August 2018 Reads, Part 2

(continued from Part 1)

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
From: Local Library
"We hadn't been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders."

It's a little hard to share even quick thoughts about this book without spoilers, but I'll give it a shot. Never Let Me Go is unexpected - the writing style and content is both calming and shocking. At its heart, it's a thought experiment that should feel more dystopian than it does.

I still feel like Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is the strongest of the three of his that I've read so far (The Buried Giant being the third), but this novel is entrancing, thought provoking, melancholy, and uncomfortably relevant.

Related Reads:
The Giver (Lowry)
Kafka on the Shore (Murakami)

Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris (2000)
From: Local Library bookstore
"I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?"

This collection of autobiographical essays is full of the author's irreverent and self-deprecating sense of humor. The title refers to an overarching theme, drawing from the author's struggles of growing up gay in the '60s (when he was forced into ineffective speech therapy for his lisp) and his adulthood move to France (where he struggled with the language).

On the whole, the collection was a bit hit-and-miss for me; some essays I found genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, while others just kind of missed the mark for me. I recall liking the author's one other book that I've read (his 2013 Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls) somewhat better, although since it's been a few years since I've read that one, I couldn't parse out exactly why (I think it perhaps came across as a bit more mature).

Related Reads:
Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls (Sedaris)
Shockaholic (Fisher)

Stone Mattress [Short Stories] - Margaret Atwood (2014)
From: Local Library
"But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be."

This collection of stories is - contrary to my half-formed expectations - very light on the fantasy and science fiction, and almost exclusively (save for one notable exception) centered on stories involving old people, with a heavy dose on thought-experiment. So I appreciated the different perspective, and I think it's well-written, but I didn't necessarily click with it as a whole. But I think Atwood fans will find it worth checking out.

Related Reads:
The Robber Bride (Atwood)

Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain (2000)
From: Local Library (Hold list)
"I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once."

Anthony Bourdain's biography is mixed together here with his general thoughts and experiences on life in the culinary world. It feels kind of slapdash, but that's Bourdain's style, and it's certainly interesting. He gets into the good, the bad, and the ugly of working in a kitchen and the restaurant industry - it follows that there's a fair amount of vulgar language (a chapter is practically dedicated to the art of cursing/insults in a kitchen) and crude references.

Overall, this gives some good insight into Bourdain's life, personality, and drive. Read it if you work in a kitchen, or have any interest in the lives of people who do.

Related Reads:
The Apprentice (Pepin)
Down and Out in Paris and London (Orwell)
Fresh Off the Boat (Huang)

August 2018 Reads, Part 1

I read mostly books from the library over this past month. I'm thinking I may need to ban myself from the library for a while again as I still have a decent little to-read pile of books at home that I want to get through. It's hard when there's so much that the library has to offer!

This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920)
From: Christmas gift in 2017
"Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willows. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered campus at all hours through starlight and rain."

This semi-autobiographical work is a portrait of its time as much as it is of the author. Despite its tendency towards unevenness in tone and style, I liked it better than I remember liking The Great Gatsby. I found the characters generally somewhat irritating (partially by design), but the overall book is both enlightening as to its time and unexpectedly modern.

The edition I read (Barnes & Noble) has a lengthy critical essay as the introduction, which is helpful for deconstructing the novel.

Related Reads
On the Road (Kerouac)
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)

The Overneath [Short Stories]- Peter S. Beagle (2017)
From: Local Library
"The power itself was never in question; but there comes a moment when a responsible wizard has to consider the danger of having such wild, uncontrollable power loose in the world in the hands of a young man with family problems."

This short-story collection is mostly fantasy-tinged, though setting varies a lot. Within the baker's dozen of stories are several (of varying tones) featuring unicorns, and there are a couple that are The Last Unicorn-related. A few stories that veer a bit into the horror category - not generally something I prefer, but oddly, one of my favorites was the Poe-esque "Great-Grandmother in the Cellar". And to round it out, a couple of stories (including the titular one) dip into science fiction territory.

