Stephany Writes

Categories: Books

What I’m Reading (6.5.23)

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones (★★★★★)

Print • Owned (Target) • Nonfiction • 2019

Short synopsis: The year 1619, which is the year up to 30 enslaved people were brought to this country, should be the founding date of our country, Nikole Hannah-Jones posits. In this collection featuring essays, poems, and works of fiction, writers come together to explore the legacy that slavery has had on our past and present.

This book took me a long time to read, as I dipped into and out of it over a period of a few weeks. And I think that’s the right way to attempt this book. It’s nearly 500 pages and the topics are dense, educational, and mostly heartbreaking. It’s a book you want to sit with and not rush through. This book is separated into 18 different topics affecting Black Americans today, everything from healthcare and politics to capitalism and music. Between each chapter are poems and works of fiction. It’s an incredible collection and I think it is a must-read for anyone committed to anti-racism.

This is why the memories and perspectives of Black Americans have so often been marginalized and erased from the larger narrative of this nation: we are the stark reminders of some of its most damning truths. Eight in ten Black people would not be in the United States were it not for the institution of slavery in a society founded on ideals of freedom. Our nation obscures and diminishes this history because it shames us.

To this day, the only Americans who have ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in Washington, D.C., whom the federal government compensated after the Civi War for their loss of human property.

Citizens inherit not just the glory of their nation but its wrongs, too. A truly great country does not ignore or excuse its sins. It confronts them, and then works to make them right. If we are to be redeemed, we must do what is just: we must, finally, live up to the magnificent ideals upon which we were founded.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson (★★★★☆)

E-Book • Owned (Amazon) • Nonfiction • 2019

Short synopsis: Have you ever wondered how your body works? Wonder no more! In this book, Bill Bryson takes us on a journey through our bodies: how it functions, how it can heal itself, and how things can go wrong.

This book was so fascinating! Once you stop and think about how many different processes are happening inside your body to keep your heart pumping, your blood rushing through your blood vessels, your brain telling you what you’re seeing and doing, your lungs working, your muscles moving… it’s pretty amazing. This book is broken into chapters that first go through the different systems of the body (i.e., brain, heart, lungs, etc.) and then delves into the ways those systems can break down when we get sick, get cancer, or eventually die. Sometimes the book could be a bit dry, but that had more to do with the subject matter than Bryson’s writing, I think. It also wasn’t as funny as I was expecting, as everyone has told me what a funny writer Bryson is. Not that I needed this book to be humorous—it was fine that it wasn’t—but I’m interested to read other books from him and see if his humor comes through better when talking about other topics. Still, I enjoyed learning more about the processes of the body and even found the last chapter about what happens to our bodies when we die really interesting!

Here are some of my favorite facts from the book:

Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them. Think of that. A couple of dozen times a week, well over a thousand times a year, you get the most dreaded disease of our age, and each time your body saves you.

The amygdala (Greek for “almond”) specializes in handling intense and stressful emotions—fear, anger, anxiety, phobias of all types … The amygdala grows particularly lively when we are asleep, and thus may account for why our dreams are so often disturbing. Your nightmares may simply be the amygdalae unburdening themselves.

For each visual input, it takes a tiny but perceptible amount of time—about two hundred milliseconds, one-fifth of a second—for the information to travel along the optic nerves and into the brain to be processed and interpreted. One-fifth of a second is not a trivial span of time when a rapid response is required—to step back from an oncoming car, say, or to avoid a blow to the head. To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet.

In the womb, a fetus’s lungs are filled with amniotic fluid, but with exquisite timing at the moment of birth the fluid drains away, the lungs inflate, and blood from the tiny, freshly beating heart is sent on its first circuit around the body. What had until a moment before effectively been a parasite is now on its way to becoming a fully independent, self-maintaining entity.

Cancer is above all an age thing. Between birth and the age of forty, men have just a one in seventy-one chance of getting cancer and women one in fifty-one, but over sixty the odds drop to one in three for men and one in four for women. An eighty-year-old person is a thousand times more likely than a teenager to develop cancer.

It’s in His Kiss by Julia Quinn (★★★★☆)

E-Book • Libby • Historical Romance • 2005

Short synopsis: Gareth is looking for a translator for his grandmother’s diary, which is written in Italian, a language he does not speak or read. Hyacinth Bridgerton has a passing understanding of Italian and offers to help translate the diary, which leads the two of them on a path neither was expecting. 

Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series has been hit-or-miss for me. I’ve enjoyed some of the books, despised others. Thankfully, this one fell into the “enjoy” category. Is she the best historical romance writer? No, absolutely not. But this book was fun to read and well-paced. I enjoyed the banter between Hyacinth and Gareth, as well as the subplot of Gareth’s grandma’s diary, as it helped unravel a mystery of Gareth’s family. Plus, Gareth is the grandson of Lady Danbury, and getting lots of great scenes with her was well worth the price of admission.

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Categories: Books

What I’m Reading (5.30.23)

The Power by Naomi Alderman (★★★★☆)

Audiobook • Libby • Dystopian Fiction • 2016

Short synopsis: In this new world, teenage girls find out that they have immense power: they have an electrical current running through them that can cause agonizing pain to anyone who comes near them.

I had such an interesting experience with this book. First, I do not recommend the audiobook. I did not enjoy the narration and wish there had been different voices for each perspective (there were multiple perspectives). The narrator did some voices really well and some really terribly. Throughout most of the story, this was a 3-star read. I found it a bit difficult to get into and hard to keep the different storylines straight. But the ending of the book was so good and really helped me understand what the author was doing here, envisioning a matriarchal society where women are the ones with all of the power. What would that look like? And would it look all that different than our society today? Is power corrupt no matter what? This was our May book club pick, and we had a really good discussion about the book, feminism, and power.

The Swimmers by Julia Otsuka (★★★★☆)

Audiobook • Libby • Fiction • 2022

Short synopsis: A slim novel about a woman with dementia, the pool where she can escape her disease for an hour every day, and the woman’s daughter.

This is the kind of novel, or audiobook in my case, that can be zipped through in an afternoon. At just four hours on audio, it was a quick listen for me and an entirely depressing one, too. The story is mainly about Alice, a woman who has dementia and is trying to escape the reality of her disease by doing laps in the neighborhood pool. The story is told in vignettes: about the pool, about the people who swim in the pool, and about Alice. It’s an interesting way to tell a story, and ultimately, an impactful one. One of my greatest fears is watching a loved one deal with dementia/Alzheimers, and this book really hit me right in the feels. This is the kind of book I am hesitant to recommend because it has a very specific style that won’t appeal to everyone, but it really worked for me.

Happy Place by Emily Henry (★★★★☆)

Print • Owned (Tombolo Books) • Romance • 2023

Short synopsis: Harriet and her friends get together as often as they can, but it’s been a few years since their last get-together. They come together this year at Sabrina’s insistence. What Harriet doesn’t expect during this trip is to see Wyn, her ex-fiance and the man her friends still think she’s in a relationship with.

Emily Henry is not an auto-buy author for me. I liked Beach Read, loathed People We Meet on Vacation, and consider Book Lovers to be my all-time favorite romance. So she either really works for me, or really does not. But because I loved Book Lovers so much, I was excited to see what she was going to do with Happy Place. I started to see a lot of mixed reviews as I read it, which tempered my own expectations, and it ended up being a pretty good book for me. It was very clear from the start that Harriet is a classic enneagram 9—a people pleaser to her very core and someone who hates confrontation so much that she wouldn’t even tell her best friends that she was going through a horrific breakup. I, too, struggle with telling my best friends when bad things are happening or I’m dealing with something hard because I don’t want to bring them down. I don’t think I’ve ever connected to a character as much as I connected to Harriet. Did I have to suspend some of my belief in this novel? Yes, of course. But that’s romance novels for ya! They are not real life. But ultimately, I found myself really loving this story and how things turned out for Harriet and Wyn. I’d probably place this as my second-favorite novel of hers.

What are you reading?

Categories: Books

What I’m Reading (5.10.23)

We Are Not From Here by Jenny Torres Sanchez (★★★★★)

Audiobook • Libby • Fiction • 2020

Short synopsis: Three teens—Pulga, Chico, and Pequeño—are on the run. They are running from a future that is uncertain and dangerous and scary. Their eyes set on the U.S. border, they attempt a complex and harrowing journey of traveling from Guatemala to Mexico to the U.S. border. 

Oh, my goodness. This book was excellent. It’s probably my favorite of the year so far. I listened to it on audio and it pulled me in from the beginning and kept my attention until the end. I learned so much from this book, especially what it’s truly like to endure a border crossing and how courageous it is to leave your home and venture into the unknown. I was drawn into Pulga, Chico, and Pequeño’s stories and all I wanted was for them to make it through and find their way to a better life. This is the book I want people who want closed borders and strict immigration regulations to read because it reminds you of the humanness at the center of the immigration debate. They aren’t pawns in a political game, but real people with real lives and hopes and dreams and families, and they deserve so much better from us.

