The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels by Ree Drummond

This was another random audiobook choice, which I chose because I have liked Pioneer Woman's recipes for years, and I used to read her blog (until I got tired of her blog posts that took 15 minutes to scroll through because she takes pictures of every. single. step. of each recipe). This was her story about how she met her husband, a rancher, and basically how she became the Pioneer Woman. I liked it at first, and thought it was a cute story. But the longer the story went on, the more annoying it got--her obsession with her husband and her descriptions of his huge muscles and how weak her knees got when they were together got really old after a while. Literally every chapter, every time she mentioned his voice or his appearance or anything about him, she gushed on and on about how amazing he was and how she couldn't control herself around him. It got kind of old after a while. She also started to seem like she was really dependent on him, and said things like he was her "savior," and just let him make all the decisions like how many kids they were going to have, etc. She didn't really give Marlboro Man a personality (she never even said his name--he was always Marlboro Man, every time), and it stopped feeling real. It got kind of weird to me and I got kind of bored with it by the end. But the first half was cute, and I think it would be fun to write something similar about our relationship.

Regency Buck by Georgette Heyer

I didn't love this Georgette Heyer as much as I did Sylvester, but it was still a fun read. It's interesting how some of these storylines don't seem appropriate to our modern sensibilities but were perfectly acceptable just sixty or seventy years ago when they were written (not to mention two hundred years ago in the day and age when they are set). In this book, Judith Taverner and her brother are accidentally made wards to an unknown guardian, who, it turns out, is a handsome and fashionable young man. You can guess what's going to happen just from that one-sentence summary, I'm sure, but it's still enjoyable to watch it all happen. The parts that seem a old-fashioned are how even though Judith is a very stubborn and strong-willed woman, she still is controlled by all the men in her life--her guardian, her (younger) brother, and her cousin--and she allows them to do it. And even finds it attractive. This sort of storyline would never happen these days. But it was still a fun Heyer book.

The Letters of Jane Austen by Jane Austen

It's crazy that we are so addicted to Jane Austen's writing that we read her personal letters, even now, 200 years after her death. I listened to this because I've been scrambling to find audiobooks, and it was actually fun to listen to, because the reader had the perfect British accent and acted out what she was saying perfectly. Also, it was only about 2 hours, so I figured there was nothing to lose. I loved getting a little more insight into Jane's character--she was very funny in many of her letters, and sarcastic and witty, just like you'd expect from her books. Definitely a fun, short read.

Sylvester, or, the Wicked Uncle by Georgette Heyer

Basically, this book followed all of Georgette Heyer's best storylines, and did it amazingly. There's the unwilling aristocrat who accidentally falls in love with an unsuspecting and outspoken maiden, and has to keep it a secret for a while while he works for her hand. This one was about a duke who falls in love with a young girl who had beforehand written a novel that became super popular with the elite set--but she had used him as the villain. It was cute and fun, and I read it for our book club meeting in June, and loved it. I will probably always love any Georgette Heyers that I come across.

Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie by Jordan Sonnenblick

This was a super-short audiobook that I had heard about in my book club a while ago, and I listened to it while driving around on my trip in Utah. I wasn't sure if I would like it at first, but as soon as things started happening in the story I got into the story. This is about a middle-school-aged boy whose younger brother got leukemia, and how he dealt with it. It was a really realistic depiction of how this scenario might play out, in my opinion, and it was written in Steven's voice, which was sarcastic and hilarious and really fun and believable. I really enjoyed this short book.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Okay. Honestly. This was about the most terrifying book that I've ever read. It wasn't like a horror novel--it was terrifying because it seemed like it could have been real, like this really could happen in our world, and this is how our society could fall apart. This is a dystopian novel, but unlike most dystopian stories, this doesn't take place a couple hundred years in the future after everything's been figured out again--it's written about the moment when everything is falling apart and how our society falls apart, and in the years immediately following. A flu pandemic sweeps through the world, a super-contagious, super-fatal, super-fast-working strain of the flu, and basically 99% of the world's population gets wiped out within three weeks. When this happens, all of the services and products and things we are used to in our society are GONE. No more electricity, gasoline, telephones, Internet, travel, food deliveries, police, anything. The very few people that are left have no choice but to revert basically to the hunter-gatherer stage, and live off of scavenging and start to slowly figure out survival. The story follows four or five people at the time of the collapse and what happens to each of them--how they die or survive, what they do and what their lives are like afterwards.

