Dark Sparkler by Amber Tamblyn

Summary from Goodreads:
The lives of more than twenty-five actresses lost before their time—from Marilyn Monroe to Brittany Murphy—explored in haunting, provocative new work by an acclaimed poet and actress

Amber Tamblyn is both an award-winning film and television actress and an acclaimed poet. As such she is deeply fascinated-and intimately familiar—with the toll exacted from young women whose lives are offered in sacrifice as starlets. The stories of these actresses, both famous and obscure-tragic stories of suicide, murder, obscurity, and other forms of death—inspired this empathic and emotionally charged collection of new poetic work.

Featuring subjects from Marilyn Monroe and Frances Farmer to Dana Plato and Brittany Murphy—and paired with original artwork commissioned for the book by luminaries including David Lynch, Adrian Tome, Marilyn Manson, and Marcel Dzama—Dark Sparkler is a surprising and provocative collection from a young artist of wide-ranging talent, culminating in an extended, confessional epilogue of astonishing candor and poetic command.

Actresses featured in Dark Sparkler include:

Marilyn Monroe
Brittany Murphy
Dana Plato
Jayne Mansfield
Jean Harlow
Dominique Dunne
Sharon Tate
Heather O’Rourke
Bridgette Andersen
Shannon Michelle Wilsey
Judith Barsi
Peg Entwistle
Carole Landis
Anissa Jones
Susan Peters
Barbara La Marr
Lucy Gordon
Sirkka Sari
Li Tobler
Thelma Todd
Samantha Smith
Lupe Valez
Taruni Sachdev
Rebecca Shaeffer

My working knowledge of contemporary poetry is not good. So color me surprised to find out that not only does actress Amber Tamblyn have a book of poetry coming out from HarperPerennial it isn't her first collection.  Huh.  But I was really intrigued by her subject matter for the new collection, Dark Sparkler: the lives and deaths of women in the entertainment history.

I won't lie, there are no happy poems here.  This is a sad and intriguing collection of poems distilled from the tragic lives of actresses, some quite obscure (I had trouble finding them with Google - and there is an 8 page list of search terms consisting of actress' names and deaths, many of whom died young and holy dude will that take a bit to go through and reconcile with those poems based on actresses I couldn't find initially).  There is no consistent form or style; it is pure feeling.

Included in and around these poems based on real women are anxieties that Tamblyn herself must share with these women - the pressure to perform, to conform, to be on display, to be perfect, and to be the object of obsession. The collection reminds me that actresses are judged far more for their appearance and behavior than their acting ability and that pressure causes so many women to harm themselves or turn to substance abuse. One particular poem is chilling in that it is blank, wordless, as if it is waiting for its subject's final move before filling in (I won't spoil that one by telling you who it is).  There are lessons here and a lot of things to think about.

Dear FTC: I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher.

Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

Summary from Goodreads:
“Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman’s existence.” So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why­ she—along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing—remains unmarried.

This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless—the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life.

Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives—a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savor.

As a single woman approaching middle-age, there are two things you can do: loathe your single state or work to accept the single life you have. I opt for the second. Loathing one's self because one lacks a socially acceptable relationship construct takes too much time. I have things to do. Yes, it sucks that there's no one to come home to at night (cats do not count) but there's a bit of pride that it's all mine, from the weedy yard to the dripping sink to the bed I do not have to share.

Kate Bolick has been coupled and uncoupled, but never married.  As her friends married and had children, she wondered why she wasn't doing the same.  She had a great life - she was an editor with Domino magazine at one point - and loved it.  She loved her apartment.  So....was she normal?  Bolick began to notice a pattern in her reading: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edith Wharton and others were women who held good jobs and houses and social lives independent of a marital bond.  She explores the lives and intersecting themes of these women and her own life in Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own.

I thought this was a very interesting, thoughtful look at women's lives in the last 100-150 years through the lens of Bolick's five female predecessors.  And, yes, several of them married later in life or were married early then divorced/widowed, but the major point is that their most productive periods - and possibly happiest periods - coincided with periods of their lives when they were single.  I liked the balance between personal memoir and group biography.  A definite recommend.

Dear FTC: I received a digital advance copy from the publisher via Edelweiss.

When Your Genre Kryptonite Has Its Own Kryptonite

One of my “genre kryptonites” – i.e. the genre of book guaranteed to part me from my money – are books about books, specifically of the memoir variety.

Read a book a day for a year (Nina Sankovitch’s Tolstoy and the Purple Chair)? Sure.

Your dad reads to you every night from grade school until college (Alice Ozma’s The Reading Promise)? Yep.

Examine all your childhood heroines and how they are helpful or problematic (Rebecca Ellis’s How to Be a Heroine)? Yes!

Decide to “better” yourself by reading 50 specific books (Andy Miller’s The Year of Reading Dangerously)? Yes, HarperPerennial, you know me well.

Examine how your relationship to a specific work of literature has changed as you age (Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch)? Yep, yep, yep.

And (my personal, current favorite), read one book from EVERY country in the world in ONE YEAR (Ann Morgan’s The World Between Two Covers (US)/Reading the World (UK))? HELLZ YES.

Gimmie. I will take them all. Hand them over.

Until I can barely force myself to read the blurb of a particular book.

On the first Sunday of December 2011, I was working at the bookstore. It was the holidays, there were more customers than would seem to fit into the aisles, then my brother called. He told me to get off the sales floor and go to the back – he wouldn’t tell me why. When I did, he told me he was at the emergency room, with my parents, and my mother had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

My manager told me to go to the ER to be with my family. Immediately. Once there, I convinced the doctor to show me the CT scan. The tumor looked like a small golf ball lodged in the back of her right ventricle. Over the next week Mom underwent brain surgery, rehab to make sure she was regaining her balance and strength, and the critical meeting with her oncologist and radiation specialists.

