under the banner of heaven

January 23, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Really Liked But Can’t Really Remember

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about books we really liked at the time that have kind of faded in the memory banks. As someone who reads quite a bit, I find this happens fairly often…I have a good opinion of the book when I’ve finished it, and then within a couple months, I’ll remember only a vague outline. Here are some books that I’d need a refresher on if I ever had to describe despite liking them when I read them.

A Brave New World: I read this in high school and thought it was incredible and I could not do more than describe the gist of it if I had to. It’s going on my “to revisit on audio” list.

Under the Banner of Heaven: I hated Krakauer’s Into The Wild, but loved this when I grabbed it at the airport on the way back to Alabama for my second year of law school. I remember how compelling it was, but remember few of the actual details besides the most egregious ones.

The Kite Runner: My clearest memory of this book, which I know I thought was really interesting because I’d not read fiction from that area of the world much yet (I was in college), is that an ex-boyfriend lent it to me and I prepared what I’m sure was a truly embarrassing letter about how I wanted to get back together to tuck inside when I returned it. Luckily he told me he didn’t need it back when I tried to give it to him.

Memoirs of a Geisha: This is sort of cheating, because I listened to it on audio a few months back so I DO remember it now, but holy smokes I’d forgotten SO MUCH of the plot. And I’d read this multiple times, too!

Never Let Me Go: I think the themes resonated so strongly in this book that the plot kind of just fell away because it’s not really about the plot, is it?

Skinny Legs and All: Like many of Tom Robbins’ books, this book has multiple plot threads, so I’m not going to give myself too hard of a time about the fact that I remember little about it except how much I’ve liked reading it the several times I’ve done so.

The Lovely Bones: I read this in high school and think I re-read it once (maybe twice?) in college and other than the central conceit I could tell you almost nothing about it except that I liked it so much that it still lives on my shelf.

The Interestings: I read this only a few years ago and while this is probably the one I remember the best on this list, how little I do actually remember is extra annoying because I loved reading it so much!

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: I think my memories of this book get conflated with the movie (Blade Runner), even though I’m very clear on remembering that when I saw the movie (in college) after reading the book (in high school), the book was better.

Child 44: Another one I read fairly recently and is all fuzzy anyways! In my defense, this is a thriller and the plot is all twisty-turny so the odds were stacked against me.

August 15, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Recommendations For Feminists

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! I am so excited that Top Ten Tuesday is back, y’all! Putting these lists together is honestly so fun, both to do for my own blog and reading what other people have come up with. Anyways, today’s topic is recommendations for a particular group of people, and I thought I’d put together some recommendations for feminists. I’ve tried to mix it up with both fiction and nonfiction so no matter what you read, you can find something here.

Bossypants: Tina Fey’s book is one of the few comedian-writes-collection-of-amusing-essays that I thought actually lived up to the hype. It’s not 100% on, but it’s funny and insightful and a must-read for being an ambitious female in the world.

Too Fat Too Slutty Too Loud: This recently-published collection of essays from Buzzfeed’s peerless Anne Helen Petersen profiles the ways in which famous women exemplify culture prohibitions against being too much, and how they’ve escaped (or in some cases, haven’t) from the consequences for violation. Anyone interested in both pop culture and feminism should get their paws on this.

The Creation of Anne Boleyn: She was Queen of England for only about 1000 days hundreds of years ago but she’s been a subject of fascination ever since. Susan Bordo chronicles the ways that the perception of this long-ago royal have changed over time, reflecting overall shifts in how women are treated.

Under The Banner of Heaven: I considered adding Reading Lolita in Tehran instead of this book here, in the “religious fundamentalism leading to oppression of women” slot. But I think it’s easy for white people in the Western world to look at a Muslim country in the Middle East and point the finger at them for oppressing women. It happens right here in the US, too. This is the best Krakauer, for my money.

My Horizontal Life: Sure, it’s easy to respect “good” women, like Tina Fey, who for all her genuine feminist bona fides is still quite traditional in many ways. It’s more challenging to look at a woman like Chelsea Handler, who is perceived as having slept her way into her E! show that she did before her current Netflix gig. But feminism includes women who don’t necessarily do things the way other women approve of, and Handler’s stories about being drunk and on drugs and sleeping with who she wanted when she wanted are pretty funny in her first memoir.

The Handmaid’s Tale: This feminist classic has been recently revitalized by the Hulu production of it, and none too soon because it’s just as relevant as when it was first published. Most chilling is the way that not only men control women, but the ways in which other women’s cooperation is necessary and so easily given.

Americanah: Being a woman in the world is one thing, but we can’t forget the necessity of considering how other identities intersect with femaleness. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel focuses on an African female experience, both in Africa and America, and her protagonist Ifemelu is as rich and complicated and ambiguous a character as any ever written, regardless of gender.