The prose is tight and beautiful, and the story is so well-crafted that it felt 100% believable. That is what made it so terrifying. I seriously cannot stop thinking about how fragile our society is now and how quickly it could all end if something terrible like that happened. For three days after reading this I kept feeling like it really happened and looking around at everything imagining it being a ghost town and trying to figure out how we would survive. And the thing is--we wouldn't. We totally depend on the food being trucked in to our grocery stores, the police to keep us safe, the doctors and medicines keeping us alive. So it would definitely be better for us to die in the flu pandemic than to try and stay alive afterwards... although I'm just going to operate under the assumption that this will never happen.

There was a lot happening in this book. I feel like I wish there had been more with the graphic novel that the title of the book comes from--I don't totally understand the title or much about that storyline. I feel like Mandel could have made more about that storyline to make it make more sense and fit better with the rest of it. But honestly, the quibbles that I had were small.

I feel like this book is going to stay in my psyche though. It was so well-done and so good, but I almost wish I hadn't read it, because it's going to take a long time for me to stop imagining it and worrying about it.

Navigating Early by Claire Vanderpool

I wasn't super excited about reading this one, because it was written by the same author as Moon Over Manifest and I didn't love that one. But we were reading it for my book club for the month. I almost skipped it altogether, but I read another good review about it, and decided to just go for it--and I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I did Moon Over Manifest, although it took me almost 3/4 of the book for me to really get engaged in the story. I would probably not have stuck with it for that long if it hadn't been for a book club meeting, but I am glad I did, because once I finally got into the story, I enjoyed it. This story requires a little more-than-usual suspension of disbelief--it's almost like a little bit of fantasy mixed in with this fiction story. Like, 1% fantasy, where the story somehow magically follows this story that Early Auden makes up in his head to explain the number pi. I honestly didn't really get the connection to pi in this story, and enjoyed that the least--but I liked the adventure that Early and Jack go on, and how they meet all sorts of people and explore all over. It almost reminded me of the Odyssey, with different adventures happening all along their journey that they had to go through before going home.

I don't know, but maybe the format changed how I experienced this book. I might have liked it better because I was listening to it, and that made me slow down and enjoy it instead of trying to speed through it like I might have while reading it. All in all, I am glad I finished this one.

Hourglass by Dani Shapiro

I've never read anything by Shapiro before, and I don't know anything about her. But this book was a beautiful collection of short tidbits about her life and her marriage and her thoughts and fears and memories with her husband. She contemplates the way that time seems to constrict and change as she gets older, and how she remembers things that happened a long time ago, but how her memories have changed or remained the same, and how her thoughts on marriage and her experience with her marriage have evolved. She is a very deliberate writer, with some beautiful passages and clearly chosen words, and I really loved many of her thoughts. I feel like I could ponder them for a while and get a lot out of them.

I feel like this blog post is WOEFULLY short and terribly unrepresentative of this book, which is beautifully written and really poignant at times. But I am tired and ready for bed, and not feeling like writing something super analytical right now.

The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins

I've read these books at least five times, but I keep coming back to them every few years because they are so addictive, and at this point, they're so easy and mindless for me to read that I can enjoy them without having to work too hard. I read the first one on Thursday night after having a rough day with the kids, because I needed to just relax my brain, and I just finished the third one tonight, so I really powered through them. I don't have anything interesting or profound to say about them except that they were exactly what I needed to read right now. They hit the spot in my reading life this week, after I've been struggling through some slower, more intellectual books lately, and I just needed something fun and fluffy. Soon it'll be Harry Potter...

Daughters in My Kingdom: The History and Work of Relief Society

I read this book before, around when it came out, but maybe I didn't read it all and I'm sure I didn't read it all at once. I decided to read it this time because I just got called into the Relief Society Presidency in my ward, and I wanted to think about the bigger picture. I loved reading about the church history aspects of this book, particularly the chapters after they arrived in Utah and the next century and a half. It was so interesting reading about what the Relief Society sisters did in the years of church history that we don't talk much about... it seems like we only talk about Nauvoo and being pioneers, but once they make it to Utah I hardly know anything about what they did. I liked how they mentioned/discussed all of the past Relief Society presidents, and talked about what Relief Society has done over the years and how it has changed.

I didn't love several of the chapters, especially the one about women in the home. There was a quote about how women are homemakers and specifically talked about how that meant sewing and cleaning, etc... Not exactly the most exciting or empowering of quotes. But I felt like I got the idea out of this book that we need to do more service to get back to our Relief Society roots, and we need to do more with helping people be prepared for emergencies. I also think we need to study more of our past Relief Society leaders' words and thoughts. I hope we are able to do some of these things in our Relief Society.

