Time and Place | It’s just about 8:30 a.m. and I’m sitting in my favorite chair, windows open so I can hear the rain outside. It’s supposed to be by storming on and off most of the day, which I’m taking as an excuse to just stay inside.

Eating and Drinking | Basic black tea and a yogurt. I work up this morning feeling sick-ish with a headache, so I’m exercising some caution. I’ve been feeling off most of the week though. I blame work stress and the humidity.

Reading | I’m making progress with 11/22/63 by Stephen King — I passed the 600 pages mark just before I went to bed last night! I also started a new comics series, Shutter, thanks to this recommendation post from Panels. It’s delightfully weird — if a tad confusing through the first volume — and definitely has the same vibe as one of my favorite series, Saga.

Watching | Yesterday, the boyfriend and I finally sat down and watched Jon Stewart’s final episode of The Daily Show. I followed that up with the final episode of Friends, ending my epic 10-season binge watch. What’s next?

Listening | Spotify has a new feature for finding new music, Discover Weekly, which sounds sort of like a custom mix tape based on what other songs and playlists you’re listening to. My mix today is so eclectic, I just love it.

Blogging | It’s been a good week on the blog. I shared my reading recap from June and July, followed by some thoughts on comfortable and uncomfortable narratives inspired by Just Mercy and Ghettoside.

Promoting | This New York Times piece on what happens when people are released from prison is great.

Hating | For my birthday, the boyfriend agreed to do the dishes for a month. My month reprieve from chores ended yesterday… which is a bummer!

Loving | Jenny and I leave for our trip in 14 days! Also, ice cream. Dairy Queen has a mini Rolos blizzard that’s pretty awesome.

Avoiding | I have a lot of work to get done at work before I can head out of the country. I went into the office for a couple hours yesterday afternoon to get some writing done and I probably should go in today but… it’s raining and I’m tired.

Wanting | I could use a break in the humidity. It’s been brutal the last couple days, despite some thunderstorms that should have helped things cool off. Our county fair is this week and boy, would I love it if the temperatures were reasonable.

Anticipating | We’re leaving for London in 14 days! There are things I should be anticipating before that but, let’s be real, that’s all I can think about at the moment.

Happy Sunday everyone! What are you reading today?

There are lots of narratives that make us feel comfortable, that reinforce the way the world works or tell us that institutions work the way they’re designed to work. While there’s nothing wrong with reading those comfortable stories – in fiction or nonfiction – I also like finding books that challenge my worldview in important ways.

In this post I wanted to write about two books – one that pushes readers to acknowledge uncomfortable narratives, and another that relies on a comfortable story in service of an uncomfortable argument.

The first book, one of the best I’m going to read this year, is Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson.

As a young lawyer, Stevenson helped found the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization focused on providing legal support for those who need it most. Based in Monroeville, Alabama (hometown of Harper Lee, setting of To Kill a Mockingbird), many of EJI’s early cases focused on people wrongly placed on the death penalty. The book focuses strongly one of of those cases, a man named Walter McMillian wrongly accused of murder. As Stevenson shares the long, difficult journey to get Walter off of death row, he also writes movingly about cases that were not successful and about the biases and unfairness inherent in our criminal justice system.

Stevenson is a clear, persuasive, honest writer – this book really is a must read for anyone interested in issues of race, justice and the death penalty. There were several instances in this book where Stevenson moved me to tears with his stories. It’s uncomfortable to acknowledge that a system – and some of the people we task with making it fair and just – can protect people like me while truly hurting others who are not so fortunate. And the system is set up to make correcting those wrongs extremely difficult, if not impossible, without the help of organizations like EJI.

The second book I want to talk about is one that gave me more complicated feelings, Ghettoside by Jill Leovy.

The book opens with this fact: black men compose about 6 percent of our population, but are victims in almost 40 percent of homicides. In digging down to find the story behind that statistic, Leovy sets up a premise that seems contradictory to some of what Stevenson suggests. She argues that when “the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic.”

In addition to being overly prosecuted for minor crimes, black men in Los Angeles are further punished by the system because the system doesn’t work hard enough to solve their murders and prosecute their killers. That’s an intriguing premise that, on the whole, I think Leovy successfully manages to support. And Ghettoside is a truly engaging read – the reporting that went into this book is incredible, and Leovy is a gifted storyteller.

But I also worry that the story is engaging because it centers on a narrative that’s comfortable – heroic detectives with above average talent who work harder than everyone else to solve cases. The case of the story is the murder of a young black man who also happens to be a police officer’s son. He’s unquestionably a good kid and, by virtue of his family, a person whose murder is going to be investigated to the full extent possible. Leovy uses the case to show what it takes to solve “ghettoside” murders that many consider unsolvable, but on the whole it’s a fairly traditional, comfortable, true crime narrative.

The uncomfortable narrative – the reasons other police officers don’t take ghettoside murders seriously and the biases they bring to policing neighborhoods – feels glossed over. Instead of interrogating deeply the reasons that policing as a whole isn’t done well, Leovy seems to give a lot of the officers and detectives a pass while holding up the work of a few. That’s not the full story, and not the story that is going to make readers think more deeply. I liked reading the book, but I didn’t feel challenged by where it ultimately went.

