Eating Stone

"Homo sapiens have left themselves few places and scant ways to witness other species in their own world, an estrangement that leaves us hungry and lonely. In this famished state, it is no wonder that when we finally encounter wild animals, we are quite surprised by the sheer truth of them."

Ellen Meloy

Eating Stone

The world is a fantastic and complicated place, with fantastic and complicated creatures. Unfortunately, not much is known about many of these animals, pushed to the fringes before they are seen by many people. Southwestern bighorn sheep and one of these animals. Long thought to be on the declined and even extinct, they have in recent years made a comeback.

In Eating Stone Ellen Meloy describes her experiences with the Southwestern bighorn sheep, her observations from the river, back-country hikes. With beautiful prose and brilliant observations, she describes her connection with the wilderness and the bighorns and laments the growing separation of humans from the natural world, that the severance has left us spiritually lacking.

This book was spectacular, a truly amazing piece of nature writing. Her prose is beautiful, her story arc spectacular. Its a fantastic conservation piece examining the complexity of nature and the necessity for it. Everyone should read this book.

"That wild animals have largely moved out of our view is of a small note to many of us. We think, abstractly that they live out there somewhere, browsing or flying or killing or doing whatever it is they do, and we think that we are keeping them among us by the sheer force of our desire, even as we consume, insatiably, the places where they live."

Man in the High Castle

"They want to be agents, not the victims of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness."

Philip K. Dick

The Man in the High Castle

We all play the "What if?" game. What if I had asked him out? What if I had quit this job, or gotten that one? What if that butterfly flapped its wings? Some "What ifs?" have small consequences, while others can be felt around the world. What if Guiseppe Zangara's assassination attempt had been successful? What if he shot Roosevelt in Florida in 1933?

These are the questions that Philip K. Dick asks in The Man in the High Castle. He shows us a world where the Allies lost the War, Germany and Japan control much of the world. Space travel has been achieved but television is still a work in progress in 1962. The US has been divided into the Pacific States of America (run by a puppet government controlled by Japan), the indipendent Rockies and Plains, and The United States of America (part of the German Empire). Death camps have been set up in New York. The governments are Fascist. 

The story follows several different characters, their stories weaving in and out. A Jewish man making a living in San Francisco after fleeing New York, a Japanese security agent, a German revolutionary trying to war Japan of impending attack, an American antiques dealer attempting to adapt to new markets, and a woman in the Rockies who is reading a book that tells what could have been. Their stories weave together creating a wonderful answer to the question of "what if?" while examining the ideologies and racism's that occurred after World War II.

I enjoyed this book. It was well written, adopting different voices for the many points of view that it follows. The characters were well rounded and unique, behaving believably as people might have had things been different. It was fast paced and exciting, one of those books you can't wait to find out what happens. I highly recommend it and I cannot wait to see the show that Amazon has made of it.

  

Fates and Furies

"Let me be the wave. And if I cannot be the wave, let me be the rupture at the bottom. Let me be the terrible first rift in the dark."

 Lauren Groff

Fates and Furies

Ever once in a while you read a novel that makes you fall so in love with the characters and takes you so by surprise that you find yourself thinking about it constantly for days after you've read it. Fates and Furies is one of these novels. Beautiful prose, fantastic storytelling, and one of the most interesting characters I have ever found in a book. Lauren Groff's writing style is fantastic, beautiful and absolutely unique. I've never read anyone who strings sentences together in such a wonderful way.

The story follows the lives of Lotto and Mathilde, two beautiful people who are madly in love with each other. The book follows the twenty-four years of their marriage through both of their perspectives. The result is a magnificent commentary on marriage, art, love, power, and how we perceive people. How we can know and not know a person.  

I loved this book. It builds beautifully, throwing in a twist that I did not see coming at the end. The characters were fantastically complex, and extremely relateable. The prose was beautiful, and the story structure was fantastically crafted, jumping forward and backwards in time.

 I highly recommend this book for everyone. Everyone.

 

  

Reading Lolita in Tehran

"Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth."

"The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old girl by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individuals life by another"

Azar Nafisi

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Fiction is important. It's a fundamental way to make sense of reality and practice empathy. The story of Iran in the past forty years is not one that we experience often in the U.S., let alone a woman's perspective. In Reading Lolita in Tehran Azar Nafisi tells of her experiences teaching western literature in Iran during and after the revolution, first at university, and later, in secret, holding classes in her home for her committed female students. She tells of their stories and their experiences as seen through the lens of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.

This book was phenomenal. Part memoir and part literary critique, it offers an incredible in-depth look at the experiences of women in the Islamic Republic of Iran, their struggles with the restrictions of their personal freedoms, their arguments for and against the wearing of the veils,their stories becoming linked with the ones they read.

The writing in the book was fantastic. Nafisi is eloquent, her sentences are beautiful, and she tells her story with an incredible amount of compassion, teasing out the nuances of her and her students lives in the broader context of the politics of Iran, through the revolutions, the Iran-Iraq war, and the religious and political rhetoric. 

This is a book that everyone should read if the are interested in the Middle East, women's rights, or western literature.

Tiny Beautiful Things

"You will thrive not in spite of your losses or sorrows, but because of them"

Cheryl Strayed

Tiny Beautiful Things

Life has its ups and downs. It can be wonderful, and it can be hard. Life is complicated and simple at the same time, and it can be so hard to sort through all of the pieces when it is all you can do to keep afloat in a sea of them. It can also be really hard to ask for advice or help, especially from people we know, people we are close to. It can be really scary to ask for advice from strangers.

For years Cheryl Strayed wrote an anonymous advice column for the Rumpus, helping people through their troubles and confusions. Her responses are something entirely different from those found in any advice column I have ever seen. She is kind, she is witty, she is compassionate and her responses to those writing "Dear Sugar" are so incredibly understanding and beautiful. 

This book was wonderful. Sugar's responses to her the questions thrown her way are wonderful, and so different from the responses in any advice column I have ever read. The letters are so intimate, and Sugar proves herself worthy of this trust in her responses, which are so loving, well thought out, and compassionate. 