The Children of Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren

After reading Pippi Longstocking last month, I wanted to revisit this amazing book by Astrid Lindgren with Graham. I read this with Dane before Graham was old enough to listen along to our chapter books, and I wanted him to hear these books too, because they are so cute and sweet and just perfect. I absolutely love these books. It reminds me of Betsy-Tacy and All-of-a-Kind Family and Five Little Peppers and so many perfect classic children's novels; each chapter is a fun little episode where the children explore something, play a game, go somewhere new, and each little story is told so well that the kids listening or reading are just enthralled. This book is different from the rest because it's set in Sweden, so it has the added charm of having traditions and activities that are different and unfamiliar for my kids, but are so fun to read about. Dane and Graham both love this book. I think my favorite chapters in this book might be the Christmas chapters about how they celebrated it there, and the magic of Christmas for all the children in Noisy Village.

The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan

I absolutely loved this audiobook. I felt like I was sucked into Nina's life and couldn't wait to find out what happened next. This book was clearly written for bookish people like Nina, who have all always wished to run a bookstore (every person who loves books has had that fantasy), but it was also set in beautiful rural Scotland, and the setting played a great part in the novel as well. Nina gets let go from her job at a library in Birmingham because they are shutting down the library, and she decides to buy a van and be a bookseller. She ends up having to travel up to northern Scotland to pick it up, and ends up staying there to sell her books. She begins to live life for the first time, instead of just relying on books to live, and she begins to make friends and actually fall in love in real life for the first time. I loved how Nina came out of her shell and bloomed (excuse my mixed metaphors) as the book went on--I felt like her character was one I could relate to (once she stopped being so timid as she gained confidence as the book went on). I loved the setting of rural Scotland, and the blatantly Scottish experiences Nina has (particularly the farmers' dance and the midsummer party) that really made me be able to envision it and made me want to be there so badly. I loved how Nina really contrasted Birmingham and Scotland so well, and showed why she loved it. I could see how some people would hate living there, but I could see how Nina would love it. It fit very well with her personality, and it was such a pleasure to see her succeed and grow. The romance was also great too. I loved it.

My one complaint about this book was that it seemed a little unrealistic that Nina should have such complete success so easily, selling books in this tiny Scottish village. It seemed like she didn't travel around the countryside as much as I'd expect, and she still was selling enough books to get by in just this tiny village. She didn't seem to need to stock up on new books very much--just got a couple sets of books from libraries shutting down, and that was apparently fine to set her up all summer. I felt like there could have been a little more focus on the work of owning the bookshop, since that was the main focus of the first half of the book as she got it set up, but I still hugely enjoyed the story.

Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now--As Told by Those who Love it, Hate it, Live it, Left it, and Long for it by Craig Taylor

Another book I wanted to read before going to England. I feel like most of my imagination of London is about the city as it was in Regency, Victorian, or WWII times. All very different eras, but all eras in which many books about London are set. I've read a bunch of current books set in London too, but I still imagine London in a long-ago sort of way. This book was a really interesting spectrum of perspectives from all sorts of people doing all sorts of things in London, in the current day (this book was published in 2012 or 2013 or something like that, so it is pretty recent). Taylor basically interviewed a huge collection of people and transcribed their interviews into this book. I loved how varied the types of people are who Taylor interviewed, and I loved how they truly spoke in their own words, without much or any interference from anyone else. I love the oral history format (I always think about Listening is an Act of Love and how powerful it is to hear people's stories from themselves) and I love how Taylor managed to organize this huge, varied group of perspectives into a semblance of a story, a portrait of the city as a whole as it is for the people who live there now (or some who have left, as the subtitle says). I obviously am more sheltered than I thought (because I'm still picturing WWII London, obviously) but I was surprised by how many people were talking about how dangerous London is and all of these unsavory parts of the city. Although I guess people would say that about New York as well, if you talked to the wide range of people like Taylor did. I loved hearing about how so many people love it, and why so many people hate it, and I felt like this really did help prepare me for our upcoming trip there.

Pride by Ibi Zoboi

You know I love me some Jane Austen fan fiction, and this one sounded particularly compelling: a retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in the "hood" of Bushwick in Brooklyn. And it totally lived up to the hype. I thought it was so fun, and it was so much more than just a P&P rewrite. Zoboi did not keep all of the storylines from P&P (like the embarrassingly obsessed mom, etc.) and focused more on creating a strong culture and main character. Zuri, the main character, has such a strong voice and a strong personality, and so much pride and love for her family and her neighborhood and her culture. There is so much Dominican and Haitian influence in her story, and I really felt like I was a part of it because of how well Zoboi incorporated the Dominican food and words and dances. I loved Zuri's concern for her block and this place she loves, as she watches it get gentrified and change before her eyes, and how she is so proud of where she comes from. This was particularly good as an audiobook, because the narrator has the perfect accent for all of the Spanish words and Dominican influence, which really helped to bring it all to life for me. I really felt like I could envision their block and their family.

