Bookish Thoughts

I miss the years of the Obama administration. It's not that Obama was a perfect president, but he was a great one. He was thoughtful and deliberate and really cared about people. He did what he could to make life better for all Americans. And if he didn't always succeed, he spoke more to the complex nature of the problems, his own limited time, and the nature of the obstacles he was facing than his motives or character. Reading Michelle Obama's memoir was an excellent way to revisit those years and remember what hope and change feel like. To take a step back and recognize all the seeds they planted that will hopefully reap positive benefits in the years to come. Change is slow, but it's constant. This book was delightful, and it really left me in awe of Michelle Obama. She goes to great lengths to emphasize that she's just another person. That she faces a lot of the same struggles as everyone else. But she also had a lot of advantages, from a family that never f...

Born With Teeth is not at all what I've come to expect from celebrity memoirs. Granted, most of the celebrity memoirs I've read lately have been from comedians. Still, they tended to be light, quick reads. Even the ones that tackled heavier subjects went by pretty fast. This wasn't the case with Kate Mulgrew's memoir, which took me a week to read. And not just because of my pregnancy-induced exhaustion. There's a lot in this book, and it all adds up to Mulgrew being an extraordinary (and distinctly Irish-Catholic) woman. Mulgrew's memoirs is somewhat less focused on the acting aspect of her life than I expected. She mentions most of the TV shows and plays she acted in, and of course she devotes a chapter to Voyager. But there are also chapters devoted to her relationships and romances, her various adventures around the world, and her family. Even though Mulgrew wanted to be an actress from a very young age and worked incredibly hard to achieve that dream (and...

I picked this book up because it cost $0.60 and was less than 200 pages long. One of the reasons I've gotten into celebrity memoirs lately is that they tend to be really cheap at used book stores and very quick to read. It's fun to learn a bit more about the celebrities I admire, though I'm often left feeling a little meh after I finish them. That was the case with Carrie Fisher's memoir. Parts of it were interesting, but most of it left me confused and a bit put off. The book was adapted from her live stage show, and I think a lot of the jokes would have worked better in that setting. Many of the punchlines felt rather ambiguous; I was left wondering who exactly was being made fun of and it really could have gone either way. Being privy to Fisher's body language and tone would have cleared that up and made me more comfortable. (Or possibly significantly less comfortable.) That said, it was an interesting look into her life which was certainly dramatic and fraug...

Every now and then you come across a perfect book. Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, which has since been turned into a Tony-winning musical, is one of those times. It's a close examination of her relationship with her father, jumping back and forth through time to examine it from multiple angles, always revealing a new layer. Bechdel does a great job of capturing an immensely complicated relationship, one that has left its mark long after its conclusion. Bechdel's father gave up a glamorous overseas life to run the family funeral parlor when his own father died, shortly before Alison was born. He was strict and eccentric, clearly filled with regrets but bound to his family and hometown by duty. He died when Alison was twenty, and though the circumstances are blurry, she concludes it was suicide. It came on the heels of her decision to come out as a lesbian to her family, which was overshadowed by the revelation that her father was also gay. Her reflections on her childh...

This is a book I ought to have judged by the cover. Because looking at the cover - an mage of Tina Fey's head photoshopped onto a man's body - filled me with exactly the same mixture of emotions as the book did. I think it was supposed to be funny, but it mostly just left me uncomfortable. My biggest problem is that Fey's feminism is dated. Which is to say it fails to be intersectional. Fey is mostly concerned with the plight of the middle-class white woman. She's basically a poster child for Lean In , juggling a family and her dream job and making it look easy (because of that full-time nanny she employs, who she can barely even talk to). Fey's racism and homophobia come through in interesting ways. Even in the story where she learns an important lesson about not using gay people as props in her own story, she manages to use a cast of gay people as props to teach her a lesson. One she clearly never internalized. There were things I could relate to...

Amy Poehler's memoir is a little bit all over the place. Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy it. I mostly did. There are fun stories about working as an improv comic and on SNL. Stories about childhood and friendship. But the book isn't all that cohesive. It's barely in order. It's almost like Poehler wrote until she had something nearly book length and then padded it with pictures, quotes, and dialogue from her work. (Ben and Leslie's proposal and wedding vows and recreated entirely.) I wasn't really expecting more from a celebrity memoir. And I'm glad I picked this up for a buck at a used book store. I probably would have been let down had I paid full price. It was a quick fluffy read that served to get me out of the slump I was starting to fall into (Does only reading ~50 pages a day count as a slump?) Parts of it made me uncomfortable, but most of it was funny and comforting. And sometimes that's all you want.

Janet Mock's  Redefining Realness  is part memoir, part Intro to Trans Issues. It's an incredibly accessible primer on the struggles and barriers many trans people face, grounded by Janet's personal experiences.  She was incredibly lucky in some ways and unlucky in others, and she's quick to point out the factors that made her transition easier (a loving supportive family and access to resources at school) and the ways in which she fell through the cracks (a victim of sexual abuse, occasionally homeless). She does a good job of tying her experience in with research about trans people in general, and her story remains incredibly personal while also showing the reader a much wider world. Redefining Realness  tells the story of Janet's childhood and her slow but steady journey to womanhood. She continually references literature and authors she found comfort in over the years, particularly Maya Angelou's work and Zora Neale Hurston's  Their Eyes Were Watching ...

