Book Log 2022 #37: You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero

So another genre I don't normally read that I've had to dip into for reading challenges is self-help. I wound up picking this for the most recent challenge as the title was amusing. I found the book less so. Some of it is motivational, but then there's a lot about manifesting things and becoming a life coach. I suppose there are people for whom this is the right book to get their life jump started. I'm not one of them.

I don't know if my reaction is specific to this book or to the genre as a whole. I suppose I might find out the next time I'm forced to read a self-help book.

 Book Log 2022 #36: Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

When oil was discovered in Oklahoma, it turned out that quite a lot of it was sitting under land owned by the Osage nation. The Osage quickly became rich, and looked to be headed towards long-term security.

Except that the Osage started to die. Some mysteriously, others more obviously murdered. The killings often targeted families, with the inheritances eventually winding up with a sole survivor. This sole survivor was, more often than not, a white man who married into the family.

Officials took up investigations into the killings. Many of the investigators were themselves killed.  The nascent FBI took up the cases, struggling until J. Edgar Hoover assigned a former Texas Ranger, Tom White, to lead things. This book largely tells the story of White and how he was able to unravel the conspiracy against the Osage.

While the book does an excellent job of detailing the crimes and their eventual solution, what stood out to me was how it set the crimes into a larger context of American history and colonization. These were not isolated events, but part of a greater conflict over race and class. Recommended.

 Book Log 2022 #35: The English Assassin by Daniel Silva

Art restorer and Israeli spy Gabriel Allon is in Switzerland for his former job, only to find that the owner of the Raphael he's restoring has been killed - and left at the foot of the painting. An investigation uncovers that the owner also held a collection of looted Impressionist paintings, which are now gone. Allon is tasked by his service to track down the killer (who appears to be someone Allon trained) and recover the art so it can be returned to its rightful owners.

This book has all the hallmarks of the spy thriller - twisty plot, gunplay, clandestine meetings, etc. - while throwing some light on how Switzerland became a repository for treasure stolen by Nazi Germany. I enjoyed the book quite a bit and will likely stick with this series.

 Book Log 2022 #34: The Rumor by Elin Hilderbrand

One of the challenges of doing a reading challenge is when you get a category that falls into a topic or genre you don't really like. This kind of happened to me with this book, which I read to satisfy a requirement for a "beach read." And while the person running the challenges was very flexible about the category, I felt like I had to respect the spirit of the thing and go with a summery romance-type novel.

The set up here is that a writer is blocked, and with bills looming is desperate for inspiration. She finds it when her best friend decides to revamp her garden, and hires a "ruggedly handsome" landscape architect to get the work done. While the friend seems attracted to the architect, the writer works this into the sort of "woman hires gardener to trim her hedges, if you know what I mean" story you'd expect, and both have to work to counter a rumor mill that already has the friend and her lawn guy laying sod together. If you know what I mean.

Without any real background in the genre it's hard for me to say if this is a good representation. Objectively, it's not a book I would recommend. Ever. One thing it did do for me was confirm my prejudices against Nantucket, which were developed early on thanks to an unlikely football rivalry. So if you're looking to find something to justify thinking that people from Nantucket are jerks, this may fit the bill.

 Book Log 2022 #33: The 99% Invisible City by Kurt Kohlstedt and Roman Mars 

The 99% Invisible podcast focuses on the aspects of architecture and design that typically go unnoticed. This book combines topics from the pod with additional information and helpful illustrations to explain details in the built environment that we often see but usually don't understand (for example, what the symbols and colors spraypainted on pavement before digging mean).

While I found much of this book fascinating, the one drawback is that if you are a regular listener to the pod you may find that you're familiar with a lot of what's covered. This is probably a common hazard for books based on other media - I had a similar issue with For the Love of Europe by Rick Steves - but in this case there was enough new material to keep me going.

 Book Log 2022 #32: Dad is Fat by Jim Gaffigan

Gaffigan reflects on being a parent in this collection of essays and stories, mostly centered around the challenges of having younger kids (his musings on diaper changes and organizing family trips to the park will feel familiar if you've had kids) and the problems of being outnumbered (he and his wife have five kids). 