My mother was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, grade IV. A tumor that is perhaps two percent of brain cancers which are only two percent of all cancers diagnosed in one year. Aggressive, very aggressive. Insidious, hard to get “margin” surgically. The best clinical trial evidence said that half of all patients are still alive eighteen months after diagnosis. We were lucky in that my parents live near one of the best teaching hospitals in the country and that my day job is there as well, working in research for the hospital epidemiologist. I knew Mom’s surgeon was the best we could hope for, my boss is neighbors with her oncologist. She was in good hands. We counted off the days of radiation treatments, watched her white cell counts, bought her books (and a Nook – Mom had a noticeable decrease in her field of vision so it was easier for a while to read “one page” at a time with larger print on a tablet than navigate the pages of a paper book), counted out chemotherapy pills, and we waited to see what would happen.

That fall, a book was published that should have been in my wheelhouse, The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe. When his mother was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer, they began to read and discuss the same books. All sorts of books, up until her death two years later.

When I had to stock the store display with shiny new hardcovers of The End of Your Life Book Club I could barely open the packing case. Ordinarily, I’d have been all over a book like this, happily reading a personal account of books read. I would likely cry over what would probably be a beautiful rendering of a mother-son relationship. Instead, reading the first paragraph of the blurb made me feel nauseated. I couldn't read a memoir about a mom-who-liked-to-read dying of cancer. I couldn't – in a rational world, I could, but my irrational mind was worried that it might jinx my own mother’s treatment.

My genre kryptonite had developed its own kryptonite: my mother.

Three years later, Mom is doing better than anyone could have predicted. She wasn't able to go back to work as a parish administrator, but she has started playing the organ for church again (on occasion, it’s still too much to prepare for two services every week). She helps my nieces practice their piano lessons. Her balance isn't, and will never be, back to normal but as long as we make sure the kids don’t leave toys in her path it’s fine. She’s still my mom. All these extra months and years are a gift.

The End of Your Life Book Club is now out in paperback, it’s been included in promotional sales, and a few copies of the hardcover have popped up in the bargain bin. And I still won’t read it. Not even the first paragraph. I wish Schwalbe all the best, but I will probably never read his book.

There will be other books about books to make me weak-at-the-knees. And that is just fine.

I Am Not a Slut! Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet by Leora Tanenbaum

Summary from Goodreads:

The author of the groundbreaking work Slut! explores the phenomenon of slut-shaming in the age of sexting, tweeting, and “liking.” She shows that the sexual double standard is more dangerous than ever before and offers advice to—and offers wisdom and strategies for alleviating its destructive effects on young women’s lives

Young women are encouraged to express themselves sexually. Yet when they do, they are derided as “sluts.” Caught in a double bind of mixed sexual messages, young women are confused. To fulfill the contradictory roles of being sexy but not slutty, they create an “experienced” identity on social media-even if they are not sexually active—while ironically referring to themselves and their friends as “sluts.”

But this strategy can become a weapon used against young women in the hands of peers who circulate rumors and innuendo—elevating age-old slut-shaming to deadly levels, with suicide among bullied teenage girls becoming increasingly common. Now, Leora Tanenbaum revisits her influential work on sexual stereotyping to offer fresh insight into the digital and face-to-face worlds contemporary young women inhabit. She shares her new research, involving interviews with a wide range of teenage girls and young women from a variety of backgrounds as well as parents, educators, and academics. Tanenbaum analyzes the coping mechanisms young women currently use and points them in a new direction to eradicate slut-shaming for good.

"Sticks and stones will break my bones but words can never hurt me."

I was teased a lot as a child (by one specific individual mostly) and repeated that phrase to myself for comfort.  But that old saw is wrong - words have the power to cut a life down, particularly the word "slut" and it's linguistic extension "ho" and in the viral culture of the 21st-century's social media those words can easily become lethal rather than a phrase to shrug away.  That is the point of Leora Tanenbaum's new book, I Am Not a Slut! Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet.

Through a societal sexual double-standard, young women are expected to cultivate a sexually experienced image but not to actually engage their own wants or desires in demanding agency in their own sexual experience.  How often are there hand-wringing articles about pre-teens "dressing provocatively" or about how "young women place themselves in bad situations" or about the vicious, vicious slut-shaming and victim-blaming that has cropped up online around cases like the Stubenville rape case? How often?  The shaming and blaming doesn't come exclusively from men; some of the worst accusations come from other women.  

What Tanenbaum does is back up and ask us to examine the societal pressure that would cause a girl to send a naked selfie to a boy (who is praised for amassing a collection of naked pictures from multiple girls while the girl is shamed, and possibly prosecuted, if that one photo is circulated).  Ask us to examine why other girls and women are so often the ones to throw the first stone and blame the "slut" for everything that happens to her.  Ask us to examine why young women turn to substance abuse in social situations.  Ask us to examine why "nonconsensual sex" is now a term used instead of "rape" when a woman who cannot actually give her willing consent to sexual intercourse has a forcible sexual encounter.

While I have a few quibbles and bones to pick with a few of Tanenbaum's points (first among them: her prescriptive advice to "not dress in a provocative manner" because the girl can't control the way boys view her as a sexual object), those quibbles I'm sure would touch off a really good discussion.  This whole book is something necessary to open up discussion.  The frank and very open discussion we need to have with teen girls and teen boys about media, social/peer pressure, good sexual relationships, and why it is so important to have agency in expressing sexual desire.

