pammab's 2019 challenge

Back into 2019!

My goal this year is to finish 19 books that garner 4 stars or more (without me goosing the stats! this means I shouldn't be checking up on my progress as the year goes on...). In 2018 I finished 34 books, of which 20 reached this threshold. Since I'm suspecting that 2019 will leave me less time to read, tying my goal to the year seems like a very good fit. I'm imagining categories to be rating buckets right now -- though that is so unimaginative that I may need to change it partway through the year.

So you all know, despite the best of intentions, I find myself ebbing and flowing in LT (and general internet) activity -- especially this past year, as I struggle to focus on books of length or substance -- so please don't be offended if I disappear for a stint! I still think of people here often, and I'm always wishing you the best.

I tend to read a lot of speculative fiction, just about anything except high fantasy/magical realism/grit or edgy settings, and a lot of famous fiction that I'm only getting to now, especially prize winners and bestsellers from the last decade or so. I've been steering far away from darkness, depression, and such, and putting down books that aren't either light or completely engrossing, and I try to track what I put aside as well. I particularly love engagement with (all) religion, education, social identity, and culture.

Ratings:
I rate according to this scale:
1 - Eek! Methinks not.
2 - Meh. I've experienced better.
3 - A-OK.
4 - Yay! I'm a fan.
5 - Woohoo! As good as it gets!

Two stars don't mean I hated it! It just means the book wasn't especially shiny when I read it. In fact, I tend to end up with a bimodal distribution, with a small peak around 2 and a larger peak around 4.

A. ★★★★★

7. Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (retelling of Iliad)
32. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
41. Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
46. Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin

B. ★★★★ and ★★★★½

2. The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy by Mackenzi Lee (vivid 1700s feminist adventure)
3. Silence on the Wire by Michal Zalewski (cybersecurity nonfic)
4. The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist by Ben Barres (short & moving)
6. The Long List Anthology: More Stories from the Hugo Awards Nomination List (mixed bag, some amazing)
8. Educated
9. Birth Partner
10. On the Come Up
11. Becoming
12. Cribsheet
13. Born a Crime
16. Fangirl
19. The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank
22. The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
23. A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea
27. Leviathan Wakes
28. The Happiest Baby on the Block
29. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
30. Attachments
31. Orphan Train
34. The No-Cry Sleep Solution
36. Carry On
37. Graceling
38. Unequal Childhoods
43. Families Like Mine
45. Endurance: My Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery
47. Fire
48. How to Hide an Empire

C. ★★★ and ★★★½

1. The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis (amusing but eventually dragged)
14. Symptoms of Being Human
15. High Output Management
17. Dreams From My Father
20. Being Human
21. House of Cards
24. Landline
25. The Handmaid's Tale
26. Into the Void
32. The Two-Front War
35. End Game
39. Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II
40. Martyr
42. Mistborn: The Final Empire
44. Wayward Son
49. Fire on High

D. ★★ and ★★½

5. Babel-17 by Samuel Delany (diverse... and misguided)
18. I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
50. The Dazzle of Day

E. ½ and ★ and ★½

(Hopefully this category stays empty!)

Options (books that have caught my eye recently -- potential TBR)

-- A Suitable Boy by Vikran Seth (http://www.librarything.com/topic/301295#)
-- "You'll Surely Drown if You Stay Here" (Alyssa Wong)
-- Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
-- Strange Weather: Four Short Novels by Joe Hill (rec from mathgirl40)
-- Among Others by Jo Walton
-- The root: a novel of the wrath & athenaeum (rec from karenb)
-- Spaceman of Bohemia
-- Time and Again (via DeltaQueen50, whitewavedarling)
-- The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage via scaifea
-- Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me
-- In Other Lands
-- Lumberjanes
-- Influencer
-- Ride the Wind
-- Homegoing (access)
-- Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain
-- Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World (via Mamie)
-- Conclave (via Vivienne)
-- A Thousand Splendid Suns (via lkernagh)
-- Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace
-- The Buried Giant (recommended by saroz in SantaThing 2017, access)
-- Crucial Accountability
-- Change Anything
-- "A Day in/on the ___" series by Kevin Kurtz (rec from pantsu)
-- America Chavez comic series by Gabby Rivera
-- Charles Dickens -- possibly Hard Times (scaifea, access)
-- Foundling (scaifea, 1001 Books Before You Grow Up)
-- The Spy Wore Red (christina_reads)
-- And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker (mathgirl40's choice over All Systems Red) -- at https://uncannymagazine.com/article/and-then-there-were-n-one/
-- Nine Perfect Strangers (light chick flick, access)
-- Into the Wilderness (American Outlander; tess_schoolmarm)
-- Artificial Condition by Martha Wells (second book in series) (access)
-- Speak Easy, Speak Love
-- Conversationally Speaking (access)
-- Circe (access)
-- How to Hide an Empire (access)
-- Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (scaifea)
-- The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within (scaifea)
-- The Future is Female (rabbitprincess)
-- The Bitter Side of Sweet (DeltaQueen50, access)
-- The Cruel Prince (mathgirl40, access)
-- The Kid by Dan Savage (access)
-- The Complete Lesbian & Gay Parenting Guide (access)
-- Family Pride (access)
-- Raised by Unicorns (access)
-- Finding our families (access)
-- Empire of the Summer Moon via tess_schoolmarm
-- Travelling in a Strange Land via VivienneR
-- A Memory Called Empire (new space opera)
-- Inkheart
-- Der Vorleser
-- Small is Beautiful (MissWatson, access)
-- Vivekananda
-- Children of Time - Big ideas science fiction dealing with consciousness, evolution and survival - and the most relateable giant spiders in genre fiction! (Arifel and EllsieFind, santathing 2019)
-- Incomplete Solutions - One of my favourite collections of 2019, bringing together a range of short work from Nigerian speculative fiction writer Wole Talabi. I particularly loved some of the longer SF pieces, including the title novella "Incomplete Solutions". (Arifel, santathing 2019)
-- The Wrong Stars - Great found-family light-hearted science fiction, with an interesting set-up, and tropey but satisfying alien adventures! (Arifel, santathing 2019)
-- The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein - one of the few non-fiction works I've read recently, this is a memoir from a white anti-apartheid activist whose husband was arrested and later acquitted as part of the Rivona trial - a really interesting part of history that I didn't know much about, and a very tense and ultimately quite heartbreaking read. (Arifel, santathing 2019)
-- Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear - I think this is her most "levelled up" work, a fantastic space opera with a lot to say about mental health and some really great galactic adventures. (Arifel and AurumCalendula, santathing 2019)
-- Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer - near-ish future utopias that I think might work for you. (Arifel, santathing 2019)
-- Informocracy by Malka Older - near-ish future utopias that I think might work for you. (Arifel, santathing 2019)
-- Ninefox Gambit - though quite a way along the weird-and-icky scale. (Arifel, santathing 2019)
-- Not For Use In Navigation: Thirteen Stories by Iona Datt Sharma (AurumCalendula, santathing 2019)
-- Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells (AurumCalendula, santathing 2019)
-- The Wheel of the Infinite by Martha Wells (AurumCalendula, santathing 2019)

Welcome back and have a great reading year! Wishing you many four-star-and-above reads!

Welcome back and I hope you have many entries in the top range!

Thanks, guys!

1. The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis
2018.01.09 / ★★★½ / review

I tried this book once many years ago and I couldn't get into it -- but I just recommended it to a friend I thought would enjoy it, and I wanted to give it another try. I love the first third or so -- it's a very amusing satire from the perspective of a devil, with snarky one-liners that I enjoyed. The implicit advice on how to live well and what to avoid was also fascinatingly aligned with other religions, which I enjoyed engaging.

By the second half, I was dragging though -- the novelty of the format seemed to wear off, or perhaps the biting satire lost steam. I also found one later chapter in particular to be a bit too sexist for me to be wholly comfortable, though of course it's a product of its era (about 80 years old now!).

I'm glad I read this classic, and I stand by it being an excellent choice for my friend, but I don't think I need to own a copy.

I like how you are going to list your books this year, I will be following along and will probably get struck with a few 4 star or better book bullets!

>11 pammab: I felt exactly that way about the Screwtape Letters.

Welcome back!

What a fun way to look back and view your reading for the year and easily see which ones worked and which ones didn't.

>12 DeltaQueen50: Thanks! I am selfishly hoping for a huge onslaught of excellent books. It helps when I'm hanging out around here too. ;)

>13 Tess_W: Yes! There's something in it that's grand, and the idea is excellent, but The Screwtape Letters doesn't quite hit the level of 4 stars of excellence...

