June was at the very least better than May, though that’s a very low bar to clear. We’re still mourning our sweet little pug, which I suspect will be the case for quite a while to come: he was a part of our everyday lives for over eight years. Otherwise, it was a typical summer month in Reno: dry and hot, and lots of trips to the park and the library and sometimes just honestly wherever we can think we might take the toddler where there’s air conditioning and he’ll be entertained.

In Books:

• Lower Ed: A classmate of mine in law school once said something I’ve never quite forgotten. This was well over a decade ago, he’s a good person, and I think he would retract the sentiment now. But he’d gone to an Ivy League college, and was expressing regret at ending up at his home state’s law school, and said something about feeling like a failure for being at the same law school as someone who’d gone to DeVry University for her bachelor’s degree. The classmate who’d gone there had gotten pregnant shortly after high school, married her boyfriend, and gone on to have two more kids. By the time she was ready to pursue her degree, she was a working parent of three. She was in many ways exactly the target student for a for-profit university. Tressie McMillan Cottom would know. She was an enrollment officer at two kinds of for-profit universities before she earned her Ph.D. at Emory. The beauty school and technical college she worked at served different clienteles, but the students often shared motivations: they need skills to secure a steady job, or position themselves for the next step up on the ladder, and time/ease of process are at a premium. This book is clearly a re-working of her dissertation research, so it’s a little more academically-oriented rather than “pop” non-fiction, but I found it honestly very accessible. She takes pains to not bury her points under loads of jargon, and her qualitative research (actually talking to students) shines. She explores what drives students towards for-profit universities, how those schools market themselves to students, and the underlying social and economic forces driving both the students and the growth of the schools. As a result of her own experiences in enrollment, as well as being a member of a group (Black women) that are disproportionately represented in the sector she is examining, she is uniquely well-positioned to take a clear-eyed look at the situation, probe its origins, and think about its future. I don’t know how broad this book’s appeal is because not everyone finds the subject matter especially intriguing, but I think it’s interesting and well-written and makes an argument about why you should care, even if you think you don’t, so I’d recommend it!
• The Historian: I had been really intrigued by the idea of a big sprawling historical thriller about a hunt through both archives and the world for the legacy of Dracula. Honestly, though, it was a real disappointment. It spins the tale of a teenage narrator (never named) who lives with her father in Amsterdam when she discovers an old book, blank but for a woodcut of a dragon in the middle. When she asks her dad about it, he tells her how it came into his possession as a graduate student in America and how his own inquiries to his thesis advisor about it was followed shortly by the older man’s disappearance. In trying to discover what happened to his professor, her father found himself on a journey around the world, to places he never dreamed he might visit in a desperate attempt to find clues, and connecting with people with lives incredibly different from his own. The path leads inexorably to Vlad Tepes, the Impaler, and the haunting possibility that he may not be in his purported tomb at all, but still active in the world. And then her father, even before he can finish recounting the full story, disappears as well. All of this is an excellent set-up for a literary page-turner! Instead, it was a drag. The book needed at least 200 of its 700 pages cut, because the pacing was mind-bogglingly bad. I got incredibly bored in the middle and kept hoping it would pick up, but alas, virtually all the action (such as it is) takes place in about the last 50ish pages. Even with all of those pages of text, there is very little character development despite it being nominally rooted in a family story, which was a bummer to me as someone who really loves rich characters. I couldn’t really get engaged with anyone. And the payoff was not remotely worth it. The book’s version of Dracula is just kind of dull. There’s a reasonably good book in here somewhere, but it’s not the one that was published. I can’t recommend it.
• Ladykiller: Sometimes I get a hankering for a dumb fun thriller, but picking one up is usually followed closely by remembering that they just make me anxious and I don’t actually like them very much. This was about par for the course. It tells a story about Abby and Gia, best friends since they met as children when Abby’s mother came to cook for Gia’s multi-millionaire father. In the hopes that steady Abby will be a good influence on willful Gia, her family pays for Abby to attend the same exclusive prep schools as Gia, and the two girls (with Gia’s little brother Benny) spend their teenage summers poorly supervised on a small Greek island. The summer they turn 18, though, disaster strikes. When a former acquaintance of Gia’s attacks Abby, Gia inadvertently kills him in an effort to defend her friend. After that, their paths diverge, with Abby pursuing college and then law school, while Gia writes a best-selling tell-all about what happened and generally jetsets around and lives the life of a 20something heiress. The two remain close, however, until shortly after her father’s death when Gia impulsively marries Garrett, a man she’s known for just a month. Angry that Abby would not support her choice, the girls (now approaching 30) fall out…but then, Gia invites Abby to Sweden to celebrate her birthday with her brother, just the three of them. But when Abby and Benny get to Sweden, Gia isn’t there. She’s not answering her phone. She’s seemingly just gone. The book follows two tracks: one, in Abby’s present as she gets the invite from Gia, goes to Sweden, and tries to figure out what could have happened to her friend. The other is a manuscript written by Gia beginning a few months before the trip, as she and Garrett prepare to put up the family home in Greece up for sale and enjoy the last few weeks there. Only three months into their marriage, it seems painfully obvious that Garrett is not exactly who he appears to be…and then a young, attractive couple show up on the island and start sharing the house with Gia and Garrett, complicating things even further. I don’t read a lot of thrillers, but even I can tell that this one relies on a lot of tropes familiar in the genre: unreliable narrators, elements of the past rising up again in the present, double identities. I thought the pacing could have been better, the beginning dragged a bit but it took off around the halfway point. It’s a page-turner, with the kind of short chapters that make “just one more” an easy sell. The ending has some ambiguity, which may or may not be appealing (I don’t mind it in and of itself) but it felt rushed. I didn’t like it very much, clearly, but I’m also not really the target audience.
