The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron

Lucky is a thoughtful 10 year old girl that has seen a lot of tragedy in her short life. Her mother died two years ago and she has a father who sends money has never had the urge to meet her. Lucky's guardian is Brigitte, her father's other ex-wife, and Lucky is scared that one day she'll have enough of life in their tiny desert town and move back to Paris.

Besides Lucky's rough life, she lives in a unique place. Hard Pan is a desert town in California, population: 43. There are windstorms, snakes hiding in the dryer and inedible government cheese. Lucky's best friend is obsessed with tying knots and the only other kid in town (it seems) is another abandoned child--a 5-year-old neighbor that alternately annoys and entertains Lucky.

This was decent. I agree with the opinion that better books have won the Newbery. It was sweet and comforting. Books about abandoned kids, for kids, tend to be.

Appetites: Why Women Want by Caroline Knapp

Ever since I first discovered Caroline Knapp I've enjoyed reading anything she's written. This is a book that is basically her anorexia memoir, but it's more like an set of essays or reflective pieces about her experience with anorexia and her thoughts about the larger issue of physical and emotional appetites and how women indulge or deny them.

I thought this was a lot different than anything else I've ever read about anorexia or eating disorders. Knapp was struggling with anorexia in the early 80s and has a lot to say about how the political and social climate in the US at that time influenced her life back then. It was a time when feminism was seeing a backlash after it's huge heyday in the 60s and 70s. At this time, in the 80s, women were told that they could have it all, think big, be ambitious. Feminism had ostensibly leveled the playing field, but insidious undercurrents were there. While women were supposed to get bigger and bigger in their careers and ambitions, there was an enormous cultural push for women to be smaller and smaller physically. Inordinate worth was placed upon a woman's ability to be thin.

The book gives a lot to think about. Knapp does not propose that the main cause of anorexia is society's skewed views of women's bodies. To her this is a huge influence, but not the be all end all reason. At the heart of her compulsion to starve was a complex tangle of feelings about being a young woman, unsure of what she was supposed to do with her life, of how to realize all these new dreams that were open to women. Knapp proposes that women never really gained the freedom to acknowledge, experience, pursue, and understand their appetites fully. The push from society is to repress the appetite, to make yourself smaller. The concept of appetites is broadly framed. She addresses hunger for food, for sexual pleasure, for love from family and partners, for career advancement and professional success. She suggests that some women suffer from eating disorders, compulsive shopping, cutting, and other issues because of our problematic relationships to our own appetites in all these areas. Society does not truly support women being hungry for these things and so we find outlets that help us to repress or deflect our appetites we feel we're not supposed to have--we overeat, we starve, we purge, we cut, we steal, we drink. All to help us not feel the giant hunger for love and recognition as equals that is yet unfulfilled.

I really think this book was worth reading. You can read it quickly and feel like you're just rushing through it, but the ideas she puts forth really stuck with me.

Will Grayson Will Grayson by John Green & David Levithan

I really liked this A LOT. I thought that it was a lot better than the other 2 John Green books I've read--Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines. I think I liked it about as much as David Levithan's other stuff. I thought the ending really went off the deep end, cheese wise, but since I liked everything up to then so much it was that offputting.

The story is about two teenagers in Chicago, both named Will Grayson. The story is told through both of their points of view in alternative chapters. The first Will Grayson is fairly affluent, straight but pretty reserved. His best friend is a ginormous gay man with a ginormous personality named Tiny Cooper that frequently overshadows Will in complicated ways. The second Will Grayson is not out yet gay man who is on medication for depression. He lives with his single mother, they don't have much money, and his dad is out of the picture for reasons never fully explained, but we assume he just left. The two of them meet through a weird coincidence in a porn store, and for a time their lives overlap.

I really liked the way that although romance was a big part of the book, we ultimately come to realize that it's not the main conflict in either boy's life. Straight Will's main issues are not with his girlfriend but with his best friend Tiny, and gay Will's main conflict is not with his boyfriend Tiny but with himself and his depression.

