MeFi FanFare posts about Books

Book: Broken (In the Best Possible Way)

fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 11:13:17 -0800

Jenny Lawson's back with her third book, Broken (In the Best Possible Way). In it she chronicles her treatment with transcranial magnetic stimulation for depression, battles with hospital bills, and the many questions that come up in everyday life. Her husband Victor and her daughter (plus the many delightful animals both real and taxidermy) also make appearances throughout.

Book: A Desolation Called Peace

signal — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 17:30:20 -0800

The sequel to A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Book: Tales from Earthsea

Cash4Lead — Fri, 02 Apr 2021 06:36:32 -0800

The tales of this book explore and extend the world established by the Earthsea novels—yet each stands on its own. It contains the novella "The Finder", and the short stories "The Bones of the Earth", "Darkrose and Diamond", "On the High Marsh", and "Dragonfly". (Book 5 of the Earthsea cycle)

Book: The Devil You Know

The corpse in the library — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 17:46:46 -0800

Writes Blow: "The proposition is simple. As many Black descendants of the Great Migration as possible should return to the South from which their ancestors fled." By concentrating their political power in key Southern cities, Blow posits, Black Americans will be able to effect actual social change. "The mission begins with the states, which are the true centers of power in this country, and as such control the lion's share of the issues that bedevil Black lives: criminal justice, judicial processes, education, health care, economic opportunity and assistance." - - Hope Wabuke

Book: Hench

DowBits — Sat, 27 Mar 2021 13:29:34 -0800

Anna does boring things for terrible people because even criminals need office help and she needs a job. Working for a monster lurking beneath the surface of the world isn't glamorous. But is it really worse than working for an oil conglomerate or an insurance company? In this economy?

Book: Leave the World Behind

MonkeyToes — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 16:15:25 -0800

Anyone else in the mood for a tightly-written disaster novel that's more interested in people's responses to an emergency than in the emergency itself? Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind is a dread-packed piece about two families forced to hunker down together during an uncertain, unsettling period of world-altering events. It was a finalist in the National Book Awards 2020 for Fiction, and is Alam's third novel.

Book: Mexican Gothic

MonkeyToes — Sat, 20 Mar 2021 17:09:33 -0800

Kirkus on Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia: "Inquisitive 22-year-old socialite and anthropology enthusiast Noemí Taboada adores beautiful clothes and nights on the town in Mexico City with a bevy of handsome suitors, but her carefree existence is cut short when her father shows her a disturbing letter from her cousin Catalina, who recently married fair-haired and blue-eyed Virgil Doyle, who comes from a prominent English mining family that built their now-dwindling fortune on the backs of Indigenous laborers."

Book: Fortune Favors the Dead

DowBits — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 23:26:30 -0800

I really enjoyed this 40's hardboiled mystery.

Book: Our Time Is Now

OHenryPacey — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 14:35:38 -0800

Stacey Abrams rose to national prominence, first with her ill-fated run for Governor of Georgia, then with the formation of Fair Fight. This book was published prior to the 2020 run-off election in Georgia.

Book: The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

Literaryhero — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 05:14:26 -0800

The fourth and final book in Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series. With no water, no air, and no native life, the planet Gora is unremarkable. The only thing it has going for it is a chance proximity to more popular worlds, making it a decent stopover for ships traveling between the wormholes that keep the Galactic Commons connected. If deep space is a highway, Gora is just your average truck stop.

Book: Tehanu

Cash4Lead — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 06:57:46 -0800

Years before, they had escaped together from the sinister Tombs of Atuan—Tenar, an isolated young priestess, and Ged, a powerful wizard. Now she is a farmer's widow, having chosen for herself the simple pleasures of an ordinary life. And he is a broken old man, mourning the powers lost to him not by choice. A lifetime ago, they helped each other at a time of darkness and danger. Now they must join forces again, to help another—the physically and emotionally scarred child whose own destiny remains to be revealed. (Book 4 of the Earthsea cycle)

Book: Doomsday Book

soelo — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 18:38:44 -0800

For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin--barely of age herself--finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.

Book: Blacktop Wasteland

COD — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 16:14:03 -0800

I picked this up at the library on Friday and finished it on Sunday. That may tell you everything you need to know.