Reading this book was fantastic. I have experienced things similar to some of the people who have written in, and I have experienced things that are completely different, but Sugars responses to all of the letters were wonderful, as she examines the problems at hand and reduces them down to the critical questions. She does this without judgement, boiling down complicated questions into simple important ones. I highly recommend

this book.

Cleopatra

"It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life."

Stacy Schiff

Cleopatra

When we think of Egypt we think of the Nile and the Pyramids, King Tut and Cleopatra. Thirteen hundred years separate the lives of the two rulers, and, even though she was often portrayed as nothing more than a seductress, Cleopatra had a far more influential rule and skilled rule, skillfully leading Egypt during the turbulent times from 51 BCE to 30 BCE, vastly expanding her territory and wealth before losing it to Augustus.

The story of Cleopatra is fascinating, yet the general knowledge of her is small, often consisting to her seduction of Julius Caesar and her suicide. In this wonderful biography Stacy Schiff delves into the details of Cleopatra's life, which was so much more than those two events. She ruled Egypt successfully for twenty years during an extremely unstable period in the Mediterranean (Rome became a monarchy after years of civil war, ending the idealized "Republic" that it had been), was one of the richest people in the world, and vastly expanded her empire. These events cannot be boiled down to the simple story line of her seduction of two powerful men.   Schiff examines all of the evidence available to tell Cleopatra's story, while also explaining the corruptions that have invaded it from historians of the past, beginning with the prejudices of Cleopatra's own peers.

This book was wonderful. Well researched (notes take up fifty pages of the book) and well written, Schiff adds dimension and complexity to a strong woman who has often been portrayed as weak. She adds context to Cleopatra's story, examining what else was happening in the world at the time and the cultural differences that existed between Egypt and Rome at the time, fleshing out the nuances that would have influenced Cleopatra's decisions and the circumstances that led to the events that took place. The story is wonderfully complex and the characters dynamic.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has heard of Cleopatra, read Shakespeare's play, or is interested in history. Fascinating, interesting, and wonderful, I could not put this book down.

Infidel

Islam is a sensitive idea in the US. Ever since 9/11 there has been a large, xenophobic reaction to Muslim and Arab people (it is important to note that not all Muslim people are Arab and not all Arabic people are Muslim) in the United States. Two foreign occupations, decolonization,  and large amount of regional instability that has bled into international theaters has led to high tensions.

Infidel is the biography of Ayaan Hersi Ali, a Somali woman who was raised Muslim in Africa during the decolonization process in the 1970's and 80's. In her 20's she fled to the Netherlands as a refugee, earned a masters degree in Political Science, became a citizen, and was elected to parliament. In this book, she delves into her childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya and shares her experience growing up a Muslim. She is very blunt, sharing the horrors of the excisions that she and her sister were subjected to, the way women were expected to act, and sharing the nuances of the Somali clan system and the nuances of Islam.

Ali explains how she came to the conclusion that she did not believe in Islam after being a staunch believer all of her life and explains why she doesn't think that Islam and the West can reconcile their differences, Her life and the changes she accomplished on behalf of Muslim women while serving on the Dutch Parliament are amazing, and the research she did and the insights she offered then to migration and asylum in  the Netherlands were a wonderfully frank and fresh new look at the issues.

She also talks of the film Submission: Part One that she had made with Theo van Gogh, and his assassination.  The film provoked controversy and threats were made against Ali.

Throughout the whole book Ali backs up her ideals with clear and concise arguments while
eloquently relating the story of her life. She tries to explain all of the nuances of here experience in these different countries,  explaining some of the differences between the  practice of Islam in Somalia and Saudi Arabia, explaining her theories on the resurgence of fundamental Islam in Africa and the Middle East.

It was fascinating to hear the story of a Muslim woman, let alone one who was raised in Africa and has experienced what it is like to be a refugee. So often I feel that Islam is explained with one story in the media and minds of most Americans. This seems so strange to me considering there are 1.57 billion Muslims in the world, many from different continents and cultures, and all of their stories would be vastly different, similar in some ways but divergent in others. I feel like a way to remedy this is exposure to many stories, to realize that and problems we might encounter are nuanced and complicated.

This book was wonderful. Thoughtful, with difficult subject matter, but extremely hopeful. I recommend it highly.

The Art of Asking

"To erase the possibility of empathy is to erase the possibility of understanding.To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of art, theatre, fiction, horror stories, love stories. This is what art does. Good or bad, it imagines the insides, the heart of the other, whether that heart is full of light or trapped in darkness."

The Art of Asking

Amanda Palmer

I had never heard of Amanda Palmer. I had heard of her band, the Dresden Dolls. But I hadn't heard of her. I picked up this book because a friend is reading it. I picked up the book because I hate asking for things in my life. I'm so afraid of what asking for things says about me, or that my asking will give someone leverage over me, control over me. This book was magnificent. I loved it, I felt it. It is beautiful. It feels real.

In the Art of Asking follows Amanda's career from a street performer (she was one of those living statues) to the largest music Kickstarter to date. She goes into depth and detail the events of her life, and emphasizes how important it is to be able to ask for what you need, and how to hear others when they ask. Her stories were touching, and heartfelt. It was so wonderful to read a book that felt so extremely honest about wants and fears. This book was fantastic. 

I thought how interesting it was how loaded the act of asking people is, when it really shouldn't be. I work in a ski rental shop in the winter and I remember one day I couldn't get a binding to release on a boot, and I asked for help from a coworker who was stronger than me. The client preceded to tell me that my asking "wasn't very feminist." I was astounded that me admitting my weakness and asking for help could make me a "bad feminist." Though this is something that so many people feel at one point or another, that they can't ask for something because it might mean that we are not enough, it is one that is never talked about. 

I am so happy that Amanda wrote this book. It is important, and feels like an entirely new way of addressing the issue while asking thoughtful questions (such as what is the difference between asking and begging, and why is empathy sometimes considered a negative trait) and her stories are inspiring.  Everyone should read this book, and if Amanda ever reads this blog, I would like to thank her for writing.

Winter

"The mirror answered: "You, my queen, are fair; it's true.

