JULY books

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest by Ken Kesey / A / **** / Kindle
Favorite quotes: "He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy."

"The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon"

HA HA this book CRACKED ME UP. I read this book for my Goodreads challenge, but the only thing I knew about it is that it had been made into a movie. I'm glad I didn't look up any information about the movie until after I had read the book, as I know I would have pictured Jack Nicholson the entire time as the main character.
This book was funny on so many levels but so deep and well written on so many others. It had a lot of messages to me... how we create our own prisons. How we make ourselves sick. How we give our power to others as sometimes it just is so much easier.
I'm glad I read this one.

Silo Series 1 (Wool 1-5), Silo Series 2 (Shift 1-3), Silo Series 3 (Dust) / Hugh Howey / **** / A / Kindle

Favorite quotes:
From WOOL:
"We get no credit for being sane, do we? I get no credit. Even from me. From myself. I hold it together and hold it together and I make i another day, another year, and there's no reward. Nothing great about me being normal. About not being crazy." He frowned. "Then you have on bad day, and you worry for yourself, you know? It only takes one".

From SILO:
"And so I ask you now, dear friend: was this world worth saving to being with? Were we worth saving?"

From DUST:
"Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying."

What do you do when you are driving to SLC for work and none of your books on your kindle will operate with Text to Speech and you are soooo bored?  You pull up an oldie but goodie. And you fall in love with it again.

The story starts with people who live underground in a 130 story silo. As the books unfold, you find out why they are there (the world has been destroyed), how long they have been there (over 200 years), who put them there (Americans haha), and (most importantly) how they can get out. 

The appeal of these books for me is multi-faceted.  I get total geek thrills trying to get my brain around the planning effort it would take to figure out what a population of people would require for 300 years. How much food will they need? How much can be grown? What supplies and equipment would be needed to produce and store such food? How do you teach people to do these things without hinting too much of the world outside so they don't get silo crazy and want OUT OUT OUT? What has to be re-used? What kind of water, air, and sanitation systems would you need? What do you do with the garbage? How do you control the population?

The other reason I love this book is just that it takes an entire society and makes an island of it. No one can get on the island... no one can get off. You can't ever get away.....  I love the whole psychological aspect of it.  It is a great study on crowd mentality, the use of fear for control, and how many times in life we put on blinders.

These books start strong and kind of fade out towards the end. I think this is because the first books were published as short stories, and are finely crafted. The last part is a longer book and drags a bit.

Brown Girl Dreaming / Jaqueline Woodson / YA / ***** / Book

Favorite quotes:
There were just TOO MANY. This book was written so beautifully.

This is the autobiographical story of the childhood of the author, Jaqueline.  She lived two lives... one with her Grandmother in the South and one with her single and independent mother in New York.   I remember learning in history class about the migration of young black men and women from the South to the Northern cities... seeking economic opportunity as well as a decrease in racial inequality.  I love how books like this bring history to life and make it feel more personal and meaningful.  I also love how the author writes about her love for words and her desire to write books even at a young age.  

This book is written in a style reminiscent of "Out of the Dust" and "Crossover" in that is written in prose.  I liked this one.  

The Warrior Heir by Cinda Williams Chima / YA / *** / Book

This was a re-read with Elissa. It is one of the first books by Cinda Williams Chima that I ever read... and I remember really liking it.  I didn't enjoy the writing as much this time, but still love this author.  It is the story of teenage Jack, who lives a normal life in a normal town doing normal stuff. His life changes when it is discovered that he is really the last heir of a magical and mystical group and has been hidden since he was a baby to avoid being conscripted into the magical tournaments that determine power in the wizarding world.  Sounds crazy I know. But the story is fun.

The Beginning of Everything by Robin Schneider / YA / *** / Book

Summary: Too much teenage angst.

Ezra has it all... he is the student body President. The athlete headed to college on a scholarship. The guy with the perfect girlfriend.  All of this is supposedly taken away when he is injured in a hit and run, shattering his leg.  The rest of the book tells how he tries to find his new "place" in the world, which happens to be with the Speech and Debate team.

The weird thing about this book is that Ezra makes it pretty clear he wasn't really that happy with his perfect life pre-accident.  The story gets really kind of muddled as it sounds like his old friends and old team still want him as a friend (I mean I'm sorry, how does hurting your leg make you unpopular now? The author doesn't explain this) and leader but he doesn't feel worthy of them or something?  The details kind of get in the way of each other. Anyway, Ezra meets a girl. The girl is awesome. The girl has a secret and we are drug along for the ride. I give this book props for not following the formulaic "happy ever after" story line, but the ending doesn't make a lot of sense as far as the 180 degree turn the girl makes. The books spends all this time exploring how awesome and mature this new girl is, just to make her a total dope at the end. I don't get it.