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

This book took me a long time to read, but I think it was worth it. I really liked this book and I think it helped me to think about things from a new perspective. It's weird to try to approach something like European colonization of other continents without any moral judgments. But when you step back as far as this book does, all the way back to viewing all of human history from the very beginning of the species, it seems ok. Societies that have denser populations, more technology, and more bureaucracy have conquered or absorbed other societies several or many times before the Europeans did so beginning with Columbus. People from Taiwan spread out to populate and displace other populations in much of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Farmers from Cameroon spread and displaced other people southwards in Africa. And the reasons that these societies had the characteristics that allowed them to conquer and displace others is due to geography and environment, ultimately. It makes you think, what will people be thinking about us in 10,000 years?

The Ill-Made Mute by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

I thought this book was super frustrating. I was really excited to read it based on the description of it and it started out well. There are soooo many amazing elements in this book:

• Winged, flying horses that walk on the clouds with the help of these cool magnetic-y horseshoes.
• Ditto -magnetic-y pirate ships that fly through the air.
• the protagonist is a mute foundling, face scarred beyond recognition with no memory of how he/she came to be this way, no memory of the past.
• he/she was raised as a boy, only to discover early on in the book that she is in fact a girl.
  
• these crazy, awesome "unstorms" where some kind of magnetic or electric disturbances cause people to feel either extreme fear or extreme elation. Crazy things happen during unstorms -- pictures of scenes long past appear in mid-air, psychedelic colors whirl around the forest...
  
• Wights. The entire wilderness of this world is populated by mythical creatures that run from helpful to mischievous to truly dangerous.

What's really frustrating is that with all these amazing and interesting elements, none of them is ever treated with any depth. Early on we learn that the foundling has a strange talent for calming the eotaurs (the winged horses). Do we ever hear of this again? Nope. Just an interesting, unrelated fact. When the heroine discovers she is in fact a she, one might think this would be a huge revelation? Perhaps it would be explored? Nope. She thinks about it for a page or so and then just kind of starts wearing dresses. And the wights -- oh my god -- the fricking wights! At first it's cool, these wights are interesting supernatural creatures, but there are soooooo many of them. The structure of this book is as follows:

1. a little bit of the main plot happens on a page or two
2. wade through 10 pages of random adventures with wights that don't relate to the main plot.
3. Repeat.
4. almost ready to throw the book down from boredom...
5. a little bit of information on the plot or characters, sucked back in!
6. 50 pages of random wights.
7. Repeat, repeat....
8. Fabio appears. Literally. The main character's love interest is Fabio, complete with neverending descriptions of his flowing, glinting hair (I'm not kidding) and a spirit animal (a hawk) that is his traveling companion.
9. More fricking wights.
10. One page of resolution and a cliff-hanger.
    

I mean, I liked the main plot a lot, maybe I'll try to read the next book in the trilogy at some point, because I really do want to know what happens next and to find out the answers to the main character's mysterious past. But don't start reading this if you don't want be really bored 90% of the time.

Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss

This is a classic for me. King Yertle is quite the expressive anti-hero, commanding his subjects to become a living throne for him. Soon he even yells at the moon, just like Buzz Aldrin and Liz Lemon. Mack's burp is like the butterfly flapping it's wings across the world and then...Yertle is King of the Mud and Poof! Instant Democracy! It's a timeless tale.

The second story is that of Gertrude McFuzz. She is a girl bird so of course the conflict in this story has to do with being pretty and vanity. Gertrude gets hers, but she's happy in the end. It's all good. As a kid, I never noticed that funny part where the female character is in a story like this, while all the others are of course assumed to be dudes. Oh well.

The last story is The Big Brag, where a bear and a rabbit are put in their place by a snarky worm. I liked this one too, but I think Yertle is still the best.

I can't help it, but I love poems that rhyme, so Dr. Seuss will always be tip-top in my book.

Guardians of Ga'Hoole Book 1: The Capture by Kathryn Lasky

This is the first book in the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series. It's all about OWLS! Soren is a barn owl who is kidnapped from his nest in the first few weeks of his life. He's taken to a strange place, a colony of owls hidden deep in a canyon. The owls hardly seem like owls. They have been cut off from everything that owls love, like the moon, the sky, and the hope of flying free. They eat strange foods and do strange things. Soren and his new friend Gylfie know that something evil is going on and that they have to escape. But first they'll have to do something they've never done before--fly. Can they learn without parents to help them? Will they be able to escape? Or will they fail in their first flight and be put so deep in the canyon that they'll never be free?

This book is a little like Watership Down with owls. But not nearly so enthralling. I'll probably pick up the next one, but I didn't love it so much that I'd commit to the whole series.