Wander every day

I won a copy of this book from Alice aka Reading Rambo awhile ago and read it over the summer. I love the idea of disconnecting but since I am not great at that, a book telling me how to do it seemed like the type of thing I could use. And the book's purpose, through a variety of methods, is to teach you to let go, focus on now and not worry so much about what has happened or what will happen.

But, here's the thing. I think this book would have been better if it had been more straightforward. Instead of being a self-help type book about the benefits of slowing down and just wandering, being in the moment and all that stuff that I should probably get better about, instead it's presented as a book the author found, about a society (that never meets) of wanderers, inspired by Walt Whitman. So instead of it being "Here are things to do to wander and the great stuff you can get out of it" it's more "I am uncovering this secret society that focuses on wandering and everything in here is written by me but I'm just compiling stuff and I'm going to leave footnotes with my thoughts but the other stuff isn't my thoughts" and I got tired of this conceit real quick. It felt, as a few reviews said, gimmicky and I had trouble giving into it and just going with the flow.

Which is too bad cos there are some good things in here. She has recommendations on books to check out, there's some advice on how to wander, so there's good stuff there. There are also poems and a fairly long section with crafts that I skimmed right through, but could see that being for someone else.

Overall I like the idea and if it wasn't for the whole "secret society" bit I think I would have been more on board. But since I couldn't take that seriously I had trouble with the whole thing. But I will try to be more mindful and make attempts and just wandering without any particular plan in mind. Just go with the flow, enjoy where I am. Also I should say that the cover of the book itself is very pretty, so I do appreciate that. And it came with stickers.

Gif rating:

Title quote from page 3

Smith, Keri. The Wander Society. Penguin Books, 2016.

Everyone needs to be part of something

Oh man. Butler. Her stuff is intense. Excellent but oof.

Parable of the Talents is the sequel to Parable of the Sower. It's the not too distant future and everything is terrible. There's still an energy shortage. And food shortage. Basically all of the shortages and much of the government infrastructure has been privatized so some people live in walled-in communities, separated from the rest of the country. Those who don't have the money to live in one of these safe havens (most people) are trying to get by in a world marred by violence

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.

Olamina has gathered her people and they've set up the settlement of Acorn. Things are going well in the community and Olamina and Bankole are even expecting a daughter. The story is actually told both through her now grown daughter's POV as well as chapters from Olamina's diary. But the country elects a new leader who is promising to "make America great again" and this is an actual quote from the book because Butler is a time traveler.

Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, "simpler" time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. he wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him the same way...and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. 

Naturally, this presidential candidate, Jarret, is garbage and terrible and his followers are frightening. Jarret uses the nation's fear over what has become to get elected and his followers hunt down settlements that don't follow Jarret's version of religion and set up re-education camps, to teach them the correct way to behave.

My ancestors in this hemisphere were, by law, chattel slaves. In the U.S., they were chattel slaves for two and a half centuries - at least 10 generations. I used to think I knew what that meant. Now I realize that I can't begin to imagine the many terrible things that it must have done to them. How did they survive and keep their humanity? Certainly, they were never intended to keep it.

Because this is Butler and she is amazing, there is a lot here discussing race and religion and freewill and family and feminism. She is not afraid to tackle difficult subjects, as is the case with all of her books. This is apocalyptic but doesn't include the supernatural as many of her others books do which gives it that much more a feeling of "this could happen now". Especially with quotes like "make America great again" and are you kidding me?

A warning, there is a lot of rape in the book. It's not gratuitous and it's not explicit but it is something that happens to multiple characters, multiple times. There are never scenes detailing it, but it is used as a war tactic in this horrible world.

I did not plan for my review for this book to go up now but the timing just worked out. That said, I'm glad I read this over the summer because as we get closer and closer to this election coming to an end, I don't know if I could have handled this book at that point. It would make me far too stressed out. It's making me stressed out trying to review it now and remembering everything that happened in the book. Read it, maybe with a happier book on the side.

Gif rating:

Title quote from page 379, location 5603

Butler, Octavia E. The Parable of the Talents. Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy, 2012. Originally published 1998.

How do you discover the identify of a spy...who has been dead for nearly a century?

Who could have predicted I'd be reading books about colonial/revolutionary American history by choice? This is what you've done, Hamilton. Though I guess really, since I finally gave Hamilton a chance because of Vowell's Lafayette, it's really her fault. ANYWAY, this is how I found my way to George Washington's Secret Six about a spy ring operating during the war, care of a friend.*

Upfront, I was looking up information about the authors to fill out my super cool spreadsheet and learned that Brian Kilmeade** is a "Fox News personality" and keeping the eye rolls to a minimum was HARD. This definitely colored things and while I think I'd still ultimately have the same feelings about the book, I wish I had learned that after the fact. Damn my need to record these details.

The book is about the Culper spy ring which, as the subtitle tells us "saved the American Revolution." Kilmeade and Yaeger look at the people who made up this ring and the dangerous work they did and offer up portraits of the men whose names we now know (and the one woman who is still only known as Agent 355) to show how they helped secure victory for George Washington and the US.

