Shaina Reads

Goal #1 of 2019 is a go! I've finished two books in my Audible backlog since mid-January, bringing my unlistened-to total down to 20. My thanks go out to dishes, laundry, and a giant, truly-too-difficult jigsaw puzzle.

First, I listened to The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang, narrated by Carly Robin. This was fun and steamy, and Carly Robin did each character justice with only occasional voice-changing corniness. A few things pulled me out of the story, though, and some are hard to talk about them without spoiling. The protagonists kept making out and feeling each other up in front of one of their families. Why? Not trying to clutch pearls too tightly here, but it's family dinner, ya 30-year-old adults. Also, there was a sexual assault scene that... got worse, when I think the author meant for it to get better? I loved hearing the story of a character on the autism spectrum falling in love, written by someone also on the spectrum. However, what felt like endless would they-won't they + the issues I shared above made it a cute meh.

Next up was Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel, narrated by a full cast. This was a second try for me. It turned out to be a great audio thriller, high on personal drama with the added bonuses of giant robots, ancient aliens, and the people behind the scenes investigating/covering it all up. Told in dossier format, you get insight into every character's head through personal diaries and one-on-one interviews, and then the occasional news dispatches about how broader society is handling the supposed-to-be-secret giant robot and ancient alien thing. I saw some of the twists coming, but as much as I expected another "meh," the ending left me wanting more. I wanted to buy the other one via Audible immediately, but the library came through with no wait list. I've already blown through the sequel, Waking Gods, and currently have the finale Only Human out from the library. I found Waking Gods even more interesting than the first novel; it built off well-laid character foundations by throwing them into even more morally gray situations. I'm having trouble sinking into the final installment so far, but I have faith it will click with time.

I have had Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction by Maia Svalavitz out from the library since January, but I haven't touched it in a couple weeks. Svalavitz frames substance use disorder as a learning disorder, using scientific evidence and her personal experiences with cocaine and heroin to build her case. My job has me wading into the weeds of opioid use disorder treatment strategies every day, and I often see substance use disorder framed either as moral failing or chronic disease. I've appreciated Svalavitz's willingness to think outside those boxes. The book is fascinating but dense; I started it in the thick of my concentration issues, and I stalled out halfway through. I want to give it another go now that those are subsiding.

ETA: Also entering my eyeballs lately is Rising Strong by Brene Brown. I don't have any coherent thoughts on it yet, but so much of it is speaking directly to my darkest beliefs about myself and others and helping me reconsider them. More soon!

Good news, everyone! Litsy finally released an update for Android beta testers that allows me to post photos again, so this Litten is back in book-snappin' business.

For those unfamiliar with the app, Litsy is most quickly summarized as Instagram for books. You can share interesting quotations from or fun facts ("blurbs") about your current read, and you can even post reviews, complete with a 3-point rating system. You can stick with your standard book + random household/nature items shot, or you can get creative. I've seen people post photos of where they are or what they're doing and how it relates back to their current read. In short, Litsy is a bunch of fun, and I'm neglecting all my other social media apps in its wake.

Much like Shannon, I think this app is going to be a godsend once school really starts to pick up. I am going to be writing a ton for my program, and I don't know that I'll have the brain power for longer reviews here. I know I'll appreciate the flexibility that comes with dashing off a few quick sentences about how I liked (or didn't like) my last read.

In that spirit, here are a few quick and dirty reviews of some books I've been meaning to write about here:

I recently read two books that most struck me because they reminded me of, well, me. This is not to say they weren't good on their own merits, but the reasons they will ultimately stick with me are entirely selfish.

The Ghost of Shaina Past - The Girls by Emma Cline

The Ghost of Shaina Yet to Come - ???

*Y'all should know that I had this stuck in my head the entire time I was writing this post. You're welcome.

Elizabeth Sanderson's son Tommy has gone missing. He was supposed to be spending the night with his friends Josh and Luis, tromping around their private Minecraft server, but a midnight trip into neighboring Borderland State Park has swallowed him up. Josh and Luis's lips are sealed, and it's only over the course of a few hundred twisty, ominous pages that the full truth of their night at Devil's Rock comes out.

At first, I thought I wasn't crazy about this book, but then I remembered what I was comparing it to. Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts did such a thorough job of blowing my socks off back in February that anything would have had its work cut out for it as a follow-up. Part of the problem is that I went in expecting more of the same genre, but this books reads much more like a mystery or thriller than a straight-up scare-fest. In A Head Full of Ghosts, there was horror lurking in every room of the Barrett home. Tremblay takes that tasty melodrama down a notch in Disappearance at Devil's Rock, focusing more on the possibly even more horrific reality of a child, a sibling, a friend disappearing in the deep, dark woods.

I loved that Tremblay played around with perspective, taking us inside most of the characters' heads, and I particularly enjoyed it when he switched up the format. Parts of the story are told through handwritten excerpts from Tommy's diary (including a particularly creepy drawing that had me spooked for an entire evening), transcripts of police interviews with Tommy's friends, and present-tense flashbacks of previous visits to the landmark where it all began.

Really, I think my only legitimate problem with the book was the abundance of Minecraft references. Then again, it's a contemporary story revolving around pre-teen boys. How authentic would it have been otherwise?

At first the protags of DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL'S ROCK annoyed me, but then I realized they're middle schoolers. Of course they're annoying.

— Shaina (@shainareads) May 5, 2016

Disappearance at Devil's Rock has aged well in my memory, and I think any fan of the creepier side of the mystery and thriller genres would enjoy it. Either save A Head Full of Ghosts for later, or know that you're going in for a much different ride.

