Winter

The Lunar Chronicles are far and away one of the better YA series. Meyer takes the familiar fairy tale stories and shakes them up in a way that makes it all feel fresh again. All of the previous characters are reunited in this last story, and it's a tome. Luckily, there is plenty of action and suspense to keep it all moving. There is romance, but thankfully no love triangles, and the romance never sidelines the plot, or gets in the way of themes like prejudice, loyalty, leadership, agency, and "being happy with who you are". All of the heroines are strong and talented in their own way, but Meyer makes them all different too--Cress cries but is wicked smart, Scarlet is tough but gets homesick, Cinder goes after the throne, but doesn't know how to deal with the attention, Winter is beautiful but is mentally unstable. Yet they all become lovable and accepted for who they are.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a fascinating read on several levels. I knew next to nothing about Malawi, it's customs and history. I had to keep reminding myself that this novel was set in the early 2000's as William described a rural farm community without electricity or running water, yet they built play cars from recycled trash. The famine sounds devastating--both for its intensity and for the fact that in this century, they were not able to get humane relief from it. William's windmill defies his circumstances, educationally, financially, culturally. His parents are good role models--thinking outside the box to survive the famine, but William transcends even them and shows us what imagination, curiosity, and ingenuity can accomplish.
My main complaint is the title of the book. I didn't want to read this solely because it sounded extremely boring and it is not. Seriously, with a better title, this book would have done much better. William calls his windmill "electric wind"--couldn't they have utilized that into something better? "William's Electric Wind" or "The Boy with the Electric Wind"--anything!!!

View all my reviews

Levels of Life

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Barnes puts together hot air ballooning and grief. Two things that are put together for probably the first time. It did not change my world. But I wouldn't say it crashed and burned. Or burned and crashed. It was interesting; I learned a lot about ballooning and his crossovers are spot on. I also appreciate that he included an essay, a short story, and a memoir--the kind of genre blending that brings literature to new heights. I can also not criticize his grief, because every grief is different and deserves to be respected. But I can't say that I gleaned much--it was thankfully short, because the couple of hours it takes to read is about the right opportunity cost for this not uninteresting little read.

View all my reviews

Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of dolescence, of thrilled discovery.

language of the fan

All couples, even the most bohemian, build up a pattern in their lives together, and these patterns have an annual cycle.  So Year One is like a negative image of the year you have been used to.

An Ocean of Minutes

An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've determined that I give too many 4 stars. In order to differentiate the books I LOVED (5*) and good books, I have defaulted to 4 * when really most of them should be 3. So this is indeed a 4* or a 4 1/2 if you will. Reading about a pandemic while in the midst of one may not seem very smart, but I loved the time-travel twist. Every time I thought I knew where the story was going, it went a different way. It was entertaining and explored issues such as immigration, love, and homecoming. An ocean's breath of fresh air.


View all my reviews

Just as the invention of air travel had made it easy to go, but no easier to leave, the invention of time travel made time easy to pass, but no easier to endure.

It was not the conditions but days of conditions, tied together.  Like the threads of a rope rubbing the same ring of skin again and again, until all seven layers are gone.

God does not send us despair in order to kill us; he sends it ignorer to awaken us to new life--Herman Hesse.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Man

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was hailed as one of the most influential books, especially in journalistic innovation. I will have to agree that his point of view, style, and content is unlike anything I have read. He describes his awareness of his own perspective in reporting, and how his own presence changes the lives he's reporting on. His solution includes describing his surroundings in literary 4-D. This can be in turns excruciating and enlightening. It is remarkable how much one can understand and know about someone simply by examining the minutia in their lives (down to the color of dust in the bottom of a trunk). Perhaps my favorite paragraph explains that the memory the mother has of quitting school because her dress is unfashionable and sneered at, is actually the experience of the daughter. Some may think that the practicalities of living hand to mouth would drive cares of trying to fit in, or caring about social embarrassment aside, but the fact that the mother took her daughter's shame so deeply she remembered it as her own, was heartbreaking. Yes, there is a lot of detail to wade in, but it is the gems like these that make these dust motes shimmer. (Also, the e-copy I had had SO many typos, it was distracting, and sometimes hard to decipher!).

