February Books of the Month

March 20, 2020 by Christina

February feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? I know it was a busy month for me because my calendar is packed with book club meetings, dinner plans with friends, and an introduction to quilting class on Sundays. Yet, from the vantage point of mid-March, it feels unimaginably footloose and fancy free. What did I do when I could go and do whatever I wanted? Well, what I did was read an astonishing 17 books during this month thanks in […]

Categories: 2020 Reads, Amish, Animals, Audiobook, Awards and Prizes, Book Club, Canada, Caribbean, Classics, Classics Club, Crime, Europe, Feminism, Fiction, Food, Indigenious Peoples, Juvenile, LGBTQA+, Mountain West, Nonfiction, North America, Persephone Books, ReadDiverse, Religion, Travel, United Kingdom, United States, Women's Prize • Tags: A. J. Finn, Adam Darlin, Audre Lorde, Becky Ohlsen, Brendan Sainsbury, Catherine Bodry, Chris Chalk, Christopher Ketcham, Coco Morante, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Edwidge Danticat, Jesmyn Ward, Jia Tolentino, John Lee, Jon Krakauer, Kamila Shamsie, Kevin Harrison Jr, L. M. Montgomery, Linda Castillo, Marghanita Laski, Richard Thomas, Rutina Wesley, Shelly Frasier, Steven Higashide, Susan O'Malley, Sy Montgomery

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

August 9, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – audiobook. Read by Derek Perkins. Random House Audio, 2018. 11 hours, 41 minutes. Library copy. Based on the title, I assumed this book would provide 21 ways of how homo sapienswill need to adapt to life in the twenty-first century, as envisioned in Harari’s Homo Deus. Instead, Harari builds from one chapter to the next to explain how the current stories we collectively tell ourselves to orient our outlook and provide social cohesion are no longer accepted by […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, Religion • Tags: Derek Perkins, Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

February 22, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the Hebrew. Harper, 2015. Originally published 2011. 541 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “A Brief History of Humankind”, Harari’s book covers three “revolutions” that shaped the course of history – the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution – before delving into a lesson in how culture binds the world together and a short speculation about the future. Beginning about 70,0000 years, the Cognitive Revolution led to the evolution of Neanderthals and other […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Africa, Chunkster, Economics, Europe, Hebrew, Indigenious Peoples, Middle East, Nonfiction, North America, Religion, South America, Translated, United States • Tags: Yuval Noah Harari

Educated by Tara Westover

January 31, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Random House, 2018. 334 pgs. Purchased. Westover’s memoir generated considerable buzz after its publication last year. Former US President Barack Obama included it in his list of favorite books for 2018, and it seemed like every single book club I considered joining in my new town had read or planned to read this book. I bought a copy figuring I’d end up reading it for a book club eventually, but bumped up to the top of my […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Education, Mountain West, Nonfiction, North America, Religion, United States • Tags: Tara Westover

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

January 22, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction — Kindle edition. Pantheon, 530 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion”, Haidt’s book reviews a series of evolving theories on how and why people are motivated to believe the way they do. The rejection of these theories in history is blended with Haidt’s own evolution from student to social psychology professor, and he spends the bulk of the book documenting why these theories fail to hold up. It isn’t until chapter eight […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Chunkster, Nonfiction, North America, Religion, United States • Tags: Jonathan Haidt

I Was Told to Come Alone by Souad Mekhennet

October 28, 2018 by Christina

Nonfiction — Kindle edition. Henry Holt and Co, 2017. 368 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad”, Mekhennet’s memoir begins with a recounting of her childhood in Morocco. Born in Germany, Mekhennet was sent to live with her grandmother in Morocco while her mother and father worked as a cook and cleaner, respectively, in Germany. Her exposure to the language and to her family’s history as Muslims in North Africa may have set her apart from […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Africa, Book Club, Europe, France, Germany, Middle East, Nonfiction, ReadDiverse, Religion • Tags: Souad Mekhennet

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

March 15, 2017 by Christina

Fiction – print. Little, Brown and Company, 2016. 291 pgs. Library copy. Seven years after the Irish potato famine of 1845 and 1852, a Nightingale-trained English nurse by the name of Lib Wright is employed by an Irish town council to investigate the claim that an eleven-year-old resident by the name Anna O’Donnell has existed some four months without consuming any food. As deeply pious Catholics, Anna, her parents, and her cousin-turned-maid believe the young girl’s faith in God is sustaining her life, and the […]

Categories: 2017 Reads, Book Club, Europe, Fiction, Giller Prize, Ireland, Religion • Tags: Emma Donoghue

Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me by Harvey Pekar and J.T. Waldman

February 23, 2016 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Hill and Wang, 2012. 176 pgs. Library copy.  Over the course of an afternoon in Ohio, Pekar interweaves the history of Judaism from Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac on the alter for God to expressions of the Jewish faith in 2011 with his own personal history as a Jew and a critic of Israel. Panels are devoted to depicting both histories — the personal and the publicly shared — as well as the time Pekar and Waldman spend […]

Categories: 2016 Reads, Comics, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, North America, Religion, United States • Tags: Harvey Pekar, J.T. Waldman, Joyce Brabner

Killing a King by Dan Ephron

December 23, 2015 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. W.W. Norton & Company, 2015. Print. 304 pgs. Library copy. On November 4, 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel was assassinated as he left a pro-Oslo Accords peace rally in Israel by a twenty-five-year-old Israeli citizen named Yigal Amir, who justified his actions through the Talmudic concept of “rodef”. The law of “din rodef” allows an individual to kill a person in order to save innocent lives and, according to Amir, Rabin was guilt of murdering Israeli settlers in the West Bank because he […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, Religion • Tags: Dan Ephron

Betrayal by The Investigative Staff of The Boston Globe

December 17, 2015 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Little, Brown, 2008. Originally published 2002. 304 pgs. Library copy. As a resident of Boston and someone who briefly worked in journalism, I felt compelled to see “Spotlight”, a feature film that follows the Boston Globe‘s reporting of the Catholic Church child-abuse scandal in 2001-2002. The film certainly makes a compelling case for supporting the local paper and, more specifically, the investigative journalists who take months to develop a story rather than the click-bait headlines that seem to be […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Crime, New England, Nonfiction, North America, Religion, United States • Tags: Ben Bradlee Jr., Kevin Cullen, Matt Carroll, Michael Paulson, Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, Stephen Kurkjian, The Boston Globe, Thomas Farragher, Walter V. Robinson

The Underground Girls of Kabul by Jenny Nordberg

February 27, 2015 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Crown, 2014. 350 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan”, Nordberg’s book introduces readers to families who have made the decision to raise their daughters as bacha posh (“dressed up like a boy” in Dari). These young girls are raised as boys and, therefore, allowed to travel freely outside the home, attend school, work, and play with other children unlike females of all ages. As Nordberg explains, because Afghanistan is a patriarchal […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Book Club, Middle East, Nonfiction, Religion • Tags: Jenny Nordberg

A Love That Multiplies by Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar

November 18, 2014 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Howard Books, 2011. 288 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “An Up-Close View of How They Make it Work”, the Duggars’ second book is anchored by the story of the premature birth of their nineteenth child, Josie, and the loss of Jim Bob’s father to a brain tumor. The rest of the book is devoted to covering why they decided to stop using birth control, how they manage to raise such a large family without going into debt, and […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Nonfiction, North America, Religion, United States • Tags: Jim Bob Duggar, Michelle Duggar