As someone who can safely look at parenting young kids in the rear view, I did recognize a lot of what Gaffigan writes about, and appreciated how he applied his particular brand of humor. Not all of the stories worked for me, but I expect that the success of the stories are more dependent on the experiences of the reader than usual. 

 Book Log 2022 #31: Atonement by Ian McEwan

The combination of an interest in writing and an active imagination is typically a good thing - how would we get books otherwise? - but in the personage of Briony Tallis, they prove damaging on a generational scale.  Her interpretation of things seen and read during a particular day in 1935 cause her act in a way that cause permanent injury to family and friends.  We see how she came to act the way she did, and how her actions played out in the future, over the course of the novel.

As much as I appreciated the writing and the nuanced way history played out over the course of the book, I had a hard time not thinking about what drove Briony to make the decisions she made. She was young (13 in 1935) and not particularly experienced, and the way her interior life seemed to influence her behavior made me wonder if she had an undiagnosed ASD (to the extent one could diagnose such a thing at the time). But it could just be that she's kind of a monster.

And just to put a cherry on top, the book also has a bit of a twist at the end that may change how you view everything that happened before it. 

 Book Log 2022 #30: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

While several authors used the Covid-19 outbreak as the inspiration for writing a pandemic novel, Mandel is among the few who used it to write a second pandemic novel. The difference between her first, 2014's Station Eleven, and the second, is personal experience.

A number of people have noted the similarities between Mandel and Olive Llewellyn, the main character who is also an author whose breakthrough novel involves a pandemic. Olive is on a lengthy book tour, and misses her family on the moon (there being two moon colonies in the 23rd century where Olive lives). Olive is on Earth at a time when an actual pandemic seems to be brewing, and isn't quite sure if it's enough of  threat to cut the tour short. Outside of actually living on the moon, it's pretty easy to see how Mandel's pandemic experience informed Olive.

But this is just one timeline in the book, which follows characters from the 20th to the 25th century. These timelines have a number of callbacks to other books (most notably The Glass Hotel), and are tied together by a real-life anomaly that Olive worked into her book. That anomaly later becomes a focus of time researchers, who provide its ultimate solution.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, but I've liked all of her books. It will help if you've read Station Eleven and The Glass House prior to reading this one, as there are some spoilers. There are significantly more sci-fi elements to this book than the others (you did notice I mentioned time travel and living on the moon?), so price that in if you're not typically into sci-fi (though I think people who aren't into sci-fi can still enjoy this).

 Book Log 2022 #29: London to Ladysmith via Pretoria by Winston Churchill

This book is the first of two Churchill wrote on his experiences in the Boer Wars. He went to South Africa as a reporter, and his letters and dispatches form the book's source material. While there's ample coverage of the military engagements (which Churchill would later participate in when he rejoined the military), I found the sections dealing with his capture by the Boers and subsequent escape to be the most interesting part of the book. 

Unfortunately I found most of the book not that interesting, probably a combination of a somewhat archaic writing style and a lack of knowledge about British military history and the Boer Wars in general. I wouldn't say it's a bad book, just one with a fairly narrow appeal.

 Book Log 2022 #28: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

An Asante woman named Maame has two daughters, half-sisters who live in separate villages in what is today Ghana. One winds up marrying the British governor of a local slave forts and remains in Africa, while the other sister is captured in a raid and enslaved, sent through the fort her sister lives in to North America, where she winds up at a plantation in the US south. The book follows their stories and those of some of their descendants, up to the present day.

Gyasi, who was born in Ghana and raised in the US, wrote this book after her first trip back to Ghana, where she was struck by the difference in the upper levels of the slave fort and the dungeons, and how the people living upstairs were unaware of what the people in the dungeons were going through. 

I don't know that I would have picked this book up on its own, and I'm very thankful to the reading challenge that led me to it.  It's wonderfully written, both story lines are engaging and the characters fully realized. It's also impressive that this is Gyasi's debut novel. Recommended.