Books

Book 650: We Are Lost And Found – Helene Dunbar

This was an achingly beautiful book and I’m glad I stumbled across it after I saw someone else had read it. I can’t find the blog where I first read about it, but if it’s you let me know and I’ll add a link to your review! It took a while for my local library to get it, but because it’s a sleeper/quite book I was able to keep it for two check out periods and actually absorb it.

Set in NYC in the early-1980s We are Lost and Found takes a look at one teen’s coming out and coming of age (sort of—it’s only a year) as the AIDS crisis begins to unfold. There were some parts that I wasn’t a fan of (hello to my old nemesis, no quotation marks) and for some reason Part 2 really dragged for me—it took me two weeks to read that portion, but Parts 1 and 3 I read at a lightning pace.

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Books

Book 635: Severance – Ling Ma

I’ve been digesting this one for a little over a week as I write this (it’s posting much later than that). I very much enjoyed the work, but I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

The story follows first generation immigrant Candace Chen after an apocalyptic virus has decimated the human population creating habit zombies. You loose all higher function and go about doing a habit/routine until you die. The problems that Candace faces (and even creates in some occasions) are uniquely urban and (predominantly) millennial.

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ARC, Books

Book 633: When Brooklyn Was Queer – Hugh Ryan

I’m split on this one. It was better than I thought it was going to be, but not as good as I wanted it to be. I find it very hard for any book to really and truly dig deep into LGBTQ+ history satisfactorily, they’re always scrounging for resources or materials and there are always more questions than there are answers. I reached out to the publisher after I stumbled across this on an LGBT news blog.*

There were times in the book where I kept asking myself, is this really Brooklyn or is it Brooklyn-adjacent or is it “this probably happened” in Brooklyn too (there was quite a bit of this). Ryan was open about there being a lack of primary resources, but I felt that it wasn’t as acknowledged as much as it should’ve been in the introduction and left more to a footnote of the epilogue.
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Books

Book 615: Pride – Ibi Zoboi

It took a lot of effort not to read the Goodreads comments on this one. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, but I knew I would get mad after I read the first one and it legit said “this is nothing like Pride and Prejudice, but maybe I’m wrong because I haven’t read it in a while.”

Don’t get me wrong, there are major deviations from Pride and Prejudice, but how could there not be. The OG is set in 1797, this is set in modern day Brooklyn (Bushwick, specifically). The OG is about decently rich (aka they own land and make money from others, but poor compared to the really rich) British family and their neighborhood and this is about poor Haitin-Dominican family and their neighborhood. OF COURSE THERE ARE GOING TO BE DIFFERENCES.

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Updates

January Recap 2019

This was actually a nice normal month. It didn’t feel like it flew by and it didn’t feel like it dragged either. Maybe this means I’ve started to find equilibrium in life?

We started off the month with a Macaroon class at our local Sur La Table and I was very impressed with our product. I can’t wait to try at home now I know basically everything we could do wrong we did last time we tried.

Books and Bookish Things
I finally finished the tome that is Adam Tooze’s Crashed. I started it back in November and slowly worked my way through the last decade of world politics, financial news, and their interconnectedness. After that I basically moved into the library with the next five books on my list all coming in from being on hold or my grabbing them when I went to pick up the others 😀

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