July-September 2017 books

I didn’t read very much at all these last 3 months. I was just super busy and worked throughout the summer.

The first book I started in June was The Moor, a Sherlock Holmes book by Laurie R. King where he and his wife, Mary Russell, solve a mystery in the moor. I know, right? I totally thought this was going to be derivative fanfiction and that Mary was going to be a Mary Sue (pun unintended). This book was actually really good, very well written, and it did not trample on the Sherlock Holmes legacy. Mary is this badass Jewish feminist scholar and she wears trousers and keeps her last name in the 1920s! She takes over the Watson role, helping Sherlock and being the narrator of the novel. The only thing I didn’t like was that the ending was pretty abrupt. I actually want to read the rest of the series. 4/5

After that was Highland Fling, a historical romance novel by Amanda Scott that had more history than romance. The romance was pretty uneven and typical (headstrong redhead and this older rich dude who resists his attraction to her then is like ‘I’m going to tame you’, gag me with a spoon), but the historical stuff was interesting. England’s dickishness in taking over other countries is well known, but I hadn’t heard much about how it was for Scotland. Anyway this was ok and whiled away the time. 3.5/5

I decided to start reading books from my ever-growing to-read list, and checked out All the Single Ladies: unmarried women and the rise of an independent nation by Rebecca Traister from my library. This book did not disappoint: it talked about the views and roles of single women (mostly in the US) and the changes they’ve made in this country and culture. It was so good and affirming to read about all the kickass ladies out there who didn’t get married and had good, fulfilling lives, as well as women who today are dealing with various aspects of being single. I liked that Traister followed up with the women she interviewed for the book so that we could see where they were a few years later at the time of publication. The author is currently married with kids but was single well into her late twenties, so she gets it. I may buy this book for my own library. 4/5

The last book of this trimester is Morality for Beautiful Girls, the third book of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. He is British, and I am usually very suspicious of books set in countries the author is not from, and of books with characters of color when the author is white, but Wikipedia says he was born in Zimbabwe and worked in Botswana as an adult, so it appears he knows his stuff. The books (I’ve read another book in this series many years ago) sound like he’s done his research, and have colloquisms and the like. Mma Precious Ramotswe runs a detective agency with her assistant Mma Grace Makutsi and is called upon to solve all sorts of mysteries. In just this book MFBG, the duo must (together and/or separately) determine if a government man’s brother is being poisoned by his wife, figure out where a feral child found in the bush came from, run the detective agency and Mma Ramotswe’s fiance’s auto repair shop simultaneously, try to figure out why the fiance, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, is acting the way he is, and detect if any of the contestants of a local beauty and morality contest are, in fact, immoral. This is a lot of plots going on, but McCall Smith handles them all well. The characters are very well written, interesting and likeable. I want to read the rest of the series but since there are like 17, I’ll stick to getting them from the library. 4.4/5

Trigger warnings for mentions of rape, sexual violence etc., attempted child death. I wrote this a few days ago.

So I’m sitting at the reference desk and this scholar dude who’s been using our reference books to write an article is on the phone/a video call with someone. He’s talking about all sort of Biblical topics with the person on the other end of the line, and he brings up how in a sermon he talked about this “really disturbing story” from Judges 19 where this concubine who (according to this dude) is abused by her master, is given over to a male gang who wanted to rape him, is raped all night and then dies at the door of the house the man is staying in. The man then proceeds to cut her body up into 12 pieces and sends each piece to each house of Israel, inciting a civil war. He used this story in a sermon about uplifting women!!!!! What kind of idiocy, of tone-deaf obliviousness, of lacking sense of what’s appropriate? What kind of idiot wouldn’t say to himself, a college-educated ministerial sort of man, “you know, maybe the story of a sex slave being gang-raped to death isn’t the best story to include  in my women-uplifting sermon.” He does not see anything wrong with this whatsoever! And what’s worse is that he’s LAUGHINGLY telling his friend how in the audience some teenage girl was making weird awkward faces, while some teenage boys were laughing--not that they were laughing at the rape and death, he assured his friend, but that they were laughing at the jokes he’d made about it. Or they were not jokes directly about the concubine’s rape and murder, but were still made adjacent to it. I repeat, he did not see anything wrong with this, and expressed no discomfort or regret about it.

