January 2018 reads part 2

(Continued from Part 1)

Writers Gone Wild: The Feuds, Frolics, and Follies of Literature's Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Lovers, Iconoclasts, and Misanthropes - Bill Perschel (2010)
"When Richard Burbidge was playing the lead in Shakespeare's Richard III, he arranged an assignation with a lady for after the performance. Shakespeare heard about it, got there first, and seduced her. When Burbidge arrived and sent word up that her Richard III had arrived, Shakespeare sent a message back that William the Conqueror came first."

This book is basically what the subtitle says: short blurbs about the various deeds and misdeeds of authors, arranged loosely by type in chapters. I thought it would be a fun read - and at times, it was - but a number of the incidents veer towards the serious or depressing rather than fun. All in all, while a little funny or interesting at times, the collection felt somewhat voyeuristic and thus sort of uncomfortable to read. It might be an interesting coffee-table or road-trip read, but I'd recommend just checking out full-on biographies on authors of interest if you're looking for interesting facts on certain figures.

Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself - Melody Beattie (1992[2nd ed.])
"Overinvolvement of any sort can keep us in a state of chaos; it can keep the people around us in a state of chaos. If we're focusing all our energies on people and problems, we have little left for the business of living our own lives." 

This is an easy-to-read, widely-applicable self-help book. There are activities and exercises throughout that help the reader really think through and absorb what's being said, and I appreciated that the author encourages community through going to supportive meetings and/or therapy.

The author is obviously a fan of 12-step programs, and her advice, though widely applicable, is written in the frame of having an alcoholic/addict in your life. Thus, if your situation is different or if you're not a fan of 12-step programs like AA, you'll have to do a little mental work to separate that out. Overall, though I'd recommend this book to just about anyone, especially those who have a "difficult person" in their lives.

Related Reads:
Boundaries (Cloud & Townsend)

Kiss Every Step: A Survivor's Memoir from the Nazi Holocaust - Doris Martin (2009)
"I got a chilling reminder of how my life hung by a thread when, one morning, Mrs. Unucka informed me that in the middle of the night she had overheard me talking in my sleep. She couldn't understand what I was saying, but it sounded like some language other than Polish. Oh, my God! I had never expected this... All of my self-training to speak only Polish had not converted into my unconscious mind, which still operated in Yiddish, and I was in grave danger of discovery even in my sleep."

I actually briefly met the author of Kiss Every Step a year or two back at a Barnes and Noble book signing where I picked up my copy. This book was surprisingly better than I thought it would be - I didn't have terribly high expectations as it's a self-published book. Though there are some scattered typos throughout, it's well-written and well-organized as a whole.

All in all, this is a good example of a compiled family history, and its unflinching and detailed accounts from Martin and some of her family members make it worthy of being more well-known and widely-read.

Related Reads:
The Hiding Place (ten Boom)

The Sentinel [Short Stories] - Arthur C. Clarke (1983)
"But Captain Saunders, like all spacemen, was fundamentally a romantic. Even on a milk run like this he would sometimes dream of the ringed glory of Saturn or the somber Neptunian wastes, lit by the distant fires of the shrunken sun."

I'd started this book a few times in the past, but had never got past the first few stories. The stories included here (10 of them, if you include Clarke's introduction/biography) span Clarke's career, from the 40's to the 70's, and all include brief blurbs by author that I found helpful.

I haven't read any of Clarke's novels yet, so it'd be interesting to compare the short stories I've read so far with his other works. While I didn't love all the stories included in this volume (and I probably would've preferred to read his stories in a larger anthology with a greater mix of authors and types), I still found it interesting to read through the collection. I'd call this a good choice for anyone who's a fan of Clarke's, and/or anyone who's interested in how Science Fiction morphed through the 40's to the 80's.

