Completed Books

It's a fair accusation to say that I enjoy collecting, researching, and writing about books just as much as I enjoy reading them - but let this post serve to prove that I do finish one once in awhile!

I have mixed feelings about We, The Jury. On one hand, it reminded me of my greatest television love: Law and Order - and I did keep eagerly flipping pages. It also managed to make the many different narrators distinct, which is no easy feat. The ending, however, was unexpected and a little anti-climatic. A worthwhile read, but not an amazing one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geddy signing someone else's book (sigh)

My feelings about Mr. Lee are decidedly not mixed (so much hero worship) and I was very, very excited to open this book on Christmas morning. The photography is gorgeous and it turns out that Geddy and I have one thing in common, anyway - we both obsess over things we love. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone will ever take pictures of my book collection! I learned a great deal about the history of bass development and construction, and enjoyed imagining the book read in Geddy's voice!

I read Good Omens in preparation for the upcoming Amazon Prime series. I was delighted to see Death make an appearance and I became quite fond of Crowley, Anathema, Newt, and Adam Young (a stand in for "young Adam" [read: all of us]). It did take me a long time to finish, however, unlike most Pratchett books and there were moments of lag throughout.

I've been reading my way through the King canon since I loved The Outsider so much. The narrator of Revival is its great strength; I felt like I could "listen" to him forever. The setting was also strong and convincing. The weakness in this one was the brief burst of supernatural elements at the end. It felt unconvincing, wasn't overly frightening, and was stopped with a bullet (that's always boring).

Buy fewer books? Easier to ask a leopard to change its spots!

When I was very small, my uncle got sent to Africa by his company. When he came home, he brought me a copy of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories - made all the cooler and more exotic because it came from so far away! Kipling tells us how the leopard got his spots, but he doesn't tell us what to do with people who can't stop buying books about spotted cats! This post is dedicated to felines mottled, smudged, bespattered, and adorned with rosettes, speckles, and splotches!

This is a wonderful series! (Their most recent offering is pangolins). I've wanted Cheetahs for a good, long while - but its pricing is prohibitive. I finally found a reasonably priced copy and I'm giving it to my self as an end-of-semester present! 

There's a theme to this post beside the spotted felines that inhabit these books, and it's this: books on spotted felines are expensive! Jawai is not exception and this title only finally made it into my collection because I found a copy for $30 instead of the usual $76! 









The Amur leopard is the rarest big cat in the world. Consequently, books on said rare cat are pretty scarce, too! To date, I've found exactly three in English: Population and Habitat of Amur Leopard in China, Against all odds: the Amur Leopard's Fight for Survival, and Stalking the Spotted Panther. As of this post, I'm proud to be the owner of two out of three (which, as Meat Loaf tells us, care of Jim Steinman: "ain't bad"), having added Stalking to my collection when I found a copy for $25 instead of the usual asking price of $40.

The Snow Leopard and the Goat isn't out yet - but this year (and, apparently 2020) have been great years for cat books! And I suspect that I already know a little bit about what it's about. Nepal has been a landmark country for snow leopard conservation and one of the methods it has employed to save these big cats is compensating farmers for goats lost to predation. Because the farmers are compensated, they don't retaliate by killing the leopards. Furthermore, the local population is enlisted as citizen scientists, being asked to report leopard sightings.

New Release Tuesday (edition 2)

The Farmer's Son - I went back and forth on whether or not I wanted to add this book to my library (the author is a Hemingway fan and I am decidedly not) - but, in the end, I couldn't resist the idea of baby cows!

Kentucky Derby Dreams -  I once got to spend some time with two foals. I loved their gangly legs and whiskered muzzles - and found out they can bite quite hard with their little teeth! And if I'm going to read about calves, I thought I should read about foals, too!

The Lambs - To round things out, I thought I'd add some lambs, too!















I paired these two titles together because they both concern the Academy. I had high hopes for The Study of Animal Languages since I'm interested in animal studies and animal communication, but it's been sad so far. I hope it turns around! The Scholar features a professor and researcher that gets swept up in a murder. I certainly don't want anything of the kind in my own academic life - but it's fun to read about!

Both of these titles are YA works that include LGBTQ+ characters - something YA does, in my opinion, much better than current "grown up" literature. I think I'll enjoy Multitudes more, since it's an epistolary novel, but the offspring-of-the-(female!)-POTUS/ royal son sounds fun!

I still have enough sawdust (stall-dust) in my soul to be excited when a new horse book comes out!


Rough Magic concerns the "lonely" world of Mongolian horse racing, while Wild Horses is about riding in Iceland.

