Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I thought this had interesting concepts about an alien invasion and I even liked the inversion of time, memory, and religion, but I didn't think it was executed all that well.

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Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There were times when I was reading this that I thought I didn’t like this book that much. It’s not an easy book. But I kept at it and finally it opened up. This is a classic among the classics.

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Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Doscher, read this out loud to us in class, and I think it was the first time anyone read out loud to me as a kid. In my memory, it took us a few months to read it, chapter by slow chapter. I don't remember crying in class, but this book is still one of the saddest books for me.

As an adult though, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would the people in the book assume a pig was writing on a spiderweb? Wouldn't they rightfully assume it was the spider doing it?

Update from 2020: I'm rereading this to my kids and I realized I'm such a dummy! The farmer characters in the book thought God wrote in the Spiderweb! It totally took me 35 to get that. Maybe because I never really thought about the literature of miracles when I was younger. I have been humbled by my own stupidity. Haha.

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Humorous Stories and Sketches by Mark Twain

Humorous Stories and Sketches by Mark Twain
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Most of these stories didn't pass the test of time, but I enjoyed "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed," about some Confederate soldiers who avoid fighting in the Civil War.

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Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a beautifully-written and enjoyable read, but it's not an easy book to sum up because of its moral ambiguity. Mrs. Bridge is a complete person and you feel for her and for her somewhat mysterious children, listless friends, and servants, though Mr. Bridge is left mostly in the shadows.

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Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire

Flowers of Evil: A Selection by Charles Baudelaire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I like how Baudelaire's dark pessimism exists in perfect harmony with his romantic heart. I find that to be very realistic and moving.

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From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming

From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

DNF at 50%. I was humming along with this ridiculous plot. A female Russian spy basically announces herself to James Bond instead of actually being sneaky, but I thought, whatever, it’s just a fun trashy book. But then I hit a big rapey wall of misogyny and nope I can’t do it. Life is too short. I’m taking the rest of the Bond books off my physical and Goodreads to-read shelves. They’re all a racist-sexist mess.

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Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is wonderfully written and I loved everything about it, even the sad parts... until the end. Then I felt like Helen said a lot of weird unrealistic things about wanting to feel like a woman (?). And I wanted a more realistic future for the easy-to-love Giovanni too.

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The Sibyl by Pär Lagerkvist

The Sibyl by Pär Lagerkvist
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am having a lot of trouble coming up with actual reasons why I liked this book so much. I think it's the character of the Sibyl which is so powerful and unique. The beginning outline of her story follows a realistic one, with a virgin in the village being chosen to be the sibyl for the temple and how all was accomplished in the temple. But it's really her feelings and religious devotion which make the book what it is. All her love mixed with rage jumped off the page and grabbed me. I really enjoyed the book.

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A Medicine for Melancholy by Ray Bradbury

A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Some of these stories are so great. I read All Summer in a Day as a kid and it has haunted me ever since. But a lot of the stories in this collection are skippable.

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Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book sort of reminds me of Death of a Salesman. It's easy to relate to Wilhelm even while judging him (and while judging myself by association). The sentences are wonderful and still very relevant to modern life. I also appreciate that the book is on the shorter side. Bellow packed a lot into a small space and nothing is belabored.

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Love Poems by Pablo Neruda

Love Poems by Pablo Neruda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this in English and in Spanish, and I wasn't crazy about this collection. I thought the poems were just a little better in Spanish. I especially liked the laughter poems in Spanish better. I find the English easier to understand because I'm more comfortable with it, and the Spanish a bit more musical, but there's not a huge difference in these particular poems for me. Love is a maybe the most difficult topic for poetry, and this just left something missing for me.

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Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tongue-in-cheek spy novel that gets a bit dark and more exciting as it goes on. Graham Greene is a confusing author for me because he wrote one of my favorite literary works, The End of the Affair, but his writing isn't limited to literary fiction, and The Third Man, for example, is just some noir nonsense. This was sort of in between but I did enjoy it.

