Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

This is my third and maybe final David Sedaris book that I'm going to listen to for a while. Not that I didn't enjoy them, because I did. They are especially funny to listen to, since he reads them and his voice is really distinctive and he does excellent accents for his siblings and places the emphasis on things so well (hopefully so, since he wrote these essays). Some of his essays were so funny I laughed out loud, and some were funny but also a mix of depressing. I feel like I should be able to explain it better, but he is so honest and up front about his family and his upbringing and the flaws in his family and himself that it makes me a little sad. He tells a story about when his dad said they would buy a beach home on the coast of North Carolina and how excited and happy his whole family was, but then his dad changed his mind and didn't want to spend the money on it and how disappointed all of the kids were and his mom. He tells it so well and I could feel all of their emotions, which makes it such a great story, but it was kind of gut-wrenching to sense all of their deep disappointment (especially the mom's).

I also couldn't listen to most of these stories without wondering how his family feels about how he portrays them. He doesn't just write about when they were kids in the seventies in North Carolina, but he writes about them today and seems like he exposes quite a lot about their lives and their relationships. He addresses this specifically in a few of his stories, but doesn't quite resolve it and I know that I definitely would not be happy if I were his sister and he were doing that to me. Mostly his essays expose more of his flaws and his realizations about himself, which he learns through his interactions with his sisters, but it still feels like a violation of privacy.

The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease

I read The Read-Aloud Family a month ago and in it, she raves about this book as being the book that got her started in her adventure of always reading books aloud with her children. I'd already heard of this book years ago but never gotten around to it, but that book motivated me enough that I wanted to read this one too. Unfortunately, this book is not as good as The Read-Aloud Family, or at least, it has a different point and it wasn't as useful to me. This book seems to be written to convince people--possibly people in positions of power, like superintendents of a school district or at least teachers in a classroom--that reading to children is a silver bullet to help improve all sorts of test scores and every possible learning achievement you could want for your kids and your schools. This book is very heavily research-based and there were even chapters debating how harmful digital books and digital learning can be, and how television is detrimental to kids. I definitely agree with these things, but it didn't seem to fit in with what I expected to get out of this book and it wasn't useful to me, since I am already convinced that TV isn't good and we hardly watch any at all in our house. I thought some of it was very good, and I definitely enjoyed the book list at the end of the book with books to read, and I will be checking those out for sure. I am glad to have a copy to refer back to at different times (again, especially for the book list!), but I will definitely be skipping about half of the chapters and not needing to read those again.

All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor

Oh my goodness. I completely forgot that this book existed, and I have NO IDEA HOW I FORGOT ABOUT IT. I started reading it and it was like fireworks were going off in my brain on every page as it all came flooding back and seeming so familiar. I know I read this book dozens of times, because I knew every story and recognized every illustration, but for some reason the name of the book really doesn't seem that familiar to me. I don't remember it as a childhood favorite like I do Betsy-Tacy, for example. But I am so happy to have rediscovered it and I hope my kids want to read it too.

This book reminded me of a happy shiny version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, where the family isn't so desperately poor and the kids are happy and well-fed and nobody is assaulted or ever feels in danger. It's set around the same time period and in New York City, but the family in this story is Jewish so there is a lot of detail and information about how they celebrate Jewish holidays and go to the Jewish market. I vividly remember some of these stories, like when they are given a bunch of books from their father's junk shop and how they sit and go through them, deciding which ones they should take. Or when one of the girls loses her library book and they have to go apologize for it at the library. I just love, love this story of this sweet, happy family. I think I love these old-fashioned, long-ago stories because you get to learn about how things were 100+ years ago, but also they didn't have so many of the problems or annoying things that books written today have, like issues with kids being disrespectful to parents, etc. I am sure this is not great literature--the things that make it differ from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, like it's happy shininess and ignorance of all the unpleasant aspects of life, probably knock it out of that category--but it's a perfect book for young children to read and I look forward to reading it with my kids.

