It seems like I just wrote one of these. Maybe I should stop doing them annually and skip to more like once every 5 or 10 years... and then I would never remember to do it and thus cheat the world of such great reading pleasure. It looks like I didn't read so very much this year. I used to be more competitive about it, but this year has changed a lot of things for me. Besides, there are some serious whoppers on this list. Check it out. If you read all the way to the end, you deserve to have someone buy you a steak dinner. But, unfortunately, it won't be me.
* Harry Potter's Bookshelf: I picked this up off one of those display tables at Barnes and Noble on a whim. That store kills me ... or at least my pocketbook. It took me a while to decide to read it, but I'm glad I did. It explores the classic literature and philosophy that influenced J.K. Rowling in her writing of the Harry Potter books. I'm a big enough fan to have read all of the published Harry stuff, but I've lost patience with the Pottermore site and so have not been able to read recent online backstories. Disappointing, for sure. If you have any interest in literary history and theory and/or Harry Potter, read this book.
* Call the Midwife: Shadows of the Workhouse: This is the second in Jennifer Worth's Call the Midwife memoirs. I must say that while I tired of the television show's sappiness and was very well glad the last season was actually the last season, I loved the books for providing a unique and real perspective on a time and place and profession I really didn't know anything about.
* In the Beginning: At one time (ahem, my depressive phase in college), I was Chaim Potok's biggest fan. I still think he writes a beautiful book, but this was one was sorta been-there-done-that. I might have liked it a lot more if I hadn't already read The Chosen, My Name Is Asher Lev, and even Davita's Harp—all of which are far superior.
* Phantom Island: Watermark: Continuation of a fun teen series written by my friend. It was good.
* The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands: My reading of this book came about because of a conversation I had with some married girlfriends. They both said that they have read it and re-read it, and it always helps their marriages. I had been curious about it since my parents mentioned it to me many years ago, but never enough to read it. After all, I didn't need to know what to do with a husband. I wasn't married. But the conversation was powerful enough that I suggested it as one of the monthly readings for my book group, and it got enough votes to be included. It was funny hosting that discussion, the only single woman in the group (with my boyfriend hanging out in the background because we hadn't got to spend much time together that week, and anyway, he was curious how women's book club meetings rolled). It sounds like a book that would mortally offend any strong-minded, independent, feminist woman ... and I don't think Dr. Laura particularly cares if she does offend that group of people. However, she did write what, in my opinion, is an eye-opening book about respect and how many women may just not understand that many of the things they do are sending the wrong message to their husbands. The premise is so refreshing—most men (excluding obvious jerks and sociopaths) want their wives to be happy, and they are willing to do quite a bit to make their wives happy. A man just needs his wife to communicate what she wants in a way that is intelligible to him, and women can, and should, take equal responsibility for effecting change when a relationship is heading in a troubling direction.
* Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End: They run together. I don't have anything to say about this one that I didn't already say about Shadows of the Workhouse.
* How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less: I listened to this short audiobook one day while I was bored at work. It had some good pointers, but nothing earth-shattering, other than just making sure you practice coming across as a friendly, empathetic, and well-adjusted person.
* Eater's Manifesto: Another trendy audiobook I picked up when I was bored. He pretty much thinks people should avoid processed food.
* Between Two Ends: This is one of those advanced reader copies I got at the last library conference I went to. The premise sounded pretty exciting—a kid being magicked into another world in order to save Shaharazade from an untimely death—but it was ultimately predictable and doesn't stand up well to other similar stuff if you've ever read a children's book before.
* Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography: Good, but I've read an awful lot of Anne Frank stuff over the years.
* The Gate Thief: Second in Orson Scott Card's Mither Mages series, this one was as good—and weird—as the first. I do look forward to more. The main characters can open gates in space and transport themselves (or things) to other places. Pretty cool stuff.
* Miss Buncle's Book: This adorable book was recommended to me by my sister. I recommend it to anyone who wants a sweet, light read. It's not without substance, but it doesn't take any effort. Barbara Buncle is completely endearing without being sappy, and the picture of small town drama is quirky enough to not be as predictable as one would fear.
* Laddie: A True Blue Story: I'm not sure what to make of this one. On one hand, it's terribly sappy and preachy. On the other, it's pretty brilliant. Told from the perspective of "Little Sister", who only half understands what's going on, it is an attempt to paint a picture of a set of parents who have good hearts and did everything right, whose efforts yield honest, happy lives for their children—both the ones who are grown up and the ones who are still small. Its effort to portray the pastoral American family, one with the land and faithful to God, as vastly superior to those corrupted by either city life or the classist ways of the Old Country is both touching and annoying.
