summer vacation = lots of reading!
hamlet's blackberry, by william powers (i have been proselytizing about this book since i finished it; it's the authors thoughts on technology, along with seven great thinkers (plato, seneca, shakespeare, and others) talking about technology in their time period and how people reacted to it. in plato's era, the big technology was writing down your ideas on a scroll and reading from it, as opposed to memorizing it. in shakespeare's, they had invented little erasable tablets, so there was the idea of revising your thoughts. i loved hearing how people across thousands of years have responded to technological changes - often in very similar ways - and thinking about how attached we are to our phones. great to read as i embarked on summer and had much more time to just mess around thoughtlessly on my phone.)
shrill, by lindy west (i listened to this audiobook - body-positive, humorous, moving. i was into it. she got a smidge shrill (ha) for me at one point, but i still really liked it. i hadn't realized that i knew this author - i listened to the book at the recommendation of my cousin, laura - but then realized i'd heard at least one story on a this american life episode, and had enjoyed it. thumbs up!)
hillbilly elegy, by j.d. vance (so everyone was talking about this after the election - a book to read to understand trump's america...or something. it got SO much press. i listened to this audiobook on a long car ride, and i was intrigued by the story of vance's life. i found some of it unsurprising, having grown up in rural appalachia myself, and maybe he did help me understand trump's america a little more. but i wasn't blown away by it and i was surprised by how much press it had gotten. glad i read it / but at the same time it wasn't revolutionary.)
vertigo, by joanna walsh (this was a pick i got in my monthly book subscription from a local independent bookstore. a book of short stories - fine - nothing exceptional - good reading while on vacation and i was only able to read in snippets.)
the uncommon reader, by alan bennett (kate lent this to me - a fictional imagining of what would happen if queen elizabeth fell so in love with reading that she couldn't rule. i was vaguely entertained but not blown away. both this and vertigo were short and quickly finished.)
a gentleman in moscow, by amor towles (i read this for two book clubs (thanks, book clubs, for picking the same book and making my life easier). it's a character study, really, of a man on house arrest in a hotel in moscow starting in the 1920s. not much happens, which frustrated me, but perhaps i should have expected it since he can't leave the hotel. my friends either loved it for how richly he and the hotel were depicted it...or they were slightly bored like i was. i have to admit that i can still easily walk the halls of this hotel in my mind, but i wasn't as blown away by it as i wanted to be. this book has gotten a ton of press this year, and our librarian at school said it was the best book she read this year. so maybe i expected too much?)
modern romance, by aziz ansari (every person who has ever online dated MUST read this book. so good. so true. it was really interesting to hear the research behind what i've experienced in real life. i listened to this audiobook, too, and loved having ansari read it to me!)
