This memoir is subtitled “on the power of friendships” which clues you into the fact that it’s not all about dinners with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, though she does feature prominently through the narrative. I have always been a fan of Totenberg and her legal affairs briefings on NPR, and especially enjoyed learning how she got to that post and how she handled the position. Per the subtitle though, the book really is about friendships and the lifelong support they provide, both professionally and personally (sometimes sorely needed in the very. sexist environment of the time). One of Nina’s very greatest friends was the formidable RBG, whose quiet determination and unstinting generosity come to life in Nina’s words. The two women supported one another through the early parts of their careers, through the illnesses and deaths of their respective spouses, and always managed to maintain a professional distance between their work and personal lives. The memoir’s tone starts out dry and funny, and turns more poignant as events progress.
Author: librarykat
Druid Vices and a Vodka, by Annette Marie, read by Cris Dukehart
I have been loving Dukehart’s audiobook narration. I am now familiar enough with the shading of her voices for the various characters that I don’t need the text to explicitly introduce them. That said, for the first time, the plot became tense enough that I wished I was reading text; I so wanted to skip ahead of Dukehart’s (very appropriate!) dramatic pauses so I could catch up on the action. This book brings the morally gray character Zak to the fore, forcing Tori to reckon with her own loyalties, set against a backdrop of (of course) mortal danger. The interweaving storyline from the “Demonized” companion series is both enjoyable and frustrating; as the events intertwine you just want to shake the characters into talking to one another despite their (very solid) reasons to keep their secrets close. I continue to love Tori’s resourcefulness in magical combat situations.
Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher
T. Kingfisher is so good at writing “subverted fairy tales;” her stories turn the standard tropes inside-out and examine them with a critical eye. Marra, third daughter of the king, has watched both her older sisters get married off to the cruel prince of the much more powerful neighboring kingdom one after another; deciding that this is unsustainable, she sets off to do whatever she can to rescue the remaining sister, despite the powerful blessing of the prince’s fairy godmother. I loved the characters; Marra’s determination contrasts well with the resigned world-weariness of the various witches, heroes, and fairy godmothers, and her mother and sister are also really interesting in their motivations and decisions. Great commentary on the lack of agency of women in traditional fairytales, and how they find ways to exert their power anyway.
Slaying Monsters for the Feeble, by Annette Marie, read by Cris Dukehart
Second in Marie’s “Demonized” series, but really ninth in her linked series of books: this one is from the perspective of Robin Page, the shy, awkward nerd who would rather bury herself in books and baking than deal with the fact that she’s accidentally made a highly illegal contract with a demon. Her flinching cowardice gets old quickly (even though it’s totally how I would react in similar situations) but it’s refreshing how everyone, from her assertive cousin to her combat-trained guildmates to her demon Zylas, does their best to try to help her overcome her fears and prepare for challenges. The layers of secrets that she keeps from different audiences is complex and exhausting for the reader as well as for her, but it’s fun to watch her (nervously) chase down leads in search of the answers she needs.
book collage, January 2023
2023 already! These are the books from January:
Wild Magic, by Tamora Pierce
Archangel, by Sharon Shinn
Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, by Bushra Rehman
Bannerless, by Carrie Vaughn
Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers
Critical Point, by S.L. Huang
Jovah’s Angel, by Sharon Shinn
The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal
Hellbound Guilds and Other Misdirections, by Annette Marie and Rob Jacobsen, read by Iggy Toma
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin
The Blade Between, by Sam J. Miller
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
The Alchemist and an Amaretto, by Annette Marie, read by Cris Dukehart
Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food and Love, ed. Elsie Chapman and Caroline Tung Richmond
A Thousand Beginnings and Endings: 16 Retellings of Asian Myths and Legends, ed. Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman
The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, by Eric Weiner
The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, by Eric Weiner
Reporter Weiner (aptly pronounced “whiner”), having amassed a collection of self-help books in pursuit of his own happiness, decides to visit the happiest places of the world in order to see if he can find some clues for success. The resulting book is part travel memoir, part occasional forays into happiness research, and part observations and sweeping conclusions about entire cultures and societies. I found the book a little too glib and Weiner’s sense of humor was a bit grating; the characters he met were also sometimes presented as cultural stereotypes, which was off-putting. Nevertheless the writing style was smooth and easy and I made it through the book without too much trouble. I did like the detailed portraits painted of each country; as an NPR reporter, Weiner definitely knew how to create a vivid descriptive image.
A Thousand Beginnings and Endings: 16 Retellings of Asian Myths and Legends, ed. Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman
This was a really neat collection. Each short story is followed by an explanation of the myth or legend that inspired it. Some authors retell a story but in a different time and place (“The Land of the Morning Calm” by E.C. Myers, which injects Korean ghosts into an MMORPG), while others latch onto a tiny detail and expand it (“Spear Carrier” by Rahul Kanakia, which imagines an entire life for a battlefield redshirt). I don’t know a lot of the stories in Asian mythologies, and really enjoyed reading both the stories and the background segments that explained the original myths.
Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food and Love, ed. Elsie Chapman and Caroline Tung Richmond
The connection between these short stories is that they all take place on Hungry Hearts Row, a neighborhood of restaurants featuring very different cuisines and very different stories. There’s some interplay between characters but only enough to unify the scene. Only a couple of the stories take the prompt literally and use food to bring characters together romantically; others were about relating to estranged family through food, or using food as a way to make peace with one’s past. I particularly liked the ones that were more out of left field, like the one where the Chinese restaurant was actually an integral part of a gang war, or the one where the Muslim superhero literally fell out of the sky in front of a food cart. Some duds, but a strong collection overall; I appreciated the wide variety of ethnicities and cultures represented in both the foods and the stories.
The Alchemist and an Amaretto, by Annette Marie, read by Cris Dukehart
Oh man after four books of comparatively lighthearted urban fantasy, and then after 75% of a book being spent mainly on trivia like Tori trying hard not to be impressed by her friend’s parents’ magic school (basically Hogwarts, but for privileged combat sorcerors), and doing a little bit of werewolf hunting, the plot suddenly hammers Tori (and the poor reader) with a huge emotional bomb. Over the preceding books Marie had been dropping hints and gradually ramping up the tension and urgency around this issue, but the revelation at the end of this book abruptly turns things up to 11. Dukehart does such a great job with the narration too, her Tori switching between indignation and vulnerability. I’ve been trying to pace myself with this series, and it was a fight for me not to instantly run off and download the next. (This is why I dislike rating individual books – the plot of this particular book was pretty standard, but its effect on the overall series is huge.)
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
I grew to hate this book and seriously considered abandoning it several times, but I somehow made it to the end anyway. The book begins with narrator Theo feverish and afraid, mysteriously unable to leave his Amsterdam hotel. We flash back to when the Theo was a child, caught in a museum bombing whose effects would skew the course of his life; we then follow Theo through an unstable childhood and adolescence defined by substance abuse and bad choices, then into a young adulthood in which he continues to suffer from the same issues, and finally (hundreds of pages and very little character development later) into the frankly ridiculous and chaotic sequence of events that take him to the hotel where we began. Theo is extremely frustrating to read, a character whose musings are occasionally incisive and delightful, but inevitably become self-indulgent and whiny. The only characters I consistently enjoyed reading about were his mentor in furniture restoration (a flawed character but a stable one at least) and his friend, the unbelievable but hugely entertaining Boris, whose life choices are just as bad as Theo’s but who manages not to be a complete drip about everything. Tartt can put words together well but this book is a mess; I am so glad to be done with it.