Book Recommendations Summer 2022
I read this book while traveling to, during and traveling home from Western States. The majority of it is harmlessly silly and also something I’d consider dystopian because I am not on my phone nor do I use Facebook in that way. The story was written by the person who helped produce How I Met Your Mother, a TV show I enjoyed. The premise of the plot follows different characters in their use of social media and meeting others online. All the storylines are intertwined in some way that is both cute at times and troublesome at others. The hard bits come when a character or two is going down the social media rabbit hole and finds out someone committed suicide when their quest to make a computer feel emotions like a human was denied research. This book tries to reflect society and the strange, uncomfortable ways social media makes us who we are.
I brought this book on my trip to Alaska and it took me little time to read. The book takes place in a small village called Lapvona and centers on the experiences of a mentally underdeveloped, malnourished young man. It was uncomfortable to read yet the writing was really good so I didn’t want to stop reading. It’s a classic story of a village suffering due to draught causing them to do outright awful things to each other to survive. The wise-woman of the town is also the wet nurse to everyone causing strange relations between she and her now-grown past charges. The king doesn’t have a system of laws and uses his subjects to entertain him. The main character accidentally kills the king’s son and rather than punishing him, the king simply trades sons with the young boy’s abusive father flipping his life completely. It’s a wild read.
My mother recommended this book to me after she had read it and it actually helped our relationship. The story centers on a family of twelve kids, ten of them being boys, eight of them having schizophrenia in the 1940s. What I most enjoyed was how the author weaved the story between the researchers who were desperately trying to understand and get funding for this strange disease, and the stories that came from the family mostly through the eyes of the daughters, Margaret and Mary. My heart broke for each character at points while also causing me to be angry at the people who enabled the abuse. This family help provide groundbreaking research on mental illness by providing samples of the genes of a family that produced eight subjects with the disease.
After Lapvona and Hidden Valley Road I needed something a bit lighter and why not go with a book I ordered from the library months ago but came in at just the right time? I subscribe the Barker’s newsletter and am a sucker for correlational research. He also frequently cites research done by two of my favorite writers, Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant. This book took no time to read and though I cannot say I am changing anything about myself to reach success (that’s not why I read the book after all), I enjoy a good anecdote and story about different ways to prosper and succeed in whatever way works best for the individual. The language is simple and to the point, giving my brain something to think about lightly while also providing respite from the heavier books I’d read earlier in the month.
I am currently halfway through this book and it is fantastic! It is a historical fiction piece centering on uprisings and revolts among slaves, Coloreds and Blancs in South Africa. There is a love story going on as well which intertwines the stories of the two leading women, though the love story is not between them. I enjoy books like this because though the stories are fiction, I usually look up more information about the time period and learn more of what happened.
I believe I read a few other books too this month but nothing that stuck with me so as to remember them. I might not be running big miles, but my reading habit is as strong as it’s ever been.