Modern Romance - Aziz Ansari

Whoops. This is an example of where going to a bookstore and flipping the book over to read a description is effective. Instead, since I love Aziz Ansari as a comic and I saw that the book was highly rated, and recommended to me by Goodreads after I finished and loved, Bossy Pants by Tina Fey (read my review here), I used my Audible credit to purchase this book.

I thought it was going to be about Aziz Ansari. I thought it was going to be funny. That's all I thought it was going to be. Whoops.

Modern Romance is co-authored by Ansari and a sociologist. And true to its title, it chronicles and examines romance in the modern age. How does technology (social media, smart phones, dating apps) effect dating today? And how does that manifest in the US and other parts of the world?

The book is really pretty good, even though I've been married for almost a decade and none of the subject matter even applies to me anymore. But Ansari is hilarious and a perfect foil for all the technical scientific and and study-related data. I found the section on modern romance in Tokyo especially entertaining.

I'm giving the book four stars because it was well written, researched, and presented. I just wasn't that interested in the subject matter at this point in my life. But that's my own fault for just assuming the book was something it wasn't. 

4/5 Stars.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail - Cheryl Strayed

I wanted, really wanted, to like this book. I like stories of personal growth. I like stories of the outdoors. I had never heard of the Pacific Crest Trail and the idea intrigued me. But, Strayed, or I should say, an emotionally damaged and young Strayed, is a harsh travel buddy. She does get more likeable as the book goes on, but I just got annoyed with her all the time. She admits to so much of the things that really bothered me about her, but somehow it didn't entirely help in this case. The honesty was fine, but it didn't make me want to hang out with her more.

I know this has been made into a movie and I've heard from people that the movie was disappointing after reading the book. I may check it out just to see how it's done, but I'd have to be pretty bored to do so.

The story starts out with Cheryl on the trail and then weaves back to the points in her life that led her to try backpacking more than 1,000 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail. The narrative weaving worked well. The portions detailing Cheryl's life growing up fit well where they were put into the narrative. I actually am curious about what she did after she exited the PCT. I admire her determination to do something radical to completely change her life. 

In the end, I'm glad I read this book. But it just wasn't as fun or as interesting as I'd hoped.

3/5 Stars.

P is for Peril - Sue Grafton

Kinsey Millhone. After 16 books with her, she still sometimes makes me shake my head when she does dumb things. In this book, she takes on another missing person case. Promising to find Dowan Purcell a doctor with an ex-wife who hires Kinsey, and a new wife who is busy not caring much about how much he's missing. 

On the side, Kinsey is trying to find office space to rent because.... well that's not really clear. The attorney she rents from, and who gives her some business, is moving offices so Kinsey is.... well she's just Kinsey. She doesn't like to get tied to anything for too long. At this point, I'm kind of thinking she needs to get over herself a little bit. Anyway, so she finds a place that is up for rent from two brothers, Richard and Tommy Hevener. Turns out these boys have a bit of a past, but she doesn't find that out until after the check is written. How does this tie in to the missing doctor? It doesn't. It absolutely has nothing to do with it, but I kind of think maybe Grafton's central mystery wasn't taking up enough room so her editors had her pitch in a second minor plot line.

Because after all that, the case of the missing doctor ends kind of with a fizzle of Kinsey figuring it out but none of the normal explainers at the end to figure out what happened to the involved characters. So it was a bit unsatisfactory of an ending. I've made catching up to this series one of my goals for 2016 so here goes.

3/5 Stars.

2015 Review

In 2015 I read 39 books, or 11,683 pages. Some of the reviews on this blog from this year are from books I read last year. By about August, I ran out of those and going forward all reviews will be contemporary to when I read them.

Longest Book: A Crown for Cold Silver by Alex Marshall. Apparently this is a pen name for a well known fantasy writer looking to start fresh with a new world and cast of characters. Despite a difficult first 100 pages, I eventually really grew to like this book and it ended up earning a four star rating. I haven't looked recently to see if the actual author name has leaked yet (Current popular theory is that the author is Mark Barrowcliffe, click here for the full theory). But in any case I'll be reading the eventual sequels to this one. You can read my full review here.












Shortest Book: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. This was a pleasant surprise since I wasn't sure what I'd missed having never read this in high school, but I really enjoyed this short novel and gave it a five star rating as well. You can read my full review here.

Best Book: The Martian by Andy Weir. This was my first book on audible after I discovered that Jock Jams was just not going to get me through two hour 1/2 Marathon training runs. So I strated listening to book on audible and absolutely loved the rendition as read by the narrator. Also saw the movie this year but the book was better. You can read my full review here.

Best Character: Mark Watney in The Martian. He's funny, he's smart, he's a great guy to be stuck on a planet with or get a beer with. I thoroughly enjoyed him being the only character in a book for a long portion of the novel. That's rare in real life let alone in a book. Loved him.

Worst Book: No book earned only a single star rating this year but looking back on the books, Senate Proof by Logan Snyder should have. It had bad writing, a bad plot and terrible characters. Triple bogey. Read more about that here.
















Biggest Disappointment: Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. This had potential and I heard so many good things but ultimately it was SOOOOO boring. You can read my full review here.

Worst Character: Julia from The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. I'm not saying 11 year olds can't be good narrators, but this time it didn't work out. Julia was boring and merely an observer in her world. The book would have been better told form someone else's perspective. Someone called it "haunting" but I just couldn't get over the melodrama wrapped in soccer cleats aspect of the book.

Goals for 2016: I've set my goal of 50 books for this year. I feel like this is a little daunting, but now that I spend more time listening to audio books than music, I think it is doable. I'll be training for another half marathon soon so I'll have the time to listen. 50 books roughs out to one a week with two weeks of vacation thrown in for good measure.

