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Book 165: Butterfly Boy



“I want to tell him the truth. Yes, I know this story. He’s told it to me at least three times, and each time he tells it he remembers more details. That’s how my father lies, convincing himself more and more that what he’s telling is fact, because fiction isn’t this exact and memorable.”

Dates read: August 2-5, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Since I’ve started tracking my reading for this blog, I’ve tracked particular categories. Fiction vs. nonfiction. Hard copy books vs. Kindle editions. And male vs. female authors. Like a lot of white people educated in predominantly white schools, I’ve been exposed constantly to white writers, usually male (my AP English teacher did make it a point to have us read works by black authors as well). I took it for granted until I started reading book blogs before I launched my own, and I started to really think about how many books I was reading that were written by dudes. I decided that I wanted to keep an eye on that metric…women are half the world, shouldn’t we be telling half the stories?

Turns out, I often really like books written by women! And I’ve become more and more sensitive to the number of white and heterosexual (and cisgender and able, etc) narratives I read as well. Books force us to really think about people that don’t look like us as people worth investing our time and energy in. And so I was intrigued when my book club chose Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Butterfly Boy. I’ll admit that I was initially concerned about finding something to relate to in this memoir of a gay Latino man’s coming-of-age, but I realized how ridiculous that was very quickly. What there is to relate to is the experience of being a human growing up. Although the details of Gonzalez’s childhood and adolescence are very different than mine, the broad themes are very similar: trying to figure out who you are and who you want to be, struggling with your relationships with your parents, finding yourself in unhealthy relationships. There’s a reason the coming-of-age genre is so popular: everyone’s gone through it, so everyone can relate.

Gonzalez centers his narrative around a bus trip he takes with his father to his maternal grandparents’ village in Mexico. Gonzalez, at this time a college student, has just had another ugly, violent fight with his lover and reflects on this relationship as well as his life growing up, particularly his conflicted relationship with the man he’s traveling with. It’s a harsh life he’s led: the family’s poverty keeps them rootless, chasing unskilled labor jobs, constantly living with relatives to keep a roof over their heads. Their time living with his paternal grandparents is especially bad: his grandfather is physically abusive and rules the home through fear. Gonzalez knows fairly early on that he’s gay, and while his sexuality is mostly a topic avoided by his family, his mother encourages him to hide it from his father, so he lives in a constant state of shame and suppression.

Gonzalez’s writing is really beautiful, even as he describes brutal violence and searing embarrassment. He mostly avoids telling the reader who people are (himself, his father, his mother) in favor of showing who they are through their own words and actions. When, early in the book, Gonzalez gives his father money for two first-class bus tickets and the older man returns with two coach tickets, overriding his son’s decision about how to spend his own money, we can tell what kind of person he is. By the time Gonzalez gets to the end of his story, we understand how the ways he’s been taught to hate himself leave him vulnerable to a relationship in which he’s treated with contempt. This would probably be a very difficult book to read for people with a history of domestic violence, but I’d recommend it for other readers. Regardless of your background, there’s a story here that’s very worth reading.

Tell me, blog friends…do you think about who writes the books you read?

One year ago, I was reading: Mansfield Park

Two years ago, I was reading: Helter Skelter

Three years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

Book 162: Me Talk Pretty One Day



“After a few months in my parents’ basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of those things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations. The moment I took my first burning snootful, I understood that this was the drug for me. Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit? These are questions for insecure potheads. The speed enthusiast knows that everything he says or does is brilliant. The upswing is that, having eliminated the need for both eating and sleeping, you have a full twenty-four hours a day to spread your charm and talent.”

Dates read: July 20-23, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: The New York Times bestseller

What is the standard for calling something “nonfiction”? It can’t be 100% objective accuracy, because there’s always something that gets left out of the telling. No one will ever be able to capture all the nuance, every single gesture and word that went into an interaction. I couldn’t recount the full details of a three-minute conversation I had with my boss a couple hours ago, much less look back into my childhood and perfectly recreate important moments. So if it’s not total undisputed truth, is it mostly true? More true than not? True in spirit? It’s hard to draw a line.

When you make your living writing books of essays, usually prominently featuring your childhood, you’re definitely liable to accusations that your treatment of the truth is…flexible, which is something David Sedaris knows all too well. Me Talk Pretty Some Day is the first of his books I’ve ever read, and I have to admit, some of the pieces it contains do strike me as a little too good to be exactly, totally true. The book is separated into two parts: the first focusing on his early life, mostly his childhood with his family, and the second focusing on his adult life, mostly the portions in which he lived in France with his boyfriend. He didn’t speak French before he spent time there, and his frustrating attempts to learn the language are a major through-line of the back half of the book.

As in any essay collection, there are hits and misses. For me, personally, there were many more of the former than the latter here. Humor in books is a tricky thing…even if I find something funny, the most it usually provokes is a smile. An out-and-out laugh is a rare thing, but Sedaris managed to get a few good chuckles out of me (including while I was reading it on an airplane, which made me seem A+ sane I’m sure). “A Shiner Like A Diamond” (about David’s sister Amy freaking out their father by wearing the bottom half of a fat suit on a trip home) and “Make That A Double” (about Ugly Americans refusing to even try speaking French, and the weirdness of learning to speak a language with gendered nouns) were particular highlights for me, but most of the pieces were decent to good, in large part because they weren’t ever boring.

