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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