I received Disappearance at Devil's Rock from William Morrow/HarperCollins for review consideration.

Helen Phillips blew up the book blogosphere last year with her surreal debut novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat. While I wasn't blown away by the end of the story, that doesn't change the fact that I slurped down every last sentence of it in under 24 hours. When I heard Phillips had a short story collection coming in May, I jumped at the chance to read more of her utterly captivating writing in a different format.

In many ways, Some Possible Solutions delivers. The collection is sandwiched between two stories that took my breath away. The first, "The Knowers," explores what it would mean to be able to find out the exact date that you will die. Would you do it? If you did it, would you tell your loved ones? Would it change the way you lived your life?

"Isn't it macabre to know that we've lived the date of our death many times, passing by it each year as the calendar turns? And doesn't it perhaps deflate the horror just a bit to take the mystery out of it, to actually know, to not have every date bear the heavy possibility of someday being the date of one's death? I do not know the answer to this question." - pg. 7, Some Possible Solutions

Just as tender for me was the final story, "Contamination Generation." Danny struggles to bring joy into his daughter Lulu's life despite a tense marriage, a crumbling world and overwhelming envy of his wealthy neighbors. He is completely enamored of his daughter, who he believes has the oldest soul of the three of them.

"When Lulu was newborn we called her Muskrat, though neither of us really knows what a muskrat is. It was just that she seemed like a small, mysterious mammal. I remember the way she would arch her tiny eyebrows when I picked her up after she'd finished drinking as much as she could get from Sarah's nipple. ... I have no photograph of this face Lulu used to make, it was far too fleeting to ever catch, but that face of hers, those eyebrows peaked, imperious, disoriented, that is the face of my life." - pg. 217, ibid.

There were many good stories in between the bookends—the autobiographical "Life Care Center" broke my heart, and "Children" delighted me in its bizarre portrayal of the moment you realize that your kids aren't, and never really were, yours—but some others struck me as a bit one-note. There's a lot of melancholy in this collection; I'm not against melancholy, but I started to feel desensitized to and impatient with the same manifestations of sadness appeared again and again. I tried to stretch this collection out over time to avoid this kind of burnout, but I may very well have overloaded myself anyway.

Still, when does every story in a collection land home? Despite some misses, there are even more odd, poignant and (always) readable winners here, and anyone who enjoyed The Beautiful Bureaucrat will find at least a few gems to marvel over.

Many thanks to Henry Holt for sending me a copy of Some Possible Solutions for review consideration! The book will be available on May 31.

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, by Steve Silberman (Audio)

When I saw how much Shannon raved about NeuroTribes, I added it to my list. When I saw it for sale on Audible, I couldn't resist diving in immediately.

I went into this book knowing next to nothing about autism—not its history, nor the various ways it can manifest, nor (most importantly) the experiences of those on the spectrum and of their loved ones. Silberman covers it all, from the development of the diagnosis (and how Hans Asperger—and the syndrome named for him—was nearly lost to history) to the stories of individuals and families all fighting to be heard, to be supported, and to be understood as different rather than deficient.

While it is by no means a breezy read (it runs to nearly 19 hours/544 pages and is stuffed to the gills with good research), it is well worth your while if you've ever wanted to learn more about the history of autism and the reality of living with it. I highly recommend William Hughes's crisp narration.

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote (Audio)

This one was on my largely abandoned Classics Club list, and I managed to burn through about half of it during Readathon.

For those of y'all who have been living under a rock with me, In Cold Blood tells the story of the quadruple murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. The story profiles the Clutters before their untimely demise; their murderers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith; and various members of the tiny Holcomb community leading up to and after the murderers' arrests and subsequent executions.

I've mentioned before that I was absolutely floored by the extent of the research* that Capote and Harper Lee conducted to make this book possible. Everyone in the story is (sometimes overwhelmingly) fleshed-out and human, even the men responsible for the Clutters' merciless slaughter. Another person might find the attention paid to Hickock and Smith's psychologies gratuitous and unnecessary, but I appreciated Capote's dedication to laying it all bare for us to judge ourselves.

I gotta say, it was sure was nice to hear Scott Brick's voice again after spending almost 40 hours with him for Chernow's Alexander Hamilton. He's an excellent narrator, and I think I enjoyed his reading of In Cold Blood far more than I would have enjoyed a print copy.

*'Bout this asterisk: there is a lot of evidence to suggest that Capote took immense liberties with his storytelling, including downright fabricating certain scenes and dialogue. While this definitely deflates the book's magnificence for me, particularly in how it affects the portrayals of the killers, I still say that any true crime fan worth his or her salt ought to check this one out.

Sorcerer to the Crown, by Zen Cho

Hyped from seemingly all sides, I had such high hopes for Zen Cho's fantasy debut.

Zacharias Wythe is the Sorcerer Royal, the highest magical office one can hold in Regency England, but he has two problems: 1) his dark skin and the mysterious circumstances of his mentor's death have combined to turn most of society against him, and 2) Great Britain's atmospheric magic is dwindling away seemingly without cause. Now it's up to Zacharias to prove himself, and he might just get some help from the spunky, determined Prunella Gentleman to do so.

A magical adventure with an eye toward racial injustice should be right up my alley, but it simply wasn't meant to be. I tried the book at two different times, and, on both occasions, I abandoned it less than halfway through. Though I can't quite pinpoint the cause—slow pacing? too much focus on magical politics?—all I know is that I kept wishing I was reading something else. Let's boil it down to a case of "good for [someone else], not for me."

Thanks to Ace Books for providing me with a copy of Sorcerer to the Crown via NetGalley for review consideration!