When offered a review copy of I Am Not a Slut! by HarperPerennial, I had to back up and read Tanenbaum's previous book, Slut! Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation, because it had missed me when it first published.  I was in my junior/senior years of undergrad (in a pre-med track) when it published so if it wasn't a biochemistry textbook or MCAT study guide or a work of escapist fiction completely removed from pre-medicine it just wasn't on my radar.  But in reading Slut! now, I recognized a lot of things that had happened when I was in junior high and high school.  And remembered a few others.  That I had, at the request of a friend, called a girl a "ho-bag slut" because the rumor-mill had it that she had "done" my friend's crush; in retrospect, it's likely that she hadn't done a single thing with said boy and if she had I was clearly out of line.  I remember the peculiar schadenfreude (a term I didn't know then) I felt when reading bathroom graffiti about another girl and was crushed when bathroom graffiti was written about me (over 20 years later, it is laughable that someone thought the need to write that when it was clear I had no time or opportunity to do those things).  I remember being so terrified by the excessive drinking and associated activities at the only "traditional" high school party I attended that I sat outside on the stoop in the middle of February because I hadn't driven there and couldn't even have called my father to come get me since we were out in the country and I had no idea where we were; as it happened, I was the only sober one at the end of the night and had to drive a stick-shift, without a permit/license, at something like 2am to get everyone back to the one girl's house where we were staying the night and the entire way back I worried that something had happened to one of the girls and didn't know how to ask her about it. I stuck to parties with the drama crowd where the craziest thing that ever happened was that we had too many Pez and put Time Warp on repeat.

Both Tanenbaum's books work through a combination of research and interviews with young women (and in the case of Slut! with older women who came of age in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s).  The personal histories, including Tanenbaum's, cut deeply into the ways that being labelled a "slut" or "ho" (or "whore" depending on the age of the woman) has caused serious damage to how these women view themselves as whole people.  The first book lays down the history of slut-shaming or slut-bashing.  The second is one-quarter new edition with updated (horrifying) statistics and three-quarters new information due to the advent of social media and the anonymity conferred by some social media sites.  Both are worth reading.

The situations presented in Tanenbaum's books weigh on my mind because I have nieces who are very rapidly approaching the "tween" stage.  I don't have children, and am unlikely at this point in my life to have any of my own, so my nieces and nephew are getting a third parent.  My older nieces are wonderful, beautiful, creative and fabulously eccentric in the way that only grade school-age girls are, yet....their parents have had to deal with a little boy who repeatedly tried to kiss one of my nieces - and it wasn't just a peck on the cheek.  Only a few days ago the other one asked her mom why all the pretty boys were so rude.  These are children.  What will we have to contend with as everyone starts going through puberty?  My nieces are lucky in that they have a good system of parents and uncles and aunts and grandparents who love them unconditionally and will be in their corner to matter what.  But many children are not so lucky.

Apologies, this review has wandered a bit.  We need books like Tanenbaum's to begin the discussion about sexuality, sexual agency, empathy, and social pressures.  We need to end the sexual double-standard that privileges one gender (male) over the other (female) (and I haven't even touched on the differences in the use of "slut" and like words and how those words are viewed/used differently among racial or non-heteronormative groups).  We need change.  Starting with our words.

Dear FTC: I received an advance copy of I Am Not a Slut! from the publisher; I borrowed Slut! from the library.

Four Nights with the Duke by Eloisa James (Desperate Duchesses #8)

Summary from Goodreads:
As a young girl, Emilia Gwendolyn Carrington told the annoying future Duke of Pindar that she would marry any man in the world before him—so years later she is horrified to realize that she has nowhere else to turn.

Evander Septimus Brody has his own reasons for agreeing to Mia's audacious proposal, but there's one thing he won't give his inconvenient wife: himself.

Instead, he offers Mia a devil's bargain...he will spend four nights a year with her. Four nights, and nothing more. And those only when she begs for them.

Which Mia will never do.

Now Vander faces the most crucial challenge of his life: he must seduce his own wife in order to win her heart—and no matter what it takes, this is the one battle he can't afford to lose.

A million stars and a box of Kleenex. That's the whole review.

(haha, joking)

Fans of Eloisa James's Desperate Duchesses were introduced to Vander in Three Weeks with Lady X (review)...where he was attempting to affiance himself to heroine India while hero Thorn was having a temporary attack of love-induced idiocy.  Which doesn't exactly make Vander an s*-ferret, but that does put him on the back foot since attempting to scoop one's best friend's lady (even if everyone thinks the best friend and lady are broken up and you are doing it to save her reputation) isn't exactly cool.

Vander has his reasons for acting as he does but, mental arms folded, I was quite prepared to dislike Vander at the start of his own book. Dislike might be too strong...perhaps expect him to dig himself out of a trench is better? The prologue to Four Nights with the Duke also doesn't show Vander in a particularly good light when he doesn't defend teenage Mia during an excruciating scene at in the Villiers' library involving a love poem, moonbeams, and a skeevebag male friend.  Teenage males are the worst at empathy, so I gave him a pass even as I wanted Mia to cut him dead (which she did).