Edited later: I read this to Dane a few months after reading it myself and he loved it. He asked if there were more books in the series after we finished, and I said there were, but we don't have them. And he begged me to get them. He especially loved how it ended with them getting a baby brother, and was so proud that he guessed what was happening. So definitely a good read together.

A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond

I read this with Dane and I think he liked it more than I did. Paddington is a bear found at Paddington Station in London, and the Brown family takes him home and lets him stay with them. He gets into all sorts of scrapes and makes all sorts of messes but they love him so much they let him stay. (I'm not sure I understand that--I would definitely not have wanted him to stay at my house considering all the work he caused.) It was a cute story with some really cute episodes in it, like when Paddington goes backstage at a play because he thinks the villain really is bad and he needs to save the girl, or when he smashes the next-door neighbor's watch while trying to do a magic trick. (That one made me laugh out loud.) The only tricky thing for me with my audience was that the story was set in the 1950s, maybe? Not sure what time period--but it was long enough ago that I had to explain a whole lot of things to Dane, like why the photographer was going underneath a black cloth or what opera glasses are at a play. I wasn't sure if he was understanding everything even when I was explaining these things, but he still seemed to really enjoy it and was super excited about reading it every time we did. I didn't love it though and didn't really rush to read it so it still took us a while to get through.

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight

I am not super interested in business-y books or in Nike specifically, but I felt like I kept hearing about this book and how good it was, so I figured I would check it out as an audiobook when I got the chance. And I actually really enjoyed it. Phil Knight talks about the early days of Nike, its beginnings as his "crazy idea" out of his MBA at Stanford and selling Japanese-made Tiger shoes out of the back of his car at track meets, and goes until 1980, when Nike went public and he became overnight a multimillionaire. It was so interesting learning about how this super, super-famous brand began so humbly and how it grew from this tiny beginning, and struggled for so many years to continue to grow and to make ends meet. I definitely don't think I could make it work as an entrepreneur--it sounds excruciatingly hard. But Knight makes it clear that the work he did was "play" and that they loved the work they did. I couldn't wait to find out what happened next to the intrepid Nike team as they made it through their beginning years--it really was a page-turner (although I was listening to it, so I'm not sure what the term would be for that).

The thing I especially liked about his memoir is that he was extremely honest and candid about his failures and mistakes that he made along the way. He was very upfront about his struggles as an introvert in the business world and the times he had to testify in court or deal with politicians, and he talked about stupid mistakes he made along the years too without trying to justify his actions. He also talked at length about his mistakes with his children, and his regrets that he didn't spend enough time with them while trying to build his company. This honesty was surprising at times and very refreshing--he doesn't seem like he's writing this book to explain himself or make himself look good at all. He actually talks about the movie The Bucket List and explains that this book is somewhat fulfilling one of the only things left on his bucket list--since he is worth billions of dollars by this time and has done everything he could have wanted to do (except for fix the things he regrets). It was very well done and very interesting--I kept thinking about it even when I wasn't listening.

I would be interested to get a feminist take on Knight's account of his company's beginnings, though--it was 100% male, 100% testosterone-driven. All of the top people were men handpicked by Knight for their thick skins and their abilities to jive with the team, and their informal team weekends where they would hash out important issues were called "Buttfaces" and they spent the whole time yelling at each other, drinking, and poking fun at each other. I cannot imagine any woman thriving in that atmosphere, and I am curious how much that has changed in the last forty years since the memoir ended. It was the sixties and seventies, though, so times have changed.