Spring is (kinda-sorta, depending upon your location) upon us, guys! It poured earlier this week and promises to tomorrow. I just visited Seattle (where it was crazy sunny). What better time to discuss a book about rain? I guess this doesn't apply as well to Matt Kaplan's book—he only talks about rainstorms part of the time—but let's roll right on ahead with that introduction.

Cynthia Barnett's Rain: A Natural and Cultural History dives in to the minutiae of the weather that can make for a cozy day in or a frustrating day out (if you don't have the right gear). She covers everything from the nitty-gritty of how rainstorms develop, both the normal and not-so-normal kinds (acid, frog, etc.), to how rainfall is related to climate change and human migration. I loved learning the specifics of how devastating both droughts and deluges can be and how some of the driest cities compound their problem by letting their rainwater flow out to sea. Also, the wettest city in America totally isn't Seattle. (Spoiler alert: it's New Orleans, LA.)

Barnett goes beyond writing about rain in and of itself; she explores the people who loved it, prayed (and continue to pray) for it, and first learned to measure it. Did you know that Thomas Jefferson was a huge rain buff and that he picked the absolute worst spot to build Monticello in regards to average precipitation? I didn't. She also covers how rain may have been the subject of "the first work of modern journalism" (pg. 71), how the famous mackintosh raincoat was born, and so much more.

Barnett also explains the history of a rain-related idiom, and idiom origin stories are the quickest way to my heart:

"The saying ['when it rains, it pours'] was an ad rather than an adage, developed for Morton Salt. Prior to 1911, table salt had the notorious problem of caking in rainy weather. That year, Morton began adding the anticaking agent magnesium carbonate to its salt. Executives wanted to emphasize the idea that it would pour even in the damp. The original pitch, 'Even in rainy weather, its flows freely,' proved clunky." - pg. 148, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

Where Rain goes for depth, Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers goes for breadth. Kaplan takes well-known magical and mythological objects and phenomena and grounds them in past and current scientific inquiry. I learned a handful of cool things from the book, to be sure. Did you know that ancient Egyptian eye makeup may actually have been effective at staving off infections, despite being full of lead? Also, another fun idiom origin: the phrase "mad as a hatter" comes from the fact that hat makers used to inhale mercury fumes from the while treating their products. The repeated exposure caused them to become "pathologically shy, depressed, and forgetful, [and] some became permanently delirious" (Loc 1020).

Sadly, the fun tidbits and my own initial excitement could not make up for how many times I raised my eyebrows reading this. Kaplan tries for humorous and self-deprecating footnotes, but many don't land (really, you had to throw in jokes about pregnant women eating Ben & Jerry's?). Also, for a science writer, Kaplan uses far more causal language and fewer examples than I am comfortable swallowing. The results of one study might be intriguing and cause for further exploration, but definitive evidence they are not.

It might be unfair to compare these two books directly. Barnett gets nearly 300 pages, not counting endnotes, to stretch out and explore the nuances of her subject. Kaplan crams in nearly several dozen concepts in under 250 pages, notes and all. Science of the Magical's slimness might account for some of the language I mentioned earlier (we all know how misleading short and snappy science headlines can get), but I'd have preferred he covered fewer things in a better manner.

Overall, if you ever find yourself having to pick between the two, Rain gets my vote. If you want to learn a little about a lot and have a keen eye for picking out the good science from the bad, Science of the Magical may get the job done. I'd love to hear if it works out better for you.

You guys. YOU GUYS. You guys.

After a blissful two-week stint with it, I just finished the audio of N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, the first in her Broken Earth series. I managed to glom together enough of the puddle it reduced me to to grab my laptop and open up a new post draft. Considering this is only my second blog post in a month that's almost over, you might say this is big.

At its heart, The Fifth Season tells the story of Essun, a woman who comes home one day to find that the family—and the world—she's known has ended. She will never be able to go back to the way things were before, but she can track down the one who's responsible for taking it all away from her. Interwoven with Essun's story is that of Syenite, an Orogene (a master of the Earth's seismic activity) who is slowly uncovering the dark secrets of the academy that trained her, and Damaya, another powerful young woman who casts off her beginnings as a pariah in the hope of something better. I don't want to go into the specifics for fear of spoilers, but here are a bunch of generalities: this story is about race, caste, gender, and sex (the sexy kind, not the biological kind); it's about a cast of horribly interesting and diverse (actually diverse! not just pretend!) characters; it's about a mother's love and how far it will carry you before you break; and it's about freaking awesome earth magic and stone lore and mysterious gemstone monoliths that float among the clouds.

Although I'm certainly not shy about expressing my enthusiasm for the things I love, I would not call myself overly gushy when I review. No book is perfect, and I like to temper my positivity with the parts that didn't sit right with me, whether they're mountains or mole hills. Here? I've really got nothin'. This book had me by the throat from the very beginning and did not let go until more than 15 hours of audio had gone by. I am sitting here trying to think of a single negative thing to say, and the only thing I'm coming up with is that it ended.

I'm still only getting started with fantasy, and I think this would be a perfect start for anyone looking to break in to the genre. Jemisin's world is vast and thorough, layered with a mythology that's either all its own or based on one I need to learn much, much more about, but it does not feel intimidating or unwieldy. I remember feeling overwhelmed at the outset when I tried Jemisin's The Killing Moon last year, but I did not feel that same sense of disorientation in the Broken Earth universe. My audio book came with a handy PDF appendix that helped me over the initial hurdle, and it was smooth sailing from there.

In fact, I might be trying The Killing Moon again via audio next. I'm just terrified that no one can live up to Robin Miles in the narration department. She tackled an invented language, narration changes (a significant amount of the story takes place in second person), and a wide variety of voices with ease and more than a bit of sass. This is a story about women, and Miles took them off the page and made them live and breathe and just be, unapologetically.

