My Escape from Slavery by Frederick Douglass

My Escape from Slavery by Frederick Douglass
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a follow-up to Douglass's autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and fills in the missing information about how he escaped from slavery.

Frederick Douglass is one of the best writers of all time. His subject matter is captivating, but his skill as a writer is both technically perfect and extremely moving.

Some favorite sentences:
"This contest was now ended; my chains were broken, and the victory brought me unspeakable joy."
"I was without home, without acquaintance, without money, without credit, without work, and without any definite knowledge as to what course to take, or where to look for succor."

And this! I love this: "While in this situation I had little time for mental improvement. Hard work, night and day, over a furnace hot enough to keep the metal running like water, was more favorable to action than thought; yet here I often nailed a newspaper to the post near my bellows, and read while I was performing the up and down motion of the heavy beam by which the bellows was inflated and discharged."

Available free here: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/doug...

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The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The writing is beautiful. You can feel the claustrophobia of her depression. You can experience her frustration with the effort of life and her frustration with chauvinism. The biographical notes indicate it's loosely based on her real experiences during college.

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The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A beautiful memoir of how Didion experienced the death of her husband. I read Blue Nights first and now I wonder if I need to revisit Blue Nights, because apparently Quintana had not yet passed away when this book came out.

I looked up the timeline. In 1964 Joan and John got married, and in 1966 they adopted Quintana. Quintana got married in July 26, 2003. Shortly thereafter, Quintana fell into a coma from sepsis a virus or bacteria, and during that time, John Dunn, Joan's husband and Quintana's father passed away on December 30, 2003. Quintana recovered within 3 months. She had a hematoma while traveling shortly after that. She made a difficult recovery in 2004, but then passed away of pancreatitis on August 26, 2005. Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking about her husband's death was already coming out on September 1, 2005. Blue Nights about her daughter's death didn't come out until 2011. These books might be best read back to back, though The Year of Magical Thinking is the better book.

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Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Blue Nights by Joan Didion
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I haven't read The Year of Magical Thinking yet, so maybe my view of this book is a bit incomplete. There are beautiful, sad, and disturbing parts but overall the disjointed nature of the book ruined my enjoyment of it. She also repeated certain phrases over and over again. I appreciate the poetic value of that. However, she overused the method so much that, particularly in it such a short book, it felt like a word count stretch, rather than something that added value to the narrative.

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My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A very short, beautiful, and somewhat sad book. It's about a protagonist Lucy, her family, and a few people that make an impression on her. It's about love-and-hurt. It's about poverty. War. Psychological trauma in the lower case.

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James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Maybe more like 3.5 stars. I couldn't remember the ending from when I read it as a child though I did remember the beginning pretty well. Maybe I only read half it when I was little? The beginning is fun in a dark way but then it sort of just meanders. The poems/ songs aren't really a strong point for Dahl either. But James says he likes it- though I'm shocked because he'd only let me read a few pages at a time. Maybe he just enjoyed having a long-term reading project with me.

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Maus II : And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman

Maus II : And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This one was better than the first. It was an interesting combination of an exploration of the relationship between the father and son (the author) and the father's memories in the concentration camps and after. It made me feel: angry, sad, interested, and inspired.

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Maus I: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A father and son (the author, Art Spiegelman) discuss the father's experience as a Jewish Polish citizen during the Holocaust. The first book deals with the father and mother successfully avoiding the concentration camps until 1944. This part is really stressful and upsetting, and we haven't even gotten to the concentration camp yet (Part II).

It also deals with the father and son's current day relationship as the Spiegelman interviews his father for the book. It's meta.

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Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having read my first graphic novel just a few weeks ago, I can't stop now. Alison Bechdel is really smart. Her subject matter is interesting, but what's more interesting is how she thinks about and writes about the subject matter. It's one of those books that mention a million other books. She makes me want to read even more.

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Cutting Teeth by Julia Fierro

Cutting Teeth: A Novel by Julia Fierro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Brooklyn playgroup plus their spouses and one nanny goes to Long Island for a short vacation together and drama ensues. Together the playgroup characters capture what it feels like to be a modern day parent in the urban United States: there is baby lust, difficult pregnancies, so much anxiety, a renegotiation in marriage, financial stresses, mom wars and jealousies, gender issues- both among parents and children- the whole deal. I don't think the author left anything out. I think that it very accurately captures the state of parenthood right now. This is not what it was like for previous generations, and (let's hope) not what it will be like for future generations.