I'm confident I'll be reading Justin Cronin's City of Mirrors this year, despite this being a prediction for the two previous years (check out that May 24, 2016 expected date!). Will George RR Martin get around to publishing Winds of Winter (probably not - check out this update), I'm not counting on it or I would have set the goal at 45. But if it ruins my reading goal for the year, I'd be okay with that.

Blindness - Jose Saramago

It's been two days since I finished Blindness. And I thought two days would be enough time to really process what I thought of this one. But here I sit, two days of thinking of what to say, and I'm still not really sure.

That I even decided to pick up this book and start it is a real accomplishment. I tried so hard to read Saramago's History of the Siege of Lisbon last year. But once the dog started narrating I was just done. And I couldn't get past Saramago's lack of paragraph breaks for dialogue. I guess the story just wasn't interesting enough for me to do so much work to figure out what was talking.

But in this case, Blindness was interesting enough, and horrifying enough, and realistic enough. (No dogs narrate in this one). The book starts with a man suddenly going blind at an intersection. Despite the honking cars, he's paralyzed by indecision and cannot find a way to get out of his car. He's disoriented. A "good samaritan" helps him home and into his house (and then steals his car -but don't worry that guy goes blind too, so Karma). 

The blindness begins to spread. The government, also paralyzed by fear, decides to stick the blind and those they've come in contact with in an unused former mental asylum. They deliver food three times a day. Otherwise the blind are left to fend for themselves. More and more afflicted begin to arrive. The conditions are deplorable. No working toilets, no clean water. 

And then, one group of the blind begin to terrorize the others. Until, well, I don't want to give too much away. But it's actually painful to read, but again not totally foreign because sometimes epidemics do not bring out the best in people. And just because people are afflicted does not mean that they are honorable or even worthy of assistance. Being blind brings out the worst in people in some cases.

The interesting parts are how Saramago really nails all those things we rely on sight for. The blind don't even recognize each other. People they've known or been intimate with are strangers. It's altogether pretty fascinating. 

Again, I'm not a big fan of how Saramago constructs his dialogue. It's confusing and irritating, but in this case, I didn't mind a little extra work to get it done. So, I can see why he's a nobel laureate, and I kind of forgive him for that Lisbon thing.

4/5 Stars.

It Starts with Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways - Dallas & Melissa Hartwig

You are what you eat. Basically. It's hard to argue with some of the main precepts in this book. Added sugar is bad for you. Eating too much of the wrong thing is bad for you. Vegetables are good for you. I did enjoy the science background of the information. It's important to have that as well. Although I do think sometimes they emphasize the science that supports their conclusions and dismiss the science that does not rather summarily. 

My sister "discovered" the Whole 30 this year and I was at first skeptical. No wine? That sounds terrible. But I've had a bit of my own transformation with food this year and the Whole 30 takes it a couple steps past what I was already doing. So this doesn't seem quite as scary as it would have earlier in the year. 

You can check out their website for all the nitty gritty (click here). But I appreciate their "tough love" concepts that basically acknowledge our complicated and emotional connection to food. The Whole30 seems strict so it's probably not as accessible to some people. I think that's okay. Sometimes we need some tough love to look at what we've been eating and how we got that way. Taking a break from all that for 30 days is a great way to really examine what we put in our bodies. 

Here's a good quote from the book that's pretty hard to argue with: “There is no food neutral; there is no food Switzerland—every single thing you put in your mouth is either making you more healthy or less healthy.” 
― Melissa Hartwig

Here's the basics. 30 days. No dairy. No gluten. No alcohol. No legumes. No grains (not even rice or quinoa). Just meat, vegetables and fruits. And after 30 days, slowly reintroduce small amounts of these things to see how you do. What makes our bodies feel the way they do. There are apparently thousands of anecdotal good results with this program. And while I usually dismiss anecdotal evidence, large amounts of anecdotal evidence start to represent trends and more solid evidence in my mind. This is a way to address chronic inflammation, immune and bowel diseases and a host of other conditions. 

So after listening to the book. I'm not "sold" but I'm definitely going to try it starting January 1st (I'm realistic enough to know I won't make it through Christmas without eating a cookie) and I'll use my body as its own laboratory to figure out how the food I eat affects me. If it works for me, then it works and then I'll be "sold." I'll post an update January 31st.

4/5 Stars.

The Girl in the Spider's Web - David Lagercrantz

I was concerned that Lagercrantz wouldn't be able to capture the odd mix of action and exposé that marked the earlier Millennium books. I was thankfully wrong. 

This book finds us with our two friends, Lisbeth Salander and Mikhail Blomkvist again on the hunt of a story. Mikhail's little magazine has suffered a bit since its last scoop and is now partly owned by a larger media corporation which has threatened to show Mikhail the door. He's lost his stuff. His writing is tired and so is Mikhail. 

Lisbeth, however, has been busy. She's been trying to track down her erstwhile sister Camille, who she suspects has picked up where their horrible father left off. In order to get the information she needs, she sneaks into the NSA to find get the dirt on her sister's organization. In the meantime, there is a Swedish computer genius and his autistic son Franz and August Balder, who get caught in a struggle for Franz's technology. Franz is murdered while Mikhail is on his way to interview him. 

And if that was then end of the conspiracy, this would be a poor Millennium novel indeed. It goes deeper than that and of course Salander is in the mix on it all as well. Mikhail and Lisbeth maintain a loose affiliation and friendship and it's nice to see them work together again. 

There were a couple sections of exposition that may seem slow, but that again is also characteristic of this series. This is a solid action/conspiracy drama, perfect for fans of the first three novels. I can't write any more without giving away the goose.

3.5/5 Stars.