The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill

The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved this story, just loved the magic and the sorrow and the hope-- it's strangely very 2020 despite being written some years ago. Beautiful writing about love. I recommend it for adults and children alike. And high praise- the story reminds me a bit of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series.

But (I am so harsh but) so much of the story depended on the old- no one told anyone anything trope.

View all my reviews

Save Me a Seat by Sarah Weeks, Gita Varadarajan

Save Me a Seat by Sarah Weeks, Gita Varadarajan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cute story about new friendships, new cultures, and developing sympathy and understanding.

View all my reviews

Unfu*k Yourself by Gary John Bishop

Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Life by Gary John Bishop
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Absolutely nothing new or interesting here. You know what conveys the ideas here in a much more interesting, moving, and satisfying way? The movie Groundhog's Day with Bill Murray. Seriously, it's an amazing movie.

View all my reviews

Why Diets Make Us Fat by Sandra Aamodt

Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession with Weight Loss by Sandra Aamodt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This strikes me as an irresponsible title and first few chapters. The author has clearly looked at a lot of weight studies, though she’s often drawn aggressive conclusions that all diets make you gain weight. Some of the diets aren’t even diets but actual periods of starvation that caused food-related psychological issues.

As the author herself states, there are numerous reasons why people gain weight, not just as the first few chapters suggest, the actual act of dieting. By Chapter 9, she’s listing people who can’t lose weight through intuitive eating. By Chapter 10, she’s discussing how the food environment is itself a huge factor in causing weight gain.

She’s also underplayed the importance of achieving a lower weight- even temporarily- to lifespan.

Maybe start with Chapter 11, and read chapters 1-10 in backward order.


View all my reviews

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really liked this book! It fails to fall neatly into any categories; it's a mystery/ not-quite-a-thriller with many literary qualities. From the beginning, you know who has died and only subsequently do you grow to know the players involved. But the real theme of the book is media, society, art, and death.

View all my reviews

Nutshell by Ian McEwan

Nutshell by Ian McEwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Even though the premise is somewhat silly in its device, this dark and humorous tale captivated me completely. I loved McEwan’s literary magic. In general, I try to avoid horror or even horror-tinged books, but this was grabbed me in slow increments and at the end I was so invested in the character of the baby that I wanted to know how the rest of his life went. Time to reread Hamlet.

View all my reviews

United by Cory Booker

United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good by Cory Booker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cory Booker isn’t my favorite candidate for the Democratic nomination but I was pleasantly surprised by his memoir. After reading this, he’s moved way up my rankings. The memoir dealt with some but not all of my policy concerns: poverty and the prison-industrial complex. He only briefly touched on environmental issues. I would have preferred a more comprehensive explanation of his policy perspectives.

View all my reviews

The Houseguest by Kim Brooks

The Houseguest by Kim Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This novel is full of beautiful writing. I'm looking forward to whatever Brooks writes next.

View all my reviews

The Opposite of Woe by John Hickenlooper

The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics by John Hickenlooper
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First of all, this book is too long, so right off the bat, you get the impression that Hickenlooper thinks too much of his importance. I read short books and super long books, but I can forgive a lot of writing gaffes if you manage not to waste my time. On the flip side, if your book is a tome, I expect you to provide Anna Karenina-levels of spiritual fulfillment. Don't get me wrong, I also thought Bill Clinton's My Life and Ron Chernow's Grant were too long at twice the length and twice the political importance of this.

Why is it so long? The first 60% of the book focuses on Hickenlooper's early foibles and every woman he ever dated. Some of this background is important so that we can see why he became the type of leader he became, but certainly, not most of it. In defense of this section though, Hickenlooper can be very very funny.

The remaining 40% is the important part, but by that time I'd lost a lot of interest and focus. Considering that Hickenlooper is running for President just 3 years after the publication of this book, there was a noticeable lack of overall policy. Rather, he recounted his process and decisions along the way. While I appreciate that his process is facts-based, as that seems to be lacking in governance these days (though especially in Republican governance), quite often, his fact-gathering was insufficiently comprehensive. Other times he emphasized public opinion over fact-gathering, making for somewhat inconsistent results. For example, I thought his explanation and support for fracking seemed to be lacking in any views inconsistent with the limited facts he'd gathered as an insider in the industry. Okay, he drank some fracking fluid that a government agency said was technically safe for drinking, congratulations. But just off the top of my head, here are some things he failed to investigate or mention: 1) how comprehensive are these government requirements when corporations and conservatives constantly lobby to loosen or remove envirnmental regulations? 2) safe for whom? testing on pregnant women and children is not allowed and at best are a guess. I didn't even take a single Tylenol when I was pregnant, do you honestly think pregnant women drinking fracking fluid is safe when it's not even tested? But this is just one example of his lack of rigorous thinking which stood out mainly because of his constant self-congratulation on his rigorous thinking. Don't get me wrong, he's still 100% better than Trump for the leader of the free world, but that appears to be true also of most people I know.

