Unclutter Your Life in One Week by Erin Rooney Doland

Unclutter Your Life in One Week by Erin Rooney Doland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this when I read it in 2010, but it didn't help me get more organized in any kind of major or long-term way. Since then I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo and that made a huge change in my life.*So read that one instead.


*The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up didn't just change the way I organize my home, but it also changed the way I tackle problems generally. Als,o the section where I had to organize my books, increased my reading dramatically.

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Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first time I read this book I hadn't encountered all the many mentions of it in our culture yet. Or if I had, I hadn't noticed yet. I've encountered many uses of the quote of the Queen telling Alice that in the Mirror Land you must keep running just to stay in the same place. I think once I encountered it as a physics analogy and another time as a more pedestrian analogy.

This is also the origin of the famous poem Jabberwocky. That's probably a good enough reason to read the book.

The first time I read this book, I read it like any other children's book. On a second reading, it appears to be one puzzle-analogy after another with a minimal uniting plot, ie. Alice is a pawn in a real-life chess game trying to become a queen.

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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The same as I remembered it from childhood.

Claims to begin at Christmastime even though the girls are sitting outside.

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Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It was okay. Mostly boring. Barely even an adventure story as one challenge was met, and not very surprising. I forced myself to finish it so I could say I did. But it was pretty clear it wasn't going to get any better pretty early on.

I never really got invested in any of the characters except maybe the grandfather, who had an interesting life story, and an interesting way of relating with his grandson.

[Small spoiler alert.] The only thing I liked about it was the concept of time loops but it wasn't used to any fun effect. In fact, at the end of the book, they just changed the rules of the time loops for no discernible reason.

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A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I saw the movie many times before I read the book, and the movie is very similar. Reading the book was a bit more enjoyable though because you get more of Scrooge's internal world. It's such a feel-good treat.

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A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle

A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I wish I had written notes on what I thought of this book when I read it as a kid. I didn't so these are just my thoughts from my adult-rereading. It skips ahead about 10 years, and Charles Wallace is 15 now and Meg is married and pregnant. It seems a bit different than the others in that the challenge is overcome indirectly by altering the course of a family history in one place over time. This one has more legitimate time travel than the first two. However, the magical creature involved, a unicorn, is decidedly less cool than the multi-eyed dragon thing in A Wind in the Door (#2). The story is generally more adult and has a lot more structure. I recommend jotting down the family tree as you read though because the genealogy gets very confusing.

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Candy Freak by Steve Almond

Candy Freak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book isn't exactly what I thought it would be about; it's not a typical nonfiction book with interesting information candy generally. It's more a book about candy in America 50- 100 years ago, when candy was produced by many different small business owners. Some small business owners are still barely hanging in, but competition against the big manufacturers is killing them. Almond (ridiculous that this is his name- sometimes you feel like a nut?) travels to many of these small candy operations and visits their often beautiful factories, or at least Almond sees and describes them as beautiful.

Also, there's a memoir aspect to the book, but it's not really a memoir either.

Overall, not a very exciting read, especially since I can't get any of the candy he describes.

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A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book many years ago. It was my first book about physics, and I'm so lucky that it was because it inspired an interest in other books about physics, not all of which have been as enjoyable as this one. At the time I read it I did not have any understanding of what Einstein's theories of Special and General relativity meant for humans' understanding of time and space. It was also my first introduction to quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. That changed my understanding of reality (or lack thereof?)

Particularly because it was the first to introduce me to these ideas, this book was one of the most important books I've read. It changed the way I saw everything.

It's also a good history of physics. It's not completely clear on the current controversies of physics because Hawking favored his own views over the controversies generally.

Update: I lowered the number of stars from 5 to 4 only because Hawking's book The Universe in a Nutshell is *very similar but I think the organization is way better.


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The Odyssey by Homer

The Odyssey by Homer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I think I've read this 2 or three times in high school and in college and I've always loved it. It's a great adventure, with wonderful language, and I've always thought that the real hero of the story is Penelope. She's more clever as her husband- able to keep her suitors at arms-length without starting a war, more loyal to Odysseus than he is to her, and not prone to violence as he is.

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Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle

A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't care for the title of the book. It would be better named The Hole in the Sky, The Nothingness, The Wind in the Trees, or um, The Sick Mitochondria? Haha, okay the last one is bad, but at least then I could remember what the book is about when I see it on my shelf.

I gave this 3 stars as an adult, but to be fair I gave it 4 stars in my reading journal when I was a kid.

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