Bookish Thoughts

I grew up watching Buffy. It premiered when I was in fifth grade. I didn't watch right from the beginning, but I did catch up with reruns that summer so that beginning with season 2, I was a devoted watcher. Every week I tuned in, and the next day at school I'd dissect the episode with my friends. It was there for me through middle school and high school, and it's been there for me ever since, whenever I needed it. I can't tell you how many times I've rewatched the series in it's entirety, or my favorite episodes in particular. I can quote nearly all of it, have come up with head canons to fill in all the plot holes, can determine which season a still is from based on Buffy's hair style, and will still happily spend hours dissecting the minutiae with anyone willing. I learned a lot from Buffy. One of the most important things Buffy taught me is that the world is not simply divided into black and white, good and evil. As the series progresses, Buffy learns th...

  The Dark Interval is a series of letters of condolence that the poet Ranier Maria Rilke wrote to various friends over his life. Each is addressed to someone who has just suffered a loss, whether of a spouse, a parent, a sibling, or a friend. Each attempts to console the survivor while Rilke explains his view of death. I found this collection to be, of all things, affirming. Which was really unexpected. This passage, in particular, really spoke to me: ...you must continue his life inside of yours insofar as it was unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours. You, who truly knew him, can quite truly continue in his spirit and on his path. Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you. If I could just convince you, dear friend, that his influence has not vanished from your existence. When Kevin passed, I set about trying to finish his unfinished business. I moved forward with house projects we'd bee...

I don't think I ever would have picked up this book on my own. But the point of a book club is to get outside your comfort zone a little bit. To give a fair chance to books you might not otherwise look twice at. So I picked it up and read it. Honestly, I found most of this book to be incredibly frustrating. Gladwell opens with the confrontation between Sandra Bland, the black woman who was arrested on a traffic violation and subsequently found dead by apparent suicide in her jail cell, and Brian Encinia, the cop who arrested her. There is video of the incident, so we can all see exactly what happened. But the video lacks most of the context. So Gladwell went in search of that context, which he presents in this book as an extended inquiry into what exactly happened between Bland and Encinia. Most of the book is focused on a person's ability to sift lies from the truth. Gladwell argues that we default to believing that people are telling us the truth. That it takes a great deal o...

This book was a gift, and a perfect one. The author is a professor at MIT whose research is focused on the search for exoplanets. She's also a widow who lost her husband to cancer and found herself suddenly juggling her career with her two young sons all be herself. I related to this book much more than Joan Didion's memoir. Getting through the day to day when every little thing is overwhelming, learning new skills because you suddenly have to do it alone, finding your grief all mixed up with gratitude for the things you do have, these are all deeply familiar experiences for me now. Interleaved with that was a fascinating look at Dr Seager's career and research, her pursuit of planets outside the solar system that might support life. I loved reading about her work. Not just because it was so interesting, but also because it was this subtle reminder that life just keeps going on. I'm so glad I read this book. It was a big reminder that I'm not alone, that other peopl...

It was a long wait for Allie Brosh's second book, but it was worth it. A lot happened to her in the years between books - a divorce, the sudden death of her sister - and the really informs her new stories. While her earlier work was hilarious and relatable, it also tended to stay on the surface. She started digging deeper at the end of her last book, and that same depth is present in nearly every story here. I'll be honest: I wanted a bit more of the surface hilarity. These stories hit hard, and I wasn't always ready for the raw grief that showed up. I also got unreasonably upset at the fact that her new husband was named Kevin, like she'd stolen him from me somehow. But I'm sure I'll keep revisiting these stories in the future, and I'll keep getting more out of them in the coming years.

Joan Didion's memoir of grief after losing her husband felt like something I should read after I lost my own husband. I wanted a book that I could see myself in, something that would feel familiar and let me know I'm not alone.  I wish I'd connected to this book more. There were a few small things that rang true, but there was also a lot that I just didn't connect with. Maybe that's a sign that everyone is different and every loss is different. Maybe it's just a difference between me and Didion. Either way I wanted something from this book that I didn't quite get. But I'm still glad I read it.

I've been following Stevenson's career since she was an art student with a tumblr making fun of Lord of the Rings and The Hunger Games. I loved watching her get her big break and launch into the stratosphere. I watched her start to make the sort of stories she wished she'd read as a child. She accomplished a lot at a ridiculously young age. She's also had some struggles,and I've always been impressed by the way she's open about them while maintaining her privacy. Because I've been reading her blog for so long, I'd already read most of the comics in this book over the years. But it was nice to see it all pulled together in a single place. Stevenson has a long career ahead of her, and I'm excited to see what she does next.