Many Waters by Madeleine L'Engle

This is the fourth book in the Wrinkle in Time series, although it really has nothing to do with A Wrinkle in Time except that it features the Murry family. It's extremely different from the first three, in which Meg and Charles Wallace are the main characters, and they get taken to weird worlds and times but are always based back at their home. In this book, however, Sandy and Dennys, their twin brothers, who are always preceded as the "logical and normal ones of the family," are accidentally swept away by an experiment of their dad's and get thrown back several thousand years to the time of Noah and the ark. They land in the desert and spend some time needing to recover from their severe sunstroke and figure out where they are, and in the process become close to Noah's whole family, including his father Lamech and his children who live with him, and they need to figure out how they will be able to get home.

I loved this look at the Noah story and the focus on the other characters that you don't hear about in the Bible story--namely the women. I felt like reading this book as a kid gave me a way better view of what it would have been like to live back then. I also really liked the magical/mythical creatures and people that lived at this time, like the seraphim and nephilim, and the mammoths and manticores, and I liked how L'Engle mixed this myth and history and even some science-fiction-y stuff in with it too (explaining how the twins got there and how they got home at the end of their time there). I think it's interesting re-reading this book now as an adult, because there is kind of a focus on sex, at least for Sandy and Dennys--they start off the book completely unaware of sex and totally innocent, and become kind of awakened to these possibilities as they are treated like adults and tempted by people there. It's definitely a clean book--but the possibilities are there and Sandy and Dennys think about them for the first time. The conclusion seems to be that having sex is something important and should only be done at the right time with the right person and not just wantonly, which I think is a good message for most people, especially the young audience who this book is written for (although obviously I would generally go a little farther than that). Overall, I still really enjoyed this book. It kind of reminded me of The Red Tent because of its Old Testament rewrite sort of style, although it was meant for a much younger audience than that one.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

I've meant to read this book for forever, and now that it's a Hulu series I've heard more and more about it. I haven't watched the show at all, but I guess its increase in popularity has given me more motivation to read the book because I finally got around to it.

This book is about a creepy dystopian future (or actually, now it's probably in the past since this book was written in the 80s or 90s) where this small group of religious nutjobs has taken over the country and implemented super strict Old Testament rules over society. This means that women are not given any power or choices, and they are known simply by their husband's names. Most people are infertile and so there are women who are known as handmaids, who are basically there to try and get pregnant to increase the incredibly low birth rate. The book is told from the perspective of Offred, a handmaid, who tells about her past from before everything changed, and what has happened to her since then.

I had to read this in a few chunks because it was a little bit scary. Scary in the Brave New World and 1984 senses--like this is a dystopian future that seems slightly possible, and even if it's not totally likely, there are some aspects of it that could happen if we are not careful. Like the country being taken over by a really crazy uber religious minority and imposing a completely different set of rules over the country? Not likely, but look what happened to Afghanistan. Decades ago, women were allowed to walk around on their own and wear whatever they wanted, but the Al-Queda took over the government and took away all freedoms that women had had before then. That's what I kept thinking while reading this book--I wanted to complain that it is totally impossible that all of these changes could be implemented within one person's lifetime, that this woman could remember the time Before but still be living in this world as it is now (kind of my complaint about Ready Player One), but aspects of this literally happened in Afghanistan. That's what made this so scary to me.

However, it felt like Atwood kind of dropped the ball on the world-creating aspect of her job. She never really described why or what happened--she says vaguely that the President and Congress were all killed and there were never new elections, but she never really explains who did it or why, and although you know it's just the nebulous "they" who are in charge now, I really wanted to know more about it. I think that's something that we are more used to with these dystopian novels now--there's always spot where the narrator gives you a clear-cut explanation for what's happened and how it happened, and it really didn't happen in this book. It seemed like an oversight to me as the reader. I also kind of hated reading about her past with her husband and daughter and how they got taken away from her--but that's just a personal qualm because I hate any sort of storyline that affects children negatively.