And that’s where we get into the truth-telling. These are funny stories, based in fact. But are they true? There’s been more than one examination into the accuracy of the stories Sedaris tells (this one from The New Republic is particularly thorough). So if they aren’t really all that true, sometimes, does it really matter? For me, I guess the answer is that it depends. For these kinds of books (memoir-ish essays, usually humorous or meant to be), I’m generally proceeding under the idea that there might be some minor embellishment, usually to fill in dialogue or some of the finer details. But it seems like some of these stories in this book (particularly the one about the guitar teacher) are more than just slightly spruced up. And that’s a little more bothersome. Part of the reason some of these stories are so funny isn’t just because they recount humorous situations, but because those situations are supposed to have been real. If they’re not actually real…I feel like there should be some sort of acknowledgement that these stories are based in fact but might have been dazzled up to tell a better story, maybe?

That probably sounds more negative than I intend it. At the end of the day, even after I read about the likelihood that some of these stories weren’t exactly real life, I did enjoy reading the book. And for me, that’s what counts. I enjoyed it enough, honestly, that I’m likely to continue reading other David Sedaris books, because I like his writing. My husband tells me that this is his best collection, so I’m curious to read more and see if I agree with him. I’d recommend Me Talk Pretty One Day to anyone looking for a mood-lifter (especially if you, too, have suffered through the indignity of learning a foreign language).

One year ago, I was reading: Pond

Two years ago, I was reading: The King Must Die

Three years ago, I was reading: Thirst

Book 158: Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud



“There’s a highly circumscribed performance of femininity expected at each stage of a woman’s life—a certain way her face and body should look. All of these ideals are some form of striving for youthfulness, but only to the extent that it’s ‘appropriate’, and with any part of the body that fails its duty hidden from sight.”

Dates read: July 4-6, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Like most girls of my age, when I was little, I was told that I could be anything I wanted to be. And for a while, I (and I assume most everyone else) believed it. But as you grow up, you realize that no matter what you are, girls are expected to not be “too much”. Don’t be too smart, that intimidates the boys. Don’t be too ambitious, set goals that are high but not too high. Don’t be too capable, guys like being the ones to “rescue” you from spiders and leaky faucets. Don’t be too direct, people won’t think you’re very nice. Look how big this box is, you have all the room you need in here. Don’t get out of it.

I’ve long-since looked forward to Anne Helen Petersen’s work on Buzzfeed. She’s so good at not just really looking under the surface of our cultural climate, especially in how we perceive and treat women, but explaining it in a compelling, understandable way. If you haven’t read her Cool Girl essay, go read it right now because it’s phenomenal. And so of course I was psyched when I found out she was writing a book, Too Fat Too Slutty Too Loud, about women who transgress our social norms. Who among us hasn’t stepped outside the lines, peeked out from inside the box and felt blowback for it? Who hasn’t looked at the women who do get out there and live out there and regarded them with a curious mixture of revulsion and envy? Petersen highlights nine (well, ten technically) “unruly” women, focusing on how each in turn has challenged the expectations we place on lady people. Many of these challenges focus on the body, from Serena Williams’ “too strong” frame to Madonna’s refusal to cover up because she’s “too old” to Caitlyn Jenner’s “too queer” gender confirmation surgery. There are also women who make other choices they’re not supposed to: Hilary Clinton might be smart and ambitious, but she’s “too shrill”, and Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer (the Broad City team) make us uncomfortable because they’re “too gross”.   
I wanted this book to be amazing and mind-blowing and incredible. And it was good! Petersen’s writing is lively and insightful and serious without being ponderous. But I think maybe it would have worked better if it had been split into two volumes, one focusing on body and one focusing on personality. The essays felt like they skimmed the surface, taking a shallow dive into concepts that deserve deeper thought and analysis that I would have loved to read Petersen’s take on. In writing about how Nicki Minaj is “too slutty”, for example, Petersen refers to and gives some brief background on how black female bodies are sexualized and fetishized. But there’s so much there that because the book needed to be a reasonable length and there are eight other subjects, she doesn’t really have space to really give it the full context it deserves. I felt the same way, perhaps even more strongly, about the chapter on Jenner and trans issues. It would have felt problematic to leave the gender binary untouched entirely, but to only briefly interact with it doesn’t feel quite right either. 
One essay, though, that really made me think was the piece about “too loud” Jennifer Weiner, who won’t just quietly accept the judgment of her writing about women and their lives (which, to be perfectly honest, I don’t personally much care for) as mere “chick lit” not to be taken seriously. I know I fall into that trap with my own reading, disdaining titles with pastel covers or shoes and shopping bags prominently displayed. It’s snobbish, but if I’m being transparent here, I will say that it takes a lot to get me to take a second look at a title deemed “women’s fiction”. Which is actually pretty bullshit of me. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is just as good as Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, so why is the former a “girl book” and the latter a book for everyone? There’s not a good reason why we treat stories about women’s lives and problems, written by women, as lesser than books written by and about men. I love Nick Hornby, but he writes lighter fare that would probably be shrugged off if he and his protagonists were ladies. I need to do some work to think about my own internalized misogyny, especially when it comes to my reading choices.

