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.