But the book definitely made me think about these possibilities--I couldn't stop thinking it over after finishing it this afternoon. I was reading the Wikipedia page about the book and read about how many people classify this book as science fiction but Atwood doesn't like that classification--she argues that it's speculative fiction, because it's something that really could happen and isn't just based on technology in the future. I definitely don't see this book as a science fiction, and I like her thoughts about it. I feel like I have many more half-baked thoughts about this book and its real meaning, but it's been a long day and I don't want to spend all night writing this up so I'll leave it here.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle

I think the first two books of the Wrinkle in Time series are more science fiction, but this book definitely feels much more like fantasy. There isn't much science in this one--there's a unicorn, and magical time traveling, and "kytheing," or Meg and Charles Wallace's ESP connection between their minds, all of which feels more like fantasy to me. I remember really liking this book when I was younger, and I still enjoyed it today. This book starts out with the Murrys finding out that the world is about to end because of a nuclear war which is about to start, and Charles Wallace using an ancient rune to go back in time (with the unicorn) and try to change things so that this doesn't happen. I loved the different storylines that Charles Wallace drops into--first Madoc, in ancient times, then the Puritan times, then Civil War, and then just fifty years prior, and I loved how they each resolved using the rune and for the better. I love the Murrys and their close family, even with their different personalities, and I especially love how Mr. and Mrs. Murry are so open to the possibilities of otherworldly things happening, despite their oh-so-science-y minds and careers. They are a stark contrast to the ever-rational Sandy and Dennys, and are also a contrast to the standard stereotype of "scientists" today.

However, it is a little bit stretching beyond my belief nowadays to believe that a) all of those people would remember the legend of their Welsh ancestors so vividly that they would all be named Branwen and Brandon and Zylle and Zillah and that b) they would all be so interconnected like that. However, that's not a huge complaint for me, because of how much disbelief you have to suspend when reading a book like this anyway (I mean, Charles Wallace flies on a unicorn to a magical unicorn hatching ground at one point). I still loved it, although I wonder how much of me loving it is just my nostalgia and memory of it. (But it is a book written for middle-grade or YA, definitely not for someone my age, so I don't know that it matters too much what I think about it now in that respect.)

At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging while Wandering the Globe by Tsh Oxenreider

I was kind of not excited to read this book when I first read or heard about it on whatever book blogs I follow--I'm kind of tired of people talking about how much they *love* to travel and how it's the best thing in the world (cue this video which makes me laugh every time). But, it was available as an audiobook and I will listen to (almost) anything while I'm exercising! I ended up really enjoying this book and it definitely got me more raring at the bit to try and go on some more trips with our kids.

This book is about Oxenreider's one-year trip around the world with her family of five. It's mostly a travelogue about their travels to Asia, Australia, Africa, and Europe (they completely left out South America--doesn't that seem like a bummer?), and it seemed like a pretty magical year. They did some fantastic things like snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef, seeing Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, and climbing the Great Wall of China. But I honestly felt like she was holding out on us about how the experience really was, and how they truly were able to manage and afford it all. She says over and over again that they were traveling on a budget, and they had to save money, and references doing "school" and "work" at random times, but doesn't really talk about it in depth or tell what she actually even does for work or how they could possibly have been "working" and making enough money to live for that year. And hearing about all of their marathon flights, spending 30-hour stretches flying and traveling to get from country to country, honestly made me want to vomit. That's where I felt like she was holding out on us--it could not have been pleasant to do those things with three small-ish kids, and she rarely talked about them struggling or being tired or throwing tantrums. Maybe her kids are such good, well-seasoned travelers like she talks about that they never have problems with those long days, I don't know. But there were lots of times where she refers back to something that happened in Thailand before, which she hadn't mentioned, and it made it obvious how much she was editing out of this memoir. Which, of course, she has free license to do, since it is her life and her book. She also talks about how she had severe depression while living in Turkey and several of her friends who travel for long chunks of time who they meet up with talk about how their marriage struggled and how they lost their sanity while traveling for so long with their families--and I have to wonder, does the magic of seeing all of these places make up for those problems? For having depression and struggling in your marriage?

