Crossing to Safety

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The story of an author and his wife just starting out in their marriage and forming a friendship with another young couple. It is a story of their marriages, especially their friends, whom they see as lopsided with the wife being controlling, the husband not validated enough. Our protagonists' marriage on the other hand is portrayed as loving and supportive, though it is only seen through the husband's eyes (and I sort of wonder if his wife's support and "gamely" enduring all the hardships wouldn't have been seen differently through her eyes). There is sickness, arguments, birthing stories, promotions, demotions, publishings, kids, etc. But it is a pretty ordinary story. The protagonist tells his friends he can't write a story about themselves because a happy story is a boring story. And I have to agree. It is a nice story but nice didn't really captivate me this time.

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What Is Yours is Not Yours

 

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a book of short stories, but the characters repeat throughout, so you have to keep track of who is who. Which is difficult because some of them are real people, and some of them are conscious puppets and the whole thing is rather confusing, trying to keep which parallel world is which. I gave it two stars because I really did like "presence"--a haunting and beautiful story of regret and love. But I lost my grip on the rest of it--there are some pieces that were good, but it was just too much to keep track of for me in the end.

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Get in Trouble

Get in Trouble by Kelly Link
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kelly Link is very imaginative. And it was entertaining to read some of the things she thinks up. However, there is something I don't understand about the art of the short story some authors use, which is to keep the reader wondering what really happened. Link employs that a lot. Like "The Summer People" reads like a novel that has the middle taken out, so you wonder how the ending came about. Other stories read like a puzzle jumping through space and time, and some are just cryptic. Despite wishing some of the stories were more clear, other stories were enchanting and I appreciated the art that went in to all of them. If I wanted to know more, it was just that the stories were that good.

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I'm the human equivalent of one of those baby birds that falls out of a nest and then some nice person picks the baby bird up and puts it back.  Except that now the baby bird smells all wrong.  I think I smell wrong.

Her chest feels very tight, as if she's suddenly full of poison.  You have to keep it all inside.  Like throwing yourself on a. bomb to save everybody else.   Except youre the bomb.

"I thought they were more like a memory," Gwenda said.  "Not really there at all. Just an echo recorded somehow and played back, what they did, what happened to them."

Shame

Shame: The Exposed Self by Michael Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this as a companion to Brené Brown's I Thought It Was Just Me since it popped up on Bookbub for less than $2. It was surprisingly helpful. It was much more academic and covered aspects of shame research as well as experiments the author performed. By being clear with the history of shame research and theorizing about the cause and effect of shame, I was much better able to see how to overcome shame (or as Brown puts it, to have shame resilience). It is quite in-depth and I now know everything I ever wanted to know about shame but did a great job of explaining it.

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I Thought It Was Just Me

I Thought It Was Just Me: Women Reclaiming Power and Courage in a Culture of Shame by Brené Brown
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was my first Brene Brown book and I am assured that others are better. I think she dies a good job of defining what shame is and how it harms us but I don't feel like she was clear enough on what to do to combat it. The whole book was circular and used too many drawn out "episodes" of shame especially in her life, which just seemed like she was trying to shame the people that shamed her. Best take away from the book: be nicer to people.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What can you say about a novel that has such far-reaching influence? It starts out in almost melodramatic drama, then morphs into a rather boring catalogue of excess, then into gothic horror. It definitely gives some thinking points--what would we do for eternal beauty and youth? Is beauty and youth that important? Are our misdeeds recorded in our countenance? What would we do if we could get away with it? And of course, Lord Henry's quips are timeless. Definitely worth the read.

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Taft

 

Taft by Ann Patchett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This story fell a little flat for me. It is a story of a black man who owns a bar. Perhaps that was part of the problem--I was nervous the whole time that Patchett would misstep in her portrayal of another race, another gender. I can't be entirely sure she doesn't (being neither myself) and maybe it's unfair to not allow an author to become whomever they want. Aside from that, the main character wants things and thinks about things, but he rarely does anything of his own volition--just sort of lets things happen to him, or tries to stay out of the way. Things turn out ok in the end, but if there's a character arch, it's tiny. Not one of my favorite Patchett novels but still some great passages.

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