Book Review

One Sentence Summary: Can you tell a history of life within the four walls of a country cottage?

One Sentence Review: At Home has plenty of Bryson’s characteristic sharp humor, but the topics covered by the book feel a little bit disconnected.

Why I Read It: This book was shortlisted for the Indie Lit Awards in nonfiction, and I am a judge for that panel. Opinions expressed in this review are my own, and don’t reflect the thoughts of the panel or reflect our ratings of the book.

One Sentence Summary: Between 1915 and 1970 almost six million African American migrated from the South to escape Jim Crow laws, which changed the entire face of the United States.

One Sentence Review: Wilkerson’s book manages to be both epic and deeply personal at the same time, and is the kind of nonfiction that changed the way I think about the world.

Why I Read It: This book was shortlisted for the Indie Lit Awards in nonfiction, and I am a judge for that panel. Opinions expressed in this review are my own, and don’t reflect the thoughts of the panel or reflect our ratings of the book.

One Sentence Summary: A grandly operatic story about four people connected over time and space through their connections to the opera.

One Sentence Review: Gallaway’s writing style didn’t work for me, but a well-plotted story and intriguing characters make the book worth exploring.

Two Sentence Summary: Emily White has struggled with a feeling of being alone her entire life, but was frustrated by the way the feeling simply wasn’t acknowledged. So she wrote a book about it.

Two Sentence Review: Is it possible to write a memoir about loneliness that is not depressing? Yes, and this book does it really well.

Why I Read It: I enjoy memoirs, and chronic loneliness seemed like an interesting and not-often-covered topic to write about.

One Sentence Summary: A collection of David Grann’s previously published essays that cover a range of murder, madness, and obsession.

One Sentence Review: Individually, each of the essays is a lot of fun to read, but the collection as a whole seems a little thematically uneven.

One Sentence Summary: From the publisher, because it’s so succinct — “A crisp, passionately argued answer to the question that everyone who’s grown dependent on digital devices is asking: “Where’s the rest of my life?”

One Sentence Review: If you need a thoughtful and well-written book to remind you that it is, in fact, ok to step away from all the screens in your life, then this is the book.

The thing I remember most clearly about Food Fray by molecular biologist Lisa H. Weasel is that it made me both curious about and angry with Monsanto, a “U.S.-based multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation” (thanks, Wikipedia), that seems to have it’s tentacles in everything I love to eat.

From previous food reading, I knew Monsanto was a bit shifty, but the company has really exceeded my expectations: patenting genetically modified foods then suing family farmers after those genetically modified seeds happened to pollinate their corn and pushing for a ban on labeling modified milk. Monsanto is messing with milk, and I love milk!

I love the first few paragraphs of the Year of Our Lord: Faith, Hope, and Harmony in the Mississippi Delta by T.R. Pearson and photographed by Langdon Clay, because of how well they set the scene for this short but moving true story.

The book is about Lucas McCarty, a young white man with cerebral palsy who sings in the choir of the all black Trinity House of Prayer Holiness church in the Mississippi Delta. Lucas’s disease keeps him from most facets of a normal life, but he’s found acceptance and even a voice in this particular church.

I’ve had a couple of really uncharacteristic reading weeks over the last month. It started back in November when I realized that I could spend basically all of November and December reading whatever I wanted because I was done with reading commitments for the year.

I decided to finish all of the books I’d borrowed from people over the last several months, which I managed to do really quickly because I went unplugged for awhile. Since then, I’ve been on a literary fiction reading kick, which has been really abnormal and a lot of fun.