luisvilla's reviews
1002 reviews

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

dark emotional sad

This starts off delightful and then takes a darker turn. I enjoyed it but will ponder its messages of love and loss for some time.

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 by Milton Mayer
Did not finish book. Stopped at 30%.

The lessons were too obvious and grim, so when the library wanted it back I did not say no.
.

Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power by Timothy W. Ryback
Did not finish book. Stopped at 50%.

This was not *bad* but it was not what I wanted - less a theory of why, more a blow-by-blow of what happened. That is probably fine for many readers but not what I was interested in.

The Armored Saint by Myke Cole

2.0

On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis

challenging medium-paced

A thoroughly banal book.

The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times by Adrienne Mayor

Delightful piecing together of evidence from a variety of fields to build a story of how the ancients collected and tried to understand fossil bones. 

The Iliad by Homer
Did not finish book. Stopped at 50%.

Loved her translation of the Odyssey but found this tedious.

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

4.0

Powerful.

Eric by Terry Pratchett

2.5

Teenage me would have loved these and I wish I had discovered them then.

Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche by John Higgs

This book would have been a lot better with more effective with more emphasis on British and less on psyche. The pop psychology parts are pretty wretched, and the parts about the interaction of the B+B with British culture and history are often great. (And so much great trivia too.)