But the young queen is far more fair than you"

Marissa Meyer

Winter

The fourth installment of the Lunar Chronicles was amazing. In it Winter, Cress, and Scarlet carry out their final plan to return their cyborg friend Cinder to the throne of Luna, and it did not disappoint. Full of action, plots, and YA angsty romance (full of "I thought you were deads" and passionate kisses after declarations of love), this book was extremely entertaining and a wonderful read all the way through.

For those of you who don't know about this series and enjoy YA let me explain what these are about. The Lunar Chronicles are a wonderful steampunk retelling of the fairy tales Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Snow White. These are all mixed together with four strong female leads (though they do lend themselves to stereo type), a evil queen who really needs to see a shrink, a bioengineered plague, and a war between the moon and Earth and you have some wonderful fantasy that is extremely entertaining. If you liked the Hunger Games and Divergent, you should definitely check these out.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

"Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending." 

Caitlin Doughty 

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Death is not something we often talk about, even though it is something that exists all around us. It is often skipped over, spoken of in awkward metaphors, and it is rare to encounter a body. Even the covers of magazines and beauty products mask its coming: "Look years younger!" "Reverse the aging process." Yet for something that is rarely spoken of, it is something that is always in the back of our minds. There are eight billion people on the planet, and every one of them will die.  In twenty years there will be as many people over the age of eighty-five as there are children under five. Given a long enough time frame the survival rate of everyone drops to zero.

Yet this is something we don't talk about. Caitlin Doughty examines this in her book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and comes to the conclusion that this is not a healthy thing. In this book she recounts her experiences working in a crematory and what she learned in mortuary school, and applies that knowledge to how we encounter death in the US. The book is fascinating. Doughty goes into detail describing how bodies decompose (not for the squeamish) and the processes of preparing the dead for their final rest (including many legal options and some illegal ones). So does all of this with a wonderful touch of humor. From witty stories from her time in the industry to well researched examinations of how death was thought upon in the past, the book comes together beautifully, forming a wonderful commentary on how the way we think about our dead offers insights to how we live our lives.

I loved this book. It was charming, funny, insightful, morbid, and wonderfully educational. In a society that glances over death, it was extremely refreshing to be told what actually happens to bodies after the animating force has left them. She offered wonderful examinations of the ceremonies surrounding death in other cultures and throughout history, as well as a scathing critique at the funeral industry in the US. It was brilliant.

Deep Down Dark

"Yonni Barrios places his ear to the stone. "It was like listening to the inside of a seashell,"he will say later. "You hear nothing and you hear everything, you can imagine an ocean rolling inside that shell, and then you take away your ear and realize it's just an illusion." 

Hector Tobar 

Deep Down Dark

Every once in a while there are events that are so big, that resonate with so many people in the far corners of the world that they they spawn stories, frenzies of newspaper articles, international headlines everyday for months, eventually a book deal that will turn into a movie. I saw the trailer to what will eventually be the movie that this is based on, and it made me cry. If a three minute reel could elicit that level of emotion from me, I figured that I should read the book.

Deep Down Dark, by Hector Tobar, is the story of the thirty-three miners that were trapped underground when the San Jose mine in Chile collapsed in 2010. The miners survived underground for sixty-nine days, seventeen of the days unsupported to the outside world. The book mixes together the stories of the miners experiences underground, the rescue crews first searching for signs of survival and then finding a means of rescuing the men, and the family members feelings as they waited at Camp Esperanza for their loved ones to come back to the surface. Brilliantly research, Tobar looks in depth at their experience both before and after their rescue.

This book was brilliant. Well researched and well written, Tobar captures the experience well and tries to explain all facets of what the men trapped underground experienced for those sixty-nine days, and he goes above and beyond following them to where they are now and how they cope with the trauma that they experienced. He examines all of the stories with impartiality (which is amazing considering how much thirty three people, in close quarters for a long period of time under stress, might rub on each other), and presents the story in an extremely dignified way.

The story, itself, is fantastic. Considering that most mine accidents of this magnitude are fatal, the fact that not one person was seriously injured is nothing short of miraculous, which is what many of the miners themselves thought it was... a miracle. This was the longest that anyone had continuously spend underground and the collective effort that was used to keep them alive and to bring them to the surface is amazing. I remembered when this happened and it was hailed as a triumph of the human spirit, an example of what we could do if we put our minds to it. It is a wonderful story.

There is a darker side to it that I couldn't help but notice. The mine was know for being unstable and unsafe, and all of the workers took jobs there because they needed the money, yet no one cared enough to invest the money to stabilize the mine and keep the workers safe. I love this story, I love how it represents how far human ingenuity can go when we work together, but I can't help feel like its to little to late. This accident happened because people were cutting corners for profit, instead of caring about the workers that mine the product. This negligence is terrible. It shows a lack of respect for the miners, as well as a carelessness towards people that is heartbreaking. And its not just something we see in foreign countries. We see it when ladders are set too high, and rickety stairs aren't repaired after complaints have been made. We see it in a callous disregard to the needs of employees here in the US. If just a little more care was taken, harm could be avoided.

This is a wonderful book; a truly magnificent story. Well researched and well written with wonderful attention to detail (his translations from English to Spanish, and vice versa, add so much to the book) I highly recommend it to anyone who liked Unbroken or Lone Survivor. A great read.

Extreme Medicine

"That is the truth of all exploration-in science or the physical world. We do not climb mountains, traipse to polar ice caps, split atoms, or unravel genomes simply because "they are there," but because we know that it is within the unanticipated fruits of exploration that our improved survival lies."

Kevin Fong

Extreme Medicine

The medical world is amazing. For most of human history, the average age of death hovered around 30. Disease and exposure came for everyone, and medical treatment was rudimentary. Every once in a while, though, a break through increased our odds of survival. From vaccines, to life support technology, these new innovations were, and still are, amazing (I am extremely grateful that I have never had to worry about Polio, Tuberculosis, or Small Pox). They came after much hard work, and often going against the grain of the medical community, driven forward by new exploration into new parts of the world, and sometimes, beyond it. 

