A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Bookish People You Should Follow On Instagram

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: Ten Bookish People You Should Follow On Social Media. I’m not big into book vloggers or Snapchatters, but I do follow several bookish Instagram accounts, so here are ten of my favorites!


@kath_reads: Lots of people are into super carefully posed and arranged photos. I like those every once in a while too, but I like looking at pictures that don’t seem “art directed” but are still pretty even more. Kath’s photos are lovely without making me wonder how long she spent putting everything into place just so.

@theguywiththebook: Faroukh posts very naturalistic book pictures from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The instagram book community (at least the parts that I see, which may be a reflection of my own internal biases) tends to be very female and mostly white and Asian women at that. To see a Middle Eastern guy’s perspective is refreshingly different.

@wordrevel: Josephine’s images are simple and striking. You don’t realize how hard it is to achieve that kind of unfussy grace until you try it yourself!

@thethumbedpage: Just because I’m not always into more artsy photos doesn’t mean I never appreciate them! Tess’s photos look like she wants to make them nice, but doesn’t spend hours working to make them perfect.

@bookmarauder: Mara’s pictures always make me want to start collecting the Funko Pop figurines!

@books.tea.quotes: I fell in love with Nina’s account when she posted a photo with her hedgehog in a book. Who can resist a hedgehog?

@hardcoverquotes: Seeing quotes that are meaningful to people is something I especially love about the book community! This account is just quotations in their natural habitat: the books they’re in!

@sweptawaybybooks: Alyssa’s sock game (and, of course, book collection) is seriously on point.

@pulitzerprizes: The book awards official account is full of interesting insights and information about the many books they’ve honored over the years.

@theenglishreader: These pictures give me serious cover envy. I pick up most of my books secondhand, so they’re frequently in less than perfect shape in the cover department (as long as the words are still there, that’s what matters to me), but it sure is nice to sigh longingly over the gorgeous copies on display here!

Book 18: The Woman Who Would Be King

“She had just embarked upon the highest-stakes move any woman had made in the history of human politics. With this novel and irregular kingship, she had arguably created more problems than she had solved. She would need to unite all her abilities in the years to come- ideological, economic, military, and political- to maintain what she had wrought.”

Dates read: January 14-19, 2016

Rating: 7/10

When I was a little girl, my mom bought me a book about King Tutankhamen. It had beautiful glossy photos, and I was fascinated by the short life of the boy king…and the maybe-supernaturally shortened lives of the people who excavated his tomb and awakened the mummy’s curse. From there sparked a love of ancient Egypt, peaking when I was absolutely nerdy enough at age 9 or so to write a letter to the editor to correct one of the Detroit papers when they ran an article that misidentified Osiris as a goddess. While my hardcore Egypt phase eventually faded, the Egyptian exhibit is still one of my favorite places at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and I’m always interested in reading more about it.

Quick, name me an Egyptian queen. I’m guessing that for most of you, Cleopatra crossed your mind. Maybe some of you went for Nefertiti. But while Cleopatra is remembered for her dramatic life and death and Nefertiti is remembered for her beauty, the queen that had probably the most successful reign as the ruler of Egypt has been largely forgotten: Hatshepsut. Like most Egyptian queens, she was initially married to her brother, Thutmose II. But he was sickly, and when he died when she was only about 16, she successfully finagled a role as regent for her toddler stepson/nephew, Thutmose III, and from there, had herself crowned king in her own right alongside him. In The Woman Who Would Be King, author Kara Cooney walks us through how Hatshepsut pulled off this highly unusual feat by using the authority and power she’d acquired through her religious role, surrounding herself with the right advisors, and emphasizing her own royal lineage. During her reign, she embarked on an ambitious temple building program and maintained her country’s security while continuing to subjugate its vassal states. Her gender was, of course, the elephant in the room, and Cooney describes how Hatshepsut’s depiction of her own gender in statuary shifted over time, from frank acknowledgement of her femininity near the beginning (when she served as regent) to an entirely masculine presentation as her co-ruler grew up and became a man himself. She goes on to detail what became of Hatshepsut’s legacy after she passed and how Thutmose III initially embraced but ultimately rejected reminders of her rule, having artistic depictions of her altered or destroyed to erase to her from the record as much as possible.   

