Joanna’s Comments (group member since Nov 17, 2010)

Joanna’s comments from the Reading with Style group.

Anika wrote: "I always read what is going on and feel warmed and a kinship with everyone in this group.
Thanks for creating and maintaining this haven/heaven on the internet."

Me too! I've been participating in this challenge since Fall 2010 and I've benefited so much from it. Thanks to everyone who keeps it running and who participates to make the group feel special.

My planning has way more books than I'm likely to get to over the summer, but it's fun going through my shelves for things I have and making sure that if there are a few things I want from the library I get them borrowed now.

I have two books that haven't found a home yet, so maybe they'll fit one of the remaining tasks.

10.7 In Memoriam

The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates

I read this because my bookclub picked it. It's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. Obviously, the message is good. I'm glad that the Gates Foundation is doing important work. But I didn't find much here that I didn't already know. The book talks about her own journey from traditional gender roles to a deep understanding of why it's important to empower women. But I'm already the choir on that, so she didn't have to sell me (and I'm not sure that reading her own thoughts would sell me if I weren't already convinced).

I did enjoy the personal chapter where Melinda talks about ways she worked to create equality in her marriage and how she and Bill have tried to balance all the different parts of family, work, children, etc. But overall, her description is less useful to working women than, say, Michelle Obama's similar description in Becoming.

As authors reading their own books go, Ms. Gates does a fine enough job. Since it's a personal story, it's nice to hear her read it and it made some of the passages a bit less grating because she read them with real emotion. But, like many authors, she isn't all that familiar with audiobook narration and has a hard time not sounding like she's giving a speech instead of bringing a book to life. The cadence for each is somewhat different and this comes across more as a long speech/lecture than an audiobook.

+10 Task
+10 Review

Task total: 20
Grand total: 960

+100 RWS finish

Grand total: 1060

Second the recommendation for the Leo Demidov trilogy. I don't read many spy novels, but I really enjoyed those.

Will fantasy settings that are based on a county/region work?

E.g., I'm looking at The Rosewater Insurrection, which is set in a fantasy or future Nigeria.

10.6 Richard Adams

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The audiobook knocks this out of the park. By having the book read by a host of narrators, the rockumentary style comes through perfectly. I actually had to go look up whether this was fiction because it was so believable. This is an ode to 1970s rock bands--the music, the times, the journalism about them. The characters felt like real people with complicated, sometimes infuriating, thoughts and actions.

This is an author to pay attention to. Her previous book, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, was similar in structure: a journalist writing about an aging film star. In both of these books, there are unexpected feelings among these stars, c0mplete with nearly too cute twists, but I was willing to forgive these slight quibbles because the books were just so much fun.

Highly recommended, particularly in audio format. I read that this is going to be turned into an Amazon TV series with Reece Witherspoon. I'll be looking out for that when it is released.

+10 Task
+10 Review

Task total: 20
Grand total: 940

Change

In Post 276, I claimed Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children for 10.6.

I'd like to move that to 10.2.

This doesn't change my score.

Grand total: 920

20.5 Jeffrey Eugenides

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

This first novel by Chabon shows his promise as a writer. He manages to write characters that are compelling even when he isn't sure what he wants to say about them. This is a coming of age story, with the honesty, confusion, sexual experimentation, and fantasy of so many young men. This may not be the story of the author's own actual life, but it reads like the story that you can at least imagine that 24-year-old author Chabon kind of wished was his life, if not really, at least in novelistic fantasy. But because Chabon is a good writer, even this semi-fantasy navel-gazing coming of age reads in a compelling way.

These characters are really pretty different from me and from anything that I ever felt, but it nonetheless aroused in me fantasy-nostalgia for the time after college when I could have been this sort of undirected and carefree person even though I wasn't actually. It's not easy to engender this sort of feeling writing about hapless, drinking and drugging twenty-somethings. Usually that just ends up seeming either anti-her0-ish or boring.

In the end, maybe what this all means is that Chabon just turns out to be a really good novelist. Or maybe I liked his book because I'm predisposed to like him since I know of his later work. Either way, I'm glad to have read this one.