Tell me, blog friends…do you think of books by and about women as less important than books by and about men?

One year ago, I was reading: The Games (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Seating Arrangements

Three years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

Book 155: Spook



“If you do a web search on the initials EVP, you’ll find dozens of sites with hundreds of audio files of these recordings. Though some sound like clearly articulated words or whispers, many are garbled and echoey and mechanical-sounding. It’s hard to imagine them coming from dead souls without significantly altering one’s image of the hereafter. Heaven is supposed to have clouds and white cloth and other excellent sound-absorbing materials. The heaven of these voices sounds like an airship hangar. They’re very odd.”

Dates read: June 24-27, 2017

Rating: 7/10

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but if I ever want to send myself into existential-crisis-land, I start wondering what exactly happens when we die. I get the biological piece, but what about the “me” part? Where does it go? Is there a soul, or am I just the sum of various electrical and chemical reactions in my brain? Of all the many thousands of years that there have been and will be humans on this planet, do I really only get to see these decades that I’m allotted in this life? Or is there another life where I get to see how it all plays out?

I’ve given myself anxiety just writing about it! Much like me, Mary Roach is a skeptic about life after death, and so decided to turn her science-oriented eye towards the various theories out there about what happens when we’re gone. In Spook, she travels to India to meet people who claim to be reincarnated, she meets mediums and goes to a class to learn how to channel the dead herself, she goes to England to see Cambridge’s preserved sample of what was alleged to be “ectoplasm”, and she looks at the so-called research behind the popular theory that people lose 21 grams of weight at death when the soul departs the body.

In every instance, she’s confronted with the gulf between what the heart wants to believe and what the scientifically-validated research says is real. Hindus frequently claim to know someone who is reincarnated, but their belief system encompasses this and reincarnations usually seem to occur in close proximity (i.e. the person who is now dead and their “new” body are usually within less than 100 miles of each other). On the other hand, the motives that one might suspect behind a dubious claim, like the desire for financial support, aren’t usually present. There are frequent reports, in the United States, of people who have had near-death experiences feeling like they’re floating away from their body and can see it recede below them as they go towards the light. But only in a very, very few of them did they report seeing anything that they wouldn’t have been able to see from within their body before. Every attempt to replicate the 21 grams experiment has failed, including several of that researcher’s own.

Much like A.J. Jacobs in last week’s post, Mary Roach manages the tricky art of tone-setting for a work exploring an issue that tends to elicit strong and often irrational feelings. It comes clearly through that, like most of the audience that would be inclined to pick up this book, she’s primarily fact-oriented but in her heart, hopes she’ll find something there. The idea that when our bodies die, the person that we are inside that body just stops along with us is a harsh one, and the fact that virtually every belief system includes some sort of continued life demonstrates that people really don’t want to believe it. The way she structures the book, too, into short chapters focusing on one theory each, helps keep it moving along and away from getting bogged down into tiny intricacies. In a subject area that can be heavy, this helps keep it light.

I will say that this might not be the book for the deeply reverent. Roach refuses to hold back from having a sense of humor about any of it and some may think she treats the sacred too cavalierly. But for anyone who has questions and wants a peek into what science tells us about the various and sundry ways that the dead have been said to interact with the living, this is a witty, enjoyable read.

Tell me, blog friends…do you let yourself go down the rabbit hole on this issue or do you manage to not think about it (if the latter, please tell me your secret in the comments)?

One year ago, I was reading: A Vast Conspiracy

Two years ago, I was reading: Eleanor of Aquitaine

Three years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

Book 154: The Year of Living Biblically



“The Bible says thou shalt not steal; I stole my neighbor’s wireless signal. And now I’m limping around the house with a bum knee.”

Dates read: June 21-24, 2017

Rating: 6/10

I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a senior in high school and remember being shocked at how many n-bombs there were. I’d heard the word used by white people maybe a handful of times in my life to that point (not that there weren’t racists in my very white town, there were plenty, but they kept that kind of talk out of the public sphere) and here it was just all over this work of classic literature. The book tends to inspire challenges and protests for this very reason, and I’m definitely speaking from a place of privilege here, but I don’t agree with campaigns to produce a version that has it censored out. All historical documents are a product of their time and place and working with that context is an important part of thinking critically about the world.

The Bible, for instance, is a historical document. The Old Testament dates back to hundreds of years before Christ, and the New Testament to within 100 years after his death. It’s a holy book, but it’s also the product of two distinct time periods, both very long ago. It’s filled with rules, both specific and vague, that reflect the world of nomadic, desert-dwelling herding people rather than the world in which most Judeo-Christian people live today. Writer A.J. Jacobs decided to see what it would be like to actually try to live by these rules in the modern world in his book, The Year of Living Biblically. As Jacobs is a secular Jewish husband and father in New York City, wackiness ensues.

