Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife - Mary Roach

Another lucky Library Sale shelf find, this book is apparently the UK edition - I guess the US title is Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. Regardless of the title, the subject matter was fascinating. The author looks into how people have described and believed in an afterlife, and how in the last couple of centuries scientists have been trying to ascertain if there is any such thing, and if we can somehow prove it. The most entertaining part of this book was the part related to the fad for "mediums" and "seances" in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and how some skeptics tried (and succeeded!) to debunk them and their (literal) parlor tricks. I have rapidly become a big fan of this author and I am happy that there are more of her books out there for me to discover. Recommended.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal - Mary Roach

I've really become a fan of Mary Roach after reading this book - she has a way of breaking down complicated scientific topics into entertaining and easily understood portions. And yes, some of this information is gross, but the writing makes up for it. I have another book by this author on my TBR pile too, so looks like that one might have to be next up!

August - This Month in Reading

Reading seems to have picked up around here - I managed 4 books in August, which is twice as many books as I read for July. Apparently I neglected to ever post a wrap-up for July, but no matter - I'll just say that I am hoping this momentum sticks around. For September, after I finish celebrating what to me is the beginning of Fall, I hope to read at least 4 books, to at least match August's reading.

How was your summer reading? How's your reading for the last quarter of 2017 looking?

Tender Is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Another book I was supposed to read months ago for the Classic Book A Month Challenge - to be fair, I started this back in April with good intentions but had a hard time getting into it, so I've been reading it off and on since then and finally finished.

So, as you can see by my review of The Great Gatsby, I love that book, and I expected I'd love this one too. Sadly, that wasn't the case. I realize this book is in some ways autobiographical, but it was the writing that just didn't send me, as they say. Just wasn't my cup of tea.

A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry

I was supposed to read this book back in May for the Classic Book A Month Challenge, but better late than never, right? I seem to remember reading this book in school but I had forgotten everything about it, so it was like a new book. The play is a classic story of a 20th Century African-American family trying to make their way in a world that can be relentlessly hostile to them because of their skin color. The characters are so well drawn that I could picture them easily in my mind as I read, and I still can as I write this review. All in all a worthy classic that I am glad I got the opportunity to read again.

The Truth Will Set You Free - Alice Miller

I've been meaning to read Alice Miller for ages, specifically her book The Drama of the Gifted Child, so when I stumbled on this book at the library I decided impulsively to grab it and see what I might find.

Miller is a psychologist who specializes in child abuse and the effects it has throughout a person's life. This particular book is geared toward what the subtitle spells out: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self. The book describes learned patterns of child abuse that are then perpetrated on one's own children, because of "that's the way I was raised and I turned out fine!" and other similar excuses. In this regard, it would be helpful for someone who might be wondering if they really did, in fact, turn out OK, and if their parents' way of parenting was actually abusive.

At the end of the day, the book is an interesting treatise that more people should read, but I do wish it had had more practical information for people trying to recover from childhood abuse, and how to ensure abuse isn't just mindlessly perpetrated generation after generation. But definitely a good book if you're just trying to grapple with why (some) abuse still occurs as often as it does.

Zap - Paul Fleischman

Where was this book when I was reading for the Alphabet Challenge? If you need a book that starts with Z, this play is a quick read!

I stumbled upon this play at the library and was intrigued by the jacket copy. It's a play that is meant as a kind of pastiche/satire of other types of plays (the English murder mystery, the Neil Simon/New York kind of play, a classic Russian play, and of course Shakespeare, etc.) and it's designed to appeal to high school drama departments. Overall I thought it was OK and the idea was interesting, but it seemed kind of confusing, and there were a couple of instances of dialogue that might have seemed OK in 2005, when the play was written, but strike me as somewhat racist and unnecessary here in 2017.

