seems stretched too thin or can't be satisfactorily pulled against exactly the single straight line to reach the endpoints that Kendi seems to want it to reach. To my mind this suggests the arguments still aren't fully wrought, because there is a truth undergirding the not-quite-perfectly-whittled ideas that I find undeniable.

There's a sizeable amount to think about here, especially once the book starts to take on what you consider truth (wherever that occurs). Although it didn't blow my mind, I am glad of the time I spent engaging How to be an Antiracist, and although I think it will in turn be surpassed, I would recommend it without question for anyone wanting to think more concretely about race and what might drive greater racial equity in 2020 and the near future.

>72 pammab: Thumbs up for an excellent review!

>73 rabbitprincess: I told myself I wasn't going to write an essay -- and then I wrote an essay! Your response is gratifying though. :)

>72 pammab: I really enjoyed your review as well. I also was interested by your thoughts about the Chambers book. I read The long way to a Small, Angry Planet recently and I'm among those who thought the characters were too nice. The thought that Chambers actively wrote nice characters, rather than lacking the skill to write more complex characters, is quite interesting.

>75 chlorine: Yeah, her characters don't seem realistic to me either, but I like it. It's what I want the world to be like.... Fantasy fulfillment 100%. :)

32. Children of Time
Adrian Tchaikovsky
2020.08.08 / ★★ / review

As Earth tears itself apart, scientists and engineers are terraforming other planets, until the unrest reaches even them. Experimental worlds are left untended, leading to the evolution of at least one world with multiple sentient societies. We watch the spider society evolve over millennia. In parallel, human refugees come across the experimental planet and are sent away by its tender, until they can't stay away any longer.

This book has all the makings of something I'd love (sci fi, science, religion, AI, languages), but it just didn't do it for me. The premise is intriguing but I found the execution to plod -- 600 pages, minimal dialogue, uncompelling characters across the board, predictable plot, a lot of social evolution of the emerging society seems to just be inverting human society rather than building anew, no surprising ideas surfaced. I actually think it would have worked extremely well distilled to a short story that only has time to wave at its themes rather than getting bogged down in clarifying all of them.

>32 pammab: Ha this one is on my wishlist but your review doesn't make me want to get to it soon...

>78 chlorine: Sorry... For whatever it is worth, everyone but me seems to love the big ideas of it. So you probably shouldn't let just me put you off! It had some of the science-over-story vibe that I didn't like in The Three Body Problem, but again, that other people love.

Don't apologize, I find it a good thing to read negative opinions so that at the minimum if/when I get to it my expectations aren't too high. In this case I care about the form as much or more than about the ideas so I think your opinion is very relevant to me.
I haven't read the three body problem so I can't compare.

>80 chlorine: Definitely expectation calibration would have help for me. It was so perfect on paper! I probably shouldn't have hoped for so much. I still hope you love it when you read it!

33. Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
2020.08.13 / ★★★½ / review

A sweeping history of the human species, building mostly from anthropology.

Harari's dissections of inter-subjective realities spoke most strongly to me: core abstractions around which we structure our lives -- justice, race, money, capitalism, religion, more -- teased apart to clarify their lack of intrinsic reality. It's a rather godless stance, but his explorations were very well done.

I didn't particularly care for the stylistics, but this book is nevertheless thought-provoking. In fact, I was reading two non-fiction books close in time to it (How to be an Antiracist and Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?), and I was shocked at the dialogue all three seemed to be in; I suspect most readers will find any non-fiction to be in close dialogue with Sapiens.

34. The Silence of the Girls
Pat Barker
2020.08.22/ ★★★★ / review

The Trojan War, from the perspective of Briseis, with an eye to the place of all the women in the background of the epic.

Brutal, beautiful, and blazing. Violent without being lurid, this retelling takes on the Trojan War with what seems like far fewer corners scrubbed off for modern sensibilities. It left me reflecting on how much space there is between the lines even of well-trodden stories, and how we like to spin stories to suit our current sensibilities.

>83 pammab: This looks quite interesting, thanks!

>84 chlorine: I've been liking all the modern takes on the Trojan War more than Homer's!...

35. Tomorrow's Tomorrow: The Black Woman
Joyce A. Ladner
2020.09.04/ ★★★½ / review

Groundbreaking at its time, Ladner's sociological study of black girls growing up in the American innercity in the 1960s revalorized the worth and culture of poor girls of color.

The second half delivered excellent reflections on how womanhood is constructed and interwoven with sexuality and motherhood and independence, though I didn't get much out of the few few chapters of the book. I was also uncomfortable with many of the contextualizations (primarily on two fronts: the just-so story of "black culture is like <x> because of its African roots" premise, and Ladner's conclusion section that recasts black poor cultural practices as "what white women of the 1960s keep hoping for for themselves"). That said, I quite liked the book as a historical narrative that bottles the era, and as a snapshot in time for cultural expectations and practices.

Even so, the key ideas have been picked up and worked over and integrated into more modern thinking. I'm not convinced this is a book worth revisiting for the general public. It feels mostly suited to academics tracing the lineage of black studies or race in America.

