I realized last week, when I was too tired and cranky to write a new post, that I am way, way behind on trying to review the books I’ve read this year. But I also realized that writing reviews (even short ones) doesn’t actually take that long… as long as you just sit down and do it. #duh

This week I’m sharing the nonfiction reviews I got caught up on over the weekend. All of these are books that, with a few caveats for content, I enjoyed and would recommend — that’s pretty exciting!

The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil

When she was six years old, Clemantine Wamariya and her older sister, Claire, fled their home in Rwanda to escape the mass slaughter of Tutsi citizens by the Hutu majority. After six years migrating through seven different African countries, the sisters found their way to the United States. Clemantine was taken in by a typical white, suburban family who raised her as their own daughter, but of course the scars from her time as a refugee were still there. This book is told in alternating chapters, shifting from Africa to Chicago and Clematine’s experiences in each place, in a really thoughtful way. It’s a difficult read, but one built around an idea that relates to everyone – building a life in our own way and finding a way to voice our own stories. I thought it was a very effective, heartbreaking, and hopeful read.

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson

In June 2009, a renowned 20 year old flutist named Edwin Rist went to a suburban branch of the British Museum of Natural History and stole a suitcase full of invaluable rare bird specimens, many collected by Alfred Russel Wallace. Rist, a well-known savant in the small world of Victorian salmon fly-tying, wanted the feathers both for his own use, and to sell to support his lifestyle and hobby. Johnson learned about the theft while fly fishing, then set out to both understand the crime and try to find bird skins that are still missing, despite the fact that Rist was apprehended. I thought this work of true crime was pretty delightful – particularly if you’re into true crime without the blood and guts typical of the genre. I thought Johnson did a great job showing why the theft was important, both to the museum and to our understanding of science as a whole, giving the book a little more heft than I originally expected. The criminal justice system’s treatment of Rist is extremely unsatisfying, but it’s unfair to fault the book or the author for the truth.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Comedian Trevor Noah grew up mixed-race in South Africa during apartheid. Being “colored,” the son of a black woman and a white man, was literally a crime at that time, so Noah hard to learn to navigate a complicated set of circumstances. The book is also a story about his mother, and the sacrifices she made to craft a life of her own and raise her young sons. The book is incredibly funny, but also scary and sad and complicated in a way I appreciated a lot. I listened to the audiobook version of this book, and I definitely think that is the way to go. Noah narrates it himself, and he is truly wonderful.

Odd Girl Out by Laura James

British journalist Laura James was diagnosed with autism in her 40s. This book is about figuring out what to do with that information, along with a story about what it was like for her to grow up not having words to describe how different she felt. It’s about her initial impulse to “fix” herself, and how that mindset about something as complicated as autism doesn’t really work. It’s also a thoughtful story about her family and her marriage, and what a condition like autism (both unnamed and named) can do to a relationship. I thought it was deeply honest and thoughtful, and enjoyed reading it a lot.

Stuck in the Middle With You by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Jennifer Finney Boylan is a transgender woman who wrote about her transition from James to Jennifer in her first memoir, She’s Not There. In this book, Boylan writes about what being transgender has meant to her as a parent, and how ideas of motherhood and fatherhood are being complicated all the time. I loved a lot about this book, but especially how empathetic Boylan was to her wife and kids, reflecting that a decision she made to live a life that is authentic to her had huge consequences for them. It’s very generous while still being very honest, which is so important in a good memoir. That story was interspersed with interviews with other people on parenting and family that were ok, but not as interesting as the story they were interrupting. Overall though, this book was great.

Today, Sophisticated Dorkiness turns 10 years old.

Truthfully, I spent most of this week thinking I’d only been blogging for nine years. I discovered it’s actually been a decade when I went to look at last year’s blogiversary post and realized my mistake. Ten years! That’s amazing.

I started this blog in 2008 just a few days before my college graduation. I was 21 years old, and I was feeling sad and nervous about leaving college and all of my friends and teachers. I wondered who I would get to talk about books with when I wasn’t an English major anymore, and so decided that I would start a blog and see what happened. To find other bloggers I literally Googled “book blog community.” Everything was small back then, and so that worked. That was such a stroke of luck.

I wish that I had something profound or insightful to say about a decade of blogging, the lessons I’ve learned or the trends I’ve observed or what the landscape of blogging looks like now compared to 10 years ago. But I don’t think I have much that’s new there, I can just talk about how my life and this blog have changed.

For a period of my blogging journey, I saw this as a semi-professional space. It was a personal project that, as I finished grad school, was helping me with my career as a young journalist because I could show that I understood online communities and how to write for the Internet. That was a big deal back in 2010. And even as I worked in journalism, I kept this space going with an eye to professionalism. I shared a picture of my life, but not many of the messiest and most difficult parts.

And then in 2016, I lost my person and became a widow at 30. It still feels un-fucking-believable to write that sentence. Eight months later, I lost my job in community journalism and found myself having to radically rethink my life after being on, essentially, one path since I graduated college.

I let this space sit quiet for some time while I tried to sort all of that out. I started being more involved at Book Riot through writing a weekly nonfiction newsletter and, this spring, launching a nonfiction podcast. For better or for worse, a lot of my professional bookish energy now goes there, which has allowed this space to become more personal. I worry less about being unfinished and casual here. To me, Sophisticated Dorkiness now feels more like a reading journal than a book blog, although that may just be a difference in mindset and semantics.

