Monthly Archives: September 2018

Top Ten Tuesday – My Fall TBR

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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s topic is my fall TBR list! Sadly, I haven’t yet finished my Summer TBR list, because half of the books haven’t made it through the library system to me yet! So, having learned my lesson, for fall I’m going to go mostly with books I already have in my possession, whether that’s books checked out, books I actually own, or books I have borrowed from elsewhere.

lord of the wingsFirst off is Lord of the Wings – it’s #19 in an avian-themed murder mystery series, which I didn’t know when I picked it up. (I love birds, though, so that sounds right up my alley.) I picked it up because it’s a murder mystery set on Halloween, and I need a Halloween-themed book for PopSugar’s Reading Challenge, AND Litsy’s Booked Challenge! The cover even looks Halloween-themed!

In my current library books I have Educated, Tara Westover’s memoir, which I talked about in my Education-themed Top Ten. Another library book is Swastika Night, which hits Popsugar’s “Woman writing under a male pseudonym” prompt. I’m getting down to the wire on PopSugar’s challenge, I need to buckle down and get the rest of those prompts read! In that vein, I also need to read No is Not Enough, which was gifted to me last Christmas by my awesome mother-in-law.

 

I have a September Book of the Month to read, The Silence of the Girls. I’m reading Headscarves and Hymens along with Book Riot’s Persist book club, and I need to read Summer Bird Blue before the 27th, so I can join in YA_Pride’s book discussion on Twitter. (That requires getting my hands on the book first, though!)

 

I should be receiving my Barnes & Noble Book Club copy of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Hank Green’s debut novel, sometime after the 25th, and I also preordered Girls of Paper and Fire from Barnes & Noble, because it looks amazing.

 

For my tenth book on my Fall TBR, I’ll go with Look Me In The Eye, a memoir of a man with Asperger’s. I’ll have to add it to my Autism Reading List.

I’m sure I’ll read more than these 10 this fall – I need to read 46 more books to make my goal by the end of the year! What are you planning to read? Are you going to Barnes & Noble’s book club meeting in October to discuss An Absolutely Remarkable Thing?

Book Review: Cinnamon and Gunpowder

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cinnamon and gunpowderCinnamon and Gunpowder
by Eli Brown
Pirate Adventure
318 pages
Published 2013

Cinnamon and Gunpowder reminds me a lot of Treasure Island. Or at least of my childhood memories of reading Treasure Island, as it’s been decades since I read it. The book is told from the viewpoint of Owen Wedgwood, a chef who finds himself kidnapped by a famous pirate and forced to cook gourmet meals for her in exchange for his life. As a home cook who’s had a small amount of actual training, I really enjoyed his descriptions of making do with only the cooking tools the ship has on hand and whatever rations he could lay his hands on. The creativity he displays in making amazing meals out of almost nothing is one of the best parts of the book. (And the descriptions of those meals – YUM.)

The formatting is set up as a kind of personal ship’s log, each part dated and written down after the events happen. Wedgwood (or “Spoons,” as the crew calls him) even mentions how he hides it and leaves out a decoy log, since he also writes down his dreams (and plans!) of escaping the pirates.

Some of the events in the book are incredibly predictable, but there are still a few surprises. I was a little disappointed when one thing in particular happened; I saw it coming but hoped that wasn’t where the author was going with it. I know that’s vague, but I don’t want to spoil anything!

I enjoyed learning about Mad Hannah’s background and why she’s a pirate; she’s fighting against the opium trade, and she actually gives Wedgwood a pretty accurate summary of the terrible things the opium trade was responsible for.

Any book that can combine sumptuous description of exotic meals with action and cannonballs will have my attention. And Brown does not shy away from proper action scenes. These are pirates, and fights get brutal. Men lose limbs if not their lives to storms and Navy bombardments. Keeping order on a pirate ship involves lashings and brute force. The book doesn’t shrink from those, but it also gets philosophical with Wedgwood’s description of flavors, and almost comedic with the images of using cannonballs as pestles for grinding herbs. It’s that contrast and variety that makes this book so much fun to read.

From the cover of Cinnamon and Gunpowder:

In Cinnamon and Gunpowder, the prizewinning author Eli Brown serves up the audacious tale of a fiery pirate captain, her reluctant chef, and their adventures aboard a battered vessel, the Flying Rose. As these unlikely shipmates traverse the oceans, intrigue, betrayal, and bloodshed churn the waters.