36. Pumpkinheads
Rainbow Rowell
2020.09.04/ ★★★½ / review

Delightfully nerdy graphic novel -- on the last day of the last pumpkin patch season, teenagers Josiah and Deja are on a mission to do what they've left undone for the years they've worked together there.

Great art, cute story, tells a complete arc, realistic characters, super cute. I particularly like how much these two unabashedly love their pumpkin patch super nerdy subculture.

37. Lumberjanes Volume 1: Beware the Kitten Holy
Noelle Stevenson
2020.09.04/ ★★★ / review

I've been hearing about Lumberjanes for years now, generally described as a "very queer summer camp graphic novel".

The framing element of a handbook for a camp and getting badges is quite cute. Alas, though, the first volume turned out to be a bit too fantastical & comic-y for my taste. There's one bad guy to fight per episode, where the bad guy is a super-X version of a normal Y, and it all feels rather Powerpuff Girls + anime rather than my hope for summer camp caper. Definitely worth recommending to the right audience, but I'm not in that audience.

>87 pammab: Aww, Pumpkinheads is such a pleasure. The perfect cozy fall read!

>72 pammab: Great review of How to be an Antiracist. I am looking forward to reading this. My husband just received a copy. The head of HR at his tech company sent copies to the executives and managers to read, which I thought was a great idea.

>90 christina_reads: I can't believe it is September already! Definitely time to be thinking about fall. I think this makes me a Rowell completist in about... eh... 12 months, heh.

>91 mathgirl40: I hope you get something from How to be an Antiracist too. I'm getting the impression that it resonates with different people quite differently. How funny that a company sent copies to everyone when the book indicts capitalism (quote: "To love capitalism is to end up loving racism.") -- it makes me think your husband has an immensely progressive and comfortable-with-ambiguity workplace.

38. The Science of Trust
John M. Gottman
2020.09.17 / ★★★½ / review

John Gottman is the leading relationship empiricist in the US. He, his wife, and his academic lab have spent decades researching the causes of strong and divorce-headed marriages, and using their findings to bolster and examine particular empirical practices while weakening others. Most notably, he can predict with 90% accuracy which newlyweds will divorce within 6 years. The Science of Trust is not a self-help pop psychology book on improving your relationship (he has many others in that vein) so much as a layman's technical overview of those forty years of research.

It strikes me that most of this book is applicable to friendships, workplace relationships, and other environments as well as for couples, though of course Gottman wouldn't want to make claims in those other fields. Some of the core insights he covers:
- Bids & reservoirs of trust. Partners come to each other with bids for attention all the time; healthy relationships "turn toward" these bids, rather than ignoring or actively dismissing them; without the bank of trust that turning toward bids for attention builds, the core belief that your partner is a fundamentally good person erodes and small issues become big problems
- Fundamental attribution error. In distressed relationships, people attribute troubling behaviors to their partner's negative traits and rehearse negativity (and miss 50% of the neutral and positive interactions that an observer sees); in happy relationships, people attribute troubling behaviors to their partner's situation and find opportunities to actively reflect on what they love about the partner
- Having conflict successfully. In conflict conversations, the tone set in the first few minutes matters immensely; it's very good for the relationship to maintain a positivity-negativity ratio of at least 5:1, and very bad to escalate the conflict through criticism, defensiveness, contempt or stonewalling; it's a very bad sign if these conversations become zero-sum; repairs that attend to the partner's needs are necessary throughout this conversation, and affective repairs (like empathy, self-disclosure, taking responsibility) work much better than cognitive repairs (like compromise, keeping conversation on track, questions); giving a positive prescription for action when addressing a sore point helps keep everyone on track
- Stress hormones. Once one person becomes physiologically aroused in an argument, there's no point to continuing the discussion -- it's best to take a break, self-soothe, then come back and heal the emotional wounds of the original concern and any bad interactions that followed (revisiting is necessary or the resentments can calcify into believing the partner is a bad person); chronic alarm leads to being less able to take in information, spending lots of time summarizing yourself in hope the partner will finally "get it" (they won't), reduced creativity, less humor and listening and empathy
- Emotional attunement. Active listening doesn't matter, but it does matter to be attuned to even weak emotions and validate them, recognizing when you have no responsibility for them; being warm but emotionally dismissing is not as pro-social as being emotionally attuned
- Defining & using trust. Trust and trustworthiness are about whose interests you believe your partner will support in an interaction game; after betrayal, it's reasonable to check on current trustworthiness through smaller interactions: is the partner positive and relationship building? negative, critical, derisive, sarcastic?