Book: Big Girl, Small Town

Sheydem-tants — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 13:55:20 -0800

A young working-class woman named Majella navigates a constrained life in Northern Ireland sometime after "peace broke out" in Ireland in the nineties. Some things distinguish her from her fellows: she's not social at all, she's unusually sensitive to sensory input, and her grandmother was just murdered.

Book: Earthlings

BibiRose — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 06:16:19 -0800

Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata's first novel to be translated from Japanese to English, received glowing reviews for its portrayal of a woman who rejects the values of her family-oriented social class and finds her niche working in a convenience store. Now comes Earthlings. As one reviewer puts it:" The two books might be seen as siblings, though Earthlings would definitely be the evil twin."

Book: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

MonkeyToes — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 17:33:38 -0800

"Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure....However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful." Katherine May's memoir, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, reflects on what she has learned about this life season: not avoidance, but acceptance of its inevitability, and the ways she has found to soften its impact.

Book: Slough House, by Mick Herron

The corpse in the library — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 12:11:26 -0800

At Slough House, Brexit has taken a toll. The slow horses have been pushed further into the cold, Slough House has been erased from official records, and its members are dying in unusual circumstances, at an unusual clip. No wonder Jackson Lamb's crew is feeling paranoid. But are they actually targets? With a new populist movement taking hold of London's streets and the old order ensuring that everything's for sale to the highest bidder, the world's a dangerous place for those deemed surplus. Jackson Lamb and the slow horses are in a fight for their lives as they navigate dizzying layers of lies, power, and death.

Book: The Farthest Shore

Cash4Lead — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 07:20:24 -0800

Darkness threatens to overtake Earthsea. As the world and its wizards are losing their magic, Ged—powerful Archmage, wizard, and dragonlord—embarks on a sailing journey with the highborn young prince, Arren. They travel far beyond the realm of death to discover the cause of these evil disturbances and to restore magic to a land desperately thirsty for it. (Book 3 of the Earthsea cycle)

Book: The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning

progosk — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 08:09:50 -0800

A grieving widow discovers a most unexpected form of healing—hunting for mushrooms.

Book: On the Clock

COD — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:27:17 -0800

When journalist Emily Guendelsberger gets let go from a local alt weekly she embarks on a 1-year journey to explore low wage work, and write a book about it. She logs a couple of months at an Amazon warehouse near Louisville, KY, a call center in Hickory NC, and a McDonald's in SF. All the jobs suck, and the suckiness can be summed up by this line. A good rule of thumb: the more interest management takes in workers' use of the bathroom, the more that job is going to suck.

Book: Suggested Reading

COD — Sat, 23 Jan 2021 15:58:01 -0800

High School senior and bookworm Clara got to school early on the first day of her senior year because she volunteers in the library. She discovers that over the summer the tony private school she attends has banned 50 books, including her very favorite book by her favorite author, which she has just stayed up all night reading before getting zero sleep and coming to school. So Clara does the only logical thing, she starts an underground library loaning those books from her locker.

Book: Becoming Duchess Goldblatt

MonkeyToes — Sat, 23 Jan 2021 12:08:34 -0800

"Part memoir and part joyful romp through the fields of imagination, the story behind a beloved pseudonymous Twitter account reveals how a writer deep in grief rebuilt a life worth living. Becoming Duchess Goldblatt is two stories: that of the reclusive real-life writer who created a fictional character out of loneliness and thin air, and that of the magical Duchess Goldblatt herself, a bright light in the darkness of social media." Real But Also Not Real: An Excerpt From Becoming Duchess Goldblatt

Book: Children of Ruin

fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 20:09:39 -0800

Long ago, Earth's terraforming program sent ships out to build new homes for humanity among the stars and made an unexpected discovery: a planet with life. But the scientists were unaware that the alien ecosystem was more developed than the primitive life forms originally discovered. When the Old Empire fell, the scientists were on their own.

Book: The Last Stone

Fukiyama — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 18:54:05 -0800

On the morning of March 25, 1975, sisters Sheila and Kate Lyon left their home in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. to visit the local mall. Their mother Mary gave them firm instructions to be home by 4:00pm. When they weren't home by 7:00, the sisters' parents called the police. A massive search was launched. But after weeks and months of effort, there was no trace of them: the girls had disappeared into thin air.

Book: Running with Sherman

COD — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 14:42:03 -0800

The subtitle of the book is How a Rescue Donkey Inspired a Rag-Tag Gang of Runners to Enter the Craziest race in America.