Summer Reads: focusing on health

It's a cool and gloomy day (and it looks like it's going to stay that way until the end of the week) but I am declaring it the first day of summer anyway! Actually, it's the first day of summer teaching - but close enough! Since regular courses are over, I have time to focus on things I've neglected. First on this list is my health. Some of the hits it took weren't my fault, of course; I had a hard time recovering from surgery and got a late season flu that became pneumonia. But I also haven't been very good about exercise or eating well.

To mark this new season (on this day I artificially chose) I got up and used youtube to find some exercise videos to get me started. I did some tae bo, some yoga (it felt great on my back!), some tai chi, some dancing to oldies (no video needed), and, finally, finished up with some meditation. As a way of marking my start (to what I hope will be a good, permanent change), I thought I would share some of my favorite health-related reads!

I got New York City Ballet Workout when I started graduate school and moved into my first apartment: a third floor walk-up with scuffed wooden floors. I'm sure I annoyed my neighbors with my "dancing" - but this book led me to youtube ballet workouts that I find very helpful (especially since I hate/ get bored with ab workouts very quickly (read: as soon as they hurt).

If I remember correctly, my introduction to tai chi was through something really stupid, like That 70s Show - but, being curious, I always tend to look for books on anything "new" I hear about! I found The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi and started reading - and practicing. I admit that I sometimes laugh at some of the video dialogue ("hug that beautiful tree") but I do enjoy the workouts!

My husband is the one who introduced me to meditation as a way to manage anxiety. I've had great success with it - but when I'm feeling good I tend to let it slide. Real Happiness isn't (in my opinion) the best title - but it's a great book to get a foundation in meditation. One of my favorite features is that it adapts all the meditation exercises to sitting, lying down, or walking - so if you're feeling too antsy to sit still, you can still practice on the move!

I'm not big on self-help books. I always (cynically) think that if they worked the industry would be pretty small! And I really don't like the recent turn toward raunchiness in self-help - as if adding the F word to titles somehow makes them adult and rebellious. Despite this, I liked the messages included in The Gifts of Imperfection. The downside (and this is probably connected to my personality more than a fault of the book) was that I felt a little like a student in math class. Everything made sense when I read it. When I closed the book and tried to apply it - that's when things got tricky!

School Books: Summer and Fall

Designing courses is a great excuse to add books to the library! 

I'm teaching sports literature online this summer and will be teaching it again in the fall. As the summer version only lasts six weeks, it has a truncated number of texts: Friday Night Lights, The Game, In these girls hope is a muscle, and Last Shot.

In the fall, the line up includes:  Queen’s Gambit, Beer and Circus, Crossover, Never Ran, Never Will, and How soccer explains the world. I hope they will provoke questions about what constitutes a sport, gender in sports, college athletics, and the link between sports and the larger society.  

I'm also teaching graphic novel this summer and again in the fall. The summer syllabus includes: Understanding Comics, Maus, Batman:death of the family, Saga, ElfQuest, and He-Man: Eternity War. The fall line-up will pick up The Snagglepuss Chronicles, The Dark Knight Returns, Belonging, and possibly Rat Queens.

We will be tracing the following themes as we read: how comics portray history, the evolution of the superhero and supervillain, portrayals of gender, and comics “growing up” (taking on a childish theme and writing it for adult readers). I wish we had time to explore all of the cool new offerings in the infinitely-expanding world of the graphic novel, but I hope these texts will serve as touchstones. 

Completed Books!

Desperate Characters– This is definitely one for the regret pile. I kept finding it on internet lists and it had a promising introduction that said the characters would stay with the reader for a long time. What really lured me in, though, was the cat. The premise of the book is that the main character gets bitten by a cat and finds her life unraveling. The truth of the book is that everyone in it is a horrible person and that the cat deserved better. Ick.

Poached – I chose this book because I always like to expose students to a work of recent scholarship, especially in an honors class. Published in 2018, this work garnered plenty of acclaim. In taking the reader into situations where poaching and wildlife crime were normalized, it was a successful work. However, the author’s style got on my nerves. She quotes extensively from Extinction Market, making me feel I should just read that book. She also spends a lot of time on trivial details and emphasizing how attractive she is. I hope it proved valuable to my students, but I don’t think I will be teaching it again. Rotating into my reading list to take its place is a title I predict will be more enjoyable, though equally sobering: Blood of the tiger.

The Boy at the Keyhole- Another regret... or, at least, a partial regret. What I liked about this book was that it drew me in and kept me turning pages. Samuel's (the nine year old protagonist) point of view felt very authentic. What I didn't like: the ending. Nothing felt resolved and it was very sad and anti-climatic. I'm disappointed that I stuck with it and glad it was a library book.

Unicorn Bowling - Simpson is back on her game with this volume - very funny! I devoured every delicious, comic panel while sitting outside on a warm, sunshiny day. The atmosphere and the book complimented one another and I'm excited for more Phoebe (coming in October!)