As a semi-related aside, I recently watched the first season of Lisa Kudrow's 2005 HBO show, The Comeback, and found a similar issue. In one of the episodes, Kudrow's character, who is an actress making a comeback in a sitcom, is given a line that is racist. The character doesn't want to say the line, (and it's ultimately changed) but no one ever identifies that it's a racist thing to say, and at no point does anyone just say, "this line is racist and we shouldn't say something like this on a mainstream sitcom." Were people just this oblivious to stuff like this in 2005? I dunno.

So back to the play at hand, it was a fast read and it wasn't awful, I just think it was sort of jumbled. It might make more sense as a stage production than as a "book" to read.

Tranny - Laura Jane Grace with Dan Ozzi

The subtitle of this book is as arresting as the title and cover: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout. It's the autobiography of Laura Jane Grace, the founder of the band Against Me! It's a well written, fast read that chronicles the author's life, including childhood, the formation of the band, all that's comprised in having a band these days, starting out in the punk scene and risking the label "sellout" if one is successful, and of course the gender dysphoria that the author experienced through all of this.

Random rambly thoughts:

The cool cover looks kind of like a 'zine, which after reading the book I can only assume is intentional. Like I said, the writing is solid and I couldn't put the book down - I read it in the course of several hours after getting it from the library. I am not super familiar with the band Against Me! or their music, but reading about how they came to exist and the general trials and tribulations of being a punk band in the late 20th/early 21st century was interesting to me, someone who is older than the author and who once had ambitions to be in just such a band, but much closer to when punk got its start. Frankly, after reading this book, I am fairly glad that my lack of talent prevented this from ever happening - the tightrope walk of being constantly called a sellout if you experience any success would suck. Do people really buy tickets to shows just to flip off the band as some sort of protest statement?? Yeesh.

In any case, I enjoyed this book and hope there are more from the author, as she's obviously a talented person and writer.

The Humans - Matt Haig (Spoilers)

Hi Readers! I managed to read a book! Hooray! :) If you're still reading my blog, thank you! please stick around :)

So this book was a recommendation, and to be honest, I was looking for something written in what I like to call the "common vernacular" - as opposed to, say, Jane Austen, and I took a chance on this book, hoping it would spur more reading.

The good news is, I do feel more like reading these days, so that's good!

The bad news is, this book wasn't a new fave.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a bad book or anything; and it truly fit the bill of being a fast read that was indeed written in the common vernacular.

However, it was a letdown in many other ways. It reminded me way too much of "The Time-Travellers Wife," a book that advertised a really interesting premise and then quickly became a book that was really about infertility. The supernatural elements didn't need to ever exist; the author could have just written a book about someone struggling with infertility, as the time traveling parts of the book were actually silly in the overall context of the book. And so it is with this book, which is supposedly a book about an alien coming to Earth but in reality is a cliched ode to a specific woman and their teenage son. I have no problem with a writer doing this - Judd Apatow, for one, has made a huge career while mainly writing movies that are nothing but love letters to his wife and kids - but I was honestly looking for a book about aliens, not a family drama. I feel like there are 10000000000 books that are family dramas and not even a fraction as many books that might be about aliens, so it was disappointing when the "alien" aspect is quickly overtaken by the other stuff. So it wasn't an awful book or anything, it just wasn't what I was hoping for when I read the description and assumed a book that was supposed to be about an alien coming to Earth and trying to fit in as a human, and instead I got a book about a dysfunctional Earth family, and how much the father figure suddenly decides that he LOOOOOOOVES his dysfunctional family and needs to try harder, like so many other books. Sigh.

I don't mean to be a downer, but I was hoping for more from my first read in a while. Luckily I have an enormous TBR pile to draw books from, now that I am more inclined to read. Let's hope I can get some momentum!

June - This Month in (Not) Reading, the Sequel

Not much to elaborate on - I didn't get any reading done in June! Sigh. I'm obviously getting really behind in my challenges, so let's hope I can get out of this slump soon.

I hope y'all did more reading in June!