He’s no stranger to offbeat projects…he’d previously written a book about his experience of reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. But when he was doing prep work for this book and realized that the Bible contains over 700 rules, ranging from very specific things like fiber-mixing and beard trimming prohibitions to very general things like restraining from covetousness, he decided to focus on the Ten Commandments first and tackle as many of the others as he could, because he knew he couldn’t do all of them every day. He also seeks out people who are devoted to their religious beliefs in their own ways, leading to a visit to Amish Country, the Creation Museum, to see snakehandling Pentecostals, and even an overseas trip to Jerusalem. This on top of a regular job writing for Esquire, parenting a small son, and being a partner to his pregnant wife.

Jacobs is witty without being snarky, which is a good tone for this book. There’s sometimes a tendency among secular types to get condescending about matters of religious faith and belief, which is counter-productive at best. He admits that since he’s deeply agnostic, one of the hardest rules for him to follow is regular prayer, but he gamely tries anyways and is honest about both his initial discomfort and the ease that grows after months of practice. After having a hard time, in a hyperconnected world, retreating into the quiet of the Sabbath, he comes to look forward to that time to unwind and recharge. While he can’t quite get into the harshness of parenting his son from a “spare the rod, spoil the child” perspective, he knows he needs to be better about discipline and he starts taking steps in the right direction.

I found this book enjoyable, if a little on the lightweight side. Although it’s necessarily from Jacobs’ perspective, I found myself really curious about how his wife felt about this particular experiment and what it was like to live with someone doing this. It’s pretty clear from what Jacobs writes that his wife was often irritated by the project, and his frequent absences while leaving her with their son to handle while she was pregnant with twins had to be absolutely infuriating. Then again, that Jacobs seemed to simply expect her to shoulder the mental and emotional burden of dealing with his choices isn’t really out of line with the very patriarchal culture in which the Bible was steeped. Recommended for people curious about religion and/or with a sense of humor about their own.

Tell me, blog friends…do you think it’s valuable to look at books through their cultural context?

One year ago, I was reading: The Underground Railroad

Two years ago, I was reading: What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

Three years ago, I was reading: Primitive Mythology

Book 152: Shattered



“It was hard enough to run against Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, the Republican National Committee, the FBI, the House Benghazi Committee, and the national media—plus slippery-lipped Joe Biden on any given day—without her own team screwing things up. The one person with whom she didn’t seem particularly upset: herself. No one who drew a salary from the campaign would tell her that. It was a self-signed death warrant to raise a question about Hilary’s competence—to her or anyone else—in loyalty-obsessed Clintonworld.”

Dates read: June 14-18, 2017

Rating: 7/10

On November 8, 2016, my husband and I had plans to go to an election party with a colleague of ours. He had actually left work a little early to go help set up, and I was supposed to join him after I got out of the office. Being on the West Coast, polls start to close on the other side of the country at 4 PM our time, and so by the time I got home and took the dog for a walk and made myself a little dinner, results were starting to come in. I watched, stunned, as things started to tip away from what had seemed a certain Clinton victory. Our pug is not the cuddliest little guy (he’s almost kind of like a cat in that he likes to be near us but not right on top of us), but he got pulled into emergency snuggle duty that night. After he pleaded with me to come out at least for a bit, I dropped by the party, but we didn’t linger. Sometime around 11 we just turned it off. We had to go to work the next day, after all.

And so the world went on, and the thinkpieces about how it had happened, how what seemed like a sure shot had gone south, commenced. Journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes had spent several months in close contact with the campaign, intending to write a book about how we got our first female president of the United States. Instead, they wrote Shattered, about what went wrong. There isn’t a single, easy answer. There were a lot of things, none of which alone would likely have doomed her, but they didn’t happen alone: Hilary’s own decision-making pre-campaign regarding paid speeches, leaving her vulnerable to the primary challenge from the left she got from Senator Bernie Sanders, the decision to employ Robby Mook as campaign manager and tilt towards his preferred analytics instead of traditional tools like polls and persuasive field efforts, the bloated bureaucracy of Clintonland and infighting among the inner circle, the server, the emails, James Comey, Anthony Weiner, all of it and more happened in overlapping waves. And so, much like that other unsinkable ship, the S.S. Clinton went under.

Allen and Parnes were able to get deep access because they spoke to most of their sources as background, which means lot of the information isn’t tied to a particular person. Since you know you won’t be identified, you feel comfortable speaking more freely without fear of recrimination for divulging sensitive details. And the details Allen and Parnes got tell quite the story: what seemed like an unstoppable behemoth from the outside was very messy from the inside. Although no one forgot their main enemy was outside, the warring power centers within found plenty of time and energy to skirmish among themselves. Healthy competition between allies can be productive, but this variety was decidedly not. The Clintons themselves were not a part of the solution…from the perspective in the book, they seem largely at a remove from the campaign and disinclined to help clear lines of authority be drawn. Hillary’s unwillingness to force Huma Abedin to take a step back from her established role as gatekeeper and be in more direct contact with her own campaign, her refusal to either place all her faith in either the data-driven Mook or old-school politico John Podesta, created a situation in which no one was really at the helm to navigate through very tricky waters indeed.