Then, in the first chapters of Four Nights with the Duke Vander dug his trench even deeper, which really surprised me.  Eloisa James's heroes are not, to my recollection, mean.  They might make stupid decisions (Thorn and his father the Duke of Villiers (my favorite), Gabriel, Piers, James) or enjoy some pointed verbal sparring with a partner of equal ability (what is it about those Daughtrys and their wives?) but they don't actively work to to come across as nasty (even Piers, really, despite his being patterned on House).  Even before Mia made her proposal and backed it up with sufficient inducement, Vander was downright mean.  He punished her for the sins of her father, just as he is punished for the sins of his mother...which is also the fault of Mia's father.  And just to top it all off, he tries to shock her sexually.  He does his best to dig that trench to infinite depths.  This is the first time I've ever actually disliked an Eloisa James hero (he isn't even funny like Loretta Chase's Dain).  S*-ferret.

Mia, however, stands her ground.  She requires this marriage to save her little brother and his future from their sinister uncle.  She fully intends her marriage to Vander to only last long enough to circumvent her elder brother's will.  The only mistake she makes is that she blackmails first, rather than explain exactly what is going on, and Vander doesn't bother to read the document setting out her plan. He makes his own demand for the marriage: that he will only bed her four nights out of the year and only if she begs him for those four days.  Well, it fits easily in with Mia's plans.  She will never beg him for those four days.

I was in Mia's corner from the beginning.  You give me a short, curvy, smart heroine who doesn't fit into the given Society expectations for women and I will root for her at the top of my lungs (cf. Sarah Maclean's Pippa).  Mia is a novelist.  Specifically, the bestselling Lucibella Delicosa.  She has her own income because her father dismissed her abilities - she could "keep her pennies" (bestselling novels bring in a lot of pennies).  She wants that love-match she gives her heroines for herself because there is no way that Vander will ever forgive her.

Trust me, Vander not only forgives her but works hard to dig himself out of that deep trench he made.  He makes her believe that she is worth loving.  For herself, in all her inky, novel-writing, curvy glory, not just because Vander can seduce her and scramble her brains and make her beg since he's a virile duke.  Vander comes to realize that not only does he want Mia to remain his wife because he loves her, he would do anything to make her trust him and love him back.  And, most important, he has to re-examine the relationship between his mother and Mia's father and himself...and let it go.  At the very end, Vander manages to get himself out of that trench.  You'll need the kleenex.

In addition to an A-plus love story, Eloisa scatters returning Desperate Duchess characters into the mix.  She introduces Vander's charming, drunk uncle - Chuffy - who wears eye-catching waistcoats and orders Lucibella Delicosa in special binding and quotes what seems to be the entirety of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.  There are two sweet canines with names to delight any Harry Potter fan.  And then there's Charlie, Mia's little brother, who gives Thorn's ward Rose a run for her money in the "adorable wise moppet" department.  Even the villain is graced with a little pointy chin-beard like the grand-standing evil doge in a Gothic novel.  There's a delicious little bit of everything in this novel.  I loved it.

Four Nights with the Duke is available today at your favorite book dealer.

Dear FTC: I received a digital advance of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss...and then I bought a copy, too.

Above Us Only Sky by Michele Young-Stone

Summary from Goodreads:
From the author of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, which Library Journal called, “ripe for Oprah or fans of Elizabeth Berg or Anne Tyler,” comes a magical novel about a family of women separated by oceans, generations, and war, but connected by something much greater—the gift of wings.

On March 29, 1973, Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was born with a pair of wings molded to her back. Considered a birth defect, her wings were surgically removed, leaving only the ghost of them behind.

At fifteen years old, confused and unmoored, Prudence meets her long-estranged Lithuanian grandfather and discovers a miraculous lineage beating and pulsing with past Lithuanian bird-women, storytellers with wings dragging the dirt, survivors perched on radio towers, lovers lit up like fireworks, and heroes disguised as everyday men and women. Prudence sets forth on a quest to discover her ancestors, to grapple with wings that only one other person can see, and ultimately, to find out where she belongs.

Above Us Only Sky spans the 1863 January Uprising against Russian Tsarist rule in Eastern Europe to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Lithuania gaining its independence in 1991. It is a story of mutual understanding between the old and young; it is a love story; a story of survival, and most importantly a story about where we belong in the world. This “is a raw, beautiful, unforgettable book” (Lydia Netzer, bestselling author of Shine, Shine, Shine).

There are times when you read a book and it so completely consumes your emotions....I finished Michele Young-Stone's Above Us Only Sky at my desk, at work, at lunch, absolutely in tears.

The beauty of this novel is not in the sweep of history but in the story of a family who has survived against the backdrop of that history.  Surviving the Tsarist rule, surviving massacre by the Red Army in World War II, surviving the Nazi invasion, surviving emigration to the US, surviving Communist rule in Lithuania, and, in Prudence's case, surviving the loss of her wings.  For in the Vikas family, the women's wings grow throughout their lifetimes.  Prudence's relationship with her grandfather - discovered when she is 15 - helps her understand some of the emptiness and contributes to her study of ornithology.  She begins to understand her family history and how much has been lost, including, to her grandfather's belief, his youngest sister, Dania.  They make two trips back to Lithuania - once before the fall of the Berlin Wall, where they are shepherded by a Party official, and once after 1991 when they make a remarkable discovery.

I can't even put all this into a proper review.  It's such a beautiful knot of a novel.

Above Us Only Sky is a heart-wrenching story of music, loss, grief, separation, hope, and joy.  Read it.  Read it, read it, read it.

Dear FTC: I received a DRC of this novel from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique

Summary from Goodreads:
A major debut from an award-winning writer—an epic family saga set against the magic and the rhythms of the Virgin Islands.

