Reading Journal || May

May was a great month for me. I got back to running after having a hurt knee for a good 6 weeks. I studied a lot of Portuguese, picked up some new clients, and am very close to getting my Brazilian residence visa. The weather has turned to be cooler and the days are both sunny and rainy, so it's the best of all the worlds.

I want to do a quick numbers count of books I've read this year.

written by men: 18 / 35%
written by women: 24 / 46%
non-white authors: 14 / 27%
non-fiction: 14 / 27%
YA: 10 / 19%

Conclusion: I need to read more YA! Any suggestions??

Adult Fiction

The Hundred Secret Senses // Amy Tan
A Chinese-American woman whose marriage is on the rocks goes on a documentary work trip back to China with her crazy Chinese sister and her husband. It made me laugh out loud with its perfect descriptions of Chinese logic, and the writing is so on the nose that I enjoyed every minute of reading it. This book came highly recommended from two friends and I seriously loved it!

Longbourn // Jo Baker
If you love Pride & Prejudice and ever wondered about the other issues besides upper crust courting concerns that were going on in Georgian England, give this a shot. As for me, I found that I didn’t really care about the servants or the war because I was went into it searching for another juicy angle on the Bennet sisters’ love interests.

Young Adult Fiction

A Gathering of Shadows // V.E. Schwab
Fast, fun, spunky, modern, this is the second book in a fantasy trilogy that jumps through Londons… all four of them. I am such a fan of this series, guys. The only thing bad about reading this book now is having to wait until next year for the next one!

The Orphan Queen // Jodi Meadows
YA TROPE ZONE ALERT!!! The writing is so, so, so bad. And the story is incredibly predictable. BUT I read a good 33% and by then it had me so sucked in that I had to finish it (because what if my predictions are wrong??). And now I’m on the hold list for the next book in this series. SUE ME. All you need to know is: fantasy, magic is illegal, a badass orphan girl is going to take back her kingdom.

The Raven Boys // Maggie Stiefvater
People who I trust love this series, so I had to see what all the fuss was about. I like it but I’m still not exaaaactly sure where it is headed. The beginning of the book was pretty slow-paced and I felt lost for a while because of how it meanders around, but the writing itself is so tasty. Yummy books. I stuck it out, and I’m going to continue. The other bookclub member (my boyfriend) liked it too.

O Pequeno Príncipe // Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Ugh, finally finished this. Am I perhaps the only person in the world who thinks this book is boring and pretentious? I kept getting the feeling that the author was writing to adults under the guise of writing to children. gag.

Poetry / Non-fiction

Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful // Alice Walker
Approachable poems about social justice topics. This is the kind of poetry I like.

The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts // Laura Tillman
The second read for the #SJBC was so-so. This is a journalist’s personal journey into trying to understand what caused a man to snap and stab his three toddlers to death. Along the way she debates questions of capital punishment ethics with… herself. It was interesting but I wish I had known it was just as much about the author (if not more so!) as it was about the story, because maybe I would be less critical of it.

The Ragamuffin Gospel // Brennan Manning
A very down-to-earth, honest-about-the-dirt book about what it means to follow Jesus’ teachings without trying to earn love and blessings from God. I missed the discussion questions in the back, so when I reread (which I will definitely do!) I will journal along with those. Seriously the best book to read if you are burned out with religion.

Reading African-American Authors

Norma Impressions by Kara Walker (source)

A few months ago, I loaded up my twitter account with a lot of book critics, educators, and activists who are involved with the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign. I wanted to know what kinds of conversations they were having, and why. At first I didn’t understand a lot of academic-y terms they threw around, so I had to google and read a ton. I still have to google, but I’ve gained a lot of understanding into the conversation. Every day there is something new, but it really can be boiled down to: White people, why aren’t you listening?

I know I have a case of white guilt that has more than once tempted me to unfollow and stop listening because I feel ashamed and out of place. I don’t dare chime in to the conversation because these women are fierce, strong, educated, and I would be both out of line and out of my league to think that I had something to add. This has been humbling in a painful way.

Sometimes I want to feel like I belong with them because I’m a woman living in a severely misogynistic society (After I moved to Brazil, I understood why women become anorexic out of an attempt at control over their own bodies… I struggle with eating in certain situations here). But I can’t say I face the same thing that a woman of color is up against; I consciously use my race and gender to get in and out of situations that other people would not be able to, and I have done so my whole life. For example, one time I boarded a plane without any form of legal ID because I had forgotten and packed mine in my checked luggage. I can think of scores of personal examples like this.

I know a British guy who is so quick to point out horrendous racial crimes that ‘my people’ have done. I think it’s because he is deeply insecure and tries to criticize others whenever possible. But I was so gleefully happy when I read Longbourn and the global capitalist inheritance system clicked into place in my brain: white Americans got rich from the bodies of slaves, but so did white Englishmen, and even if this guy I know did grow up poor and does have ancestors who slaved in the fields as he so frequently claims, he too is reaping the profits of slavery by the mere fact that he was able to afford a university education and make a living using his native language in Brazil. There is a reason that English teachers are in such worldwide demand, and it is directly linked to money that was made by, cities that were built by, and advantages that were gained by African bodies.