• Shadow and Bone: This book was very popular on the bookish internet when I started blogging so it’s been on my list for quite some time. Alina Starkov is an orphan who serves in the Army of the fantasy kingdom of Ravka (which is obviously meant to be Russia) with her childhood best friend and longtime crush Mal, she as a mapmaker and he as a tracker. The kingdom was split in two centuries ago by the Shadow Fold, a pitch-black wasteland populated by monstrous bird-like creatures called volcra, and Alina and Mal’s unit is set to make an attempt to cross the Fold. When they do, however, an injury to Mal triggers the display of an amazing magical power by Alina. She is promptly whisked away to the capital to become a member of the Grisha, who use their magical talents in their own military units, commanded by a leader called the Darkling. In an unfamiliar new world, Alina is hailed as a savior who could destroy the Shadow Fold forever. But feels like a fraud as she struggles to learn how to use her power and manage a growing attraction to the Darkling, even as she yearns for news of Mal. A betrayal is discovered and Alina’s subsequent flight has consequences she could have barely imagined. I had mixed feelings about this one. To start with the positive, it’s undeniably engaging, a page-turner filled with vivid characters and their shifting motives. Alina is reasonably appealing, as these kinds of characters go, naive and full of doubt without being too much of a dummy or sad sack. But it’s the “as these kinds of characters go” that’s representative of the bigger problem here. There are a bajillion of these books out there, YA fantasy with a 16-20 year-old female protagonist, who feels awkward and plain, and finds herself as a sort of Chosen One, probably with a love triangle thrown in to boot. Leigh Bardugo is a talented storyteller, her version is compelling! But since there are so many of them, everyone seems to feel the need to take an angle on the material to keep it fresh. Bardugo chose Russian/Slavic as her flavor, and this is where she erred enough to mar my enjoyment of the book. I don’t speak Russian and won’t pretend to have an exhaustive knowledge of Russian culture, but I know enough that her choices threw me out of the narrative. Alina’s surname, for instance, in Russian, should have the feminine “-a” ending: Starkova. If she’d just decided to use Western naming convention as a default, that would make sense: she’s writing for a primarily American audience. But no, there’s reference later on to a person called “Ilya Morozova”, which is doubly perplexing because now while we do apparently have feminine surnames…Ilya is a boy’s name. Bardugo’s characters drink kvas, an actual beverage consumed in many eastern European countries. It is about as alcoholic as kombucha, but Bardugo’s characters get drunk on it like beer. Why not just use vodka as the alcoholic beverage of choice? And then there is the term “Grisha”, which is literally just “Greg”. These are unforced errors that could have been solved with a Google! For many readers, these sort of things likely won’t be an issue. But it was for me, and it’s a shame because I did otherwise like the book.
• The Darkening Age: As someone who grew up going to church at least semi-regularly until my teen years, my rough understanding had been that Christians started out as a persecuted and harassed minority (sent to the lions at the Colosseum!) but the Roman government was unable to keep the faith from spreading, and when Constantine converted, becoming the first Christian emperor, it was only a matter of time before the whole empire followed. If you look at the historical record, though, it turns out that it’s a bit more complicated than that. This book traces the role of Christians/Christianity in the later years of the Roman Empire, challenging the widely-accepted narrative of a relatively peaceful transition of power. Rather, Nixey posits it as a violent time of staggering cultural loss. Untold numbers of statues, frescoes, and other objects of art were defaced, beheaded, or destroyed because they depicted either personages (the gods) or themes (sex, mostly, or any other sort of leisure or enjoyment) that were antithetical to Christian doctrine. Much the same was true of literature, philosophy, and even science/math with the overwhelming majority of written work being either censored or destroyed. Christians were not content to displace the previously-existing Roman culture, or, as the Romans themselves mostly actually wanted to do with the Christians when the roles were reversed, subsume and integrate it. They wanted to (and did) virtually destroy it. After all, under the tenets of their creed, this was a mercy. Better to remove temptation to err and prevent the loss of an immortal soul. As someone who has become largely skeptical of organized religion, this book was interesting to me. Despite being a bit of a history nerd, I actually find the Roman Empire to be kind of boring, so I was largely unfamiliar with the time period and felt like I learned new things. But I did feel like it struggled a bit with style/tone. It’s meant to be a popular history, accessible to a broad audience without significant specialized knowledge. And it succeeded in that! It’s readable and non-technical, avoiding getting into minutiae about Latin translations in the way a more scholarly text likely would. But it also limits the depth of the analysis, leading to it often feeling repetitive. I wanted it to be just a little more thoughtful than it was, but as a broad introduction to the time period and the perspective, it’s very solid.

In Life:

• I got my first tattoo: I’ve thought sometimes about a tattoo but never felt strongly enough about something to pull the trigger. But the depth of my feelings of loss meant I wanted to do something significant to memorialize Stan, so I worked with an amazing local tattoo artist and we came up with the tattoo in the picture above. It just feels right, somehow, to be literally forever marked by loving him and losing him.
• Eighth anniversary: We’ve officially been married for eight years! We don’t tend to make a big fuss out of our anniversaries so we just hung out at home with our little guy but I know how lucky I am to have found such a wonderful husband and father.