>14 lkernagh: Thanks for the welcome back! I'm glad to be here and I hope I keep it up. :)

>15 LittleTaiko: I have really enjoyed the variety of approach this year! It's quite a different challenge when it was in 2009/2010 or so, when everything really did center around "stretch" reading goals. People are going so many creative ways with their challenges! Mine is not creative at all, but hopefully it has practical uses for me, and that at least is well aligned with who I am. ;)

>16 pammab: I got off to a good start, then I got into some mediocre reads, but the book I'm reading at the moment will receive a high rating.

>17 thornton37814: I'm so glad to hear it, Lori! I love to hear about the books that make people rave.

2. The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy
Mackenzi Lee
2018.01.12 / ★★★★½ / review

Absolutely lovely romp through the 1700s, featuring three very different and very vivid female leads. Felicity, the POV narrator, is a prickly young lady who keeps being thwarted in her desire to be a university-trained and board-certified doctor. Johanna, Felicity's old friend, was a tomboy child but also likes frilly things; they've had a falling out, but she is soon to marry Felicity's idol. Sim is an African Muslim pirate who may inherit a fleet from her commodore father -- so she's a princess to boot. Mix these very relatable if somewhat-larger-than-life humans with a rollicking adventure plot that can't be predicted, and the result is a very impressive achievement and deliciously easy read from Mackenzi Lee.

(I also think my favorite part is either the title, which takes on more and more overtones as the book progresses, or the final author's note, where the author lays out something I get the impression she believes fervently and got very sick of saying. It starts: "Women in historical fiction are often criticized for being girls of today dropped into historical set pieces, inaccurate to their time because of their feminist ideas and independent natures. It's a criticism that has always frustrated me, for it proposes the idea that women throughout time would not see, speak out, or take action against the inequality and injustices they faced simply because they'd never known anything else." Then she spends 8 pages giving the stories of modern-style women living in the 18th century whose stories have been largely forgotten or written out of history, but for whom we have definitive historical evidence that they espoused feminist ideals in the same time period as our heroines do. It's powerful and rousing conclusion that addressed my biggest eyebrow raises during the novel, and it's a fitting crown to an excellent book.)

I picked this book up at the library because it was flagged with "New", "YA", and "LGBT" (nothing explicit or even particularly romance-laden in it, though -- this is self-consciously not a romance), and it had a cover that made me think it'd be lighthearted, and it was thick enough to really get lost in -- and it turns out that strategy worked out very well. It's almost like librarians spend a lot of time considering good books to buy. ;) It also turns out that the same author wrote The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, which I have never been inclined to pick up before (but will now), and my not having read the previous novel didn't affect my enjoyment of this one in any way.

Strong endorsement from me if this seems like your kind of book!

3. Silence on the Wire
Michal Zalewski
gave up late 2017 but didn't decide to be done until 2019.01.05 / ★★★★ / review

Silence on the Wire is a solid description of the ways in which the internet can be unsafe (and wasn't designed for safety) -- it covers all the topics you would expect, as well as all the background knowledge necessary to make sense of them, a non-dry and non-academic tone. It also gets a bit bogged down with the sheer amount of stuff to cover, and having more solid background in this than the average Joe, I couldn't keep pushing myself through material I am already familiar with. My deciding not to finish it (after 18 months of being partway through) is not a slight on the book, which is an excellent around-the-board introduction to cybersecurity and its challenges.

>19 pammab: - Lovely to see another positive review for the Lee book! I hope to dip into both books (I think there are only two books in the series so far) at some point.

>21 lkernagh: I hope you pick it up! It's hard for me to imagine anyone whose interest is piqued by the idea not enjoying it to tiny pieces -- though it's definitely genre fiction so I expect some people would be turned off entirely just from the premise. :)

4. The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist
Ben Barres, with forward from Nancy Hopkins
2019.01.13 / ★★★★½ / review

Potent short autobiography from a groundbreaking neuroscientist who mentored his trainees extraordinarily and also used his tenure and status to advocate for women and other minorities in science -- including tirelessly advocating for a non-sexual harassment clause for all NIH-funded conferences, which still has not yet happened (ostensibly for legal reasons).

I was mightily moved by his personal story, even though it's clear he was more comfortable reflecting and interrogating science than his own beliefs and motivations, and there's definitely some meat lurking beneath the surface there. I am deeply saddened that he died before I even knew of his existence.

5. Babel-17
Samuel Delany
2019.01.15 / ★★½ / review

Linguist, poet, and sometimes-telepath Rydra Wong is asked to break a military code for the war effort, realizes what she is actually hearing is a complete language, and then learns the language while captaining a space crew on a quest to the areas that use it. The language Babel-17 -- like all languages, the book seems to say -- affects how you think and therefore what you think. Additionally, this language in particular is so highly analytic (not in the technical sense) that it facilitates inherent telepathy.

I found the linguistic premises rather far-fetched and hard to get past, and the plot hard to follow on audiobook. That said, the novel was extremely modern-feeling for being published in 1966, and that's the piece to which I found myself most reacting. There are references to polyamory and illegal sex and gay identities, and the diversity in the cast is astounding -- most strikingly, the lead is female, active, and named Wong! There is definitely some explicit lecturing on both the linguistic and diversity theories (one character remarks on interacting with "a bunch of the weirdest, oddest people I had ever met in my life" who after a while "didn't seem to be so weird or strange anymore"), though I can't really fault the book for its moralizing, since that's exactly what kept my interest.

Generally an interesting book, but more worth reading for its historic role and near-chutzpah & daring in imagining a diverse future than for the content itself, to my mind.

6. The Long List Anthology: More Stories from the Hugo Awards Nomination List
David Steffen (editor)
2019.01.18 / ★★★★ / review

Twenty-one stories assembled from the 2014 Hugo nomination list, self-published in an anthology with the support of a Kickstarter campaign -- these stories did not all win awards, and many play with themes that others have taken on, but there are some gems of stories and gems of ideas. Among my favorites are:

"The Breath of War" (Aliette de Bodard) -- A symbiotic relationship between women and the stonepeople they carve in puberty allows babies to quicken. Unlike most women, our protagonist does not have access to her breath-sibling, so she journeys to the mountains near the due date. This was my first exposure to the idea of stone people (a fascination rekindled with N. K. Jemisin's series this past year), and the tale is a beautifully written one of loss and freedom and coming of age. ★★★★

"Covenant (Elizabeth Bear) -- If we can rehabilitate felons by changing both their brains and bodies into new people, what is the fall-out for individuals? This story approaches a similar premise to Shusterman's Unwind from an adult, post-occurrence, high psychological perspective. ★★★★

"Goodnight Stars" (Annie Bellet) -- When the moon explodes, a group of kids supports one of their own in getting home to her widower father. ★★★½

"The Husband Stitch" (Carmen Maria Machado) -- Macabre, dissociated, and fascinating. A woman wears a green ribbon around her neck, and goes through the stages of life with it there. There are themes of maintaining parts of yourself despite marriage and family, and about loving others enough to give them what they want even when you don't, and bodily autonomy -- beautifully done. ★★★★½

"A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i" (Alaya Dawn Johnson) -- Key keeps humans in good quality arrangements in Hawaii for vampires to visit and use. An interesting approach to slavery and issues of consent and reasons people might be traitors to what others perceive as "their kind". ★★★★½

"A Year and a Day in Old Theradane" (Scott Lynch) -- A traditional fantasy trope -- wizards own a town and fight over it, a rag-tag group of misfits crosses one of them and is given an impossible task to complete by a deadline. Cute, easy read. ★★★★

"The Regular" (Ken Liu) -- An escort is murdered, and a woman on a personally and professionally driven quest to investigate. This is lovely speculative fiction, with its vision of a "Regulator" for brain chemistry (legally required for police), use of omni-present signals monitoring to catch criminals, and likely near-future technologies that make people feel safer but really just leave them vulnerable in new and different ways. An excellent spec fic story from Ken Liu, and highly recommended. ★★★★★

"Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)" (Rachel Swirsky) -- A Jewish girl with cancer nears the end of her life, and her bereft father creates an automaton and embodies it with all her essence and history and memories and personality. Their identities merge and diverge the last few weeks of Mara's life. Excellently structured, excellently thought through, excellently supported by a real backbone of religiosity. I've never seen the question of "if all your cells are destroyed and recreated somewhere else such that your consciousness persists unchanged, who are you?" handled in such a deft and impressive way. Very highly recommended. ★★★★★

---

And, because it came to me at the same time I was reading "Grand Jeté" and feels extraordinarily appropriate to that powerful story, I share with you a poem by Yehuda HaLevi, a medieval Jewish thinker of Muslim Spain:

It is a fearful thing to love
what death can touch.