Related Reads:
The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories

January 2018 Reads part 1

New year, new books! I'm still using Goodreads, but I'm planning on posting my thoughts here as well for the time being. And I have a large stack of to-be-read books that has built up over time at home that I'm going to try to be working through throughout the next few months, so some of this month's choices will reflect that.

A Darker Shade of Magic - Schwab (2015)
"That was the thing about magic. It was everywhere. In everything. In everyone. And while it coursed like a low and steady pulse, through the air and the earth, it beat louder in the bodies of living things. And if Kell tried - if he reached - he could feel it. It was a sense, not as strong as sight or sound or smell, but there all the same, its presence now drifting toward him from the shadows across the street."

First, the good: At its best, A Darker Shade of Magic is a stripped-down fantasy that warrants comparison to some Neal Gaiman novels (high praise indeed!). It drew me in immediately, and I felt the world-building and explanations made sense without overburdening the reader with lots of explanation and exposition. I loved the concept of the different Londons, the magical items described, and the colorful scenes and characters dotted throughout.

However, I had some issues with the book. There was something of a YA feel to it that kept cropping up in tone and in the way the characters were portrayed (a little too heavy on the descriptors for character appearance, for one). There was a dark feeling to the blood-linked magic in the book, which I didn't necessarily dislike, but I didn't care for the (sometimes seemingly purposeless) cruelty of the various antagonists in the book. And I liked the tie-ins with the real world (the mad King George III, for instance) but felt a little cheated out of reading more of that. In the end, I was left with the feeling of wanting to like this book a little more than I did.

Overall, the book is clever rather than surprising or brilliant, and it's a generally solid pick for those who like darker-toned, realism-tinged fantasy, and I'm planning on reading at least the next book in the trilogy.

Related Reads:
Neverwhere (Gaiman)
A Court of Thorns and Roses (Maas)
Howl's Moving Castle (Jones)

More Soviet Science Fiction - forward by Isaac Asimov (1952)
"But we could put it this way, too: man's conquest of space, his knowledge of the Universe, clashed with the primitive thinking of the individualistic property-owner. The future and the very life of humanity hung in the balance for years before progress triumphed and mankind joined into one family in a classless society. Before that happened people in the capitalistic half of the world refused for a long time to see any new paths into the future and regarded their mode of life as eternal and unchanging, with war and self-destruction as man's inevitable lot."

I picked up this random little book from my late cousin's large SciFi collection over a year ago. There are five rather long short stories included here, as well as an enlightening forward by Isaac Asimov. I found the included stories a little on the dull side generally, but still intriguing as a whole due to the specific Soviet worldview and school of thought displayed throughout.

For me, the thought of what else was going on in the USSR during the time that these stories were written (the Gulag labor camps, for instance) was particularly striking and sobering. Read this to round out your knowledge of both earlier Science Fiction and 20th century Russian history and political thought.

Related Reads:
The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn)

Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance - Ruth Emmie Lang (2017)
"Two weeks later, I wore a coat for the first time that year. Fall had made its presence known in the form of wet, earthy smells and shivering tree limbs shedding leaves in various shades of exotic cat. I walked to school that morning, listening to the crisp sounds that punctuated each one of my footfalls and the honks of geese flying overhead. I found it strange that there could be so much beauty in the death of all these living things. Maybe it was only beautiful because we knew they would be resurrected next spring."

I didn't actually care too much for this book, which was somewhat of a surprise and disappointment to me. I can't say I really disliked it, nor do my lukewarm feelings stem from the format of the different voices throughout the chapters (I actually thought the format was fitting and found that I related especially to one or two of the particular storytellers). I think I just was expecting something a bit different than what the story ended up actually being - maybe I was looking a little too hard for mystery and magic and missing general overall themes (misfits, choices, family, fate). But I wasn't in love with the writing style or tone, either. I'm left with feeling like this is a more average book than I was expecting, but a bit of a loss explaining exactly why. Maybe that's as good of an overview-thought as any.

Related Reads:
Maniac Magee (Spinelli)

(Continued in Part 2)