In Extreme Medicine, Kevin Fong, explores the history of several of medicines great breakthroughs. Drawing on his medical experience and his work with NASA, he explains how exploration has been necessary for these discoveries, from polar exploration to space exploration, deep sea diving flight, each has been extremely important to developing critical practices in life support, trauma, treating burns and pushing the limits on surgery. Through creative storytelling and an expansive knowledge of science, Kevin Fong puts together a magnificent piece of work showing how far we have come, all the while examining why that innovative push may stall out.

"But we're growing more circumspect about physical exploration, particularly that which sees us staring out into space at the final frontier. We've begun to wonder if we should continue to boldly go."

This book was magnificent. The stories of exploration and medical advancement are fascinating and exciting, and when paired with Fong's scientific knowledge, which he relays in simple, concise, and easily understandable ways, leads to an incredible look at how science has advanced in the past hundred years and how it may continue to advance in the future if we are willing to take risks to push the boundaries of what we know. This is a fantastic read, and I highly recommend
it to anyone who likes to explore, or enjoys the use of their heart and lungs.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

"Mountaineering is always spoken of as though summiting is conquest, but as you get higher, the world gets bigger, and you feel smaller in proportion to it, overwhelmed and liberated by how much space is around you, how much room to wander, how much unknown."

Rebecca Solnit

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

It is often that we speak of things in terms of lost and found: we are lost in our minds, we have found our soulmate, we can or cannot find what we are looking for in life. Not knowing our location is not the only way we can be lost in the woods. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit explores the concept of "getting lost" in a collection of essays, trying to find answers to the question "How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you," that was asked by Meno several millennium ago.

Solnit does this in her wonderful way, mixing personal narration with examinations of external sources. She examines the characters in the movie Vertigo and how they relate to each other and how they relate to spacial forces like gravity and height. She looks at how maps evolved and how they way they have represented the "Terra Incognita" has changed over time, and how we use these maps to place ourselves in the world. She examines art, color, and language; she delves into the histories of the disappeared, looking at what Everett Ruess, Amelia Earhart, and Antione de Saint-Exupury had in common. 

There is a certain romance in being lost, in existing in a space that is not being somewhere and not being nowhere. Solnit captures this beautifully. Each chapter is well thought out, the language beautiful, and the composition of the entire book exquisite. I loved this book.

     

Girl in the Woods

"Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life."

John Muir

Growing up is difficult. There is a struggle to create who you want to be, to find ways to do the things you love, to exist comfortably in a space and to fill it in the way you choose away from the exceptions imposed on you from youth. This struggle becomes infinitely harder when you are female, when violations against the space you fill are common place. Sexual assault is a rite of passage for young girls, a coming of age ceremony when we are told that any space we occupy is not truly our own, and who we want to be is influenced and impeded by violence. This is not the way it should be, but it is something we rarely can openly talk about. The violence becomes our shame.

It is refreshing to find a voice that openly describes these violent trespasses and the long roads to healing. Aspen Matis does this in Girl in the Woods, speaking candidly on her second night of college when she was raped, and experiences walking the Pacific Crest Trail in search of herself. The "story of how my recklessness became my salvation," and it is marvelous.

Part memoir, part travel adventure, and part nature writing; Aspen Matis's writing is beautiful. She speaks eloquently about the events that happened to her, beautifully of the 2650 mile path she walked, and she then ties it all together with masterful storytelling that captivates and inspires. This is a truly wonderful memoir (think Wild meets Lucky), blunt and open and incredibly inspiring. Matis gracefully tells of the hardships she faced and how she learned that the violence she suffered was never her shame, and how she found the strength to be who she wants to be.

I loved this book. I highly recommend this, to everyone. The writing is beautiful, the adventure is marvelous, and I can't wait to see what Aspen Matis writes in the future. 

You Are A Badass

"In order to kick ass you must first lift up your foot."

Jen Sincero

You Are a Badass

Books from the self help section, are generally not my cup of tea. Not only have I never read one, but I had no desire too. The only experience I had ever had with self help books was the on-again off-again trials from Dr. Phil and Oprah, the plastic smile and perfectly poofed hair of Joel Olsteen. It either felt to hippie dippy for me, denying the realities of the world to justify a more livable fantasy, or too much of evangelism: "sow your seeds so you may reap the harvest."So when I found that a self-help book was a requirement of the Read Harder Challenge I was less than enthused.

I heard Jen Sincero speak at the book store I work at in 2013. It was the first author event that I had worked, and I was unsure of the proceedings (I would later learn that all authors did it differently, and that if I were ever an author giving a presentation I should not read any passages longer than a page from my book). Jen was extremely kind and charismatic. In her talk she told stories of how she learned some of the lessons that she talks about in her book. I had never laughed harder. She was a hoot. And the way she talked was so different from the way I had come to expect self-help books to be. She wasn't condescending or preachy, she wasn't super spiritual or religious. She talked about things in a no-nonsense, get shit done kind of way; it was extremely refreshing.

When I finally picked up her book, You Are a Badass, it read just the same. Funny, quirky, with good advice on how to get your life together. It was a really good, extremely inspiring book. Jen writes just like she talks, her book is full of funny stories and anecdotes, and she breaks it down in to very understandable practical steps showing you, not that you could be a badass but that you are one, and that you should let your freak flag fly.

This book was very funny and charming and I highly recommend it to everyone, whether or not "self-help" is your thing. It is hilarious.

Alone on the Wall

"I always call risk the likelihood of actually falling off. The consequence is what will happen if you do." 

Alone on the Wall

Alex Honnold

When Alex Honnold arrived on the climbing scene in 2008, he completely changed the game by free soloing big walls with no support (climbing really big rocks with no equipment, no ropes, and no partner). Not only were these tall climbs, they were difficult. The sheer physical strength and determination to climb these walls is immense, having the mental capacity to do it with no back up plan is even greater. His innovations, however, have not come without judgement. Climbing is already a dangerous sport. The removal of the back up safety precautions has led people to question Alex's choices, and implies that, at best, he has not fully thought his decision through or, at worst, that he is reckless. These accusations are addressed in the book Alone on the Wall.

