In the midst of the stress of moving and fundraising, I fell back on my comfort standby: books!
I read and reviewed 85 books this year (I read a few more than that, but I decided they were a bit more academic and too boring for a review). You can check them out on my review page called Title Archive.
I also updated my Recommended page with better lists of books and some new categories!
Favorite Books of 2015
(I read them in 2015, they were not necessarily published in 2015) Continue reading
This book was so cute! And despite our protagonist Devon’s love for all things Jane Austen, I was two-thirds through the book before I realized I was reading a Pride and Prejudice retelling. Maybe I am super dumb, but I like to think that it was also pretty subtle.
You’ve got the proud Ezra with barely any facial expressions but ‘apathetic,’ and you’ve got the prejudiced Devon, who cannot believe what a jerk he is. But as they are thrown in each other’s paths more often, they learn more about each other and realize they were wrong about their judgments. Okay, that doesn’t sound subtle. What Mills does so well is incorporate so much more into her story. There’s Foster, Devon’s cousin whose addict mom sends him to stay with her, giving her the little brother she never wanted. There’s Cas and Lindsay, and Devon’s growing awareness that just because the boy she’s crushing on likes The Perfect Girl doesn’t mean Devon has to hate her. There’s Devon working through her fear of the future by getting excited about college at Reeding. Continue reading
This book is absolutely delightful. Its protagonist, the titular 100-year-old man, is a sweet, mild-mannered guy who hates politics and loves drinking and making explosives. An odd combination, but this book is a Forrest Gump-esque romp through history, and Allan Karlsson is distinctly created to affect history without ever being affected by the consequences. He gives atomic bomb advice to Americans, Russians, and Iranians. He spends years in jail, which is okay by him so long as he has a place to sleep and perhaps a bit of vodka. He is utterly unflappable, even as chaos reigns around him.
But that’s just his past. The book goes back and forth between his past unexpected adventures and fancy dinners with various famous politicians around the world and throughout history and his present circumstances: bored with life in an nursing home, he climbs out the window, spontaneously steals a suitcase full of money, and manages to outwit and escape a gang while making friends during his escape. Continue reading
Ugh, I did NOT enjoy this, hardly at all. Despite a cool premise (video games are secretly preparing civilians to fight aliens) it all just felt so….dumb. And since I can’t say that without explaining myself, Beware! Click through for spoilers. I borrowed an epiphany from my brother when I was visiting him for Thanksgiving. Roy and Idil were giving me a tour of their house when I noticed Half the Sky on one of their bookshelves (I tend to focus on people’s books during house tours).
“I tried to read that, but it was too depressing,” I said.
“Huh,” Idil mused. “I thought it was supposed to be really empowering.”
“Oh. I didn’t get very far. I just really hate reading over and over again about all the ways women are abused throughout the world. But…maybe I’ll just skip to the empowering parts.”
Roy laughed. “That’s an interesting idea,” he said. “Why should we force ourselves to re-experience something we know is bad? We have the right to give ourselves a break and just get to the good news.”
“Yes,” I said fiercely, absolutely confident in my two-seconds-old opinion. “That is 100% correct.” Continue reading
A travel memoir about a woman who lives in Athens for a year? How could I pass that up?
Fortunately, if I ever write a memoir about MY year in Athens, it will be distinctly different in feel and tone. Storace is almost to poetic in her language for my taste – instead of describing where she’s going or who she’s hanging out with, she jumps over the details in order to describe general trends and observations. Which are totally interesting, don’t get me wrong. But it doesn’t actually feel like a travel memoir. Instead, it’s something more like an emotional evaluation of Greece – past, present, and future. Continue reading
I really enjoyed this book – a satire on all the “Chosen One” YA books, where teenage angst is explained via the metaphor of soul-eating ghosts or romantic vampires. In The Rest of Us Just Live Here, it’s only the indie kids who have to deal with the supernatural: Mikey and his friends are struggling to survive their very realistic ordeals: anxiety attacks and OCD compulsions, eating disorders, overbearing parents, and….okay, so Jared isn’t so normal. He’s a gay God of the Cats, and he is awesome.
Ness starts each chapter with a summary of what crazy shenanigans the indie kids are getting up to–what the plot of a stereotypical YA book would be. For instance, Chapter 7 begins:
Chapter the seventh, in which Satchel and the rest of the indie kids share their grief for Kerouac by throwing stones soulfully into a nearby lake; wandering off on her own, Satchel takes the amulet in her hand and has a vision of the single most handsome boy she’s ever seen in her life; Dylan, finding her, takes the opportunity to kiss her, and though his lips taste of honey and vegan patchouli, she pushes him away, revealing what the amulet told her; “The Immortals are here,” she says.
And then the chapter is actually about Mikey visiting his grandma in a nursing home and coping with the fact that Alzheimer’s is horrifying. It’s a neat set-up, where every once in a while Satchel will stumble through the main plot on her wild quest, but Mikey, Meredith, Henna, and Jared are unconcerned. They’ve got their own issues to deal with.