I generally liked this mix, although I can't say I loved it. At the very least, I appreciated that the stories presented are such a mixed bag. And I was somewhat pleasantly surprised that Beagle is still writing (given that The Last Unicorn was published in the 1960s).

For a slightly spoilerish review that goes more in-depth into many (though not all) of the stories included, see this post from Barnes & Noble.

Related Reads:
Fragile Things (Gaiman)
The Line Between [Short Stories] (Beagle)

Gorilla and the Bird - Zack McDermott (2017)
From: Local Library
"People say that excessive drinking is often used as an escape from reality. In my case, I felt erased, so why not erase myself? It was easier to chip away at what was left of me than to try to recover the self I'd lost."

This book grabs you and pulls you into the author's world almost before you can catch a breath. In very readable language, McDermott describes everything in his life - including his psychotic breakdowns - with candor and humor. Interlaced throughout his story of Bipolar disorder and struggle with addiction is his mother's unwavering support, his family background (in poor/rural Kentucky), his sometimes soul-crushing work as a court-appointed public defender, and his hobby of stand-up comedy.

Although I quickly got caught up in the story, at times I struggled with McDermott's storytelling and comedic style - the line between exploiting/making fun of others, himself included, and portraying a humorously-realistic picture seems a little thin at times. There's also a fair amount of language and crude sexual references as part of the mix.

Oftentimes, books like this are written by a family member who had a front-row observation seat. I really applaud McDermott's willingness and ability to tell his story and talk about his struggles in his own words.

Related Reads
Ben Behind His Voices (Kaye)
Everything is Horrible and Wonderful (Wachs)

Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik (2018)
From: Local Library
"The only thing that had ever done me any good in my father's house was thinking: no one had cared what I wanted, or whether I was happy. I'd had to find my own way to anything I wanted. I'd never been grateful for that before now, when what I wanted was my life."

This hit a lot of sweet spots for me as a fantasy book. It's long enough to be sufficiently world- and character-building, but not too long. It switches first-person viewpoints between several characters; this isn't always my favorite, but I felt it really worked here. There are strong Russian and Jewish influences in the story's world, which I thought that made the book more interesting and realistic (tempering the overall fantasy element with reality). And it manages to have serious and dark elements without feeling overly heavy.

There are caveats, to be sure. Yes, it shares more than a few similarities with some other recent popular fantasy books. Yes, a few plot points are a bit weak upon closer inspection. But as an overall opinion, I enjoyed Novik's other fairy-tale-esque fantasy book, Uprooted, and I'd say that this one was even better.

Related Reads
The Bear and the Nightingale (Arden)
A Court of Thorns and Roses (Maas)
Ella Enchanted (Levine)
Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice - Christoper Hitchens (1995)
From: Local Library
"Saints, it seems, are immune to audit."

So, first off, I should establish that I think that it's important to look critically at revered figures. I don't think it's inherently "mean" to dig into issues related to religion. And I knew that I was going to come into this short book with a background quite different than the author's.

My main issue with this book, then, wasn't that Mother Teresa was being critiqued, or that the author is an avowed atheist. My main issue was that I found it disappointingly detrimental that the author was coming at the subject from an angle that seemed so biased due to his use of leading and deliberately provocative language. I don't disagree that Mother Teresa and her order had some issues that should be brought to light and further explored, and I think the book does provide some interesting food for thought. But I do think the overall explorations here would've been much better served though a style that seemed less like a personal attack and more like detached reporting.

As a side note, some of the examples given seemed to be more due to the author's misunderstanding of Christianity/Catholicism rather than an actual crime or failing of Mother Teresa's. For instance, Hitchens uses the example of Mother Teresa talking about her personal relationship with Jesus as being a sign of grandiosity and lack of humility. However, most Christians would take this the opposite way - that someone expressing that Jesus was working through them would be a sign of humility that the person was not taking credit for their actions.

