Really beautiful and intricate storytelling in only 100 pages! I wish it was longer. Loved the setting and the characters and the way the author unwrapped the story. Can‘t wait to read more by her.

This one was so fun! Really hilarious, engagingly written, and did so well bringing Ancient Rome to life. Highly recommend!

“I know,” Gregory said amiably. “My tutors have imbued me with it, from my earliest days. Do not talk about severed heads at a wedding.”
Forgot how much (dark) humor Hilary Mantel injects into these books! 😂

This one was really fun! Quite different than I expected, but a cool mix of folk tale and sci fi. Also mostly light and (possibly tried to hard to be) funny, which is much needed these days!

Was not at all impressed with the mystery or drawn in by the characters, but I did appreciate the setting in Malaysia and learning more about the dual court system there.

Wow, this one was beautifully written, captured the voice of a child so well, and tackled a devastating topic around children from the slums who go missing in India. Read it in a weekend, which does not happen very often for me any more. Highly recommend.

Thanks for the tag, @NeedsMoreBooks

- How I'm feeling: honestly, pretty anxious about a global pandemic and whether the US is doing enough to stop the spread (pretty sure it is not). Also really sad that it seems to be every country for itself vs a coordinated effort by all.

What do I read: just the act of reading helps :) about to start the tagged book

Best thing: hanging out with my niece and nephew! 🥰

@MoonWitch94 #thoughtfulthursday

This was a nice read about women working in silk factories in China in the 1920s and 1930s. I appreciated reading about all the very different types of lives the women had before coming to the silk business, but felt the lack of depth in character development. The book was more a series of vignettes vs a strong plot and story, which was nice but not as impactful as I wanted.

Such a beautiful story about an Iranian girl growing up during tumultuous times - coming of age, coming out, and coming to terms with her family‘s and her country‘s past.

Really enjoyed this one and the author‘s awakening to her own biases. So eye-opening and an excellent work to understand the impact America has on the world and other people.

Really enjoyed this one! Has pretty strong world building for a novella, and the setting in an alternate 1912 Cairo, in a world on the cusp of social change, is so fascinating. Also enjoyed the mystery aspect and the way Egyptian culture was deeply woven into the magic and story. I hope there is more to come in this world!

I loved every other book in this series but just could NOT get into this one. Most of the plot seems to take place in an immersive RPG, and I was not really into that. Loved every other book in the series, though!

This was excellent and sweeping! Loved hearing american history from a different perspective, and so inspiring for all the work to do. Recommend reading this with the 1619 Project, they complement each other very well. And for another lens on american history, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is great!

Ooh, a fantasy heist novel! I was excited to read this one because the GoodReads reviews are ON FIRE. It was a pretty enjoyable read, though it dragged in the middle for me. Also, the main characters are all supposed to be 17, but they don‘t act that age at all - I just pretended they were 10-15 years older, and they made much more sense. Ends on a cliffhanger - luckily, I have the second book.

So hard to rate this one as it felt like two different books. The first part, with a competition and hidden identity and jealousy and such, was really good and held my interest! But the second part felt like a completely different book (kind of like The Poppy War), with most characters disappearing and a romance taking center stage. It dragged for me, and the character development mostly stopped. I will read the sequel, but am not antsy for it

I am 300 pages into this one and losing steam (with another 600 pages to go!) I feel like I should be far more moved by some of these character deaths and these tense scenes, but I really am not. For those who enjoyed it - did you love it the whole way through, or was there a tipping point? For those who didn‘t enjoy it - do you feel the same way? Did it improve at all?

I am completely devouring this series! And Before Mars is my favorite of the three I have read to-date. Such an excellent story about how women are often made to doubt themselves and their experiences, and about the conflicting feelings around marriage, parenthood, and so much more. So good!

Enjoyed learning more about O‘Connor, but this was lighter than I wanted. It didn‘t really give details or depths to major decisions she made, and spent more time on her private life than I expected. For a more detailed review, see my post on IG, handle aartireadsalot

It is probably unfair to compare this author to Attica Locke, but I LOVE Locke‘s stories set in the rural Deep South, and it is hard for other authors to match her. I listened to this on audio, and it was so good at setting the scene, but the story was not quite there for me - too many POVs in the telling, I never felt like I knew the characters well enough to care a lot about them.

Wow, this book packs a punch. The author described it as a “comedy of good intentions,” and that describes it very well. A 20-something black woman babysits for a well-to-do white family and starts dating a white guy, and it seems like everyone wants to prove to her just how woke and down-to-earth they are. She just wants to figure out her life and spend time with her (pretty awesome) friends. The satire is on-point - really enjoyed the audio!