This was an incredibly difficult book to read. I came very close to not finishing it. Not because it was bad. It was just so hard to see a family treat their children the way Tara and her siblings are treated. Tara was raised in an extremely fundamentalist Mormon family. Her father trusted almost no one, so the kids didn't go to school. They never went to the doctors. The family lived off the grid as much as they could, avoiding other people and preparing for the rapture. A large chunk of the book is about Tara's childhood, and particularly the various injuries she and her family members suffered. For a while it was like every chapter was detailing a horrific new injury, and I had to walk away from the book for a bit. But I did return to it, so I got to read about Tara's decision to go to college, where she blossomed and was finally able to cut ties with her abusive family. She goes into some detail about her ultimate decision to break with her parents and brother and the t...

After taking several months off, I finally made it back to my book club the month we read The Library Book . This one took me a while to get through. It was a little bit dry, but it ended up being interesting. This book is about the central library in LA. It takes as it's entry point the time the library burned down and the arson investigation that happened after, digging in to the main suspect's life. The author also looks at the deeper history of the library - how it grew and changed under varying leadership through the decades. And she follows around the current staff to get a sense of how the library operates today. These three threads are all woven together in a way that got frustrating at times. The various threads meant that this book wandered and jumped around a lot. It worked for me, because I was having trouble focusing at that point anyway. Each chapter is pretty self-contained, so I was able to follow those. But I had a hard time putting it all together and remember...

This was a good primer on racism and how to talk about it. On identifying it, especially the more subtle and insidious forms and interrogating yourself. Oluo does a good job of balancing personal anecdotes with larger known patterns to show both how widespread these attitudes and how they affect individuals. I'm glad I read it, and I wish I'd written this months ago so I remembered more of the specifics. But it's probably worth reading (this and other, similar books) again and again until those lessons sink in completely.

This was a book club pick that I never would have picked up on my own. I knew virtually nothing about Sally Field going in. I've seen Mrs. Doubtfire and Forrest Gump , but none of the movies that she's more famous for. And having read it, I'm not that interested in seeking out more of her work. Field weaves a theme of birth and rebirth through the memoir. She structures it on what she learned in her Lamaze classes when she was pregnant and makes a case that she has been constantly giving birth to new iterations of herself throughout her career. This tracks with the fact that she clearly subscribes to the method acting school of thought, without ever using those words. But reading the book gave me the impression of a deeply passive woman who has a hard time with both accountability and control. Things keep happening to her. And no doubt a lot of awful things did happen to her. She suffered some serious traumas and never received help for them. Nor did she seek help. It seem...

I really ought to have taken the time to write this back when I finished this book. The main reason I maintain this book blog is to help me remember what I read. The act of writing about a book, coupled with the ability to go back and read it, keeps this all fresher in my mind. But now it's been almost two months since I read Lindy West's second essay collection, and I'm struggling to remember the specifics of the book. All I'm left with are general impressions. Lindy West is superb at articulating her rage, a rage I often share but have a harder time talking about. I think it's her comedic background that makes her so adept at words, at being able to say so much with so little and make incredibly cutting and precise observations. At the same time, she has an incredible amount of compassion for people who disagree with her, or who have even hurt her. She's good at teasing out small victories without losing sight of the bigger picture. And she does an incredible ...

It's been years since the-toast shuttered, but back when they were still posting (and I was reading) every day, I loved Gretchen McCulloch's column , in which she analyzed internet slang as a linguist. When the site went down, I lost track of McCulloch (and a handful of other people whose writing I always looked forward to). Happily, she didn't go far. She has her own blog , a column at Wired , and now a book! It took the book release for her to come back on my radar, but now I'm looking forward to reading more about the rise of casual written language and how it interacts with the rest of life. Like all of her writing, this book as a ton of fun to read while also being incredibly informative and helping me shed my prejudices about the evolution of language. It helps that I can easily see myself in the pages (I'm a Full Internet Person, tyvm), and I actually remember a lot of history McCulloch goes through, from early chat rooms and AIM through the proliferation o...