So, there's a lot of useful information in this book, and it seems especially designed for engineer-style brains. Even so, the fundamental orientation of the book doesn't lay entirely well with me. There are two dimensions to my discomfort:

- Traditionalism. This book is unabashedly monogamist, heterosexist, and generally traditionalist. Gottman argues it is better to be in a relationship that betrays you than to not be in a relationship at all; mentions the applicability of his theories to queer couples but writes with only he-she language and never develops how his findings are influenced by heterosexuality; devalues gay male, kink, and poly community social practices & ethics as sex addiction and disruptive to bonding; assumes porn use involves dishonesty and deception; and fervently ascribes to the idea of expecting the family unit to meet all your needs. These are all cultural expectations quite out of step with my milieu, and I wouldn't have minded their presence if he had actively argued for them rather than assuming their universality.
- Quantitative social science. There isn't much in this book to dispel the stereotype of professional quantitative social scientists as producing undergraduate-term-paper quality research. Though I thought the formulation of a trust metric was quite clever, the "what drives X" discussions gave me the impression of misused regression models and/or not correcting statistical significance for testing multiple hypotheses, and the introducing MATLAB with a citation and a misspelling didn't do much to belie the impression of sometimes falling into being "unconsciously incompetent" within the four stage of competence. That doesn't mean the findings are wrong or even that there necessarily is a lack of competence -- Gottman is well-versed in qualitative practices as well, to be sure -- but it was a disappointment given my expectations that this book would be up to quantitative standards in behavioral economics or even political science.

I'd also have liked it to touch on whether two engineer-style brains would find this book worthwhile for their relationship, but that's a "yes and" complaint; the book doesn't hide its position that it makes sense to start by looking for general trends in relationship data, rather than starting with corner cases, and I agree -- I just want even more nuance.

Overall, I found this book to have very valuable content (4.5 stars!) but my misgivings are so fundamental and my rating system is so tied to my own affect that I can't bring myself to give it even 4 stars ("Yay, I'm a fan!"). And yet, I'd still recommend The Science of Trust -- with those caveats -- to anyone quantitatively minded.

39. Raja-Yoga
Swami Vivekananda
2020.09.20 / ★★★ / review

Hindu spirituality and philosophy from Swami Vivekananda, focusing on the science of yoga, written for an early 1900s American audience. Yoga is the process by which a person can yoke of the moving energy underlying all existence (prana) with oneself -- postures, yes, but also breath attention and meditation. Properly followed down the full path, the practitioner gradually eliminates the separation between his self and his reality, and can bend his reality accordingly.

The mysticism and promised powers -- like being able to become invisible -- I have always been more comfortable taking as metaphorical when here they seemed presented as quite literal and reasonable outcomes. At the same time, I know enough to be skeptical of my skepticism, because I've also seen Hindu monks succeed at what I'd have considered impossible feats. Regardless of the mysticism, the refresher on Hindu philosophy was appreciated since it's been years since I have dipped any toes into Hindu beliefs. Unlike many other readers, however, I didn't find it to be an overwhelmingly spiritual or remarkable text.

Since this book is from 1896, I found a free electronic copy. It was poorly edited, used a generic typeface, and was formatted to use at-home printer paper. Comparing to a few pages of a nicely printed and bound copy, I'm also surprised by the extent to which my skepticism was primed by the incidentals of the form -- the printed book seems much more confident, engaging, and believable. That leads to interesting and useful reflection itself, to be sure, aligned with some of Vivekananda's arguments.

I've started a host of books in the last few weeks that I'm thinking I might abandon for being not-the-right-time -- most notably Persuasion and Catch-22 (which somehow I had all confused with both Slaughterhouse-five -- understandable! -- and A Clockwork Orange -- uhhh, that confusion makes no sense to me). I heard an interview with LeVar Burton a couple weeks back and I can't past his sentiment that reading is for self-care. To me that means more getting lost, less putting more time into books that aren't ferrying me away!

It also means most of my outstanding categories in my challenge are potentially going to be quite hard to get excited about! Populating a personal Bingo challenge partly with specific author names was probably not a great idea. If I do something similar in the future, I'll have to do something more generic ("classics", "something you've been curious about for a while"), or maybe set it up so I get credit if I read any of a set of authors and reduce the squares. Couple months yet to think on this (but somehow it's already getting toward the end of the year, sheesh...).

>95 pammab: Totally agree with putting books aside if it's not the right time!

>93 pammab: I'm not going to read this book, but your review was excellent and I enjoyed reading such a thoughtful assessment.

>95 pammab: This is the time of year where I notice which of my reading categories is lagging behind and I have to make an effort to fill in the holes. I'm also having a hard time choosing my next books to read. And yet, I set up my reading with a few categories that are more challenging to fill and will certainly do so again.

>96 rabbitprincess: Appreciated!

>97 RidgewayGirl: I have to say, I would never think of recommending Gottman to you, Kay!

As for the challenge, I do want to honor my intentions by making a solid attempt. I'm quite glad to have dipped into some of these authors and make a chance to get to know the author a bit better. I haven't had a moment of dismay in any of these books -- mostly it's awe combined with a curious lack of engagement.

40. Nothing to See Here
Kevin Wilson
2020.09.26 / ★★★★½ / review

Two women who were freshman year roommates at posh boarding school maintain a penpal friendship for over a decade. Then the rich one (who is still rich) invites the scholarship kid (who is still poor) to visit, and their families end up entangling. Add some fantastical elements and reflections on parenting, social class, and politics, and this quick read from Kevin Wilson emerges.