I guess I just think of those things because I am pretty sure that if we tried to do that--travel so much all over the world in such a short span of time--I would lose. my. mind. I would literally go crazy. I like my routines. I like traveling, but if we go longer than two weeks I start to really struggle. Of course, this oxymoron of loving home but also loving traveling other places is kind of the point of this book, and really the only conclusion she comes to is that you can have both and it's okay. They end up coming home and settling down and living a normal lifestyle afterwards.

It did get me thinking and wishing about being able to go on some trips with our kids--nothing that big, of course! So I'm going to sit down with Tommy and plan out our trip to CA now!

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

I liked this book better than I liked Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, probably because it's more memoir-ish and therefore more real. There were so many funny stories about Sedaris's childhood and his adulthood, many of them about him moving to France and attempting to learn French. I was disappointed after finishing this to find out that the audiobook is an abridged version of the written book, because I would have liked to listen to more. He does a great job of telling about his life and making it funny, but also having a lot of heart and emotion in it at the same time. Some of the stories about his drug use or about his parents' reactions to him coming out as gay are poignant at moments, although he never comes across as self-pitying. I really enjoyed his balance of emotions and I would like to find another one of his memoir books (instead of his fictional ones) to listen to.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

This book doesn't try to make a secret of what the story is about--it's all there in the title, and the narrators give it away within the first few pages that all of the Lisbon sisters end up committing suicide. So you're never surprised by what they do or what happens, so I don't think that is the point of this book. This book is really about the boys, the nameless narrators, who spend their teenage-hoods obsessing over and fantasizing about the Lisbon sisters, and watching their lives disintegrate and eventually kill themselves over the course of a year. Their interest in them--which lasts for decades, as far as I can tell from the format of the book--is intense, and I kept being put off by it and wondering why they were so obsessed. Eugenides must be making a point about how they saw the girls and how they never looked at them as people. When the girls finally commit suicide and basically arrange for the boys to find them, they say, "We had never known her. They had brought us here to find that out." They spend decades afterwards trying to find out what happened and to really get to know them as much as they could through the pictures and evidence left behind. This seemed a little unbelievable--they hint a few times at how they have been unsatisfied with the rest of their lives after their brief encounters with the Lisbon sisters, and I don't feel like their associations with them justified that sort of long-lingering reaction.

The writing in this book is beautiful. I've read one Eugenides book before and I remember thinking the same thing about that one--it was beautifully written, even if the story itself is disturbing. I listened to an audiobook a few months ago by a librarian talking about her favorite books and she goes on and on and ON about how much she loves this book and how it's her favorite book ever, and I would definitely not agree with her on her level of obsession with this book. It was definitely, definitely worth a read, wonderfully written and thought-provoking, and almost un-put-down-able. I read it in only about two days and have neglected all my Saturday chores this morning to finish it off (while Tommy is out with the kids). But I think it was a little too creepy (in the stalker-ish way of the boys who apparently spent their entire adolescence staring out their windows to catch glimpses of the girls locked up in their house across the street) and too depressing (when five sisters in the same family all commit suicide) to be one of my favorites. I don't think I will want to see the movie for the same reasons--I feel like it would be too depressing for me.

The Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle

This is the second book in the Time series and the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time, and I am really enjoying revisiting this series. In this book, Charles Wallace is struck deathly ill and Meg and Calvin are taken on a quest to save him and to fight the Echthroi, or the evil forces in the universe that cause war and death, which are apparently fighting to kill Charles Wallace by attacking his mitochondria in his cells. There's a whole different fantastical set of characters helping them with their quest, including Progonoskes, a cherubim who looks nothing like a cherubim as we know it but instead is mistaken for a drive of dragons with hundreds of eyes and feathers and flames. Meg and Calvin go with Progo and a few others into Charles Wallace's cells and manage to save his life (spoiler!).

