Books of 2018- Installment #11

51. Logan's Run by William F. Nolan & George Clayton Johnson
This was a movie I loved when I was a kid, so I decided to check out the graded reader for my students. Such a strange story.

52. Summer Hours at the Robbers Library by Sue Halpern
I'm a sucker for books about bookstores and libraries and this one is set in New Hampshire! Sold!! Riverton, NH is not a place I had heard of but when she said it was on the Connecticut River I knew it had to be near Vermont. Turns out it's in Coos County which, while very far from where I grew up, is in the same county as a friend of mine grew up in. So northern NH. Nice! North of Mt. Washington- oh interesting! Must be super cold in the winter! Yowzers! This is a super moving story about establishing relationships and finding your place.

53. Radiate by CA Higgins
This is the third book in the series. I enjoyed Lightless quite a bit and decided to revisit this universe after listening to Liberty Hardy at All the Books talk about Lightless. It is super engaging but darker than I was quite in the mood for.

54. The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts
After hearing David Barr Kirtley talk to Peter Watts, I decided to read his short story The Things. That was awesome! So I decided to check this one out too. And let me tell you it was a ride! I really enjoyed this incredible story. It's a relatively short novel but with an epic scope. I found it utterly fascinating!!

55. The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat
I decided to check out this book after hearing Liberty Hardy at All the Books talk about it. It was a dark book that did not suit my mood. A young girl becomes entranced by a man that works at a parking lot. And this man turns out to be rather involved in the Ethiopian community of Boston. Her loneliness and innocence blind her to some seriously strange aspects of this relationship, and it does not end well.

Books of 2018- Installment #10

46. A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
I read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet back in 2016, and while I enjoyed it, I wasn't sure if I was going to come back to this universe. Sometimes I like to sit with a universe for awhile before I decide to revisit. After sitting for a while, I decided I would. I liked The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I loooooooooooved A Closed and Common Orbit. The Long Way was an epic- full of fantastic alien races. It was good. But this was up close and the main characters are so lovingly rendered and I will carry them with me always.

47. Death by Dumpling by Vivien Chien
This is a nice little murder mystery- a cozy mystery. The author has created a nice little world for her characters to inhabit. It reminded me of Bon Temps in the Sookie Stackhouse books.

48. The Inner Lives of Animals by Peter Wohlleben
I loved Peter Wohlleben's book about trees- The Secret Life of Trees- and was so pleased to see a book he had written about animals was translated into English. While I liked his book on trees more than I liked his book on animals, I do appreciate his perspective and how broad his discussion is. He talks about both wild and domesticated animals- including both pets and farm animals. He talks about research and laws, and while he speaks more about German contexts (since he's German), he talks about other contexts as well. An interesting side note, I thought the translator was American because temperatures were converted into Fahrenheit, but I was clearly wrong as she used the British word for nearsighted, which if you don't know is shortsighted it is a bit confusing.

49. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
It's a graded reader and I needed to read it, so I did.

50. If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth
This is a book about a poor rez kid going to school with white kids- it's going to be compared to Sherman Alexie. That's just what's going to happen. It doesn't matter which one was written first. ]The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) If I Ever Get Out of Here (2013)] There are lots of parallels. But I loved it. It's set in New York on Tuscarora tribal lands (both rez and traditional), which is super close to Toronto. This book is about (among many other things) the forging of a friendship in junior high. The narrator, Lewis, is a Tuscarora boy, and his best friend, George, is an Air Force dependent, and let me tell you- I never read books about AF dependents. It was not perfect, but it was pretty dang awesome. And while it's not New England, it's pretty dang close. And while I wasn't in junior high in 1975, I was living in the northeast in the late 70s. And being a military kid in the aftermath of Vietnam is in there. Long story short, a whole lot of this book resonated rather deeply with me.