(Continued in Part 2)

July 2018 Reads

I ended up with a varied little mix of summer reads this past month. Onward to my quick thoughts!

The Girl with Seven Names - Hyeonseo Lee (2015)
From: Local Library (Hold List, waited 4+ months)
"I was already hiding beneath so many lies that I hardly knew who I was any more. I was becoming a non-person."

This is the story of a young woman who escaped from North Korea, but it's not a gritty and horrifying read along the lines of Escape from Camp 14 or The Aquariums of Pyongyang where the atrocities of the NK gulags are exposed. Rather, it's a story of a more "ordinary" life. Hyeonseo didn't flee across treacherous deserts at the mercy of traffickers (like many others that she meets later on did); she "merely" illegally crossed the river that borders China on a teenage adventure to visit a family friend, only to realize too late that her decision was irreversible. The Girl With Seven Names exposes not only the lengths that many North Korean citizens go through to escape, but the difficulties that they face once outside. It's an interesting and important read, and a good pick for anyone unfamiliar with the subject.

Related Reads:
In Order to Live (Park)
Nothing to Envy (Demick)

Fire and Fury - David Wolff (2017)
From: Local Library (Hold List, waited 6+ months)
"This was the peculiar and haunting consensus - not that Trump was guilty of all that he was accused of, but that he was guilty of so much else. It was all too possible that the hardly plausible would lead to the totally credible."

I'll be honest and admit that I had a hard time finishing this. Part of the issue is that the book, though published within the last year, is already fairly dated. There are also a lot of names thrown about, and while most who pay attention to the news will have at least passing familiarity with many of the political figures, it's hard for someone like me (who tends to need to pair faces with names) to keep track of all the players mentioned.

That all said, it's almost gossip-column-esque, weirdly quotable, and an interestingly terrible read - taken with several grains of salt.

Related Reads:
Nothing is True and Everything is Possible (Pomerantev)

Magic Kingdom For Sale - Terry Brooks (1986)
From: Bought at local library book store in early April
"Visions born of fear give birth to our failing. Visions born of hope give birth to our success."

This is the first Terry Brooks book I've read, so I went in not really knowing what to expect. I think I was assuming something a little more along the lines of Terry Pratchett - that is, a story that didn't take itself very seriously. And there is a little bit of that aspect here. But at other points (and again, this may just be the unfortunate result of me having recently read a good amount of Discworld novels), it seemed to be trying a little too hard. I also had a problem taking the title of High Lord seriously because of playing Ni no Kuni (wherein a comical character repeatedly proclaims himself to be the "Lord High Lord of the Fairies").

My weird quibbles aside, though, I rather enjoyed the read (notwithstanding that it was a bit slow and uneven), and I think it was a pretty good introduction novel to the author. I was left with the overall sense that it read like a book that just happened to have fantasy elements, not like a fantasy book per se [perhaps this is a) somewhat due to the decade it was written, and/or b) very intentional given the main character's background and arc, but I'm interested in seeing if I get the same impression with other Brooks novels].

Related Reads
The Merlin Conspiracy (Jones)
Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore (Sloan)

Coming Clean - Kimberly Rae Miller (2013)
From: Local Library
"Before there was ever a word for hoarding, I knew that whatever driving force drew my father to garbage was beyond his control. I never felt like he loved stuff more than he loved me. He loved stuff. And he loved me."

This is squarely in the memoir rather than the self-help genre, but it still is a potentially-enlightening read for those who haven't experienced living in a hoarding situation first-hand, and a possibly-cathartic read for those who have.

I appreciated Miller's honesty throughout the book, and it's obvious that the book was somewhat of a therapeutic exercise for her - experiencing PTSD as an adult became a catalyst for her starting to finally deal with her childhood, and she doesn't shy away from the ways that she enabled her parents as an adult. I did notice a section or two that seemed repetitive and/or out of place, and I was slightly annoyed by the author's focus on how smart she was as a child. Overall, though, it's a helpful read for people who have experienced similar situations or have loved ones who have.