Cooney is an actual Egyptologist, and it shows: she presents tons of information about ancient Egyptian social, religious, and royal life in the context of spinning Hatshepsut’s story. She must be a good teacher in her day job as a college professor…the information she gives us is detailed but not dull; it doesn’t feel like reading a reference text. For as much as we do know details about ancient Egyptian society, it’s amazing to me how much we don’t know at the same time…Cooney’s writing, as well-researched as it is, is peppered with “probably” and “might have”, because there is just no way to know for sure. I’ll admit I found this same quality irritating in Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra: A Life, but maybe that’s just because I’m relatively accustomed to reading about Cleopatra in the context of historical fiction. I’ve never read about Hatshepsut before, so I don’t have the same kind of expectations about being told a fleshed-out story. Also, Cooney makes it very clear, repeatedly, that the kind of records that would lead to a better story simply don’t exist, because the Egyptians at that time kept written records only of the official version of events, with any sort of juicy personal interest tidbits left off entirely.

Cooney’s writing is lively and interesting, and I think she does a good job of presenting the information in a way that makes you care about it…she doesn’t just dump it out there without context, it’s always clear that the things she’s telling you about are necessary for an understanding of what happened. That being said, unless you’re inclined to enjoy reading a factually-dense non-fiction book, you might find your attention wavering during some of the longer passages about religion or royal administration.

Tell me, blog friends…did you ever go through an Egypt phase?

**I received a free copy of this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Of My Most Recent 5 Star Reads

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: Ten Of My Mose Recent 5 Star Reads. Since the bulk of my content are actual review posts with ratings, I don’t want to sit here and type more about things I’ve already typed about at length (unless, of course, you want to go back and comment on the posts, in which case I’d LOVE to have a conversation about anything I’ve reviewed). So I’m going to look at books I read in the year or so BEFORE my 30th birthday/the start of this blog and highlight ten of the best books I read.

Bring Up The Bodies: I’d read the first volume of this series, Wolf Hall, and actually not really cared for it despite being a sucker for Tudor historical fiction. I think part of it might have been reading it on my Kindle…some books really benefit from being read physically. But I was willing to try the second novel in a hard copy and I LOVED it. The slow build of the first book pays off in this one, the intrigue and drama fly fast and furious, and reading it from a different perspective than we usually see in these kind of books was fascinating. It was great.

Remains of the Day: I’d read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which I liked a lot, so when I saw this at a secondhand book sale, I figured it was worth the $1. I was right. This one grabbed me right from the start, ripping my heart out as I read about Stevens’ life and the happiness and meaning it could have had if he’d have only opened himself up to it. It’s gorgeous and sad and wonderful.  

A Thousand Splendid Suns: Like everyone else in the world, I read and loved The Kite Runner. I was a little wary of this one because I had such high expectations from Khaled Hosseini’s debut, but I knew this was a story about women and I’m always a little suspicious of men writing women’s stories. I didn’t want to be disappointed, and I wasn’t. It was a lovely portrait of female friendship and the power women have when they work together.  

Blindness: I’d seen the movie first, because I love Julianne Moore, and found it well-done but difficult to watch. But I heard the book was a struggle to adapt and better than the movie, and it’s true. It tells the story of a world where blindness has become a contagious disease. The first round of victims are quarantined, and an eye doctor’s wife refuses to leave her husband despite not being affected and so pretends that she too is blind. It’s about humanity and inhumanity, and even though it’s written with nameless characters and lack of dialogue markings, it’s so good that you just adapt to it and the pages fly by.