A fearful thing to love,
hope, dream: to be --
to be, and oh! to lose.

A thing for fools this, and
a holy thing,
a holy thing to love.

For
your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was gift to me.

To remember this brings a painful joy.
'Tis a human thing, love,
a holy thing,
to love
what death has touched.

7. Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller
2019.01.24 / ★★★★★ / review

Gorgeous, lyrical, and unputdownable, this re-imagining of the Iliad through the eyes of Achilles' constant companion Patroclus is intoxicating.

Having tried and failed to read the Iliad, I found this book to bring all the characters, gods, and their attendant drama into the world of entrancing fiction. The foreshadowing was foreboding but not heavy-handed, the path to tragedy was inexorable but balanced with joy, the cultural context was accessible. Even for a known story and with the knowledge of Greek storytelling rooted in the back of my mind, Patroclus takes actions I wouldn't have expected (and his wise insights into men and power go beyond what I would have initially expected).

A visit to Greek tragedy that is as accessible as it is exquisite in storytelling and characterization -- a very rare find.

>26 pammab: I'm reading Song of Achilles at present and enjoying every word. Although I wish I had remembered more about the characters and gods before I started.

>26 pammab: I cannot wait to read this! I love, love ancient history, particularly the Trojan War, so read anything I can find about the ancient world.
I really loved Valerio Massimo Manfredi's trilogy on Alexander the Great.

>26 pammab: I loved this. I always enjoy seeing other people enjoy it just as much.

I'm so glad everyone else enjoys Song of Achilles as well!

I've been reading a ton of fanfic, but also just finished Educated and On the Come Up this past weekend, so reviews forthcoming for those.

>30 pammab: I am also pleased to report that, at ~ 1/3 distance, her second novel, Circe, is every bit as good.

>31 Helenliz: Onto the list Circe goes!

8. Educated: A Memoir
Tara Westover
2019.03.31 / ★★★★½ / review

Tara Westover grew up unschooled, unvaccinated, and unaware of culturally core facts, while she adroitly performed dangerous chores on her parents' fundamentalist Mormon property in Idaho. As a teenager, she studied for and took the ACT, gained entrance to Brigham Young University, and began an education-fueled journey that gradually but inexorably separated her from the family members who were most important to her childhood on every dimension imaginable.

An excellent book that I find very believable. Others have discussed in much greater detail and with greater insightfulness than I have to offer. My major comment is that I don't find Educated at all similar to Hillbilly Elegy, to which it has been endlessly compared. Educated is about an entirely different population with entirely different concerns (and it's much more incisive and better written to boot). The imposed alignment is redolent of city people painting with a very broad brush, which seems to entirely miss the point (and strength!) of personal memoir.

Definitely worth a read.

I'm going to try to update this thread and write some more reviews, and maybe even check in on others in the next few days!

X. The Star-Touched Queen
Roshani Chokshi
given up / ★★ / review

Didn't draw me in -- perhaps too much fantasy in the premise of the gods for my cuppa?

9. Birth Partner
Penny Simkin
2019.03.24 / ★★★★ / review

Recommended to us by a doula and chock-full of excellent information and advice. Focuses on the non-birthing partner's perspective (especially intimidating when it comes to what you might see in terms of pain if the partner opts against medication). Has a useful chart for identifying where you might fall on the "put me to sleep to deliver this kid" to "if I don't hurt I didn't do it right" spectrum, which uncollapses the endpoint caricatures and helps get everyone on the same page.

10. On the Come Up
Angie Thomas
2019.04.01 / ★★★★ / review

Very similar tone to Angie Thomas's first book The Hate U Give -- humorous light take on a serious topic that the characters, author and you all know is serious. Entertaining, easy read, engaging. I found the plot pretty obvious and not nearly as wrenching, perhaps because the themes of interpersonal relationships and making choices unwisely as youth having long effects are more mundane -- if more common. Would still recommend!

11. Becoming
Michelle Obama
2019.04.02 / ★★★★½ / review

Devourable memoir from Michelle Obama covering her journey to the present. Fast to read, extremely relatable, highly worthwhile.

X. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon
given up / ★★★ / review

I wanted to like this book -- I have heard wonderful recommendations and it touches on comics and queers and Jews -- but it didn't catch my fancy. It felt a bit too epic and hard to follow; it almost reminded me of Eugenides' Middlesex in its literary telling of a normal life. Perhaps the audiobook format detracted.

12. Cribsheet
Emily Oster
2019.04.28 / ★★★★ / review

Cribsheet provides an overview of the current best literature on parenting practices and child development. From her background in quantitative academia, the author reviews the relevant papers, discards the ones with untrustworthy methodologies, and summarizes the best evidence we have on topics like sleep training, spanking, TV, and potty training.

The evidence is much weaker than the evidence in Oster's excellent pregnancy book Expecting Better, but I still appreciate the no-nonsense presentation of facts in this book. I can't say I was surprised by any findings (they all either agreed with my predilections or I had very weak predilections on the topic to start), but I do appreciate having solid ground on which to build my opinions. Recommended.

13. Born a Crime
Trevor Noah
2019.06.01 / ★★★★½ / review

Trevor Noah is extremely insightful, and I am glad we get to benefit from that in the form of a memoir. This book picks episodes from his early life in South Africa that will be maximally interesting to American audiences, portrays them with characteristic humor, and draws morals about humanity, life, and love that speak loudly and across divides. Very well-written, very entertaining, and very worthwhile.

14. Symptoms of Being Human
Jeff Garvin
2019.06.03 / ★★★½ / review

I picked up this story of a gender fluid teenager coming into their own via an outing on their blog as a light read -- not because the subject matter is light (with some inference there are actually some very heavy scenes) but because it seemed like the sort of book that would follow a predictable path and not require much thought. By that definition of a light read, this book definitely qualifies. I devoured it. I didn't want to put it aside.

It is a bit formulaic, but it handles gender fluidity and coming out and anxiety extremely well, it is humorous, and it doesn't make any demands. My only complaint would be that for all the careful attention to getting gender fluidity right, the author has some gaping holes when it comes to veganism (a recurring Starburst theme is only the tip of the nonexistent vegan research iceberg). Disappointing given the quality of the rest of the book in introducing mainstream readers to new worlds.

Excellent book in the "what the cover says is what you get" genre. I am giving it 3.5 stars because that is about where that genre caps out for me -- but I enjoyed it immensely and would recommend it to others, especially as an introduction to trans identities.

15. High Output Management
Andrew S. Grove
2019.06.06 / ★★★ / review

A classic in which some sections spoke to me and some sections fell flat. I suspect this might be largely driven by my background and experiences -- some felt dead obvious and the breakfast factory metaphor felt forced, but a handful of comments were pretty valuable to me.

Valuable to me:
- Goal is to engender productivity in everything -- feedback, reviews, framing motivations. See it all through that lens.
- Motivating people means addressing their needs a la Maslow's hierarchy, giving opportunities to compete on metrics, ensuring folks get recognition in the form they want

Not a book I will be buying or recommending, but one I might revisit and that wasn't a waste of 2 hours to skim and focus on subareas.

Great to see you posting again!

>42 pammab: that's interesting, a teen is currently dealing with those issues. Would this be something they, and those around them, might find helpful?

>44 DeltaQueen50: You too! Love your reviews.

>45 Helenliz: Yep, I think it might be a good I'm-not-alone resource for that teen, and I'd definitely recommend it for any adults who care about or want to be able to support the kid a bit better, because it gives a really good introduction to major challenges of the trans population in an accessible narrative form. The book is a bit kitchen-sinky and includes a rape scene (it's not graphic but it's there) among other plot points, so for a kid going through gender identity struggles, I'd definitely also want a trusted adult aware of what's in the book and able to support if the kid needs it, though.

16. Fangirl
Rainbow Rowell
2019.06.11 / ★★★★½ / review

Cath, known throughout the internet as one of the most brilliant writers of slash fanfiction set in an extremely popular British magical boarding school, enters college still attached to her twin Wren. Wren wants to establish a separate identity, abandon their cowritten fanfiction, and make the stereotypical most of her college experience. As a result, Cath starts school alone, and she spends the year finding herself, making peace with her parents, working on her fiction, and making friends.

