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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I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is a little uneven but it has three basic ideas: 1) the relative size of souls from small mosquitoes all the way to the most compassionate, selfless humans, and 2) the ability to share one's soul closely in great detail or largely in a general way, 3) consciousness arises from conscience.

Leaving aside the issue of animals for the purpose of this review I believe in the equal treatment and honor of all humans as the basis for good and my conception of goodness itself or God. On the flip side, sociopathic cruelty towards any human is evil and I am not open to relativism. In other words, I completely reject #1 and embrace #3.

The book itself feels like it jumps from these three topics sometimes accompanied with logic puzzles or personal stories without actually persuasively tying these topics together. It wasn't a bad read though, it definitely gets your brain going and introduces some new things to think about.

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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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Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Pérez

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Every now and then I read a book that changes the way I see the world. This is one of those.

Of course, I am aware of some of the things mentioned in the book because I am a woman. I am well aware of the relative danger I face while walking around at nighttime as opposed to a man, but there is so much more than those types of observations here. The author explores so much in the world of data that my entire perception of moving through the world has shifted.

Absolutely everything seems different. I'm even looking at the headrest in my car with wonder and confusion. I'd give this book 10 stars if I could.

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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 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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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 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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Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this even though I typically don’t enjoy whatever genre this is: romance, women’s lit, whatever. I liked all the characters and their friendships and their little struggles. I also live in Nebraska and have become obsessed with local news this year, and the characters work at a local Nebraska newspaper.

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Normal People by Sally Rooney

Normal People by Sally Rooney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I became very invested in the characters even though I low-key hate Connell. (I don't think I was supposed to hate him? I think I'm supposed to love him a little? But I definitely don't.) The writing carried me along and I barely put it down until I was finished.

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Book Scavenger by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman

Book Scavenger by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A dangerous and exciting adventure in San Francisco as two friends try to break codes and solve a literary puzzle. Slow start, but fun exciting midway on.

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Wayside School Gets A Little Stranger by Louis Sachar

Wayside School Gets A Little Stranger (Wayside #3) by Louis Sachar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not as good as the first two but nice to see the adults’ lives progress.

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Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman

Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've become a Frederik Backman fan, and this is the 5th book I've read by him, but it is by far my favorite. Yes, he has a grumps-with-a-heart-of-gold theme that he repeats over and over. However, he really succeeded in created a nuanced imperfect character with Brit-Marie who experiences life as realistically as I've seen in a while. Most books I would change this or that about but this is a pretty nearly perfect story. Backman makes it look easy, but judging by all the many books I've read, it definitely isn't.

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A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon

A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was both funny and deep though it ended in kind of a silly way.

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The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am torn about how to review this book. Yes, of course, it's as badly written as everyone who read this 10 years ago says it is. And it's ridiculously disgustingly sexist- and it appears to be the author pushing this sexism more than it being a reflection of the subjects of the book. The thing is, 10 years ago, we didn't know that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook would contribute to the destruction of democracy. While it's not necessarily accurate, it at least lets us see what Eduardo Saverin thought of Zuckerberg at a younger age.

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House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Good writing, but what a horrible joyless book. Do I need to be hit over the head to be empathetic? No. As someone that is already fairly empathetic, reading this was stressful and awful for every minute of reading, and like having your insides ripped out in the least enlightening way possible. I can't believe I even finished it, and I definitely shouldn't have. Life is too short to read this.

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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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Superstition Freeway by Miles Waggener

Superstition Freeway by Miles Waggener
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Forlornness as breathtaking desert scenery.

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American Sniper by Chris Kyle

American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History by Chris Kyle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am starting with my bias because it deeply colors my entire reading of the book and therefore my review. My bias is first of all that I am one of those people who strongly supported our military personnel but thought it was fairly obvious that we should not be at war in Iraq as they had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 and there was also clearly no evidence that they had weapons of mass destruction. I was disturbed they wouldn't allow proper inspections of course, but war is a really big commitment and precisely because I support our military people, I thought we shouldn't endanger them unless we had a really good reason. My second bias is that I am one of those super annoying good works Christians, who doesn't believe that faith alone is all it takes to be in God's (metaphorical) good graces. I know, we are the most inconvenient and annoying, but with that out of the way, I turn to the book.

I thought seeing Chris Kyle's perspective was really enlightening because his thinking is so unlike my own and so unlike that of most authors I read. Expanding the way I view the world is a huge part of the reason I read books, so 5 stars for that. I thought his point about some of the rules of war endangering servicemen and women was especially salient, and I would hope that all the military heads read his book.

My issue is that Kyle refused to engage with any kind of critical thinking or philosophy in this book and that is really important when the book is fundamentally about having the most kills in a war with a poor justification. While he claims some general philosophical protection from Christianity, and some from the demonstrated sexism and cowardliness of his opponents, I was left cold. His philosophy is not actually the philosophy of Western Judeo-Christians, but the philosophy of Roman and Greek warriors to which Judeo-Christianity sprung up in direct opposition. He is a hero very much like Achilles, celebrated for his physical might in battle. WWJD-people need not apply to this story. I appreciate the risks he took for the love of our country. I love our country: our values as a democracy, the people who live in our country, and the troops who protect it. And I appreciate his honesty throughout. And I'm sorry he was killed after his return from the war while engaged in helping a fellow veteran. But giving his gun to a veteran he knew was struggling mentally is a pretty good indication of the type of critical-thinking lack throughout this book.

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