High Fidelity: Another one where I’d seen the movie first. The movie is a really solid adaptation, Nick Hornby’s novels seem to move well to screen. He really nails that “adult who hasn’t quite grown up yet and finally takes significant steps towards maturity over the course of the story” place, which, even though his characters are mostly white dudes, I think is a place that’s relatable for a lot of people (myself included). It’s a coming-of-age novel, just with the actual age being older than the traditional version of that reliable story. 

The Age of Innocence: I actually still haven’t seen the movie for this one! But I want to, because I loved this story of smoldering passion and the ritualistic social manners that keep the players stuck in their roles. It’s a love triangle, but one where all the players are sympathetic, the ties that bind them are real, and no one is an interloper just created to be an obstacle in the Twu Wuv of the “real” couple. It explores a lot of the same themes as Anna Karenina, and while it’s not quite as masterful, it’s beautifully written and a lot shorter. If you enjoyed this, and you should because it’s great, the Tolstoy should be on your TBR too.  

The Pianist: And yet another entry in the “I watched the movie first” file. And while the book is excellent and heartbreaking (as Holocaust survivor stories are), this might be one of those cases where the movie measures up to a really good book. Both are incredible stories of survival and the power of music to play on the humanity of both performer and listener. 

So Big: This was something I never would have picked up on my own, but it went on sale for the Kindle and when I saw it had won the Pulitzer Prize, I figured it was worth a read. And yes, yes it is. So Big is the story of Selina, a high-spirited young woman who leaves her native Chicago to teach in farm country for a year. She plans to return home, but instead falls in love with a strong, handsome farmer. They marry and have a child, but her husband dies not long thereafter. Her young son is nicknamed So Big, and her struggle to raise him as a single mother is affecting and inspiring. She’s an amazing character and this book is unforgettable. 

The Interestings: I’d heard a lot of buzz around this one when it first came out and finally got around to reading it when I scored a secondhand copy for cheap. It’s the story of a group of kids that come together at a summer camp for the artistically gifted and whose friendships wax and wane over the course of their lives as they unfold in many directions. I find these kinds of friendships-changing-over-time novels to be incredibly compelling, and the current running through it about what it means to think of yourself as special and how it impacts your perception of happy-but-ordinary circumstances is just icing on the cake.

Stardust: Last one where I saw the movie first (which is cheating, because this is the last book on the list)! The movie was fun and forgettable, but the kind of epitome of “the book is better”…there’s nothing wrong with the film, it’s just not as good.

Book 17: Approval Junkie

“I was weirdly comforted by the fact that my new husband chalked up most of my distasteful behavior to my being possessed by the devil himself. It was as if he saw the best in me, and my best self was haplessly caught in an evil stranglehold that made me do things like show up sullen to the party his network threw to celebrate his show that I wasn’t on, as aggressively passive-aggressive as I could appear.”

Dates read: January 11-14, 2016

Rating: 6/10

I want people to like me. My friends (obviously), people at work, the people reading this. I’m pretty sure I should be embarrassed by how much it matters to me what people think, but it does matter all the same. The older I get, the more I’m okay with the idea that since some people aren’t really my cup of tea, it’s fair that I’m not everyone’s cup of tea either. But that means that I’m okay with about 2% of people not liking me, maybe 3% as a worst-case scenario. Everyone else, I’m going to go ahead and need your approval.

Which is why I was intrigued enough by the title of this book to put it on my to-read list, even though comedian essay/memoir isn’t the end of the reading pool I do more than lightly dip my toes in very often. Faith Salie’s Approval Junkie chronicles her lifelong pursuit of other people’s regard, from her childhood acting career, to her determination to win her high school’s Miss Aphrodite crown, to trying to build a career as an actress in Hollywood, her relationship with her first husband, her divorce, remarriage, and eventual family life with children. Her writing voice is strong, sure, and entertaining, and she doesn’t just go for funny (although when she does, her chapter about trying to win over Bill O’Reilly is a highlight). She also hits pathos, describing her difficulties dealing with the death of her mother when she was 26 and her struggle to conceive a child; as well as life advice, in her chapter about how to conduct an interview/genuinely listen to other people.

