Rated D.C. Trip 6/10
Slight, endearing, often quite perceptive; a high school trip as seen through the eyes of both the sophomore students and the chaperoning teachers. Cutesy but funny, and a quick read.
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Rated Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America 10/10
Really stunning - a well-researched story about crime and policing in Los Angeles, particularly the stubborn problem of a high risk of violent death for African American men. Manages to be interesting and compelling in a journalistic way, a theoretical way, and a novelistic way, with really empathetic and closely-observed portraits of real people affected by homicide. A tough read, but quick and informative.
Rated The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn't Have to Be Complicated 8/10
a quick read that i highly recommend. compassionate, straightforward and realistic - simple tools to upgrade your financial practices offered without shaming or elaborate promises, and not premised on the idea that there are silver-bullet secrets.
Rated I'll Never Write My Memoirs 6/10
Fun, sharp, a really cool look at the worlds of music and fashion and life as a performer. She can get repetitive, self-contradictory, off on tangents and loose and vague about chronology, but it's still a pretty great read - Grace Jones is clever and charming, and very thoughtful and intentional about what she does.
Rated Right as Rain 6/10
a good, ever-so-slightly trashy DC-based mystery.
Rated An Untamed State 8/10
This is an incredible book - hard to read but also hard to put down. It's about a Haitian-American woman who gets kidnapped and held in horrific captivity in Haiti, and the effect it has on her. The writing is so good - powerful and emotional but very clear and controlled and and stark. I would love to be able to write anything like this.<br/><br/>Be forewarned: this book is pretty upsetting, one of the most intense and painful books I've read. For me it was worth it because it's so well-done, but go into it knowing what you're in for.
Rated Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City 8/10
Great book on DC's native-born party music; mixes sociology, personal essay, journalistic reporting to explain how go-go binds together Washington's black culture. Especially worth reading if, like me, you're a white person who moved to DC in the past decade - it's so easy to think of DC as just one thing when there's a whole other city happening.
Rated Dare Me 8/10
Sitting at a weird intersection of teen drama, noir, literary fiction and body horror, this book is dark, trashy-smart and engaging. If you can suspend your skepticism about a story that tales place in high school, you'll be rewarded: Abbott is sharp at constructing plots, building tension and exploring her characters' minds and motivations. She takes the world of her teenage protagonist seriously, depicting cheerleading as something like gladiatorial combat and intra-group friend rivalries as political bloodsport. As clever and mean and claustrophobic as [b:Gone Girl|19288043|Gone Girl|Gillian Flynn|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1397056917s/19288043.jpg|13306276], with better prose.
Rated The Year of Magical Thinking 10/10
Lovely and painful. A minutely-observed study of grief that Didion wrote after her husband suffered a fatal heart attack and her daughter a severe illness. Brief, but it's not that fast a read, both because it's a little tough emotionally and because her writing is so sharp and good that I often found myself turning back to see how she phrased things a second time. Highly recommended even though it's sad; I think it will stick with me.
Rated Geek Love 8/10
Not quite like anything else I've read. It's a sad, sweet, deeply weird story about a family of carnival freaks. The world is not quite real, not quite "magic realism," definitely a few degrees off from ours, just enough to make it uncanny. My favorite thing about the book is the richness of the big and sprawly and strange, but most mostly self-contained, world of the carnival, with vivid scenes and striking characters. The plotting can be a little confusing and doesn't quite come together as well as it could, but it's so heartfelt and convincing that you just let Dunn take you along wherever she's going.<br/><br/>Trigger warning if you're weird about disfigurement/amputation, because it comes up a lot. <br/><br/>Had this book awaiting me on my Kindle but decided to read it right away when the author died earlier this month, and several very cool people on twitter independently tweeted at once about how much they loved her work. I am very glad I read it, it's terrific.
Rated In the Country We Love: My Family Divided 6/10
When the actress Diane Guerrero was 14, her parents were deported to Colombia. In this memoir she details the practical and emotional toll of living undocumented, and the practical and emotional catastrophe of living on her own after the deportation. A quick read, charming and honest, with some really powerful moments.
Rated Commonwealth 10/10
Terrific - a lovely read that I tore through in just a few days. It starts with a christening party for a baby and expands from there, bouncing around in time, to tell the interlocking story of two big complicated families. Patchett is always great; this one is a little unusual for her - her prose is usually so stately and heightened, whereas this one is more straightforward stylistically, though it's still really great - she makes it look easy. You get perspectives from almost all the major characters, and Patchett takes their views seriously and compassionately. The book it reminds me of most, in structure and tone, is [b:A God in Ruins|3722183|A God in Ruins|Kate Atkinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1451442002s/3722183.jpg|42652219], which I also love.
Wants to read An American Marriage
Rated Almost No Memory 8/10
it's hard to put your finger on what's so amazing about her. it is weird and beautiful and true, and sometimes just a paragraph.
Rated Dead Is Better 4/10
A modestly clever mystery novel, the gimmick of which is that it's narrated by a ghost who's accompanied by a ghost dog. It should have just leaned into how slight it is, and been more fun, rather than having aspirations of depth. It's weirdly structured, too, and sort of fell off at the end, in ways that make it obvious that it's setting up to be a series, which I'm not inclined to pursue further.
Rated The Obelisk Gate 10/10
I love this book - it definitely requires having read THE FIFTH SEASON first, and if you've read that you don't need me to convince you this one is great too. Super-compelling, a rich and well-thought-out world, exciting and emotionally gripping and smart. Also deeply weird.
Rated Death Comes for the Archbishop 8/10
Lovely slice-of-life, not a lot of overarching plot but more of a series of vignettes. Beautifully told, with great characters and an attitude that feels a lot less dated than other fiction from its period. A really interesting look at what life was like in the Southwest during the middle of the 1800s. Spoiler alert: the archbishop dies, but the book is mostly about him as a younger man. Excellent descriptions and fun to read when you're in the thick of the Southwest.
Rated Varieties of Disturbance 8/10
Lydia Davis’ short stories are brief and strange - all the more strange because they’re about extremely mundane subjects, like parenthood, aging, communication between romantic partners. She approaches all of these subjects like an alien naturalist explaining them as though they’re profound and haunting. I didn’t love this book as much as her others but it’s still compelling.
Wants to read Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell
Wants to read Unaccustomed Earth
Rated Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe 6/10
Rated Mislaid 8/10
Curious and compelling. Zink pulls off something very difficult really well, and though it doesn't always land quite right - and wraps up too neatly - it's really enjoyable, rich with distinctive characters all with their own perspective. As with her last book [b:The Wallcreeper|22237292|The Wallcreeper|Nell Zink|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1400625481s/22237292.jpg|41610859] there were times that I stopped short and sort of squinted at this book, as though in a conversation with somebody with poor social skills who doesn't know it; unlike that book, the rest of the time it's terrific and feels real and lived-in and yet delightfully weird.