View all my reviews

One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid

One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I loved this book. I flew through it in two days, and I loved its exploration of love and grief, especially the latter. I'm describing it like I might a literary book but it's more in the chick lit category. That said, I'd argue that it's not completely not-literary. Sometimes you need double negatives. She really delves into grief in a protracted way. She only explores one or two aspects of love but maybe love is more complicated than grief and needs more space.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

Deep Work by Cal Newport

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a totally decent mashup of books about mindfulness, flow, and the books about ditching your phone. I've been reading so many of these types of books lately, and it's usually either researchers who have dedicated their lives to studying a particular type of psychology now termed behavioral economics and, alternatively, guys who write about other people's research. I find the latter category kind of unfair but often they do better summaries of the research because they're not so personally invested.

View all my reviews

The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read a lot of behavioral economics, and I've read Kahneman and Thaler, but I was missing the context of the history of Kahneman and Tversky, followed later by Thaler, being the inventors of this discipline. I was also missing the context of the in-between location of the discipline between psychology and economics, but more importantly as the source of strife between psychologists and economists. This book also expressed my frustrations with my economics classes, and I'm even more annoyed now that I realize my economics professors were basically just ignoring research that was at that point already 20 years old. I was also interested in learning about how this research came out of Israel. I was maybe a little less interested in the ins-and-outs of Kahneman and Tversky's personal relationship and about which Lewis left me a bit confused.

View all my reviews

Monsters: A Love Story by Liz Kay

Monsters: A Love Story by Liz Kay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

While on the surface we seem to be focused on a slowly developing relationship, there's a lot of darkness under the surface of this book. It's not all darkness, and I enjoyed spending 2-3 years in the lives of the characters because it really gives time for all the friendships and relationships to develop naturally. However, the characters are deeply flawed and realistic and reveal their good and bad characteristics as you get to know them. The bad personality traits are pretty serious though and there’s a dark controlling undercurrent tugging at the romance in the book.

Also, there's an Escher-esk quality to it because the themes of the fictional epic poem are the themes of the real novel, Monsters. The main character Stacey is a poet and she has an epic poem that is being developed into a movie. The epic poem is about feminism, control, and mythological power, and the things that are happening during the development of the movie are decidedly not feminist, all the while the characters are fighting for creative and romantic control.

View all my reviews

The Diary of a Hounslow Girl by Ambreen Razia

The Diary of a Hounslow Girl by Ambreen Razia
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This story is full of high drama told in a British slang dialect. It feels messy and it's a lot to wade through.

View all my reviews

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a memoir only of Trevor Noah's childhood in South Africa during and immediately after apartheid. Really interesting to read a personal account of living under apartheid by a person uniquely situated inside the insanity and hypocrisy of it all.

He stops before his comedy career and that was really disappointing. There wasn't even a mention of how his career began.

View all my reviews

The Course of Love by Alain de Botton

The Course of Love by Alain de Botton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a very strange book. It's a fictional case study of a couple. It feels like a very uncomfortable cross between nonfiction and fiction. The author's discussion of love in a married relationship is the nonfiction portion, but he uses no scientific data and instead relies on his fictional account of a rather standard marriage to communicate his ideas. I really wanted a rigorous nonfiction book on love, but I still think this book is excellent mostly because I agree with a lot of what it has to say about real love and generosity in marriage.

View all my reviews

Shelter by Jung Yun

Shelter by Jung Yun
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is much more literary than mystery, but I'd go ahead and call it a literary mystery. Fast-paced, interesting, and extremely thoughtful, I'd recommend it generally - especially in October.

View all my reviews

The Longevity Diet by Valter Longo

The Longevity Diet: Discover the New Science Behind Stem Cell Activation and Regeneration to Slow Aging, Fight Disease, and Optimize Weight by Valter Longo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I trust Dr. Longo's research, he's a recognized expert, but I don't think this plan is very useful to normal people. The concept is basically this: do the Longo "Fasting Mimicking Diet" for 5 days a month, every month. The rest of the time, eat the Mediterranean diet and exercise 5-7 hours a week. Okay.

So my problems with the Fasting Mimicking Diet is that it's super hard. Mind you, I've done "every other day fasting" for three months (then I fell off) and I've done time-restricted eating: not eating for 16 hours, and eating for 8. So my objection about difficulty is not fasting per se. It's that eating 800 calories a day for 5 days sounds harder than a water fast for 5 days because hunger actually decreases on a real fast. This low-calorie diet results in constant hunger for 5 days. So maybe I'd actually try what he recommends but just substitute a water fast? (I am not a doctor so you definitely should not follow any of my ideas or advice.)

Then I also have a number of objection about the OPTIONAL ProLon product they sell- just the food measured out for the 5 days so it's a no-brainer for you:
1) Anytime you're trying to sell me something I lose trust in the science (even though it is tempered in this case by the fact that Longo claims to make no personal profit)
2) ProLon isn't real food but packets of things you mix or whatever. Yuck.
3) It's super expensive $250 a box (one box lasts for the one-month 5-day fast) unless you buy a year supply in advance. No. Just no.

A counterargument to my complaints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpN5V...



View all my reviews