The thing I've learned (that this dudebro doesn’t understand yet) is that white privilege does not mean an absence of hardship of any kind. L.L. McKinney tweeted recently: ...yes. All white people are privileged. No this does not mean they don’t struggle or are not marginalized in some form fashion. (source)

Nowadays, I’m careful to check out an author before I bother checking out a book. I’m pretty tired of reading books by white men. Not because white men are evil, but because I’ve been reading books by them my entire life and I’m ready to stop now. There’s lots of other people who deserve to be heard, and a lot more that I need to learn that I’m not going to learn by listening to the same thing all the time.

My Recent Reads

Just Mercy (Bryan Stevenson)
Stevenson is a lawyer working primarily in Alabama, fighting against injustice (racism and otherwise) in the criminal justice system.

Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehesi Coates)
A letter from a father to his teenage son about what it means to have a black body in a country that constantly seeks to control it.

The Book of American Negro Poetry (various, ed. James Weldon Johnson)
An anthology that sets out to prove that African American poets are equal and often superior to white poets.

Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems (Alice Walker)
Tangible and accessible poetry that contemplates race, exploitation, and colonialism.

Parable of the Sower duology (Octavia E. Butler)
Set in a dystopian America, a strong, young black woman makes her way from Southern California to better lands in the north, all the while developing a new religion based on acceptance and equality.

Good Links

Lemonade Syllabus (and on Goodreads so you can add 'em to your TBR already.)
The Sublte Linguistics of Polite White Supremacy (an essay by @YawoBrown)
White Fragility (an essay by Robin DiAngelo)

Reading Journal || March

This month I ripped through books at a pace that surprised even myself! One week I finished five books in five days. It’s bound to happen, I suppose, because I read so many books at the same time that I can finish a bunch in a row.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot resist reading less than eight books at once:

• Audiobook
• Poetry
• Fiction
• Non-fiction
• A Portuguese book for fluency
• A Portuguese book for vocab study
• Something on the ‘backburner’
• In Search of Lost Time

But I’ll focus on what I completed in March, not what I’m in the middle of.

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are a duology by Octavia E. Butler that were written in the 1990’s and set in a dystopian America in the 2020’s. Usual dystopias that I read feature oppressive government control; these show a country on the verge of anarchy. Poverty, substance abuse, vandalism/robbery/rape/murder, and extreme drought are the backdrop for Olamina to set out on her own to develop a community based on the principal of a religion that she leads called Earthseed. The mantra of the religion is “Change is God”, and her goal is to advance the community so much that they start a fresh life on another planet. The novels don’t reach that far into the future, and the mostly focus on how hard it is to inspire trust and win commitment in relationships when everyone is hellbent on self-preservation. What was most interesting to me was how Butler predicted the appearance of a Donald Trump/Ted Cruz character, down to the line of “make America great again.” Butler herself is an interesting person—an African-American female science fiction writer who earned a lot of awards for her work.

I continued the Lunar Chronicles series by Marissa Meyer with reading Scarlet. I was let down by the cartoonish new characters and predictable plot. Probably not going to finish reading the series.

Though there are literally hundreds of people waiting for the e-book copy of Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee, no one seems to want to listen to the audio (even though it’s read by Reese Witherspoon). So I snatched that up and was proud of myself for keeping my vow that I wouldn’t read the book until after Ms. Lee had passed. My brief responses to the FAQs:

• I believe that Harper Lee did not intend for the book to be published. Many passages are standalone short stories or underdeveloped dialogue—more of a polished writing exercise than material that moves the current of the novel forward.
• Atticus is racist, and no, it doesn’t appear to be an alternate universe Atticus.
• Reading GSAW did not change how much I like TKAM. Though it’s not set in an alternate reality, since I really believe that Harper Lee wasn’t finished developing this novel, it’s easy for me to categorize it as something totally separate, in its own box.

I made a conscious decision to read more female authors this month, and want to continue with that for the rest of the year. I should have tried to take a history of feminist lit class to fulfill my gender studies requirement in college… though I am thankful that such an abundance of material exists on the subject that is totally easy to find and read for free online. I started making my way through feminist classics with A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf . If you haven’t read it already, you should know that it is an extended essay that was fleshed out from a talk that Woolf gave to a girls’ college about the absence of female authors in literature. Woolf makes surface-level observations, but it’s a perfectly good place to start to lay a foundation for future readings. It reminded me of feminist art in the 1960’s-70’s (Judy Chicago, et al)—very blatantly obvious about what it was trying to communicate, but it was appropriate for the time, place, and context.

