Rated Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 8/10
book
Finished reading The Essential Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury
Wants to read To Play the Fool
Wants to read Confessions of a Public Speaker
Rated Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite 8/10
A very brave and well-done piece of journalism; a Korean-American woman goes semi-undercover as an English teacher in an elite North Korean school. rare, compellingly-drawn glimpse into the deeply strange parallel universe of North Korea.
Rated Between the World and Me 8/10
Beautiful and important. A letter from the author to his teenage son about growing up black in America, and the very real risk of bodily harm that comes with it. A sharp, lyrical mixture of autobiography, history, and sociology, centered around the memory of a friend who died from police violence. Powerfully makes the case of America's racial divide not in abstract moral terms but viscerally, physically, in terms of injuries, rapes and death, in terms of exploited labor and stolen wealth and enforced poverty.
Rated Bird by Bird 8/10
This is lovely. Basically a writing class with a teacher with a free-floating mind. Anne Lamott just seems like a delight and she's tough, funny, practical, inspiring.
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.
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 Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction 8/10
Big-thinky book about the history of life on earth and what we'll need to figure out to survive another million years. Cleverly-constructed, slightly overglib but a quick read and relentessly interesting. The most fun you can have reading about pestilence, famine, disaster and doom.
Rated Gas, Food, Wifi: On The Road in the American Southwest 6/10
Pleasant travelogue, doesn't honestly have a ton of justification for existing but a quick and engaging read. Makes me want to explore more places out west.
Rated Just Kids 10/10
Beautiful, sad, enjoyable memoir of the friendship between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe as they lived the starving artist life in 1970s New York, on their way to becoming the punk rock poet and groundbreaking photographer they grew into. Mostly a two-character play, but populated by iconic side characters like William S. Burroughs, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
Rated Outline 8/10
Remarkably little happens; it’s brief and there’s no real plot or conflict. A writer travels to Greece and listens to the stories of people around her as they work through ideas and memories. Still, it’s very compelling - beautiful writing, the well-spoken characters eliciting insights and aphorisms about life from their own experiences for the benefit of the listening narrator. Mostly what it captures is the writers’-eye view of the world and the weird loneliness of traveling by yourself, not feeling quite like you exist beyond your observations of what’s going on around you. Quite lovely and enjoyable once you get past looking for what it’s “about.”
Rated Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space 6/10
A layperson's guide to the physics and the human effort that went into the discovery of gravitational waves from massive, distant events like black hole collisions. I wanted to like this a little more than I did but it's still a nice clear story about a complicated subject and the complicated people who found a way to measure an elusive signal. Physics! It's weird!
Rated How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life 8/10
I kind of want to buy a copy of this for everyone. I really love Havrilesky's generous, warm approach to life, and there's so many gems in this book. It's a *little* overwhelming to absorb what is, in essence, a collection of advice columns, but this one is thoughtful, engaging and a fast read, full of extremely well-put versions of truths I sort of know at 38 and wish I had understood better in my 20s. <br/><br/>"Every morning, you will wake up and see that life is all about fumbling and accepting that you're fumbling...life is about feeling your way through the dark."
Rated Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business 8/10
Clear and well-constructed look at how finance is overtaking rather than fueling the economy. None of it is shocking but it's a very well-assembled, well-documented argument. Highly recommended - it makes a technically complicated subject accessible and presents some infuriating facts in a straightforward and dispassionate way.
Rated The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession 8/10
Fair-minded, wonky, well-done book that looks at the history of schoolteaching and the struggle to make it work. Illuminating/depressing in how many the controversies and arguments are the same as they were a century ago; offers a strong defense of the role of teachers, and the organizations that represent them, even as it identifies new models and advances that can improve schools. Modest in scale and in the prescriptions Goldstein recommends, but really well-researched, with great portraits of historical figures both major and obscure.