In the early 1900s, the Virgin Islands are transferred from Danish to American rule, and an important ship sinks into the Caribbean Sea. Orphaned by the shipwreck are two sisters and their half brother, now faced with an uncertain identity and future. Each of them is unusually beautiful, and each is in possession of a particular magic that will either sink or save them.

Chronicling three generations of an island family from 1916 to the 1970s, Land of Love and Drowning is a novel of love and magic, set against the emergence of Saint Thomas into the modern world. Uniquely imagined, with echoes of Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, and the author’s own Caribbean family history, the story is told in a language and rhythm that evoke an entire world and way of life and love. Following the Bradshaw family through sixty years of fathers and daughters, mothers
and sons, love affairs, curses, magical gifts, loyalties, births, deaths, and triumphs, Land of Love and Drowning is a gorgeous, vibrant debut by an exciting, prizewinning young writer.

Sometimes a book comes along at just the right time (even though it takes me a bit to actually get it read, the arrival is still timely).

Amid all the discussion last year of needing diverse books and how we should seek out books by diverse authors and containing diverse characters, there was a fair amount of buzz for Tiphanie Yanique's Land of Love and Drowning, her debut novel set in the early to mid-20th century as the Dutch Virgin Islands were being transferred to United States control.  Rebecca Schinsky at Book Riot talked about it, other bookish friends and Internet places talked about it, and I won an ARC in a Goodreads Giveaway.  Which I fully intended to read until my second Riot Read book arrived in August and that turned out to be a brand-spanking new hardcover edition of Land of Love and Drowning.  So I intended to read that copy but here's the thing about reading diversely: when you decide to try and make reading diversely a thing, your to-read list expands exponentially squared (I have decided this is a thing).  Because not only do you have all the books that you might normally find, but you start getting backlist and frontlist recs for authors of color in the US, outside the US, books in translation, books by authors of Jewish descent, books by LGTBQ authors, and books about all sorts of different, diverse characters.  And that's just the fiction books.  The TBR goes from large to Mt. Everest.  And that's OK.  All those titles will keep, I just have to keep reaching for them even as more are added to the top.

So I finally got far enough into the pile to find Land of Love and Drowning again.  It is a tangled web of family secrets set against the backdrop of the US Virgin Islands.  Fathers and mothers have suspect motives.  Sisters keep harmful secrets.  Myth and fate become reality.

The voices in this novel are absolutely pitch perfect: Eeona, so determined to be a "perfect" upper-class lady; Anette, who embodies the culture of the Virgin Islands; Jacob, whose sense of being caught between worlds is embodied in his language; and the narrator, who looks down on these characters as they play the hands dealt to them by their parents and the politics of the time.  The plot emerges in pieces as the voices in turn impart history and perspective.

What was most interesting to me was the look at the annexation and "Americanization" of the islands from the perspective the islands' inhabitants.  It's a perspective that I, as a white US citizen, have never been encouraged to entertain.  So in the midst of this evocative novel we, as readers, are given information that tells us the US has never made good on the promise that the inhabitants of the US Virgin Islands are actually citizens.  The land has been closed off, the young men drafted in war and subjected to racism, the tourism and entertainment industries have marginalized or stereotyped the island culture.  Land of Love and Drowning pulls the rug out from under the beautiful, care-free paradise we are sold on the travel websites and makes us think about the people who truly live there.  As it should.

Dear FTC: I received an ARC of this book via a Goodreads First Reads giveaway and then I read a copy purchased through the Book Riot Riot Read subscription.

How to Be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis

Summary from Goodreads:

While debating literature’s greatest heroines with her best friend, thirtysomething playwright Samantha Ellis has a revelation—her whole life, she's been trying to be Cathy Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights when she should have been trying to be Jane Eyre.

With this discovery, she embarks on a retrospective look at the literary ladies—the characters and the writers—whom she has loved since childhood. From early obsessions with the March sisters to her later idolization of Sylvia Plath, Ellis evaluates how her heroines stack up today. And, just as she excavates the stories of her favorite characters, Ellis also shares a frank, often humorous account of her own life growing up in a tight-knit Iraqi Jewish community in London. Here a life-long reader explores how heroines shape all our lives.

I was at work exactly 3 minutes before one of the merch managers tossed me a book: How to Be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis.  It was going in the Discover Great New Writers bay.  I bought it on break.  (My fellow booksellers know me well.)

Ellis's examination of her favorite childhood heroines intercut with a memoir of growing up in an Iraqi-Jewish community in London was really, very interesting.  I'd been thinking recently about how favorite books shift and change as I grow up and have new experiences (how I think about Jo from Little Women is a good example) so the fact that Ellis and I are approximately the same age, and that we'd read almost all the same books, was so timely.  And besides, where else can you read about someone's reading life stretching all the way from Anne of Green Gables to Pride and Prejudice to Ballet Shoes to Jilly Cooper's Riders to Scheherazade?

(Side note: In the eternal Jane vs Cathy debate I'm firmly in Jane's corner.  Jane saves her own backside and gets the happy ending; Cathy is a twit.)

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Summary from Goodreads:
About 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. Our ancestors shared the planet with at least five other human species, and their role in the ecosystem was no greater than that of gorillas, fireflies, or jellyfish. Then, about 70,000 years ago, a mysterious change took place in the mind of Homo sapiens, transforming it into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, acquiring divine abilities of creation and destruction. * How did Homo sapiens conquer Earth? * What befell the other human species? * When did money, states and religion appear, and why? * How did science and capitalism become the dominant creeds of the modern era? * Does history have a direction? * Is there justice in history? * Did people become happier as history unfolded? * And what are the chances that Homo sapiens will still be around in a hundred years?