Just a lovely easy book. It introduces themes and layers them onto each other bit by bit -- divorced parents, transferring writing skills, making the big leagues in one genre and being a small fish in another, assigning credit, making sense of boys, finding mentors, deciding whether to stay after a semester at school, dealing with mental illness and anxiety, and more. As a modern coming-of-age story, it's top-notch, filled with a warm humor and lots of love. Highly relateable for geeky sorts, and widely recommended. I'm already reading more by this author.

(And a heartfelt thank you to whoever recommended this book in this group -- I forgot to note your name, but I'm really glad I got to this book. It's exactly the sort of gentle enjoyment I've been looking for.)

17. Dreams From My Father
Barack Obama
2019.06.23 / ★★★ / review

I wanted to enjoy Obama's memoir, especially after Becoming's adorable description of Obama running off to try to finish it... but it was a slog. I have a suspicion this book rests only on the glow of its incredibly impressive author, because to me it is only an average book, seemingly focused more on introspection than on engaging others. That's fine, of course, but it's also a grim reckoning against the height of my expectations.

18. I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
Erika L. Sánchez
2019.07.15 / ★★½ / review

Our narrator Julia comes to adulthood by making sense of all the secrets and facts unsaid around her, as part of the first generation of natural-born Americans in her family.

This book didn't speak to me. I found it both gritty and stereotypical, without much character development or much plot beyond a "best of" set of tropes. Very disappointing given its awards.

>47 pammab: I love Rainbow Rowell, so I'm glad you enjoyed Fangirl! My favorite of her books is Attachments.

>50 christina_reads: I just finished Landline and my partner and I started Eleanor & Park on audiobook (though that one will probably be a long time in finishing unless we take a lengthy car trip sometime soon). I am on the waitlist for Attachments too -- I'm really looking forward to it. It was probably you that recommended Fangirl a year or two ago then. :)

19. The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank
David Plotz
2019.07.18 / ★★★★ / review

A full-length treatment of the donors, children, mothers and families who were conceived through the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank advertised as focusing on Nobel prize winning donors.

David Plotz writes insightfully and colorfully about the history and human relationships created through the sperm bank, about the meaning of family, and the drive to understand the genetic and experiential components of identity. It is an interesting and highly humanized tale, worth reading not by everyone but by the people intrigued by the premise.

20. Being Human
Peter David
2019.08.18 / ★★★ / review

Clearly part of a long series, this book requires more context than the amount we arrived with, and doesn't quite deliver a self-contained punchline. Also, its incorporation of gods felt a bit like fan service to the Edith Hamilton + Star Trek fanboy contingent. That said, for a read aloud for the purpose of hearing a voice, it worked extremely well, and we will probably start on the first book next and work our way through in order. (On a side note, I was impressed by the forward-thinking nature of the plot and characters given the publication date. Maybe I just underestimate the past. Or maybe I want to think the best of the motivations of the 1990s giver of this book.)

Would not recommend starting here, but it felt like a solid installation in one of those series that is designed to speak to fans' need for installations in their addiction.

21. House of Cards
Peter David
2019.09.02 / ★★★ / review

House of Cards is the first book in an 18-book Star Trek subseries that we started at book 12 (Being Human) -- this book makes a lot more sense and requires a lot less context than the first one we read. The plot, however, amounts only to "let's get all these characters introduced and onto a starship" -- so the book isn't worth reading unless you intend to read the series. (You should read the series of the idea of reading lengthy Star Trek novelizations is exciting -- don't go out of your way, but definitely worth the time if this genre is your cuppa.)

Having read a later book and only half understood the characters, it was fantastic to have them introduced properly, get their backstories in one place, and learn all the monikers. Even so, a book that introduces about a dozen main characters without actually doing much with them might be hard to follow for someone who hadn't already engaged a story in this universe -- so your appreciation will likely vary based on your background and willingness to engage the series genre.

So 66% of the way through the year, I was up to 11 books with 4+ stars -- 57% of the way to my goal. That suggests that achieving my goal this year is actually achievable! Onward with the review writing! I have only 4 more unreviewed-but-finished books to plug in, and then I'm off to start reading recent threads.

22. The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
Mackenzi Lee
2019.09.03 / ★★★★ / review

Self-absorbed Monty heads to Europe with his sister, best friend, and a tutor who is leading them around the Continent -- just what highborn Englanders apparently send their children to do in the 18th century. Monty has had his share of trauma and it makes its way to the surface in a bunch of bad behavior, but he's loveable and clearly cares about his friend and his sister. In addition to a rollicking adventure plot involving pirates, alchemy, and evil rich men set on chasing the trio, we get to see Monty's gradual awareness of the effect his lousy coping mechanisms have on the people who care about him, and by the end he endeavors to do better.

Great fun, easy to read, lovely all around.

I actually read this series backwards, starting with The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy, and came to this one because I enjoyed the sequel so much. I don't think it quite measured up, but perhaps that's because I'd been spoiled on some of the plot points and had already met the characters. I do love how the author gets into each of the siblings' heads and fleshes them out quite distinctly. They clearly care a lot for each other, even when they are fussing as siblings are wont to do.

23. A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea
Don Kulick
2019.09.17 / ★★★★½ / review

A non-traditional telling of a very traditional anthropological experience. For multiple many-month stints since the 1980s, Don Kulick hiked and canoed his way deep into the Papua New Guinean swamp to live among villagers whose endangered language tipped over to unrecoverable. He explains the trajectory of and reasons for the language's death, which are rooted deeply in the local culture, and he provides colorful descriptions of that culture, entirely lacking the usual studied neutrality of anthropology.

Highly entertaining and itself potentially of anthropological interest, this book is a captivating account of people and beliefs in contact with an outside world that has left them behind, of which Kulick himself is a privileged representative. Some of the most interesting cultural accounts to me are those of the villagers' attitude toward children -- the surly first words that villagers hear in their babies' babbling, the highly capable children who handle knives from the moment they can grasp, the association of both children and the village's native language Tayap with animalistic urges compared to the association of maturity and the regional pidgin with reason, and so on.

Fascinating material, engagingly written. We don't have that many more "uncontacted" regions left, much less regions that have had an anthropologist embedded to watch an entire generation grow up and raise children of its own as contact increased. This book is likely to stand as one of the only and the last non-academic accounts of a substantial cultural shift toward regional (and eventually worldwide?) monocultures.

24. Landline
Rainbow Rowell
2019.09.17 / ★★★½ / review

Before a Christmas trip out of town with her family, a work-related chance of a lifetime comes up for Georgie. She decides to stay home, work, and stay with her mother for the holiday. Her husband decides to take the kids. When she realizes that these decisions might be the defining crisis of her marriage, she starts trying to reach her husband on the landline in her childhood room -- and reaches the version of him decades past, during their courtship.

Somehow I really liked this book despite the magical realism and despite the guessable plot -- perhaps it's the warm and solid execution of two simultaneous love story getting-together-despite-obstacles tropes? Perhaps it's the clever dialogue and on-point characterization (even down to the 4-year-old daughter living in a pretend magical cat world)? I'm not sure. There's not much substance here, but it's easy beach reading for the winter holidays.

25. The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
2019.09.23 / ★★★ / review

A fundamentalist Christian theocracy takes over part of North America, holding everyone in line through strict control of sex and gender.

This was a re-read for me of a book that I read in early high school and absolutely adored for the way it broke open feminism and religion and gender politics and dystopia and totalitarianism for me. I thought it was Atwood that I liked, and I've read or tried to read a few more books by her since, but none of them lived up to the first. And now, on reread, I find I'm just not that into The Handmaid's Tale either.

I found this book pretty pedestrian. I didn't like that it was entirely worldbuilding with barely any characterization or plot. Perhaps that was because the world wasn't surprising to me. It could be that the original story was groundbreaking and has since suffused a lot of literature that plays with the same themes better (a la LeGuin). Or it could be that we just know all the lessons in this book already. I'm really not sure, but there wasn't much shiny here for me, and I was certainly duty-reading too much to justify investing in the suspiciously-aligned-with-HBO-popularity sequel.

That said, I did quite enjoy the tart send-up of academia in the Afterword. I didn't understand the point of that section at all as a 14-year-old, but I am quite able to appreciate it now. I was also set back by the implicit message that "people with guns will win", because it underlines the same message that I hear around not giving up guns so as to be the people and the cultural values that survive when the revolution comes. So, I still find a bit of interesting spec fic commentary/reflection in the book -- just not enough for me relative to its length.

26. Into the Void
Peter David
2019.09.27 / ★★★ / review

More background for this series, with not a lot of action. We continue to build up characters, bring them together (one major character stows away), and establish background political tension with refugees and an area of space known as the Gauntlet.