Later on in his conversation, he tells his friend how in some church service he’d been part of, the girl in charge of telling the children’s story decided it would be a good idea to tell the story of when God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac his first-born son on the altar instead of the ram. And he expressed to his friend how the girl cheerfully and systematically described the story and how exactly Isaac [a child] would be killed on the altar to a bunch of five-year-olds, ending it with, “and that’s why we should always obey God.” I think this dude was quite right in feeling uncomfortable with the telling of this violent, child-death-adjacent story to a bunch of impressionable children, but I find it staggering that he could care about children being traumatized from a children’s story but not how women and girls could be traumatized by a story of rape and misogynistic murder in a sermon explicitly for them. I can guarantee you that there were women and girls in his audience that had already experienced sexual violence and assault, and they may have very well found this part of the sermon triggering. This lack of common sense and empathy  is just staggering to me and it could be the caffeine but I’m honestly shaking in rage. Shit like this is why I don’t trust men, even 'good' religious men.

April-June 2017 books

The first book I read in April was Ella Minnow Pea: A progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable by Mark Dunn. This is one of the most unique books I’ve ever read because as the book goes on, it keeps using words with fewer and fewer letters. It’s also a fable with a moral in it. In a fictitious? island off the coast of South Carolina, a charmingly retro town adores its statue of a hometown boy made good: the guy who invented the phrase “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, which is mounted on his statue. When the letters begin to fall off the decaying statue, the superstitious (or enterprising?) town elders decide it is a message from beyond the grave that the entire island must give up using that letter from the alphabet. You can imagine what happens when more and more letters keep dropping from the statue, and the faster they fall, the more outrageous and rapacious the demands on the townspeople become. This book made me angry because I could see a clear parallel between the “devout” town elders, who really just wanted a reason to take others’ houses and property, and current events. Clever, creative, sweet and mirroring our times: highly recommended. 4/5

Ellen White’s World: A fascinating look at the times in which she lived is the third book from George R. Knight’s Ellen White series. It’s basically a sweeping overview of the nineteenth century’s religious and cultural aspects, with a few EGW quotes thrown in to tie it to the Adventist prophet and writer. I had to read this for a class and found this book interesting, but I thought Ellen White’s World should have included more on the prophet herself and not kept to such an insanely short page length. 3.9/5

Bee: The Princess of the Dwarfs by Anatole France is a classic old-fashioned fairytale about a princess and her cousin/betrothed who, as children, wander from home and get kidnapped by dwarves and nixies, respectively. It was a nice story but very short, and I felt like it could have been fleshed out more. The ending was also kind of meh because there wasn’t any sort of climactic battle; the kids end up being freed by the king of the dwarfs because he loves Honeybee. Yes, that’s her nickname; not sure why they didn’t just put Honeybee instead of Bee in the title. I mostly liked this anyway. This was a Nook ebook. 3.4/5

Another Nook ebook that I read was A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe, which was a Gothic Romance. Secret passageways and tunnels below a castle, possible ghosts, tons of chases, heroine is constantly fainting and needing to be rescued, several faked deaths, a corrupt abbot, a band of thieves, caves, forced marriages and true love. A fun trip. 3/5

I guess I was in the mood for Gothic novels since after that I read Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Carmilla, which has been adapted into a YouTube video series, is the OG lesbian vampire who preys on pretty young women, hilariously changing her name to another anagram as the decades pass (Marcilla etc.). As with most if not all classic vampire novels, it ends with the hunting and elimination of the vampire threat. Even going in with full knowledge of what friendships between girls were like in Victorian times, this was super gay. It ended pretty abruptly (I guess a lot of novels from this period do), but I liked it anyway; it was pretty funny. 3.5/5

Technically I finished this book in July but I mostly read it in June, so I’m going to include it in here anyway. Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-v.s.-Christians Debate by Justin Lee is an excellent book about how we should view and treat gay Christians and gay people in general, and how our church should change its view of homosexuality and how it treats those in the LGBT+ spectrum if it wants to repair relationships rather than cause pain. This was excellent; highly recommended. I honestly feel like every Christian should read this regardless of their orientation and opinion. 4.9/5

February-March 2017 books

So I usually do a trimester's worth of flash book reviews at a time, but I read so much in January that I did those books in a separate blog post.

My two February books were started in January, but I've decided to count books as pertaining to the month in which they were finished.

The first Feb. book was The Elements of Eloquence, which was about rhetorical devices. An example (I no longer remember the specific name for this) is when you hear something like "he stole my heart and then my car" in a song. Get it? It juxtaposes literal theft (car) with metaphorical theft (a figure of speech). I'd heard dozens of lyrics like that but I never knew it was rhetoric. I liked this book, but unless you're a language nerd like me, you're probably going to find it too boring. The author has a very dry British sense of humor, and he provided lots of examples that I found interesting and often funny. He brought up William Shakespeare a lot, but the book didn't touch on him as much as I thought it would, although of course Billy S. was mentioned a good deal. This was a library book. (late Jan.-early Feb., 3.9/5 stars)

The second Feb. book was Step Aside, Pops by one of my favorite cartoonists, Kate Baeton Beaton. Just like the first Hark! A Vagrant collection, I'd already read probably 99% of all the comics included, but this is not at all a detractor for me. I like having physical copies of things I love from the Internet. I got this one from Barnes & Noble with a coupon, I believe. (late Jan.-early Feb., 5/5)


I started off March by rereading two books for children in order to decide whether or not I wanted to keep them (I shelved all my books in the beginning of March, but unsurprisingly, there are a few stacks that need to be taken care of!).