I went into this book with zero expectations (I actually thought it was YA, and I couldn't make sense of the cover art), but I quite enjoyed it. It was weird, absolutely, but compelling, and it has a tight narrative arc, clearly drawn characters, somewhat snarky and incisive observations on its setting, and self-conscious but not overstated themes -- and it's light. Right up my alley.

>99 pammab: So glad to see you liked this book too. It was one of my favourites from this year's Tournament of Books list.

>100 mathgirl40: I bet it came from you then! Usually I try to keep a note but I didn't see one for this book. Much appreciate the rec!

>101 pammab: If the rec did come from me, then we're even, since I've taken a good number of BBs from you in the past. :)

>99 pammab: I loved Nothing to See Here and even sent a copy to my best friend for her birthday. I always end up sending her books about problematic female friendships although our friendship is just fine, thank you!

>103 RidgewayGirl: That's funny! I hope she loved it.

And clearly I had lots of good influences encouraging this book!

>99 pammab: - Great comments on the Wilson book! You got me interested.

>105 lkernagh: I hope it works for you if you read it! The central conceit really is quite weird (but good!).

41. The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
2020.10.03 / ★★★ / review

Our protagonist Hans goes to visit his cousin at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Alps somewhere around the turn of the last century.

I read Mann's Doctor Faustus at my choice back in high school and I had very similar reaction this time despite how long it's been: the writing is lovely, but only for about 50 pages. Its sheer density wears on me, and it takes a long while to move the plot forward. There's a lot of symbolism and literariness, and what that is saying is more interesting than the plot, but spending time trying to tease it out slows down my read and enjoyment even more. Worth reading, probably, but for me it was the kind of classic that quickly morphed into a duty read from being initially enlightening. I'm doing my best generally to not read purely out of a sense of duty, so when I had read to page 75 realized it wasn't working for me, I decided to stick with it to page 100. I got to a section break around page 102, and then I returned the book.

I wonder a bit if this book felt to folks of its era the way N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season and its series felt to me when I read it a few years back -- rich in blatant and clever political commentary disguised as literature, successful on two levels at once. The way we write today is different and my political & philosophical concerns are different from what they were 100 years ago in Germany; I suspect those cultural and contextual changes worked against my enjoyment of this book.

I wouldn't normally count or review a book I read so little of, except that there was a group read this fall and I had hopes from early in the year that I'd participate in it. Which I kinda maybe did, for the couple weeks it took me to realize this book was not for me, at least. So... group read good intentions only partly redeemed.

42. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
N. K. Jemisin
2020.10.15 / ★★★★ / review

Yeine's grandfather rules the world, but she has never met him; her mother left the court long ago to run off to a small backwards kingdom with a husband of the non-ruling class. Soon after her mother dies, Yeine's grandfather calls her to court as one of the possible contenders for succession to his throne. She (and we) spend the book making sense of the triple mysteries: how does this world-of-court work? how should we interpret the active gods and the old mythos? and is it possible for a child to come to know her parents?

I quite enjoyed this debut novel from Jemisin. It manages to toe the line between traditional fantasy (long uncommon names, palace intrigue) and novelty (mythology that feels both believably ancient within-world and entirely fresh to this reader, fantasy used for commentary). The story works, but the conclusion felt a bit too traditionally fantasy pat for me; I'd say that the story is a vehicle for the worldbuilding and thematic material. And the worldbuilding and themes are gems. To me, they aren't quite as shinily polished as in some of Jemisin's other works, but they are still buffed enough to see her value and talent, and then set into this semi-mainstream fantasy work.

43. Tamsin
Peter S. Beagle
2020.10.19 / ★★★★ / review

A ghost story! A rather peculiar one actually, because it incorporates most of the hallmarks of Gothic fiction (history and death and a touch of romance) while substituting in the darkness of traditional English magical lore for horror, and it uses a transplanted-to-rural-Dorset-from-NYC young girl to frame the ghostly part of the story with a modern setting and growth into one's future self.

I found it all quite compelling, and loved the way it balanced traditional English-feeling real and unreal mythos with the pitch-perfect sulky voice of our teen narrator Jenny.

44. Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi
2020.10.22 / ★★★★½ / review

A family saga of two distinct lines of descent originating in 18th-century Ghana: A mother abandons her first daughter, the product of her enslavement to a Fante man, when a fire gives her a chance to flee and head home. On the mother's return to her home village, she marries the Big Man and has a second daughter. The first daughter marries a British colonial officer who becomes rich from the slave trade; the second is captured by slavers and sent to work on plantations in the American South. Each chapter describes the story of a successive generation on each side, culminating in the present-day.

A sweeping work and one of the most discussed books of 2016, Homegoing is an astonishingly complex and thoughtful novel about the multi-generational implications of family history, and it is especially impressive as a debut work from an author in her mid-twenties. I found every chapter compelling, telling just enough story to see the interlinkages and with such superb characterization that the characters felt fully fleshed out despite only pages with each. Despite clearly being based in a literary fiction tradition and deliberately reflecting the arc of history, it also works as intelligible personal stories clouded by time, and poses many questions to reflect on. Excellent, brilliant, and striking on multiple levels.

45. Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered
E. F. Schumacher
2020.10.24 / ★★★★ / review

Despite being originally published nearly 50 years ago in 1973 (wow), this non-fiction book re-imagining what people-first economics could look like is only a bit dated. It's quite interesting to notice what has and hasn't drifted into public discourse. The key here is a different set of starting assumptions from traditional economics that lead us different conclusions -- most especially the idea that there are different planes of existence, humans are indeed near the top, and we hold a responsibility to each other and to the rest of the world to not screw it up. This stands far apart from underlying tenants of modernism -- especially the positivist idea that the only real truths are scientific truths, and the economic idea that greed is a virtue as long as you re-invest the proceeds. It's all rather traditionally religious.

The parts that especially stood out to me were about work and education:

• Schumacher argues that work itself is humanizing. Not all work -- just the work that involves the right amount of brain challenge and outcomes where improvement is tangible. That's a core Buddhist tenet, but it's also one that we find in Catholicism and even in political science (we know social instability is severely aggravated when most of a society's young men lack both work and families). Now I'm thinking this is pretty universal.
• In contrast to the idea of work being valuable in itself, today's economics treat work as entirely problematic. From the employer's perspective, labor is a cost that should be minimized. From the employee's perspective, it would be ideal to be paid without having to work. This insightful framing explains to me the rise of interest in UBI from rich folks (ahem, Andrew Yang) -- it's a way to "make things more even" for workers while still working within the system that made them rich. A fundamental need of humans to work on tasks that challenge them and show them rewards is also an intriguing and new-to-me argument against UBI.
• A focus on STEM and on education as a vehicle for making more money means insufficient focus on the higher calling of education: knowing oneself, one's moral duties, and what you will bring to the world.
• The type of work that modern tech is most successful at reducing is skillful, productive work done by human hands -- the kind of work that human beings enjoy and need the most. Some people are still able to engage in tasks like woodworking, gardening, sewing, small engine repair and cooking, but they tend to be richer people who have the space and tools and teachers to create humanizing value through their "spare time" work.

There's a bunch more in the book too (like the illogic of treating $1 of a renewable good like corn as equivalent to $1 of a non-renewable good like oil as equivalent to $1 of a manufactured good like cloth as equivalent to $1 of a service like a haircut, environmentalist thoughts on how we're living in a rather large but still limited planet which left me thinking about Easter Island and Biosphere 2, and exposition on the value of intermediate technologies that are labor-intensive and capital-limited as being better positioned for humanizing and effective international development work than shipping abroad major machinery that requires only a handful of low skill workers). Some parts vary pretty far from my ideology (like a strong recommendation for England to burn coal now and forever), but even reasoning through those was fruitful for me. I do suspect this book will continue to stand up to reads for years to come.

Dense, but a very worthy read for anyone wondering what alternatives to our current economics might look like.

--
Via MissWatson a few years back -- one of those very thought-provoking books I'd never have found without her, so thank you!

And that's that, finally done with all the reviews that have been backing up the past few weeks (and no longer reading half a dozen books simultaneously, heh).

>111 pammab: I'm glad you took away as much from it as I did. His thoughts on the importance of work truly resonated.

>107 pammab: I totally agree with your thoughts on The Magic Mountain, this was a book that I probably wouldn't have finished except for the group read. There was so much symbolism that I definitely lost the thread of the storyline a number of times. I am very happy to be able to check this one off the 1,001 list.

>111 pammab: This one sounds interesting! Thanks for your thoughtful review.

>107 pammab: Reading Doctor Faustus at 15 is a big ask! I enjoyed The Magic Mountain and found that it was best read slowly. It would be difficult to get into it if you were busy and short of time. I enjoyed it, and was happy re-read sections, but I had plenty of spare time because of the lockdown.

>113 MissWatson: I really got a lot out of Small is Beautiful, on a whole host of fronts. It was worth some additional effort to finally get a copy! Really glad again that you brought it to my attention.

>114 DeltaQueen50: The 1001 list is quite intense and I will cheer you on your journey through it! May the other treat you better than The Magic Mountain.

>115 christina_reads: I hope it speaks to you too if you find a copy!

>116 pamelad: I may have been a bit older than 15, but I did read many classics quite young -- I think it's because they were widely available, easy for folks to recommend to a voracious reader, mostly free of sex and violence, never terrible, and I had the time to devote. Doctor Faustus was a pretty good fit for my interests too. I am really glad you were able to savor and enjoy it! I wish it had worked for me, but even though it didn't, I am quite happy to celebrate that you enjoyed it.

46. Farthing
Jo Walton
2020.10.29/ ★★★★★ / review

Apparently a traditional manor house murder mystery, against a backdrop of 1940s England in which Hitler conquered the Continent and headed East and in which the British nobility is still strong -- but really a reflection on power. Our narrators are a daughter of the rich aristocracy, recently married to a Jew and thereby caught in-between spaces, and the justice-driven police investigator who drew the case.