Onward! So far this series definitely reads like a large book that could have been edited down into a single volume but that was instead chopped into pieces and sold separately. I suppose that's not a bad way to make money -- it's faster to write, faster to edit, and creates more units for fans to procure.

>57 pammab: That book caught my attention when I saw it listed in a giveaway or upcoming books list. Several friends of mine have gone to Papua New Guinea to work with some of the indigenous peoples by living among them and translating the Bible into their language. One friend who went to provide support to the translators by doing some of the typesetting returned to the States, working for the same organization, when her mother's age-related needs made that necessary. She just continued what she was doing but from a distance.

>61 thornton37814: When I was in high school and interested in linguistics, I seriously considered doing exactly what your friends do -- I'd have loved to chat with your friends to hear about their experiences. :) I got the impression from the book that Papua New Guinea is no laughing matter; the cultures are very very different from ours, which makes it hard for both sides to connect, and which is pretty impressive for your friends. The author also says very explicitly that as he was trying to construct a grammar and lexicon, it was really hard because the older generation would struggle to find the word for a concept or would disagree vehemently with each other on the correct word. As a result, the missionary dictionaries from a generation prior when the language was in active use were invaluable.

27. Leviathan Wakes
James S. A. Corey
2019.10.01 / ★★★★ / review

The planets of our colonized solar system hang in a delicate balance. When a spaceship's away team observes their home vessel annihilated, they share their circumstantial observations with all of humanity. The resulting war serves to hide a greater threat -- an immediate threat from sociopathic corporate interests and a long-term threat from outside the solar system.

Apparently this book is famous and the source of the Expanse TV series, and I didn't realize that until after I had picked up the first novel. The genre-inclusive book runs from crime thriller to space opera to zombie story to off-kilter love story, which I also didn't realize that until I was embedded in it. Either of those facts might have dissuaded me from this book, but not knowing either of them meant that I got to discover the oddities for myself -- and the book does hang together. I struggled initially to keep the characters (and worse, the political factions) straight, but it didn't take too long to make sense of them all.

The central issue in the book is whether all information should be freely given to all parties, whether it should be strictly controlled and deployed for well-thought-out purposes, or something in between. It's a fantastic and timely theme, and it's addressed through plot rather than explicit commentary. Even so, each standpoint has a main character who shills for it blatantly, which detracts from the artfulness of the presentation.

This is a rollicking adventure incorporating detectives, vying political factions, space opera, mystery, and vomit zombies. It's deeper than one would imagine from the summary and worth enjoying for what it is, but it's not Deep. For me, although it's definitely a solid 4-star book, I'm not inspired to seek out its sequel.

28. The Happiest Baby on the Block
Harvey Karp
2019.10.02 / ★★★★ / review

Modern classic book on helping newborns to cry less.

The book is a classic because his methods work. I had been previously taught the 5 S method (swaddle, shush, side/stomach, swing/shake, suck) so those sections were not particularly helpful, but I did appreciate a number of asides on topics like ear infections and teeth coming in. I also appreciated the section on how the 5 S's apply to sleep, complete with recommendations for timelines for weaning. I took specific notes in the comments on my instance of the work.

N.B.: I'm not sure what the second edition adds beyond a lot of thinly-veiled advertising copy for a "smart sleeper" that "automatically adjusts to your baby's sleep needs" (the only one on the market appears to be sold by the same folks who wrote the book). If the chapter on sleep was added to sell that machine, the second edition is still worth seeking out because the chapter is worthwhile. But if the first edition also has that chapter, I'd recommending seeking out the first edition; the second edition's self-serving regular admonitions to consider such a machine sat very poorly with me.

29. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
Matthew Walker
2019.10.04 / ★★★★½ / review

Walker packages everything we know about the science of sleep for laymen, not shying from scare tactics and relying extensively on evolutionary imagery.

Very good book, but the exhortative author deliberately encourages audience terror; he definitely believes he's sharing a gospel. His reliance on arguments from evolution annoy me, because I find "evolution" tends to be used like "human nature" -- anyone can appeal to it for as justification for anything, and the arguments always seem pretty appealing on the surface. Even so, the science and the experiments portrayed are strong, and this is a book that is rightly changing behaviors and making people think twice before engaging in unquestioned cultural practices that are problematic for good sleep. Definitely a book that I'll be recommending.

30. Attachments
Rainbow Rowell
2019.10.05 / ★★★★ / review

In 1999, Lincoln is hired by a newspaper to read the emails of its employees that hit a recently installed "bad word" filter. He does his job for everyone but one pair of social emailers, whose exchanges he enjoys too much to send them warnings. As he falls deeper into his eavesdropping campaign, he becomes embroiled in the emotional struggles of the women he's observing.

This is a very cute love story. It reads like it has a contrived premise ("use this set of bad words as the catalyst for falling in love"), which I happen to love in such stories. The language and intertextuality and jokes and turns of phrase are highly enjoyable, and the conclusion isn't foretold. Too bad the characters are creepy in their love entanglements; I was uncomfortable throughout that our protagonists choose to act on impulses they know are immoral, though the characterization might read as particularly human or especially love-induced-heart-warming to others.

31. Orphan Train
Christina Baker Kline
2019.10.08 / ★★★★ / review

Drawing explicit parallels between the poor outcomes of the orphan train and the poor outcomes of today's foster care system, Kline tells an engaging story of an Irish immigrant who lost her parents in New York and was sent to Minnesota by train. As one might expect when children are advertised as a source of income, the folks stable and loving enough to know they couldn't possibly provide for the orphans' true needs opt out of the entire process.

As historical fiction, this book is excellent. It tempers its sadness with happiness and seems rooted in reality and research throughout, and it is highly engaging. It isn't mind-expanding on any level other than the historical context, but on the strength of its plot and context alone, it more than pays for its time investment. It also verges on damning most of us for our complicity in enabling a broken foster care system even today.

(thanks to dudes22 for the recommendation of this book)

>65 pammab: Thumbs up for your review of Why We Sleep. I've requested it from the library.

>68 rabbitprincess: Hope you enjoy! Best read when you're doing well at sleeping, I think....

32. Eleanor & Park
Rainbow Rowell
2019.10.11 / ★★★★★ / review

This high school romance between two misfits rings true in the dialogue, characters, plot, and everything else. Telling the story of a fat and a half-Asian-in-Omaha protagonist brought together by music, Rowell takes on issues of self-doubt and abuse. The characters act like adolescents in their focus on themselves and their misinterpretation of others, with self-centeredness intermixed with amazing depth of insight. The plot kept us guessing, the setting was fresh, and the exploration was bathed in authorial love -- even as the majorly damaged character kept acting on that damage. A really excellent book; Rowell can write, and her critical acclaim is well-deserved.

>66 pammab: >70 pammab: I'm so glad you're enjoying Rainbow Rowell! I love her books.

>71 christina_reads: Totally devouring them. :blush:

33. The Two-Front War
Peter David
2019.10.14 / ★★★ / review

The saga continues with the rediscovery (kinda) of the sister Si Cwan adores, some additional plot for our Vulcan doctor, and the arrival of the refugees to a planet that accepts them. It ends on yet another cliffhanger -- though the plot here is much more substantive than that of previous books. It's beginning to come together, though, and the writing continues to be solid.

34. The No-Cry Sleep Solution
Elizabeth Pantley
2019.10.16 / ★★★★½ / review

The usual advice on baby sleep 0-24 months, well-organized and complete. After a few chapters, I didn't feel that I needed to read anymore (but I skimmed through anyway). This would be an excellent first-stop book. Fairly complementary to The Happiest Baby on the Block.

Putting down All the Pretty Horses -- it's too slow-moving and hard to follow on audiobook for me, perhaps because of the density of the language on my scattered brain. Cormac McCarthy may be an author I'll need to revisit in the future, or read on paper where I have more control over the pacing.

35. End Game
Peter David
2019.10.22 / ★★★ / review

Okay, so this "wrap-up" book of this quartet feels like bizarre crackfic. A serious spoiler: what we've been leading up to for about 1000 pages is that an important PLANET cracks open and births a GIGANTIC BIRD?!?! Plus more on Kalinda and our sexual subplot that is used as the only mechanism to characterize a Vulcan. Iunno. If I weren't committed to reading this series for other reasons, I doubt I'd be continuing. But I probably wouldn't have picked this series up to begin with, either, in that case, so perhaps my opinion should be discounted entirely.

Peter David's tendency to have his characters interrupt each other in dialogue, use sentence fragments, and trail off with ellipses even in his narration is getting on my nerves a bit. I simultaneously find myself more impressed with his zingers, though; the line-over-line dry humor can be quite laugh-inducing.