As excited as I am to get my hands on The Obelisk Gate (Broken Earth #2) in August, I'm going to be sorely disappointed if Robin Miles doesn't eventually read and record it. I may just start a petition.

Go read and/or listen to this book. Now. Like, really. Close this page and go.

The awesome reading streak continues! Julianne and Emily were my bookish fairy godmothers this week and pointed me toward two very different but equally excellent novels. One brought the creepy, the other brought the magic, and both were an absolute joy to read.

A Head Full of Ghosts, by Paul Tremblay

Mr. Splitfoot, by Samantha Hunt

It's difficult to come up with a summary for Bats of the Republic; the 2016 Tournament of Books shortlist pick is so darned ambitious. In a blend of science fiction, historical fiction and more than a dash of the Wild West, Dodson weaves a pair of dramatic love stories. Though they take place 300 years apart, they are connected by Texas landscape, powerful bloodlines and the contents of a mysterious letter. As those of you who follow book buzz likely already know, the format of Dodson's solo debut is anything but traditional.

First, the good. That whole "illuminated" thing on the cover? 100% accurate. This is one of the most physically beautiful books I've ever had the pleasure of reading. There are sketches, photographs, family trees, diagrams and books within books. Pages fold out and become maps, and, right in the back, there's a mysterious envelope with "DO NOT OPEN" scrawled across the front. And there's an actual letter in it! (Library readers, don't fret; if your copy of the letter is missing, Dodson includes a URL you can use to access it.) I loved turning each page and not knowing what I would be in for. While Dodson isn't the first to have gone the dossier-as-novel route, his take on it is definitely most aesthetically-pleasing I've come across.

A photo posted by Shaina (@shainareadsbooks) on Jan 17, 2016 at 5:22pm PST

Unfortunately, I don't think the story lived up to the concept. I am willing to admit that some of the historical or mythological references probably went right over my head. Even so, it felt too cluttered. Without getting into spoiler-y territory, Dodson packs in cowboys and Indians, dystopia, occult alchemy, serial killers, political succession and intrigue, and zoology. Got all that? Yeah, me neither. If we had gotten, say, three of those things, I think this would have been a much more cohesive story. As it stands, I got way too lost trying to link all of the details together. I'm not opposed to a complex story (for one I loved, see The Shore by Sara Taylor), but it has to come together. Unfortunately, Bats never fully did for me.

I also think that the number of things going on got in the way of me connecting with any of the characters. Some of this is intentional, I think (you know, rigidly-surveilled and regulated futuristic society and all that), but I would have liked some more humanity along with my bells and whistles.

If you're looking for an absolute treat for the eyes and don't mind the story playing second fiddle, Bats of the Republic is a worthy choice. If the story gels more for you than it did for me, even better—please come back and tell me all about it!

After dipping in and out of it since October, I finally finished up Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar. Made up of letters to and from The Rumpus's former advice columnist Sugar (AKA Cheryl Strayed), this book lends itself well to taking your sweet time (heh), reading a column or two every day, and letting the insights percolate.

Sugar loads her responses with personal stories, and people seem to love or hate that with fairly little in between. Me? I'm firmly in the love camp. Strayed has been through hell and back herself, and her advice is often brutally honest, occasionally saccharine, but always 100% well-intentioned and given with love. This book is like being hugged by your best friend's cool mom over and over again.

There are so many gems in here, but here are a couple of things that Sugar hammered home when I needed some reminding:

1. Boundaries are a-OK.

I've struggled to build boundaries with my immediate family (and my significant others, and my friends, and my colleagues...) for my entire life. I used to think that they were a sign of my own intolerance and inflexibility, but, as the quotation below beautifully illustrates, that's just what other people want you to think so that they can better push you beyond your limits, intentionally or not.

What's harder, you can't just build these boundaries once. You keep building and fortifying them over your entire life. This is exhausting, but the payoff—your sanity, your peace of mind, and your self-respect—is worth all of the effort and more. Build up those walls and protect them fiercely.

"Fucked-up people will try to tell you otherwise, but boundaries have nothing to do with whether you love someone or not. They are not judgments, punishments, or betrayals. ... Boundaries teach people how to treat you, and they teach you how to respect yourself." - A Glorious Something Else

2. Get on with it, because no one else will do it for you.

"Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out." - A Big Life

I know I'll be returning to this collection time and again, and I can't wait to see which letters stand out to me as I continue down this twisty, turn-y path of life.

At some point last year, I stopped eating meat. Despite my love for cheeseburgers, cheap hot dogs, and saucy, bread-y sesame chicken, I'd come to realize that I didn't agree with the way we mass-produce it. Maybe I didn't agree with the idea of killing animals to eat them at all. I could not in good conscience go on eating it, so I stopped...

... until Thanksgiving. Over the holiday, my dad, my boyfriend and I all went into the Florida swamplands with the intention of killing a pig. I wanted to see how being directly involved in an animal's slaughter would affect my feelings about eating it.

A bona fide Florida swamp man guided us to a clearing and left us to wait, my dad with rifle in hand. No more than an hour later, we were standing beside our kill. My boyfriend took a really powerful picture of him with it right before it was butchered. I realize this isn't something that everyone wants to see, so feel free not to click the link. (There's a bit of blood, but otherwise no gore.)

A day or two after the hunt, I started reading Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. First published in 1975, this classic is a rousing call to action against the many atrocities of factory farming. Singer's argument revolves around the concept of "speciesism," or humankind's inherent belief that they are superior to all other animals, and how it leads us to devalue animal suffering in favor of our own ease and enjoyment.

