Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (by Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling)

My final book of the Read Harder Challenge! (And I just realized I haven't updated my post all year, so I'll get on that.) The category was "a book about media literacy."

This is a book I wouldn't have read without the RHC and it's really great. Some of the data is outdated - usually it's even better than presented - but the 10 tips on interpreting the world around you are evergreen.  Rosling was a Swedish researcher and in this book he presented 10 instincts that we use for interpreting human behavior. 

The very first one, the gap instinct, was a good reminder during election season when things are very "us vs. them" and we envision the country as two polarized groups instead of a spectrum of people when it is, in fact, a spectrum. (Also, registering college voters in person this year was similarly enlightening.)  

Highly recommend this as a very digestible read that will help you interpret the world more clearly, and more hopefully.

Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange (by Tess Taylor)

Last year, I read the wonderful Rift Zone, a book of poems by Tess Taylor that met the "an author local to you" requirement. This year, Ian alerted me that Tess was doing a reading at our local library, and I'd enjoyed her book so much I bought another one, Last West, and then we went to see her read it.  So this qualified as "Read a book by an author with an upcoming event (virtual or in person) and then attend the event."

Last West is a book of poems written to accompany a Dorothea Lange exhibit at the Met.  Tess Taylor talked about how she read Lange's notebooks when she was documenting the lives of migrants in the American West, and did a road trip herself, following the same path. The poems are a collage of Tess's words and Dorothea's.

I loved the reading but as a standalone, the book of poetry is mixed (as books of poetry so often are). Some parts of it worked better for me than others - the choppiness of the pastiche/found poetry approach didn't always give me enough to grab onto - and on the whole I'd recommend Rift Zone more. Still, I'm excited that I have a signed copy now and definitely will be excited to read whatever she releases next.

Another First Chance (by Robbie Couch)

You know I'm always going to run, not walk, to any queer RA speculative fiction. (As long as it's not fantasy.  It's a fine line.)

This one has a kid grieving the death of his best friend sign up for a mysterious weeklong experiment called the Affinity Trials. How he gets recruited into them is somewhat convoluted but then we watch the Trials happening, we watch him make new friends and wonder what the researchers running the trials are truly hiding and what their real agenda is. 

(When you find out the answer, you too may find the experiment design somewhat nonsensical.) This book had a slow start and setup, but I powered through (read this while getting my hair done for five hours) and enjoyed the reveal and the ending.  Wasn't at the level of More Happy Than Not, but still enjoyable.

Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers (by Deborah Heiligman)

This book won a whole bunch of awards, so feel free to take this review with a grain of salt. (Or a grain of sand, like the one we saw through a microscope at the Van Gogh museum because Van Gogh painted one of his canvasses at the beach and it was windy that day.) 

The RHC category was "a YA nonfiction book" and that's probably why this didn't work for me. Although the content was good, and I learned a lot about the Van Gogh brothers, the writing style was super choppy, a bit juvenile and simplistic, and not particularly engaging.  I would much rather have read a biography written for adults, but that wasn't the task. 

I do love that she gave Jo her due though; it was not only Theo but Theo's wife Jo that ensured Vincent's art lived on after both brothers were gone.

The Worst Perfect Moment (by Shivaun Plozza)

This was for the RHC task "recommended by a librarian" and it is queer YA! With an amazing supernatural concept about a girl who dies and goes to her happiest moment, only it's inside of a horrible memory in a rundown motel. Seems tailor-made for me, am I right?

Unfortunately I had a lot of issues with it.  The banter is mostly the main character and the angel who designed her heaven calling each other "dick cheese" and "butt face" a lot. Just not clever or cute, honestly. It's also a really frustratingly dumb concept of heaven, which I guess gets figured out by the end but not in a brilliant, The Good Place type of way. The romantic chemistry is minimal. The entire story of our MC's life (and those she leaves behind) is depressing as hell.   

I would have quit this one, I think, if not for the challenge. I have three other librarian recommendations in my library queue so I may read more of them, we shall see! Sorry this was a miss for me.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (by Satoshi Yagisawa)

Read for the"read a book about books" Read Harder category and also recommended by a librarian (although I don't double dip, so the librarian category will be another book). 

As you might have guessed, this is a Japanese novel about a young woman who is a bit adrift in life and goes to live in her uncle's bookshop, the Morisaki bookshop in a famous bookshop area of Tokyo. As with so many Japanese novels, it's restrained and thoughtful and moody and cozy.  And I enjoyed it!