The first March book was Whittington, a Newbery Honor book that I was assigned to read in one of my Children's Lit classes. It is a solemn, rather charming story within a story. The outside story has to do with barnyard animals getting along and trying to encourage a young boy in his struggle with dyslexia. The inner story is his reward for the struggling: hearing the story of Dick Whittington and his cat from Whittington, a descendant of that cat. One thing I didn't like was that the DW story was supposedly passed down from cat to cat, but it felt like a story humans would tell, as it was all from Dick's perspective. The cat's perspective would have focused much more on the cat's experiences and feelings rather than Dick's feelings towards the merchant and his daughter. Overall this was like a less frolicsome Charlotte's Web written by someone who usually writes for adults. I do like this but will give it away to my cousin's kids. (mid-March, 3.9/5)

The second March book was on paintings, especially portraits of young girls, from American Girl. Imagine the Girl in the Painting is a lovely book to inspire creative thinking and an appreciation of art, as well as learning about history. This will also go to my cousin's kids. (mid-March, 4/5)

Probably my most harrowing book of the month was The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, wherein the author examines loneliness in the context of a breakup, being alone in New York City, technology, and several NYC male artists whose work or lives in some way embodied loneliness. Many of the artists were abused in their youth, which was horrible to read about, and some of the things the author wrote about loneliness were 2real. I do recommend this though, and will try to look for more from the author. Trigger warnings for abuse, rape, self harm, mental illness, depression, suicide, and violence. This was a library book. (mid to late March, 4/5)

After such an emotionally wringing read I needed to take a break, so I read the next three Artemis Fowl books in basically one sitting: The Artemis Fowl Files (a filler book that is supposed to be book 4.5 or something), The Lost Colony, and The Time Paradox. After (spoiler!) Commander Root was killed off in the beginning of the 4th book The Opal Deception, it was nice to see him again in one of the Files' short stories. The Lost Colony is my favorite post-Opal book because of No.1, while I've never been that enamored of The Time Paradox (even my credulity can be strained, plus I hated it that REDACTED). I think I've mentioned before that while they are still enjoyable books, some of the magic is lost a bit when reread as an adult. I still like them a lot, though. (late March, 3.9/5, 3.99/5, 3/5)

January 2017 books

The first book I read and finished this year was Debating Disney: Pedagogical Perspectives on Commercial Cinema, which was a series of essays about Disney films under different lens (feminism, race, gay or Semitic stereotyping, etc.) It was interesting but somewhat dry as it is an academic work, but I would recommend it if you like analyzing Disney movies and can stomach reading academia. In my notes I had put that some facts were incorrect, but I didn’t put what so now I don’t remember. This was a library book. I may have skimmed this a bit, rather than reading every essay (early January, 3.9/5 stars)

I actually read a lot of library books since mine were packed up in boxes until a few weeks ago. The next one I read was In the Open Hand: Sonnets from the Californian, which is a book of poetry by a faculty member at the university where I work. It was pretty good but the reading experience was marred somewhat by the fact that I met him and it’s kind of awkward reading love poems by someone you’ve personally met. Not his fault; the writing style was quite good. (early January, 3.5/5 stars)

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity: A Biography is exactly that: the biography of a book. How meta is that? It went over the circumstances leading up to Mere Christianity being written, such as WWII and C.S. Lewis’s radio talks, as well as its reception and influence. This would be a great resource for someone wanting to write a book report on MC, or any other CSL megafan. I think I kinda skimmed this one towards the end as it is scholarly and dry. (mid-January, 4/5)

Later that month I went to my achilles’ heel, the thrift store, and bought several more books. Among them was a TV spinoff book, The Douche Journals, Volume 1: The Definitive Account of One Man's Genius. Basically the book is written as if it’s Schmidt from New Girl’s journal where he writes down every “clever” thing that caused him to be made to put money in the douchebag jar. It was just as crude and hilarious as I expected. (mid-January, 3.4/5)

I also acquired The Code of the Woosters at the thrift store, to my delight. These are laugh-out-loud funny, and I’m going to try to buy them all. I had seen parts of it from a BBC Jeeves and Wooster episode, but it was still hilarious.(mid-January, 4/5)