The Good

• Spy stuff is fun, and there are some suspenseful(ish) moments when you think a spy is about to get caught.
• It's an easy read that doesn't get dry which is always a worry for history and nonfiction books in general.
• There are parts that are directly quoted from primary sources.

The Bad

• It feels like a dumbed down history book and Chernow's Hamilton was just as readable but more enjoyable.
• They repeated a few times how important the spy ring was, but they never actually showed the important information that directly led to victories. Maybe it's because we don't have that information, but in that case, you're going to need to restructure this book.
• There are weird moments where we suddenly get conversations between the characters that I guess was supposed to "bring to life" the people in history, but instead awkwardly felt like the authors actually wanted to write historical fiction and then decided they wanted credit for all the research and were going to write a "serious book". On the one hand, this really only happens through the first half of the book, but even that just means it feels even more awkward.***
• One of the praise quotes is from Donald Trump. So.

Ultimately, I don't know that I learned much about the spy ring other than it existed and it makes me want to read a book someone else wrote about it. OR, I'd even take a historical fiction novel about the ring. Or specifically Agent 355. I could totally get behind something like that. It's not terrible (not all of it, though those weird fake convos between spies were...not good) but certainly not great.

Gif rating:

*In return, among a couple other things, I also lent her Lafayette because this nerdiness must be spread around. I am also writing this review now rather than tackling some of the other books I've had on my list so I can return the book.
**I should stress here that my friend did not know about this when she read it or when she lent it to me SO it's likely this makes less of a deal than I think but I couldn't get it out of my head while reading it.
***There is an author note that says the dialogue is fictional (OBVIOUSLY) but then says it's based on actual conversations which...you do not know that. Hence the fiction part. Maybe it happened. Maybe it happened exactly as written. But like, prob not and feels super awkward when they happen. I could maybe have gotten behind a version that alternated between narrative story and history chapters. That is not what we get here.

Title quote from page xvii

Kilmeade, Brian and Don Yaeger. George Washington's Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved The American Revolution. Sentinel, 2013.

October Reading Wrap Up

October has ended and yet the day I'm writing this, it is 70 degrees outside and we're all going to die #climatechange. But let's focus on the happier things.

Halloween is great though I read pretty much nothing for the holiday. Which is kind of fine since I'm so far back with posting that I wouldn't get around to reviewing them until like January. But I did get a good amount of reading done, including the #MasterAndMargareadalong and I think we should all get an award for finishing that one. Bonus awards if someone can explain it.

Let's jump into the stats.

Total books read
5
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay (5 stars)
The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (wink) (4 stars)
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (3 stars)
George Washington's Secret Six by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger (3 stars)
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (5 stars)

Total pages read
1,766

Fiction
80%

Female authors
60%

White authors
60%

US authors
60%

Book format
ebook: 40%
paperback: 60%

Where'd I get the book
borrow: 40%
indie bookstore: 20%
Kindle: 20%
Netgalley: 20%

Rereads
0%

Readalong/Bookclub
20%

Blogger reco
40%

Translation
20%

Books by decade
1960s: 20%
2010s: 80%

Books by genre
History: 20%
Lit fic: 40%
Mystery: 20%
Satire: 20%

Resolution books
80%

Pretty much killing it here this month.
Both Difficult Women and Everything I Never Told You are written by POC authors.
The Master and Margarita is by a non-US author (Russia) and a translation.
Cuckoo's Calling is by a non-US author.

That was pretty successful. Let's see if I can keep it up next month!

MasterAndMargareadalong Post V: The devil, believe me, will arrange everything!

This is it, the final post for the final chapters of this MasterAndMargareadalong, hosted by fearless leader Alice.

I feel so naive. Because, despite all evidence to the contrary, I legitimately thought something was going to happen in these last chapters that were going to pull everything together and shed light on what we just read. My eyes would be opened and I would understand everything.

Let's see if we can make sense of this ending.

Margarita finishes reading the Master's Pilate fanfic, and instead of realizing she's made a terrible mistake, what with the whole deal-with-the-devil-for-this bit, she seems pretty happy with the story. Just...ugh. I hope you guys are happy together.

Some of the people who were disappeared are returned, though no one can explain how Woland & co. were able to do their performance and paperwork around this is a Very Big Deal. Police are trying to figure out where people have been and what's the deal with apartment 50 and oh yeah, Margarita and Natasha seem to have gone missing. Except, OF COURSE they are most concerned with the apartment, so police are dispatched there where they get into a shootout with Behemoth, who sets the apartment on fire and then jumps out the window. Now NO ONE CAN HAVE IT!

Then we get maybe one of the best chapters cos it's just Behemoth and Koroviev screwing with people and I realize I wish the book was just these guys. Maybe these 2 plus Margarita and Natasha being witches together. They show up at the restaurant/house/thing from the early chapters where all the literary people hang out, where they get fancy food before police show up to continue their shootout and another place gets set on fire.

