Blogging Amnesty!

I keep almost finishing my book reports, but not quite getting ready to post, and then the next week I fall farther behind. But if this blog is going to be my book diary, I need to catch up!

So, I'm going to cheat. Here are some books I've read in the past few weeks, and maybe next week I'll do all the diary stuff about starting, which is only of interest to me anyway.

We've had a wet and windy week here in the Pacific Northwest, with flood warning for several rivers. My poor mom is still trying to settle into her new apartment and is really finding the lack of sunlight tough. She moved up from Texas, where they are just starting to move into the winter season, since summer lasts well into October. So it's hard for her to be missing her friends and also missing sunshine!

I've signed myself up for a December 5K in the hopes that I'll be inspired to start jogging again. It has encouraged me to walk more, so that I make it a minimum to the gym for a brief amble along the treadmill. I just hope I can finish the 5K before they take down the timers...

Books I've Read

You Can't Say That, ed. Leonard S. Marcus. 2021 Cybils High School Nonfiction nominee. A book about authors talking about books! This is chocolate for me, and then the peanut butter is that they are talking about (and not approvingly) censorship. Markus describes his relationship to the authors and then dives into the conversation -- how they came to write their books, what reaction they expected, how they felt and dealt with the banning attempts. I recognized most of the authors, and I've read many of the books (one of the authors is R.L. Stine, author of the Goosebumps books, so I've probably not even read most of the books discussed), so it was interesting to see the wide variation in what they expected and experienced. 

I'm not sure it's a book for kids rather than for lovers of kids books though. I guess some kids are included in that latter group.

Last Witnesses (Young People), Svetlana Alexievich. 2021 Cybils High School Nonfiction nominee. A mosaic history book, where Alexievich goes out gets short memories from a great many people to build up the image of an event. In this case she talks to Russian children during the German invasion during World War II, so we see kids of all ages fleeing, seeing their parents die, being protected by their parents, being rounded into camps, hiding in their basements, fleeing the war, fighting the war. It's a powerful experience. I did want some more context -- how were the speakers found? Did they come forward or were they enticed into speaking? I wanted more from the editor than just the occasional footnote to explain a reference. 

Singled Out, Andrew Maraniss. 2021 Cybils High School Nonfiction nominee. I think I like this guy's niche, which he is now deliberately carving out. He wants sports books with a social twist, and this one taught me a lot about Glenn Burke, minor league baseball, and the intersection of the emergence of Gay Rights and major league baseball. It was a bit personal for me, for I was in San Francisco in the 90's and I had a lot of friends in the music business, which meant I had a lot of gay friends and that was still a time of great loss in that community. So it was hard seeing Burke plunging into the Castro scene when I knew what was coming. But I liked the mix of baseball and real life, and how it put both in context. Maraniss talks about Burke's original biographer and how he helped with the story but also includes the rest of his sources in careful notes in the back. 

They Better Call Me Sugar, Sugar Rodgers. 2021 Cybils High School Nonfiction nominee. The autobiography of a WNBA player, showing her athletic potential as a child in the hood, a poor, mostly Black neighborhood in Virginia where she lived with her mom, siblings, and nieces. It was interesting that her mom saw golf as a potential ticket out (this was the age of Tiger Woods) and actually discouraged basketball. The kids-eye perspective on the world was fascinating, especially in contrast with Beautiful Struggle where Ta-Nesi Coates lets his adult understanding mediate what he remembers. Rodgers, maybe because she is younger, just tells her experience, so the police are an unmitigated evil, drugs are just a fact of life, stealing is a cheaper way to acquire things, and slurs are heard and used without blinking. 

A lot of Sugar's energy and personality come through, but I felt the book as a few editing passes short. Characters moved in and out, and sometimes a lot of weight would suddenly be given to someone who hadn't appeared on the page yet. I'm also squeamish about the language; I understand that it's authentic, but moving into a book changes the setting. 

We Are Not Broken, George M. Johnson. 2021 Cybils High School Nonfiction nominee. I read their other memoir earlier, so I came to this knowing the outline of their life. This book is another memoir but structured around their love for their Nana, who was a strong force in his family and one of the main childcare providers during their youth (for all the grandkids). It did a good job of evoking particular scenes and conveying the love and importance of Johnson's grandmother and family, but didn't have the unity and focus that I kept expecting. I'm also squeamish about the language; Johnson uses the slurs and slang that were authentically part of their experience, but given the level of the rest of the book and the audience, it comes across as very harsh. As they explain in the start, these words are very context-dependent and not to be used in most situation, but writing a book means leaving the context in which they were spoken. So I'm not sure. 

Even If We Break, Marieke Nijkamp. 2020 Cybils YA Finalist. I know teens feel their emotions very intensely, but somehow the concentrated lens of each of the five kids featured in this book felt over the top to me. Which OK, one of them was a psychopath, and the readers don't know which one it is at the beginning, so the author pushes to make it clear that any one of them could be the one to careen off kilter, but as an old person it felt a bit silly. But I can see this being a fun book to read as a form of campfire spooky tale. 

The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher. Foolscap book club pick. I talked my book club into reading this because I wanted to read it but it looked scary so I needed a club. It worked! This had the usual Kingfisher delightful characters but leaned heavily into the suspense around the creepiness. Most of her stuff have a deep creepy throughline (see her Paladin Romance series) but in this case she worked on building up the suspense and fear as the main point. It worked really well, and the final confrontation worked well, leaving me (like the main character) with some residual fears but mostly an ability to get on with my life. Some notes that I particularly liked was the references to family dynamics where you don't ask for much, but when you ask, the family will do its best to answer. We kind of have that, although my family is closer and often we don't have to ask for the small stuff.

Knot of Shadows, Lois McMaster Bujold. The Penric stories are a continuing delight to me. Penric is a fundamentally decent person, with a supportive family and an interest in kindness and justice and an awareness of their frequent clashes. Desdemonia adds a rich perspective and humor to him, and they both operate within a religious discipline that has not been hollowed out by corruption, perhaps because the gods they serve operate directly in the world. It's a setting rich with possibilities -- here there is a murder mystery, a tragedy, an injustice belatedly addressed, and a desperate decision answered with deep mercy. I like the theological and philosophical points addressed as much as the tricks with demon powers.  (Warning: child harm)

Kind (Good Neighbors 3), Holly Black. Finishing a series. I am not a skilled enough graphic novel reader for this book. I can't tell anyone apart! That's not really on the artist; it's me being face-nearsighted when reading. All the humans blurred together; I kept hoping for fairies to move into the narrative since I can tell the winged people from the flightless ones. The clash between human and fairy ethics was interesting, but I found the teen love bits rather dull. High school is too young for a permanent bond -- go ahead and break up with your boyfriend and jump on that new hottie you see; that is not the same thing as your dad cheating on his wife. That was about one panel of emotional work for me, but the main character angsted over it for pages. I'm too old for that. So a good book for people with romantic hearts.

Good Talk, Mira Jacob. I thought this was an anthology when I picked it up, but I was very pleased with the reality -- it's an autobiography with a focus on the complexity of skin color, highlighted by raising a mixed race kid in New York City during the Trump years. Jacob's parents immigrated from India, and her extended family has always disapproved of her dark skin. Her southwestern peers were never sure whether she counted as Black, or Caucasian, or what. She was never sure either. She looks at her own internalized racism while also noticing the micro- and macro-aggressions others push at her, and also worries about how her son will perceive and be perceived. The art style was also very good for me -- lots of layered photographs so that I could easily tell people apart because they rarely changed!