Under the Never Sky Veronica Rossi / YA / *** / Kindle
This was was just meh for me. I thought I would love it, especially as it is based in a society living in protected domes due to the destruction of the world outside. The story begins when the main character, Aria, is unjustly "cast out".  She decides she will try and find her mother, who was doing research in another dome with which communication had just ceased. She unites with a "dweller" who is looking for someone, too. They work together to survive... even though really she isn't helping much with the whole survival thing as she is basically useless... except she can sing.... and she's pretty... and she does get more tough at the end.  Anywhoo.... I didn't love it but I will read the sequels.

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo / YA / ****1/2 / Kindle

Favorite quote:
"The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true."

Oh man I love this author.  I read this book on Kindle and had not realized this was the same author as the Grisha series that I love love love.   This book sat on my kindle for weeks until I received an email from pioneer.utah.gov indicating it would expire in 14 hours.  So I figured I better at least try and read the dang thing .... and then I received this delightful SURPRISE.  It was seriously like the universe was smiling at me.  You should have seen me do several mental double takes as my mind wrapped around the fact I was reading a new book by LEIGH BARDUGO!!!

This story takes place in the same world as the Grisha series, but with a totally new cast of characters. I don't know what the literary term is for the skill of creating real, unique, awesome characters but whatever it is called Leigh Bardugo is the QUEEN of it.  Her dialogue is as good as Cassandra Clare with enough one-liners to keep me giggling.  

I'm also realizing the Leigh is the queen of the "Squad".  Taylor Swift has one.  The Grisha books have one. It makes sense that the Six of Crows series would have literally the baddest (literally and figuratively) squad of all.  I am buying this book for my personal library and can't wait for the sequel.

Euphoria by Lily King / A / **** / Kindle

This is the story of three scientists living among the aboriginal tribes of New Guinea in the 1930's.  While the setting and their observations are fascinating in and of themselves, it's the relationships and dynamics between the three that make this book so intriguing.  Nell is married to Fen. She's written a successful book based on her previous research. Fen is the charismatic but jealous husband whose flaws provide just the right amount of tension to the story. They join up with Bankson - a brilliant but depressed scientist who falls for Nell.  This book was really multifaceted... it painted a beautifully complex picture of self discovery and self destruction as well as the need to be an individual without being alone.

Prom by Laurie Halse Anderson / YA / **** / Kindle
Oh man I love this author. Her book, "Speak" is one of the best I've ever read.  Anderson writes about serious issues such as eating disorders, date rape, and PTSD.  In this book Anderson takes a comedic break. The book feels like a sitcom complete with a blue collar working class family, a smart but unmotivated high school senior (Ashley) barely eeking her way to graduation while juggling detention and her job as a costumed rat at Chuck E Cheese , her sweet by semi-loser boyfriend, her very pregnant mother with her very Irish family, and a best friend obsessed with the upcoming Senior Prom.  Anderson indicated in the acknowledgements at the end that some fans at a book signing said they wanted a book about "normal kids like us".  This was their story.  It was a lot of fun.

Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones / JF / *** / Kindle

This is the exact kind of book I would have loved to read as a kid.  It was full of magic and castles and crazy adventures and beautiful English humor. This book had some very Harry Potterish slants (refusing to call a powerful wizard by his name, the idea of having multiple lives and the need to protect those lives by storing them away), which was interesting as it was written in 1977... well before "The Boy That Lived".  I read up on this author and found that JKRowling lists Diana Wynne Jones as a childhood influence.  I am not saying JK Rowling plagiarized Diana Wynne Jones. But the author says it best:  

"I think Ms Rowling did get quite a few of her ideas from my books – though I have never met her, so I have never been able to ask her. My books were written many years before the Harry Potter books (Charmed Life was first published in 1977), so any similarities probably come from what she herself read as a child. Once a book is published, out in the world, it is sort of common property, for people to take ideas from and use, and I think this is what happened to my books."


Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky / A / *** / Kindle

Favorite quote:

"To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's".


This is from the Goodreads list of classics I am working my way through. It was an engaging, although laborious read. This is one of those books that I feel I would have to take a college class to truly understand all the nuances of this book. What I did glean from it was a fascinating look at human nature and the idea that some crimes may be against societal law but are not against the laws of nature or the laws of human need. For example, if a terrible drug dealer is killed by someone, is that really a crime when society is better off for what happened? I have actually thought a lot about this because we had a homeless guy get in trouble recently for selling his $194 food stamp allotment. Come to find out he sold it to buy his estranged kid a playstation for Christmas. BREAK.MY.HEART. It is true that the law is the law but man sometimes it can get hard to want to punish people.

What I enjoyed the most was having another look at Russian society and how just messed up it was during that time period. The riches of the time did allow for a lot of intellectual thought to be cultivated, but at the same time there was so much just abject poverty for the rest of the people.