+20 Task
+10 Review
+5 Combo (10.2)
+5 Oldies (1988)

Task total: 40
Grand total: 920

10.5 Sherlock Holmes

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

Published in 1903, this book stands as an important piece of history and literature. But, unfortunately, it still resonates with the present and describes the difficulties faced by black Americans today. DuBois is a tremendous writer and his prose springs from these pages and sings to the reader. I was given this audiobook through the Audiobooksync program that pairs contemporary teen audiobook fiction with related works (sometimes classics, sometimes nonfiction, sometimes other related fiction). I forget now what this was paired with, but I'm glad to have downloaded this one.

The audio version of this book read by Rodney Gardiner carries the cadence of black ministers through the text and makes listening to this book a powerful experience. Highly recommended in audio format.

+10 Task (1903)
+10 Review
+10 Oldies (1903)
+10 Combo (10.4, 20.2)

Task total: 40
Grand total: 880

20.6 Katherine Anne Porter

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin is one of the cleverest authors out there. I'm so thrilled with her writing. If you haven't read the Broken Earth trilogy, stop here and go read that. Seriously, she managed to win the Hugo for each of the books in the trilogy. Off you go to read The Fifth Season.

Now, for folks who are already familiar with Jemisin, this new book which promises to be the start of a new series. This book offers a cast of great characters and a love story for New York City. But it's the real New York, including distrust of gentrification and multi-ethnic mishmash that makes NYC great. There's a wonderful fantasy underpinning here about how cities become living entities. But what carries this book are the characters working together to bring NYC into being.

I can't wait to see where this series goes.

Also note: the narrator for the audiobook is fantastic. I've listened to other books read by the wonderful Robin Miles and I highly recommend this one in audio format if you're an audiobook fan.

+20 Task
+5 Combo (20.2)
+10 Review

Task total: 35
Grand total: 840

20.7 Annie Dillard

The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg

The book is an examination of the heresy trial of an Italian miller during the 1500s. What's interesting is that this man had come up with an entire religious theory that contradicted in important ways parts of the Catholic teachings of the time. This book looks in detail at the trial transcripts and documents and tries to figure out what other books this miller must have read and how he came to form the ideas he had.

I can see that this work is revolutionary in its own way for how it tackled the history here and that it's considered one of the founding books of "microhistory." And if I were more of a religious scholar, I'm sure I would have appreciated this a lot more. But for this lay reader, I found it incredibly dense and slow going. I could only read it a few pages at a time before I would find myself skimming too much to follow the arguments.

This was recommended to me by someone who actually is a religious history scholar, so I can see how she would have appreciated the book more deeply than I did.

+20 Task
+10 Review
+10 Combo (10.3 - and; 10.4)
+5 Oldies (1976)

Task total: 45
Grand total: 805

15.9 Blackjack

Scythe by Neal Shusterman
Lexile: 830

A of Spades - 1st in series
7 of Diamonds - Title begins with S

Task total: 30
Grand total: 760

15.8 Blackjack

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

10 of Spades - Short stories
7 of Spades - 7 letter title word - without

+30 Task
+5 Not-a-novel

Task total: 35
Grand total: 730

10.3 Conjunctions

Because I Said So! : The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids by Ken Jennings

An entertaining little book of short pieces researching the validity of all those things that your parents tell you but are of dubious scientific origin. Caffeine stunts your growth--false. You need to wait an hour after eating before swimming--false. Don't use a fork to get things out of a toaster--true. Alcohol kills brain cells--not really. And on through about one hundred more similar examinations. The book is read by the author (the GOAT of Jeopardy), who keeps it lively and enjoyable. This would be the perfect book for a waiting room--you could easily pick it up and read just one entry.

+10 Task (Title-so; subtitle-and)
+10 Review

Task total: 20
Grand total: 695

I am reading My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

The first listed author is the editor: Kate Bernheimer, who also has a story in the anthology.

I'm using it for 10.2, but was wondering if it gets combo points here?

10.10 Group Reads

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney

What a wonderful little book. The narrator for the audiobook really captured this character and I think raised this book from what would have been a three- or four-star read to a five-star for me. It also doesn't hurt that I have fond memories of living in and walking around New York City, not in the mid-eighties when this book is set, but in the early 2000s. The author has hit on something important about the way that walking around a city puts people into contact with each other and with their city. That level of contact often feels lost out in mid-America where we all have plenty of space, drive our personal vehicles, and don't have these sorts of chance encounters nearly as often.