Alone on the Wall is coauthored with David Roberts, and it tells the story of Alex Honnold's life and climbing career. It jumps back and forth between the two authors, with Roberts tackling the more journalistic side of it, and Honnold offering personal insights into the events. This format makes the book feel more like an interview then a collaborative piece of writing. The two different voices are clearly heard, and while the language has a lot of jargon (it brought to mind I Hate Climbers, which is a great read) but definitions are given and it is adapted to a more general audience. The transition between the two authors gets a bit awkward at times.

The story itself is extremely interesting. It traces Alex's adventures across the globe, he explains several of his climbs in depth, and explores how he has reacted to the fame he has received, including the roller coaster of sponsorship (in 2014 Clifbar surprised the world by dropping the sponsorship of many of their climbing athletes).   He also speaks of his experiences with the deaths of those in the climbing community.

His response to the allegations that he is either reckless or thoughtless in his climbing style is wonderful. He explains that he is one of the best climbers, with a large amount of experience, and that he never free solo's anything he fells he can't achieve. He weighs the risks, and if they are too high, he doesn't make the climb. Its a question that comes up often in extreme sports. It was asked when Shane McConkey died, and when Dean Potter died. Is it worth the risk? Its one that everyone needs to answer for themselves. For some, Kayaking class III water is to risky, for others, its a walk in the park. There is always added danger when pushing the envelope, when attempting to do something that no one else has done before. That is why it is so exciting when they succeed.

This was an extremely interesting book. The writing wasn't great, but I feel like that is to be expected from someone who doesn't need to use that skill very often. Honnolds climbing and experiences more than make up for it, and I was massively entertained. This book made me want to go climbing.

News of the World

"Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts"

Paulette Jiles

News of the World

So often books set during the settling of the west deal with questions of belonging, and where ones place is in an ever changing world. This is true of News of the World. Following the journey of retired Army Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd as he travels through Texas, in the wake of the Civil War, with a young orphan who had lived with the Kiowa tribe for four years after the murders of her parents.

The story is very compelling, using the young girl, Johanna, and the Captain as foils for each other, both trying to find ways to live in their ever changing world. They each deal with their own loneliness: Johanna struggles with assimilation into a new culture and the seeming abandonment of her Kiowa parents, and the Captain coming to terms with the death of his wife and the changes in Texas after the Civil War as he travels around Texas making a living reading the news. Together they come to terms with the world and find support in each other.

I'm not sure how I felt about this book. The story was compelling, it is a fantastic tale that is reminiscent of True Grit. However, it was anticlimactic. Though several of the obstacles that the Captain and Johanna faced were extremely gripping and terrifying, but they never read that way. The characters themselves were unbelievable. The Captain was too perfect. He had only perfect war stories, he was only ever perfectly patient with Johanna, all of his solutions were easily come by, and the ones where he broke the law had no consequences. As a result, the heart wrenching and tender scenes towards the end of the book fell flat and lacked emotion, despite the fact that we had been with the characters for 200 pages. 

This is a story that has a lot of potential. However, this attempt fell flat. I do hope that someone adapts it to the big screen, and gives the characters more emotional depth. I think this is one of my least favorite books I have read. It will hit the shelves March of 2016.

   

Beasts of No Nation

"I was able to expel from my mind all human hope. On every form of joy, in order to strangle it, I pounced stealthily like a wild animal"

Une Saison en Enfer

I like dark books. Every once in a while there is a book that is too dark, too haunting, too hopeless for even me. I don't think this is a fault of the book. I think this is a fault of mine that is wrapped up in the privilege of white America. I've never had to imagine the world of in country warfare, of child soldiers, of rape as a weapon of war. It is something that has only ever flitted on the edge of my conscious, seen as side stories in Hollywood movies like Blood Diamond. It is something else entirely to approach these real life things from a first person narration.

Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation is short, only 142 pages, but it is packed with rhythmic prose telling the haunting story of a boy named Agu in a war torn, West African nation. When his country dissolves into a civil war he is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters. Reeling from the death of his father, and powerless against the ruthless but paternalistic Commander, he struggles to make sense of the new reality that is so different from what he new before the war. 

This book was powerful. Told from Agu's perspective, the disjunctive language and rhythmic prose drive the story, and made the contrast between the time before and during the war even more apparent. The confusion that Agu feels as the story unfolds is extremely powerful. The story is a powerful look into the lives of child soldiers.

I had a really hard time reading this book. The writing was almost too good in the fact that I was really freaked out by the events in the book. In 2004 it was estimated that there were 100,000 child soldiers in Africa. This book really drove home the fact that desperate times drive people to truly desperate actions just to survive. Refugees leave their homes because it would be incredibly dangerous to stay, and they can be the lucky ones when so many are trying to flee but cant.

This was a great book, but not for the faint of heart or the squeamish. It has also been  adapted for the screen in a Netflix series. 

  

A Whale for the Killing

"The combination of man's genius for destruction together with the satanic powers of his technology dyed the cold, green waters of the Antarctic crimson with the heart's blood of the whale nation."

Farley Mowat

A Whale for the Killing

When I was a small child, my parents took me to a wildlife park in Sacramento, California. There I saw Orca's perform tricks in a tank. I had never seen the ocean. Up till that moment I had no idea of the life that the graceful animal in front of me might live, if it wasn't doing tricks for my entertainment. From that point on, I was extremely curious about the lives of the biggest animals known to earth. Free Willy showed several years later, and while I could understand the horrors of a prison and the quest to free Willy,  I didn't grasp the several of the important messages in the film until much later. 

A Whale for the Killing was published in 1972, but in 2015 is still extremely relevant. With Seaworld San Diegos breeding program being banned, films such as Blackfish, and books such as War of the Whales, attention has been drawn to the plight of the whales more in the past several years then it has ever been, yet whaling practices continue. More research has been done, and more is known about whales then ever before, but whales are still butchered for commercial means.

