Chapter Eighty-Six: Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (Essays, Etc.)

Who else but David Sedaris would publish such a strangely titled book of "essays, etc."? (The collection is comprised of "essays, etc." ccording to the cover--the etc. turns out to be monologues that he cheekily suggests high school students preform in forensics, a type of debate...)  It's not quite clear how diabetes comes into it--other than the fact that some of Sedaris's essays discuss various health issues (including periodontal surgery and colonoscopies), though diabetes is not among them as far as I recall.  But the owls... let's just say there's a story involving taxidermy.  Anyway, these essays and monologues are hilarious, replete with Sedaris's bizarre sense of humor and unusual way of looking at everyday events.  If you want a book that will have you laughing out loud (and if you're not squeamish), then I highly recommend this collection.

Chapter Eighty-Five: Crow Like Thunder

Crow Like Thunder is the sequel to Sparrow in the Keep (reviewed in Chapter Fifty-Two of this blog) by Jean Hudson.  The writing feels a bit more polished than in Sparrow, and the plot trots right along with plenty of fun-to-read drama.  Additionally, this novel is split into two parts, the second of which takes place fifteen years after the first, so there is plenty of character development as the babies in part one gain more importance as teenagers in part two.  It's interesting to see how they have begun to mature and I'm looking forward to reading the third and final book in this trilogy once it's published, hopefully later this year.  If you want a fun, light read, check these books out.

Chapter Eighty-Four: The Silkworm

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling) is the sequel to The Cuckoo's Calling and was just recently released.  Let's just say that I wanted to read it so badly that I actually shelled out to buy it in hardcover (rather than being number 10 billion on a library's waitlist) even though I am currently between jobs.  This book was definitely worth the money spent on it!  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The Silkworm is another captivating detective novel with plenty of human interest and further development of the main characters (Detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant, Robin Ellacott) from The Cuckoo's Calling.  It is a very fun summer read and I recommend it to anyone who wants to read an interesting story well-told.

Chapter Eighty-Three: Reality Is Broken

So the full title of this non-fiction book by game developer Jane McGonigal is Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.  This is another book that my grandmother purchased for me, and I would not have picked it up on my own, probably.  But it turned out to be absolutely fascinating!  I highly recommend it, whether you play lots of games or whether, like me, you rarely play games.  McGonigal starts by defining what a game actually is; she focuses on computer and video games but makes it clear that more traditional games such as board games, card games, or sports.  Then she explores why people like games so much, claiming that it isn't just about escapism: often games challenge us and reward us in ways that real life is not structured to.  Then she looks at how we can modify aspects of real life to be more gameful to increase engagement with the everyday world and to solve most any problem you can think up.  I'm not going to give any more detailed a summary than that, but I highly recommend you read this book if you want an interesting, thought-provoking, and highly-readable non-fiction book.

Chapter Eighty-Two: Kill Shakespeare

So Kill Shakespeare is actually a serial graphic novel that has been collected into so far three volumes, which my grandmother was kind enough to purchase for me.  She was interested in reading some graphic novels and then she found these and was interested, and that's how I got my hands on them.  I should say that I'm biased because I am not a big fan of graphic novels as a genre: I find the images distracting from the story, in general.  I simply prefer to read in print.  There have been graphic novels that I really enjoyed... Persepolis, actually, is the only one that comes to mind, though Maus was pretty good, too.  But I digress.  Kill Shakespeare is set in this really weird sort of world that encompasses many settings from Shakespeare's plays and where all of his characters are inhabitants.  Some of them view Shakespeare as a god, others as an evil figure who must be killed.  Hamlet finds himself drawn into this battle, ending up on the pro-Shakespeare side along with Juliet and Othello, as well as some others; his main enemies are King Richard and Lady MacBeth.  There are some funny Shakespeare jokes that you'll get if you've seen or read the plays they refer to, but the plot is quite violent at times--more violent than I would prefer.  There is also a lot of misuse of thee, thou, thy, thine, and ye, and this drives me crazy.  I don't know if it's supposed to be funny, if it's poking fun at old English, or if it's just sloppy editing.  The plot is reasonably interesting, but I don't see myself reading any future volumes.

Chapter Eighty-One: The Time in Between

What a great novel!!!  The Time in Between by María Dueñas, translated from the Spanish by Daniel Hahn, is an epic (609 pages) tale of one woman's journey from being the only child of a single mother in Madrid to becoming a dressmaker for the rich and famous, first for society women in the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco in the late 1930s and then, with the onset of World War Two, for the wives of Nazis and supporters of Franco in Madrid.  Protagonist Sira Quiroga also becomes involved with espionage during the war, finding totally new aspects of herself both as a dressmaker and as a spy.  This novel is rife with love, loss, intrigue, and drama, and also with smaller, daily concerns that make it really believable.  I became truly engrossed with Sira's world, the various characters populating it, and the lushly described settings.  If you want an excellently told story that will keep you interested, I definitely recommend The Time in Between, which I will certainly be re-reading at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Chapter Eighty: The View from Saturday

