by Nicola Griffith

Hard to follow. But an impressive piece of work. Felt very true to 7th century. The only anachronism that jumped out at me was mention of a ‘mosquito’ (preferable would have been ‘midge’ or ‘gnat’). The concept of “gemaecce”, two women in a formalized friendship, had me searching the internet, and led me to the author’s blog. Her tiny author bio, and the book’s appendix, had already given a glimpse of her personality and voice – she seems super fun and clever.

by Hannah Stowe

A nice book about my favorite book topic: a woman doing stuff. Something like the Bechdel test, I have a little test: whether it be fiction or non-fiction, I want a book about a woman doing stuff a) not related to a boyfriend or husband, nor related to finding a boyfriend or husband; b) not related to having a baby, having had a baby, nor wanting to have a baby; and c) not related to having been a baby. Preferably the woman should be partnerless and childless, although these aren’t deal-breakers as long as she shuts up about it. In a nutshell, not about relationships. Just about a woman doing stuff.

Oh! So, the book. In this case, the woman Goes to Sea. She hires herself out on boats, and learns about whales and albatrosses. She suffers a terrible surfing injury, and mostly recovers.

The author grew up on the Welsh seashore. There is no author photo on the very charmingly designed hardcover. However I discovered a black-and-white photo hidden on the last page. She’s beautiful, and now lives in Dresden, Germany, where she paints (art), and sails her own boat.

Sing huzzah for the life of a woman.

by Dwight Garner

“On Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating, & Eating While Reading.” Shut up and take my money! This book was so awesome – eating and reading in one place, by someone who truly savors both. “I go to bed thinking about what’s for breakfast.” OMG, I’d be ashamed to agree if I weren’t emboldened by him putting it in print; it’s often the only thing that motivates me to get up off the couch and go to bed (“Only 8 hours till oatmeal…”).

“People who grow up with too much good taste miss out. They don’t get to make discoveries on their own.” Yes, this was why I warmed to Dwight Garner and not to his wife, who was groomed from birth to prefer Annie’s macaroni & cheese to Kraft.

Those were quotes from him; a huge proportion of the book, though, is given over to quotations by others. He is a voracious reader, after all.

He divides his book into sections – “Breakfast, “Lunch,” a few interludes, and “Dinner.” I was nearing the end when I started to realize there would be no dessert. Indeed he admits to having no sweet tooth, and I struggled to think of a single place in the book I had read anything about something sweet. I part company here with the author. I do not understand people who have no interest in dessert – as he and I would agree that we feel like a different species from those who have no particular interest in food. Dessert is the BEST food. Other foods WISH they were dessert. It’s overwhelmingly men who don’t care for dessert; I’ve always wondered if it was just a matter of feeling too unmanly if you admitted, yes, you want some damn creme brulee.

(Yes, so it’s come to this – I picked up a book on menopause.)

This was a disappointment. I thought that “Mayo Clinic” would indicate something of more heft. I want to know why I am getting headaches. I want to know how estrogen affects the vascular system. What about the effects of long-term oral contraceptive use on menopause?

Instead, it’s mostly a 3000-foot view of things that might be happening to you, but little “why” or “how.” Lots of stuff about aging in general that you might find in a throwaway newspaper advice column. An entire weight loss chapter with things I’m sure you NEVER thought of, like eating more fiber and avoiding sugary drinks. For this I bought a book by the Mayo Clinic.

by Zeke Faux

I enjoyed it. It was a nice counterpoint to Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite – some of the details are identical, right down to the chickpea korma SBF apparently liked for lunch. But SBF wasn’t truly the focus. The focus was Tether. He kept waiting for Tether to self-destruct, and it never really did. Except, of course, that everything kinda did.

Epilogue: “The technology was as old as WhatsApp or Uber, which had long since wormed their way into our everyday lives so thoroughly their nanmes had become verbs. But no one had invented a mainstream use for cryptocurrency. So many smart people had spent so many thousands of hours working on crypto – and yet shockingly little use had come of it.” Count me among them, I guess, for those dreamlike 10 months I spent at TechLab.

by Ursula Parrott

Extra-marital sex. Abortion. Substance abuse. Skepticism about the sexual revolution, and how it sure seems to just screw over women.

