I can't decide if this was supposed to be a love story or not.  It involves an obsessive stalker with a penchant for young teen girls that was hard for me to reconcile with its portrayal as affection and love.  Of course, in typical Garcia Marquez style, the prose is superb and the interwoven story line well plotted.  Set in the decades before and after 1900, it is a heartbreaking tale of misplaced and unrequited affection from a very masculine, unhealthy perspective .  Not recommended.

​This book, set circa 1800 in Japan, about a white Dutch man was not my favorite book of the year.  Written from a colonizer perspective, without reflection, it left me  frustrated at the loss of opportunity to provide a richer narrative.  His obsession with a Japanese woman being mistreated by men in her own culture provides an easy backdrop to trash misogynism in Japan with no insight into Dutch colonial treatment of women or communities they attempted to or did colonize. All of this in the context of a protagonist it appears we are supposed to feel sorry for because of his heroism, commitment to truth, and so on.  There is a lot of clever interpretation errors and confusion over various English words, which is both funny and demeaning at the same time since it not once pokes fun at westerns trying to speak Japanese, but focuses on how Japanese characters misuse Dutch/English words--I found this very confusing since the book was written in English, so the miscommunications make sense in English, but since they are supposedly speaking Dutch in the book, I was constantly wondering if the English/Dutch words were similar enough that the Japanese/Dutch confusion translated into English.  This was really distracting.  I say skip it. 

This is another heavy read. It is about the treatment of women in the late 1800's, in the context of the spiritualist movement. There are interesting subplots involving herbal medicine and mental illness.  There is quite a bit of violence, including some torture and sexualized violence.   The story itself is quite readable, but the plot is better than the writing, especially when it gets bogged down in the detailed brutality.  Ultimately, I found the subplot focused on that to be too much and a distraction from the rest of the novel, which I thought held together really well and really drew me in.  The violent plot twist ties together parts of the story , a popular literary technique, but just seemed like an unnecessary distraction from the character and story line development that I was really enjoying up to that point.  Because of this, I can't really recommend it.

This is a fun, light read that is basically an introduction to Buddist thought in the context of the author's love of his favorite movie, The Princess Bride.  It is one of these books that feels like they started out as someone's thesis or dissertation and then was creative and interesting enough to disseminate more widely, but unlike many of those, this actually works as a full-length book.

The book is divided into three parts: friendship, romantic, and family.  Somewhere in the romantic love section,  got bored and distracted, but it picked up again mid-way through the section on family.  But for whatever reason, I loved the section on friendship; it really resonated with me and was exactly what I needed after more than two months of social distancing and voluntary quarantine.  It reminded me of a lot of things and put some other things in perspective.  At the same time, I didn't find it to be trite or preachy. 

It is hard to recommend a book that I really only liked half of, but I am going to make an exception in this case because the lull in the middle was probably more about my pandemic-impacted attention span and not the book itself.

Recommended.

I have heard a lot about this book, seen it referenced many places, and the term "white fragility" has certainly made its way into common lexicon among the academic folks I interact with, read, and follow.  I am going to start by saying reviewing this book is hard in the way that talking about race in general is hard.  First of all, it's a trap. How do you critique a book that has an entire section dedicated to talking about how white people who say that they are tired of racism 101 and would like something more nuanced and advanced are the problem?  Not just a problem, but actually more of a problem than the white supremacists. You basically just can't complain because, as described in the book, saying that I would like to level up the discussion is defined as the worst kind of racism.  In fact, complaining that I don't want to sit through or read the same material about racism and privilege makes me THAT kind of liberal white person who can't admit they are part of a system of white supremacy. 

But I disagree.  I am, it seems, constantly saying that I don't want to attend another course/book/workshop because I have already been to so many of them and it has been a very long time since I have found one to be useful or enlightening.  I can readily admit that I fall into the category of white liberals who are tired.  I am definitely not as tired of reading/listening to/participating in things about racism as POC are of experiencing racism, but I have read so much on this topic, have been going to workshops on [fill in the trending topic, be it diversity, cultural competency, privilege, anti-oppression, anti-racism, inclusion, difference, power and control, the list goes on] since at least 1995. Some years I probably read or went to a dozen things and there probably hasn't been a year that I did less than two or three.  I perceive myself, rightly or wrongly, as deeply committed to racial justice and to undoing systems of oppression and racism.  I understand, at least as much as one can learn from books, lectures, workshops, classes, and navigating the legal system with people of color as clients, how my own privilege benefits me. 

So, at the risk of sounding like I am just part of the problem, I will say that I was disappointed that this book did not bring more to the conversation.  Certainly, if you are relatively new to the topic or if you have resisted thinking about race, then this book, written by a white woman, will absolutely provide you with an solid introduction to things like white women's tears, why the blues lives matters counter protest is racist, implicit bias, and why saying that you don't need to read a book about racism because you aren't racist is a sign that you are likely racist.  But if you have done any serious amount of reflection on your personal contribution to racist systems, then this book is more of a good summary and survey of the greatest hits of things you should have learned by now.