As critics are quick to point out, he can be extreme (he equates our treatment of animals with slavery, which had my head cocking more than a bit), and I'm less than on board with his PETA endorsement. Regardless, so many of his main points were too cogent for me to ignore:

"The principle of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings."

"If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose?"

"The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"  

I do not regret killing the pig nor eating it, but I don't know that I could ever do it again. The ninety or so seconds it took to die were some of the most deeply uncomfortable moments I've ever experienced. This was an animal that had free reign of its surroundings until it died, too, unlike many of the animals that end up packaged for sale at the grocery store. I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that I may never have my beloved sesame chicken again.

I'm still figuring out what to do about other animal products, like eggs, milk, and cheese. I get the sense that I'll be "figuring this out" for some time yet. I'm grateful to have had Singer's seminal work to refer to at a crucial moment on my journey.

Ultimately, Animal Liberation is heavy, polarizing, and the kind of book you absolutely have to read for yourself. I think that all kinds of eaters and activists will find plenty to think about, and I'd love to have more people with whom to discuss it!

"People talked. Do you know what that does? Do you know what that does to a marriage? People talking. Have you heard how people talk?"

Nat and Paul Collier just moved to Idaho Falls for Paul's new job. It's 1959, and he's just completed nuclear reactor training; he's now responsible for operating the CR-1, a prototype that no one will admit is falling apart. Nat is light and airy, Paul brooding and tight-lipped; they've built their life together on a tightrope that only becomes more difficult to walk as Paul's work anxiety mounts. When Paul gets deployed to Greenland, Nat develops a quick friendship with Esrom, the handsome, local cowboy who charms her young daughters and set the neighbors to whispering... and more than whispering.

On its face, this is a story we've all heard before: a marriage held together despite seemingly irreconcilable personality differences; one partner leaves, literally or figuratively, and someone new surfaces, appearing to offer an escape, an alternative to the everyday drudgery of "weaving your entrails together" with the person you married. Chaos ensues. Williams did not reinvent the wheel here.

At first, it was hard for me to take Nat and Paul's struggles seriously. They're my age, and I couldn't help thinking of them as two big kids tottering around playing grown-up. I eventually realized that, yes, they were, but they also had children to look out for, and wildly different and intense social expectations to live up to, and ever-present Cold War anxiety to contend with.

What sets The Longest Night apart is Williams's unwavering tenderness toward her two leads. They are both flawed, but they know it; different as they are, Nat and Paul are both naturally reflective, perhaps a touch unrealistically. Still, they are always struggling inwardly, both to come to terms with their own natures and what they each bring to their union. Where will they go from here?

"But then eventually they would belong to each other, which was a miraculous kind of a thing but a savage one, too."

Williams's writing is gorgeous and heartbreaking, a feat for a debut novel, and it didn't feel like it lasted half as long as its 400 pages. If you enjoy history, rejoice; it's based ever so loosely on true events. Even if you don't, this is a stunning portrait of a marriage hunting for solid ground in an increasingly uncertain world. It shouldn't be missed.

I received this book via NetGalley for review consideration. Thanks so much to NetGalley and Random House for the chance to read it!

All right, y'all. I'm gonna flex my reviewing muscles for the first time in, er, two and a half months to talk about the first book I finished in 2016. A TL;DR version of this review could be: I just really want to sit down with Sarai Walker and talk about feminist porn.

To start things off easy, here's the blurb from Goodreads:

"Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when you’re fat, to be noticed is to be judged. Or mocked. Or worse. With her job answering fan mail for a popular teen girls’ magazine, she is biding her time until her weight-loss surgery. Only then can her true life as a thin person finally begin.

Then, when a mysterious woman starts following her, Plum finds herself falling down a rabbit hole and into an underground community of women who live life on their own terms. ... At the same time, a dangerous guerrilla group called 'Jennifer.' begins to terrorize a world that mistreats women, and as Plum grapples with her personal struggles, she becomes entangled in a sinister plot. The consequences are explosive."

Plum's struggle with her body image and taking control of her life ("In my real life I would have more friends, and dinner parties and overnight guests, but my life wasn't real yet.") made me ache.  I won't say much more about this. As a woman who has never struggled significantly with managing her weight, I don't think it's my place. However, I think that all women can relate to that insidious social pressure that makes us want to eat less, work out more, and compare ourselves endlessly to other women who are doing "better" or "worse" than us. We're constantly under surveillance, not only by society but also by each other.

This tab-keeping goes for both our physical appearance and our sexuality, or "fuckability," as actress-turned-sociologist Marlowe Buchanan would say.

"'A fuckable woman doesn't take up space. Fuckable women are controlled.'"

At one point after moving in with the women's collective, Plum stumbles upon an underground room that literally broadcasts PornHub's greatest hits on the walls and ceilings 24/7. "Jennifer" murders a female porn star and calls for men to be objectified in the media just as much or else suffer the extremely violent consequences.

And here's where my brow quirked. Yes, the mainstream pornography industry can be unbelievably degrading to women. No, a woman's worth should not be determined by how desirable she is as a potential sex partner. How to use this information to create change, however, is less clear-cut. As freaking always, right?

I think it's important to acknowledge that women do enjoy sex and many also enjoy sexual imagery (i.e., porn), and I really didn't get that sense from Walker. How can women both embrace their sexuality and feel good about enjoying porn while also avoiding the disrespect that is so often inherent in sexual objectification? I think that some feminist porn sites are making strides at bridging the gap, but it's still an extremely open (and difficult) question, one that Dietland seemed to ignore entirely.