Something About You by Julie James (★★★★☆)

E-Book • Owned (Amazon) • Romantic Suspense • 2010

Short synopsis: After Cameron Lynde witnesses a crime, she’s pulled into a major FBI case involving a U.S. senator. The bad news? The agent leading the case is none other than Jack Pallas, her sworn enemy. 

This is my third time reading this book! I’m not much of a rereader, but I tend to reread my favorite romance series when I need something light and easy. Julie James used to be one of my go-to authors but she stopped writing books a while ago, with her last book published in 2017. This is the first novel in her U.S. Attorney/FBI series, and I was curious to see if it would hold up all these years later. At times, the writing was a little rudimentary and Jack has some toxic masculinity traits, but all in all, a solid romance that was still fun to read.

True Biz by Sara Nović (★★★★☆)

Print • Owned (Book + Bottle bookstore) • Contemporary Fiction • 2022

Short synopsis: Welcome to the River City School for the Deaf where the students just want to have a normal life without doctors and politicians trying to tell them how to live. There’s Charlie, the new girl with a cochlear implant who has never learned ASL; Austin, the school’s golden boy; and February, the school’s headmistress. Their lives are inexplicably drawn together due to a series of events that could have an unfortunate ending.

This book taught me so much about the Deaf community, the controversies surrounding cochlear implants, and the way sign language functions. I loved that there were informational tidbits between chapters teaching us ASL and providing stories about the Deaf community in general; this is where the book was the strongest (both the informational sections and the way Deaf culture was weaved into the story). I also really, really loved the characters. They stole my heart from the very beginning, especially Charlie. She was such a well-developed character.

However, the plot itself was really weak. There just wasn’t much to it overall, and the ending felt very rushed. It felt like the author just lost steam at the end and wasn’t quite sure how to finish the book. I just wanted something else from the plot, a different type of tension propelling the plot forward. In the end, I would give this book 3.5 stars, which I’m rounding up to 4 stars.

What are you reading?

Categories: Books

What I’m Reading (5.1.23)

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (★★★☆☆)

Audiobook • Libby • Nonfiction (True Crime) • 2017

Short synopsis: In the 1920s, the Osage Indian Nation were the richest people per capita in the world, thanks to a reserve of oil being found on their land. And then… members of the Osage tribe began to be killed off one by one. When the number reached 24 Osage killed, the newly created FBI stepped in and this became the first major homicide investigation they solved.

This book has been on my TBR shelf for a long time, and I finally listened to it on audio last week. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting from the novel. I think I was both expecting it to be a bit dry at times but also propulsive. And it turned out to be both of those things. The book was separated into three parts: one from the point of view of the Osage as members of their tribe are murdered, one from the point of view of the FBI as they tried to solve the case, and one from the point of view of a journalist looking into the case years later. Part 1 was so interesting because it really laid out in clear prose the way the Osage lived and how these murders affected every member of the tribe. Part 2 is when things started to feel a little dry and even clinical at times. It was interesting to learn how the FBI solved the crime but I felt like I needed a character bible to remember all of the characters and their relationships within the tribe. And part 3 was just rather boring to me. It was an important part of the story, but I think it could have been an epilogue, rather than multiple chapters of drawn-out story. All in all, an interesting story but not one I’m rushing out to recommend.

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai (★★★★★)

Print • Owned (Book of the Month) • Fiction • 2023

Short synopsis: Bodie Kane is a successful film professor and podcaster, and when she’s invited to teach a course on podcasting at Granby School, the boarding school where she attended high school, she’s happy to say yes. What she doesn’t expect is to get drawn back into the case that rocked Granby School when she was there. Thalia Keith, Bodie’s roommate, was murdered in the spring of her senior year and while the former athletic trainer, Omar Evans, was eventually charged and is serving a life sentence for the murder, Bodie’s podcasting students aren’t sure he did it. And they want to make a podcast about it.

This book was so good! I listened to Rebecca Makkai’s interview on Sarah’s Bookshelves Live podcast right before I started this book, and it made the experience that much better. This book is not a thriller or even a true crime story… it’s really about so much more than that. It’s about violence against women, about the #MeToo movement, about racism and the justice system, about memory and the faulty way it can work, about trauma and our responses, about being a teenager and the ways we try to fit in with our peers… Makkai truly does delve into so many different topics in this book but for me, it all worked together seamlessly. It never felt like she was taking on too much, and that’s probably because she is such a talented storyteller. I felt vividly a part of this story and thought Makkai deftly handled the subject matter and all of the interweaving plotlines. The story centers around the death of a high school girl and violence against women is used as a narrative device throughout the book (in a super powerful way), so be aware of that going into it. I loved this book and it’s got an easy place on my favorites list.