Related Reads:
Dirty Secret (Sholl)
The Secret Lives of Hoarders (Paxton)

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex - Nathaniel Philbrick (2000)
From: Local Library
"Backlit by the red glow of a dying island, the twenty men of the Essex ventured into the farthest reaches of the Pacific, looking for another whale to kill."

This book is a new favorite of mine; the events surrounding the sinking of the Essex in 1819 inspired Melville's book Moby-Dick. It should come as no surprise that In the Heart of the Sea is fascinating and full of history. Philbrick makes good use of the historical material and accounts available, bolstered by his drawing from similar accounts and situations throughout. He also explores the history of Nantucket and as delves into cultural backgrounds and psychological explorations for the various figures. One particular thread of note throughout is the havoc that 19th-century sailors played on the biodiversity of the sea and the islands that they visited.

Read this if you're at all a history buff and intrigued by adventure/survival stories. It made me want to read and learn more (perhaps yet more accounts have been uncovered since this book's publication?), and my only wish was that the book was longer.

Content note: the book does include descriptions of cannibalism, butchering animals, and the effects of extreme hunger and dehydration on people.

Related Reads:
Moby-Dick (Melville)
Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean (Logan)
Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder, and Piracy (published by Hurst & Co; free on Kindle)

June 2018 Reads

Summer's in full swing - we'll see what that does to my reading habits! This year, I've been trying to focus on getting through books that have been in my to-read pile for far too long. I decided that I'm going to include where I obtained each book from in my reviews through the summer just for funsies.

Wonder - R. J. Palacio (2012)
From: Local Library (Hold List)
"I wish every day could be Halloween. We could all wear masks all the time. Then we could walk around and get to know each other before we got to see what we looked like under the masks."

This is a Y.A.book, so my thoughts on it will be colored by that. I liked the different first-person perspectives given throughout the book - I felt this made the book more compelling than it would've been to just focus on one character. My general overall thought is that Wonder a powerful and illuminating book for kids, especially, who are still grappling with many of the life difficulties portrayed. And (given the Y.A. nature of the book) although it deals with some difficult subjects, the story is positive overall.

Related Reads:
The Sun is Also a Star (Yoon)

We Were Eight Years in Power - Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)
From: Local Library (Hold List)
"In such revisions of history lay the roots of the noble Lost Cause - the belief that the South didn’t lose, so much as it was simply overwhelmed by superior numbers; that General Robert E. Lee was a contemporary King Arthur; that slavery, to be sure a benevolent institution, was never central to the South’s true designs. Historical lies aside, the Lost Cause presented to the North an attractive compromise. Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the country’s blacks. 
That interpretation served the North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North’s long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the Constitution itself."

I had a hard time picking out just one quote from this book. This is a collection of essays written by the author during the years of the Obama presidency (previously published by The Atlantic). Coates gives an introduction to each of his eight essays, putting them into the context of the time he wrote them and evaluating how he thinks they held up, and concludes with a final essay. In a nutshell, this collection gives some necessary historical context to many past and present issues, and it's definitely recommended reading.

Related Reads:
Between the World and Me (Coates)

Commonwealth - Ann Patchett (2016)
From: One of the Little Free Libraries in La Jolla a few months ago
"'There’s no protecting anyone,' Fix said, and reached over from his wheelchair to put his hand on hers. 'Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.'"

This isn't the sort of book I usually tend to read, and it probably would rate higher in my mind if I read more of this genre. The story deals with a lot of serious and common issues, such as divorce, infidelity, death, and grief. Some of it also takes place in the area I grew up in, which was a nice little surprise.

On the whole, although I generally liked the read, Commonwealth left me feeling like something was wanting by the end, and I'm not sure if it's because it was good and I was left wanting more, or if it was more because it just wasn't fleshed out enough. I also had a little bit of trouble keeping all the characters in the families straight, but I'm inclined to chalk that up to a personal failing rather than a problem with the book itself.