Wow, this book is like a punch in the gut. Emma Newman is a real master at portraying characters who are still dealing with the aftershocks of trauma, and in showing how trauma can keep coming back to you. The technology and environment in this was so well-developed, and the mystery very well-plotted. Similar to the first book in the series, the ending seemed to come out of nowhere. But definitely plan to read more in Planetfall!

I enjoyed most of this book. Appreciated that the protagonist was a 70-year-old biracial, bisexual woman - so rare to see older women as the lead in stories! I also think the author did a really nice job of bringing anxiety to life. Wasn‘t a huge fan of the ending, but looking forward to reading more by Newman.

Truly enjoyed this memoir about Bharara‘s time as a federal prosecutor and what justice means to him. He is so thoughtful in sharing the thought process behind his own actions and the consequences they had and detailing some cases that stood out to him.
I loved the way he finished the book with a story about forgiveness and the hope and wisdom that people can have and the strength and spirit we bring to the practice of law.

Loved this book!! Was not sure I would enjoy the writing style, which has limited punctuation, but once I got in the flow, I loved its poetry. Such a celebration of the diversity of experiences we all have in life, and of seeing others as they want to be seen.

♥️ inclusivity

That feeling when you finished a really good book today but won‘t get your massive library haul until tomorrow, and you know you should not start a new book now but you also don‘t know what else to do so you look for the shortest books on your bookshelf and realize you read them all before because this is not the first time you have been in this situation.

Read the whole trilogy in a very short time and will likely now have a book hangover. I think the first book was my favorite, I didn‘t love the third book nearly so much, though I think it was much more mature and reflective. This series, above all, is about loneliness and finding your people. And realizing m your people are not always who you would expect them to be and are not always deserving of your love, but having hope for them, anyway.

Key takeaway for me was that the America was extremely fragile at the start, and there was no great belief that it would succeed, but it did. America came into being DESPITE massive differences of opinion. once everyone came together & compromised, they went to their corners and started vilifying each other. This country has been on the brink before and it will be on the brink again, but it is only as strong as its informed and active citizens.

While reading reviews for The Ten Thousand Doors of January, this series was mentioned a lot because it is also fantasy about different worlds accessed through doors and portals. I read this one and part of the sequel/prequel on audiobook, though, and just wasn‘t drawn in or entranced by the characters or the story or the worlds. I think I‘ll give up on these and move onto other fantasy novels!

This is one of those books I purchased on the recommendation of a friend and then allowed to languish on the shelf for years. To be honest, I picked it because I wanted something short. This was weightier than expected, with surprising but amazing commentary on women‘s roles in the late Victorian era. George Gissing was a feminist who thought deeply about the roles and restrictions his world offered and wrote a compelling and empathetic novel.

Never had it occurred to Widdowsdon that a wife remained an individual, with rights and obligations independent of her widely condition. Everything he said presupposed his own supremacy; he took for granted that it was his to direct, hers to be guided. A display of energy, purpose, ambition, on Monica‘s part, which had no reference to domestic pursuits, would have gravely troubled him.

Found this one disappointing. It is about Shirin, a Muslim-American girl trying to get through high school in a very racist town in the year after 9/11. But it is mostly an angsty YA romance novel, and one in which the (white athletic) guy‘s feelings and experiences seem to be explored far more than the (hijab-wearing minority) girl‘s.

This does an excellent job of shifting perspective on American history, putting Native Americans at the center and changing the way we view America itself and how inevitable the whole takeover of the continent feels to us today. What I ❤️: Treuer makes clear that Native Americans were not passive victims, but that they have used (and continue to use) every available resource to fight for their rights.

I enjoyed this book far more than I expected! I went into it thinking it would be a pretty light young adult fantasy about a girl growing up and discovering herself along with new worlds. And it is that, but it also explores the impacts of colonialism and racism, how love can inspire and hurt, and the deep and powerful nature of words and books. I really enjoyed the story and all the characters. It was an excellent fantasy winter escape.

Just bought this behemoth because winter is my season for epic fantasy reads! Though I admit that the size of this one does intimidate me (it‘s even longer than the Hamilton biography! 😱) That said, I love that the whole story is in one book - often hard to find in fantasy!

Hoping to finish Alexander Hamilton and read this “gentrification horror” comic book set in Chicago before the end of the year! #wintergames #merryreaders

Listening to this while I cook and clean. An interesting mix of personal histories beside bigger picture histories. I am enjoying it but probably not ideal for audiobook, at least for me.

And because parties were frightening new phenomena, they could be easily mistaken for evil conspiracies, lending a paranoid tinge to political discourse. The Federalists saw themselves as saving America from anarchy while Republicans believed they were rescuing America from counterrevolution. Each side possessed a lurid, distorted view of the other, buttressed by an idealized sense of itself.