So Big: A recent book club exploration of a Willa Cather novel reminded me of how much I liked this book, which won Edna Ferber a Pulitzer Prize. She crafts a story of a woman who faces long odds and disappointments and changes in fate with good humor and cheer, without being saccharine about it, and it’s a testament to women’s perseverance.

The Group: For better or worse, many women I know are as much defined by their friendships as they are by their romantic relationships. It’s not really a progressive view of femaleness in that the women involved are often catty, but it’s worth reminding ourselves that the struggles we face (work or family life, breast or bottle) are ones that have been around for generations.

Wild Magic: For a younger reader wanting to explore female-driven adventures, any Tamora Pierce series will do. But for me, the series kicked off by this book was my favorite…I’ve always loved animals, so Daine’s brand of nature-based power was right up my alley.

October 25, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Horrifying Books I’ve Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! With Halloween around the corner, it’s fright season. I enjoy a good pumpkin patch and seeing the neighborhood kiddos in their costumes, but actually scary things like haunted houses have never been for me (I don’t like corn mazes either because being lost makes me panicky). I don’t read much in the way of “horror”, but I do read things that creep/freak/wig me out more often than you’d think for someone so jumpy. Here are ten favorites:

Go Ask Alice: Huge caveat here- I thought this was horrifying when I first read it at like, 11. A young teenager tries drugs and before you know it’s she’s getting sexually abused and runs away from home (I think, I can’t really remember it very clearly) and it was supposed to be a true account of someone’s life. Even though I think of it as laughably overblown now, I somehow was surprised when I found out recently it was complete fiction written by someone who’s done a lot of these “scared straight” books.

The Stranger Beside Me: Ann Rule was a volunteer at a suicide hotline in Washington, and often worked the late shift beside a likeable young man named Ted. They became friendly, and sometimes spoke of what was then front-page news in Washington State: a series of murders of pretty young women. Ted, of course, was Ted Bundy…the serial killer who was committing all those murders. Realizing how little we actually know about other people is definitely frightening to consider.

In Cold Blood: The horror of this one comes from the sheer unpredictability of the gruesome murders of the Clutter family of Kansas, and Truman Capote’s rendering of how their murderers came to them. The Clutters were just sleeping in their beds, minding their own business, when their home was broken into and they were brutally slaughtered. That’s so scary to think about.

The Hot Zone: We’ve all heard, after the Ebola scares that happened fairly recently in America, about what that virus can do to you: bleeding out internally is not a pleasant way to go. But before those few cases that developed on American soil, there was another close brush with Ebola: an outbreak of a strain among imported monkeys just outside Washington, DC. Ebola-Reston turned out to be a version that didn’t infect humans, but how easy it would be for a pandemic to spread in our globally linked world freaks me out to think about.

Under The Banner of Heaven: This is not really a book about Mormonism (even though there’s a lot of interesting historical information in there), it’s a book about fundamentalist religion. As a lady person, the treatment of women is especially awful.

Devil In The Grove: You learn about Jim Crow-era injustices and violence and lynching and the profound mistreatments of African-Americans in school, but it’s sanitized. Reading this book, about four young men on trial in Florida for raping a white woman, doesn’t sanitize anything. The actual constant threat and terror of black existence in the South during Jim Crow is eye-opening and just gut-wrenching.

The Pianist: The Holocaust is flat-out horrifying. There aren’t words for it. Of the Holocaust memoirs I’ve read, this one’s elegant-but-unsparing prose hit me the hardest.

The Shining: I don’t read much traditional horror, hence this mostly-nonfiction list. But I love the Kubrick movie, and even though the original Stephen King book is almost entirely different, I love it too. Like most of the rest of this list, it’s mostly about the monster inside of a man (the malevolent hotel plays a role, too, but it’s Jack Torrance’s internal demons that are the root of the issue).

The Stepford Wives: I’ve tried to keep the politics to a minimum here on this blog (we’re here for books, after all), but I will never keep my passionate support for women’s rights, including rights to control our reproduction, to myself. This quick-read satire makes you wonder, particularly in this election cycle, what men really do want from women.

The Circle: I read this very recently, so there’s no review up yet, and it’s problematic in a lot of ways. But the picture it paints of a world in while we give up more and more privacy to the internet is really scary to consider, because the slipperiness of that slope is real.

March 1, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books To Read If You Are In The Mood For Learning

My original plan with this blog was to do just one post per week: my 500 books, in the order I’m reading them. But with the Book Blogger Love-A-Thon, I got a little inspired to do more. I’m not going to go bonkers here, but there’s a feature hosted by The Broke and The Bookish called Top Ten Tuesday that I read a lot on other people’s blogs that I follow, and I want to get in on the fun! The prompt this week was Ten Books To Read If You’re In The Mood For X. I kind of waffled back and forth about what exactly I wanted X to be, and then finally hit on my topic. That’s right, y’all: non-fiction. I feel like non-fiction doesn’t get a lot of love on the book blogosphere, so I’m highlighting ten of my favorite non-fiction books to read if you’re in the mood to learn about something new!