Immediately after, I read A Rogue by Any Other Name by Sarah MacLean. Maybe you don’t see the connection between an extended essay about women’s exclusion from literature and a romance novel, but the connection exists in my mind. The heroine in A Rogue by Any Other Name is fighting for her rights to make life decisions for herself instead of her father, fiancé, or society to make them for her. The point is that females can do things too and don’t need the peanut gallery to make a running commentary about it! I picked up this romance novel on Amanda Nelson‘s recommendation and because I thought, “Hey, I’m an adult, I can read what I want and I don’t need society shaming me into reading or not reading something.” I did feel proud that I read that book, silly smut and all, because it felt like cutting one more string to caring about doing things because it’s what people want me to do instead of what I actually want to do. I'm working towards my goal of becoming the Honey Badger.

Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott) and It Chooses You (Miranda July) approach the same subject in slightly different ways. What do you do when you want to write something but you are procrastinating on actually sitting down and doing it? Both books were a delight to read, well worth waiting for years on the waitlist, and I reviewed them together because they are so closely related.

I finished Sandman: Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman in Portuguese. My boyfriend keeps telling me to read Neil Gaiman stuff, and I keep doing it, and I keep not liking it. He and I do have similar tastes that often overlap, but there are many cases where they don’t. Dear readers, should I trust him once again and give a final try on American Gods?

I was let down by The Psychopath Test (Jon Ronson), too. I blogged about my disappointment, because I hoped that I would be able to spot the psychos living around me if I read that book. Maybe this reveals a hidden motivation for trying to understand why people in Brazil do what they do (I bet they’re just psychopaths. Let’s find proof.), or maybe it just means that I’m tired of reading books by white British dudes.

Reading Journal || January & February

This blog is turning into more of a reading journal and less of a YA book review blog, and I’m okay with that. This year in general I’ve been focusing on expressing my thoughts because I want to express them and not because I want other people to know them. When I read my posts from last year, I was really happy that I took the time to write them and I was glad that they look pretty and easy to find in the format of a blog. So, I want to keep up my blog for those reasons.

Let me recap my 2016 reading journey so far.

After listening to The Heart Goes Last (Margaret Atwood) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey) during the turning of the year, my mood swung to things that were equally disturbing but in a slightly different genre. Horror manga.

I read both the Uzumaki and Gyo series by Junji Ito. Ito is known as the patriarch of horror manga, and really, these books are bad dreams. Each chapter in Uzumaki functions almost independently and focuses on a spiral pattern that drives people to mental and physical insanity. The Gyo series is about a mutated fish invasion, and if you weren’t already jumpy about things touching your feet while you are swimming… this will convince you.

I think each person has their own idea of what truly inspires fear and horror. When I had a book club that discussed The Shining (Stephen King), the three of us discussed which parts of the book were the scariest for us personally. I am claustrophobic, so the part where Danny gets stuck underneath the snow in a small tunnel was the part that got the most sensory reaction out of me. For me, Ito’s nonsensical illustrations are disgusting (imagine my facial expression when I watch a medical show on TV), but the stories are not scary. In my mind, manipulative stalkers are true horror.

Speaking of true horror, I listened to Dark Money: The Hidden History of Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Political Right (Jane Mayer) after I heard an interview with the author on NPR. It’s loquacious and has its flaws (not citing sources of minor information), but it legitimizes the feeling that US politics has become more polarized than it used to be. This book made me feel more wary of “organic” political movements and skeptical of opinion articles. It also made me think more than ever before that I am being manipulated by a system that is out of my control, and the only solution that I have in my grasp is to read and write (or create) more. If you love hating Monsanto, Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Seven Sisters, then read this book.

After that glut of heaviness, I read a bunch of fluff: How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are (Anne Berest et al), some smutty manga in Portuguese, and Carry On (Rainbow Rowell). Carry On makes my second m/m romance read, and though I still haven’t heard a good explanation for why straight women like to read it, I guess I fall in that group.

Also in the romance category, 11/22/63 by Stephen King surprised me in all the right ways. The only other King book I’ve read is The Shining, and that book disappointed me in a mass-market paperback sort of way. Forty years of prolific writing later, 11/22/63 completely redeemed King. Every single aspect of it is en pointe—characters, pacing, action, feelings, plot rhythm, originality. As a plus, the audiobook narrator was mindbogglingly fantastic. I can’t recommend the audiobook enough.

After over a year of being on the hold list, it was fiiiiinally my turn to listen to Cinder (Marissa Meyer). I’m a few years behind on The Lunar Chronicles bus, but I’m glad I got to see for myself what all the fuss is about. Cinder was good. I thought it was cute, creative, and I adored the characters. Scarlet and Cress came in soon after, and I was excited to listen to them as well. Scarlet had some big issues for me regarding character development (the thing I loved the most about the first book) or rather, lack thereof. The plot was yawningly predictable, and I almost didn’t stick it out to the end. I kept finding more things that annoyed me, and that’s when I decided I probably have had too much YA in a row. I’m going to wait to read Cress until the next time I feel like being in a tub of book fluff.

My ongoing project of reading In Search of Lost Time has been progressing very slowly. I keep getting caught up in other books! I’m a chronic multi-book reader.