TTT – Authors I’d Love To Meet

October 2, 2018 by Goddess in the Stacks

I actually got to meet a ton of authors this last weekend at the Baltimore Book Festival – several of which I didn’t know I wanted to meet until I met them! (Na’amen Gobert Tilihun, Sam Miller, Zoraida Córdova, and Charlie Jane Anders all come to mind, as well as Kenneth Rogers Jr. and Nibedita Sen!) But authors I’d love to meet that I haven’t met yet?

John (left) and Hank Green

Well, John Green and Hank Green, first. I’ve been watching them on Youtube forever – I’ve read most (maybe all) of John’s work, and I have Hank’s debut novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, on my side table to read this month.

Seanan McGuire

Because I’ve been following her on Twitter, Seanan McGuire, oh my god. She is an absolute riot and a fabulous human being. Even if I come away from the meeting covered in glitter, it would be worth it! (She wrote Into The Drowning Deep as Mira Grant.)

S. A. Chakraborty

Rin Chupeco

Julie C. Dao

I’d love to chat with S. A. Chakraborty and Rin Chupeco and Julie Dao. Strong women who write strong women! (Pictured in order, left to right.)

Does Barack Obama count? He’s written books. So has Michelle, I suppose, and I would LOVE to meet them both.

I’d also love to meet Ellen Oh, Meghan Maclean Weir, and Heidi Heilig. (Pictured left to right.) I keep hoping some of these authors will have events near me, but the closest most of them come is Boston! There’s been a few events scheduled in DC, but it’s really hard for me to get down into DC. I wish Baltimore attracted more author events! That’s part of why I enjoyed the Baltimore Book Festival so much, but it’s only once per year.

TTT – Books by My Favorite Authors that I Still Haven’t Read

September 25, 2018 by Goddess in the Stacks

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s topic is “Books by My Favorite Authors that I Still Haven’t Read.” This is actually a little difficult for me; I’ve either read absolutely everything from authors I like, or I’ve stopped being interested in that author, or I’ve read one or two and want to read their entire back catalog. Finding authors I love that I’ve read everything but one or two things? Harder than it sounds.

I came up with a few.

I’ve read Circe by Madeline Miller but not yet Song of Achilles, so I think that probably counts. I adore Neil Gaiman, but have yet to read his newest, Norse Mythology. And I’ve read several of Brandon Sanderson’s books (though I never read The Wheel of Time – Ain’t nobody got time for that!) but I haven’t read the Stormlight Archive yet.

In that same vein, I’ve read the Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom duology, and her Wonder Woman: Warbringer book, but I haven’t read the rest of Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse. I’ve been shying away from the epic fantasy giant trilogies/series lately. They’re amazing, don’t get me wrong, but they take so long to digest!

I read Kerry Greenwood’s Delphic Women novels, and then realized sometime later that she’d written Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, after I’d watched the AMAZING show based on them. I’d kind of like to go back and read those sometime.

I love Seanan McGuire writing as Mira Grant, and after falling in love with her Twitter, I REALLY need to read more of her back catalog, because she is an absolutely fabulous person. The same is true of Bill Bryson – I adored A Short History of Nearly Everything, and should really read more of his books.

Mercedes Lackey’s The Five Hundred Kingdoms series has been on my To-Read list for a long time, but somehow I still haven’t read it, despite having read almost everything else she’s written.

That’s only eight authors, but considerably more books, so I’m going to stop there! (Like I need MORE BOOKS on my To-Read list…)

Top Ten Tuesday – My Fall TBR

September 18, 2018 by Goddess in the Stacks

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.

First 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?

Top Ten Tuesday – Hidden Gems

September 11, 2018 by Goddess in the Stacks

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s topic is Hidden Gems – books we think didn’t get enough publicity or aren’t as well known as they should be. Since I read whatever catches my interest, I’m not always reading the latest and greatest. Sometimes I’m learning more about a topic, or reading an old classic that someone recommended to me, or reading a book to fit a challenge topic. So I feel like I’ve come across a fair number of books that I thought were excellent but hadn’t really seen talked about – some of them probably because they’re older.

Little Bee, for example, came out in 2010, but is still an excellent example of a refugee’s experience. Her experiences in London might not be typical, but her reasons for wanting to escape her home country? Heart breaking.

Period came out this year, but is a wonderful, diverse collection of essays on menstruation or the lack thereof.

Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything remains one of my favorite books. It came out in 2004 and was a bestseller then, but it seems like not too many people know about it now. It’s a gorgeous, fascinating book on the history of science, discoveries, and the planet.

period twelve voices tell the bloody truth

Invisible is a nonfiction book on invisible illnesses and how they affect young women. It gets into the social and physical aspects of it as well as how it affects work and relationships and mental health. The book also talks about doctors’ reluctance to LISTEN to women, which other books have gone into more detail about. The topic is near and dear to my heart, as I have at least two autoimmune diseases (and possibly a third) that dictate a lot of what I can do day-to-day.

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair is a book I read for the PopSugar prompt “book with your favorite color in the title” and I am so glad I did! The author made a decision to read a book every day for a year to heal from losing her sister to cancer. She talks about what she read and how it affected her life. It’s a lovely, sweet book that appeals to my desire to escape into books when life is hard.

Cinnamon & Gunpowder is a book I just read, about a chef kidnapped by a pirate. It’s a bit of a twist on the pirate adventure story, and I really enjoyed it. My full review will be up on Monday!

I don’t remember hearing much publicity for Into the Drowning Deep – it’s a very Cthulu-esque mermaid story. I had read the novella that precedes it – Rolling in the Deep – some time ago and was very excited to see a sequel. It’s by Mira Grant, which is a pen name for Seanan McGuire. (She’s a riot to follow on Twitter, by the way!)