Walker also gives antidepressants extremely short shrift (essentially, Plum's life becomes a whole lot better after she kicks her habit). It's true that medication isn't for everyone and that many people stay on their regimens longer than they need to, but I will always roll my eyes at stories that peg antidepressants as an unnecessary evil.

On the whole, the writing left something to be desired, and I noticed this more as the plot became less engaging about two-thirds of the way through. Despite significant flaws, this was a bold first showing from Walker. She tackled subjects that many of us would like to continue sweeping under the rug, and I'll be curious to see what she decides to take on next.

"We enjoy magnificent advantages over our forebears in the quest to remedy unfairness. We know much more than they did about human behavior, we possess amazing technologies to track, address, and prevent problems, and we have a greatly enhanced capacity to coordinate actions that affect millions of people.

But for it to matter, we must act.

The arc of history does not bend toward justice unless we bend it."

- Unfair, pg. 286  

In his nonfiction debut Unfair, Drexel law professor Adam Benforado brings together a wealth of psychological research findings to argue that the potential for injustice lurks not only inside "the dark heart of a bigoted police officer or a scheming D.A. but within the mind of each and every one of us" (Unfair, pg. xiv). This relatively slim volume covers tons of experiments, from the classic to the more modern (fun fact: my boss's PhD advisor helped develop the IAT!), and all of them focus on how our cognitive tendencies work against us: we're far worse at identifying faces, reconstructing memories and making unbiased judgments than we'd like to believe. Benforado was dedicated enough to making his case to have created a 300-plus page set of endnotes, available online for free without book purchase. This is a social justice nerd after my own heart.

As a staunch champion of using social and behavioral science to cure social ails, I'm obviously biased (haha, bias joke in a review about a book on bias), but I found Benforado's syntheses to be cogent and many of his policy suggestions compelling. However, I do have one rather large bone to pick with him. While it is not a question that many prisoners have or have had mental health problems and that American prisons serve as de facto mental health care centers, I couldn't help but cringe every additional time he drove home the point that many prisoners suffer from mental health problems. As someone who's devoted significant time to mental health promotion and care advocacy, the "criminal = mentally ill" framework rankles because of how easily it can be reversed and how untrue the reverse really is. Mental health problems aren't a significant predictor of criminality, and individuals with severe mental health problems are, in fact, far more likely to be victims of violence than the general population. While I'm almost certain, based on the rest of the book, that Benforado did not intend to promote this paradigm, it didn't sit right with me, and I worry how it would come off to those without a deeper understanding of mental health and illness.

Despite this, Unfair is refreshing in its willingness to address how we all—not just the racist and sexist, not just the callous—have blindspots that prevent us from being 100% fair and just. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of how the brain functions and why humans as a whole are ill-suited to passing objective social judgments.

I received Unfair from Crown Publishing's Blogging for Books program for review consideration.

All book covers courtesy of Goodreads.

The R.I.P. X Challenge, hosted by The Estella Society, has had me devouring all of the spooky, mysterious fiction I could get my hands on in September and October. I successfully completed their Peril the First challenge this month, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the books that helped get me there.

A quick note: the challenge runs until Halloween, so if you've a hankering for some darker reads, jump right in—Peril the Third requires you to read just a single book that qualifies as R.I.P. lit!

What Strange Creatures, by Emily Arsenault

Ring, by Koji Suzuki

The Fever, by Megan Abbott

Things seem to be going well for Deenie Nash. Her mom might have left her in Dryden, but she still has her devoted father and older brother Eli, one of the star hockey players at the high school Deenie began attending last year. She has her two best friends, Gabby and Lise, and it looks like they might be finally becoming friends on their own, too. There's even a guy in the picture, if in a way Deenie isn't sure she understands yet. Everything changes when a mysterious illness strikes Lise and begins taking down other female students at the school with her. Suspicions whirl—could it be the HPV vaccine, or the fluorescent bacteria in the lake? Deenie doesn't know, but she does know she is not about to let Lise go without finding out.

This book falls solidly in the YA category, which isn't my usual bag, but I would definitely read more from Abbott. She perfectly captures the feeling of being a high school girl in the mid 2000s and later: on the verge of womanhood but so often still a child, simultaneously yearning for intimacy but afraid (with good reason) to trust, and suffocated by social expectations and the knowledge that your every move will find its way onto the cell phones of the whole student body. She also nailed the hormone-fueled obsession, the kind that makes us helpless and reckless in the name of what we think might be love. Abbott manages to balance Deenie's everyday life, interesting enough on its own, with the twisty mystery of just what is striking down the young women in Dryden.

Those who are fans of reading about young female friendship, splintered but resilient families, and darned-good mysteries to boot had best not miss this one.

The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks

Lauren and I buddy-read this during the Readathon, and her tweet to me about the ending basically sums it up.

@shainareads WTAF?

— Lauren O'B/Winters (@LolosLetters) October 18, 2015

Frank Cauldhame is sixteen years old, homeschooled by his eccentric father and given fairly free rein of the Scottish island they call home. He spends his time building "sacrifice poles" (read: sharpened sticks mounted with animal heads), reflecting on his three familicides and wondering when his older brother Eric, a recent escapee from the psychiatric hospital, will show up at their house.

If you haven't figured it out yet, this book is weird. There isn't a lot of plot to be found, but that's not the point; Banks is painting a portrait of a deeply disturbed teenager. I don't know that I've ever read more scenes of animal cruelty in one sitting; it was disgusting and infuriating, but the eerie and darkly humorous quality of Banks's writing and the sheer oddity that was Frank's character kept me reading. His is a life steeped in ritual, both of the everyday and awful variety; he'll wax on about his adventures at the pub each Saturday and, in the next breath, detail his extensive (extensive) strategies for murdering insects. I never quite knew when to trust what he was saying, particularly because much of it was horrible, obsessively methodical and, at times, even mystical. For a similar protagonist, think Patrick Bateman of American Psycho.