If you’re curious for more thoughts on Ghettoside, I highly encourage you to check out this post from Shannon at River City Reading. She looks Ghettoside in relation to another big book on race and justice, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, pulling out some similar problematic aspects of how the narrative is structured. The comments are particularly great as well, so make sure you head over there.

Whew, that post got long and was probably a little rambly. I’d love to hear your thoughts on comfortable versus uncomfortable narratives, and about books you’ve read that challenge ideas about race and justice.

June was My Month of British Fiction. July was The Month I Didn’t Read or Blog. As a result, I never posted a June wrap up and my July wrap up was turning out to be pretty boring. So I’m going to just squeeze them together and go from there. Here’s what I read in June:

• Yoon, Nicola: Everything, Everything (YA fiction — Sept. 1 from Delacorte Books)
• Freeman, Anna: The Fair Fight (fiction)
• Gawande, Atul: The Checklist Manifesto (nonfiction, audio book)
• Cocks, Heather and Morgan, Jessica: The Royal We (fiction)
• Ansari, Aziz: Modern Romance (nonfiction, audio book)
• O’Malley, Daniel: The Rook (fiction)
• Brennan, Sarah Rees: Unspoken (YA fiction)
• Oates, Joyce Carol: The Lost Landscape (memoir)
• Stevenson, Bryan: Just Mercy (nonfiction)

Nine books in June certainly isn’t anything to sneeze at, although I do wish I’d gotten to a little more nonfiction and a comic book or two as well. But c’est la vie, it is what it is.

And here’s what I read in July:

• Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird (fiction)
• Cline, Ernest: Armada (fiction, audio book)
• Groff, Lauren: Fates and Furies (fiction – Sept. 15 from Riverhead)
• Leovy, Jill: Ghettoside (nonfiction)

Only four books! That’s so weird. But July was also a crazy challenging month for me in some personal ways, so I can see why reading took a back seat.

My favorite fiction book over the last two months was probably Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon a wonderful young adult novel about a girl who isn’t allowed to leave her home as a result of severe allergies. When a boy moves in across the street, Maddie discovers that there’s value and even joy in taking risks. While the book isn’t obviously like Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, Maddie and Olly’s story gave me the same kind of swoony feelings I felt for Cath and Levi. It was just delightful.

Fates and Furies was also pretty excellent, but in a different way. Groff is such a spectacular writer, and this portrait of a marriage is sharp and, in a lot of ways, unexpected. I won’t say more for fear of spoilers, but know that this is a book I can see myself picking up to reread when it comes out next month.

A Look to August

I have basically no reading plans for the month of August. Between getting ready to leave on a three week trip to London and Greece, then being on the trip, I just don’t know what I’ll be in the mood to read. I guess I do plan to pack Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel to read on the plane on the way over, but other than that I’ll probably bring whatever is grabbing my attention at the time. You can expect a “Books in My Carry On” post, and lots of Instagram photos of the bookstores of London, later this month.

What books are you most excited to read in August?

Briefly | I took a quick trip down to the Twin Cities with a friend so I could get a long list of London/Greece trip related items finished/purchased — 21 days to go! It was nice to just spend a day away, since now I still have , and still a full Sunday to catch up on chores and relax.

Reading | I finally finished a book! I got a bit of my reading mojo back last week and finished Ghettoside by Jill Leovy, a look at the high murder rate of black men, specifically in Los Angeles County, and what that means for the broader criminal justice system. She makes a compelling argument about how the criminal justice system devalues the lives of black men by not investing time and resources into investigating their murders. It’s a great companion read to another excellent book I read last month, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I’m also still working through 11/22/63 by Steven King — I expect that’ll be a common sentence over the next month!

Watching | Last week we went to see Inside Out (so lovely) and, I think, we’re going to see Ant Man later today. I’ve heard it’s pretty funny, so fingers crossed on that.

Listening | Last night I finished An Ember in the Ashes by Sabba Tahir, a young adult (maybe new adult?) fantasy about a slave and a soldier in an oppressive, military regime. There’s a hint of magic and some romance, but neither are central to the story. It ended in a pretty enormous cliffhanger, so I’m glad there’s going to be a sequel.

Cooking | I’ve got all the supplies to make a new slow cooker recipe, Mexican Black Beans and Pork. It’s pretty similar to this recipe. I better get started on it soon since it needs 8 to 9 hours.

Blogging | Last week I wrote about my new obsession, coloring and audio books and shared all the books I bought in July. This week I’m thinking about a June and July reading wrap up and a discussion of Just Mercy and Ghettoside. We’ll see what I get done today!

Buying | I dropped off three big bags of books at Half Price Books and came out with a small stack, a couple I’d read and four more I’m excited about. Wolf Hall is going to be my plane read for our trip, and I’m thinking about bringing along Beautiful Ruins for a beach read in Greece.

Loving | I bought a new planner, the Get to Work Book from Elisa Blaha Cripe. I’ve been using it exclusively at work and, so far, it’s exactly what I need — a place to focus on remembering and completing short and long-term tasks. I can share more about that in another post if people are interested?

Anticipating | My sister and I leave for London in 21 days! I’m actually thinking of it more in terms of newspapers — I have three editions to go, plus work to get done for the three weeks I’ll be gone. That makes it tangible. I suspect I’ll be anticipating this one for the rest of the month!

Happy Sunday, everyone! What are you reading today?