At the end of the day, I remembered why I don’t usually read these kind of books unless they’re by people I already love, like Mindy Kaling and Tina Fey. Even with their books, I find myself smirking wryly rather than actually laughing out loud. It’s really hard to be laugh out loud funny in print…the only comedy book I can actually remember triggering more than the occasional light chuckle was My Horizontal Life. I’m not super into Chelsea Handler, but that book was hysterical. Salie’s book is pretty decent, but not up to the Kaling/Fey level. On the whole it’s more funny than not, and it’s entertaining if not particularly memorable. I’d recommend this for a slightly older crowd…a lot of its humor deals with divorce, fertility treatments, and childrearing. While it can certainly be appreciated by people who haven’t had those experiences (like me), I feel like it would be most enjoyable for people who can relate better. 

Tell me, blog friends…have there been any books by comedians that have actually made you laugh out loud?

**I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I Really Love But Feel Like I Haven’t Talked About Enough

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: Ten Books I Really Love But Feel Like I Haven’t Talked About Enough. Since I’ve posted fairly little about my reading outside this blog and obviously I read a lot before I started, I’m going to take this opportunity to write about ten of my all-time favorites as mini-reviews!

 

Lolita: An incredible book that I really believe everyone should read. Humbert Humbert is objectively an evil man, a child molester that marries a mother just to get close to her pre-teen daughter, and once the mother dies, takes advantage of Lolita’s powerlessness to finally satisfy his desire for her. But it’s an astonishingly beautifully written example of how everyone is the hero of their own story, even terrible people.

 

The Secret History: This was a book I read originally in AP English in high school and have read so often I had to replace my copy when the cover fell off. When a working-class California kid goes to school at an elite Northeastern liberal arts college, his background in Latin gains him entrance into a tight-knit group of Classics scholars. The book opens with the group murdering one of their own, and then goes back in time to show you the before, and then the after as the group struggles to cope with what they’ve done. So good. 

 

The Virgin Suicides: This is my all-time favorite book, and my signed copy (from a reading Eugenides did at Michigan while he was there) is one of my most prized possessions. I connected with it instantly: when the youngest Lisbon sister is taken to the hospital after her first suicide attempt right at the beginning of the book, she goes to Bon Secours Hospital, which happens to be where I was born. It’s a wonderful coming of age story about infatuation and obsession and bad parenting and those the marks those heady teenage years when you feel so much so deeply leave on your psyche. 

1984: This is the first book I can remember loving. I must have read it in 7th or 8th grade. From the opening line (“It was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen”), I was just totally hooked on the story of Winston, Julia, and the dystopian world they live in. In today’s increasingly surveiled society, this novel is more relevant and important than ever. 

 

Emma: I wasn’t a girl that grew up on Austen. It was only a few years ago that I read my first (Persuasion) and have from there read my way through most of the rest. And maybe it’s colored by my affection for her modern-day incarnation Cher Horowitz, but Emma Woodhouse is one of my favorite characters in literature…I think as much as anything because she’s a fundamentally happy character, not given some sort of trial to suffer through but whose conflict is mainly coming to terms with the consequences of her own non-malicious but oblivious mistakes. 

The Cider House Rules: I saw the movie first, in high school, and loved it. Once I found out it was based on a book, that was my introduction to John Irving. It’s still my favorite Irving, probably because it illustrates (beautifully) one of my most deeply held principles: that this world doesn’t exist in black and white and sometimes virtue means re-evaluating your ideals to accommodate real life in all its infinite complexity. 

 

The Great Gatsby: I read this for my junior year English class and hated it. HATED. I thought Gatsby was a moron and Daisy was a twit and thought the ending that left no one happy was just fine for a group of awful people. But then I grew up and experienced loss and heartbreak and regret, and did a complete 180 on the book. It’s so great but I think it’s read way too early in the standard high school curriculum. I feel like you need to have at least one big romantic loss in your rearview mirror to really appreciate this one the way it deserves. 

