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 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 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.
Rated The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration 10/10
Truly fantastic book about the black families who moved out of the South and into northern and western cities in the middle of the 20th century. It took up a decade and a half of the author's life and it shows: it's incredibly well-researched and well-written. The book is a mix of intimate stories and sweeping sociological analysis, focusing on the lives of three people who moved to New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. One of the best works of American history I've read.
Rated The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks 8/10
Really good in depth bio of Rosa Parks, from her decade of community organizing before the Montgomery bus boycott through her decades as an activist and Congressional staffer in Detroit after the boycott. She's more thoughtful, more radical, struggled through more than the reductive popular version of her story lets on. Highly recommended - the only thing keeping it from being five-star is that it's a little dryly academic, but Parks' life and the power of her political commitment are enough to keep it compelling.
Rated Made for Love 8/10
Weird, sad and funny. In the very near future, a woman leaves the domineering tech CEO she married and moves in with her widowed father and his life-sized doll. The humor is pretty dark, and you need a high tolerance for odd, particularly in a parallel b-plot that takes some getting used to. But I ended up really enjoying it, and it's a quick read. It mostly succeeds at being clever/dirty/creepy/touching in the way that [b:Super Sad True Love Story|7334201|Super Sad True Love Story|Gary Shteyngart|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320540909s/7334201.jpg|8996782] tries to but doesn't.
Rated The Fever 6/10
A good airplane read - a vivid, pulpy, paranoid story about a high school seething with teenage tensions and the mysterious medical phenomenon that makes it explode. Slight but very well-done.
Rated The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures 8/10
A thoughtful look at how DNA and heredity shape human lives. I enjoyed this but I feel like I have more critical things to say about it than good ones; it's a little messy and hard to explain what it's "about." Tonally, it reads like a book with an argument, but there isn't much of one; it's best approached as a series of essays about DNA, genealogy, and human history, rather than looking for a thesis or a through-line that isn't there. But it's full of insights and ideas that are challenging and eye-opening. <br/><br/>I had my guard up a little around this book because of the shoddy way these ideas are often used to justify inequity, but to the author's credit she doesn't either avoid or endorse those aspects of how we think about genetics and heredity. Instead, she does a really good job of swatting down that kind of thing, explicitly talking about the ways heredity has been used to oppress (including a chapter on the Nazis' obsession with ancestry), and also explaining how "race" is not a robust scientific concept. While the book doesn't explicitly address "Bell Curve"-style race-based genetic determinism, it's pretty good at showing implicitly that race-based genetic determinism is dumb. <br/><br/>I don't think she did a great job of explaining the science and mechanics of DNA - I found myself skimming past some stuff because I wasn't really getting it. There may be a ceiling for how technical she can get in a book for laypeople about the history and cultural ramifications of heredity rather than a science text. <br/><br/>Recommended, overall, but more as a set of angles and perspectives and case studies on its theme than as a single story. I've found myself thinking a lot about this book even when I'm not reading it.
Really fantastic - highly recommend to anyone who works in politics, community outreach, etc etc. In-depth look at the nuts and bolts of the civil rights movement in the Delta region of Mississippi, particularly the local people who worked with SNCC. Thought-provoking and well-reported.
Rated The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War 8/10
A new thing I learned: there was a small but real interracial anti-Confederate insurgency in southeastern Mississippi during the Civil War. The book is a little academic, with all that entails - it's quite narrow, somewhat dry, and takes for granted that you're well-read on the larger context. You have to read between the lines to get to the real meat of it, but when you do, there's a ton of fresh insight on the complicated relationship of race, gender and class in the South. The author's afterward, in which she explains her decision to let the book be the basis for a movie, is a great look at the role of the historian.
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.