Mikey’s family is really something special (in the YA world). I loved the depth of their dysfunction. His dad is a barely functioning alcoholic, his mom is an ambitious politician, his older sister died for three minutes after her anorexia put her into cardiac arrest, and his younger sister is obsessed with boy bands. Mikey himself has an anxiety disorder. I really loved that, although there were hints of his parent’s underlying love for him, relationships weren’t resolved tidily by the end of the book. The best thing for him really is to leave for college and put some distance between himself and his parents.
I also loved how Ness dealt with Mikey’s anxiety. It was crushing to see him get trapped in loops of washing his hands. It was reassuring to see his friends help him in his moments of weakness. And (especially as a counselor) it was awesome to see him admit he needed professional help and started seeing a therapist.
I really enjoyed The Rest of Us Just Live Here. It was a great reminder that even those without cosmic responsibility have an important life….and that if you’re ever going to have a character who is a minor deity, he should always be a God of Cats. Continue reading
Whaaaat a weird book. Now that I’m done with it, I guess it’s about a pre-teen with some severe mental disorders – anxiety for sure, but also possibly schizophrenia. It is utterly disorienting to be in his brain, especially for me, because my reading habits predisposed me to think that this was fantastical. I’m still not entirely sure it wasn’t.
Steve, the aforementioned pre-teen, has a history of anxiety and OCD-like symptoms. They have taken a turn for the worse ever since his parents had an unhealthy baby that may or may not survive. He’s always had nightmares, but now his dreams include a seemingly benevolent wasp who promises to replace his baby sibling….if only Steve will help them by opening the window and letting them in so they can do their work.
If that sounds ominous, IT REALLY IS. Now, I have a negative tolerance for scary stuff, so perhaps I am overreacting. But his dreams and the subtly shifts in the wasp’s tone from understanding to demanding really creeped me out. Oppel does a phenomenal job allowing for Just Enough reality to make sense of Steve’s hallucinations…but then there are times it really does seem the wasps are relaying information to him while he’s asleep!
It’s super weird. But it’s also super short, so I highly recommend you set aside a couple hours to read it and let me know how you made sense of it all. Continue reading
Sequel to Peak, once more we get to follow teenage super-climber Peak. I really loved the first book, which was about his attempt to summit Everest; I learned a lot about mountain climbing. In The Edge, Peak is climbing in the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan, but instead of being about climbing, it’s a lot more action packed. That might sound like a good thing, but I was mostly underwhelmed while reading.
Peak (the book) felt realistic, and the drama was effective because real people do stuff like climb Mt. Everest on the regular. But in The Edge, Peak (the boy) avoids kidnapping, rescues his mother, the girl he’s crushing on, and the randomly returned Zopa (who is awesome but…it’s still weird that he’s in this book), and witnesses a whole buncha people getting murdered. That is…not so relatable.
Also, the book felt very expositional. We learn a lot of things because either Peak or another character wants to lay out a bunch of information, paragraph-style, throughout the course of an otherwise normal conversation. And was Peak always so arrogant? He’s a nice enough guy, but he’s super judgmental while thinking he’s not, which is the WORST kind. He’s not into phones, or flirting, or insulting people. He’s above it all and COME ON you’re a human teenager, it’s okay to have a bad side.
Clearly, this book did not win me over. It was interesting, and I did learn a few things in the midst of all that exposition, but. I don’t recommend it.
What a strange book! It just…didn’t do anything that I expected it to do. 
I was anticipating a Hunger Games-style revolution, but…nope. And I think I love it? Because it was so unexpected, and I really like when books surprise me. But because it’s outside the established narrative, my insides are all confused! Probably you should also read it and draw your own conclusions, but here are a few thoughts anyway:
The setting is awesome. 400+ years in the future, an AI named Talis has taken over control of the planet, ruling with a semi-benevolent but iron hand. To keep peace between nations (in a world where water is scarce so tensions run high), all rulers must send a child to specific Preceptures where they will learn to run nations…and be held hostage. If a nation goes to war, their child is murdered.
Greta is a princess hostage, and until Elian comes, she never bothers to question the system. It’s all she knows. But then she begins to question things, and this is where I thought things would be typical, and they would revolt and start a new world order. But…everything EXCEPT that happened. There’s a revolution, of sorts, and also torture, stalemates, negotiating, AIs, and a LOT of ambiguity. This is the book’s strong suit, I think.
Talis (who steps into the story about halfway through) is, like I said earlier, a brutal but semi-benevolent AI ruling the world. He’s also hilarious and snarky, and I couldn’t help but like him while being terrified of his every move. Then there’s the Abbot, an AI who runs the Prefecture and tortures students, but who saves Greta and is kind of a good guy? And the humans! They’re a mess! They also torture people, hold people hostage, and murder people. So….in the question of whether humans or AI should rule the world, this book answers with a resounding “¯\_(ツ)_/¯.” And I like that. Also I really like Talis, did I mention that? Ambiguous AI are my new interest, apparently. Continue reading
It Is Trish 