Related Reads:
The Husband's Secret (Moriarty)
The Little Friend (Tartt)

A Clergyman's Daughter - George Orwell (1935)
From: Bought at D.G. Wills Bookstore in La Jolla last year
"Dorothy pulled a frond of the fennel against her face and breathed in the strong sweet scent. Its richness overwhelmed her, almost dizzied her for a moment. She drank it in, filling her lungs with it. Lovely, lovely scent - scent of summer days, scent of childhood joys, scent of spice-drenched islands in the warm foam of oriental seas!
Her heart swelled with sudden joy. It was that mystical joy in the beauty of the earth and the very nature of things that she recognized, perhaps mistakenly, as the love of God."

If you've read other books by Orwell, you can see this as a continuation of him drawing from his personal experiences of "living rough" on the streets in London and the surrounding countryside. This book a fascinating, bleakly realistic window into the time period and setting, and Orwell takes the opportunity to probe into several contemporary social issues (schooling, religious community, women's place in society).

Quick content notes: The main character engages in self-harm throughout the book as a form of religious penance. And although most curse words are censored out with a dash (as was common for literature at the time), there are a couple of racial pejoratives that are freely used - in one case, as a nickname for a character.

Related Reads:
Down and Out in Paris and London (Orwell)
A Little Princess (Burnett)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Hardy)

Wild Beauty - Anna-Marie McLemore (2017)
From: When I trialed a month of OwlCrate in October 2017
"These memories took root, turning into rows of uncountable trees. They became the orchard Fel had once run through. They bloomed into almond and cherry blossoms, fluffy as the cotton candy Estrella had set in his palms. They splintered into the thin leaves of olive trees."

I have to describe the prose here as flowery - very flowery. I didn't necessarily dislike the style, but it felt like a lot of the same after a short while, and the story itself is fairly slow-moving. At times, it seemed like a lot of flowery language covering up little substance. But anyone who has a love of flora will certainly appreciate the sensory experience of the descriptions here.

Some positives of Wild Beauty are its relative uniqueness (compared to my usual reads) of having the majority of main characters being LGBT+ and the book focusing heavily on Latinx characters and culture. I also enjoyed the fairytale-esque setting, although I was somewhat annoyed that I couldn't place what the time period was supposed to be.

Related Reads:
A Court of Thorns and Roses (Maas)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez)

May 2018 Reads

I'm finally getting around to posting this halfway through the month rather than at the beginning, but better late than never!

I didn't end up reading a whole lot in June due to lots of stuff going on (including some travel). And according to Goodreads, I only read two books in May because Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat were paired in a Kindle collection that I found for 99 cents. Ah well.

Soul Music - Terry Pratchett
"It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive."

This was another Discworld novel in the Death story line (the one I've been focusing on of late). It was a little random and jumping around a bit much for my tastes - there was something of a whiplash effect from switching between modern-cultural-references humor and surprisingly moving and deep scenes - but I generally enjoyed it. I appreciated the Welsh-inspired main character with the various little references (using ll's and w's in speech, his devotion to harp-playing, etc). All in all, Soul Music isn't necessarily the best Pratchett novel to start out with, but it's fairly solid.

Pat of Silver Bush - L.M. Montgomery 
"The only marked talent she had was for loving things very greatly, and that did not help you much with Greek verbs and dates."

This novel (by the same author as Anne of Green Gables, for the unfamiliar) follows the title character from about age six into her late teenage years. I found it an interesting window into daily life for the time period and place (1920's-ish Prince Edward Island). The main character's deep and abiding love for her home is forefront in her story, and this makes for a somewhat unique (for me) perspective in that all her ambitions are tied up in her family's house and land. Though it feels a bit incomplete without its successor, Pat of Silver Bush still manages to stand on its own, and should certainly be picked up by fans of any of L. M. Montgomery's other books.