 

Skinny Legs and All: This was a book I actually grabbed at my dad’s house growing up, and the trademark Tom Robbins mix of sex, metaphysics, religion with a quick-moving plot and bold female characters just grabbed me and didn’t let go. The adventures of Ellen Cherry Charles and Boomer the accidental artist and Can o’ Beans and Dirty Sock and Spoon has always had a special place in my heart and on my bookshelf. 

 

Remains of the Day: I read this a few years ago and it just ripped my still-beating heart out and stomped on it. As English butler Stevens reminisces about his past piece by piece over the course of the book, you see how his sense of duty and propriety has robbed him of the chance to experience any real happiness in his life. Gorgeous and sad and wonderful.

 

The Stranger Beside Me: I’ve always been fond of true crime…my mom had some Ann Rule books laying about here and there when I was growing up and I enjoyed them, but this one is the one to read. You see, when she was just getting started in her writing career, Rule spent time volunteering at a suicide crisis call center. And one of her frequent partners, with whom she grew fairly close? Ted Bundy. Yes, that Ted Bundy. She tells the story of his criminal history while at the same time telling the story of her coming to terms with the reality of the bright young man she had thought of as a friend. Fascinating stuff. 

So You Miss The Hunger Games?

With the final movie having come out a few months ago, The Hunger Games are officially over. Like most readers, I tore through the trilogy in what felt like no time…more than once even! While Katniss Everdeen inspired her really obvious knockoffs (Divergent, anyone?), nothing has quite lived up to Collins’ trilogy. And while they’re not all quite the same, obviously, here are some of my favorite YA series led by bad-ass female characters:

The Old Kingdom trilogy: For me, these books are the most similar to Collins’ and the most likely to be enjoyed by the Hunger Games crowd. Anyone who loved tough, strong Katniss should love equally tough and strong Sabriel, whose beloved father has disappeared into the realm of Death while fighting a powerful necromancer. She has no choice but to rely on the skills he taught her to find him and save her home from evil. These books are fantasy rather than dystopia, but they’ve got a similar girl-on-a-quest narrative, and a similar approach to the obligatory “love interest” plot point (in that it’s a relatively minor plot point…and bonus for no artificial love triangle!). For me, the second volume of this was the weakest (I didn’t like Lirael as a character as much as I liked Sabriel), but the first and third were great. There’s actually a fourth one that’s come out, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it and read it because Garth Nix is amazing.


The Immortals quartet: Anything by Tamora Pierce is a solid choice for a young feminist (she’s also got the Young Lioness quartet that’s very popular and well-regarded, but that one didn’t do nearly as much for me when I read it), but this series is my favorite. Daine Sarassri is an orphaned young woman living in a fantasy kingdom called Tortall who discovers that she has a kind of magic, not of the traditional spells-and-charms kind, but a rarer kind of Wild Magic that allows her to commune with animals. Her gift has always set her apart from people, so she’s more comfortable with four-footed than two-footed company. Daine, like Katniss, is proud and private and awkward and uses her strength to protect the ones she loves, and her adventures make for compulsive, entertaining reading.

His Dark Materials trilogy: This one is stretching it farther from The Hunger Games base, but it does feature a headstrong, scrappy girl who fights back against the system. The plot is complicated and gets into some strong theological questions like the nature of sin, so the reading is a little bit slower paced, but don’t worry, it’s not drudgery by a long shot. Lyra Belacqua is an unforgettable heroine and readers who gobbled up Katniss’ fight against the Capitol should enjoy Lyra’s push back against authority in her world, too.