I was especially interested in the pre-Castro Cuban setting. My family is from Cuba, and around this time my grandparents would have been in their 20s. My paternal side moved to Santa Clara at about the time of the story (the main character James Wormold goes there on vacation). My maternal side moved to Havana shortly after the time period of the novel. All Cuban-Americans are devoutly anti-Castro but the sacrilegious question is always whether the dictator that preceded him, Batista, was also a bad guy. This makes the character Segura particularly interesting to me, especially since Greene doesn't make him as one-dimensional as it initially appears.

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The Quiet American by Graham Greene

The Quiet American by Graham Greene
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This novel is great. There's so much to it that I'm not sure how to review it.

[Full disclosure: Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is currently my favorite book ever, and has been for 10 years, and probably 500 books. But The End of the Affair is not an ambiguous book like this one.]

A huge part of the book is about the foreign involvement, diplomacy, and media in Saigon during the Vietnam war. To a small degree, it's also about the Vietnamese people at that time. It's more about religion and ethics, and the evils of relativism. It's about the inability to really know other people, and possibly even to know ourselves? It's about the different ways people understand - or misunderstand love. It's a crime mystery.

It's just very good! But The End of the Affair is still my #1.

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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was pretty interesting in that it was significantly different in both form and substance than what I usually read. Although substance-wise, I recently read a discussion of The Iliad and its pre-Christian culture having an ethics not of kindness and mercy but rather of strength and beauty, and it reminds me of this sort of narrative.

On the other hand, though Okonkwo often commits terrible acts, the reader is not alone in his judgment. There is often a villager who voices the wrongness of his action. And when Okonkwo is opposing the missionaries, I found myself suddenly sympathetic to him.

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The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein

The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very fun and short. It's almost a puzzle to solve with fictional futuristic tools. Two funny or irritating things (I can't decide which) are 1) the big plot hole in the resolution, and 2) Heinlein's creepy sexism and hilarious projection of sexism into the future.

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The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan W. Watts

The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety by Alan W. Watts
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book makes sense if you're familiar with the practice (not just the idea) of meditation. But it's still too hippy-dippy, fluffy, and imprecise for me.

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Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I reread this as part of my "Bannon-Trump-resist" reading list. I only read it before it in middle school and I'm not sure what I got from it at the time except maybe that tyranny, and tyranny of ideas, is dangerous.

It has a peculiar effect on me this time around. I've been reading fast and furiously for about a year, trying to make up for lost time (all the time I spent not reading very much while I was working a lot). The more I read, the more I become aware of all the books that are necessary to read; the books I have yet to read. And in this frame of mind, the single scariest sentence in the book is: "Remember the firemen are rarely necessary. The public stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it's a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line."

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The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley

The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A very interesting book about how peyote/mescaline affect perception and consciousness. Mescaline is the active property occurring naturally in peyote and some other breeds of cactus. It was particularly interesting to me in light of the meditation and mindfulness books I've read this year. Huxley takes mescaline, records it, and have friends observe him and ask him questions while he's on it. It's a very interesting format.

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I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I liked this novel. It's totally different from the movie- so much so that's it's really unexpected. The only thing in common with the movie is the three laws of robotics.

First of all, the main character is a robotics psychologist, Susan Calvin! That's awesome. She solves a number of problems with various different models of robots by trying to use logic traps. There are some definite feminist elements in the book, as the men don't take her concerns seriously, and she has to deal with that on top of solving the problem at hand.

Also, there are more disturbing issues of racism and subjugation present in the book as well. It seems fairly intentional. The engineers regularly call the robots "boy" and do other things that call up an ugly human history. Asimov even takes a swipe at the death penalty.

The book was written in 1950, so the Calvin is born in 1982, and she's robot problem-solving from when by the time she's 38, 2020. Get ready robot psychologists! Of course in reality, we don't follow the laws of robotics at all. Drones are used mostly for the purpose of harming humans. And Asimov didn't anticipate the internet or network connections so reality is much more frightening than science fiction.

I, Robot is very interesting and worth considering, but it was also a fun read. So either way, I recommend reading it.

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