Joanna’s
Comments
(group member since Nov 17, 2010)
Joanna’s
comments
from the Reading with Style group.
Showing 1,021-1,040 of 2,307
15.10 Name of the GameAcross the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire
Square 15D - Letter L - most recent novel
Square 2B - Letter E - 2+ Es in auth name
Square 12C - Letter S Series #4-7
Square 8D - Letter S - Wild Card (S)
Word = LESS
Task total: 45
+100 Finish
+100 four letter words
Post total: 245
Grand total: 825
15.9 Name of the GameWhen Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
Square 8C - letter W - when
Square 9B - letter I - island setting
Square 7E - letter G - good
Word = WIG
Task total: 30
Grand total: 580
15.8 Name of the GameBetrayal in Death by J.D. Robb
Square 4E - Letter D - double trouble
Square 1C - Letter R - Romance MPG
Square 14D - Letter Y - mystery MPG
Word = DRY
Task total: 30
Grand total: 550
10.8 LunarClaudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose
Lexile: 1000
In keeping with my current attention span, this YA nonfiction book was just right. The author did extensive interviews with Claudette Colvin and other people who knew her and produced this excellent young adult nonfiction account of her role in the Montgomery bus boycott. I had never heard of Ms. Colvin. She was a teenager who refused to give up her seat on the bus about a year before Rosa Parks. Colvin's court case started the discussions of changing the policy in Montgomery and she later became one of the star witnesses in the federal case that actually ruled segregation a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Colvin's story shows the way that history tends to pick a narrative and doesn't tell the stories of all involved. Because Colvin was a teen and got pregnant, the leaders of the civil rights movement didn't want her to be the face of the movement. She did some pretty courageous things, but was largely forgotten when the history narrative was written.
I'm glad her story has been recorded. This book would be great for high-level middle school or early high school readers who want a better understanding of what the people involved in the bus boycott were really facing.
+10 Task (pub. 2009)
+10 Review
+5 Combo (10.4)
+5 Prize Worthy (National Book Award)
Task total: 30
Grand total: 520
20.5 AfricaTears of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall Smith
Simple and easy books are about all I've wanted to read lately (see, e.g., the fact that I've read four "In Death" books in the last 9 months). So, this series fits the bill.
This book delivers exactly what it promises--a light, charming, not particularly challenging read. The characters are heartfelt, if somewhat simple. The "mystery" here isn't much of a mystery, but that's typical for the cozy genre, I think. This is as much about the setting as about the detective work and there's a culture being described as the characters drink tea and talk about politeness, the effect of the modern world on culture, and other topics.
The narrator irritatingly seemed to stumble on the character names every single time they were read, which made the listening experience a bit less enjoyable than it could have been. Even so, I would listen to another of this series.
+20 Task
+10 Review
Task total: 30
Grand total: 490
15.7 Name of the GameArtificial Condition by Martha Wells
Square 7C - letter G - GR auth
Square 16D - letter E - title has no E
Square 10B - letter T - published teens (2018)
Word = GET
Task total: 20
Grand total: 460
20.2 JazzLive by Night by Dennis Lehane
This 1920s/1930s mob book is far outside of my usual reading picks, but I really enjoyed this story. I had in my head that this would be a mystery, but it's more of a period piece and crime book. The main character is involved in low-level crime, then rises in gangster hierarchy to greater and greater control of rum-running (during Prohibition) as well as other rackets. The author does a great job bringing the era to life as the characters travel from Boston to Tampa to Cuba.
The narrator for the audiobook captured the tone well and made this relatively long book a pleasure to listen to.
+20 Task (set 1926-1935)
+10 Review
+10 Awards
+5 Combo (10.3)
Task total: 45
Grand total: 440
10.6 NotableFreshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
I am thoroughly impressed with this novel. It's the kind of debut novel that shows tremendous promise for a new and interesting voice. It's also a very hard book to describe--it's a spiritual book, it involves a character with multiple personalities or perhaps multiple spirits contained within one body. It touches on some very difficult experiences--cutting, gender transition, female genital mutilation, rape. I read that the author considered this semi-autobiographical, which is disconcerting given the experiences and the disassociating. The story is told from different perspectives of the different personalities/spirits within the main character.
I listened the the author read the audiobook version and she did an excellent job with the narration.
This is an author that I'm excited to see how she develops as an author.
+10 Task
+10 Review
+5 Prizeworthy (Otherwise Award)
Task total: 25
Grand total: 395
10.4 ValentinesUnlocked by Shannon Messenger
This book does not seem to have a Lexile number, so I believe is not eligible for style points. Mods-let me know if I'm wrong here.
+10 Task
Task total: 10
Grand total: 370
15.6 Name of the GameJudgment in Death by J.D. Robb
Square 4D - Letter D - death
Square 5E - Letter I - two initials
Square 10E - Letter T - no "the" in title
Square 12E - Letter S - sci fi
Word = DITS
Task total: 20
Grand total: 360
10.4 ValentineSeven by Farzana Doctor
I am officially a Farzana Doctor fangirl. Earlier this year, I read All Inclusive, which couldn't be more different from this book. In Seven, we meet a New York family about to travel to India for an extended stay (a professional trip for the husband, and a break between jobs for the wife, plus a chance for their seven year old to experience the ancestral homeland and meet the extended family). The book explores the intersection of traditions with changing values, female genital mutilation and its impact on the community and the women, and notions of identity. This is a powerful read and I highly recommend it.