Small Spaces (by Katherine Arden)

Middle grade is not my favorite genre and horror is hit and miss for me, so I really wasn't super exited about this Read Harder category, "read a middle grade horror novel."  But thanks to the recommendations on Goodreads, I decided to check out Small Spaces for this category, and I'm glad I did!

It's age-appropriately creepy (and definitely very creepy) with a wonderful sixth grader, Olivia, who is dealing with grieving the death of her mom and isolating herself emotionally.. until a school field trip goes wrong and the ghostly diary she's been reading seems like it might not just be a ghost story after all.

I read it in a few hours (it's middle grade) but really glad I did.  Another little nudge out of my comfort zone thanks to the RHC. 

Life on Mars (by Tracy K. Smith)

My 18th Read Harder Challenge book is a collection of poetry by a Black author and Pulitzer prize winner, Tracy K. Smith. The category: an indie published collection of poetry by a BIPOC or queer author.

Sadly I did not get the hype about this collection. A couple of lovely poems in here (I particularly enjoyed "The Universe Is A House Party") but not my favorite; poetry either gives you transcendent chills or it doesn't; this collection didn't hit for me.  It did make me want to read more poetry though - it's been a while since I picked up a Best American Poetry collection, and I used to get them every year! 

(What the hell, just pre-ordered this year's edition.) 

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (by Isabel Wilkerson)

Book #17 in the Read Harder Challenge was The Warmth of Other Suns, and while I was reading it it also popped up as #2 on the best books of the 21st century, so that was very satisfying, (I've read 38 of those books, and thanks to Wilkerson, I've read the top 7. Very tempted to try and read all of the rest....)  

This is the story of the Great Migration of Black Americans to the North during Jim Crow, meticulously researched and very insightful.  It centers around three specific migrants (who settled in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago) but puts their lives in context of societal changes happening around them. I found context-switching between those three life stories a little challenging, honestly; I would have preferred a straight-up oral history covering dozens of people, not just three. But regardless, I learned a lot from reading this and really recommend it to all Americans for help understanding the forces that underpin race relations in America today. 

This was just not that long ago - Ida Mae, the migrant woman whose story is told and who began life as a sharecropper, ended up meeting Barack Obama when he was a community organizer in Chicago. This is a vibrant history that every American should know. Highly recommended.

Belize Books

I'm almost done with a sixth book, but here are the five books I finished while on my vacation to Belize:

Birding Under the Influence (by Dorian Anderson)

I avidly followed Dorian's blog about the Big Year he did on a bicycle. In this memoir, he tells the story of his journey while interspersed with the love story between him and his now-wife Sonia, and his problems with drinking and drugs and general addict behavior. I thought this memoir was terrific - well written, candid, structured well, and generally one of the better blog-to-book books I've ever read. Highly recommended if you're interested in reading about a Big Year!

Journey Under the Midnight Sun (by by Keigo Higashino) 

Another Japanese Mystery, and I think the third one I've read by Higashino. This one is pretty long (I would say overly long) and you figure out whodunit pretty early, but the whydunit and will-someone-ever-catch-them elements propel you to the end. Definitely a motive I should have, but did not, see coming, which made the ending hit hard. Not my favorite by him purely because of the overlength, but good nonetheless.

The Long Run (by James Acker)

Queer YA, you knew it was making it on this list somehow. I wasn't sure an athlete love story would be my jam as they've been hit or miss for me in the past, but this one has so much depth, the characters and their relationship are actually wonderful and lovely and I cried of course. Recommended!

Noah Frye Gets Crushed (by Maggie Horne)

This was, vis a vis the RHC, "a middle grade book with an LGBTQIA main character." Absolutely adorable, funny and charming. full of terrific characters, although I would have liked to see Jessa developed better. I'm actually not a middle grade fan (Baby-Sitters Club notwithstanding ) but this nails it. Horne has got a sapphic YA debut coming out next month, can't wait for that!

Annie LeBlanc Is Not Dead Yet (by Molly Morris) 

Love the premise - every 10 years, someone in this small town gets to come back from the dead - wrapped in a queer YA.  I enjoyed it enough to finish it to the end but was my least favorite of these - I found it to be overly quirkified and aggressively 90s (authors need to stop with this).  I was thrown off at the very beginning by the quirky names. The main characters, Wilson and Ryan, are both girls. Ryan's twin brother is Mark, which makes no sense whatsoever as a sibling set. Wilson calls her mother by her first name, Jody, and Jody's ex, a man, is named Cass.  Wilson is named after Wilson Phillips. I was so confused and also, like, why do all the names have to be quirky.  My biggest issue is that the romance didn't fully work and relationships felt inorganic.  I finished it, I guess, is the best I can say!