36. Carry On
Rainbow Rowell
2019.10.29 / ★★★★½ / review

Featuring an original and modern magical world in which longstanding cultural memes produce lasting power, Carry On is in dialogue with the genre of British magical boarding school tales. It focuses its wry commentary on the school master figurehead, who regularly puts a Chosen One child in danger despite his status as the safeguarder of his wards, and includes pointed-but-humorous asides on topics like the role of the smart sidekick, the love interest, and the evil antagonist who attracts an unwarranted amount of obsession.

If you read many British fantasy novels as a child or you've read at least one as an adult, this book is worth your time. The characterization, plot, and worldbuilding are top-notch, and the consciousness of the genre's stereotypes makes this book appropriate and entertaining for adults as well as kids.

37. Graceling
Kristin Cashore
2019.11.01 / ★★★★ / review

Katsa has a supernatural talent for fighting, and like other Graced individuals in her kingdom, she performs the work her king commands. His commands tend toward the smallminded and gruesome, since he rules his kingdom through fear. As Katsa comes into her own, she throws off his influence on her, and rebels by fighting on behalf of the downtrodden. As one particular mystery deepens, she finds herself drawn in, and drawn toward a man whose story is interwoven with it and with her.

Full of fantasy tropes and an excellent, unputdownable story -- I find myself regularly returning to its characters and imagery in my mind, even days past finishing it, and I'd love to spend more time with these characters. (One quibble the author calls out in the afterword -- "Po" as a main character name is eminently distracting, being a German word for "butt"! Alas, she didn't know at the time of publishing.)

(Reminded of its existence by a recent and positive christina_reads review -- thanks!)

38. Unequal Childhoods
Annette Lareau
2019.11.04 / ★★★★ / review

Unequal Childhoods is a landmark book in understanding the interactions between class, the culture of childraising, and the expectations of institutions like schools and medical offices in late 20th century America. Lareau's central thesis is that middle class parents (which includes people I would consider rich) engage in "concerted cultivation" of their children, giving them ample opportunity to practice a cultural repertoire of skills such as playing well under the command of others with institutionally vested authority, politely demanding the institution address your questions and concerns, and ensuring success when on a team of people with whom you have no longstanding connections. At the same time, working class and poor parents allow their children to "grow naturally", giving them ample opportunity to be children, have free time, self-organize into playgroups of varying ages where leaders emerge naturally rather than being appointed from the outside, and teaching implicitly and explicitly that institutions are not easy to understand and should not to be trusted. The second edition includes a follow-up with the children about ten years later, when they are 18-21 years old, and notes that the original conclusions are supported by the children's life trajectories. Lareau also notes the middle class children seemed to reach a level of maturity between that of children and adults earlier and sustained it even into college, whereas the working class and poor children were clearly children in elementary school but by 18 were fully independent and grown.

This book proved to be a fascinating explication of the competing philosophies of the families I grew up with and still interact with -- this book feels like it would make for wonderful discussion in a K-12 educational setting, especially with the children themselves. I wonder how much of the parental nagging that college professors receive is caught up in parents who are familiar with the findings of this book. I also wonder how much of the successful charter school mantras around keeping the kids for long days and giving them access to highly educated teachers who can give them enrichment experiences and explicitly teach cultural expectations fell out of this book -- I have a feeling it is quite a lot. Her point about poorer families being more likely to engage in corporal punishment and how that puts them at risk from institutions, engendering legitimate distrust of those organizations for a cultural practice that in other eras would be unremarkable, is also well-received; I expect similar legitimate distrust fuels a substantial amount of current American cultural wars.

A lot of my initial criticisms Lareau eventually addressed. For instance, I was dismayed at her assumption of meaningful consent to be analyzed through participant-observation for an academic book by parents who don't even understand that "tooth decay" is equivalent to "cavities". She has a chapter at the end framing this question, though not as baldly as I'd have liked; to my mind the only possible ethical justification is one in which she owns that her study takes advantage of less-advantaged families who cannot grasp what they are consenting to in order to explicate their opinions to the powerful institutions that now will misunderstand those families less frequently -- a questionable ethical position to my mind, but the only reasonable justification I can perceive. I'd also still have liked to tease apart cause-and-effect a bit more than she was able to do -- if there had been sufficient money for all needs and still money left over for childrens' activities, would the poorer families have encouraged that behavior? Her argument seems to brush this aside by arguing (admittedly strongly) for the cultural components of how parents determine their children's activities, but I'd have liked some explicit evidence addressing whether it's the culture that causes the choices regardless of how much money is available, or whether it's the money that causes the culture.

Because the main thrust of the argument is articulated on the jacket, the reviews, and the first chapter in increasing depth, I was concerned that the entire book would devolve into a series of anecdotes that added nothing -- but that was not in fact the case. The chapters are rich and well-argued, and I see why this book continues to be a landmark study, despite (because of?) its consequentialist ethics.

39. Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II
Liza Mundy
2019.11.05 / ★★★ / review

During WWII, as men shipped out, women were recruited for top-secret work in codebreaking -- initially by hand, and then eventually in building and running the machines that assisted in breaking daily cipher settings quickly.

I found this book to contain lots of anecdotes, and not much of a thesis. I suppose that's to be expected in a book like this, which is deliberately just slightly more polished than oral history, but I do wish that each chapter had had a clearer argument or theme or takeaway that I was supposed to learn and hold close to my heart forever after. My main takeaway was initial surprise that most American codebreaking efforts initially focused on the Pacific front. It makes sense, of course, because our European allies had already been working hard against Nazi Germany with the stories we have been hearing for decades of Bletchley Park -- but culturally these days there is so little attention paid to the war in the Pacific that I often forget it was The Major Front for quite a long time. Just as in England, in the USA, women were the forefront of codebreaking, and just as with the American male troops, the Army vs. Navy competition was fierce. I would have loved more explicit acknowledgment that the women have been underappreciated because they obediently stayed silent, even long after they needed to stay silent -- a gender-based difference in attaining credit that ensures that even highly illustrious and effective women effectively contribute to the invisibility of women's value in the workplace.

I wouldn't say that Code Girls is an astounding book that demands everyone to sit up and take notice, but it is a solid book for anyone interested in women's studies, war, WWII, and/or codebreaking.

>78 pammab: Hooray, glad I didn't lead you astray with Graceling! I'm told the companion novels Fire and Bitterblue are also great, so I'll have to get to them sometime.

>81 christina_reads: Nope, not astray at all -- Graceling was wonderful and I'm so glad of the timing and positive review!

>80 pammab: - I have a copy of that one lurking on my e-reader. Great review!

>83 lkernagh: I hope you enjoy it! Female codebreaking efforts are definitely a story worth telling, and I'm really glad the author captured them for posterity, before all these women pass away still silent on their experiences.

40. Martyr
Peter David
2019.11.12 / ★★★ / review

Lots of talk of sex and religion as Selar's pon farr with hermaphrodite Burgoyne 172 really takes off and Calhoun is greeted as a god heralded with the ridiculous space bird from the previous book -- but this book doesn't have much to actually say about either topic. The novel seems to be dabbling in risque themes just to dabble in them, rather than because it has an original viewpoint to share. I can't say I care for it, but again, I don't hate it either.

I'll echo again my overall judgment of the other books in the series: if you want to read Star Trek novelizations for their setting, this is a very acceptable series to visit to fill that need. If you want something else or if you want something deeper (a la the TV spec fic commentary on our lives), you should look elsewhere.

41. Record of a Spaceborn Few
Becky Chambers
2019.11.13 / ★★★★★ / review

Humanity left a dying planet on a fleet of ships that sought a habitable planet while generations were born, grew old, and died on board. Now the ships endlessly circle a weak sun, a gift from one of the alien races that humanity stumbled across less than 100 years ago, and the contact with highly advanced and distinct cultures is throwing "what we've always done" into upheaval.

I have no words for how much I loved this humane and beautifully crafted story of finding purpose in the midst of massive and inexorable change. It opens in death and closes in birth, it has richly imagined characters at different life stages and from different source perspectives, it speaks background truths of environmental destruction and the threat of automation and the role of religion, its spaceborn humanity and worldbuilding is at once entirely familiar and entirely foreign. It's immensely calm and immensely emotive, it has the gentle touch of thematic layers atop solid setting, characters, and plot that I seek in my fiction, and it speaks wisdom. I didn't expect Becky Chambers could pull off yet another book so sensitive or astute as A Closed And Common Orbit -- but with this book, she jumped the same high bar for meaningful soft science fiction.