View all my reviews

whole blind earth dispread: they chainlike stream like water violins, a straight and upward rain extracted from the world: yet they are in this hour so profoundly retired upon themselves, they are scarcely the echo of an echo, music’s remembrance in a dying dream, lashed through with weltering whippoorwill, the mourner and genius of great summer night:

if these seem lists and inventories merely, things dead unto themselves, devoid of mutual magnetisms, and if they sink, lose impetus, meter, intension, then bear in mind at least my wish, and perceive in them and restore them what strength you can of yourself: for I must say to you, this is not a work of art or of entertainment, nor will I assume the obligations of the artist or entertainer, but is a human effort which must require human co-operation.

let this be borne in mind, in order that, when we descend among its windings and blockades, into examination of slender particulars, this its wholeness and simultaneous living map may not be neglected, however lost the breadth of the country may be in the winding walk of each sentence.

other times the bed, neatly made though it is, looks like an unlucky cake.

Words cannot embody; they can only describe. But a certain kind of artist, whom we will distinguish from others as a poet rather than a prose writer, despises this fact about words or his medium, and continually brings words as near as he can to an illusion of embodiment In doing so he accepts a falsehood but makes, of a sort in any case, better art.

the most dangerous form of pride is neither arrogance nor humility, but its mild, common denominator form, complacency.

In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again:

towards the utmost idea of goodness, of the horror of error, and of God.

‘Education’ as it stands is tied in with every bondage I can conceive of, and is the chief cause of these bondages, including acceptance and respect, which are the worst bondages of all.

But so are resourcefulness against deceit and against strangling: and so are pleasure, and joy, and love: and a human being who is deprived of these and of this consciousness is deprived almost of existence itself.

peanut plants twittering as under the scathe of machine-gun fire,

you know well enough how cleansed, and glad, and in what appearance of health and peace, every twig and leaf and all the shape of a country shine in such a light, and can fill you with love which has no traceable basis:

for the ear always needs the help of the eye.

Make It Scream, Make It Burn

Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very interesting set of essays. The subjects could be interesting enough on their own--a solitary whale, a museum of items left by ex's, people who become avatars in a sim-life computer game. But then she takes it a step further and questions why "we" are intrigued by these things, what the meaning is. She even takes it further by explaining what she thought she would find, or write about, and how her perceptions shifted. She is a good writer and her observations are insightful and even profound at times. All of the essays are not created equally, but I did enjoy "Maximum Exposure" and "Layover Story". Weirdly, I didn't enjoy the more personal essays as much. A good book to make you think.

Maybe desire and demand are just the same song played at different frequencies.

52 Blue suggests not just one single whale as a metaphor for loneliness, but metaphor itself as salve for loneliness. Metaphor always connects two disparate points; it suggests that no pathos exists in isolation, no plight exists apart from the plights of others.

that nothing we lived was unique, that we were always—in some sense—living again.

The etiquette of our era demands that we pretend we are still unknown to each other, though she will know I probably googled her, and I will know she probably googled me.

You never get to live the wisdom just once, rise to the occasion of otherness just once. You have to keep living this willingness to look at other lives with grace, even when your own feels like shit, and you would do anything to crawl inside a different one; when you would claw one Peaches out of the way, and then another, and then a third, just for a shot at some shell of respite.

Although many users see Second Life as offering an equal playing field, free from the strictures of class and race, its preponderance of slender white bodies, most of them outfitted with the props of the leisure class, simply reinscribes the same skewed ideals that sustain the unequal playing field in the first place.

His point wasn’t just about physicality—the ways our experiences are bound to our bodies—but about surprise and disruption.

Also true: every paradise is made possible by blindness.

Conspicuous forms of distortion, however, only force us to confront the truth that all photos are inevitably mediated, inevitably constructed, inevitably distancing. Once the bodies arrive in the dooryard, they aren’t bodies anymore: they’ve been run through chemical solutions; they’ve been flattened, framed, and fitted.