A few thoughts about this book:
-A lot of it seemed really similar to Wrinkle. The final test happens almost as a surprise and the climax is so sudden and quick and there's almost no denouement afterwards to help you figure out what happened. Also, it seemed almost like the same lesson Meg had to learn--to show love and to win over the evil forces simply by showing her love (in Wrinkle she has to love the robot-Charles Wallace and in this one she has to Name all the Echthroi and Mr. Jenkins). Isn't that kind of the same thing?
-I thought it was so interesting that the mitochondria that were so central to the science fiction in this book were such a new thing when this book was being written that nobody knew what it was and it made everyone think Charles Wallace was crazy when he would talk about them. But they are such a standard part of seventh-grade science now that all kids know what mitochondria are now. It did get a little confusing with the combination of the farandolae (which L'Engle made up) and I had to check and see, is that something I forgot or is it not real?

Some really fantastic quotes from this book"
When Progo is talking about the Echthroi: "War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming--making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn't need to hate. . . . When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished" (111-112). This seems so simple and even spiritual to me. If everyone knows who they are and feels loved, they won't need to hate. This seems like it would be the solution to all the problems in the world--if only it were easy to accomplish.

"The temptation for the farandola or for man or for star is to stay an immature pleasure-seeker. When we seek our own pleasure as the ultimate good we place ourselves at the center of the universe. A fara or a man or a star has his place in the universe, but nothing created is the center" (203). This is so appropriate for today's day and age! So many people never move past the stage of "immature pleasure-seeker" and waste their lives away.

Emily of Deep Valley by Maud Hart Lovelace

I really loved all the Betsy-Tacy books, but I'd never even heard of the other books written by Maud Hart Lovelace. I read that this one was somewhat unrelated--not about the main characters of Betsy-Tacy but still set in Deep Valley, and featuring them briefly. So I decided to get it and I was so excited to read it.

And I loved it even more than the Betsy-Tacy books, I think. As wonderful as those books are, I never really connected much with Betsy and her easy-going ways with the boys and her crowd. When I was in high school and even sometimes in college, I usually felt a tiny bit awkward and ill at ease in big groups of kids talking and joking around, and I definitely was not good at talking with boys. I was really surprised by Betsy in the first high school book by how easily she joked around with the boys (it seemed like a bit of stretch for a freshman in high school, after she had been just a kid in the book before) and fell in and out of love with them. But I was so, so, so much like Emily. I felt like Emily WAS me. The boy she has a crush on talks to her and she can never think of anything witty or funny to say in response. She doesn't feel like she's totally a member of the group because she doesn't go out with boys, and she knows she's being left out of activities that involve the boys and girls together so she feels like she's on the outside of her "crowd." She doesn't mind too much but she does have a major crush on a boy named Don, who is sometimes nice to her and other times ignores her completely and says things that seem hurtful, and she doesn't know how to have witty repartee with him. There's one night when she's with all of her friends and she feels this utter despair because nobody wants her there and nobody cares that much about her--and I swear I have had that exact same horrible awkward feeling and knew exactly what she was describing. I don't know that I've read a book that described those feelings so well.

But the biggest thing that Emily is struggling with is that she is graduating from high school and is the only one from her crowd staying home and not going to college, because she needs to stay and take care of her elderly grandfather. The book is really the story of her self-transformation from the young, timid high school girl to a much more confident and self-motivated woman, because she learns that just because she isn't going to college doesn't mean she can't keep learning on her own and doing her own self-improvement. I loved that aspect of this book and I feel like that definitely applies to my life still today--I, like Emily, and staying home to take care of my loved ones and am not going out into the world to go to school or work, but I can definitely keep learning and be proactive in taking strides to develop my mind and my interests. I also liked that Emily's love story was less important than her own personal development, and I liked how her interest in Don faded and she gradually realized what a "cad" he was and how he didn't treat her right. Hooray for Emily!