+10 Task
+10 Review
+10 Combo (10.2, 10.4)

Task total: 30
Grand total: 675

10.5 High Five Day

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

These are richly composed characters, but the book still felt a bit like a creative writing exercise. Remember the movie Crash? Me neither, but I remember generally that the premise was that there was a car accident that brought random people's lives into intersection. That's this book.

Loosely structured around a tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, the book tells the individual story of a large handful of semi-related New York characters--the prostitutes, including a mother/daughter pair, a strange Irish missionary, the missionary's brother, and various others. The women are the most well-developed and most interesting characters of the book. The men who make it in are almost entirely extraneous and boring.

The book escapes being boring because the writing is so sharp. McCann can write and can manage truly different voices for different characters, even those quite different from himself. I feel like this book didn't quite reach the author's potential, though.

+10 Task
+10 Review
+10 Combo (20.4, 20.8 - "She reached across, lifted Corrigan's teacup, blew it cool, left a smudge of lipstick on the rim." 7%)

Task total: 30
Grand total: 645

20.4 Robert Penn Warren

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

A beautifully written book, surely deserving of more stars that I could find in my heart for this novel. The writing is gorgeous. The scenery well described. But the book was just too bleak for me to enjoy right now. I should have known that before I started. I maybe should have saved this for a time when I feel less bleak about the world. But I didn't and so goes the arbitrariness of ratings and reviews.

I think there are grand themes here about standing up to misfortune and moving on with life even when things seem lousy, but I couldn't bring myself to face them with this book.

The narrator for the audiobook didn't help matters. He reads in a flat style, stumbles mightily over the passages in Spanish, and generally serves to contribute to the overall bleakness.

+20 Task
+10 Review
+5 Oldies (1994)

Task total: 35
Grand total: 615

20.8 Cup of Tea

The Unwanteds by Lisa McMann
Lexile: 880

My kids ages 8 and 11 loved this book, which I read out loud to them. As the adult reader, I found it mostly silly--decidedly a middle grade book without much to capture the adult reader.

The premise here is that a dystopian city has decided to execute anyone who by age 13 shows any sign of creativity. I guess (and I say I guess because it isn't ever clearly explained) that the reason is that non-creatives will more willingly blindly follow directions of a controlling and dictatorial society. But luckily for the teens selected for elimination, there's a magical world hiding in the wings to take them in.

In the hidden magical world, they are preparing for the possibility that they'll be discovered and there will be war with the original city. The idea of magical weapons based on art/creativity is neat, but the actual explanations for the weapons was largely lacking. There's a good-hearted mentor figure, some magical beasts, twins (one evil and one good, naturally), but for me the overall story fell flat.

Since my kids liked it so much, we're already reading book 2, but unless it improves, I don't know that I'll have patience for the whole 7-book series.

+20 Task ("'As you can see,' Mr. Today said as he poured tea and added several sugars to his own, 'your brother Alex is not dead.'" - p. 222)
+10 Review
+5 Combo (10.9 - 1st in series; see https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b... - "seventh and final" book released 2016)

Task total: 35
Grand total: 580

20.2 August Wilson

Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead

The narrator for the audiobook does an excellent read of this slim satire. Colson Whitehead has some things to say about consumer culture, about names, and about race and history. His ideas aren't fully formed in this book, resulting in moments where the plot ran thin. But there was so much to like here, including sparkling prose and truly funny moments that make me willing to forgive the book's flaws. Also, the audiobook runs at only about five hours, so it might have become tiresome had it continued too long, the book was able to get off stage before annoyance with the plot could overwhelm enjoyment of the ideas here.

+20 Task
+10 Review

Task total: 30
Grand total: 545

15.7 Blackjack

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez

5 of Clubs - MPG Science - Science is 3rd on MPG list
4 of Hearts - 400-499 pp - 411pp
9 of Spades - pub. year ending 9 - 2019

+20 Task
+5 Female
+5 Not-a-novel

Task total: 30
Grand total: 515