Books

Book 984: Two for Trust – Elle Brownlee

Book cover for "Two for Trust" with Amazon Affiliate linkI’m not going to spend a lot of time on this review. You can go back and read my original from May 2020. I decided to re-read this to see if it held up for me and it really did.

More “issues” arose this time around with some stilted dialogue and weird time jumps, but those didn’t detract from my sheer joy at reading it. It’s a tame and totally adorable romance with a little bit of external drama to really make Finch and Benedict get their shit together.

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Books

Book 977: Don’t Think of an Elephant! – George Lakoff

Book cover of "Don't Think of an Elephant!" with Amazon Affiliate linkI had to read this for a communications course earlier this fall and when I read it I blazed through it very quickly and knew I wanted to revisit it as soon as the semester was done. So I left it as “reading” in my Goodreads for over a month and finally got around to re-reading it and genuinely absorbing it.

I’m glad I re-read it, some of it was pretty obvious and some of it clearly explained things like why “climate change” is the predominant word of choice instead of “global warming.” My professor said that many of his students said they can’t watch the news anymore after reading this, and while I can still watch it I’m much more aware of the framing and terminology newscasters/journalists use than before.

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Books

Book 911: The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison

Book cover of "The Bluest Eye" with Amazon Affiliate linkToni Morrison is one of those authors who have always been on my list, mostly due to the controversy around their books (stupid book banners), but I’ve never gotten around to reading them. Both The Bluest Eye and Beloved were on my The Classics Club list I created back in 2012 and I picked up physical copies sometime after that.

When Morrison passed in 2019, I told myself I would read her works and it took me this long to get to them thanks to always being distracted and just not making an effort. Both are relatively short so ended up on my Rando Book Selector spreadsheet using randomly generated titles from roughly 60 books to slowly chip away at my TBR pile and The Bluest Eye came up as I was planning for a recent vacation and here we are.

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Books

Book 885: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

Book cover of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" with Amazon Affiliate link Ugh—I should’ve given up while I was ahead, or used the same app I used to slog my way through Ulysses. This was the longest 215 pages of my life.

I actually broke down for the last chapter and found an audiobook version from my local library to listen to at 1.25x speed while sorting data and stuff at work. So, at the very least I can say I enjoyed the Irish accents for that portion of it and the Whaley last name shout out about 75% of the way through 😀

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Books

Book 861: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? – Jeanette Winterson

Book cover of "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" with Amazon Affiliate linkI picked this book up way back in November 2014 because I’d been hearing great things about it and remembered enjoying Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in undergrad (and still languishing on my TBR shelf).

I only read this at this moment in time because a few months ago I created a spreadsheet of all the books on my TBR shelf that were under 250 pages that randomly spits out a book title so when I had a bit of a gap or wanted to actually make progress on my shelves I had an easy tool to select a book.

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