* All Creatures Great and Small: If you haven't heard of it before, this is part of a series of memoirs written by a man about when he was a young veterinarian in England. It's hilarious—more so because of his dealings with his employer/room mate and with the farmers and other clients than because of his stories about animals. I got a tiny taste of it when I was still an 8th grade teacher and an excerpt of one of the chapters was used as text for one of the kids' standardized reading test practice material. In spite of my inauspicious introduction, it is a serious treat. Read it. You'll love it.
* On Writing Well: A surprisingly entertaining take on how to (and how not to) write nonfiction. It should be standard reading, along with Strunk and White's Elements of Style. And anyone who thinks a book on the mechanics of writing is boring needs their head examined.
* Lady of Devices: My first foray into the genre of Steampunk. These books were recommended by a friend whose taste is sketchy, but because the first one was free for Kindle, I gave it a shot. It was a fun little ride. I read several of the sequels as well—which I will go ahead and list here because they're really all just one continuous story split up into several parts. Her Own Devices, Magnificent Devices, and Brilliant Devices. They are about a privileged young woman in Victorian-style England (like all Steampunk) whose days in prep school are followed by a family disaster that necessitates her going to the streets and figuring out how to live by her wits, incognito, while still maintaining what relationships to "society" she still can. The action is peppered with lightning guns and airships, all while girls wear corsets and little boys speak Cockney. It impressively avoids a lot of the cliches of most of the teen fiction aka drivel out there these days.
* The Fault in Our Stars: It wasn't bad, but it didn't really have much to offer. It was just a typical story of two teenagers who fall in love and then die. And why, why do they always have to sleep together? I understand that teenagers have a really strong sex drive, but there are plenty of other meaningful things to do when you know you're dying, aside from losing your virginity.
* I Am a Mother: This book was pretty good, but it wasn't really anything I hadn't heard before, and really, I have a problem with books that try to make motherhood sound super hard—at least I did at the moment, because I was planning on having a baby. I think there is a such thing as a healthy amount of fear, but when you're in the midst of the "I think I might be pregnant" phase, you don't want to be told that a woman who never, ever slept and worked as a news anchor in one of the most demanding careers out there found being a full-time stay-at-home mom more difficult than the career she left. Admittedly, that is the fault of the reader and not the author, though, and I think even with that dire warning, the sheer hardness of parenthood is likely to catch me off guard—rather like how naive I was about morning sickness. I seriously had no expectation that I would find pregnancy to be anything other than joyful and fulfilling (which it really is, now that the 8 weeks of nausea and 3 weeks of headaches are mostly behind us ... addendum, by the time I finished writing this post I got another headache, so no, pregnancy isn't super fun). But yes, I think it was probably a good book, but I didn't need all the feel-good quotes of how important motherhood is, I just needed something that told me I wasn't going to ruin my kid (embryo).
* Atlas Shrugged: I already wrote about it in an earlier post. Husband is still reading it. Hehe.
* Man's Search For Meaning: Nothing I say will do this book justice. I was expecting something terribly depressing, but it is a triumphant account of how people survive the unthinkable and a beautiful tribute to those who never came back.
* Home: Home is the third-person limited account of Glory Boughton, one of eight siblings, a middle-aged woman gone back to her home-town to take care of her dying father. It is one of the deepest and most interesting explorations of perspective I've ever come across. Her reflections center around her "black sheep" brother, Jack, who left home in scandal and never came back, not even for their mother's funeral, until she wrote and asked him to come see their father as he grows increasingly feeble and wants nothing out of the rest of his life but to see his beloved son. None of the problems and questions Glory asks have easy answers. It's difficult to tell if the author figured the reader would pick up on certain details that Glory didn't, or if Glory's sudden understanding of one more piece of the complexity is meant to be just as much a surprise to everyone sharing her tale. Either way, this story was not a neat, clean little package and all its ends tied up.
* Gilead: a sort of companion novel to Home, this one is written as the memoir of John Ames, the Boughton family's neighbor, the father's dearest friend, also a minister (of a different faith). Ames writes to his small son, Robert, who was born to him so late in life that he never really got over the shock of finding himself, after decades of loneliness (his first wife died in childbirth, along with their only daughter, when he was very young), a husband and father with something to live for. His voice is beautiful—a humble, unpretentious man who sincerely believes what he preached and lived for all the years of his life, but also a man who understands that his religion doesn't always answer everyone's deepest and most heartfelt questions. There is an understanding and reconciliation he has come to in his own heart, but he admits his own inability to express it to those who grieve and mourn and wonder, without sounding cliché, flippant, or dismissive of their sorrow. I love the beautiful things he observes about his wife and little boy and how he describes his love for and joy in them.
* Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea: I didn't want to read this book because I knew it would be depressing, but I had been to too many book club meetings (one?) for which I didn't do the reading, so I checked it out from the library and made myself sit down and read it until it was finished. It took most of a Saturday. Worth it? Yes. The author, a journalist, interviewed six different people who had lived in North Korea and escaped to tell the tale. It is every bit as horrible as you could imagine. Probably worse. I don't want to go into detail, but if you read the book, don't expect a happy ending even though you know because they are available for interviews that they got out of it. People don't survive things like that unscathed.
* The Way of Kings: Highly recommended. Every Mormon who likes fantasy loves Brandon Sanderson, and with good reason. This is not light reading, though. It is well over 1,000 pages and is only the beginning of what plans to be a 10-book epic series. Lots of violence. Lots of despair. But there is also lots of characters understanding that the way to conquer evil is not to embrace it but to listen to the better, encouraging, inspirational voices. The main characters are Shallan, a girl from a rich and influential family who are extremely down on their luck and desperate not only to make a comeback but to avoid certain death; Kaladin, the gifted son of a village surgeon who has been cruelly enslaved for trying to do the right thing; and Dalinar, renowned warrior and brother to the former king, who becomes increasingly conflicted about his role under the rule of the new king, his nephew.
* Bringing Up Bébé: Ok, I really liked this when I was reading it, but it has some serious flaws. The author's objective, other than to continue her successful freelance career, was to write a memoir of her own observations—and some light research—about the difference between French and American parenting. Some of it was quite good, but it must be taken with a grain of salt. It's easy to lump all American parents into one category and all French parents into another, but really, most of her observations were solely of New Yorkers and Parisians, and I'm not so sure they are a representative sample of all American parents and all French parents. But she doesn't claim they are, so that makes it ok. I like a lot of the French conventions she points out—there are no "Mommy Wars" in France. French people tend to think their parenting is their own business and don't worry too much about what other people think. Their kids are not their trophies, they are their kids. The author claims that most French children sleep through the night by the age of 2 months, always eat their vegetables, learn to bake on their own when they are three, are better able to entertain themselves and interact with adults, and never feel undue pressure to be ahead of the curve in school. At first I totally bought the sleeping through the night thing. Well, I really wanted to. I'm expecting a baby and the thought of going back to my full-time job after my brief maternity leave and still staying up all night with an infant is terrifying. There is something to it, I'm sure, and I'm not going to be one of those insane people who comments on parenting blogs and accuses people who use the cry-it-out method of child abuse and claim those people deserve to have CPS come and seize their children and revoke their parental rights for good. And goodness knows I hope my baby will want to sleep through the night so I don't lose my job after I fall asleep at my desk for the seventieth time. But everything else I have read proves more empirically that babies thrive when they feel safe, and if that means I need to pick it up every time it cries, I will do it. I like the theory that exposing a child to "adult" (read: real) food early—puréed or chopped tiny according to the child's needs—and not making a fuss about things is more likely to help the child develop a varied palate. I don't like that the author claims that French people consider daycare to be essential once the baby is three months old, even if there is a stay-at-home mom. I'm vain enough to think that my kid needs more attention from me than the best of paid childcare providers ... I may end up having to put my kid in daycare, and my heart hurts about that already. I definitely want to teach my children to be independent in the kitchen, as well as elsewhere around the house, but that is always easier said than done. Time will tell if I'm successful. The last thing I will comment on is the claim that French parents do not helicopter. They teach their children that they are there for them, but that it is not their job to entertain them, and they teach them that it is common courtesy to say "hello" and "goodbye" to everyone they interact with, including adults. Even very shy kids know this is expected of them. I think it's a very healthy expectation, acknowledging and welcoming people's presence. Anyway, I'm sure there are plenty of American parents who do it "right" and plenty of French parents who do it "wrong", so again, the book has its limitations, but it was an interesting read all the same.