Mistress Pat - L.M. Montgomery 
"At the top was the old gate, fallen into ruin, and beyond it the path through the spruce bush where silence seemed to kneel like a grey nun, and she felt that Bets must come to meet her, walking through the dusk with dreams in her eyes."

This continuation of Pat and Silver Bush follows the main character into her late twenties. I enjoyed particularly the continuing window into life back then - things like the unquestioned societal rules like single women continuing to live at home and the strained dynamics that come from of marrying into a family and moving in with them are portrayed here as I've not really come across elsewhere. And even though I have to say that I didn't particularly like some aspects of the main character (as well as certain plot points), there's a true charm here in the blend of the practical and romantic.

Side note: I did have some issues with a few things that were normalized due to the time period in which the book was written, namely (minor spoilers) the treatment of the servant Judy when she wants to travel (the family acting as if they can't get on without a servant taking care of them), as well as some fat-shaming that made me actually root for the antagonist (you wear that swimsuit and show off your thighs if you want to, May Binnie!).

April 2018 Reads

I didn't read a large number of books this past month, but what I did read was more fantasy-heavy.

The Lost World - Michael Crichton (1995)
"Looking at the fossil record is like thumbing through a family photo album. You know the album isn't complete. You know life happens between the pictures. But you don't have any record of what happens in between, you only have the pictures. So you study them, and study them. And pretty soon, you begin to think of the album not as a series of moments, but as reality itself. And you begin to explain everything in terms of the album, and you forget the underlying reality."

I didn't like this book as much as its predecessor (Jurassic Park), but it was still very readable. It didn't feel as polished, but it still contained a good blend of action and discussion of science. Some of the personal dislikes issues that I had with the previous book (namely violence, i.e. fairly graphic descriptions of people being eaten by dinosaurs) still apply.

Related Reads:
Jurassic Park (Crichton)

Coming Up for Air - George Orwell (1939)
"I looked at the great sea of roofs stretching on and on. Miles and miles of streets, fried-fish shops, tin chapels, picture houses, little printing shops up back alleys, factories, blocks of flats, whelk stalls, dairies, power stations - on and on and on. Enormous! And the peacefulness of it! Like a great wilderness with no wild beasts ...
But how about five years from now? Or two years? Or one year?"

This is one of Orwell's lesser-known books, but if you're a fan of his works in general, it's certainly worth picking up. Though fictional, its setting gives us a slice of history and opinion into a period - immediately-preceding-WWII Britain - that one doesn't often think about. It's nostalgic, pessimistic, dryly funny at times, and strangely sad.

Related Reads:
Boy (Dahl)
Babbitt (Lewis)

The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro (2015)
"After a while Axl could no longer remember how talk of this journey had started, or what it had ever meant to them."

The tone of this book is meandering and dreamlike. It's strangely hard to place in terms of genre, too, though the setting is an interpretation of an immediately post-Arthurian Britain. At its core, it's a sort of fantasy, but it has echos of science fiction/dystopian. There are some changes of perspective throughout, which I felt added some interest.

Overall note: this book is really not going to be for everyone. Even though I personally appreciated it, I'll still admit that it's slow-paced, repetitive, and even largely unsatisfying. All that said, I still found that I could immerse myself in it, and I appreciated the out-of-the-norm interpretation.

Related Reads:
The Once and Future King (White)
Le Morte d'Arthur (Malory)
The Name of the Rose (Eco)
Riddley Walker (Hoban)

Mort - Terry Pratchett (1987)
"History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time."

Mort is one of Terry Pratchett's earlier Discworld novels. I really liked it - it's about on the same level as Equal Rites, which is another early Discworld favorite of mine. It's fairly straightforward story line full of a healthy blend of humor and seriousness (especially considering the subject matter). If you haven't read any Discworld novels yet, this isn't a bad place to start.

Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett (1991)
"People get exactly the wrong idea about belief. They think it works back to front. They think the sequence is, first object, then belief. In fact, it works the other way."

