by Marie Kondo

Marie Kondo is truly a hero to me. She was a shy young Japanese woman, afraid of speaking in public, when she was catapulted to fame and the top of the best-seller list; yet she believed so thoroughly in the life-changing magic of “tidying”, she traveled the world and moved to America to spread her message. For Kondo, this is not about organizing or merely discarding; it’s spiritual, and about respect for all the world, inanimate as well as animate creation. This book is about those aspects of Japanese culture that inform her mindset.

by Alan Siegel

It’s about the SIMPSONS, but more than that, about the SIMPSONS’ golden era – the early to mid-90s. Because IT STOPPED BEING GOOD after that, people. Worst. Downfall. Ever.

But the SIMPSONS through most of the 90s was just awe-inspiring. I remember calling it “God”, which was ludicrous, but I remember distinctly actually saying that.

It was impactful. It was meaningful. It was really moving.

Yet this book… wasn’t that great. It was about the writers, and it was hard to keep track of all the different writers; I wasn’t made to care about them or even really like them much.

Stupid book!! Be more better!!

by Barbara Kingsolver

Amazing writing! It just keeps coming at you. I could pull worthy quotes from every page. Such as: “My mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it’s going to fucking leave you and not come back.” I felt like she wasn’t writing, she was channeling someone.

by Laura Ingalls Wilder (re-read)

I picked this up to re-read after reading something about the ‘problematic’ discussion of and portrayal of Native Americans, and the stripping of Wilder’s name from what is now called simply the Children’s Literature Award.

Indians play a prominent role in this installment of the Little House series. They are sometimes threatening and thieving. Ma, Mr. Scott, and Mrs. Scott are scared of them and full of dislike; but Pa feels that Indians are surely just ordinary folks who want to be left alone. Laura, about 6 or 7 in the book, is full of questions. Why is the family even here in Indian Territory?

This is a book about the 1870s. The characters have the attitudes of the 1870s. Pa and Laura are enlightened for their time.

I notice I have an expurgated version. When Pa talks Ma into resettling in Indian Territory, the original book said that there were no people in the territory; only Indians lived there. This was changed, appropriately, to say that no settlers lived there; only Indians lived there.

by C. G. L. Du Cann

I forget why I even had this in my Kindle. But it was a quick read. Run-of-the-mill self-help exhortations from the 1950s.

by David Hepworth

Worth it for the quote.

by Alison Bechdel

This was fun, and the goats were cute.

by Ben Brooks

Possible spoilers. There were times I thought this book was going to devolve into chick lit territory — intelligent young woman in abusive relationship! bambina ex macchina! precocious little kid! uncompelling characters, bad choices… but it really didn’t end up there. The abusive relationship is abruptly ended in a glorious bit of turn-around. The bambina ex macchina isn’t so precocious you want to wring her little neck. The bad choices are shown to be for not-always-bad reasons in the end.

I honestly did love these characters, starting with Yara, the wife. I loved that she was deeply flawed. I loved her dimwitted second husband who proved himself to be “more than” what everyone saw, as Yara put it. I loved drughead Emil. Arthur, the driver of the plot, with his blow-on-the-head epiphany, was harder to love; because we got no picture of who he really was before the accident, and no sense of how his life change was really due to ‘brain damage’, literally or not. Evangeline, the daughter, is maybe last on my list of appreciation, due to her choices, but she was not a character I disliked overall, and I think she made good in the end. But one quibble with the writing was that it was hard to reconcile college-age Evangeline with the high school girl of just pages earlier. I’d say she’s the character I really had the most trouble with.

by Charles Murray

What it sounds like. But not just about taking religion seriously, but about taking the Christian gospels seriously. Everything very carefully hedged and presented from the perspective of a scientific mind. Recommended.

by J. Stone

The impact of the entrance of women in droves into the workforce, tipping the 50/50 balance of men-to-women in many industries starting in the 1980s, is hard to overstate. The viral video by Helen Andrews, “Overcoming the Feminization of Culture”, was brief, and the subject deserves a full and fair treatment. The treatment we are given here is neither.