Also from the thrift store came The Mysterious Affair at Styles, my first Agatha Christie. I liked Hercule Poirot and the mystery was quite interesting, but I pretty much hated the narrator. He kept falling in love with every attractive woman and girl he saw, regardless of whether they were married or appropriate for him to date, then pouted when they didn’t like him back. His thoughts about the women were unnecessary and detracted from the story. I would have liked to know more of Poirot rather than that bimbo. I did like the story, but I won’t be keeping this one. (mid-January, 3.5/5)

Continuing my Artemis Fowl series reread, I read the fourth book, The Opal Deception. This one may have the most suspenseful plot of the series, and it pretty much held up reread-wise. (mid-January, 4/5)

My next library read was Youth and Sexuality in the Twentieth Century United States, which is a well-researched yet readable scholarly work. It was very interesting and showed that adolescence wasn’t as squeaky clean in the past as your grandparents would have you think (premarital sex was pretty common, for instance). The most interesting thing I learned was that children under 15 or so were expected to not be interested in the opposite sex at all, but in the same sex! Same-sex crushes were completely expected and seen as normal in older children and young teens. (lateish January, 4/5)

I was going to do a trimester-type post of my Jan-Mar books, but since I read so much in January, this is just for that month. That's why this post is so late.

Books Read in 2016

• Total books read during this year: 33
• Total books that I started to read but didn't finish: 5
• physical books read: 22
• ebooks read: 11
• physical books started but unfinished: 2
• ebooks started but unfinished: 3
• Nook ebooks read: 5
• Kindle ebooks read: 5
• Other ebooks format (browser/pdf/app/etc.) read: 1
• Library books read: 10
• Library books started but unread: 1
• Books I liked: 23
• Books I loved: 4
• Books I hated: 1
• Books I disliked or found meh: 6
• Books I felt strongly about but can't classify under love or hate: 2 (I mean I guess they did what they were supposed to do, but I hate unhappy endings/no comeuppance for the villain!)

I read fewer books than last year, due to tiredness after work and the instant gratification of the Internet and apps. What helped me is that I was part of a bookclub, and I read some books with them. I also traveled at least twice this year, which is really when I use my Nook. This year I began a new job where I spend more time at the reference desk and am able to read the new library books, plus my parents bought me a Kindle (!) for Christmas, so hopefully I'll do more reading next year!

Book reviews for I think most of the books I read should be under the book reviews tag.  >>>

October-December 2016 books

I started but did not finish The Well at the End of the World by William Morris (early November), which I downloaded for free on my Nook. The author's name sounded familiar to me so I googled him, and it turns out he's one of the Pre-Raphaelites and the dude that founded the Kelmscott Press, which I learned about in my history of the book class! This explains why the language is extremely old fashioned: that is definitely the way someone obsessed with medieval romance would write. I don't see anyone who isn't at least somewhat an English major being able to understand more than 60% of the writing, though. It makes Charles Dickens sound like Ernest Hemingway. What helped me is that Catherine, Called Birdy was one of my favorite books growing up. Anyway it was pretty good and I can see why people like the Inklings liked it, but I stopped reading it once I stopped traveling. It was just really dense and pretty slow-moving, although I do want to finish it sometime.

Barnes & Noble sent me a 20 or 30% off coupon, so I used it to buy Neil Gaiman's The Spindle and the Sleeper (early December), which was really good. I love and am interested in all fairytale retellings, so when I saw that Neil Gaiman wrote a feminist version of Sleeping Beauty where Snow White saves Sleeping Beauty since she knows what it's like to be trapped in magical slumber, I had to have it. It's a picture book but not necessarily for children; I can see them getting scared of it since there's a lot of freaky stuff in that book. It was illustrated by Chris Riddell, who has illustrated a lot of Neil Gaiman's stuff, and the illustrations are gorgeous and creepy, just the way you'd expect. I'm going to talk about spoilery stuff below the cut. 4/5 stars

I'm continuing my Artemis Fowl series reread, so I read The Arctic Incident and The Eternity Code (books 2 and 3) in early and late December, respectively. These are a great series for very late elementary and middle schoolers. They've got heists and magic and fairy folk and technology and a smart-aleck genius kid who outsmarts adults. I have to admit that, rereading as an adult, they seemed way shorter and less OMG than they did when I first read them. 3.9,4/5 stars

I kind of wanted to continue my holiday tradition of reading my Christmas with Anne L.M. Montgomery holiday anthology and A Christmas Carol, but as I moved in December I packed up my books and couldn't get to them.

"Music" by Anne Porter

When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother’s piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold

And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying

Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country

I’ve never understood
Why this is so

But there’s an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow

For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest

And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country

We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams

And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows

Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.