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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 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.
Rated Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay 10/10
These books are so good. It's really all one big story and I don't think this one really stands alone, but it's excellent, a sharply observed look at the narrator (the one who left her hometown of Naples) and her friend Lila (the one who stayed) as they go through their 20s and 30s, navigating careers, family, romance and the political turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s. Beautifully illustrates enduring, freshly relevant truths like "violent fascism operates to the benefit of the capital-owning class" and "men love to hear themselves talk and expect women to listen." I am looking forward to the final installment; while #2 is still the best of the individual books, as I've said, it's really one lifelong story and all together it's a masterpiece.
Wants to read All We Know: Three Lives
Rated The Idiot 8/10
One of the most spot-on depictions I've read of what it's like to be a freshman in college, where your personal life and life-of-the-mind are scaling up and getting tangled up in each other in the process. A Turkish-American girl goes to Harvard and falls in with an Eastern European crowd. Really sharp, manages to be breezy and thoughtful at the same time.
Rated The Girls 8/10
Creepy, lyrical, intense story of a woman who was caught up in a Manson-esque cult as a teenager. Really remarkable, especially for how well it conveys an adolescent-girl's-eye-view of the world, tragic and dreamy and emotionally rich and unsettled.
Rated Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe 8/10
Terrific tour of the latest ideas in physics about the evolution and structure of the universe and how it relates to the history of our solar system and life on earth. The centerpiece is Randall's theory about how dark matter in the galaxy could cause gravitational disturbances that could result in comets like the one that killed the dinosaurs. Highly recommend if you have interest in how theoretical physics works and how a physicist thinks. <br/><br/>The most interesting part for me is in the middle of the book, where she talks about the extinction of the dinosaurs. I'm just old enough that when I was a big dinosaur nerd as a little kid, "what happened to the dinosaurs" was described as a distant and maybe never-to-be-solved mystery, but by the time I was old enough to check back, the comet-strike explanation was as clear and concrete as a scientific theory can be. In one chapter, Randall explains how scientists figured this out over the 80s and 90s and it's honestly riveting (at least to me). It's a great case study in how science works. <br/><br/>Randall is very good at explaining very abstract, complex subjects, although there's a limit to how well you can do this - there were things I had to skim over, as there were with her last book [b:Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World|12470311|Knocking on Heaven's Door How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World|Lisa Randall|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328760741s/12470311.jpg|16225008]. Dark matter is very hard to get your head around because its defining feature is that it interacts barely at all with normal matter and normal light, so we can't really see it even though there's actually more of it than there is of normal matter. The theories about what dark matter is are head-hurty abstract and the descriptions of how scientists try to detect it are a little numbing and technical, so those are the parts I skimmed. <br/><br/>Still, I love Randall's attitude, her enthusiasm and the ease with which she walks the reader through the incredibly weird/cool work she does as a physicist. <br/><br/>
Rated Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution 8/10
This was great! Goes day-by-day through the writing of the Constitution and explains the context and the ratification.<br/><br/>The thing about the Constitution is that it's not some divine miracle; it's kludged together based on a series of compromises and fully satisfying none of them, and it worked well enough to roll on for a couple of centuries with only one major breakdown. <br/><br/>The chapter on the way the Constitution not just tolerated but encouraged slavery is really eye-opening. <br/><br/>Highly recommended.
Rated Drinking at the Movies 6/10
Rated White Teeth 10/10
A sprawling, insightful story of immigrant and first-generation families in London. Lots of rich characters all with idiosyncratic perspectives, coming together and clashing across class and generational and racial and cultural lines. Well-put-together and lived-in and more relevant than ever given the turn towards xenophobia in Britain.
Rated Crude: The Story of Oil 6/10
Great until it goes extremely wrong.<br/><br/>Most of the way through, this book is quite good - a well-explained, brief-but-detailed summary of the history, science and economics behind oil and the problems our reliance on it can cause, with an obvious but not obtrusive left-wing analytical lens. However, it was written in 2004, and as such it is badly dated - missing major events later on that expand, complicate or change the story Shah is telling. Chapter 9, in particular, is premised on the concept of "peak oil" - the idea that we're running up against the limits of the reserves available and our production of oil is going to enter a new era of decline and scarcity. What has happened, instead, is a remarkable growth in our ability to extract and refine oil from "unconventional" sources. Shah alludes to mining tar sands, but doesn't get into hydraulic fracking and other methods of producing oil from formerly hard-to-reach sources. If anything, the biggest problem we have with oil now is that there's more of it than we can safely use and not enough incentives to get off of it.<br/><br/>There are many developments in the story of oil that Shah by necessity misses by finishing up in 2004 - including the long slow spiraling out of the Iraq War, the soured "Arab spring" that led to crisis in Libya, and the rise of ISIS in Syria; the Obama administration's new fuel economy standards and investments in renewable energy; the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico; the political battles over pipelines; the Paris climate agreement; the emergence of the electric vehicle market, particularly in California and Europe; and most recently the 2016 election, with its possible promotion of Exxonmobil's CEO as Secretary of State. But by far the biggest thing she misses is the boom in unconventional oil development, only faintly visible from her vantage point in 2004 and now half of U.S. oil production. <br/><br/>First chunk of the book would merit 4 stars; the closing section drops it to 3. Needs a new edition, at least.
Rated The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks 6/10
Light and breezy yet encyclopedic. Kinda like getting cornered at the party by the foodie who wants to tell you all about the appetizers. You can skip around at your leisure rather than trying to read it straight through, but it's full of fun factoids.