In his book, Farley Mowat recounts his memories of January and February, 1967, when am eighty-ton, pregnant fin whale became trapped in a lagoon near his home in Burgeo, Nowfoundland. While Mowat is excited for the chance to observe one of the worlds rarest creatures, many of his neighbors see the whale as a target to practice their shooting skills. In an effort to save the whale, Mowat calls in the media, scientists, and politicians. A rift forms in the town as support pours in, and tensions spring up in the closed tight nit community. Through this story Mowat interweaves the history of whaling and asks questions of the nature of being human.

I loved this book, and I hated it. I hated what it represented, I hated how such harm could be done to any creature, so thoughtlessly. The story showed how the consumerism and commercialism had replaced the substance way of life that had existed on Newfoundland up until that point, and I hated how that lifestyle drove people apart from each other, and how it drove them to think that they could behave amorally towards the whale who had become trapped. This book made me so angry.

I loved the way the story was told, I loved that it showed the whale was worthy the of moral respect and judgement that was so denied to her, I loved the way that it showed the divisions and powerlessness among humans, and I loved the way Mowat talked about the profound loneliness that we humans feel. 

The same things that I hated in the book, were the same things that made me feel uncomfortable watching Free Willy as a small child, are the same things that make me cry in kids films. The selfishness that humans are capable of and the callousness that we, as a species on whole display, when we decide that something or someone has no value to us. It is something I think we should think about more often, but something we seldom do. 

I loved this book. It was well written, the story was fascinating (if heartbreaking), and it was well researched.

     

The Tsar of Love and Techno

"The calcium in the collarbones I have kissed. The iron in the blood flushing those cheeks. We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A shimmer of photons bears the memory across the long dark amnesia. We will be carried too, mysterious particles that we are." 

Anthony Marra 

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Every once in a while we read something that speaks to us on such a profound level that we find that the words resonate through our soul and stick with us. This is what The Tsar of Love and Techno did for me. The language was so poetic, yet the phrasing so unusual, that I am still not sure what to think of it, as the words ring in my ears. The book was phenomenal; this book is one that I could read for the first time, again.

A collection of short stories set in Siberia and Chechnya, the characters are tied together by an obscure Russian painting of a field. In the 1930's, a censor is tasked with reworking the painting towards the goals of the Soviet Union. What he does instead echoes throughout the century, linking the stories of a legendary ballerina sent to the gulag's, her grand daughter, a gangster, a widower who last saw is wife in that field, and a soldier held in a well with a mix tape of unknown contents.

The resulting story, is....well... beyond anything I have ever aspired to have read. This is the best book I have read this year. The characters are touching, charming, and incredibly human; their flaws adding to their allure. The story is fantastic, epic in its twists and turns, its humor and its sorrow. The setting itself plays a character in tale, as all of the characters are trying to find where they fit in a country that is constantly changing and recreating, and trying to survive the wars, the governments, and the capitalism. It was fascinating to see how each of the different characters dealt with Russia at different points in time.

The language was beautiful. From the snarky:

"Dozy bronze Buddhas meditated on the bookshelf, I was wondering if artsy-fartsy types in Tibet fetishize crucifixes."    

to the serious and mildly heartbreaking:

"Why are children doomed to remain beautiful to their parents, even when they become so ugly to themselves?" 

The eloquence used to describe these circumstances and the way the characters are feeling is astounding, and amazingly soul wrenching. Even when talking about sex, Marra uses language that conveys love and yearning in such an amazing way, stating that

"they pressed together with a need that is never satisfied because we can't trade atoms no matter how hard we thrust. Our hearts may skip but our substance remains fixed. We're not gaseous no matter how we wish to cloud together inseparably." 

This book was beautiful. It was crass, dark, crud, sad, funny but above all it was a extraordinarily gorgeous book about the human condition, and the nature of connecting with people in a unstable world that is always changing.

I think that this is a book that everyone should read. I think that it is one of the best books I have ever read. Oh, and if you read it, Marra put the mix tape on Spotify, and it is awesome.

The Dog Walker

"Liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice. Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality."Mikhail Bakunin

The tag that I've heard used to describe Joshua Stephens book, The Dog Walker, to people is that it is a book about an anarchist who walks the dogs of the wealthy clientele he protests in order to make things meet. While this is an entirely true description of the book, Stephens' tales of his time working as a professional dog walker in Washington DC are so much more. This book was an incredible commentary on politics, race, sex, economics, the relationships that people have with their dogs, and the relationships that people have with each other. On top of all of that, it is incredibly funny.

The book is organised as a series of essays discussing everything from the ways that capitalist economics make no sense in a care based trade to why poop is extremely funny (don't lie, everyone laughs inside when someone farts). It is extremely well written, following the authors own experiences while explaining them in a broader context.

This book was fantastically interesting to me. I knew very little about anarchism, and this was a wonderful introduction to the political theory. Stephens does a wonderful job of explaining it, and some of the movements that have been driven by the theory, without becoming dry. The book maintains its humor even in the more serious passages and brings new light to many old ideas.

I could relate extremely well to the recollections contained in the book, having worked for hourly wages that aren't remotely close to a living wage for most of my life. He examines the idea of subsidized income (remember when MacDonald's that stated that a full time employee would have to make $800 some where else just to make ends meet) and why that thought process is substantially flawed, stating that

 "neoliberalism has apparently gone so off the rails that the role of "job creator" has been stripped of its usefulness to society."

While I'm sure there are many people who disagree with this, there still seems to be something very wrong with the idea of an employer saying "maybe we need to ask the question: can you afford to work here?" (this has actually been said to me by an employer, and I am still very bewildered by it).

 Stephens also looks into many of the aspects of care, retail, and service industries that many people don't think about, and the level of risk management that is involved that many people don't see. Holding the keys to someones house, babysitting someones loved ones (as I get older I am amazed at the returns that were expected for the 5 bucks an hour I was paid at babysitting gigs when I was 13), or even the idea, on guided wilderness tours , that the guides job is not only to insure that you had fun, but to insure that you come home in one piece... very few people actually think about the amount of training and preparation involved.

This book was a funny, fascinating, and unorthodox look at many of the systems in place in the country that we don't see, and how many of these systems, under certain circumstances, can lead us to not value people. Charming and laugh-out-loud funny, I highly recommend this book.

