ktrain3900's reviews
274 reviews

Lolly Willowes, Or, The Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner

adventurous hopeful lighthearted mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

What a delightfully strange little book! Lolly (or Laura) is a dutiful daughter, a caring aunt, a bored spinster, a kind soul, a bit of a flake, and overall a captivating character whose observations and random findings contain unexpected wit and (occasionally) wisdom.  Sure the tome's prone to some of the datedness that happens after such a time (I'm reading it 99 years after its first publication) but the writing is mostly crisp, the story is fascinating, and, while I wouldn't have minded less Part 1 and more Parts 2 and 3, the resolution is earned.

Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks by Crystal Wilkinson

emotional informative inspiring reflective relaxing sad medium-paced

5.0

This may be the loveliest, frankest book I've ever read. Part memoir, part family cookbook, part lyric photo essay, Wilkinson celebrates her Black Appalachian history, her ancestors (especially the grandparents--the grandmother--who raised her), her children and future generations, and most of all the food they share and have shared as an act of love, from enslavement to freedom, from poverty to plenty. To read this is to receive a powerful hug, to curl up in a warm, handmade blanket, and to feel wholly nourished. It's emotional, deeply personal, and beautiful. Even if you're a terrible cook like me, you'll find sustenance and calm in these pages. Pure hygge. 

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman

challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.5

I love this type of memoir, one that is knowledgable and vulnerable and conversational, and that doesn't come to any easy answers. How does one write an absence? How does anyone answer a question that can't even quite be asked, at least not asked of those who are here to answer? There's a risk to this sort of writing because it's never going to present a neat package, or a tidy moral, or clear lines, even when it would seem to be subject matter that should divide cleanly between good and bad, winners and losers. I particularly enjoyed the variety of the writing from chapter to chapter, moving between travel journal, speculative fictions, interviews, histories. This is an uneasy, profound, and personal accounting 

Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard

funny informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.0

To echo other readers, I only wish this were longer. The two lectures that make up this unapologetic, intriguing, and sleekly concise book address the public voice and power of women. For a manifesto it does what it should: it declares the aim of changing the structures of public authority and power to be more inclusive of women. However, there's so much more that could be delved into and there are so many more interesting connections that could be made to classical art, literature, rhetoric, politics, and so forth. Such exploration could widen our understanding of Western history and current world cultures & societies, and could potentially even mark a path to solving why inclusive, positive change often feels too gradual and even backwards for anyone outside of the traditional white male/masculine power structure. 

Toad by Katherine Dunn

adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

The writing is exquisite. That is the pre-eminent thing to mention. The details, the imagery is grotesque, but often in the best way. The characters? Well, if you like yelling at pretty much all of the characters as you read, you will love this book. And I don't mind some reproach in my reading, but I guess despite my love of a good flawed character, the apple can't be rotten the whole way through. Maybe in our current moment I need fiction that feels a tiny bit escapist? Maybe it's the hippie aesthetic that doesn't work for me? (I recently read Drop City and felt much the same about those characters.) This is a good book, very good even, but woof if I'm not glad to leave every single persona I encountered here.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Suicide attempt

Minor: Child death, Drug use, Mental illness, Self harm

Shakespeare and Company, New Edition by Sylvia Beach

adventurous funny informative lighthearted fast-paced

3.0

Charmingly snooty, written in a delightful conversational manner. Certainly this is an important historical record of the American ex-pat community in the Paris of the 1920s, as well as of the publication of Ulysses. At times I lost patience with Beach's patience with the quote/unquote great men of letters. Unapologetically bohemian, bordering perhaps even on bougie, reading this at times felt like a frivolous pursuit. But I suppose even in the current historical moment, one needs both the lighthearted highs and distressing lows of the past. 

Ghosts by Edith Wharton

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.0

Fair warning: I've probably read more Wharton than any other author. Her writing is nuanced, witty, intricate, and equally agile with a male or female narrator, and this book is no exception. Her own introduction might be the weakest part of this collection, with her mourning of the loss of the old-fashioned ghost tale fortunately a bit premature. These stories are not jump out of your seat thrillers but subtle creepers, threaded with chills, subterfuge, and such finely wrought minute details that the occasional flipback to reread something is warranted. While you can't avoid some dated language, I find Wharton less problematic than most for this. Her work remains interesting and accessible to the 21st century reader, and I recommend this book to fans of scary stories and high literature alike. 

Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage by Rachel E. Gross

challenging funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

4.5

I kinda wanted to do a short pithy review like "I laughed, I cried, I learned something" but it was more than that. Sure, I did laugh in parts (I even LOLed), and in other places tears came to my eyes if I didn't exactly cry. And I did learn quite a bit, more about what doctors and scientists have done and are continuing to do to improve life for those of us who have "the organs traditionally bound up in baby-making" (from the back cover) than actual anatomy. This book was a wild ride through both the current and historical science of woefully and frequently ignored parts of the body as well as through the body itself, and history, and current events. There's a fine balance of fact and personal experience, only missing some nice, sciency diagrams which I agree with other readers would have been a real benefit to my full understanding.

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Content Warnings

Minor: Misogyny, Racism, Transphobia, Medical trauma, Dysphoria

All the content that I noted warnings for can't really be avoided given the subject matter and I felt like they were handled as delicately as one could.

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Due chooses to tell an important and difficult tale, and does so with expert control of word, line, pace, character, and plot. I don't feel I can write a review that would say anything that another review hasn't already said. This book is heartbreaking and heartwarming, haunting and horrifying, maddening and moving, invigorating and powerful, vital and totally alive. It's a breath of life and a punch in the gut and an engrossing page-turner, everything one might want from historical fiction. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Racial slurs, Racism

Moderate: Child death, Forced institutionalization, Murder

Minor: Animal death, Bullying, Cancer, Pedophilia, Rape, Sexual assault, Death of parent, Fire/Fire injury

While there are a lot of triggering elements to the book, I found them handled really well by the author, never gratuitous, and necessary to tell an important story.

My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit

challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

A beautifully written if overlong personal history that could but ultimately is unlikely to persuade many to change their minds. Israel, and Zionism, are difficult for a lot of folks, myself included. They're more complicated and less monolithic than I'd previously thought, yet I'm more pessimistic than ever that there's any resolution or peace to be found for all parties after reading this book (especially when you consider what's happened in the past year and a half or so). A heartbreaking patriotic love story for one's imperfect country, particularly in light of its unheeded albeit somewhat broad warnings.