I basically loved this book. I am apparently a huge sucker for old-fashioned books, I guess, based on my love for Lovelace's work. I'll have to read some more classics soon.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modern Bestiary by David Sedaris

I've never read (or listened to) anything by David Sedaris, but I've always heard of him being very funny and I decided to finally start checking out some of his stuff on audio. This one was only 3 hours long so I gave it the first priority (I love books I can get through in only a weekend of listening while doing chores!), and it was a moderately fun listen. It's a collection of short stories, each one about different animals who are completely anthropomorphized, so much so that they sound like gangsters from the Bronx or breathless young wives with completely distinctive personalities. Sedaris tells stories that could definitely be about actual people, but making them about animals instead gives him an advantage in that we already have associations with certain animals and characteristics in our minds, like skunks are smelly and rabbits are fast and purebred dogs are snobby, and he is able to use those characteristics for comedic effect by either making his animal characters have or not have those expected characteristics. The stories were sometimes funny, sometimes depressing (in a comedic way) but they all got me thinking and seemed like they could be true to life in a way--like I could imagine people acting like those animals were. I think my favorite story was about the owl who would try to interrogate his prey into getting them to tell him something new that he could learn, and who ends up making friends with a hippo and a gerbil through his adventures (although there was a somewhat gross image about some parasites living in the hippo's rear end, but it wasn't written about crudely in that story). I like Sedaris's writing style (although sometimes it was a little more crude than I prefer, but not usually) and am interested to read or listen to more of his stuff.

Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder

This is the third Little House on the Prairie book that I've read with Dane, and I really enjoyed this one. It's the only book in the series that isn't about Laura, and I think that threw the boys off a little (Graham kept saying, "Where's Wowa? Why's Wowa not in this book?") but we all really enjoyed the story. There are some great episodes in this book, like the schoolteacher whipping the bad boys, the planting their farm, the training the oxen, and Almanzo finding the pocketbook at the end of the book. Dane seemed to really like listening about the animals and farm life. I do think that some of the chapters in this book are way too technical, like talking about how they baled the hay or threshed the wheat, and too hard for them to understand (so I did skip a few paragraphs here or there when it got too hard), and I do think they would like this even more when they get older. (Not that Graham listened to much of this book, but he acted like he thought he was listening and kept talking about Farmer Boy.) We are going to move on to something else now that we've read these, and I would love to come back to them another time in a few years.

Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher

I probably wouldn't have finished listening to this book if it hadn't been only 2.5 hours long and if it hadn't been so fun to listen to Carrie Fisher's distinctive Princess Leia voice reading it. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had been reading it instead of listening to it, because this novel seemed to have a lot of breaks and jumps in perspective and time/place, and it was hard to tell when and where each segment started or began. But the book is about Suzanne, an actress in and coming out of rehab, similar to Fisher herself, and her dissatisfaction with her life and her issues. Fisher is startlingly candid about her own insecurities (through Suzanne) and the book is so funny in a lot of her thoughts and asides about the Hollywood lifestyle she's living but dissatisfied with. I really enjoyed a lot of parts of it, but I didn't quite get a lot of it because of the medium. It does make me want to read her autobiography or maybe one of the biographies about her, but our library doesn't have any of them so that will have to wait.

Reading People by Anne Bogel

I have been following Modern Mrs. Darcy's reading blog for years and years, and I really love it and her. So when she wrote a book I added it to my to-read list, but I wasn't all that excited about that topic, really--about personality tests and how they can be useful or helpful. I have never been super into personality tests, and I never seem to get accurate results, so this seemed like a super-specific topic that didn't relate well to me. However, the library had an audiobook copy and I will listen to almost anything, since I go through lots of audiobooks, so I listened to it this past week and moderately enjoyed it. (Note: This book was definitely not the best for an audiobook. The Meyer's-Briggs chapters especially were filled with so many different letter names of the different types (ENFJ, ISFP, NF, SJ, whatever) that it was really hard to keep it all straight and to be interested in it. It would have been a much better book to read, but I probably wouldn't have gotten around to reading it for years.)