I don't mean to be overly harsh, but it also just wasn't very well written.  I didn't find her anecdotes engaging, but rather condescending.  Even her examples about how white people can do better in classrooms and with colleagues felt like she was just looking for accolades for how great an ally she has been.  There were no examples of how to interrupt racism in a business meeting with your boss, in court, or with anyone with any power over you, which, of course, is the hard stuff that we never seem to get to in any of these books, which are inevitably written by white people with a tremendous amount of power in the situations they are describing.  Obviously, examples of an outside "expert" brought in by management as a trainer to educate a room full of people about racism holding people accountable is vastly different than interrupting racism in real life scenarios.  Give me that book or training and I am there. Level me up already. I'm done with the intro.

And of course, there's that entire chapter about how this makes me the problem.  Maybe it does.  

P.S. Points also taken off for a book about oppression that doesn't talk about intersectionality -- no meaningful discussion of Queerness or disability at all.

Not recommended.

This is war story through and through.  The initial sci fi of the story and set-up of the universe is great and I was thinking it was going to offer something that it just never really delivered.  By the end, I wasn't even convinced that the universe made sense, particularly from a political perspective. I just couldn't get there from here.  It felt a bit like one of those movies you go to (ahem, Avatar) where the special effects are amazing, but once you get past that you realize that the story was lacking.  If you love war novels, this is probably worth reading.  Otherwise, skip it.

This is a really clever book.  It is a story, within a story, within a story.  The narrator shifts and could all to some extend be qualified as unreliable. The book is intellectually complicated and from that perspective I can see why it has been really popular.

[This next part of the review contains spoilers, but I can't talk about this book without addressing this issue and since I am not recommending it, I am going to go ahead and include it anyhow.]

But, at its core, it is a book about the sexual abuse of teenagers by a charismatic, award winning teacher--and other adult men--in a popular theater program. It is about how people who experience this type of abuse do not see it as being abuse and often protect the abuser.  It is about how other kids not directly involved with the abuse also do not see it as abuse, even when they know that it is occurring to some extent.  And yet all of this is done within such a complex narrative that it is never fully resolved.  Perhaps this is true to the lives of many survivors, who go through life never examining what happened to them, but I found it unsatisfying. I think the point was to describe this from the perspective of those who experienced abuse in this manner, but I felt like it perpetuates the myth that teen girls lure in and consent to sexual relationships with adult men, whether they are teachers or 20-somethings that they meet and become enamored with.  I was deeply troubled by the lack of resolution or even direct discussion about the harm this does, as well as casting the adult women who experienced this as unreliable, even to the point of presenting them as liars.  

Despite the truly impressive use of literary techniques that the author layers together here, I just can't recommend it.  I also suspect that many survivors of child sex abuse--and people who do not see themselves as survivors like two of the narrators in the book, but who nevertheless are--will find this read upsetting and triggering.  Not recommended.

This book has a lot more depth than the cover or the first few chapters would lead you to believe.Set in the summer of the moon landing, the Kennedy car crash, Woodstock, and so much more, there was so much going on in this book.  Tying in all the topics of the era like war protests, abortion, inter-racial relationships, antisemitism, communes, suicide, divorce, mental health, and the women's liberation movement meant that none of them were covered in depth and the story was stretched a bit thin to accommodate all of the hot issues and memorable events. Because there was just too many things going on, I didn't find the story held together as well as it could have. I guess the point was to show how many historic and monumental things were happening in the span of a few months, but with so many happening to just one family, it was too far a stretch for me.  Not recommended.

I'm not entirely sure it was a good idea to read this post-apocalypse story within 95% of the world is killed off by a flu in the first chapter during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, but I read the things recommended to me and so I did.  It is a relatively short read, with interesting things to say about religion, the arts, and relationships.  I typically love this genre, but this one didn't stand out as particularly fabulous.  In the midst of the current situation, it was mostly just depressing to think about the loss of electricity and communication.  It absolutely sucked me in, though, and I read through it really quickly since I just couldn't put it down for wanting to see what was going to happen.  I particularly liked the way it jumped between time periods before, during, and after the flu.  Well-writing.  Probably, the timing was just off for me.

This goes in the not not recommended category, which is apparently a favorite category for folks who read my reviews. 

For whatever reason, I ended up with three of these epic historical fiction, family novels in a row.  Having not loved the last two, I went into this a bit resistant and even tired of the genre.  The book starts a bit slow and there is a brutal sexual assault of a prisoner early on that sets the stage for a lot of the book to come.  Despite all of this, I was enthralled by this book.  It deals exceptionally well with the trauma from that assault and how it impacts not only one woman's life, but her extended family and everyone around her.  This book has so much in it: The Spanish Flu, union organizing, early midwifery, immigration, and hard parenting choices.  War, changing industry, indigenous medicine, loss of young children, work-place injuries, alcoholism, brothels, and incarceration conditions. Of local interest, it is set in Oregon against a backdrop of logging, fishing, and "women's work" in and around Astoria.  I really loved this book.

​Highly recommended.