+10 Task
+10 Review
+5 Combo (10.3)
Task total: 25
Grand total: 340
15.5 Name of the GameBattle Ground by Jim Butcher
Square 11D - Letter H - pub 2020
Square 16E - Letter E - 8+ named characters
Square 1E - Letter R - Series R
Word: HER
Task total: 20
Grand total: 315
I'm trying to read some of the hardcopy books that have been sitting on my shelves for years.In 2020, I managed to read around 30 of these.
For 2021, I'd like to move along another 30 hardcopy books.
15.4 Name of the GameAll Systems Red by Martha Wells
12B - Letter S - 75-199pp
5D - Letter I - no letter i
6E - Letter N - New to me author
Word = SIN
Task total: 15
Grand total: 295
20.9 NiecesThe Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I expected to like this book much more than I actually did. It's been hyped and won lots of awards and made lots of top lists, but I thought large sections were pretty dull. The concept of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a cool idea, but the actual story was more of a mystery than fantasy. Unfortunately, many of the "mysteries" were more just stories told by some character as a recollection of long-past events. I enjoyed the description of Barcelona. While the book is atmospheric and brings out some wonderful feelings about love of reading, I was ultimately disappointed.
The narrator for the audiobook did a fine but not particularly memorable job.
+20 Task
+10 Review
+10 Lost in translation
+15 Prize worthy
+5 Combo (10.4)
Task total: 60
Grand total: 280
20.4 ScienceAquagenesis: The Origin and Evolution of Life in the Sea by Richard Ellis
Not a bad way to close out this reading year. This is probably the hardest science book that I've read outside of a science class. The first hundred pages, in particular, were something of a slog. The book is meticulously referenced, which is academically sound, but makes for a more difficult reading experience as a typical sentence says, "As Smith and Wesson (1992) found, blah blah blah." For the first hundred or so pages, there's a meticulous description of all the prehistoric non-vertebrate sea life for which we have a fossil record. This is fascinating stuff in its own way, but was largely inaccessible to this non-biologist/paleontologist. When I was a college student, I briefly enrolled in a class called Biology of Fishes. The class was way over my head and I had to drop out, but I'm sure I would have learned stuff in that class that would have helped me interpret this book.
Once we moved on to vertebrates, I was more engaged and found the reading absolutely engrossing. By that point, I'd also become more accustomed tot he scientific references and felt more able to breeze through them.
I'd recommend this book, particularly if you can bring yourself to just skip the first section if you aren't tremendously interested in invertebrate fossils. But the description of the development of land animals (and then the return of land animals to the sea) is amazing. I was that annoying person who kept saying to my family, "Hey, did you know that whales are more closely related to elephants than fish?" and "Wow, there's a really interesting theory that humans have an aquatic or semi-aquatic ancestor that we haven't really discovered."
+20 Task
+10 Review
Task total: 30
Grand total: 220
I'm already wanting to move a book.In post 139, I claimed Followers for 15.3 NotG.
Instead, I'd like to move it to 10.5 (see below).
This also means that Post 170 should be 15.3 instead of 15.4.
Sorry for the additional scorekeeping work!
---
10.5 Author
Followers by Megan Angelo
This book was engaging and is a promising debut novel. It suffers from some problems frequently seen in debuts of this type--a desire to tell the reader everything and to wrap up all the characters in the end. There's an epilogue feature to the end here where the author quickly runs through what becomes of everyone after the heart of the story has finished. The book would be better without this section and/or with it done differently. The book is structured with two timelines--2015 and 2051. Mostly, this works, but it sometimes creates confusion for the reader jerking back and forth.
The book takes on social media and envisions a near-future where certain things have gone horribly wrong with social media (coining a term emotional terrorism). The critique at the heart of this book--that social media is creating a downward spiral of living to attract viewers and "likes" and to hold the interest of followers--is interesting and worth considering.
The actual novel wrapped around the critique is a bit too flimsy to hold everything together. The disaster at the heart of the new world (called "the Spill") is interesting, but the author never fully fleshed out in her own mind how this worked and what the implications were to create a believable response.
The narrator for the audiobook is animated, giving excitement to the book and making it an entertaining listen. The narrator makes some effort to differentiate the characters, but this book might have been better read by different narrators for the different timelines.
+10 Task (main character is aspiring writer and blogger)
+10 Review
Task total: 20
-15 from NotG
Grand total: 190
What about a blogger who aspires to write a book, and is working on her book throughout the novel, but never actually writes the book? Her work as a blogger is central to the plot.I read Followers for Name of the Game, but I'm considering moving it here instead if it fits.
15.4 Name of the GameInto the Water by Paula Hawkins
Square 8E - Letter W - GR choice
Square 5C - Letter I - Into
Square 10C - Letter T - Thriller
Square 11C - Letter H - Auth. H
Word=WITH
Task total: 15
Grand total: 185
15.3 Name of the GameFollowers by Megan Angelo
Square 7C - Letter G - GR auth
Square 2B - Letter E - 2+e in auth name
Square 6E - Letter N - New to me auth
Square 8D - Used as Letter E - Wild Card (E)
Word: GENE
Task total: 15
Grand total: 170