Frankenstein

"His countenance instantly assumed an aspect of the deepest gloom;and he replied, 'to seek one who fled from me.'"

Mary Shelley 

Frankenstein

Every year, around Halloween, a new adaption of Frankenstein is released. Well over fifty movies have been based on Mary Shelley's tale, from Young Frankenstein to Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the character, the Monster, has been depicted in even more stories, from Van Helsing to Hotel Transylvania. This is a book I had never gotten around to because I assumed that I knew the story. I was wrong.

In Rebecca Solnit's book, The Faraway Nearby, the story of Frankenstein is deconstructed to examine the nature of storytelling, and the consequences of creation. The way she discussed the book was extremely interesting, and it peaked my interest. After all, this widely adapted book has been extremely influential in many different aspects of life, from literature to science. It has shaped the way we think about humanity, and it has changed our views on how humans fit in the rest of the world. 

"She never imagined that all of us could become Dr. Frankenstein, chasing and fleeing our altered creation that is the landscape all around us and its invisible contaminants everywhere, from within our bodies to the ends of the earth." 

Rebecca Solnit  The Faraway Nearby

I thought that the book would begin in the same way as most of the movies do: in a dark castle surrounded by high mountains and lightning. In opened, though, on a ship in the far north. The entire story is told through a set of letters that Robert Walton, the captain of the ship, is writing to his sister, Margaret, telling of his adventures and ambitions on his northern voyage. One day a mysterious figure appears on the ice. They pull him on board, emaciated and sick, and he proceeds to tell the captain the story of how he came to be alone on the ice. He tells the tale of his childhood, and how in his passion for his studies, he created life. He immediately feels horror for his creation and scorns it. The creature stumbles through the world, and begins to feel anger and rage  because of the scorn of his creator, Victor Frankenstein. He proceeds to take revenge on his creator.

The story was fascinating. It a Russian doll of a tale: The captain telling the tale of the doctor, who was telling the tale of the monster, who told the tale of the common people. There are so many facets to the story, so many different ways that it could be read, different story arcs to focus on. It could be a commentary on aesthetics, or on the human condition, or on the way people deal with suffering and hardship. It is a wonderful revenge story, while at the same time being a tale of forgiveness. A tale of unrequited love along side a passionate romance. A cautionary tale of the wonders of science, all at once showing the value of knowledge but warning that we should exercise caution in the application. This is a book that I think I could read a thousand times and walk away with something new every time.

Needless to say, this book was nothing like I expected. There was no Igor, the protagonist was a rational young man, not a crazed evil genius. The monster, though childlike, was rational, and, far from lumbering and slow, he moved with super human speed and grace. What I found in this story, was far beyond what I had thought I would find. During this Halloween season, I invite everyone to look back to the original, before they go to the theaters to see the latest adaptation. I don't think anyone will regret it. I sure didn't.

Faraway Nearby

"We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning."

Rebecca Solnit

The Faraway Nearby

After reading so many stories in such a short period of time, I've started to wonder how all of those different stories were affecting me. Or how any story can affect anybody. It is something that we sometimes talk about. How this book was meaningful, how that story changed a persons life, how Harry Potter has been scientifically shown to make children more tolerant, and how the Bible is supposed to make people more morally aware. It's an unspoken truth that books and stories affect our behavior, our outlook on life. People have been trying to manipulate others through censorship for a very long time because of that idea. 

Rebecca Solnit, in The Faraway Nearby, delves into these ideas behind stories by telling us the one where her mother begins to loose her memory and function, and she deals with her own sickness and change. She deconstructs Frankenstein, digs into the familiar patterns behind myth and fairytale, and examines the lives of others (Che Guevera in his travels among those afflicted by leperosy, a blues musician, an arctic cannibal, and an Icelandic artist) in order to make sense of her own story. Written like a set of essays beautifully arranged in book format, her language is powerful and her prose beautiful.

I really enjoyed this book. I loved how everything was linked together and everything was connected. I loved how she demonstrated how the meaning of stories can change so much with the slightest changes in detail. She talked about this idea explicitly with retelling's of the story of the woman caught in a snowstorm, and also did it, much more subtly, with here deconstructions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, first using the story as a way to discuss the way she thinks her mother often felt about her, then the global changes in weather and how we are unconsciously, and often unknowingly affecting the arctic, and, towards the end, how she sometimes feels writing books and telling stories, how they often take on a life of their own that is directed by the reader. I loved these deconstructions.

Another thing that I really enjoyed in this book was how she examined fairy tales and the changes that were made in the stories as the settings changed. How Cupid and Psyche became Beauty and the Beast, which then became East of the Sun, West of the Moon. I love this story. I love how it breaks down the barriers between the species to something as simple as day and night, how the nature of a relationship can change on the setting. East was one of my favorite books growing up, and it was wonderful to see the story deconstructed.

I highly recommend this book. I highly recommend anything by Rebecca Solnit. Her articles are wonderful, and her other books (Men Explain Things to Me, Paradise Built in Hell) are spectacular.

Phantom Tollbooth

"I never knew words could be so confusing," Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog's ear.

"Only when you use a lot to say a little," answered Tock."

Norton Juster

The Phantom Tollbooth

For a book that was banned because a librarian thought that it was a "poor fantasy," The Phantom Tollbooth is a fantastical story about a boy named Milo, who can't be bothered with anything and finds everything boring. One day a mysterious tollbooth appears in his room, and, because he has nothing better to do, he drives through it ( admittedly I am a bit confused by the small child driving a car through it, let alone a car in his room that can fit a large dog and a Humbug in it) and finds himself on the other side in a strange land. There he meets a ticking dog, a Watch Dog, named Tock and he sets of on a quest to rescue Rhyme and Reason. On his journey he interacts with many strange people, from the King of Dictionopolis who thinks that words are much better than numbers, to the King of Digitopolis, the Mathemegician. He visits strange places, and on the way learns that even the basic things, like numbers and words, can be more interesting then his wildest dreams.

I loved this book. I can't believe that I haven't read it. Its funny, the prose is poetic, and the story is fascinating. It has an Alice in Wonderland feel without being quite as nonsensical and much less creepy. The story itself could stand alone, but it is enhanced by wonderful illustrations through out the book.