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: This is the book that made me become a psychology major in college, and I’m exaggerating only slightly. It’s a collection of short case studies about people whose brains aren’t working the way they should. I read the title story in my Introduction to Psychology class and was fascinated, and when I picked up the whole book, I devoured the entire thing in short measure. How and why the brain goes wrong is just incredibly interesting, and Oliver Sacks (one of my favorite authors) always makes sure that it’s not just the biology and chemistry, but that these things happen to actual people and the impact it has on their lives.

The Nine: As a law-and-politics person, I’m inclined to be interested in those sorts of books for pleasure reading, so there are going to be a few on this list. This one is about the Supreme Court and how it operates: a behind-the-scenes look at the then-sitting justices and how they go about getting the business of the Court done. With the death of Justice Scalia and a confirmation fight almost certainly upcoming, this is a timely read about what actually goes on with those nine judges that make up the highest court in the land.

The Hot Zone: I first read this book in high school…and then again and again and again. It seems like something that should be a mystery thriller: an Ebola virus outbreak on the east coast of the United States. But it’s real! It happened! This is a must-read and will drive home even further how very scary that recent outbreak was and how bad it could have gotten.

Under the Banner of Heaven: I picked this up at the airport flying back and forth between Alabama and Michigan during law school on a whim and I was totally sucked in to this story about Warren Jeffs and fundamentalist Mormonism. Nevada has a lot of Mormons, and the ones I know (mostly through work) are some of the nicest, hardest working people I know. But religious fundamentalism isn’t exclusive to any one faith, and this book sheds light on the evil that can be perpetuated in the name of God and heaven.

Devil in the Grove: Speaking of evil, I think a lot of people don’t appreciate how bad things really were in the Jim Crow-era South. We know, but we don’t know. This book brings it to horrifying life by telling the story of one of Thurgood Marshall’s pre-SCOTUS cases, in which four young black men go on trial for raping a young white woman in Florida and the depths of depravity they are subjected to are just beyond imagination. I tend to be a little defensive of the South after my time in Alabama for law school, because there are so many amazing people down there that get tarred with ugly stereotypes just because of where they grew up. But, in the interests of honesty and fairness, there are a lot of people who are racist and zero embarrassed about it and pretending it ain’t so isn’t helping anyone.

In Cold Blood: This is one of my all-time favorite books, which I recommend across the board to everyone. It tends to be considered the first non-fiction novel, so its structure appeals to people who are usually all fiction all the time, while also appealing to people who actually enjoy reading non-fiction. It’s a true crime story about the brutal murder of a four family members in rural Kansas. The whodunit isn’t the point, you find that out pretty quickly. But the why and the what happens next…that’s the good stuff.

The Anointed One: This one is REALLY specific to my interests, but I think it’s a fascinating story regardless of where you live. Veteran Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston tells the story of the gubernatorial election of 1998 and how it was effectively decided by the powers that be long before the first voter cast the first ballot, recounting how each step drew Kenny Guinn’s inevitable election even closer. Nevada is a small state in terms of politics, so many of the players are still active and still at it.

A People’s History of the United States: Social justice is a HUGE area of discussion right now, what with Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and the Black Lives Matter movement. It seems like there are a lot of people who want to shout loudly about the American Dream and how incredible it is while happily ignoring the reality that the pretty much our entire history consists of things being really pretty awful for anyone who isn’t an upper-class WASP. This is what they didn’t teach you in history class. Because it seems inevitable that it will come up, no, I don’t hate America. I think America’s a good country and I like living here and don’t want to leave. Being critical of our own history, especially how it deviates from the preferred narrative about boundless opportunity for everyone ever, is something I don’t think constitutes anti-Americanism. I think it’s necessary for us to keep getting better and better.

Game Change: For the story of an election that more people might be familiar with, this book covers the presidential race in 2008. Spoiler alert: Obama wins. But unlike the smoothly orchestrated machinations of the election depicted in The Anointed One, this one got messy. This book lifts the curtain on the slugfest to the Democratic nomination and the hurried scramble to find a solid vice presidential contender on the Republican side that gave us Sarah Palin. What we see on the news is just the tiniest fragment of what goes into a presidential campaign, and this is a fascinating look at something much closer to the whole story.

Deluxe: Have you ever coveted a Louis Vuitton bag? Or sighed longingly after a designer gown? Once upon a time, luxury goods were, well, luxurious, crafted with the highest quality materials and attention to detail. But the rise of corporate monolithic ownership of luxury brands presaged the decline of the artisans who established them in the first place and cost-cutting has made what was once deluxe a shadow of what it used to be. I’m a devoted reader of my lady mags, and this really made me think about the business behind the pretty pictures.

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