Is it the 1960s? The 1970s? No – it’s 1925.

Definitely a fascinating look at sex and the (newly) single girl and the city back in your grandmother’s day. It starts with our protagonist’s husband’s exit, and has a very nice twist of an ending, but the middle was too long and made me very impatient with Patricia’s endless, mindless promiscuity. And I wish the heroine could have been given a bit more going for her besides her looks – that got very tiring to read about too. I was super sick of hearing about her “creamy” shoulders, and super sick of every man she met gushing over her beauty.

Good lines:

“New York’s a jail to which, once committed, the sentence is for life; but it is such a well-furnished jail, one does not mind much.”

“Great Lovers – men who’ve known a hundred women, and boast of it – they remind me of the man who wanted to be a musician and so took one lesson on each instrument in the orchestra… He couldn’t play a tune on any of them in the end.”

by Michael Lewis

This book is getting a lot of flack for being fawning and credulous, because Lewis doesn’t tell a story of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) as villain, It’s very interesting that parts 1 and 2 of this book were hashed out before the FTX collapse, when Lewis was merely shadowing SBF and trying to gather material for a possible book. He got his book. He unwittingly got a front-row seat to the “implosion.” But as the NYT review stated, you can see the original book peeking through.

I don’t mind any of this. I take it for what it is: Lewis’ real-time impressions of SBF and his crew.

The impressions are: Yes, SBF is… different. Caroline Ellison is an egoless spineless character without the foggiest idea how to run Alameda research. It’s painful seeing the personal memos she and SBF write to each other about basically whether or not they should fuck each other. (Answer: No, No, neither one of you should be sleeping with the other one.) The other characters were not as nailed down for me. Oh, except the therapist. There’s an actual therapist on the FTX campus who treats just about everyone. Other than that, there are a lot of people from the old Hong Kong office who moved to the Bahamas, and then there are the horde of faceless “effective altruists” who share SBF’s penthouse.

As an aside, the effective altruists sure are a weird lot. I was and am interested in EA as well as crypto, which makes me so into the SBF story. But at first my impression was that EA was basically about rating charities, so you can figure out which ones are really the most effective ones to donate to – and this is an unmitigated good, for sure! And maybe also about figuring out which interventions in the world are most effective at truly alleviating human suffering and saving lives, e.g. anti-malaria bed nets – also indubitably a very good thing! But now the EA crew as a whole has turned their attention to “existential risks” – climate change, asteroids, AI, and nuclear war – because the calculations state, an intervention that could potentially save ALL of humanity from extinction, protecting all those future lives, must trump anything you can possibly do here in the present for these measly 6-7 billion. I part company here.

But I digress, as is my wont. I loved having a book to read on the FTX collapse – I’m sure there will be many more to come.

by Ashley Audrain

Why did I pick this up? I’m drawn to Bad Mother books. And this book has got a doozy!

Whitney, the Bad Mother, is something of a Disney villainess. There are a couple of mysteries at the heart of the book: How did her son fall from a third-story window? And who is secretly screwing whom?

Much of the reading time, however, was taken up with concerns that don’t interest me. Is my husband having an affair? Horrors. Waah I can’t have a baby. I’m nonplussed. Give me more Bad Mother plot!

by Martin Walker

I guess it was a good mystery. I didn’t see the twist coming. But then I don’t see anything coming in books because I don’t try very hard. The problem is that I hate mysteries, because they are SUCH BAD NOVELS. I’m not sure how people who like the puzzle aspect of mysteries can stand all the cheesiness and awful writing and paper-thin characterization that always goes along with it. Ugh. I cracked up when the love interest turned out to be a martial arts expert, saving our hero’s neck in the middle of a riot with some karate chops! And I know the author is trying to whet our appetites with all the food descriptions, but they were over the top. Enough pate to choke a goose. A picnic where he (perfectly) cooks two fish which of course were caught just hours before – and strawberries – what the hell time of year is it anyway? Please, please, book club, no more mysteries.

by Stephan Pastis

“I woke up this morning and the maintenance light on my life was blinking.”