This book held me enthralled. I loved both narrative voices, who were extremely different from each other and felt fully real from the first few pages -- both imperfect, and both likeable despite their imperfections. The book extracted real emotion from me because it wasn't at all clear what kind of ending we were headed for (I'd picked the book up with minimal context), and I found the thematic reflections on fascism, power, and class to be insightful.

My only quibble is that Farthing is maybe a bit too queer for believability. That quibble has really no bearing on the shininess of the suspense, writing quality, plot, or themes, so this mystery-as-a-vehicle-for-spec-fic-style commentary is one of my favorite books this year.

(And that LT recommendation engine that has been suggesting Jo Walton to me for ages? Many props to it. I'm looking forward to reading more from her.)

>46 pammab: I really like Jo Walton's writing. Farthing is not my favourite of her books (Among Others would hold that spot), but I did like it enough that I'd been meaning to read the others in that series. Glad to hear that the LT recommendation engine worked for you. I should make more use of it myself. :)

>118 pammab: >119 mathgirl40: I love the LT recommendation engine! I find it so much more accurate and useful than the Goodreads recommendation engine.

>119 mathgirl40: I seriously considered Among Others for my first Walton, but it seemed like it might be too literary for me, and I think it wasn't as easily available. I'll have to turn to that one soon!

>120 rabbitprincess: I haven't tried the Goodreads engine, but I do wonder if the smaller size of the community here (and more outdated UI, perhaps) tends to keep the average quality of content higher, which would feed into things like the recommendation engine. I also had the impression -- from way back in the day now! -- that Tim was really interested in the potential of recommendations, and put a lot of effort into building software that he found useful too. That counts for a lot. Or maybe this is all just a just-so story. Useful regardless!

>121 pammab: I'd believe that he spent a lot of time and effort building a solid machine. The recommendations always make sense, even the ones for books that I know I won't like -- the underlying logic is sound.

>122 rabbitprincess: I like the little touches like "exclude authors I already have" too -- makes it easier to distinguish entirely new-to-me authors from ones I am a bit more informed about.

47. A Memory Called Empire
Arkady Martine
2020.11.10 / ★★★★ / review

The new ambassador from a small set of space stations arrives to her post in the center of the neighboring vast empire, armed with little more than her culture's secret (and her personally incomplete) technical bio-augmentation to navigate the scene -- and finds that her predecessor was murdered, and she has been thrust into epic and violent political intrigue.

I quite liked our saucy heroine Mahit, who seems more than up to her unexpected surroundings. The underlying themes of cultural imperialism versus physical imperialism and the importance of the social uses of language were excellent, and I liked the explicit sense that what was going on was being chosen by the characters in order to tell a good story, which I thought was a very clever and effective way of explaining some of the true-to-space-opera grander-than-life-is machinations. On the flip side, there were a handful of points where I felt impossibly better able to anticipate the story than our protagonists, and I didn't buy the minor romance or think it added anything (plus I am over this trend of making characters queer -- Arkady Martine does appear to be a female-partnered woman, but oof, I think I need some standout feminist writing with a solid straight romance) -- but that's all minor quibbles, really. A Memory Called Empire uses a fresh lens on a bunch of subgenres and tropes, and comes up with something new. I recommend it, though I wouldn't say this book is a "must read".

48. Exhalation
Ted Chiang
2020.11.10 / ★★★½ / review

A 2019 compilation of stories by Ted Chiang, who is even more famous than I realized. He has won four Hugos, and one of his stories (not in this collection) was adapted into the 2016 film Arrival, which I recall fondly for its circular alien writing system (though, tangentially, anything Sapir-Whorfish tends to grind my gears, mostly because it's a science fiction cliche despite being abandoned by scientific linguists).

Judging from this collection, Ted Chiang's sweet spot seems to be highly realistic science fiction. In fact, this collection contains some of the most simultaneously hard near-future scientific and humanist fiction I think I've ever read. Apparently Chiang went to Brown, studied computer science, and worked in technical roles as part of his career; his work is exactly what I'd expect from a fiction writer with that background.

My only complaint is that these stories are usually a bit too obvious to me to be intellectually interesting. Most stories seem to be a relatively simple thought experiment turned into fiction, without a lot of additional interwoven threads or depth. In general I don't like Single Theme Fiction that can be easily summarized. I also generally quite dislike author's notes that undermine the punch of the creative fictional "show" by adding a few lines of blatant expository "tell" -- but, alas, this collection also has notes.

The audiobook narrators Edoardo Ballerini, Dominic Hoffman, and Amy Landon were excellent.