The year is 1819, and Owen Wedgwood, famed as the Caesar of Sauces, has been kidnapped by the ruthless captain Mad Hannah Mabbot. After using her jade-handled pistols on his employwer, lord of the booming tea trade, Mabbot announces to the terrified cook that he will be spared only as long as he puts an exquisite meal in front of her every Sunday without fail.

To appease the red-haired tyrant, Wedgwood works wonders with the meager supplies he finds on board, including weevil-infested cornmeal and salted meat he suspects was once a horse. His first triumph is that rarest of luxuries on a pirate ship: real bread, made from a sourdough starter that he keeps safe in a tin under his shirt. Soon he’s making tea-smoked eel and brewing pineapple-banana cider.

Even as she holds him hostage, Mabbot exerts a curious draw on the chef; he senses a softness behind the swagger and the roar. Stalked by a deadly privateer, plagued by a hidden saboteur, and outnumbered in epic clashes with England’s greatest ships of the line, Captain Mabbot pushes her crew past exhaustion in her hunt for the notorious King of Thieves. As Wedgwood begins to understand the method to Mabbot’s madness, he must rely on the bizarre crew members he once feared: Mr. Apples, the fearsome giant who loves to knit; Feng and Bai, martial arts masters sworn to defend their captain; and Joshua, the strangely mute cabin boy.

A giddy, anarchic tale of love and appetite, Cinnamon and Gunpowder is a wildly original feat of the imagination, deep and startling as the sea itself.

Sunday Link Roundup

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Between all the Book Riot newsletters I get, there’s been a lot of good links coming my way this week. (In addition to things I found elsewhere.)

Pages Unbound is doing a survey on Book Blogger stats – if you’re a blogger, go fill out the questionnaire! More data just makes things more accurate! They also have the results from the last time they did it, in 2016, if you want to see how you stack up currently!

An article on the responsibility of romance writers to portray domestic violence and recovery accurately.

A excerpt and revew of Watch Us Rise, a new YA book about two teens who start a Women’s Rights club at their high school. It looks excellent.

How Children’s Book authors are protesting injustice. (Like kids in cages and gun violence.)

How people are using Young Adult novels to address the #MeToo movement.

Racism in the Nancy Drew novels. I haven’t actually read Nancy Drew. This was an interesting read.

Americans of Conscience – a weekly checklist of actions you can easily take to enact change. Things like calling your representatives about current issues, writing letters, tweeting, adding the mid term elections to your calendar. It includes scripts for calls and easy ways to look up the phone numbers you need.

Scythe by Neal Shusterman is free to read on Riveted until September 30th!

 

Book Review: Bonk

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bonkBonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
by Mary Roach
Microhistory
319 pages
Published 2008

It’s not often a nonfiction book has me laughing out loud, but this one did it. This is the first of Roach’s books I’ve read, but her voice makes me want to read everything she’s ever written! Bonk is the story of sexual research – how scientists have made discoveries about a topic that is awkward at best, and taboo or even criminal at worst. Roach takes research seriously, volunteering as a research subject more than once (and convincing her husband to help, in at least one case!) Her wordplay is clever and her footnotes are HILARIOUS – this was a nonfiction book I kept having to pause and read to my husband between snickers.

Even her chapter titles are giggle-inducing – with titles like “The Princess and Her Pea – The Woman Who Moved Her Clitoris, and Other Ruminations on Intercourse Orgasms” and “Re-member Me – Transplants, Implants, and Other Penises Of Last Resort.”

Roach writes about some truly awkward sexual encounters in the name of science:

On the bed are a man and a woman. They are making the familiar movements made by millions of other couples on a bed that night, yet they look nothing like those couples. They have EKG wires leading from their thighs and arms, like a pair of lustful marionettes who managed to escape the puppet show and check into a cheap motel. Their mouths are covered by snorkel-type mouthpieces with valves. Trailing from each mouthpiece is a length of flexible tubing that runs through the wall to the room next door, where Bartlett is measuring their breathing rate. To ensure that they don’t breathe through their noses, the noses have been “lightly clamped.”

Another passage mentions two gymnasts who have sex in an MRI tube. (For science!) I’m impressed these people can perform under these conditions at all!

There’s only one passage that squicked me out a little bit – there’s a few paragraphs describing a urologist performing surgery on a penis and it’s…a little disturbing. That aside, though, this is a delightful book on an uncommon topic. It’s an easy read, which I don’t say about much nonfiction. It might be awkward to explain why you’re snickering over this book, though!

This is also my pick for the PopSugar prompt “Microhistory.”