My favorite thing about Ursula LeGuin's work is how hard it makes me think. I don't always agree with her, but in reading her arguments I find I have to sharpen my own. I usually come out of her books either having my mind (slightly) changed or feeling much more secure in my own beliefs. It's a fantastic experience. It's also a ton of work. This collection of essays was much more accessible and easier to read than her fiction tends to be. In most cases, she's distilled her ideas into 4-ish page essays. It's a great way to engage with her thoughts without having to do all the work that, say, The Left Hand of Darkness , requires of you. I really liked these essays, which were mostly ruminations on the end of life, as she came to the end of hers. I only wish there had been a few more about her cat, Pard. But I suppose I can always go to her blog for more of that content.

If knowledge is power, then ignorance cannot be bliss. I first read this critique of high school American History textbooks when I was in high school. I was just precocious enough that I couldn't resist the title. Especially since I was at the bookstore to pick up a text that we'd received a censored version of in English class. I was keenly aware that my teachers were holding information back, and I was not happy about it. Loewen argues that kids hate history because the textbooks have removed everything interesting from it. Historical figures are presented as two-dimensional heroes rather than complex people and every major decision is presented as a foregone conclusion rather than the result of a complicated debate with many competing interests. In an attempt to make (white, male) students proud of America, the textbooks authors remove anything that might paint the country in a bad light. The narrative that's left is flimsy, inconsistent, and largely untrue. There...

This book immediately appealed to me for the nostalgia. I can remember playing "Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board" and "Bloody Mary" all the time when I was younger. Seeing them collected here with a bunch of other games I'd never heard of made me wish I'd had this book as a kid. The games are divided up by category, getting progressively more "dangerous" as the book goes along. There's a brief history of each game followed by instructions for playing it. And a whole lot of tongue-in-cheek warnings about the danger of each one. The book balances the fun of these games with that bit of fear that makes them so much more fun. I can only hope that my own kids discover this book on the shelf some day and spend countless hours summoning spirits with their friends.

The Girl Who Smiled Beads  is the memoir of a Rwandan refugee who spent six years in various refugee camps before making her way to America with her sister, niece, and nephew. Clemantine left her home and family behind before she had any concept of war or genocide or any of the things she was running from or the reasons people wanted her dead. Traveling with only her sister from camp to camp, she became incredibly tough in order to survive. And when she finally made it to safety in America, it took a long time for her to make her way back to normalcy. The book alternates chapters between her time in camps in various African countries and her time in America, learning to trust her safety and stability. It's a very stark account of her experience, and it's clear that Clemantine herself is still processing a lot of what she went through. She became a sort of poster child for Rwandan refugees in America and has been doing what she can to shed light on her experience while also c...

Rebecca Solnit always makes me feel better about the world at large. Her essays deal with heavy, depressing subjects. These latest are all about various crimes that seem baked into the very DNA of America. But she's also always able to pinpoint how things are getting better, and give me hope that things will continue to get better. The crimes Solnit discusses in this book aren't the sort that are traditionally talked about as crimes. The longest essay by far is called "Death by Gentrification" and it uses a case study to dive in to the ways the historic neighborhoods are being broken up and becoming more dangerous for the minorities who have always lived there, because of a perceived threat on the part of the new, white, wealthy residents and the system that backs them up. She also looks at the ways various voices have been silenced over America's history, the things we choose to celebrate and memorialize. And of course it all comes back to Trump and the backw...

Code Girls  is a phenomenally well-researched book about the role women played in code breaking during World War II. The author interviewed everyone she could find, read countless declassified documents and requested that more be declassified, and toured several buildings in and around DC that were used as the various bases of operations. There's no question that she has a really good handle on what was a largely unexplored aspect of American history. Unfortunately, she had a hard time wrangling all of that into a cohesive narrative. I think this book would have benefited greatly from a more aggressive editor. Mundy wants to share everything she learned, and it just doesn't all fit into a ~400 page book. Multiple paragraphs could have been moved to an appendix or the end notes. And while it's great to hear about all the women involved, it became hard to keep track of them all. The narrative as a whole would have been better served by focusing in on just a few women, inste...

This is going to sound bad, but this was an excellent book to help me get through the insomnia caused by my husband's leukemia diagnosis. It was just dry enough, just interesting enough, just enough of a remove from my own life, that a single chapter would help me turn my brain off enough to get some sleep. Which is why it ended up taking over a month to read. (I also picked up The Hypnotist's Love Story  during a round with insomnia and ended up reading until I finished it at 2 in the morning.) Cold Starry Sky  is the memoir of a woman who moved to Fairbanks, Alaska with her husband immediately after WWII. The book follows their first few years: trying to find gold, learning to survive winter, making friends, starting a family, and falling in love with their new home. It was interesting to read about the early frontier town, where the harsh conditions were a great equalizer.