Much like with What Strange Creatures, I did not know what the story was leading up to... and then the last 15 pages happened. It's hard to talk about why I feel so uncertain about this one without revealing a major spoiler, but if you'd like to chat, let me know and we can do it away from the eyes of innocents.

If you're into excellent writing, want to dive into a consciousness ruled by meticulousness and madness, and don't mind some creatures getting maimed along the way, I would give this a try. Maybe you can explain the ending to me and Lauren.

Another Classics Club (and R.I.P. X!) pick bites the dust, and I'm feeling all kinds of ambivalent about it.

Ken Kesey's iconic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest tells the story of a group of male psychiatric patients living in a hospital ward in Oregon. Our narrator, "Chief" Bromden, is an enormous, half-Native American man who thinks of the hospital as "the combine" that is literally trying to rewire him to be better adjusted to his surroundings. His paranoia begins to lift when a new patient, Randle P. McMurphy, arrives on the ward. A swaggering, gambling-prone redhead, McMurphy threatens to upend the oppressive routine of hospital life overseen by the austere head nurse, Mildred Ratched.

On its face, I adored this book, in no small part to Tom Parker's unparalleled narration. We meet and get to know an enormous cast of characters, and Parker manages to imbue nearly all of them with their own voices and quirks beyond what's found in the text. Most of the men's stories are devastating (Billy Bibbit and Pete Bancini's stories alone were enough to cleave my heart in two), and Kesey never lets us forget about the helpless feeling of inhabiting a world we struggle to fit into. McMurphy, in spite of his smooth talk and his eye on his own bottom line, fosters hope and camaraderie among the men. Maybe they can fit in after all, or maybe—just maybe—the world can adjust to them.

“What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin'? Well you're not! You're not! You're no crazier than the average asshole out walkin' around on the streets, and that's it. ” - Randle McMurphy, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

The film was also quite good (I mean, Jack Nicholson), but the producers made some changes that distinctly changed the tone (and sometimes the trajectory) of the story. The film does not follow a specific narrator, removing the unreliability of Chief's voice and, with it, the ominous uncertainty of just what is actually going on in the hospital. This shift casts some of the (spoiler-y) events in a different light, and I was grateful to have the book so fresh in my memory so I could draw comparisons. Although I enjoyed the film adaptation, it ultimately couldn't live up to the novel for me.

All that being said, there are some potentially nasty things lurking under the rosy tint of wonderful characters and excellent storytelling. This book is riddled with problematic representations of and attitudes toward women. The ward's hero, McMurphy, is committed in the first place for "statutory rape" (McMurphy, in his late 30s, rapes a 15-year-old girl). The ever-demonized Nurse Ratched is at once discussed as sexless and undesirable (and, therefore, not worth much), but one of the attributes the men keep coming back to are her enormous breasts. These breasts also play an uncomfortably pivotal role in the story's climax. The "system" the men of the ward are fighting appears to be almost entirely made up of women bent on emasculating them, and this makes me more than a bit squirmy.

I think this book has so many excellent points worth discussing (personal freedom; the individual versus society; and stark looks at mental illness, male friendship and male vulnerability), and part of me wants so desperately to believe that the sexism is just additional commentary. Since Kesey never seemed to openly address it (at least not that I noticed—correct me if I'm wrong!), I'm stuck feeling uncertain and more than a little troubled.

I told y'all on Wednesday that I'm eating every word about my supposed aversion to audio books. I honestly thought I wouldn't be into them, but it turns out that all it took to get me going was to be completely incapable of picking up a book. It didn't matter that I was enjoying the two reads I was in the middle of last week; every time I picked them up, I'd find an excuse to put them down, and eventually I stopped trying altogether. Days passed without a single turned page, and I was developing a distinctly book-shaped hole in my soul.

Enter The Old Man and the Sea, narrated by Donald Sutherland. I have Amanda to thank for this gem; she recommended it as one of her favorites on that so-recently-inapplicable post. After activating my free Audible trial, I settled on the itty-bitty Hemingway as a way to use up my first credit. The whole story clocks in at just under two-and-a-half hours. I figured that, if audio did not turn out to be for me, I wouldn't have to suffer through much of it to finish off the story. (Spoiler alert: this was not the case.)

Hemingway tells the story of the old Cuban fisherman Santiago. Having come up empty for the last three months, most believe his luck on the water has run out, but he has a feeling that change is coming. That change arrives in the form of the most massive fish anyone in Havana has ever seen. The bulk of the story revolves around Santiago being towed along by this mega-fish in his skiff, all the while reflecting on a life spent at sea, his failing body, and his relationship with "the boy" whom he's watched grow from a five-year-old, frightened by jumping fish, to a compassionate young man.

The most punch-you-in-the-face obvious themes here are aging, the inevitability of death and the legacy one leaves behind after dying. Despite there not being a lot of mystery to the symbolism (i.e., a strong, beautiful fish being slowly chewed up by sharks over time), it works so well when paired with Hemingway's prose, spare and straightforward as ever. Santiago knows his time is coming—and soon—but he isn't going without a fight, even if that fight consists of keeping on just as he always has. From what I've read before (A Farewell to Arms, ugh), I'm not a huge fan of Hemingway, but I'll make an exception for this story and for the quiet mettle of his fisherman.