There is no way to photograph the soldier’s body—moved or unmoved—that will communicate the whole truth of his life, and of his death.

A trim curatorial label can’t tell us what we’re seeking from images of the dead. We want to remember things that never happened to us. We want to sense grief we never felt.

Does that kind of brutal monotony banish consciousness?

These diary entries are a reminder that the documentarian was also, always, a woman drying her socks on the windowsill and getting eaten alive by the “night shift” of mosquitoes, a woman who got irritated and tired, who drank cold beers alone when she was exhausted by the relentless communion she craved, who was heartbroken by a lover’s betrayal back in California or by her father’s death in Texas—who brought those griefs with her. They soften the diary pages like humidity.

Annie’s failure to remove herself entirely doesn’t obstruct what she documents, it widens the scope of what she’s documenting: not just her subjects but the emotional complexity of photographing them. She confesses her own residue. She owns the taint of artistry.

The language of photography conjures aggression and theft: You shoot a picture. You take a photograph. You capture an image or a moment. It is as if life—or the world, or other people, or time itself—has to be forcibly plundered, or stolen.

Each time she returned, she brought back prints for everyone in the family, giving them back to themselves.

The Portuguese word saudade is infamously untranslatable, but I’ve always loved how it describes something more mysterious than sheer nostalgia. It’s a longing not for what you’ve lost but for what you’ve never had.

the second definition of the word saudade. In this meaning, saudade doesn’t describe longing for any particular object, but longing for that very state of yearning.

Thank you for staying married and not needing your marriage to be a white room in which you’re always entertained.

Its glaring neon landscapes were an articulation of collective longing. It acknowledged how much of our lives we spend looking toward illusory, impossible horizons. It suggested that this longing was not delusion, but one of our central truths. It constituted us.

In a city that advertised twenty-four-hour-a-day pleasure, the next best thing to immortality, every closing time was a little death.

Marriage is what happens when the mirage shimmers away to reveal plain asphalt straight ahead.

“stepmother’s blessing” is another name for a hangnail, as if to suggest something that hurts because it isn’t properly attached, something that presents itself as a substitutive love but ends up bringing pain instead.

The exhibits were all vocabulary words drawn from private shared languages that I would never entirely understand—the beaten-up pot, the plastic bin—or relics from two-person civilizations that no longer existed.

Objects make private histories public, but they also grant the past a certain integrity. Whenever memory conjures the past, it ends up papering over it: replacing the lost partner with memories and reconstructions, myths and justifications. But an object can’t be distorted in these ways. It’s still just a box of popcorn or a toaster, a hoodie that got drenched with sudden rain one night in 1997.

A guitar slide can hold the blues—“ his, mine by way of his”—or a museum can hold the blues, insisting we need to make room for them.

Yearning for things was slightly less embarrassing if I denied myself access to them, so I grew comfortable in states of longing without satisfaction.

It took me five or six months to show. Before that, people would say: “You don’t look pregnant at all!” They meant it as a compliment. The female body is always praised for staying within its boundaries, for making even its sanctioned expansion impossible to detect.

The word longing itself traces its origins back to pregnancy. An 1899 dictionary defines it as “one of the peculiar and often whimsical desires experienced by pregnant women.”

Eating was fully permitted now that I was doing it for someone else.

A Case for Jamie

The Case for Jamie by Brittany Cavallaro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A must-read if you want to understand what happened in book 2. Charlotte and Jaimie both narrate this book, so at least you now know what's going on (and a little more WHY Charlotte does what she does). However, most of this book they are apart from each other so the chemistry is gone (which may be a good thing, since in typical real-YA fashion they don't really know what they feel for each other). The dual narrative also meant that it seemed much shorter than the other two. The climax (again) is a little confusing, but I loved the way Cavallaro dealt with Jaimie and Charlotte at the end of this book. There is one more book published in this series, but I think I need a break from teenage angst (even very well-written teenage angst).

View all my reviews