Book Review

I read this book as part of my personal challenge to read the entire works of Tim O’Brien this summer. I’d previously read The Things They Carried, a novel, in high school and remember being struck by the idea of truth in storytelling. The Things They Carried is a novel, meaning things in it did not happen exactly as O’Brien wrote. But what my class discussed is whether the feeling of the book, what it made us understand on some emotional level about what it was like to be there, was probably true, and that it’s sometimes ok to bend the facts in fiction to get at a larger truth of some kind.

When I broke down the genre of the first 20 books I read this year, Becker (Dwelling in Possibility) suggested that I should read more YA fiction. Coincidentally, I already had John Green’s first book, Looking for Alaska, on request from the library — awesome! I also had a five hour bus ride home at the end of the semester, and a thin YA book felt like about all my brain could handle.

One Sentence Summary: Rich people are different than you and me, and that’s probably ok — their lives don’t sound that great to me anyway.

One Sentence Review: Wendy Burden’s take on her family and self-description as a modern-day Wednesday Addams are quite funny, but the overall book is really just another dysfunctional family story set amidst the rich and failing.

Two Sentence Summary: Young people with a new set of work ethics and styles — the Millennials — are just entering the job market. How should companies and coworkers respond to the generation and support these young people in the workplace?

One Sentence Review: The M-Factor explains what makes Millennials different clearly, fairly, with a sense of humor, and does a good job proactively outlining ways to head off generation-based workplace conflict.

The hilarious Raych at books i done read calls her mini-reviews “reviewlettes” and I love that. I borrowed the term from her to describe some short reviews of books I didn’t have a ton to say for, and I hope she doesn’t mind!

One Sentence Summary: When journalist Azadeh Moaveni returned to Iran in 2005, the unexpected happened — she fell in love and made the difficult choice to try and start a family in Tehran.

One Sentence Review: Moaveni’s second memoir is slow to start, but once it picks up provides an optimistic and honest look at what it’s like to live inside one of the world’s most unknown countries.

Two Sentence Summary: The historical record for one summer of beloved author Louisa May Alcott’s life is mysteriously silent. What if Alcott was involved with a summer romance that would inspire Alcott’s career and the love story between Laurie and Jo in Little Women?

One Sentence Review: The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott is a solid work of fiction with a satisfying love story that whetted my appetite to learn more about Louisa May Alcott.

One Sentence Summary: Middlesex is both a sprawling immigrant family epic and an intensely personal story about one person trying to find their identity among challenging circumstances.

One Sentence Review: Eugenides book is exactly the sort of educational and historical fiction that I love to read, so I was definitely wasn’t disappointed in this book.

Two Sentence Summary: Jacob Jankowski ran away from veterinary medicine at Cornell and joined the circus. Now, at “ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.” Janakowski is in a nursing home, slowing fading away while he recalls his life in the circus in Depression-Era America.

One Sentence Review: Gruen’s book is well-researched and well-written, but some qualms with the ending (discussed after a spoiler warning below) kept me from giving an otherwise awesome book a perfect rating.