As much as I like medicine and epidemiology, a wee little bit of me is still the little girl who wanted to be a paleontologist when she grew up.  So a book like Sapiens appeared to be a nice sidetrip to explore the part of science that I don't see on a regular basis.

However, as much as we shelve this book in the "Science" section of the store under "Chem/Bio" where the books on evolution are kept, this isn't a science or paleontology book in the way that I would define it.  It definitely falls more into the anthropology category and strikes me as a book about the social history of homo sapiens rather than the actual biology of our species.  There's some biology, but not a great deal.

The beginning of Sapiens is very interesting, particularly the examination of the question did we evolve directly in a line, one human species after another, or did several homo species exist at the same time with homo sapiens eventually out-competing the others for dominance (we are particularly good at out-competing/extincting other species of all varieties). And then the evolution of homo sapiens from hunter-gatherers/nomadic tribes to small farming villages then larger villages to cities.  I quite liked the book up until the turn of modern history.

Then it felt boring.  To me, a great deal of ground in modern history has been covered before by other books I've read.  So a re-hashing followed by predictions of the outcome of homo sapiens didn't end the book in a good way, in my opinion.  I also felt some things were glossed over (the use of slavery or the European/American slave trade was mentioned several times but feudalism or serfdom was not - that I could find - and I found that an odd omission).

Dear FTC: I received access to a digital advance copy from the publisher.

The Man Who Touched His Own Heart: True Tales of Science, Surgery, and Mystery by Rob Dunn

Summary from Goodreads:
The secret history of our most vital organ--the human heart
"The Man Who Touched His Own Heart" tells the raucous, gory, mesmerizing story of the heart, from the first "explorers" who dug up cadavers and plumbed their hearts' chambers, through the first heart surgeries-which had to be completed in three minutes before death arrived-to heart transplants and the latest medical efforts to prolong our hearts' lives, almost defying nature in the process.
Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion-effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? Why do we often undergo expensive procedures when cheaper ones are just as effective? What do Da Vinci, Mary Shelley, and contemporary Egyptian archaeologists have in common? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else's beating inside your chest?
Rob Dunn's fascinating history of our hearts brings us deep inside the science, history, and stories of the four chambers we depend on most.

I love the history of medicine.  Get me a copy of Oliver Sacks, or a biography of cancer (The Emperor of All Maladies), or a discussion of medical ethics (When the Wind Catches You and You Fall Down or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) and I'm all in.  So I was really intrigued by the title of this book.

Well, it wasn't exactly what I thought.  I was hoping for medical case studies from history - what The Man Who Touched His Own Heart is really about is the history of human concepts of the heart as an organ and the history of cardiac medicine and surgery.  Sooo...OK, I'm still in, at least for most of it.

I like the idea and concept of this book very much.  Dunn, who is a professor of ecology and evolution, starts back at the very beginnings of Western medicine, when practitioners just began to speculate about the function of the heart and what that organ represented in our religions and cultures.  Galen, Avicenna, da Vinci, and Vesalius all appear as humans began to dissect corpses to learn the correct human anatomy of the heart (only mammals and birds have four-chambered hearts, so examining, say, a frog doesn't get you very far).  Once Harvey posited the motion of the blood and the microscope was invented discovery accelerated - the first known open-heart surgery, the first heart-catheterization, the attempts to build heart-lung bypass machines to allow more extensive cardiac surgery, and - in a major part of the book - the attempts to determine the correct origins and treatment for that scourge of the modern age, arteriosclerosis (or so we think).

Now, this book is for a lay audience - which isn't even remotely my bailiwick given the epidemiology degree - and I think it works quite well most of the time.  However, a few of the arguments felt a bit convoluted.  For example, he discussed a 2012 meta-analysis (that link might not get you access to the article if you're not academically affiliated - the citation is Stergiopulous and Brown, Initial Coronary Stent Implantation With Medical Therapy vs Medical Therapy Alone for Stable Coronary Artery Disease: Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials, Arch Intern Med. 2012;172(4):312-319 - also, that citation wasn't actually noted in the text; just a note about how randomization works....gonna give a bit of editorial side-eye here) looking at medication+angio/stent for atherosclerosis vs medication alone then jumped back about 30 years by referencing two studies in the 80s/90s that contradicted the meta-analysis's findings because statins weren't available then...huh? I do research and those paragraphs didn't flow well. I also felt like bits were missing from the story of cardiac medicine such as the development of heart valve replacements or repair, the extension of the heart-lung machine to ECMO (extracorporeal membranous oxygenation - it allows the lungs to rest and heal while the heart pumps, which could have been briefly introduced/explained), and the development of extremely complex operations to save children born with severe congenital diseases like hypoplastic left heart syndrome.  The sections near the end of the book on comparative anatomy and evolution are very good, as they should be given Dunn's background

One thing that I think would have been very helpful, considering the intended audience, was an actual anatomical description - with pictures - of the normal working anatomy of the heart at the beginning of the book, then a picture of the condition or injury Dunn is describing in the relevant chapter. In example, there's a point at which Dunn describes, in writing, the congenital malformation Tetralogy of Fallot (a consistent appearance of four cardiac anomalies - stenosis of the pulmonary artery, ventricular septal defect, biventricular connection of the aortic valve, and hypertrophy of the left ventricle), but not completely.  I had to stop and look it up, even though I know what the condition entails.  For a reader not versed in medicine or anatomy, I'm sure a section like that is very confusing.  So perhaps a few more illustrations for the paperback edition? (If they were added after the digital advances were released you can ignore the comment - I haven't had a chance to see a finished copy, yet.)

