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What I read: May 2024




"Educated" by Tara Westover. Office book club selection for June, and one of my other colleagues who isn't in book club read it and found it good but harrowing. And my sister read it and said I'd like it. She made me cry, when her mother said "You were my child. I should have protected you." And then of course I was angry for the rest of the book. I hadn't realized when I started that her PhD is in history, that made so much of what I liked make sense (where she's presenting differing views in the footnotes, etc.) 

LHC #246: "For the Wolf" by Hannah Whitten. Hard copy because the TPL Overdrive site had 2 copies and 72 holds, so a wait of "at least six months". I found it sort of hard to read, something about the sentences and paragraphs didn't sit right. The characters' communication styles drove me crazy, maybe it was condoning toxic masculinity? Not the book for me I guess.

LHC #247: "The Women could Fly" by Megan Giddens. Audiobook because I needed something to knit to. Really good, highly recommended. 

LHC #248: "Customs: Poems" by Solmaz Sharif. Who knows why I put this on my list. I have discovered that the optimal way for me to read poetry is on a monitor that I can't reach, in the breaks between practicing my balancing. That way I have to read slowly and properly understand. 

LHC #249: "An Agent of Utopia" by Andy Duncan. Hard copy. Short stories. I read it mostly on the bus. People probably think I'm unhinged for laughing. 

LHC #250: "So you want to be a wizard" by Diane Duane. eBook. Another one I'm not the target audience for, and yet I feel like I knew someone once for whom this book was totally the jam. They had an obsession with lotuses, for example. 

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What I read: January 2024

"Morgan is my name" by Sophie Keech. Office book club selection. It gets exhausting to read about plucky young heroines who are terrible at needlework all the time. I should probably read some Jo Walton. I mean, you can be good at needlework and other things too! I didn't find this book very surprising. The first half was kind of boring, but it got better towards the end.  LHC #233: "The Shifter" by Janice Hardy. I read her writing advice website regularly, so I thought I should maybe read an actual book to find out if she was worth it. Oh my, the voice of this book grabbed me immediately. The worldbuilding seemed shady but the voice was solid. It wasn't very subtle, but I might not be the target audience.  LHC #234: "Ragnarok: The End of the Gods" by A. S. Byatt. At this point with my library account, I'm just guessing. I know there was something by Byatt there? I suspect there was. I did not know what to make of this book. Strange, but it w

What I read: March 2024

  LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by  Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence.  "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read.  LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes.  I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr