Creative,  Reading

September and October 2016 Book Report

I was in the middle of a lot of books in September so I didn’t want to do a book report at that time. However, I’ve now finished a bunch of books and am in the middle of more! Before I launch into that I’m going to launch into a rave about how much I now enjoy listening to audiobooks because I figured out how to speed them up! I have always been super bored by audiobooks, finding only a few here and there that caught my attention well enough to listen through. Recently, though, I started seeing people talk about speeding audiobooks up because many readers are speed readers (like myself) and have a difficult time pacing through an audiobook, which is typically read at a slower pace.

I had been listening to audiobooks through Hoopla Digital because there is no waiting period for books unlike on Overdrive. But, I had been listening through the computer and not my phone because my phone is a hand-me-down iPhone 4 and many apps, including Hoopla’s, aren’t compatible with that iOS version. Unfortunately their listening platform on a computer isn’t the same as for a device, there is not option to speed up the listening on the computer. Then I remembered Chris had bought another Kindle Fire tablet back in the summer during Amazon’s Prime Day sale and so I fired that thing up and saw I could download the Hoopla app from amazon on that. Voila! I could speed read! Life, changed!

Read
Voyager by Diana Gabaldon: As soon as season 2 of Outlander ended I was on such a high I had to launch straight into a re-read of the third book. This was my third or fourth reread of this book and I had forgotten quite a bit of what went on in the story. I read it fairly quickly for an Outlander book and then launched right into the fourth book which I got about a third of of the way through and put on hold. I’m so excited for the upcoming season of the show but can’t fathom, again, how they are going to cut the book down to 12 episodes.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins: This book has been talked about by so many people for well over a year but I never got around to putting it on my to-read list until this spring when I got in the very long line on Overdrive. My time came up at the beginning of October and I dropped everything else I was reading to devour this book in three days. Y’all, I haven’t read a book that fast in a long time. It was captivating, intriguing, and I couldn’t pinpoint ‘Who done it’ until quite a ways through, but damnnnnn. Good book. I definitely recommend this one! That said, in my head I never saw an Emily Blunt character in my head for the main character, it was always a mishmash of Amy Schumer and Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones. Eh, I can’t wait to see the movie when it comes to RedBox!

The Backyard Parables by Margaret Roach: This is one I listened to as a sped-up audiobook which turned out perfect because the author read the book. While I love Margaret on her podcast and through her website, I don’t have a lot of good things to say about her reading a book—there wasn’t a lot of change in tone or enthusiasm. I can imagine this is difficult for people who aren’t natural speakers and I imagine I would suck at it, too. But speeding it up made it a lot more tolerable and ideally this would have probably been a better book to read in paper. However, I did enjoy the book as it chronicled her garden over the year, talking about the ups and downs of the garden.

The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron: The term Highly Sensitive Person has become more mainstream in the last five to six years, much like the use of introvert—we introverts and HSPs are fighting back!—and so this book has been on my radar for quite some time. I checked out the digital version (after semi-long wait). Curious if you are an HSP? You can take a self quiz here. For the book, I mostly skimmed it. It had a lot of information I already knew and frankly, wasn’t all that helpful. I think if you are just coming into some self awareness on knowing what an HSP is this might help you out quite a bit. There is also a book for highly sensitive children which might be good for parents whose children may be HSPs. As I read some reviews on Goodreads about the book I found myself agreeing: the term highly sensitive is a bit negative—to me it conjures up the thoughts of people clutching Kleenex and crying—but it is more than that, and of course HSPs are likely to be easy criers. I think what I wanted to see was a how to deal with the non-HSPs, both in how to approach people to back off when telling us we’re too sensitive but also have to effectively build up that wall for the everyday and work on the sensitivity a bit to get through life, kind of like introverts having to pretend to be extroverts from time to time when need-be.

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay: I have followed Roxane on Twitter for awhile now and kept seeing this book popping up here and there over the internet. This is another audiobook listen, one that was much better sped up as well. It earned 4/5 stars for me only because of the Sweet Valley Twins rants at the beginning of the book. I was not a Sweet Valley reader as a kid so I was mostly bored by this discussion. However, the rest of the book was excellent. The premise of the book is that she is a ‘bad feminist’ in that in many aspects she is a girly-girl—she likes pink, she wants kids, she isn’t interested in doing the fixer-upper or bug killing type chores—things that maybe if you want to say you are a feminist, or maybe culturally, these are things women should or shouldn’t be if they want to call themselves a feminist. You can’t like pink and be a feminist. You should want to know how to change a tire if you want to be a feminist. You shouldn’t call a man to squish a bug. Etcetera, etcetera. All of these supposed biases about who a feminist should or shouldn’t be are exactly the problems feminists are facing from the culture. Preferring pink and wanting a man to squish a bug doesn’t preclude you from being a feminist. (FYI: The notion of pink being a ‘girl’ color is a relatively new idea). I have so many thoughts regarding feminism and have thought even harder about it during this election cycle as well as after having Forest. I read something else recently about how we’ve done so much to help girls and women realize their equality but we’ve kind of forgotten to work on how to teach boys about equality—and I mean this from the unconscious bias way. We may easily say girls can do what boys can do but we easily fall into the trap of limiting boys about so-called girl things, ie: that’s a girl toy or girl book, girl color, etc. No, it’s just a toy, a book, a color.

Anyway, the book was well worth the read; she touches not only on feminism but racism and then also on the differences in feminism for white women and people of color. Some of this I hadn’t thought much about until the last few years but my eyes are definitely opened.

“I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.” -Roxane Gay

In the Middle of

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elizabeth Tova Bradley

Move Your DNA by Katy Bowman

Blue Dahlia by Nora Roberts: I was in the middle of this one when The Girl on the Train came up and while I was sailing along with it the um, much better writing and storyline of TGotT kind of threw me when I went back to this book.

Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon

On Hold

+Second Nature by Michael Pollan

+The Journey in Between by Keith Foskett

Abandoned
+You are a Badass by Jen Sincero I began listening to this one but it did not get my attention. Abandoned.

Focus for the rest of the year
I think my goal for the rest of the year, other than digital reading and listening, is to finish up books I have left hanging around, or those I ordered but haven’t gotten around to. Those would be:

To Finish:
Illumination in the Flatwoods by Joe Hutto
Lost on a Mountain Maine by Donn Fendler
Along the Florida Trail by Bart Smith and Sandra Friend
Paths of Desire by Dominique Browning

To Start:
Baby Birds by Julie Zickefoose
Daring Greatly by Brene Brown
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
The Florida Trail by Sandra Friend and John Keatley: This is a coffee table book for the 50th anniversary of the Florida Trail. It’s beautiful!

3 Comments

  • Patrice

    I see you “abandoned” at least one book. LOL!

    I DID not like GOTT … I just think I am a big non-fiction snob now. I’m glad you liked, no loved, it!

    Lost on the Mountain in Maine should only take you a few days cause it’s so short. Great survival story, but you can tell it is told by a pre-teen!

    You sure do read a lot of books!!!!

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