The View from Saturday is a Newbery Medal winning (in 1997) novel by E.L. Konigsburg.  I know I've read it once before, probably twelve or thirteen years ago, but I didn't remember much about it except that I thought it was pretty darn cool that other time I read it and that I really wanted to be like the kids in it.  Then I happened across a copy, so I figured I'd give it another go.  While The View from Saturday is not quite as cool as I remember it being, I still enjoyed reading it.  Structurally, it's an odd story, alternating between the present (always narrated by Mrs. Olinski, a paraplegic 6th grade teacher and the book's adult-protagonist) and a moment in the (recent) past of each of the four child-protagonists (Noah, Nadia, Ethan, and Julian), narrated by each child in turn.  It's really not clear at the beginning how these snippets of various pasts are pertinent to the present (the state championships of the academic bowl in New York state), but it all does come together by the novel's end.  We don't get to find out as much about Mrs. Olinski as I might like to know, though.  Still, the messages of the book (help each other, be kind to each other, be who you are) are always ones that need to be heard.  It's a cute, quick read.

Chapter Seventy-Nine: The Cuckoo's Calling

So The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling [rhymes with bowling]) is a mystery/detective novel.  I don't read a lot in this genre, and really I only decided to read this at all because Rowling wrote it, but I was hooked after only a few pages and it wouldn't have mattered who wrote it because this book is good.  It follows detective Cormoran Strike (what a great name!) as he attempts to find out once and for all whether a supermodel's fall from her apartment was suicide or murder.  Meanwhile, he is struggling to put his own life in order, which allows him to be a multi-dimensional character: he's not just a detective on the case--he's got rather pressing personal issues he's working on as well.  His secretary (who secretly wants to be a detective) is a fun character, too.  She's a little bit less fleshed out (although we do get some glimpses of her life outside the office, which is great), and I look forward to learning a bit more about her in the sequel The Silkworm, which is not yet published and which I am eagerly awaiting!  Whether or not you typically read mystery novels, if you like a good, engaging story that will keep you in doubt until the end (I had several suspicions, some of which turned out to be correct), then I heartily recommend this book.

Chapter Seventy-Eight: The Inflationary Universe

Ever since I took an intro to cosmology course (that's the study of the cosmos, not to be confused with cosmetology, which is a course an aspiring beautician would enroll in), I've developed a real fascination with this subject, and moreover I gained enough background knowledge to actually understand something about it!  So I was excited to delve into Alan Guth's The Inflationary Universe.  Guth, a leading cosmologist at MIT, came up with the original version of the inflationary theory, which describes, basically, what happened in the very early universe (times when the universe was less than a second old) before the big bang described in the standard big bang theory, which, as Guth likes to point out, doesn't say what banged, or why, or how.  I won't get into any more science here--that's for you to read about, if you're interested.  As for the book itself, it took me ten days to read, and it was definitely worth the time it took.  The prose itself is friendly to lay readers, and there are many really useful diagrams to help you along, too.  Mathematical or overly technical language is kept to a minimum.  Nonetheless, the content itself is pretty heavy stuff, so even with the clear prose, I just had to think a lot about what was being said.  That was great!  Reading this book really worked my brain in ways that I haven't worked it enough since graduating from college.  So if you're interested in cosmology (or particle physics) and want a bit of a mental workout, I'd definitely recommend The Inflationary Universe.

Chapter Seventy-Seven: The Book of Madness and Cures

This novel by Regina O'Melveny is a fun little historical fiction jaunt across Renaissance Europe.  The story follows the fictitious Dr. Gabriella Mondini, the only female physician in Venice at the turn of the 17th century.  She has learned the medical arts from her father, a renowned doctor in Venice, who years earlier departed on a trip through Europe to study other schools of medicine and perhaps to gain inspiration for the encyclopedia of maladies he was compiling.  As his letters have slowly stopped appearing, Gabriella has decided to set off across Europe in search of her father, and this story follows her journey.  I enjoyed reading it, though I don't know if I'd read it again.

Chapter Seventy-Six: The Island of Lost Maps

So looking at the behind-the-scenes of my blog now, I see that I haven't updated since May!  It's not that I wasn't reading in June, but I was busy with lots of other things.  Now that I have a bit more time, look for several posts!

So, The Island of Lost Maps by journalist Miles Harvey.  This wasn't the most thrilling non-fiction book I've ever read, but it was reasonably interesting, enough so to keep me reading it at least.  It divagates a good bit from the topic of  map thief Gilbert Bland, which in the beginning seems like it will be the main focus of the book.  However, these divagations--usually focusing on other aspects of the rare maps world in America--are not unrelated to the story of Bland's cartographic crime spree and are interesting in their own right.  I'd recommend it if you're really into maps, or ever have been.