This book was an especially interesting read for me personally because I know people who worked at a relatively high level on the campaign (at least one of whom is called out by name). While the book focuses strongly on upper-level turmoil, they largely had positive individual experiences. Which helped me keep some of the “doom and gloom” tone that the book seemed to set around the campaign in perspective. Campaigns are messy and stressful and hard. And the way this one was run didn’t help ameliorate that. At the end of the day, this book left me wishing that it could have turned out better, because the candidate would have served the office well. I’d recommend this book highly, I thought it was interesting and informative.

One year ago, I was reading: The Book Thief 

Two years ago, I was reading: The Executioner’s Song

Three years ago, I was reading: The Nazi Officer’s Wife

Book 151: The Man Without A Face



“Putin loved the Soviet Union, and he loved its KGB, and when he had power of his own, effectively running the financial system of the country’s second-largest city, he wanted to build a system just like them. It would be a closed system, a system built on total control—especially control over the flow of information and the flow of money. It would be a system that aimed to exclude dissent and would crush it if it appeared.”

Dates read: June 9-14, 2017

Rating: 7/10

There are two kinds of people, in my experience working in politics, who decide to run: people who genuinely care about people and want to be a part of the solution in helping the community run better, and people who like power. These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but there’s generally one that seems to be predominant. Thankfully, most of the people I’ve worked with are in the former rather than the latter category. As hard as it seems to believe in our currently climate of partisan enmity, the solid majority of politicians on both sides are in it because they’re trying to do good for their communities, states, and country.

It’s the other ones, the ones who are focused on power, who are hard to deal with at best and dangerous at worst. Perhaps the world’s most prominent power-oriented politician is President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and The Man Without A Face is Russian writer Masha Gessen’s look at how he rose and how he’s managed to stay on top.  Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election has been and continues to be a very hot topic, so this book got bumped up on my reading list because I wanted some context for what’s going on in the world right now. It proved a very timely, very enlightening read.

Those looking for a straightforward biography of Putin will be disappointed. Although the details of Putin’s life, such that they are available, are discussed at significant length, the book is just as focused on explaining the Russia in which he came to power and how he’s worked to concentrate and hold that power ever since. The relative comfort in which Putin grew up, the disappointment of a boring posting to East Germany while with the KGB, his good fortune in finding himself attached to then-Mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, the way in which he was plucked from obscurity to succeed Boris Yeltsin by political handlers overconfident that he would be moldable clay…and his utter ruthlessness in completely destroying potential foes before they were able to gain any real momentum. All of that’s there, but Gessen provides important details about Russia’s political history to help understand how it was all able to be executed so effectively.

Speaking of executed…Gessen’s book doesn’t directly accuse Putin of having them carried out, but she draws damning connections between dissident activity that angered him and then sudden, untimely deaths due to very unlikely causes, like radioactive element poisoning. Documentary proof of this and other clandestine, illegal activity very likely doesn’t exist or is deeply buried, so she can’t present it to her readers. This is not surprising, but I didn’t get the sense that she was scare-mongering or making molehills into mountains. It seemed to me like she picked examples of politically motivated scare tactics/violence where the logical chain was clear, and I have to imagine that for every situation she presents, there are several sketchier ones that required larger conclusory leaps that were left untold. If you’re interested in Putin, or Russia, or autocrats, I’d definitely recommend this book. It’s worth your time.

Tell me, blog friends…do you think politicians are mostly good, or mostly bad?

One year ago, I was reading: Player Piano

Two years ago, I was reading: The Executioner’s Song

Three years ago, I was reading: Gilded

Book 147: Migraine

“But we now encounter a much more fundamental problem, which springs from the fact that migraine cannot be considered simply as an event in the nervous system which occurs spontaneously and without reason: the attack cannot be considered apart from its causes and effects. A physiological statement cannot enlighten us concerning the causes of migraine, or its importance as a reaction or item of behavior. Thus a logical confusion is implicit in the very formulation of such a question as: What is the cause of migraine? For we require not one explanation or one type of explanation, but several types, each in its own logical province. We have to ask two questions: why migraine takes the form(s) that it does, and why it occurs when it does.”

Dates read: May 20-26, 2017

Rating: 6/10

I first started getting migraines when I was about 18. I’d gone on the Pill, and suddenly found myself getting these awful headaches. For a couple years, I didn’t make the connection, and just thought they were especially bad normal headaches. But when I was driving home from a shift at Blockbuster and literally had to pull off to the side of the road and barf, I finally went to see my doctor. When I told her about the excruciating pain on one side of my head that I got periodically, she diagnosed me with migraines and gave me Imitrex and the first time I took one, it was like magic. Within about an hour, the pain just…stopped. I could go about my life like a normal person. It was like a miracle.