Act Your Age, Eve Brown (by Talia Hibbert)

Read for the category "a genre book (SFF, horror, mystery, romance) by a disabled author."  Hibbert has fibromyalgia. Also this is an #OwnVoices book for autism, as Hibbert is queer and autistic. 

I'm not a huge romance reader but I did enjoy this one, the third in Hibbert's series about the Brown sisters.  The immature Eve Brown is cut off from her trust fund by her parents and decides to go get a job, hits her interviewer with her car, and somehow is still hired? And they have instant chemistry, great communication, and frankly some really contrived conflict before living happily ever after.

If you're a fan of contemporary romance, it is cute and I recommend it.

Books Make Great Friends (by Jane Mount)

This seemed like a silly category, "a picture book published in the last five years." I can go to Barnes and Noble and leaf through a picture book in 5 minutes. But dutifully I did my research, and found out about this book, about a girl who loves to read.

It's beautifully and meticulously illustrated, with so many amazing books represented. I originally checked this out from the library and when I Couldn't zoom in to read all the titles, I ordered the hardcover so I could pore over every book. It had so many of my childhood favorites (Anne of Green Gables! Anastasia Krupnik!) and modern ones I love (Melissa! Planet Earth Is Blue!) And here's a picture of the adult bookshelf. It has some of my all-time favorites, most notably Cloud Atlas, Americanah, Crying in H Mart, and Circe. Jane Mount clearly has great taste, so I want to try and make out all the titles if I can and add them to my library list.

 

 

The story itself - about making friends when you are awkward and shy - is very sweet, and I think will resonate a lot with my child, even though she's "too old" (theoretically) for picture books.   I loved the experience of reading this, and thank you Read Harder Challenge for this lovely gift!

The Final Season (by Andrew Gillsmith)

This was the most difficult RHC category for me this year, and still not sure if I nailed it, but I read this for a book that went under the radar in 2023." The question of course is what radar? Whose radar? Recommendations in the Goodreads group included a bunch of novels from the Tournament of Books short and longlist. They do find a lot of relatively niche books, but they are by definition on the ToB radar, so they're on the radar, so then they don't count! 

Someone suggested looking for books with a small number of reviews and ratings, and I think a random rec list had this book on it. Not only is it low on reviews and ratings, it isn't carried by any of my libraries, so I bought it. And as a humorous sci-fi book, I would fully expect it to show up on The Big Idea series on Scalzi's Whatever blog, which definitely counts as "the radar" for sci-fi, but it hasn't. (Dear Andrew Gillsmith: Scalzi readers would be so into this, you should get on The Big Idea when you publish the next one in the series.) 

Anyway, the book itself! It's a Douglas Adams-style book about a reality series that's been watching a doomed planet for 10,000 years. The planet's apocalypse is about to happen, and the showrunner has the opportunity to save the planet's inhabitants. But will she? A fun, funny read and really I do think it would be a hit with fans of Agent to the Stars or Hitchhiker's Guide.

To Be Taught, if Fortunate (by Becky Chambers)

This book marks the halfway point in my Read Harder progress this year, a sci-fi novella. It's about a group of four astronauts who are exploring other planets in between rounds of "torpor" and being adapted for the next environment via enzyme patches, and is narrated by the engineer, Ariadne.

It's very creative about what kinds of other planets and life forms may exist, and I think hinges on a sort of "Choose Your Own Adventure" ending.  But ultimately I didn't really love the characters, could have done without all the bed-hopping, and wished for this to be better fleshed out as a story.  The ending could have hit better if it was better developed. Ultimately a meh for me.

Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World (by Pénélope Bagieu)

For the RHC category "a comic that has been banned."  I'm so glad I got this on paper because the illustrations are absolutely stunning. This is an anthology of stories about brazen women around the world, from little known figures (like the woman who saved the Montuak lighthouse) to world-famous figures like Josephine Baker.

I'm guessing it's banned because it features at least one transgender woman and mentions sexual assault, murder, and other difficult topics in some of the (true) stories of these women's lives. But it's wonderful. Bagieu includes a list of more Brazen women at the end and it just made me long for another volume of this amazing book!

Get it for the Brazen women (and girls; my 12-year-old loved it) in your life.