(Caveat for the entire book: if you are an animal lover, this book may not be for you. The history of medical discovery is paved with the use of laboratory animals for research, often in non-ethical and very lethal ways, none more so than the treatment of cardiac ailments.)

Dear FTC: I was given access to a digital advance copy by the publisher.

Sense & Sensibility by Joanna Trollope (The Austen Project)

Summary from Goodreads:
From Joanna Trollope, one of the most insightful chroniclers of family life writing fiction today, comes a contemporary retelling of Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s classic novel of love, money, and two very different sisters.

John Dashwood promised his dying father that he would take care of his half sisters. But his wife, Fanny, has no desire to share their newly inherited estate. When she descends upon Norland Park, the three Dashwood girls—Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret—are faced with the realities of a cold world and the cruelties of life without their father, their home, or their money.

With her sparkling wit, Joanna Trollope casts a clever, satirical eye on the tales of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood.

Reimagining Sense and Sensibility in a fresh, modern new light, she spins the novel’s romance, bonnets, and betrothals into a wonderfully witty coming-of-age story about the stuff that really makes the world go around. For when it comes to money, some things never change....

Someone somewhere got a wild idea to get best-selling authors to "officially" rewrite Jane Austen's major novels for a twenty-first century audience.

Well, OK...Austen sequels, rewrites, updates, variations, and etc. have been an industry for years.  So sure, a few more won't hurt.  The series started with Sense & Sensibility by Joanna Trollope, continued with Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid (reviewed briefly on Goodreads), Emma by Alexander McCall Smith, and Pride and Prejudice by Curtis Sittenfeld should be coming out in 2015 (I don't have a US release date for that).  I decided I'd at least give the re-tellings a try.

Sense & Sensibility as told by Joanna Trollope is a perfectly every-day novel.  I've never read any of Joanna Trollope's novels so I can't compare to her usual style but S&S is adequate.  The sentence-level writing reads well and some of the plot updates (Marianne's illness, Brandon's military experience, the Ferrars obsession with money) work very well.

However, however...I was immediately put off by a change in Edward Ferrars's backstory and never got back on an even keel.  He is changed from a diffident, but upstanding young man interested in entering the Church to a vague, unfocused drifter who was sent to school in Plymouth after being expelled from Eton for being the lookout man in a drug ring.

Excuse me?

From there we get extreme examples of bad behavior from Fanny Dashwood, John Dashwood, Marianne, Margaret, and Mrs. Dashwood (here named Belle). Belle and Marianne are so incapable of recognizing that bills such as the gas and electricity must be paid it that it becomes irritating. The number of times Eleanor points out she needs a job and every one pooh-poohs the idea....  Margaret is now a caricature of a grouchy modern teenager. (Does anyone know if British teenagers use the "w" sign from the movie Clueless as "whatever? Because I haven't seen an American teenager use that since I was in college and that's about 15 years ago now)

Mrs. Jennings and Charlotte Palmer (among others) no longer just seem self-centered and silly.  Their teasing of Marianne reaches a level of mean-spiritedness that I didn't think possible.  In the scene where Marianne sees Willoughby in London - at a wedding reception that Charlotte has managed to "get them invited to" instead of a ball - the whole thing is recorded and put on YouTube (of course).  Charlotte shows up at her mother's house and insists on playing the video over and over for Eleanor and commenting almost gleefully about what happened.  There is a lack of authorial distance in this book - Austen uses the distance for ironic commentary in the original novel that is lacking in this re-telling and it makes the characters' actions simply nasty.

And then there is the same complaint that I had with Val McDermid's Northanger Abbey - the plot is in lockstep with the original.  There are absolutely no deviations, nothing allowed to develop organically to better fit with the modern time period.  As a result the story begins to feel clunky and boring.  Does Fanny immediately start redecorating Norland? Yes. Does Marianne like music and Eleanor drawing? Yes. Does Brandon immediately fall in love with Marianne? Yes. Does Marianne get caught in the rain, requiring dramatic rescue by Willoughby? Of course.  Does Willoughby give Marianne an expensive gift? This time it's a car. Is Brandon called away right before a picnic allowing Marianne and Willoughby to sneak off to Allenham?  Yep.  Is Lucy Steele out to marry money and almost sunk by the loose lips of her idiot sister? Yep (and the sister is actually one of the most annoying and least believable characters ever written).  Does Mrs. Ferrars bang on about some Morton girl marrying Edward?  Yes.  Does it all work out in the end including forgiveness for everyone?  Yes, yes, yes.

In short, the Austen Project novels, so far, seem to be best suited for those readers who are unfamiliar with Austen's original novels.  Which I find to be galling because there is nothing wrong with the original novels and they can be read by academics and plebeians alike.  Meaning, if you are as familiar with the original novels as I am you are going to be just as bored and underwhelmed.  If one wants to re-tell a familiar story and update it for a contemporary audience there are so many successful adaptations: Clueless, Bridget Jones's Diary, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.  Each of those took the original story and concept and adapted the concept to fit the time period rather than bend the time period to fit the idiosyncrasies of the plot.  I'll probably give the McCall Smith Emma adaptation a shot but if that's as underwhelming as Sense & Sensibility and Northanger Abbey then I might bail at fifty percent. 

Dear FTC: I received a finished review copy from the publisher.

Out with 2014, in with 2015! (With Pie Charts!)