This is the second book in the "Death" storyline of Discworld novels, so it's the sequel of Mort in a way. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as its predecessor; it's a little odd and rambling at times (arguably a Pratchett trademark, but I digress). Still, it's likable overall, with the same balance of serious/humorous tone.

March 2018 Reads Part 2

(Continued from Part 1)

On the Road: The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac (2008; first ed. 1957)
"At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, are as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will. So they slowly wheeled the night and then long before ordinary dawn the great red sun appeared far over entire territorial areas of dun land towards West Kansas and the birds sang above Denver."

This book - the first draft of the edited-down, originally published version (which, by the way, I haven't read) - is full of a rollicking, occasionally-breathtaking type of prose. Keroauc's descriptions and portraits are often crude and unflattering (including those referencing himself), but his story of his ramblings across the U.S. is still somehow engrossing and infectious. I can't hate it even though sometimes I was thinking that I probably should. Side note: It's apparently great being a white male in 1950's America.

This edition also includes four introductory essays, which seemed a little excessive to me. At the very least, they're better read after reading the book itself (or at least after having read the original version).

Related Reads:
Travels with Charley (Steinbeck)
Walden on Wheels (Ilgunas)

When Helping Hurts, 2nd edition - Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert (2012; 1st ed. 2009)
"One of the biggest problems in many poverty-alleviation efforts is that their design and implementation exacerbates the poverty of being of the economically rich - their god-complexes - and the poverty of being of the economically poor - their feelings of inferiority and shame."

I picked this up because I was semi-interested in a local book study group (which I never ended up attending). When Helping Hurts is really written for church groups and ministry leaders, and thus I didn't find it terribly applicable as just an individual.  But it does have some good advice and food for thought - actually listening to the people you're trying to help, for instance (go figure). There are also lots of thought-and-action-provoking questions at the end of each chapter. And I appreciated how the authors take on the uncomfortable tasks of addressing things like problematic short-term missions trips and how systemic racism affects churches, and they ask readers to really examine and confront their own motivations and assumptions.

Are there better books out there for the casual reader? Certainly. But I do think that this book is a necessary one for its audience intended audience: conservative churches who are trying to do what's right. Side note: I took some issue with the authors' insistence that organizations and programs must be spiritual (read: Evangelical Christian) in order to effectively help people, but views along these lines shouldn't be a surprise to anyone reading this.

Related Reads
Toxic Charity (Lupton)
Just Mercy (Stevenson)

The Art of Asking - Amanda Palmer (2014)
"It’s really easy to love passing strangers unconditionally. They demand nothing of you. It is really hard to love people unconditionally when they can hurt you."

Full disclosure: I knew very little about Amanda Palmer going into this book aside from what I'd read written about her by her husband Neil Gaiman. This book is part self-help, part memoir (Palmer doesn't really touch on her childhood and adolescence, but does discuss quite a bit of her life and pursuits from college and onward). Palmer's relating of her experiences and life-lessons results in a heady blend of messy, real, fascinating, and instructive thoughts. It's different, it's quotable, and it made me think about things in ways that I normally wouldn't. I've had a hard time coming up with more of a description for this book, so I'm just going end by blanket recommending it.

Related Reads:
Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life (Lamott)

Stories of Your Life and Others [Short Stories] - Ted Chiang (2002)
"What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?"

To me, this collection of Science Fiction stories both stands out as well as integrates with the variety of other collections I've read within this genre. Chiang's style is more thought-based than necessarily story-focused, and he tends to heavily incorporate explorations of various subjects, including philosophy, religion, language, architecture, and physics. Overall, I really enjoyed the variety of tone and subjects here, though overall there's a sense of vague melancholy that pervades. Anyone who's even remotely a fan of the genre should pick this up, and those unfamiliar with scifi should give this a try.

Related Reads:
The Line Between [Short Stories] (Beagle)
Smoke and Mirrors ["Murder Mysteries"] (Gaiman)
The Golem and the Jinni (Wecker)

The Merlin Conspiracy - Diana Wynne Jones (2003)
"'...They can't both be real.'
'Why not?' he more or less snapped. 'You have a very limited notion of what's real, don't you?'"