My favorite part of the novel is the Tibetan nanny that grounds the whole story by being a reminder of the difference between things that matter and things that ultimately don't matter. Of course, in real life as in the novel, this reminder often doesn't stop us from experiencing the pain of our personal dramas.

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Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. This book has everything. It's a literary beach read? The first half of the book is in the husband's (3rd person) perspective, and the story there is weird and really good. Then the second half is the wife's (3rd person) perspective and the story becomes more intense, detailed, and darker. The perspective is nearly omniscient by the end. It's mostly a story about loneliness, and being abandoned by family in all the different ways in which one can be. But it's also about staying faithful to family and friends and learning to help each other or ask for help when no one is deserving. (Or they are.) I think the thing I love the most is the story is made up of almost all anti-heroes that are made good, or partly good, only by their love of one another.

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The Mermaid Girl by Erika Swyler

The Mermaid Girl by Erika Swyler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a lovely short story that's also the prequel to The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler. So you should read that first. You should read that anyway because it's good.

Here's one of my (many) favorite lines because it's real and common, and no less terrible because it's common:

He'd seen it in his friends. Frank and Leah were comfortable. They'd settled into lifelong friendship; like a limb you'd not known you were missing until it appeared. Reliable, essential, but not something you burned for. No one ached; he told himself it was good to ache.

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Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a very quick read. I enjoyed the style of the book and it's that factor more than anything else that would lead me to recommend it. There isn't much plot, and where there is- it took a dark turn. I wasn't prepared for the dark turn from the beginning of the book but that's pretty accurate to real life. There was a lot that was left off the page in a way I didn't think was ideal.

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The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler

The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

First of all, the language, emotions, and moods in this book are beautiful. In particular, I liked how the book approached and tried to explain the feelings of grief, otherness, and loneliness. How otherness can make you lonely and how loneliness can make you other. How family and family history affect both. How losing family makes you both. The feelings involved in trying to carry family even when they refuse to be helped.

There are a lot of things going on in this book. The book alternates the perspective of Simon in the first person present with the story of a carnival family in third person past tense. The two parts inform the story and move it along. In the present, Simon's problems layered on top of each other in a way which made me understand the character and his motivations without stressing me out. Simon's problems and challenges kept me interested and involved. The book is also filled with magical realism in the past story, carried into the present by the mysterious book seller.

Finally, the characters, especially the modern-day characters are very real to me. I feel Simon's restless laziness and quiet desperation. I love love love the character Doyle. I love to hate Frank. Even the mother, a ghost at the beginning, is filled in through the other character's longings for her.

P.S. I also like this cover that tells you a bit more about the book:


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The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Interesting. Good characters from the perspective of being interesting and varied, though there were a lot of people to keep track of. This made it a little challenging to get deeply invested in any of them. To the extent that I did get invested in some, I was disappointed by the outcomes for them- as though I got attached to all the characters I wasn't supposed to get attached to and none of the ones I was supposed to. I also couldn't get into any of the love stories- though possibly this is because there were none. This is turning out to be the kind of review that makes no sense unless you read the book because I'm trying not to spoil anything.

Some of my favorite things about the book included trying to imagine New York in the late 1800s and particularly the ethnic neighborhoods. I also enjoyed the book's underlying exploration of free will and the curious ways the characters could or could not exercise their free will. To a lesser degree, I also enjoyed how different characters resolved the question of whether or not God or the-God-of-their-faith exists, though especially for Yehudah Schaalman, these rationalizations fell short of what a real person might grapple with and consider. Wow, run-on sentence. Sorry, I'm keeping it.

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Codex by Lev Grossman

Codex by Lev Grossman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed the beginning and middle of the book, but the ending left me cold. The book appeared to be building to something bigger and left some open questions about the main character Edward's employer (and friends?) that left me unsatisfied.

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Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming

Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Lacking in redeeming qualities. Readable, but mostly boring. A strange brand of racist that pretends to celebrate racial equality in a very condescending and demeaning way.

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