Deathcaster by Cinda Williams Chima

Deathcaster by Cinda Williams Chima
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read the entire Seven Realms series and loved it, so then I read the Shattered Realms series. I liked Alyssa, Adrian, and Jenna, and their storylines, but I never got invested in Breon, Evan, and Destin. Even some of the other characters and plotlines I started to care about in previous books like Hal Matelon and weren't developed enough in this one. Add to that that many characters had multiple names and aliases, it was work to read this. I mean, I'm not crazy, this is crazy: http://www.cindachima.com/Demon_King/.... And yes, I realize that many of the characters listed here were well-known and well-remembered Seven Realms characters, but that's part of my point, the characters in Seven Realms were much better developed and interesting.

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The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Stranger by Albert Camus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I didn't really get from this what I read I'm supposed to get from it. I liked the story mostly because I find the protagonist captivating like he's stuck in a dream, and because the author narrates an interesting perspective. But there's an underlying issue with the protagonist that seems not directly related to existentialism. Is he depressed because his mother died? Is he fundamentally a sociopath that until now has been functional and productive? I could imagine a main character who professes to be Christian acting in much the same way. Whether or not it matters in the long run, many humans would still personally suffer from harming another thanks to empathy and sympathy. And when he's confronted by death, the main character seems to reject whatever previous apathy he suffered from which seems to somewhat run contrary to existentialism, even though he doesn't reject his atheism.

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Our Revolution by Bernie Sanders

Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In by Bernie Sanders
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Part 1 of this book is a rehash of Sander's 2016 presidential run and Part 2 is his beliefs and policies on a number of issues. Part 1 is not so good, and the book overall is probably too long, but Part 2 makes the whole endeavor worthwhile for me.

I've been a big Warren fan for a long time, I really want a female president, I was so annoyed at Sanders in the 2016 election, and I was doubly annoyed when he announced his 2020 run. But, oh boy, do I love this entire policy section. He goes issue by issue, campaign finance reform, banking reform, health care, higher education, the environment, racism, immigration, the economy and government programs, and more, and for each issue, he calls it as he sees it, even when it makes Democrats look bad. And I've been watching C-Span since the 1990s, I know this is who Bernie Sanders really is and always has been. The rest of the left is just starting to catch up to him.

I haven't necessarily switched my allegiance to Sanders, rather just put him up there tied with Warren for now. Warren's policies and Sander's policies are not that dissimilar, so for me, it will really come down to how the early stages of the primaries go.

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Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I put off reading this book for a couple of months because I was worried it would be about the shooting itself. Thankfully, it's not, and once I picked it up I flew through it. It's about the survivors of the Parkland shooting and their lives and political action since the shooting. A lot of it is instructive and inspirational to the rest of us and is so important. I think this book is a great companion to March by John Lewis, about the civil rights marches. Action is hard and takes a very long time, but history moves forward if we're all willing to work, and we really all need to get to work.

When I was 22 at my first job in DC, I met a Columbine kid who was working on some political action regarding th shooting at a nonprofit located in the building I worked at. Columbine is now seen as the beginning of the school shootings, and it's been 18 years, and many school children have died, and now I have my own kids in school. My kids regularly practice "active shooter" drills. They did so when they lived in New York, and they do so in Nebraska because nowhere in our country is safe now. It's a horror, and I wish I’d done more starting 18 years ago.

I really do not understand the conservative position in this country, especially regarding assault weapons. These people are opposed to abortion but are comfortable giving everyone the weapons to instantly "abort" hundreds of children and adults? Do they lose sleep worrying about their own children and grandchildren? Some of the Republican congressmen who were personally shot claim that they don't think guns are the problem. This is especially insincere because they refuse to give money to the National Institute of Health to study the problem so that we can all point to what is and isn't specifically the problem. And look, this isn't my first book on the gun problem, I get that the statistics point to a bigger problem with gun-related suicides, urban violence, or gun owners turning the guns on their own family members, but those issues are also important to me. It's not this gun problem versus that gun problem. It's the huge toll of all the gun deaths together. It's hard to imagine where we go from here beyond talking to the younger generation but it's clear that the gun control movement needs our time and our donations.

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Pivot by Jenny Blake

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters is Your Next One by Jenny Blake
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this because it was the GW Alumni book club selection for this month. This book focuses on transitioning from a current job to a new more adventurous position, probably as your own boss. For people outside that particular paradigm (say you are currently unemployed) it doesn't apply as much. It also wasn't focused on brevity or very clearly demarcated points so I didn't find it as helpful as some other self-help-type books I've read.

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Family Happiness by Leo Tolstoy

Family Happiness by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is about that thing that happens to most married people: first the passionate love, then an emotional bump in the road, and then a life-long truce. It doesn't happen to everyone, though many people can't avoid it.

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Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some amazing sentences and insights into humans, but the actual story is so sad and dispiriting and kind of “blehhh.”

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Errata by Lisa Fay Coutley

Errata by Lisa Fay Coutley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Poetry is so hard to write about, especially, when, like me, you don't read enough poetry. These poems feel very geological but the terrain is all feelings and memories. The poems are dark, but the terrain is bright. There is a languid feeling about the poems, but the terrain is urgent with extremes of cold and heat. After reading through the collection I felt hollowed out, not in a depressed way, but in the satisfied way I imagine Pinocchio felt after Geppetto made him.

*Lisa Fay Coutley teaches at the University of Nebraska at Omaha Writer’s Workshop.

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What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was sadder and less whimsical than I’d hoped given the description; I had a lot of fun in my 20s and I thought there would be more of that. Still, I loved it until the end when I felt like it wrapped up unnecessarily quickly and kind of shallowly.

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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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Atomic Habits by James Clear

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a summary of Nudge by Richard Thaler, who actually discovered a lot of this information, and Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Even though I've read a lot of the information before in other books, and I don't think it's particularly fair that Clear is just cashing in other people's work, nonetheless I think Clear did an especially good job of collecting the most relevant information to the topic and keeping the explanations of each point short. Not a lot of filler in this book and this is probably the book I'd be most likely to revisit on this topic.

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My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor

My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The memoir started off slowly as she spent what I thought was an undo amount of time on her childhood. (Spoiler alert: The book ends with her confirmation in 2009, and has only one mention of President Obama, though it's not a significant interaction.) But I got into it about halfway through as I was particularly interested in how her relationship with her family and friends developed, her struggle with diabetes, her legal cases. (I'm a licensed but not practicing attorney.) I was also interested in her personal views on affirmative action, professionalism, and the costs and benefits of giving your life to your career.

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The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism by Olivia Fox Cabane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was partly delighted and partly sheepish when midway through I remembered that the virtual people in Sims 4 also read books about charisma. There weren't a lot of new things here, and I think it's information most adults (or anyone who ever met Bill Clinton) know. The problem isn't the knowledge, the problem is the consistent exhausting implementation of something that doesn't necessarily feel authentic. Still, I enjoyed listening to the audiobook, and I might be an interesting book for young adults to start being more mindful of their interactions with others.

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Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington

Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a complicated book to review. It's partly a memoir and partly an attempt to advertise the Tuskegee school he built and for which he fundraised. There's a line in here where Washington says not to say anything in the North that you wouldn't say in the South. Well, this entire book is things he would say in the South, and its effect is a possibly false positiveness. Nonetheless, Washington was a phenomenal person and his autobiography is well worth reading.

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