Next up are two graphic novels – As The Crow Flies, which is a collection of a webcomic. It’s gorgeous and a wonderful story about a queer black girl at summer camp trying to fit in, but it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger and I’ve heard nothing about a sequel despite much Googling. All’s Faire in Middle School is the second graphic novel; I just picked it up from the Maryland Renaissance Festival at Page after Page, our book shop. It’s fantastic and really gets the atmosphere of a Ren Faire onto the page.

The last book I’m not sure qualifies as a Hidden Gem or not (it just came out), but I haven’t heard much buzz about it, and I really loved it. The Book of M is a dystopia about losing memories, and it’s an interesting look into what makes a person themselves.

Top Ten Tuesday – Education Freebie

August 28, 2018 by Goddess in the Stacks

We’re going back into the school year – the first day of my husband’s last semester of university actually starts today! So the topic this Tuesday is an education-related freebie. I’m going with ten books that I’ve used, am using, or am planning to use, to further my own personal education. I was homeschooled until eighth grade in a conservative Christian setting, so my science and history backgrounds were never very strong. I’ve been trying to overcome that most of my adult life.

To start things off, I really want to read Educated, a memoir by Tara Westover. The description makes it sound like I’ll identify with it a lot. We weren’t rural, we lived in town, and my parents wanted us educated, but certainly not to the public school system’s standards. (Though I was lucky enough to live in a state that demanded standardized yearly testing for homeschoolers, so I wasn’t as bad off as Tara.) I have a hold on this book at my library, but so does everyone else!

Among the books I have used in the years since is Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. It’s mostly a history of science – discoveries, inventions, famous scientists – it’s fascinating. I checked it out from a library twice before finally buying my own copy. It’s long, and it took me some time to work through, but there was so much that I didn’t know. And Bryson has a knack for explaining things in a down-to-earth way that keeps my interest.

When my husband started prepping to be deployed to Afghanistan, I picked up Power, Faith, and Fantasy: American in the Middle East 1776 to the Present. It’s nearly 1000 pages, but it’s a pretty thorough history of our involvement with the region. I did realize after reading it that its author, Michael B. Oren, is a Zionist Jew, meaning he’s biased towards Israel, so that’s something to keep in mind while reading his takes on the region. Growing up the way I did, I now try to be aware of what biases authors may have and how that can affect the books they write.

Another, more basic book that helped my self-education was a simple high school biology textbook! Biology: Principles & Explorations opened my eyes to a whole new world I hadn’t understood at all. I was able to find a workbook for it on Amazon, and worked through, a chapter at a time, discussing concepts with my much more scientifically literate husband. Similarly, I have Geosystems and its associated workbook that I started to work through. I need to get back into that one.

My education on Feminism began with Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed my Life. The author talks about all the classic Feminist texts she read, giving me a jumping off point to find other books to read. I owe a lot to this one just for showing me what I didn’t know! I have since collected several of the texts she mentions, and have branched out further to read more intersectionally.

In History, I have a history book of the U.S. just called “America.” I set myself a challenge to read it this year, reading three chapters a month – and have failed miserably at it as I haven’t touched the book. And it’s August. Whoops.

In political history, a book that enthralled me for a while was Great Speeches of Our Time, collected by Hywel Williams. I really like it because it gives context for the speeches and a little bit of background on each speaker, then the text of the speech. And these are amazing speeches from a wide variety of speakers.

A book that sits on the line between politics and history is Semper Fi: The Definitive Illustrated History of the U.S. Marines. This was another one I read while my husband was in the Marines; I was trying to understand the history and culture of what we’d joined. While it is a history of a specific branch of the Armed Forces, it’s also a history of the wars the US has been involved in.

I’m not sure which book to pick for my last book on this list; I have a habit of picking up textbooks for subjects I’m interested in – I have several on Counseling and psychology, a couple more on basic sciences, an intro to sociology, and a Spanish course (Plazas) with a variety of workbooks. (And a bookful of CDs! It was an excellent package I found used!)

I think actually for my tenth pick here I’ll go with Tears We Cannot Stop. Of the books I’ve read on racism so far, it’s the one that hit the hardest. And, like Reading Women, it suggested many more titles to explore the issues further.

Not all of these are school-related, exactly, but each of these that I’ve read has been educational. I never want to stop learning. That’s part of why I read!

Top Ten Tuesday – Mashups!

August 7, 2018 by Goddess in the Stacks

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s topic is an interesting one. Top ten mashups I’d make out of two novels.

A Wrinkle in Time + Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Because I’d like to see more common sense brought to Narnia and Mrs Whosit et al would fit right in.
Less + The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue
Because Monty actually knows how to have a good time while touring! He’d show Arthur how to have fun.
The Power + The Handmaid’s Tale
Because FUCK THOSE GUYS
The Power + Red Clocks
Because FUCK THOSE GUYS TOO
The Pisces + The Animators
Because that’s some weird shit that could use the therapeutic acid-trip animation treatment that Mel and Sharon would give to it!
Mortal Engines + Dread Nation
Because there should totally be zombies in the wasteland that the cities travel on.
Beasts Made of Night + Children of Blood and Bone
Because Beasts had an amazing concept and Tomi Adeyemi could actually do it justice.
Dividing Eden + Reign of the Fallen
Because I keep mixing them together in my head anyway.
City of Brass + Rebel of the Sands
Because Nahri and Amani would be the BEST TEAM UP
Fire and Fury + American War
Because it might be a history book ten years from now anyway. (*shudder*)