* The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Henrietta Lacks was a black woman in the 1940s whose cancer cells were used in labs for replication and scientific research. The book is incredibly interesting as far as ethics—did you know that any time you have a sample taken in a doctor's office, they can keep it and use it without your knowledge or permission? That has always been true and has never changed. Poor Henrietta died before she had any knowledge of how influential her cells became in the scientific research department, but her family sure knew. Most of them were poor and completely uneducated, and their lack of understanding about what happened and how her cells were used was the source of unending grief and trauma. How do you explain a situation like that? They knew their mother's cells were used to discover the cure to all kinds of nasty diseases, but they were never even well-off enough to go to the doctor when they themselves were sick. Plus, many of them never understood what a cell even was. The book is one of the most interesting "biographies" I've read so far.
* Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Childbirth: Duh. I'm pregnant. They gave me this book at the clinic and encouraged me to read it instead of What To Expect When You're Expecting (that book gives me the chills—I have no idea why it's so popular; the woman who wrote it has no credentials). This one is a nice, no-nonsense, informative guide. It does lean a little too socialist for me at the end, when it brings up concerns about the plight of pregnant and nursing mothers in America. I agree that their concerns are definitely valid, but I disagree with their proposed solutions. Regardless, I recommend it to anyone who is expecting a baby.
* Lila: This is another companion novel to Home and Gilead, written from the perspective of John Ames' wife. She is given just enough attention in the other two books to be intriguing, and this one covers her back story, which is rather awful—but again, the book manages to be sweet at the same time. It ends before the other two books begin, just after little Robert Ames is born.
* Fever, 1793: has been sitting on my bookshelf for years, since I was a teacher and read other books by the author. I would have liked it a lot more if I had read it in middle school, because it is written for the young'uns. The Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia, when it was still the capital of the young United States, is an interesting part of history that doesn't seem to ever get covered in the standard public school curriculum. Oh well. I was interested in reading a fictional account of it, since I read a nonfiction book about it several years ago as a graduate student. It was a good read.
* The Boy Who Dared: Another one I picked up when I was teaching, this book didn't grab me like I wanted it to. It is the story of Helmuth Hubner, a young man growing up in Nazi Germany. He was actually a member of the LDS Church, and his beliefs about God and his fellow men and what was right and wrong were what came between him and his affiliation with the Nazi party. He got ahold of a radio and started listening to Allied news, then, with the help of some friends, started distributing leaflets with the truth about the War. Sadly, he was turned in, imprisoned, and executed. Definitely an impressive story. I wonder if there is another account of it published somewhere. The author is quite good, but I wasn't hooked by her present-tense narration.
* Twelve Years A Slave: Because of the movie that recently came out, most people by now have at least heard of Solomon Northup, who was born pre-Emancipation as a free black man and then captured and sold into slavery. His true account of the treatment he received at the hands of his psychopathic masters is a brutal read. There is a lot of speculation about Northup's life outside of those twelve years. Some say he was trying to make easy money by allowing himself to be sold into slavery with the promise that his partners would come get him back later. I don't know if that's a fair accusation. The really sad part was what I was told by my book club leader, whose copy of the book had annotations and commentary—after Northup's liberation, he went home and traveled around educating people about what slavery in the South was like, but not long after that, he disappeared and was never seen or heard from again. No one knows if he was abducted and sold again, or what. So terribly sad.
* The Story of the Trapp Family Singers: I read most of this when I was a teenager, but somehow I never finished it, so I started over. A very nice read. I don't think Maria Trapp is the best writer ever; she tends to ramble a bit, but it is delightful to read about the experiences of a family so devoted and unabashedly faithful to God. The Sound of Music is a sweet tribute to their experiences, but it really glosses over everything in true musical style, so the book lent a lot of excellent background.
* Brain Rules for Baby: A friend loaned me this book. She is just a few years younger than me and had her first child last year. We share the same philosophies on parenting, so I figured it would be a good book to read, and it was. It's an engagingly-written compilation of the research that correlates with raising a child who is happy and intelligent. Nothing in it is super surprising, but I'm glad I read it. The major premise is that humans are not driven by the desire to be happy and to learn, they are driven by the urge to be safe. This is particularly true for babies and children under 5. If children feel safe, they will learn. The best part was the chapter on emotions. Children whose parents teach them how to express their emotions and who model extreme empathy end up much happier. And children whose parents discipline consistently, timely, and lovingly (no corporal punishment), and who explain the logic behind their rules, are generally happier, moral people who follow their parents' rules not out of fear but out of their own acceptance of them. I like that the author doesn't present anything as causal or definitive, and even states several times that only about 50% of what a parent does is going to make a difference. The rest is all genetic. Anyway, most parenting books tend to leave me with a lot of anxiety and worry that I'll ruin my kid if I do a certain thing the "experts" say is wrong, but this one left me feeling more empowered to be a loving parent of a happy, well-adjusted child.