I feel like I may have misunderstood this next part. Like, I hope I am missing something. But what I got was, Matthew Levi shows up to tell Woland that Jesus read the Master's Pilate novel AND LOVES IT!!!

It isn't quite enough to immediately get the Master and Margarita into heaven but they get "peace" and for some reason the Devil is in charge of this?

Azazello poisons M&M but then revives them, except they're still dead but now get to hang out with Woland & co. and ride around on flying horses. They fly off to somewhere and meet Pilate and his dog Banga and the Master gets to release him from his torment and what? What?

Fine. Whatever. I don't know happened with this book. Was this a happy ending? It seemed happy, but honestly I don't even know. Did Woland show up in Moscow to get the Master, and screwing with people was just something to do since he was in the area? Or was the purpose just to randomly mess with Russians and the Master thing just sort of worked out that way? Can someone else make heads or tails of this?

The point is we're finished with the book and now I can say I've read it. So success.

Title quote from page 365

Bulgakov, Mikhail. trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Master and Margarita. Penguin Classics, 1997. Originally published 1966.

I'm no plucky heroine, claiming ignorance of her quiet beauty and quirky charm

I got The Luckiest Girl as part of the Just The Right Book and I'm beginning to think that while I say I like thrillers, perhaps I am wrong and that's not actually the genre I like. Because yeah, most of the time I end up eye-rolling HARD at those books. Maybe it's crime? Or noir? I dunno. Maybe I just kept getting thrown thrillers that were Not My Thing. Also maybe this isn't really a thriller because genre labels seem so vague ("Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving viewers heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety" so sayeth Wikipedia) so that could also be part of the problem. ANYWAY. This book.

First up: I was going to put this behind a spoiler tag but then I found this link on Book Riot which talks about a part of the book, so if you want zero spoilers maybe skip this paragraph. Anyway, that story (which I can't find now, but I swear is real) was about how the author's real gang rape informed the story so yeah, that happens here, so be warned (those of you who don't mind spoilers. Others I guess, sorry). And how the author's real life behavior (getting a job at Cosmo, focused on getting the right guy and the right zip code) mimicked that of her main character and now I feel bad for the fact that Ani, the main character in this book, is just terrible. I feel like if I say that then I'm saying the author is terrible and I'm sure she's not. Although I guess who knows, maybe she is, I don't know her. But I assume not, because she's a real person and likely has more facets than Ani FaNelli.

So the basic story is Ani has a seemingly perfect life, working for the important The Woman's Magazine* a fashion magazine in the Cosmo realm, she's super skinny, something she works very hard at, she has the TriBeca apartment, a rich fiancee. All that stuff that seems to truly matter in chick-lit style books. Also, she's just the worst. She's manipulative and a liar and superficial. There are cracks in her perfect veneer (not those previous descriptors, that's just her personality) but they don't really amount to much. Then we, the reader, learn about the dark secrets she has in her past.

Except, I had a problem with the "dark secrets threaten her current perfect life" deal. She doesn't actually confront anything new. As a matter of fact, most people in the story seem to already know her dark secret. We the reader don't and we're mostly kept in the dark about what really happened, but then you find out that other people around her have know the whole story for awhile. There wasn't tension that the story would come out and people would learn it and her world would fall apart. Cos you know, they already knew. Only we the reader didn't know, so the tension it tried to create didn't really work.

Instead all of the drama comes from us learning about these secrets, mostly through flashback chapters and a bit about a documentary she's doing to "tell her side of the story". But Ani never really changes throughout the story. There's no real arc for her. Not only because there's no opportunity for her to change. Also because the person she is before the Terrible Things sort of matches the person she is after. (NOT saying that she deserved any of the Terrible Things.) There is a bit about how this is a persona she's learned as a defense mechanism, except she came off as superficial and manipulative and focused on the "right" clothes before anything happened, so if it's a defense mechanism then the flashbacks didn't go far back enough to show the trigger for it. UNLESS this is trying to say everyone goes through this phase and the events froze her there? I dunno.

There's a lot of showing how she's the "cool girl" by tearing down other girls and women and I guess at times it reminded me a bit of Amy from Gone Girl except not at all. Because Amy felt like a real (super terrifying, omg she might be the villain I'm most afraid of) person who said things about the cool girl that felt real and true. Ani feels like the bitchy villain in a stereotypical chick-lit book. And ultimately she doesn't grow. She starts out as manipulative and superficial, grows up and continues to be manipulative and superficial, only now she has money to back up a lot of her behavior. Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe there's a bit of growth, but if so, it happens in roughly the last pages and still feels pretty self-centered.

Clearly this was Not My Thing, but plenty of people seem to like it (Book of the Week from People magazine, Reese Witherspoon might make it into a movie) so this could be a me thing.

Gif rating:

*I thought that was just a generic name people were referring to the magazine has until I realized that is actually the name of the magazine and not a placeholder until Knoll could come up with something else to put there.

Title quote page 8

Knoll, Jessica. Luckiest Girl Alive. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. 2015.