As for the audio, Dave of Canton, MI put it best in his review: Donald Sutherland is Santiago. His calm, gravelly voice captured the world-weary vigor of the old man perfectly. Sutherland's tone didn't change for the other characters, but, considering the novel is 90% Santiago, this didn't detract much.

All in all, I'm glad to have been proven wrong about audio books, because they served as a thoroughly enjoyable way to scratch yet another book off Ye Olde Classics Club list.

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast." - pg. 1, Everything I Never Told You

I'm pretty sure that everyone and their pet cats have already reviewed this book, but, as some wise people once tweeted, you can spread book love months (or years!) after it comes out and there's so much to love (and discuss) here. So, without further ado, another glowing review of Everything I Never Told You.

The opening drops us right at the start of a normal day—that would turn out to be anything but—for the Lee family. Lydia is the "prize flower" of James and Marilyn's three children and, on that morning in May, she appears to be poised for success in advanced physics, her social circles and beyond. As Ng walks us through the days directly before and after Lydia drowns, we quickly learn that Lydia's—and everyone else's—veneer is not quite what it originally seems.

Rather than shifting narrators at chapter breaks, Ng moves through the minds of the Lee family within each scene. While this type of technique could end up being clunky or confusing elsewhere, it works beautifully to show us the many sides of the Lees' interactions with each other and the few people they know outside their family. In her review of Nekropolis, Amanda talked about how the multiple narrators allowed the reader to see how everyone "thinks they see and feel things the same way, when they really don’t." Ng works the same magic here, quietly pointing us toward what goes unspoken, misunderstood or willfully ignored.

This book sucked me right in and didn't let go, a fact I lamented after choosing to start it at midnight. It packs together a bunch of heavy themes: the stigma that once surrounded (and can still surround) interracial marriage, the weight of parental expectations, deep-seated loneliness and fear of abandonment are just a few. The message that ultimately comes through clearest, however, is what can go wrong when you fail to communicate and what can go so, so right when you do. A handful of (spoiler-y) moments in the story didn't quite ring true or were a bit too tidy for me, but all were minor blemishes on an otherwise exquisite piece of storytelling that I still cannot believe is Ng's debut. I eagerly await whatever she spins for us next.

Also, y'all should follow her on Twitter, if for nothing but the livestream of her four-year-old's excellent questions.

Book images from Goodreads.

Whoever says that social media is a waste of time and brain cells is dead wrong, because I got my last two book recommendations straight from Twitter: Station Eleven from a "what to read next?" poll I posted in a fit of indecision and The Book of Strange New Things from the fact that I was reading Station Eleven.


At first blush, the only thing Station Eleven seems to have in common with The Book of Strange New Things is a spaceship, drawn into whimsical comic books in the former and carrying a Christian missionary to a faraway planet in the latter. Now that I've gotten through the 836-page bulk of both of them (with Strange New Things clocking in at 500, that chunkster), I can see Derek's point.

First, Station Eleven. The book follows a band of nomadic performers called the Traveling Symphony, drifting through the desolate landscape of what was once North America, long since ravaged by the Georgian flu virus. No one knows exactly how bad the outbreak was, but, judging from the number of other people they encounter on the road, the survivors can only assume they're in the minority. All the technologies of the old world (the Internet, electricity, transit more advanced than caravans pulled by horses) have long since failed, and anyone born more than twenty years ago couldn't say what an airplane in flight or a working television look like. All the Symphony has now is Shakespeare, fading recollections of the old world, and the stifling but vital company of each other.

The book jumps through time and among perspectives to tell the story of how this new world came to be, and many of the characters are linked in ways they would never imagine nor learn. Kirsten, one of the Symphony members, hunts in vain for more issues of a comic book given to her as a little girl, not knowing they were the pet project of a woman she would never know, the first ex-wife of a man Kirsten acted alongside in King Lear. Sullied with the grit of the post-apocalypse, the book ultimately tells a story about memory: what gets passed on, what does not, and the ways that both we as individuals and larger, uncontrollable forces determine that balance.

After Station Eleven, I barely drew a breath before jumping into The Book of Strange New Things. Pastor Peter Leigh is our aforementioned missionary on his way to the planet Oasis. He's been tasked with bringing the word of God to the native Oasans, and he could only be more thrilled if USIC (the mysterious organization heading the project) had approved his wife Bea to come with him. He promises to write her every day, but he is quickly swallowed by his new life: the cheery but emotionally flat USIC compound; the merciless atmosphere of Oasis; and his Oasan flock, so religiously devoted but personally impenetrable.

I must have been in doomsday mode post-Station Eleven, because I kept expecting something devastating or sinister to happen throughout Strange New Things. There are some dark aspects to the book, but not in an in-your-face flu pandemic kind of way. Letters from Bea detail disasters both big (cyclones and earthquakes) and small (broken windows and suffering friends), and her missives travel billions of miles through space to be read at her husband's leisure. Rather than a shifting perspective, we only get Peter's thoughts, further widening the gulf between him and Bea but thrusting the reader right up against the disintegration of faith—in ourselves, in each other, in our gods—when it's tested over impassable physical and emotional distances. The tragedy here was subtle but potent once I shifted my expectations.

Although the blooks are different in terms of setting and plot, their sentiments are remarkably similar: change comes to all of us, and we can't decide how or when. All we can choose is how we react to it when it does—what will we carry forward with us, and what will it mean where we're going?

I ate both of these books up, St. John Mandel's for her hauntingly beautiful sentences and Faber's for his ability to plunk me straight down in Oasis with nary a bump. I think the books appeal to different audiences, with Station Eleven leaning more post-apocalyptic and Strange New Things more sci-fi, but both are unmistakably (very, very good) literary fiction.