It took me a few more years to figure out that the headaches were tied to my menstrual cycle and there’s a whole series of nonsense that’s connected to that, but that’s not the important part. The important part is that as both a migraine sufferer and a devoted fangirl of Oliver Sacks, I was of course going to pick up his book Migraine. It’s a quasi-scientific text, but I think it’s still accessible to a popular audience. It just needs be an informed popular audience, or at least one willing to get their Google on when he starts talking about neurotransmitters.

Sacks takes a comprehensive look at migraines, beginning with setting them into historical context (they’ve been around at least as long as recorded history) and then describing the two basic types of migraines: with aura (“classical migraine”) and without aura (“common migraine”). He goes into detail about the symptoms of the two, beginning with the common migraine, which is distinguished primarily by an intense, usually one-sided headache and some degree of nausea, and then proceeding to classical migraine, which is similar but also very different. The classical migraine has a visual component known as the “aura”, which often takes the form of  bright colors or patterns clouding the visual field. He then discusses possible causes, triggers, and treatment options.

In my experience (which is admittedly as a person with a psychology degree), Oliver Sacks’ writing style, which bursts with curiosity and enthusiasm, tends to override concerns about technicality. That being said, of the many books I’ve read of his, this the most textbook-like. Assuming that the primary audience to which this book will appeal will be migraine-sufferers who already have some background information about their condition, I think it’s fine. Even as a fairly savvy consumer, I learned things about migraines that I didn’t know before. Since I’m the type of person who doesn’t have aura, I was surprised to learn that it’s actually fairly common for people who do get aura to get just the aura, without any headache component. Migraine sufferers will also be able to see how many of their symptoms are more common than they thought. I also found myself very grateful that my migraines debuted after the use of triptan drugs to treat migraines became standard, since I know my Imitrex is a lifesaver and previous drugs sound like they were generally less effective with more side effects. I’d definitely recommend this book to people curious about migraines, since I think it distills a lot of research and thought into one volume. Unless you’re otherwise interested or a Sacks completist, though, it’s probably not worth your time.

Tell me, blog friends…how many of you also suffer from migraines?

One year ago, I was reading: Stay With Me

Two years ago, I was reading: The Professor and the Madman

Book 145: The Skies Belong To Us



“In struggling to make sense of this madness, pundits and politicians often invoked the term epidemic to describe the skyjacking crisis. They spoke more truly than they knew, for one of the best ways to understand the Golden Age of Hijacking is through the lens of public health. The phenomenon spread in strict accordance with the laws of epidemiology: skyjackings always occurred in clusters that traced back to a single incident that had turned contagious.”

Dates read: May 12-15, 2017

Rating: 6/10

September 11, 2001, happened when I was in high school, at the beginning of my junior year. I remember being in Mrs. Brehm’s Public Speaking class, chatting with a classmate about something in Spanish class, when the loudspeaker announced that there had been an attack in New York. We turned on the TV after the first plane struck, obviously, but before the second one did. It’s a day burned in my memory, for which there is a very definite “before” and “after”. The most noticeable hallmark of the after, of course, is the airport security regime that’s been in place ever since.

I knew there had been domestic airplane hijackings (like everyone else, I’d heard of D.B. Cooper), but I’d had no idea how numerous they were until I read Brendan Koerner’s The Skies Belong To Us. In the late 60s/early 70s, they were happening all the time! Sometimes even twice in one day! Koerner tells the general story of the brief skyjacking “craze”, but also focuses on a particular instance to tell the story writ both large and small. The crime he chooses to highlight was a hijacking to Algeria, committed by Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow.

Holder and Kerkow were a deeply odd couple, united mostly by their love of drugs. Holder used them to salve the psychic wounds of a life scarred by systemic racism and the Vietnam War, Cathy used them because they were fun. A one-time small-town Oregon good girl (she was track teammates with Jeff Prefontaine), she grew up to become a party girl in hippie San Francisco. Through much more luck than planning or skill (they were almost thwarted by their own idiocy), they managed to pull off stealing an airplane and get $500,000 hard currency to take with them. Although their original plan was to head to southeast Asia, when that got derailed, Holder chose to head to Algeria. From there, the couple headed to France, where Holder fell deeper into long-brewing mental illness and Kerkow propelled herself into the most exclusive social circles she could find. While the pair eventually split and Holder returned to the US, Kerkow is still living the life of an international fugitive from justice to this day.

Although I certainly recall life before the TSA, I don’t recall life before any sort of airport security at all. Which is apparently how it used to be for a long time, even after all this constant hijacking nonsense! The airlines pitched a fit about even the most minor screening measures because they didn’t want to inconvenience their customers! Which, coming from a time in which little girls are bounced from flights because they’re wearing leggings and ticketed customers are dragged off flights and beaten, seems literally crazy. I mean, there are definitely things about that time that I 100% don’t want to go back to, but given what we hear about the actual efficiency of TSA at actually finding any sort of dangerous material, it seems like maybe considering the idea of lighter security (like PreCheck, but for everyone!) should be on the list of things to do.

