The Tower Treasure by Franklin W. Dixon

The Tower Treasure by Franklin W. Dixon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's fine. There's a mystery or two and the boys solve them: a stolen car and the contents of a safe. I can barely tell the boys' personalities apart and there's nothing else that jumps out to make it memorable or wonderful.

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Secrets of the Heart: Poems and Meditations by Kahlil Gibran

Secrets of the Heart: Poems and Meditations by Kahlil Gibran
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Allegories and poems about philosophy and religion. They vary in quality and interest. Mostly I liked the misanthropic hermit at the beginning. He's like a jerky Buddhist. I also liked "John the Madman" about the difference between real Christianity and false Christianity. There's a story about saving Satan and mermaids judging mankind. A lot of the mostly Christian philosophy (but also Muslim and Buddhist philosophy) resonated with me, but I didn't feel like I gained any new insights.

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The Messengers by Lindsay Joelle

The Messengers by Lindsay Joelle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a surprise. I am not a huge fan of YA or the Amazon free selections but this was short and I was delighted by some complicated characters in an intergalactic war riddled by "plague." The length and constant discourse made it feel like a play, but this could have been lengthened into a full and interesting novel with more descriptive and interior writing.

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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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The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl by Stacy McAnulty

The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl by Stacy McAnulty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Empathy, charity, and math! I read this because it was on Nebraska's Golden Sower list for middle grades and my son selected it to read. This was a good book about a student with a very different perspective of the world making friends with other very unique characters. The kids are also trying to change the world for the better so there are a lot of positive things in the book. And I love books about a love for math though admittedly I have not read enough of these. I will rectify that soon.

James's Review (age 9): 

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

 I loved this book! I thought all the things that happened to lightning girl because of the strike were so cool and creative. I liked how each character had a completely different personality. I loved relationships and conflict to characters. Spoiler Alert! I thought it was a fun plot twist when she fell in love with a dog named "Pi" as the math term, while doing her cougars care project. 

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Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Definitely an enjoyable read. Focuses on the different perspectives of members of a fictional 70's bad, and I love the subtle ways the members contradict each other while still definitely living in the same reality. Instead of actually actively contradicting each other you start to sense that all the characters are right in their own way.

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The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer

The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There are some beautiful sentences and thoughts in this book, but let's not forget that the narrator doesn't necessarily know everything about the world or about love. She knows a very particular love- her one love. She misses another kind entirely. Therefore, I object to many of her ideas. For example, this seems completely wrong to me: “A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.”

Of course, it's exciting to meet someone and they are constructed entirely of your hopes for who you want the person to be. A new person is exciting anyway. But what if you're blessed to be married to someone who turns out to be so much more than you knew, so much more than you knew any person could be? What if in your darkest life moments you turn to the person you're married to and see a beacon of light? What if you let that person make you better too. Love isn't just rapture. Love is that which would make it easy to give your life for the other person.

So in general, I object to Pearlie's "love" for a shell of a character Holland. Of course, we can never completely know another person. But Pearlie never gives us something to admire about Holland. You can only really love children without reason in my opinion. I don't care about Holland, I don't believe Pearlie's deep love for Holland, and Holland is observed from such a distance that he didn't persuade me either.

There's more than a love story going on here, war, torture, and race issues, but nothing about it in particular spoke to me.

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The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe

The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I like that it appears to switch from horror to mystery.

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Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe

Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this a few times wondering what I was missing. I don't know. Possibly it's just not that great?

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After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid

After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was a cute story about a troubled marriage which makes no sense I guess but there you have it.

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Forever, Interrupted by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Forever, Interrupted by Taylor Jenkins Reid
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an excruciatingly sad book and I seriously cried almost all the way through it. The strange part was that I still really liked it. Taylor Jenkins Reid really captured the pain and peculiar thoughts of grief.

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The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The dark delight in this one comes from my love of the cat and hate of the man.

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The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe

The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What happens when a mild asshole befriends a murderous sociopath? Detailed and bizarre horror.

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The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A house with a haunted atmosphere works its negative influence on the inhabitants. A study in how location and company can affect your mental state.

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The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe

The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The type of thinking demonstrated in Poe’s conclusion is not an insubstantial part of my life philosophy.

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Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Villette by Charlotte Brontë
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I loved it but I'm traumatized by the feeling that Charlotte Bronte does not like Lucy Snow. In contrast, I love Lucy Snow with all her little stiff curmudgeonly ways. So what does that say about me? And what does that say about whether I would like Charlotte Bronte, that I side with her fictional antihero over her?

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The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall

The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy by Jeanne Birdsall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It was tough getting into it because there were a lot of characters introduced in the first few pages, but once I got past the first few chapters it was a lovely story. The characters are unique and reasonably well-developed for a kid's book, and the story involved everything from following the rules, being polite, and kids recognizing that the adults are also complicated people.

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The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Took me nearly 4 months to get through it because it is so long. It's a good quarantine read as the main characters are themselves in a bit of a quarantine bubble. There are a hundred stories of varying quality, but some of them were cheerful and bawdy. The tenth day of stories was a bit of a bummer though as things got even more misogynistic and cruel towards the end, especially with the husband that tortured the wife for years and is presented as wise for doing so.

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The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens

The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first 70 percent or so was well-written, thoughtful, and enjoyable, but then it jumped the shark into ridiculous thriller territory and I lost all interest. I finished the book but didn’t ultimately like it that much. I only gave it 3 stars because I think that if someone were specifically looking for a thriller they might enjoy this.

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The Memory Painter by Gwendolyn Womack

The Memory Painter by Gwendolyn Womack
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Because my book tastes have been adapting to the ridiculous number of books I consume, these days I'm surprised whenever I like a book that isn't literary. I liked it! It was fun! It was decently written! There were no ridiculous plot holes! It's even a book that might continue to interest me in a reread. This is a good start from Womack.

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