I think this is a very important book for kids to read. Each chapter has it's own individual lesson, and they all fit together for a wonderful moral: that life is never boring, if you just look around. 

Saga (Vol 3, 4, & 5)

So I thought that Volume 5 was the conclusion to the series, but its not, and I have to wait 6 months for Vol 6, which sucks cause I really, really want to know what happens.

This series is awesome. The characters are incredible, each has there own story, and the way that the story lines weave is amazing. There is a wonderful amount of moral ambiguity to the story, and it deals with many themes in these three volumes that weren't present for the first two, such as drug abuse and trying to make ends meet at a bad job.

I love this series. I love that there is a slightly good side to every character, and a slightly terrible side to every character. I cannot wait for Vol 6.

Vol 3-5 deal with Hazels growth from toddler to child as more and more people discover her existence. The tensions between the two warring planets grows, and more of the societies stuck in the middle become unhappy with the allegiances they have made that the fallout that the common people experience from the bloodshed. Rebel groups begin to try to kidnap Hazel to use her in their plans, while Alana and Marco struggle to maintain their relationship among the chaos.

I cannot wait to see where this story will go.

Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, was the most banned and contested book this year. And last year. It has been banned and contested because it contains "anti-family, cultural insensitivity, drugs/alcohol/smoking, gambling, offensive language, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group, violence, and depictions of bullying (Bannedbooksweek.org)." I loved it.

The story follows a fourteen year old boy Arnold Spirit Jr. as he transfers schools, from the one located on the reservation where everyone from his tribe attends school to Reardan High School, a middle class white school located off the reservation. There, he deals with culture shock and racism as he struggles to find a way to balance his past with his aspirations. The book is written in a diary format with cartoons that Junior has drawn included, which add so much to the story. Dark, honest, and extremely funny; I loved this book.

This book in particular has been extremely controversial, containing extremely dark content (violence, alcohol abuse, death) and honestly addressing these very real problems and how a teenager might handle these circumstances. This honesty is wonderful. The book often looks at differences in the experiences of children growing up on the reservation and children growing up in white, middle class towns, and how those experiences are greatly influenced by the crimes of the past.

Sherman Alexie addressed the issues that many have found with his book in a Wall Street Journal post entitled "Why the Best Kids Books are Written in Blood" and claims that those who think that by banning books they are keeping kids safer are "way, way too late."

"When some cultural critics fret about the “ever-more-appalling” YA books, they aren’t trying to protect African-American teens forced to walk through metal detectors on their way into school. Or Mexican-American teens enduring the culturally schizophrenic life of being American citizens and the children of illegal immigrants. Or Native American teens growing up on Third World reservations. Or poor white kids trying to survive the meth-hazed trailer parks. They aren’t trying to protect the poor from poverty. Or victims from rapists. 

No, they are simply trying to protect their privileged notions of what literature is and should be. They are trying to protect privileged children. Or the seemingly privileged."

This book was wonderful, and I really do think that everyone should read it. Even in its darkness, it was charming and funny. The issues that it dealt with were real, the characters believable.  This story was amazing. I'm really glad that I read it and really excited to read some of Sherman Alexie's other works.

Saga (Vol I & II)

Banned Book #1 (and 2) of my Banned Book week reading: Saga, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. Banned because it is "anti-family, nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited for age group." This series is awesome.

Saga is a series about a transpecies couple who are fleeing across the galaxy from both of their home-worlds after the birth of their daughter. Awesome! The first two volumes were awesome! The art was beautiful, the story is touching, with many different facets and interesting characters, toting the theme love will triumph over all.

I would like to discuss this book and the reasons it was banned. First off, I'm not entirely sure how this book could be framed as anti-family, as the main story is that of a family just trying to exist, being persecuted for there love of one another. This makes the main characters instantly sympathetic because their love for each other and their daughter is so strong that they are willing to fight everyone in the universe for each other (very romantic). Though the main characters are different species (and one is illustrated caucasian and the other ethnic for some slightly obvious symbolism), they read books together, communicate about important issues, have great sex, love each other, and have a vastly superior relationship to some of the ones I have had.

The nudity, offensive language, and sexual explicitness are objections that I can't argue with, as I am a big fan of the number of times Alana uses the word "fuck," and the book begins with the birth of Hazel.  But that is the great thing about books, if you don't want to read them for certain reasons, you don't have to.

As to the issue of whether or not Saga is suited to it age group, I went on Amazon to see which age group it is geared towards and it didn't give an age group, which is a general sign that it is not meant for children. While this is a preconceived notion that many graphic novels fight with (that they are comic books for children), I think that what each individual child is ready to read is a conversation for individual parents to have with their individual children.

I loved this story. I can't wait to read Vol 3, 4, &5. It is a fantastic story of a family just trying to find a place where they fit in a galaxy that seems so dark and cruel. The story is fantastic and I highly recommend this series.

Banned Books Week!

When the issue of banning books and censorship through print comes up, minds often turn to the imagery of the book burnings that occurred in Nazi Germany. While this image is vivid, and often charged with the romanticism of good versus evil, it feels far away; something that could only ever happen in a country that is not ours.

However, censorship is something that hits much closer to home than everyone thinks. Book burning has occurred in the past ten years in the United States, but far more often there is a more subtle form of censorship that takes place: the banning or pulling of books from library shelves and school curriculum. It is talked about far less but happens far more often.

The issue of banning books and the restriction of ideas communicated through print is not a new one. But it is important. It calls to mind questions regarding the first amendment right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Banned books week was launched in 1982 in response to a surge in the number of books being banned or challenged. In the past year alone there were 311 reported challenges, and some occurring very close to home (check out the 10 most challenged books this year).

Over the next week we will be celebrating and exercising our right to read the books that we want and to remind ourselves that censorship exists and to fight against it.  I invite everyone to join me in reading books that have been banned and to think about why someone thought that the book should not be read (for 5 tales of banned books...).

Ideas are powerful. Ideas are dangerous. Here is to Banned Book Week!