Koerner does a very solid job of balancing all of the elements in his book: the state of the country as a whole at the time, the prime hijacking era and highlighting some illustrative vignettes (including one set right here in Reno where the banks were already closed after the money demand was made so the casinos ponied up the cash), and the story of Roger and Cathy. No one story thread feels irritatingly dominant, and Koerner’s treatment of hijacking never feels like cheap drama being played up for shock value. The frequency of hijacking in that era was shocking enough and he’s assured enough to let it speak for itself. That he was able to interview Roger before his death definitely helps in creating portraits of the central hijacker and his long-ago girlfriend as actual people and not caricatures. It’s a very readable, enjoyable look at a phenomenon that happened not actually that long ago that I’d had NO idea about.

Tell me, blog friends…can you imagine the airlines pushing back on additional screen nowadays?

One year ago, I was reading: The Sisters Chase

Two years ago, I was reading: The Other Side of the River

Book 144: Friday Night Lights



“Considering the circumstances of their lives, how could they be expected to accept the harsh reality of studies showing that of the 30 million children taking part in youth sports in the United States, only about 200 go on to become professionals in any given year?”

Dates read: May 5-12, 2017

Rating: 6/10

Lists/Awards: The New York Times bestseller

Graduating from law school in 2010, it turns out, was one of the worst things I could have done for myself. There are articles about it and everything. After I moved back to Michigan and took (and passed) the bar, I started carpet-bombing the Ann Arbor area with resumes. Crickets. I came close a few times, getting to second interviews, but it wasn’t until February, a full nine months after I graduated and five months after I passed the bar, that I got a job. Which meant I had a LOT of downtime. I did do useful things, but I also watched the entire run of a TV show that has become a barometer of true excellence in storytelling for me: Friday Night Lights.

I knew there’d been a book, and then a movie, and that the show wasn’t especially closely related to either except in broad strokes. But I’d always harbored a curiosity about the book that had inspired one of my favorite shows of all time, so I picked up H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights to finally experience the source material. In it, Bissinger tells the story of the Permian Panthers, a high school football team in Odessa, Texas, in the late 80s. But he doesn’t just tell the story of the team…like the subtitle (“A Town, A Team, And A Dream”) suggests, he places them in context. He tells the story of Odessa, of the boom-and-bust oil economy in Texas with which Odessa lives and dies, the racial tensions that are ever-simmering, and the way that a community needing something to cheer for and feel good about can place so much hope and feeling into a sports team.

That enormity of public emotional investment into the team has real ramifications for the people who make it up: the coach and his family, of course, but also the players. The coach (only very vaguely reminiscent of the beloved Coach Taylor) is at least a well-compensated professional, but the players are just teenagers. You can see the loose outlines of some of the characters who would make up the core of the show: the hot-shot, big-talking running back, the reserved, wary quarterback, the trouble-making, fast-living halfback. But the players themselves are kind of inconsequential: they are merely the bodies inside the uniforms that have such symbolic meaning. It’s Permian that the crowd roots for year after year, even as the names on the jerseys come and go.

Reading this after seeing the show is the opposite of the usual reaction: the screen adaptation is so rich and beautifully realized that the book has a hard time living up to the comparison. Part of that is because they’re telling similar stories in two very different ways. The book is more interested in looking at the broader social picture and the way that team fits into that picture as a whole, and only then in its component parts, while the show takes the opposite storytelling tack and focuses on the people and their relationships making up the team, filling in the charged atmosphere around them but leaving it as mostly background. So by nature the book is more impersonal, more clinical and removed. The show, on the other hand, focused on realistic character development in a way that even many authors I’ve read could benefit from learning from. Of the two versions, I’d recommend that literally everyone watch the show, but the book is good-not-great. If you like stories about football and/or small town life, you’ll likely enjoy it. If not, it’s skippable.

Tell me, blog friends…what are your favorite TV shows?

One year ago, I was reading: The Year of Magical Thinking

Two years ago, I was reading: Life Itself

Book 142: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius



“Beth and I are still thinking it’s too early to leave Toph with anyone but family, that to do otherwise would cause him to feel unwanted and alone, leading to the warping of his fragile psyche, then to experimentation with inhalants, to the joining of some River’s Edge kind of gang, too much flannel and too little remorse, the cutting of his own tats, the drinking of lamb’s blood, the inevitable initiation-fulfilling murder of Beth and me in our sleep. So when I go out, once a week, on a day Beth and I have chosen together, Toph gets his things together, stuffs them into his backpack, uses both straps, and walks over to her house and spends the night on half of her futon.” 

Date read: April 24- May 1, 2017

Rating: 4/10

Lists/Awards: New York Times Bestseller

By the time she was my age, my mom had already lost both of her parents. My grandmother died when my mom was just 25, and my grandfather had a massive heart attack in his sleep when she was in her early 30s. My dad, on the other hand, didn’t lose his first parent until he was just about 50 and his second only earlier this year. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to lose two parents by my age like my mom did. My parents are still a big part of my life and there’s so much more still to share with them.

