My Ex-Life by Stephen McCauley

May 17, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Flatiron Books, 2018. 336 pgs. Purchased. Twenty years after their marriage ended, David Hedges and Julie Fiske are living on opposite sides of the United States. Julie is going through her second divorce; her husband, Henry, is demanding Julie come up with the money to buy him out of their rambling Victorian along the coast north of Boston. He is also insisting their daughter, Mandy, come up with plan for college, or he’s going to push […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Fiction, New England, North America, United States • Tags: Stephen McCauley

The Space Barons by Christian Davenport

May 13, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Public Affairs, 2018. 320 pgs. Library copy. I work on the periphery of the aerospace industry, relying on the industry to build and launch optical satellites whose imagery I can process in support of environmental monitoring and natural disaster response. Despite this proximity, my knowledge about the aerospace industry is limited to the photographs NASA shares on Instagram. Which is why I was intrigued when I saw Davenport’s book on display at my local library. Subtitled “Elon […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Nonfiction, North America, Space, Technology, United States • Tags: Christian Davenport

Kings of the Yukon by Adam Weymouth

May 10, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Little, Brown and Company, 2018. 288 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “One Summer Paddling Across the Far North”, Weymouth’s memoir covers the fourth months he spent canoeing the Yukon River from Canada’s Yukon Territory through Alaska to the Bering Sea. The Yukon is 2,000 miles long, the longest free-flowing river in the United States and the longest salmon run in the world. Each summer, king salmon (known as Chinook in Canada) migrate the distance of the Yukon to […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Canada, Food, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, North America, United States • Tags: Adam Weymouth

The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty

May 8, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Riverhead Books, 2013. Originally published 2012. 402 pgs. Purchased.  In the 1920s and 1930s, Louise Brooks became a famous silent film actress and dancer and was noted for her bob hairstyle, a unique take on the poplar flapper persona of the time. In Moriarty’s fictional account, Louise is a fifteen-year-old girl leaving Kansas for the first time to study with the prestigious Denishawn School of Dancing in New York. Louise’s parents insist she be accompanied by a […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Book Club, Feminism, Fiction, New York, North America, United States • Tags: Laura Moriarty

Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon

May 3, 2019 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Davina Porter. Recorded Books, 2005. 44 hours, 50 minutes. Purchased. As the conclusion of Voyager, Claire and Jamie Fraser found themselves washed ashore the coast of Georgia with Jamie’s nephew, foster son, and step-daughter turned foster-daughter-in-law. A hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean destroyed their ship and waylaid their plans to travel back to Scotland from Jamaica and return Ian Murray back to his mother, Jamie’s sister. At the start of Drums of Autumn, the fourth book […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, North America, United Kingdom, United States • Tags: Davina Porter, Diana Gabaldon

Becoming by Michelle Obama

April 17, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – audiobook. Read by the author. Random House Audio, 2018. 19 hours, 1 minutes. Purchased.  In 2009, Michelle Obama became the first African-American First Lady of the United States after her husband, Barack Obama, was elected President. Prior to that, Michelle attended Princeton and Harvard Law and worked as both a partner-tracked lawyer for a prestigious firm in Chicago and as an administrator in the University of Chicago medical system. These impressive achievements were – and continue to be […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Book Club, Feminism, Nonfiction, North America, ReadDiverse, United States • Tags: Michelle Obama

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

April 5, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Harper, 2018. 464 pgs. Purchased. Kingsolver’s latest novel teeters together two stories set roughly 150 years apart through a shared locality, the planned community of Vineland, New Jersey. The present-day story is set late 2015 and early 2016 – the characters react to the rhetoric of Donald Trump’s campaign, although never refer to him by name – and follows the matriarch of Vineland’s newest residents, Willa. Willa’s husband recently lost his tenured professorship after the small, insolvent […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Book Club, Chunkster, Fiction, North America, United States • Tags: Barbara Kingsolver

Thoughts on Three Book of the Month Selections

April 3, 2019 by Christina

About four years ago, a number of the members of my book club in Boston joined Book of the Month, a subscription service that mails you a newly published book out of five options once a month. I passed on subscribing for two reasons: I was able to pick up a number of these titles as read (and unread) castoffs at book club meetings I figured a new book would arrive each month and promptly be added to my bookshelves […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Asia, Europe, Feminism, Fiction, New York, North America, ReadDiverse, United Kingdom, United States • Tags: Candice Carty-Williams, Etaf Rum, Yangsze Choo

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

March 18, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Vintage, 2011. Originally published 2010. 622 pgs. Purchased.   Subtitled “The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration”, Wilkerson’s book follows three individuals in order to construct a larger narrative about the movement of black Americans between 1915 and the 1970s. Historians estimate roughly six million black Americans moved from majority black southern states governed by white minorities to northern and western states where racism had not (yet) been codified through Jim Crow laws. The three individuals profiled […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Chunkster, Mountain West, Nonfiction, ReadDiverse, United States • Tags: Isabel Wilkerson

Fascism by Madeleine K. Albright

March 15, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – Kindle edition. Harper Perennial, 2019. Originally published 2018. 320 pgs. Library copy. In the conclusion of her book, Albright says that some may find the title of her book to be alarmist, but it is her belief that we are living in an alarming time. Her assertion holds gravitas because of her credentials – she served as the United States Secretary of State and the Ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 2001 – and her personal […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Asia, Balkans, Europe, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Nonfiction, North America, Poland, Russia, South America, United States • Tags: Madeleine K. Albright

Deep Work by Cal Newport

March 11, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – Kindle edition. Grand Central Publishing, 2016. 287 pgs. Library copy.  Subtitled “Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World”, Newport’s book lays out how individuals who master the concept of “deep work” will be successful in an economy to increasingly demands more output. In Newport’s mind, deep work consists of “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Nonfiction, North America, Technology, United States • Tags: Cal Newport

Roger Lea MacBride’s Little House: The Rose Years Series (Books 5 – 8)

February 27, 2019 by Christina

As I mentioned in my post about the first four books in MacBride’s series, I decided to reread the series as I found myself in need of a counterbalance to the heaviness that comes with reading Crime and Punishment and a nonfiction book about human evolution. In my eagerness to share my thoughts on the books, I became a bit longwinded and had to cut the post into two parts. This part, the second, covers the final four books in the series. ‘Little Town […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Fiction, Juvenile, North America, Reread, United States • Tags: Roger Lea MacBride