A Wrinkle In Time Quintet: If you’ve read them, you might be wondering how I’d compare them to The Hunger Games, which is fair. But I think you can trace a line from smart, stubborn Meg Murray to smart, stubborn Katniss Everdeen without too much trouble. Neither Madeline L’Engle nor Susan Collins is afraid to let their heroine be prickly and sometimes unlikable. Both Meg and Katniss fiercely love and work to protect their younger sibling at great risk to themselves. Unlike The Hunger Games, we actually get to see later stories from the perspectives of the younger siblings in question, and the part of the story that involve an older Meg make me wish we’d gotten a better look at older Katniss.

Book 16: Mr. Splitfoot

“I have a parade of grotesque urges. I want to push little buttons quickly. I want information immediately. I want to post pictures of Ruth and me smiling into the sun. I want people to like me, like me, like me. I want to buy things without trying them on. I want to look at photos of drunk kids I knew back in high school. And I want it all in my hand. But my cyborg parts have been ripped out. What’s the temperature? I don’t know. What’s the capital of Hawaii? I don’t know anything. I don’t even know the automated systems in my body anymore. I don’t know how to be hungry, how to sleep, to breathe.” 

Dates Read: January 7-11, 2016

Rating: 7/10

What does it mean to like a book? Does it mean you find it compelling and want to keep reading it when you put it down? Does it mean you think it’s well-written? Does it mean that you connect with the characters and care about what happens to them? Does it mean you don’t want it to end? Does it mean you want to read it again? Or is it just something ineffable, unquantifiable, that marks the dividing line between “liked it” and “didn’t like it”? I can’t remember a book before Mr. Splitfoot that has so challenged me to think about what I mean when I say that I “like” a book. I’m still not sure, months after it’s been filed away as “read” on Goodreads, whether or not I liked it (I write the first draft of my review very quickly after finishing a book, but I do come back to make revisions a few times before anything officially goes up). That rating? Not a result of any sort of thought process besides that a six seemed too low, and an eight too high.

Mr. Splitfoot is structured as dual narratives that come together at the end. The first, earlier-in-time part of the story follows Ruth and Nat, two of many abandoned children at a state-funded, religiously-motivated facility in upstate New York that cares for them, sort of, until they turn 18. Ruth’s older sister Elinor has aged out, so she and Nat declare themselves sisters and bond to each other as their chosen family. As children, they start playing at summoning ghosts with the other kids, and once they reach their late teens, a traveling con man named Mr. Bell takes them and their act on the road. The second, later-in-time part of the story focuses on Cora, Ruth’s niece, in the present day. At 25, she’s living with her mother, working a dead-end job at an insurance company, and has just been knocked up by older man named Lord who’s still married to the wife that was institutionalized after she tried to kill him. Cora only met Ruth (and Nat) once, but that one visit stuck with the then-teenage Cora for life. When Ruth suddenly reappears, after Cora’s revelation of her pregnancy to Lord doesn’t go well, Cora is just about over everything in her life enough to follow the now-mute Ruth on a journey. Where they’re going, and why, and how Ruth came to be mute, are revealed only gradually over the course of the stories as they move forward.

I think, ultimately, that I liked Mr. Splitfoot. I LOVED the language. I highlighted what feels like a quarter of the book in my Kindle and agonized for quite a while over which quote to publish as a part of this post. I’ve put more Samantha Hunt in my Amazon wishlist, because her way with words is incredible. It reminded me of how Jeffrey Eugenides writes, and Eugenides is one of my all-time favorite authors. And I found the book compelling, both because of its powerful language and because I wanted to see how the mysteries presented by the story were going to be wrapped up. And when they do wrap up, at the end, it makes for a big and satisfying emotional punch. But I thought it moved too slowly, with not enough revelations along the way…instead of whetting my appetite for more, I just kept getting frustrated by not knowing what was going on or where it was headed. And characterization, which is big for me in my enjoyment of a book, was thin. It was hard to understand what motivated the characters to act the way they did. Was it worth reading? Yes, for the wordsmithing alone. But did I enjoy the experience of reading it? Only sort of and sometimes. I did appreciate it by the end, and it stuck with me for a long time. 

Tell me, blog friends…what do you mean when you say you like a book?

**I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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