Dave Eggers, though, had it worse than anyone I personally know. He lost both of his parents, to cancer, one just about a month after the other, when he was only a senior in college. In his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers recounts those deaths and his subsequent guardianship of his 8 year-old brother, Toph. The Eggers brothers leave their Illinois home behind and move to the Bay Area, in part to stay close to their older sister Beth, and in part for career opportunities for Dave as he tries to get a new magazine, Might, off the ground while also trying to figure out how to raise a child.

Before I even picked this book up, I was aware that it seems to inspire strong feelings. Some people HATE it and some people think it’s magnificent. How you will receive this book depends entirely on how you feel about Eggers’ writing. If you think his stream-of-consciousness, wildly tangential, constantly-on-the-verge-of-a-panic-attack style of narrative is great, you’ll think this book is amazing. If, however, you want a straightforward, relatively linear narrative, you will think this is the worst thing you’ve ever read.

It feels beside the point to talk about story structure, because there isn’t really any (it’s very hard to tell how fast time is passing and there aren’t really narrative beats to speak of), or character development, because there isn’t really any of that either. Even for a memoir, a sense of story and character tend to be important, but neither is a priority for Eggers. While I’m usually fairly open to nontraditional narrative, this book is 100% style over substance. The most compelling part, for me, was the relationship between Dave and Toph, and Dave wrestling with both his fierce love and concern for his brother and his acknowledged resentment of being prematurely thrust into a parental role. However, I mostly found it tiresome. It held my attention inconsistently at best, I was usually bored long before a particular side riff was over. Eggers’ flaw isn’t that he’s wildly self-absorbed (I think memoir is an inherently self-absorbed form since it’s literally assuming that your own life is so compelling that other people want to read about it), but that he’s not nearly as interesting as he thinks he is. I wouldn’t recommend this book, but I wouldn’t tear it out of anyone’s hands and I can understand why some people really respond to it. I just didn’t.

Tell me, blog friends…do you think your life is interesting enough to write a book about?

One year ago, I was reading: Mildred Pierce

Two years ago, I was reading: Wild Bill Donovan

Book 140: The Children of Henry VIII



“There remained, however, the problem of what to do with the body. The Duke had hoped for a fortnight in which to gather his resources, but, since the weather was warm and the corpse already beginning to decay, this proved untenable. He could not leave the body in the King’s chamber, yet nor could he risk an autopsy – which, in view of the current rumors, his colleagues might suggests which might reveal the arsenic in Edward’s body.”

Dates read: April 13-21, 2017

Rating: 7/10

The more I read about Henry VIII and the world into which he came, the more understandable he becomes. Instead of reading his serial marriages as the behavior of a man who refused to control his desires, it becomes obvious that, in significant part, the desire for a male heir to ensure the security of his bloodline was all-consuming and not unreasonable. After decades of brutal warfare between the Lancaster and York family lines, Henry was the product of a fragile new dynasty, and his failure to produce a viable heir could plunge England back into active hostilities. He needed a son, or better yet two, so that in the event that the first one didn’t survive to produce heirs of his own (like Henry’s own older brother Arthur), there would be someone to carry on the line.

These fears turned out to be both founded and unfounded. While he was absolutely correct to be worried about producing a son that would survive to adulthood, his failure to do so led directly to one of the most successful reigns in English history. In The Children of Henry VIII, Alison Weir focuses on the period between Henry’s death and the beginning of Elizabeth’s rule. This 11-year timespan saw three monarchs and a significant amount of instability, much of it driven by the religious schism between English Catholics longing to return to the old faith and Protestants wanting to protect their gains. With this book, Weir explores how Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey (Henry’s grandneice), Mary I, and Elizabeth I interacted with each other, with the nobility, and with the levers of power.

In popular culture, there’s a tendency to focus on Henry and then Elizabeth, with little if any thought to what happened in between. But there was a LOT of drama…Elizabeth’s teenage sex scandal with her stepmother’s husband, Edward’s slow death from tuberculosis, complete with an artificial prolonging of his life to give courtiers more time to scheme to get another Protestant on the throne, Jane Grey’s 19-day queenship, in which she was mostly a pawn to her parents and their co-conspirators, Mary’s romantic obsession with her largely uninterested husband and her extended phantom pregnancy which everyone just apparently pretended never happened. Seriously! She went into confinement to have her baby and stayed there for months and then just disbanded it long after it should have been obvious that there wasn’t going to be a baby.

As always, Weir has a keen sense of who her subjects are as people and gives them life rather than just dryly recounting the events of their life. We see Edward’s haughty remove and strong religious conviction, Jane’s helplessness as a pawn in a game she’s not a player in, Mary’s desperation to have a family of her own to love and fervent Catholic faith, and Elizabeth’s intelligence and caution, constantly trying to balance on a wire. It’s easy to see why Weir was inspired to write about Jane for her first stab at fiction, as her sympathy for the doomed teenager shines through brightly. She’s clearly done her research and the book feels satisfying both as reading for information and reading for entertainment. I’d definitely recommend this book!

Tell me, blog friends…did you know that Elizabeth got into hot water with Katherine Parr’s husband?

One year ago, I was reading: Butterfly Boy

Two years ago, I was reading: The White Tiger

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