2014 is fading into the background so that means its time for little old me to look back at my year of reading.  I had a few reading-related (and other) resolutions for 2014:

1. Be mindful in my reading and bookish purchases - I did really good on this in the second half of the year and really made good use of my library cards (I finally got signed up at ICPL and NL) and my Oyster subscription.
2. Be timely on reviews - I think this was kind of a fail.
3. Drink more water - also kind of a fail.
4. Move more (the Fitbit is helping, but I need to be better at going to the gym) - I was diagnosed with a probable tear in the cartilage in one hip and the gym going was really limited.
5. Cook for myself - I really limited my fast food consumption this year and started remembering to make my own coffee in the morning which helped with the mocha/latte consumption.
6. Be brave - I visited Rebecca of Book Riot when I went to Virginia for the AXS biennial Conclave (and met Amanda, too), I started a YouTube channel, and I also made sure to make use of the new FilmScene art-house movie theatre.
7. Take a vacation - I visited Washington DC with my parents and, of course, stopped by Politics & Prose in Georgetown.
8. Relax - maybe?

So, overall, I think I did pretty good with my resolutions this year.  Now, what about those pie charts I promised.... It's taken me a few weeks to wrangle my book database but I did!  And I have stats!

This year I used the .csv file generated from Goodreads to build the backbone of my book database in Access (I have an analytics background and am teaching myself SQL so this was several hours of merrily wallowing in code and Google searches and spreadsheets back in February/March).  I've been tracking genre, format, gender, nationality, and race this year and I have a little historical data, too.

To start, I smashed my Goodreads goal of 130 books by reading 195 books.  BOOM.  (Yes, I counted comic books as "books" - who cares?)  Some of my favorite books this year were Jenny Offill's Dept of Speculation, Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You, Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams, Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist, Sarah MacLean's Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover, G. Willow Wilson's/Adrian Alphona's Ms. Marvel, Brian K. Vaughan's/Fiona Staples's Saga, and Eloisa James's Three Weeks with Lady X.  And those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head!

I read a pretty wide range of genres:

And a pretty wide range of formats (I'm about 50/50 or so on paper/digital and that suits me just fine):

My gender breakdown is 60/40 ladies to gents, which makes sense given that a good chunk of my genre reading comes from romance:

The 60/40 split has been pretty steady for a number of years, with the exception of 2012 because romance novels were almost the only thing I could handle reading when my mom was being treated for cancer (a guaranteed happy ending can go a long way...).

Most authors I read come from the US (followed by the UK, Australia, and Canada so it's really Anglophone up in here):

(and I'm super-sorry about spelling Malaysia wrong - it's corrected in the database now so should be correct next time I do this).

And what about race/POC?  The issue of reading diversely was huge this year in the book community, particularly on the bookternet.

Yeah, not so good.  I read more POC authors overall, but since I read more books in general the percentage of POC authors I read didn't go up.

(I deliberately didn't make the denominator discrete "authors" but counted each book individually in these stats - if I read 7 books by the same author, and that author happens to be white, that should be counted the same as if I read 7 books from 7 different white authors).

So the takeaway here is that I get an A+ in reading but a D- in diversity.

Diversity is one of my big, huge goals for 2015.  I am going to be more mindful about reading authors of color (i.e. not-white) and authors in translation which (in theory) might help with reading more POC authors.  I was really struck by Ann Morgan's blog A Year of Reading the World - she spent 2012 reading one book from each country on Earth (about 196 books total) - and now has a book coming out where she expands on themes and issues she encountered while trying to locate and read more books by non-UK/Commonwealth writers.  Reading the World will be published in the UK on February 5 and in the US as The World Between Two Covers in May.  I have a galley and am so excited and honored to have received one.  I'm also participating in the Goodreads Seasonal Reading Challenge group and the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge - a number of these tasks require reading non-white, non-US/Anglophone literature - so that will also help me keep my reading goal.

Other 2015 resolutions, which look suspiciously similar to 2014's resolutions:

1. Be mindful in my reading and bookish purchases - keeping this up will help so much with financial responsibility and the general amount of excess stuff in my house that I will never get around to reading/liking/re-reading.
2. Be timely on reviews - such a big deal, especially for books that I have requested as a reviewer (I know that there has been a lot of discussion in the book blogging community about what is "owed" to a publisher but, in my opinion, if a publicist, etc. has taken the time to send me an ARC or DRC then I should return the gesture by reading and reviewing the book in a timely manner).
3. Drink more water - do I need to drink as much Dt. Pepsi as I do? No.  Although, #deathbeforedecaf is still a mantra (you cannot separate me from my coffee).
4. Move more - the hip (and knees and back) and I have come to an agreement on ways of moving so I should be able to at least get on the elliptical and basic weights at the gym.
5. Cook for myself - I got a Dutch oven and new pots and pans for Christmas so this year the goal is to wean myself off of frozen dinners for 2/3 of my meals (they are handy, but my MSG-sensitivity is much less of an issue if I cook food for myself).
6. Be brave - I still hate having my picture taken or meeting new people but I need to keep putting myself out there.  Nothing gets accomplished by holing up in my house with the cats and books and not interacting with actual people in a social setting.
7. Take a vacation - I hope (HOPE HOPE) to have the finances sorted out enough to visit my friend Kate and see Rhinebeck (aka New York Sheep and Wool) this year.  ALSO, Book Riot announced their first live event in early November in NYC and I really, really, really want to go to that, too. (And see my friend Beth! And maybe Karen!)
8. Relax - cf. resolution #7.

And that's it!  Bring it, 2015!

You can see me holding my iPad up to the camera (and get a serious close-up of my face) in my BookTube video for my 2014 wrap-up - same thing as here, just more visual.