The romance between Zuri and Darius Darcy was not really the most compelling part of this book. There were a few cute parts between them, but honestly, Darius was boring and I couldn't see why she liked him. But Zuri herself, and her poetry, and her aspirations, dreams, and goals (which she talks about multiples times in the book, in that order) of going to Howard and coming back to help her hometown, was worth reading this book for.

Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

Jane Eyre is not one of my favorite books. I've read it several times (although not in the last eight years, since I've kept track of my reading), and I've never enjoyed it. I just don't get the attraction of Mr. Rochester, and I don't love Jane's totally boring personality. Plus, he's creepily older than her and I feel like it's just gross. I'm sure millions of people want to kill me right now.

This book is basically nothing like Jane Eyre, except that it uses it as an inspiration, and adds the element of Jane actually being a serial killer, which improves the interest level of this book times a million. I liked this Jane, who is convinced she is evil and just keeps killing people (only despicable, terrible people who deserve to die and have hurt her or her friends). I read some reviews on Goodreads, and a lot of people complained that the story dropped off after Jane went to be a governess at Mr. Thornfield's house (different name), but I thought it was still really interesting and fun with all the changes that she made, like Mr. Thornfield being a Sikh with his Sikh best friend and household, and I loved that it was almost like a mystery, where Jane is trying to figure out who killed someone and where a missing trunk full of jewels was, in addition to being a romance and a thriller.  I loved how much drama and excitement there was in this story, and I actually didn't mind the romance between Jane and her employer like it's always bothered me in Jane Eyre. The only thing I didn't love about this book was that there were a few parts that were a little too vulgar for me (which probably outs me as being kind of picky about that, because it wasn't like there was a lot of actual sex in the novel but there were a few pornographic letters which Jane read and were included (which were written by one of the people she had to kill) and a few other instance of Jane dreaming about sex, etc.). Other than those parts, this book was really fun for me. I would not hesitate to recommend this to anyone with the caveat of being aware of some of the more vulgar parts.

On Becoming a Disciple-Scholar, edited by Henry B. Eyring

I have to be honest, I only read this book because it was sitting on our shelf, and I'm trying to read through some of the religious books on our shelves that I've never read. This is one that Tommy brought to our marriage, and he says he'd never read it either. And once I started reading it, and realized it's just a collection of talks given at BYU to the Honors students in the years of 1994 and 1995, I thought, well, we mayyyy not end up keeping this one. It was very meaningful and had a lot of good things, however. Elder Neal A. Maxwell's talk about discipleship and scholarship was particularly good, about how there are different levels of truth and how we don't need to distinguish between faith and scholarship. The other one I really enjoyed was about Elder James E. Talmage and his experience with writing Jesus the Christ, and his many qualities that allowed him to succeed at that (not giving up, not being distracted by worrying about what others thought of him, etc.). One of the themes that stuck out in this book is that humility and meekness are hugely important qualities for a scholar--going along with the scriptures cautioning people for not thinking they are too wise. I loved these men, who all have highly important callings (and could in other realms be ambitious or think highly of their own situation), reinforcing the importance of humility and showing how much they have thought about and value those qualities. It was definitely a good read, but not the most engaging of books to sit and read straight through.

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter

I read this one for our family book club, and it definitely made me think. I don't know that it was exactly earth-shattering, but it definitely got me thinking about how I use technology. I honestly think I spend too much time on my phone, and I think I pick it up too often. Even if I put it down pretty quickly, I still check my phone all. the. time. I think I need to get a watch so that I don't have the excuse to be touching my phone so much. I loved how at the beginning it talked about how so many tech leaders refuse to let their children use most of the technologies they are selling, and how they personally recognize the capabilities to overuse and be too reliant on technology. He pretty much is writing about how there is no such thing as an addictive personality, but there are circumstances in which anyone can become addicted to things, and people working in these technologies have worked to adapt their technologies to take advantage of these addictive tendencies to make us more addicted. Wow, that is the most convoluted sentence I could possibly write, but I am too lazy to go back and rewrite that right now. The things they use to make us addicted to them are feedback, progress, escalation, cliffhangers, and social interaction, and he writes about each of those things in turn and gives interesting examples of how they work in our social media and video games and Netflix shows these days. I think there's something to his ideas, and I think there's a lot we could all do to be better. I try really hard to not waste time on my phone with my kids around, but I want to be better about just not checking it at all.