>86 pammab: Excellent review, you put into print my thoughts about this book as well!

>87 DeltaQueen50: Glad I can return the favor, since everything you review I'm in awe of your words for. :)

>86 pammab: >87 DeltaQueen50: I fully agree.

42. Mistborn: The Final Empire
Brandon Sanderson
2019.11.15 / ★★★½ / review

In a highly stratified society of noblemen and slaves, the seemingly immortal Lord Ruler is a god. After a series of horrible experiences in this society that lead him to "snap" and develop magical powers, gentleman thief Kelsier wants to tear it all down. He assembles an inner cadre and they assemble and execute a plan for taking down the Final Empire -- but nothing quite follows plan and there are secrets within secrets.

I don't often read fantasy, but I thought I'd dip my toe into this highly lauded novel. There's a lot to enjoy in it, but ultimately it didn't inspire me onward to more immediately. I'm willing to chalk that up to the book being primarily escapism in a vein that doesn't hit my happy buttons; despite being substantially more logical than most books in its system of magic and care with implications, it doesn't cast anything about our modern world in new light, which is my bread-and-butter.

At its core, this is the story of a street rat girl discovering she has value, learning to trust, and overcoming her damage. Vin is impressively good at everything, from thieving to pretending to be a noblewoman to coming into her powers (and I love that we got such nice scenes in each world with the same character, and the banter between her and her noble love interest is phenomenal) -- she even somehow overcomes 16 years' worth of damage from the person she was closest to in the world over the course of just one year. Vin in fact verges so close to a Mary Sue in a book that otherwise fills all plot holes -- often going out of its own way to do so awkwardly, as well as to awkwardly stress that Kelsier views Vin in only a fatherly way, truly, wholly -- that I have to expect that we're leading up to her taking the place of the magical and powerful Lord Ruler himself. I quite like, however, that my experience reading the book echoed her experience living it; I was fully expecting an unreliable narrator and double or triple crossing from all our main characters, who all turn out to be good men in the end (and yes, all other characters except the dead mother and the mean girl noblewomen are indeed men).

The earring motif was extremely strange. It entirely failed Chekhov's gun test, and even at the end of the book something feels incomplete on that front. There were at least two or three climactic ways it could have been used, but none connected -- it's just an earring. Perhaps it's being reserved for future books?

I loved the innovative magic mechanism and its scientific, periodic table-like nature. I also loved that Kelsier intended to overthrow the Lord Ruler in people's hearts and minds, even if he couldn't get to the man himself. I found myself thinking a lot on the story and listening as much as I could -- it's very compelling as plot and imagery and worldbuilding.

I also mostly enjoyed the audiobook, which added substantially to each of the characters and helped keep them distinct from each other. Unfortunately the castrated wise man servant, one of few people familiar with the old ways, being portrayed with a Japanese accent is just wrong wrong wrong and full of all the worst racial stereotypes, and that choice nearly spoiled me on the audiobook at the beginning.

Overall, I do see the appeal for fantasy fans! It's a good story, with a bit too much hewing to some problematic or less compelling components of the genre for my taste.

>86 pammab: Great review of an excellent book! I've enjoyed all the books in this series. For me, it has a lot of the same appeal that I find in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series. Both create wonderfully complex and very human characters (even when they're not human).

>90 pammab: Thanks for the detailed review. I'd been thinking of trying this series but after finishing the first 3 massive volumes in Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series (with supposedly another 7 to come), I'm not sure I should jump into another one yet.

>90 pammab: Great review! This book's on my TBR list but I have yet to read it. Sounds like I will enjoy it, but probably with some caveats!

>91 mathgirl40: I also love Chambers' characters. I can't believe how many times now she's written a book that knocks it out of the ballpark -- and to think she crowd-funded her first book! I wonder if not having a contract with a company to start was by choice or by necessity. With Sanderson, he really uses the book length, too -- the doorstoppers aren't full of filler, and they are really telling a long, epic, complex tale (and very effectively). I suspect before going to a new book in the series, it would be useful to reread, too. So I see why you might not want to have multiple huge series ongoing.

>92 christina_reads: There's a lot of stream-of-conscious in that review, so glad you got something from it! Mistborn is super enjoyable. Culturally it reminds me a bit of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in its being a shining example of its genre and a bit of playing at the edges of the tropes but not particularly subverting them, and being a really enjoyable read nonetheless -- though the similarity stops at the cultural reception, because the books themselves couldn't be more different. I hope you enjoy it when you get to it! It's great escapism.

43. Families Like Mine
Abigail Garner
2019.11.17 / ★★★★ / review

Families Like Mine is a compendium of conference youth panel knowledge about what it's like to grow up in an LGBTQ-parented family. There's a ton of excellent content in here that is useful for sensitizing adults to the experience of the children, from continued familial pressure to have all the right answers, the constant barrage of questions from adults that ask elementary schoolers to be able to contrast their families with some unexperienced alternative, the pressure on the children to be straight, what it means for identity development to be culturally queer but not actually queer, and more. Extremely easy read, and even though it was published in 2004, I don't have the impression that all that much has changed.

More specifically, almost everything I read in this book reminded me of the challenges and fraction points that occur in the experience of Children of Deaf Adults (CODAs). Hearing children of Deaf adults are from the Deaf community but never really in it; they have a rich cultural experience as children that they aren't allowed to return to as they grow older; they struggle with how to claim their families and often really appreciate or sometimes only feel truly comfortable spending time in groups of people with similar background; and so on. On the other hand, Deaf children of Deaf adults do not need to engage the identify formation quests of their peers at similar ages, which puts them simultaneously ahead and outside of the culture to which they belong in their teens and early twenties -- just like queer children of queer adults. Additionally, in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I was investigating the Deaf experience in books mostly from the 1980s and early 1990s, there was also marked attention to exactly the same political question of whether these families should even exist. There are areas where the LGBTQ and Deaf family experiences differ, of course -- such as the potential lack of heterosexual relationship role models for the queerspawn and the pressure to translate in adult-adult interactions from an early age for the CODAs -- but on the whole, the dynamics are eerily familiar.

As a result, I place Families Like Mine in direct conversation with Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, which focuses on what he terms "horizontal identity formation" -- the creation of identities that differ from the "vertical" identities that your parents can and will transmit to you. Families Like Mine addresses the inverse of Far From the Tree: rather than mainstream parents making sense of and trying to successfully parent children with exceptional primary identities, Garner's book on LGBTQ families focuses on what it means for the child to have their parents' culture rooted in a niche subculture that is uncommon, their families questioned by the mainstream, and the children's legitimacy within the culture questioned even by the members of the culture itself. Families Like Mine is not an academic treatise, but it is specific, engaging, easy to read, and offers well-deserved attention to a different dimension of "horizontal" identity formation.

44. Wayward Son
Rainbow Rowell
2019.11.21 / ★★★½ / review

The second in a published fanfic series of a series that doesn't actually exist as canon, Wayward Son struck me as just so-so -- the setting was bizarre and a completely fanfic trope (British boarding school kids head to America! goes to a Renaissance Faire! visits Las Vegas!), but the plot was handled pretty well, there were a couple particularly deft moments like when the vampire king was all "Baz, you're a vampire, you don't belong with these mortals, and I get that you're not ready to face that yet, but just wait until you've been through a few normal human lifetimes and watching everyone you care about growing old and dying -- poignant! and felt very wise, but unlike Carry On, there wasn't a ton of smart commentary on the genre of magical boarding school fic. There also wasn't a ton of commentary on, well, much of anything (and this book could have been a great commentary on fanfiction.net-heyday fanfic itself, if Rowell had wanted to get really meta about it -- and that's definitely what this book reflects, unlike the more slyly adult Carry On). It also makes quite a bit of fun of California, which, you know, kinda deserves it, but also, those are pretty cheap shots to make. So for me, this book was overall entertaining but not shiny.

Then I found myself retelling the entire story on a roadtrip (yes, every nuance) and loving the heck out of the ridiculousness of the retelling. To me that implies a LOT more staying power than I was willing to grant Wayward Son originally. So, not a great work of literature, not a great commentary on anything, but still pretty entertaining. And probably apparently completely unmoored-round-the-bend-batshit to anyone who isn't familiar with fanfiction.net-era crackfics written by sugar high middle schoolers who want to bring their favorite characters home with them.

45. Endurance: My Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery
Scott Kelly
2019.11.23 / ★★★★½ / review

Wonderful space travel memoir, full of new science and information to me, reflections on incidents that struck me at the time as ridiculously futuristic at the time (senator shot while brother-in-law orbits the earth), and portraying a very clear sense of personality. Quite an excellent memoir -- will be recommending this one to anyone who likes space who hasn't already read it.

X. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President
Candice Millard
2019.11.29 / not finished / review

I tried, but I never found myself particularly excited to pick this book up. Maybe it's something about the breathing-life-into-historical-non-fiction genre -- Destiny of the Republic felt like Devil in the White City, which I also couldn't finish. I definitely found myself rolling my eyes at how stories that I am absolutely convinced were yellow journalism at the time, highly exaggerated and details fabricated for entertainment purposes, were again laid down in print as truth. If possible, this book adds even more to the air of wonderment and ridiculousness from the original reports. I mean, I guess I know the point of this modern genre is to reinvent yellow journalism, but I still found the result to be pretty audacious and even possibly a bit disingenuous in treating these reports as reality.

46. Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin
Rosanna Hertz and Margaret K. Nelson
2019.12.02 / ★★★★★ / review

Extremely strong study of kinship in America, investigating how people integrate "donor siblings" into their conceptions of family and self through a series of case studies and a series of chapters drawing conclusions.

The book contains a lot of insights from people who have done a lot of thinking about what family means. Among the many themes: how families decide to draw their lines of kinship (whose family, if anyone's, is the sperm donor? the donor siblings? how do you know?), why individuals or families decide to reach out to donor siblings, how kids make sense of their conception narratives when they are confronted with sex education that is focused on accidental pregnancy avoidance rather than paths to family creation, how extending familial relations to others based only on genetics connects to the queer idea of "family of choice", how a child's donor siblings in some sense equalize birth and non-birth parents, and much more. The authors benefit from very insightful study participants, and develop a book that is more than the sum of its parts in its clarity of presentation and juxtaposition of ideas.

Quite a wonderful book that I expect will be widely read by lay and professional folks interested in academic sociology and reproduction. It delves deep on topics that many people connect viscerally with (kinship, nature/nurture, identity), through a useful lens that couldn't have been used even a decade ago, and engages its topic very respectfully to uncover a multitude of useful insights in short order.

47. Fire
Kristin Cashore
2019.12.09 / ★★★★½ / review

Super duper unputdownable YA fantasy that would be just as fantastic as a first entry to the world. It hits all the cliches of the genre, but it isn't trite in any way. Fire is excellently paced and drawn with fascinating characters and worldbuilding and bad guys that feel menacing and enough mind-control-as-core that unreliable narration and a turn for the worse seems to always be around the bend. I also love how Cashore writes a love story -- it isn't goopy at all. Her strong female leads gradually realize what's going on and express it to themselves and the readers, and even though it's obvious from the setup what pairing will emerge and what the obstacles are, the process never feels forced. In contrast to Graceling, the previous book set in this world, Fire also fell into fewer hot-button-issue "traps" accidentally (our feisty heroine is a bit more complex in her relationship to gender roles, and no disabled characters get "fixed" through magic). There is an afterword as well, where Cashore reflects in a few pages on topics like why palace settings get such use in fantasy by comparing them to boarding schools, which I found extremely insightful.

Fire won't ever be ranked with immortal works of High Literature, but I found myself growing grouchy whenever I had to put it down and picking it up whenever I could -- and that's a very strong recommendation, which I'll repeat to lovers of this genre.

>99 pammab: This is very encouraging, as I bought Fire and Bitterblue after enjoying Graceling...I'll have to get to Fire sooner rather than later!

>100 christina_reads: Hope you like it! It's a good romp.

I read all 3 of them in quick succession a number of years ago. They're a fun read.

> 102 That's the path I am on too! I suspect Cashore might be on my "pick up anything new by her" list....

>96 pammab: I took a BB for this book. I love reading about space travel and this one sounds very appealing.

>104 mathgirl40: Endurance was great! When it came out, I saw a ton of people talking about it. It took me a couple years to get to it, but I also would widely recommend it.

48. How to Hide an Empire
Daniel Immerwahr
2019.12.12 / ★★★★ / review

How to Hide an Empire addresses history as told from the perspective of the American empire-non-empire of outlying colonies -- initially colonies of people, then of isolated rocks in the ocean, and now of metaphorical colonization through industrialization and standards. This book offers a cogent and well-structured fact-based antidote to the highly successful marketing campaign of the US being the continental US. (And listening with an ear to China's actions in the seas makes hypocrisy amusing and underlines the political genius of Chinese leaders.)

On audiobook: I thought the audiobook narrator's pomposity would grate, but it actually is probably the only way to read the self-aware and ironic jabbing humor of this work, and I ended the book with appreciation for it.

Recommended heartily for anyone who is interested in modern international politics or history, and/or who is engaged in anti-racism efforts in the US, and/or who was disappointed in Lies My Teacher Told Me.

49. Fire on High
Peter David
2019.12.16 / ★★★ / review

Lefler's previously-dead mother shows up, and everyone asks Vulcan Soleta for relationship advice. Oh yeah, and a creature is living in the warp core. More zaniness, weak plot, but definitely has the Star Trek vibe.

50. The Dazzle of Day
Molly Gloss
2019.12.31 / ★★ / review

A Quaker generation ship! The premise is dripping with promise, but I found the delivery ultimately unsatisfying.

Pros: Space! Quakers! Esperanto! Leaving a planet behind and encountering a new one! Culture forced with big changes twice over! Narration by older women and people of color!

Cons: A surfeit of underdeveloped characters. Relentless attention to body parts and acts that aren't discussed in polite company for a reason. "Literary" stylistics (in stately phrasing and also in structure -- for instance, although the opening and closing chapters are in distinct first person voices, the central 90% of the book is in the third person). No underlying thematic message to make up for the odder choices. My copy also had a print issue where pages 25-56 were missing and pages 57-88 appeared twice, which didn't reduce my frustration with the "literary" feel.

I'm really quite disappointed. There is SO much promise in the actions and situations described, and in a different attempt, this book could have a phenomenal plot and characterization and thematic lessons. As it stands, unfortunately, I can't recommend it.

And.... 2019 challenge complete! Having finished 50 books, 31 of which garnered 4 stars or higher, I more than doubled my challenge goal of completing 19 books that I really enjoyed. Huzzah!

I read much more this year than I have in about a decade (though I only exceeded 2017 by a couple books), and I was also much happier with what I read than I've been in the past! Almost 2/3 of my books got at least 4 stars. I was more diligent in choosing material that I thought I'd like, and I was also willing to drop a few books along the way that I wasn't excited to revisit once I'd read a few dozen pages.

My final satisfaction distribution:

* 8% (4 books) got 5 stars ("Woohoo, as good as it gets!")
* 62% (31 books) got 4+ stars ("Yay, I'm a fan")
* 94% (47 books) got 3+ stars ("A-OK")
* 6% (3 books) got less than 3 stars ("Meh, I've had better" + "Eek, methinks not!")

I wasn't able to finish three in-progress books by 31 December, so a few will be forthcoming in early January: The Buried Giant and Circe, both of which I'm enjoying quite a lot, and The Quiet Place, which is another Star Trek novel.

Thanks for reading along! All the best to you and yours in 2020.

End-of-Year Recommendation Round-Up
Top books from this year that I'd recommend to anyone whose interest is piqued by their premises:

Fiction
1. Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers -- reflecting on the meaning of life via a sci-fi setting facing individual and cultural deaths
2. Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller -- a lyrical modern retelling of the Iliad through the eyes of Patroclus, Achilles' companion
3. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell -- a YA/new adult story deftly handling cultural divides in high school; music, 1980s, poverty, Omaha, home abuse, love, small towns
4. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell -- a YA/new adult story deftly handling coming into independent adulthood in college; fanfiction, twins, anxiety/mental illness, college, romance, friendships, identity
5. Graceling by Kristin Cashore -- easy YA fantasy romp with a strong female lead and substantial entertainment value

Nonfiction
1. A Death in the Rainforest by Don Kulick -- highly non-traditional anthropological work on Papa New Guinean natives over the course of the generation that lost their historical tongue
2. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah -- humorous memoir for Americans about growing up illegally biracial in apartheid South Africa
3. Endurance by Scott Kelly -- memoir mixing astronaut Scott Kelly's record-setting year living in the International Space Station with his life's journey to get there
4. Educated by Tara Westover -- memoir page-turner about the gifts and losses dealt by education and changes in culture
5. How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr -- history of US colonialism and relationships with outlying territories, and how/why those relationships, territories, and histories have gone unrecognized

And.... 2020 thread created!