From the cover of Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex:

The study of sexual physiology – what happens, and why, and how to make it happen better – has been a paying career or a diverting sideline for scientists as far-ranging as Leonardo da Vinci and James Watson. The research has taken place behind the closed doors of laboratories, brothels, MRI centers, pig farms, sex toy R&D labs, and Alfred Kinsey’s attic.

Mary Roach, “the funniest science writer in the country” (Burkhard Bilger of The New Yorker), devoted the past two years to stepping behind those doors. Can a person think herself to orgasm? Can a dead man get an erection? Is vaginal orgasm a myth? Why doesn’t Viagra help women – or, for that manner, pandas? In Bonk, Roach shows us how and why sexual arousal and orgasm – two of the most complex, delightful, and amazing scientific phenomena on earth – can be so hard to achieve and what science is doing to slowly make the bedroom a more satisfying place.

Friday 56 – Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

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bonkThe Friday 56 is hosted by Freda’s Voice. The rules are simple – turn to page 56 in your current read (or 56% in your e-reader) and post a few non-spoilery sentences.

Today’s quote is from the hilarious book Bonk by Mary Roach. I’ve had to stop and read passages to my husband to explain why I’m snickering so much! In this passage, our intrepid author is at a sex-machine display and lecture.

Archibald winds up his talk and invites questions. A woman in wire-rimmed glasses and a green T-shirt raises her hand. “What we’re seeing is a lot of dildos going in and out of orifices. Given that the majority of women don’t orgasm this way, do any of these machines pay attention to the clitoris?”

Book Review: My Life with Bob

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my life with bobMy Life with Bob – Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
by Pamela Paul
Memoir
240 pages
Published 2017

I need to read more books about books, because the few that I’ve read, I’ve really enjoyed! Earlier this year I read Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, and loved it. I have holds on Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way Through Great Books and The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe. (I also have a hold on The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, but I’m not sure that quite counts.) And, in looking up the links for those books, I just put holds on three more books about reading, since this is a genre I apparently enjoy!

My Life with Bob is about the author’s reading life. Bob is a notebook she uses to keep track of what she’s read. Just title and author, and whether or not she’s finished it. Very simple. But in looking back through what she’s read, she recalls where she was, and what she was doing or going through at the time. So the real story is how her reading choices fit into her life, and how being a bookworm affected her life.

I enjoyed the book, with the slight irritation (in the latter part of the book) of her insistence on calling Young Adult literature, Children’s Lit. Children’s books are picture books and books for young readers, not The Fault in Our Stars and The Hunger Games. Those are Young Adult, and there’s a pretty big difference in my opinion. Maybe not in the professional world; she is the editor of The New York Times Book Review. But it’s frustrating to hear her talk about Kid Lit and lump Harry Potter in with a 36-page autobiography of a teddy bear written for kids under 10.

I was also a little shocked to learn (in the book!) she wrote a book about how porn is destroying the American family, and testified before Congress about it, sponsored by Senators Orrin Hatch and Sam Brownback. I normally don’t have a problem reading Republican authors – I often don’t know the exact political leanings of authors – but I’m reading about her reading choices, and suddenly they are all suspect. (She disliked Ayn Rand, at least, so that’s something.) The book was published in May of last year, so after the last presidential election. Anyone who acknowledges working with the GOP at this point, and isn’t embarrassed by it, immediately gets a black mark in my book.

So ultimately I’m torn on this book. I liked reading it. I dislike the author. (I will never even try to be non-political on this blog. Sorry-not-sorry.)

From the cover of My Life with Bob:

Imagine keeping a record of every book you’ve ever read. What would this reading trajectory say about you? With passion, humor, and insight, the editor of The New York Times Book Review shares how stories have shaped her life.

Pamela Paul has kept a single  book by her side for twenty-eight years – carried throughout high school and college, hauled from Paris to London to Thailand and from job to job, safely packed away and then carefully moved from apartment to house to its current perch on a shelf over her desk. It is reliable if frayed, anonymous looking yet deeply personal. This book has a name: Bob.

Bob is Paul’s Book of Books, a journal that records every book she’s ever read, from Sweet Valley High to Anna Karenina, from Catch-22 to Swimming to Cambodia. It recounts a journey in reading that reflects her inner life – her fantasies and hopes, her mistakes and missteps, her dreams and her ideas, both half-baked and wholehearted. Her life, in turn, influences the books she chooses, whether for solace or escape, information or sheer entertainment. 

But My Life with Bob isn’t really about those books. It’s about the deep and powerful relationship between book and reader. It’s about the way books provide each of us the perspective, courage, companionship, and imperfect self-knowledge to forge our own path. It’s about why we read what we read and how those choices make us who we are. It’s about how we make our own stories.