I’m glad that I made 2018 my year to recommit to this space. Posting regularly reminded me what I wanted to be doing in the first place, having conversations about the books I’ve read with other people who want to talk about books too. Whatever else is going on, being able to do that is important, and I haven’t found a space that feels more comfortable to me than this one.

I remain profoundly grateful that, despite all of those changes, there are still people who show up in this space (and in all of the other spaces we find ourselves online) to connect over a common love of books and reading (or crafts and cats and bad television, depending on the day).

Thank you for continuing to be here, and indulging me in a little metadiscourse about my blogging journey. I’m going to end with a bit of what I wrote last year, since the whole thing still applies:

As always, the biggest thank you needs to go out to all of you. Finding a community of readers and friends through this blog has been one of the biggest joys of life, and something I don’t take for granted. Thank you for being here through the rough stuff and as this space continues to evolve with me.

April was a weird month of reading! Up until the Readathon last weekend, my reading was really slow. It felt like I was right on the edge of a major reading slump, which would be a bummer because I have so many great books to read. I started a lot of books that I never got around to finishing, even though for the most part they were really good.

All that said, I still finished nine books last month, which is nothing to look sideways at. Here’s the list:

1. The Song Poet by Kao Kalia Yang (memoir)
2. Bachelor Nation by Amy Kaufman (nonfiction)
3. Circe by Madeline Miller (fiction)
4. Stuck in the Middle With You by Jennifer Finney Boylan (memoir)
5. Love and Death in the Sunshine State by Cutter Wood (true crime)
6. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (true crime)
7. The Merry Spinster by Mallory Ortberg (short stories)
8. Odd Girl Out by Laura James (memoir)
9. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (memoir, audiobook)

There were a lot of strong picks this month. Madeline Miller’s new book, Circe, was my only fiction book, but it was truly remarkable. I loved revisiting Greek myths, which I was obsessed with as a teenager, from a new angle and with a distinctly feminist lens.

On the nonfiction side, The Song Poet, Stuck in the Middle With You, and Odd Girl Out were all amazing memoirs from people in lives I’ll never get to experience — Hmong refugees, a transgender mother, and a woman with autism. I highly recommend all of them. Oh! And Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime, was also great — I almost forgot that one because I listened to it on audio book and somehow that makes it different in my head.

And finally, I can’t say enough good things about I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, an account of a journalist’s quest to identify the Golden State Killer, a serial rapist and murder who terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s a detailed, empathetic, remarkable work of true crime reporting that I won’t soon forget. Highly recommended.

A Look to May

I feel like one of my priorities for May needs to be reading a bunch of the nonfiction I started in April and never actually finished:

• The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson — True crime about the theft of hundreds of rare bird skins.
• The Extra Woman by Joanna Scutts — A look at the rise of self-help books in the 1930s, and the life of Marjorie Hillis, the first guru for single ladies.
• Beneath a Ruthless Sun by Gilbert King — Historical true crime about a racist sheriff, a crusading journalist, and a mentally disabled black kid accused of rape.
• The Girl Who Smiled Beads by by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil — A memoir by refugees from Rwanda who came to the United States as teenagers.
• The Recovering by Leslie Jamison — A recovery memoir that also interrogates the entire recovery system.

Usually I’m not that terrible at getting through books, but I just could not concentrate on much until the Readathon. Fingers crossed those good vibes continue!

Today’s the Readathon! Normally I’d have put up a post with my books and plans earlier in the week, but work was such a beast that I never got around to it. C’est la vie.

One of the other casualties of a busy work week is that I’ve struggled a bit more than usual with my book stack. My head says pick short books so I can read quickly (that’s usually very satisfying for me during the Readathon), but my heart is pulling me towards some longer titles. My stack is kind of a weird mix of both, so hopefully I’ll be able to find exactly what I want to read.

I’l probably start with one of the nonfiction books — I’m learning towards Love and Death in the Sunshine State by Cutter Wood, a memoir/true crime book about a woman who goes missing in Florida, or The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson, true crime about the theft of many rare birds. That one is a bit of a cheat, since I’m partially finished, but at least I know that it’s good!

One big change this year is that I won’t be posting here on the blog much. Storify, the service I’ve used in the past to collect my social media posts here, is shutting down, so it’s not available to use and I didn’t come up with a better option. I’m a little bummed, but I think that’ll just mean I’ll be on Twitter and Instagram exclusively after this opening event post.

Opening Event Meme, 6:40 a.m. 

1) What fine part of the world are you reading from today? St. Paul, Minnesota with my mom and my sister.

2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to? I’m not sure! If I’m feeling brave, I’m excited about I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara. I’m also excited to finish The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson.

3) Which snack are you most looking forward to? Gummi bears! And donuts, my mom brought some great donuts for us to eat. 

4) Tell us a little something about yourself! I work as a social media specialist for a public library system in Minnesota. It’s such a great job!

5) If you participated in the last read-a-thon, what’s one thing you’ll do different today? I’ll be doing my updates different, not gathering them on Storify like I have in the past. I’ll probably do a lot more sharing on Instagram stories too!

Happy Readathon, everyone!!