The Wedding Crasher by Mia Sosa (★★★★☆)

E-Book • Libby • Contemporary Romance • 2022

Short synopsis: Solange and Dean met at a wedding. Dean’s wedding, where she was the one who spoke up to tell Dean not to marry the woman in front of him. It ended up being okay in the end, but now Dean needs a fake girlfriend for a week and he knows just the person who owes him a favor. 

I enjoyed this book so much! I love a good fake-dating trope in romance, and this one turned out to be really fun. I loved Solange and Dean’s meet-cute where she disrupts his wedding; it was definitely a unique one! The journey each character takes—Dean, as he realizes what it will take to be partner at his law firm, and Solange, as she tries to decide whether to stay put in DC or move somewhere else—felt honest. It added tension to the story while also moving the plot along. I enjoyed the scenes between Solange and Dean a lot, they were such a great couple together even when they were fake-dating! There was true warmth and connection between them. All in all, a sweet romance that kept a smile on my face.

What are you reading?

Categories: Books

What I’m Reading (4.24.23)

To Sir, with Love by Lauren Layne (★★☆☆☆)

E-Book • Libby • Contemporary Romance • 2021

Short synopsis: When Gracie’s father passed away, she put away her dreams of becoming an artist to run his champagne shop. But the shop is failing and when a wealthy buyer offers to take over her store, she’s unsure what to do. So she takes solace in Sir, the nameless, faceless man she met on a dating app whom she’s been conversating with for months.

Lauren Layne has been a consistently good romance author for me, but this book was not it. Her character development and plots usually feel fresh and fun, but this one felt stale and overdone. It’s a reimagining of You’ve Got Mail, and this is a plot that has been done so many times and she didn’t really bring anything original to the plot. There was no heart to this novel and there was nothing more going on than the central romance. I just wanted more. What did I like about this novel? I enjoyed the relationships: between Gracie and her siblings, Gracie and her stepmom, Gracie and her friends. I enjoyed the slow build of the relationship. But the rest of it? MEH. And I just could not stop being squicked out by Gracie calling this faceless person on a dating app “Sir.” (He called her “Lady.” All of the eye rolls.)

The Golden Couple by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen (★★★★☆)

Print • Owned (Book of the Month) • Thriller • 2022

Short synopsis: Marissa and Matthew seem to be the couple that has it all: a beautiful home, high-powered careers, and a wonderful little boy. But when Marissa confesses to an affair and they start couples therapy with the unconventional counselor, Avery, their life—and Avery’s—becomes even more complicated and dangerous.

This was an excellent thriller! I really did not know what I expected from the ending, but I was truly surprised by it. I loved the twists and turns of this thriller. Every time I thought I was putting everything together in my head, the authors would throw in some new unexpected twist. It was such a smart, well-written thriller. Of course, Avery as a therapist is not following any of the ethical protocols and you just have to suspend your belief in that aspect of the book. (And there are some reasons I won’t get into that make it a bit easier to suspend that belief.) All in all, a satisfying thriller that was fun to read.

In a New York Minute by Kate Spencer (★★★★☆)

E-Book • Libby • Contemporary Romance • 2022

Short synopsis: On the worst day of Franny’s life, she becomes a viral meme after a man on the subway gives her his jacket when she has a really embarrassing wardrobe malfunction. The whole world, it seems, wants to push the two of them together, though they couldn’t be more badly matched. When fate continually seems to push them together, will they start to realize that opposites do attract?

This story was so sweet! I loved the meet-cute on the subway, and I was curious about how the author would continue to get these characters back together throughout the novel. And the way she pushed these characters together felt very natural! I also really enjoyed how Franny and Hayes’ relationship developed beyond that original meet-cute. There was a lot of “will they/won’t they” tension that didn’t get too over the top. There was just enough tension that their eventual “will they” felt so satisfying. At the beginning of the book, it felt as if Hayes was written to be on the spectrum based on some character details, but those details sort of fell away the deeper I got into the book. I don’t know if this is a flaw on the author’s part, but it was something I noticed. And while I truly hated the ending (I won’t give it away, but it’s a romance novel trope that really bugs me and I never think it’s necessary), it wasn’t enough to make me hate the novel. It’s a romance I can safely recommend to most people!

What are you reading?