[CW: Eating disorders. Cover removed due to concerns raised that it might be triggering itself.] Book #174 of 2020: Empty by Susan Burton Well-written but tough to face head-on, this is a fairly agonizing account of the author’s childhood and adult anorexia, bookending her arguably worse difficulty with binge-eating in high school and college. Susan …
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Book Review: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu
Book #173 of 2020: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu Mozart’s older sister is one of those great lost tales from history, a fellow child prodigy who toured Europe with him and received widespread praise for her musical abilities. We even know from Wolfgang’s letters that she was a composer too, although none of …
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Book Review: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
Book #172 of 2020: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi This book by Jason Reynolds attempts to condense Ibram X. Kendi’s excellent Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America into a more streamlined version for younger readers. (Both men are credited as authors, but …
TV Review: The Good Wife, season 4
TV #28 of 2020: The Good Wife, season 4 There’s a lot that I enjoy in this run of episodes, from the trustee played by Nathan Lane to Alicia’s growing disillusionment with her firm’s management style (which really pays off next year, but is fun to watch build up gradually for now). Since the initial …
Book Review: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
Book #171 of 2020: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn With their farmhouse and associated livelihood repossessed, 50-year-old Raynor Winn and her husband elect to pack up their few remaining possessions and hike a 630-mile trail around the coastline of southwest England. This resulting memoir is a good travelogue of that region, but I find …
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Book Review: The War Within by Stephen R. Donaldson
Book #170 of 2020: The War Within by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Great God’s War #2) I’m not quite loving this fantasy trilogy, but the second volume is a major improvement, offering an expansive plot of castle intrigue and warfare preparations in place of the somewhat stilted morality play of the first novel. The addition …
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Book Review: Be Not Far from Me by Mindy McGinnis
Book #169 of 2020: Be Not Far from Me by Mindy McGinnis A short but harrowing person-vs-nature novel, about a seventeen-year-old who gets lost in the woods with an injured foot and just the clothes on her back. I feel drawn into this story almost immediately by the sharp interior voice of the heroine, and …
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Book Review: How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM
Book #168 of 2020: How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM This new 2020 release is probably the best book I’ve yet read on global pandemics like the still-unfolding COVID-19 scenario — although admittedly not much of the text actually addresses its title claim, and those recommendations for individual steps during an …
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Book Review: Separated: Inside An American Tragedy by Jacob Soboroff
Book #167 of 2020: Separated: Inside An American Tragedy by Jacob Soboroff This title is pitched as a deep dive into the Trump administration’s draconian policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern U.S. border, but it’s instead somewhat narrowly focused on author Jacob Soboroff’s personal experiences investigating that story, including tedious …
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Book Review: Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust
Book #166 of 2020: Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust I like how this new fantasy novel of a princess whose touch is poison — so inadvertently appropriate for our pandemic era of masks and social distancing! — blends #ownvoices Persian folklore with elements of the Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel fairy tales, by way of …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 