She talks about a bunch of different kinds of personality types in this book, starting with some basic ones like introvert/extrovert, Highly Sensitive People, the five love languages, and then getting into more complicated tests like Meyers-Briggs types and the Enneagram (which I still don't quite understand). She talks about her own personality types, how she discovered them, and how it's changed her life to understand these elements of her personality. This book definitely got me thinking about what my personality type is and how my personality affects the way I see the world. I did go take a few personality tests (legit ones, like the ones she talks about in her book) and I thought it was interesting, but I don't know that I am going to make it a huge hobby like she has to be investing a lot of time into thinking about my personality. I think it can be really helpful, especially to realize that not everyone else has the same personality, and to know how that can explain how we interact. For example, I thought a lot about Tommy and I and how our personalities differ, and how that can drive the way we talk to each other or think about certain issues. I think this book would actually be super useful to review later, and to actually read, but I don't know that I will do it right now.

I Will Always Write Back: How One Letter Changed Two Lives by Caitlin Alifirenka and Martin Ganda with Liz Welch

This is my book club's book for this month, and I finished it just in time for our discussion in two days. I don't know that I would have gotten around to reading it if it hadn't been for book club--it sounded good, but maybe not good enough for me to invest energy into reading it. It's the real life story of a middle-school girl from Pennsylvania who writes to a boy from Zimbabwe for a school pen pal project, and they begin a correspondence that lasts for years and ends with Caitlin and her family helping to bring Martin to the United States to study for college. I loved how these two became so close and were such good friends through writing these letters to each other, although I never quite "got" how they felt so close through these occasional letters that didn't seem very long. (I mean, they said they felt like they were best friends but I didn't feel it from reading this book.) It was also kind of annoying to read Caitlin's sections from her middle school and high school years--hers were filled with random drama and extremely immature problems, like friends fighting at school, and it was definitely boring to read those sections compared to Martin's problems with no food or money for his family in Zimbabwe (and Caitlin did acknowledge that). I thought the second half of the book was more interesting and had more of a narrative arc when they were trying to get Martin to America to study, and I sped through that part quickly, but I think the first half of the book, when they were just getting to know each other and Caitlin was dealing with boy drama, could definitely have been condensed somehow.

I could see this book being a very good book for middle schoolers to read to open their eyes to how people in other parts of the world live. Caitlin was so shocked by Martin's poverty and totally unaware of her privilege, and I think many middle schoolers would also have that same revelation. I also think it is eye opening to see how stuck Martin was in his life and situation if it weren't for Caitlin's family helping him--in America, we tend to think that if we work hard enough we'll be able to overcome everything, but Martin had no chance of improving his life except for his extreme stroke of luck to be able to make good friends with Americans who wanted to help him. I thought this book was sweet, although it maybe could have been a bit shorter to really be great.

Small Admissions by Amy Poeppel

I have just a little time to write a short, not-in-depth review right now, but I really liked this audiobook. It was an almost-perfect quick read, almost chick lit but not super romance-y, and gave a great look into this world of NYC private school admissions (which I know nothing about).

Kate is recovering from a terrible break-up and she spends almost a year doing nothing but sitting on the couch, until she almost accidentally gets a job as an assistant of admissions at a prestigious private school in New York. She doesn't have any idea what she's doing, but she gets involved with the students and learns a lot about herself and her true desires, and finds out what sorts of things she wants for herself. The cast of supporting characters in this book were funny and fun as well, and I really liked seeing all of them develop over the year this book lasted. Some of the issues between Kate and her friends seemed a little contrived (why would anyone continue to make such issues about things like that?) but it was a very fun and believable book and I really liked all of these characters. I wouldn't say this was great literature but it wasn't super fluffy either--it was definitely a good balance.