Maya Angelou's first autobiography,  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , is a quick but intense read. The language flows the way you'd expect from a world-renowned poet. And then it cuts. The words are light enough to let you skip down the page and heavy enough to punch you in the gut and make you really feel it. This book is less a cohesive story and more a series of vignettes that paint the picture of Angelou's childhood. It begins when she is three years old, being sent to live with her grandmother in Arkansas and ends when at the age of seventeen, she graduates high school and gives birth to her first child within a month. Along the way she moves between the strict discipline of her grandmother and the much more relaxed but empowering guidance of her mom. She encounters problems with her parents' lovers and learns how to rely on herself to get what she wants. I had a slight problem with some of the sudden time jumps leaving me a bit confused. But mostly this is a ...

Oh my God, Benjamin Franklin is such a pompous blowhard. This book read like a 200+ page humblebrag, and the takeaway message was that Franklin was perfect and if we were all exactly like him the whole world would be perfect, too. Maybe that's a slight exaggeration. But only slight. And maybe part of my problem with this book was the style in which is was written, with Franklin holding himself up as a shining example of virtue and prosperity and Capitalizing every other Word for Emphasis or Something. I mean, as soon as he listed Daniel Defoe as one of his favorite authors I knew this book would be a struggle to get through. Thankfully it was short. And there was a lot of military stuff at the end that I basically just skipped. But for all that this book was a struggle, there were a few interesting things. Though Franklin fought to make even the interesting bits extremely dry and a tad repetitive. He was influential in even more ways than I remember learning about...

Between the craziness of Thanksgiving, physical therapy, and the impending holiday season, it took me nearly a month to read this book, which it really shouldn't have. But when I'm not commuting by train, I have a hard time finding time to just sit and read. Especially with everything else going on. Because of that I ended up reading Angela's Ashes in fits and starts and never really got as absorbed into it as I might have otherwise. Back when I started it, I noted that for a tragedy, the book has a lot of humor in it. Not necessarily laugh out loud humor, but the sort of wry humor that seems to me to be typical of Irish literature. It's an attitude that acknowledges that life is shitty so you have to find your silver linings where you can. For example, this book is full of the death of children. They drop like flies, and Frank himself loses 3 siblings to various sicknesses. One of his classmates loses nearly all of his siblings, but he's okay with ...

I first discovered Jenny Lawson when Neil Gaiman linked to a blog entry of hers detailing their meeting at W00tstock. You can go read it here , but the takeaway message is that after asking Gaiman whether unicorns or zombies would win in the battle for world domination, she proceeded to explain why he was completely wrong. I started clicking through her blog which never failed to make me laugh. Jenny is insane, and she has debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. Somehow she manages to find the humor in all of this and pass along her intense joy in life. I'd definitely recommend checking out her blog. Just click through to a few random posts. But make sure you look up the James Garfield Christmas Miracle , which still brings tears to my eyes. Not in a laugh so hard I'm crying way, but in a my faith is restored in humanity way. The book is a lot like her blog. It's somewhat more structured, since she actually had an editor for it, but the style and content are ver...

This is a bit of a departure for me. Managing MS: Straight Talk From a Thirty-One Year Survivor isn't the kind of book I'd typically pick up. So why did I? Well my Aunt Debbie wrote it. Which also means that any review I give will be incredibly biased. I want this book to sell lots because I want my aunt to be successful. She's been wanting to write a book for many years and with new internet-based publishing, that dream was finally realized. My aunt is a pretty amazing person. Reading her book was incredibly eye-opening for me. She's been in a wheel chair for as long as I can remember, though when I was younger she was able to walk short distances with the aid of a walker. She can still stand enough to transfer from her wheelchair to the toilet, or to unload the dishwasher, but this has more to do with locking her legs, than utilizing the muscles in them. Whenever she leaves her home, she's in a scooter. The scooter never felt like a huge hindranc...

In preparation for my vacation in the Adirondacks, Boyfriend had me read Isaac Asimov's (abridged) autobiography, It's Been a Good Life . Apparently the owner of the house we stayed at actually knew Asimov, though I didn't end up getting a chance to talk with him about how awesome that must have been. So I read this book, which was edited down by Asimov's second wife, Janet Jeppson. Boyfriend had told me that it was a bit like Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman , but with less science. And I did find that to be the case. It was a bunch of vignette's placed in loosely chronological order. Asimov discusses his atheism and humanism, which are points of view I agree with. He talks about how much he writes, which just blew me away. There's a line towards the end where says, "In those six years [since his heart attack], I had published about ninety books." The man wrote constantly, and he wrote everything. Wikipedia  mentions that his work ...

Wow. I doubt I could ever do what Joe Simpson does over the pages of this book. While climbing the 20,000+ foot tall Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, Joe Simpson falls and breaks his leg.  He and his climbing partner, Simon Yates, work out a system that gets them most of the way down the mountain in 300 foot intervals. But as they near the base of the mountain, Yates is forced to cut the rope in order to save is own life. Simpson falls 100 feet and miraculously lands on a ledge about 50 feet down a crevasse.  The crevasse looks bottomless, and Yates has no reason to believe that Joe survived the fall, so he returns to camp alone. Somehow, Simpson finds the strength to climb, slide, hop, and crawl his way back to camp over the next several days.  I read the book, and I'm still not sure how he did it.  It's sheer force of will that keeps him going. What Simpson goes through is horrifying.  He hallucinates and nearly succumbs to madness se...