This is technically a sequel to Jones' book Deep Secret, which was a favorite of mine from last year. It's not strictly necessary to read Deep Secret first (my husband picked up the book and enjoyed it without any prior context), though it is helpful to have a smattering of knowledge about Arthurian legends. Like the preceding novel, The Merlin Conspiracy switches between perspectives, although here it's all in first-person point of view.

This book seems a little more solidly in the YA category than its predecessor, possibly because most of the protagonists here are younger than those in the preceding book. Perhaps because of this, it didn't seem quite as polished. The book has its imperfections, to be sure. And the end leaves the reader wanting more. But on the whole, it's a nice adventure book of the type of reality/magic mishmash that I'm particularly fond of.

Related Reads:
The Sword and the Circle (Sutcliff)
The Black Cauldron (Alexander)
Equal Rites (Pratchett)

Raising Demons - Shirley Jackson (1957)
"Naturally a husband presents enormous irritations no matter what he is doing, and I think it is unreasonable to regard a teaching husband as necessarily more faulty than, say, a plumbing husband, but there is no question but what the ego of a teaching husband is going to be more vividly developed, particularly if if teaches in a girls' college."

To be completely honest, I had a hard time with this book and almost gave up after the first chapter - turns out it's not a great idea to start reading a dryly humorous book about a woman complaining about how her children have too much stuff right after you read memoirs about surviving the Khmer Rouge and having children with drug addictions. But I picked the book up again after a cooling off period, and I'm glad I stuck it out in the end.

I went in expecting something perhaps a little darker, given the title and Jackson's fiction. But this really is simply an autobiography that's a slice of her life with her husband and four children in 1940's America. It's certainly more readable than Ernestine Carey's Rings Around Us (written in almost the same year), and you can feel Jackson's struggles with embracing her role as housewife and chafing against the restrictiveness of it. I probably should've read the predecessor (Life Among the Savages) first for context, and I wouldn't say this book is a necessary read for Shirley Jackson fans, but it's palatable.

Related Reads:
My Family and Other Animals (Durrell)

Everything is Horrible and Wonderful - Stephanie Wittels Wachs (2018)
"No one could've saved you. Not a girl. Not a sponsor. Not a mother or a father. Not a sister.
No one."

This memoir was written by comedian/producer Harris Wittels' older sister and only sibling, Stephanie. Harris died of a heroin overdose in 2015 at age 30, and his death - coming just months after he proclaimed his sobriety publicly - shattered his family and stunned fans.

This book, then, while a tribute to Harris, is also a window into grief as well as an unflinching look at the effects of serious drug addiction on a family.  As Stephanie writes, she switches between the past - the years and months leading up to her brother's death - and the present, where she and her family process their grief and move forward in varying ways. Everything is Horrible and Wonderful feels like part journal,  part letter to Harris; Stephanie often writes as if addressing her brother ("What happened between clicking send and sticking a needle in your arm?"), and her raw emotions of grief and anger - both at her brother's addiction and his senseless death - are palpable. But so, too, are the good memories and anecdotes that she shares about her family and Harris' accomplishments.

There's a common thread to addiction that makes all affected families share the same basic story despite sometimes wildly different circumstances. The Wittels' childhood was permissive as mine was strict, and I wasn't coming into this book as a particular fan of Harris' work. But the common thread of the addiction of a sibling meant I could deeply relate to all the things that Stephanie shares that go hand-in-hand with addiction - the secrets, the anxiety, the lies, the grief, the anger, the judgement from others. In summation, anyone who's dealt with the grief that comes from the addiction or the death of a family member will find this memoir entirely relatable, and any fans of Harris will find it true-to-life: an honest, messy, and loving tribute.

Related Reads:
It's Okay to Laugh (Crying is Cool, Too) (Purmort)