---
Three favorites:

"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" -- Tales-in-a-tale told in the style of an Arabian Nights fable, in which a person can walk through a door that transports him into the future or past -- which is truly feasible time travel. Loved the structure, the moral, and the narrator. ★★★★½ (2008 Hugo & Nebula winner)

"The Lifecycle of Software Objects" -- What might it look like for us to generate, support, and keep artificial life going? I really liked this one despite its trouble with pacing/structure/conclusive endings (maybe influenced by real life engagement in related work). A core theme is a dichotomy of types of knowledge, which I first encountered in Small is Beautiful: one type of knowledge can be transmitted between people, and the other can only be gained through personal experience (and the second kind is more valuable as a result). The audiobook narrator Amy Landon also delivers a vaguely artificial voice, which I take as delightful additional artistic commentary. ★★★★ (2011 Hugo winner)

"Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" -- In a world with a time-limited device that allows people to interact with people in a quantum parallel world, a woman with a past sorts through her story. I adored this story. Excellent reflections on selfishness and self-doubt and humanity through the lens of technology, with an ultimately upbeat ending. ★★★★½

49. Skipping Toward Gomorrah
Dan Savage
2020.11.14 / ★★½ / review

Dan Savage indulges in each of the seven deadly sins as a celebration of America's love affair with personal liberty.

I was excited to read another book by Dan Savage after I came out of an initially-tentative read of The Kid with a rare five-star read, but Skipping Toward Gomorrah fell more like confirmation of my low expectations. It's more ribald, more dated, more political, while also being less human and less enlightening. That doesn't mean a total waste of time (I actually learned a bit about fat admirers, swingers, guns, and escorts, and I giggled a bunch of times). But on the whole, Skipping Toward Gomorrah was about as shallow as I was expecting, and the "we're America, f*** yeah, we're special because everyone believes Americans have a right to do whatever the f*** they want" politics don't quite sit right with me these days.

Recommended for Dan Savage completists only.

50. Gentlemen of the Road
Michael Chabon
2020.11.15 / ★★ / review

Too many characters for me to follow with language too verbose. I could fall asleep in the lap of beautiful words, but to actually follow a story takes too much concentration on recalling and summarizing what just happened, and I don't find myself caring much about the principals.

Maybe I need to read Chabon on paper. This is my second audiobook attempt, and my second abandoned book.... I had such hopes after the first chapter, too. :-/

51. Justice: What's the right thing to do?
Michael J. Sandel
2020.11.16 / ★★★★½ / review

Moral Philosophy 101, in book form, with motivating examples, and capped off with the author's own carefully corralled-off opinions. I'm not sure whether it's the quality of writing or my maturity or the review or all three, but I got a lot out of this book in terms of understanding the more-complicated-than-utilitarianism-or-libertarianism philosophies and how they interrelate.

New-to-me ideas include the concept of a narrative or contingent-and-situated identity that has moral weight, some interesting arguments against contractual obligations being the sole source of moral work, and most especially the "of course!" connection that the reason philosophers developed moral philosophy was to build out an ethical framework that could inform secular law and politics -- that is, the ideas that undergird American society were developed more or less explicitly as an alternative to religious formulations of what it means to be a good person. With that connection, it seems more reasonable to me that the idea of "liberty as the shared American religion" might now diverge from the parallel secular reconstruction of previously shared religious belief and take on a life of its own, and that as a society we would ensure future elites are conversant with these ideas. Sandel does a lot of balancing between specific ideas and general themes, and he does it well.

This is nonfiction that will reward rereads.

52. Sorcery of Thorns
Margaret Rogerson
2020.11.21 / ★★★★ / review

With impressive magical worldbuilding -- libraries full of sentient grimoires, sorcerers who harness demons, orphans who tend and separate books from people -- Rogerson's Sorcery of Thorns is a fast-paced adventure and a delightful YA romance, with a nuanced thematic and personified reflection on good and evil. Though it's a bit self-conscious in the plot execution, I was utterly captivated by the vision of opinionated books who can take off fingers or sing, and by the idea of sorcerers trapping demonic magic in grimoires, and the ultimate outcome of such a world. A lovely novel; I'll look for this author again.

Thank you to christina_reads for bringing this one to my attention!

53. A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, and The Thanksgiving Visitor
Truman Capote
2020.11.28 / ★★★★ / review

What a sad and lovely set of stories! Set in the 1930s, these have a perfect balance of nostalgia, darkness, sweetness, truth, turn-of-phrase humor, and crisp sketch-like writing from a child's perspective. They don't come off as dated, even in their references to the Negro help, a slow elderly cousin, and spinster sisters. Whether the setting is truly autobiographical or fictionally revised for serial use over 30 years, they do make me feel for Capote and all the other children of the Depression and folks caught by forces bigger than themselves.

"A Christmas Memory" (1956) -- An older man reflects on the wonder of his childhood Christmas traditions and the joy of giving. A bit too traditional of a Christmas tale to be especially thought-provoking plot-wise, but still worth reading for the excellent writing. ★★★½

"One Christmas" (1983) -- A country boy is sent to visit his estranged city father for Christmas; the father thinks he knows his child, but the son merely feels torn from his only family. Rather dark, really, though with a touching ending. This one particularly makes me suspect autobiography at play in these stories -- painfully sharp edges that needed 50 years to blunt into an impressively humanity-catching story. ★★★★½

"The Thanksgiving Visitor" (1967) -- A boy, a bully, and a lesson. This was my very favorite of the stories, the longest, and the one I read first. ★★★★★

>129 pammab: You're welcome -- I'm glad you liked it! I know Rogerson has at least one other book out, An Enchantment of Ravens...it's on my shelves, but I haven't read it yet.