The Devotion of Suspect X (by Keigo Higashino)

One of the Read Harder challenges this year is to read a "whydunit" or "howdunit" and this Japanese mystery was recommended in the "howdunit" category. And it definitely fits: you find out who is murdered, and by whom, at the very beginning. Then you follow the trail of the detectives investigating the case and the murderer as they try to cover their tracks.  The question isn't how did the murder occur, but how did the murderer cover their tracks and will the detective uncover the solution.

I thought it would be impossible for this novel to have some kind of twist, but it did anyway, and I loved it. The ending was abrupt (there is a sample of another book at the back, so partly it was that we were not at 100% yet in the Kindle progress meter when it ended) but really works. Another hit in my series of Japanese mystery novels!

Two Light Reads

A Most Agreeable Murder (by Julia Seales)

I chose this for the Read Harder category "read a book based solely on the title." It turned out to be pretty delightful - a quite silly pastiche of Jane Austen, Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie as told by Daniel Pinkwater.  One of the characters is named "Croaksworth" and the novel takes place at "Stabmort Park," if that gives you a sense of the style. The mystery and romance at the core are actually both very enjoyable, and what's not to love about the main character, a fine lady who longs to be a detective? Lots of Jane Austen easter eggs as well. If this sounds fun - it is! I very much hope there's a sequel.

The No-Girlfriend Rule (by Christin Randall) 

This was a young adult novel I picked up and then couldn't put down. It's told via a Dungeons & Dragons - excuse me, Secrets & Sorcery - campaign.  Hollis's boyfriend won't let her join his game, so she goes out and finds her own, among a bunch of awesome queer people.  Via the game, her character starts to have feelings for another character, and maybe Hollis doesn't realize how much of her own desires are in there too.  The boyfriend is truly awful from page one, and yeah it could have been a bit more subtle, but it makes the part where she finally figures out he is awful quite satisfying. I think if you are a D&D fan you will love it.  Oh! And amazing portrayal of a fat and neurodivergent heroine, both on the cover and on the page. It's done so, so well. Will definitely pick up Randall's future books!

Legends & Lattes (by Travis Baldree)

This book kicked off an entire genre - cozy fantasy - that is now a category in the Read Harder Challenge. My friend Gale also told me I must read this, even though fantasy is not my thing.  But between friendship and reading challenges, I made it happen.

It is of course delightfully cozy.  Our lead character, an orc named Val, dreams of retiring from battles and opening a coffee shop. Mild complications ensue, but mostly this is about the assembling of a charming cast of characters, a dash of romance, and general coziness.  There is a prequel which I will probably read, but mostly I want a sequel! I want more time in the world of these characters and their little coffee shop.

The Lost Journals of Sacajewea (by Debra Magpie Earling)

This was a twofer, both a Tournament of Books contender and a historical fiction book by an Indigenous author for the RHC.

I'm going to call this one a me problem. It's a wonderful story and written in such a creative fashion, with Sacajawea's unique vocabulary and interesting conventions like sacred words being written in a lighter typeface and so forth. So I'm not saying it's in any way cliche or derivative. Bu unfortunately I just do not vibe with classic indigenous literature.  Like, the mighty Spirit, the great buffalo, the wolf god, the river spirit, blah blah blah.  It's like descriptions of scenery to me, and it bores me to death. Plus, like yes, white people are colonizers and are evil, and everyone suffered, and by the end the cumulative effect was moving, but I was boredddddddd.

It's also not an easy read, because you have to translate Sacajawea's experiences, and it helps to know a little bit of the history being covered because it's easy to miss certain characters and plot points. And again, I just kept bouncing off the language. The book is a real achievement and the atmosphere and the feeling of it stayed with me in a positive way and I'm sure I could have gotten more out of it if I'd tried harder.  What I'm trying to say in the end is that I think I failed this book, it did not fail me.

Blackouts (by Justin Torres)

This is a Tournament of Books entry that also qualifies for the RHC, which is a delightful little two-fer.  It won the National Book Award in 2023, and I can understand why.  I think this NPR review can give you a better sense of the book than I can.

I've been turning it over in my head a couple of days and I think I appreciated this book more intellectually than emotionally.  But its a hell of an intellectual achievement. The blackouts and historical ephemera themselves are fascinating, as are the endnotes about them from the point of view of the narrator. That lifted the whole work for me.  

I wasn't as compelled by the two main characters and wished there had been something more, a stronger emotional core, I guess? But this is the kind of book that's perfect for plenty of ToB discussion, and I'm already looking forward to it.