>131 christina_reads: Apparently An Enchantment of Ravens won her an award too. I'm suspecting it'll jump out at me at the library while browsing one day....

>48 pammab: I am a fan of Ted Chiang's stories, but I think your criticisms of his single-theme approach and lack of depth are fair. I too liked "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" and "The Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom", and I wonder if it's because there's a bit more character development in these longer works.

>133 mathgirl40: I reread what I wrote and it's a bit down on Ted Chiang. I really liked the positivity and morality in the stories, which is so out-of-step with a lot of modern sci-fi, and I don't think it came through well. But I also did feel like most of the shorter works -- with the exception of the Arabian Nights tale -- didn't have much added by being fiction vs. essays, which was disappointing.

>134 pammab: Yes, I think that is a good point about Chiang's shorter works.

54. Knife
R. J. Anderson
2020.12.03 / ★★½ / review

An iconoclast fairy girl befriends a young man in a wheelchair, contrary to all the teachings of her people, which say that human contact kills. Together they solve the mystery of why fairy magic is dying off.

This book had lots of promise and strong moments (I particularly loved that our main character perceived her man to be very important because he was constantly seated on a throne), but it struggled from clunky writing and some very awkwardly filled plot holes. Overall I got the sense that the author was aiming for a middle grade book, but chose content for a tame YA romance, and then cast her characters as full adults (maybe 19 or 20, acting 13). It wasn't horrible, but the execution was weaker than anything I've read in quite a while.

55. The Annotated Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
2020.12.23 / ★★★★ / review

So much more humorous than I expected! I do wonder how this story struck people in its own era. For me, it had overlay on overlay of retelling and reference.

56. To Die But Once
Jacqueline Winspear
2020.12.27 / ★★★★ / review

In England in the early summer of 1940, a young man isn't acting himself, and then goes missing. When his parents ask Maisie Dobbs to investigate, she unravels more than they expected -- or perhaps exactly what they had in the back of their minds all along.

My first introduction to Maisie Dobbs, and a lovely one. Winspear has an interestingly sparse narrative; given the importance of dialogue, I suspect this series would be extremely engaging on audiobook. The setting was also not nearly as twee as I was imagining (somehow I've been expecting your average cozy to be a Mitford clone -- mistakenly!). I was quite surprised at the non-propagandist/anti-propagandist/realist commentary on events like Dunkirk and volunteer ambulance driving, and came away with a new perspective on WWII as well as some real emotional engagement in the fate of the (many) characters. I believe I'll dip a toe back in this series in time.

(MysteryKIT success!)

I've got a bunch left to read but not sure whether I'll make them in under the Thursday wire!

I'd love to hit my personal bingo a fourth time through Mord im Santa-Express, which is only a bit over 100 pages -- but it's in rusty rusty German, so that's definitely going to slow me down.

I have a PD James story to finish, and I've also got about 6 hours left in Into the Wilderness (which is excellent). Possibly I can do all three by 2021... possibly....

57. Into the Wilderness
Sara Donati
2020.12.30 / ★★★★½ / review

An epic of post-revolutionary upstate New York, I found this book absolutely delectable and immediately moved on to its sequel. I'll admit to a bit of initial disbelief at the modern sentiments of the main character -- though these become increasingly believable with time, and it's clear the author put substantial effort into avoiding anachronisms -- and final disbelief at the subtle implication that fraternal twins run on the male line.

Overall, Into the Wilderness is perfect historical fiction, laying out the flavor of the place, human characters, and believable and pressing plot arcs rooted in the small tragedies and triumphs of the era. The narrator Kate Reading is phenomenal at making it all breathe.

And that's a 2020 wrap. Personal yearly challenge ACCOMPLISHED, with the pammab bingo challenge completed three ways:



Apparently "good for me" aspirational classics still don't get much attention from me even when I name them explicitly, heh. But both German and Haruf are both quite high on my list still, and I just didn't prioritize them after I completed the challenge (and for Mord im Santa-Express I've started it, it's very easy to read, and I'm intending to finish it as soon as I've finished my next book club read).

Favorite reads of the year:
-- YA spec fic: Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore
-- reflective memoir on early gay adoption: The Kid by Dan Savage
-- uncategorizable mystery/alternate Nazi history: Farthing by Jo Walton
-- fictionalization of Cynthia Ann Parker's adoption and life with the Comanche: Ride the Wind by Lucia St. Clair Robson
-- light and weird magical realism: Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
-- family epic of two lines of descent, one in Ghana and one in the USA: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
-- rural post-American Revolution richly drawn historical fiction: Into the Wilderness by Sara Donati

Best wishes for 2021 to you and yours! Now to make a thread for next year and to start paying real attention over there....

>141 pammab: Woo hoo! Excellent work! Will you be making yourself another bingo card for 2021?

>142 rabbitprincess: I will indeed! And I'm explicitly leaving some space for tracking CATs and KITs as well. Breadcrumb for my 2021 thread!

Happy New Year, and I definitely look forward to following your 2021 reading!

>144 mathgirl40: Likewise!