Somusing

These early months of 2020 might be a record for least reading done by me. It’s partly the coronavirus excitement, which means I’ve been reading more news, as well as cooking and cleaning a lot more, since most of the kids are at home and I don’t have to go to work! How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan 🎧 Michael Pollan is an excellent writer and I love his books about food. I wasn’t sure I’d be interested in this one, but it was fascinating. I learned a lot and I hope current studies will lead to legal therapeutic use of psychedelics, because it seems like they could be helpful for many people and problems. What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide by Jana Riess I’ve read many articles about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints written by Jana Riess, so when I discovered that she’d written a book about one of my favorite TV sh...

Books I read or listened to in 2019, audiobooks denoted with 🎧: The Witch Elm by Tana French 🎧: I like her books. Good characters, good stories. But they always seem to go on a little longer than I’d like. The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson 🎧: Very good! Read by Claire Danes. The Diary of a Hounslow Girl by Ambreen Razia 🎧: Good and interesting. Fun accents. The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt: Fantastic! Should be required reading for everybody, especially educators and parents and teenagers and college students. And everybody. Autoboyography by Christina Lauren: Pretty accurate description of Provo Mormons, but flat, stereo-typed characters. I didn’t like it. The Story of Arthur Truluv by Elizabeth Berg: Very good. I love Elizabeth Berg. The Library Book by Susan Orlean: Excellent! Mr. Penumbra ’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan: Quirky and fun. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal 🎧: This was...

Category 35, Set in the summer: Idaho by Emily Ruskovich The main event of the book happens during the summer, I think. Or it could be fall, but it felt like summer when I was reading it. There's also a lot of winter in the book. It's really good. Set in Idaho. Part mystery, part family drama. Very well-written. Category 36, A book that will make you smarter: Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood by Lisa Damour Well, I think it made me briefly smarter, anyway. It's hard to remember what I learned from it when confronted with a bratty teenage girl. Not that any of my teenagers are bratty. Category 37, Bestseller: An American Marriage by Tayari Jones This is a very good book, but it didn't move me like others have. I always wonder how much my response to a book depends on my current place in life -- maybe it would have been more moving and meaningful at a different time. It is worth reading. Category 38, Reader...

Category 34, About a city: The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street by Karina Yan Glaser Here's the story of how I came to read this book. Six of us Jacobsen sisters went to New York in September so we could go to my brother Colter's art show opening at Callicoon Fine Arts Gallery in Manhattan. We had a great time being tourists in the city. One day, after visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we were walking away from Central Park down 81st street on the Upper East Side and one of my sisters (I think it was Leah) saw a book that was trapped on top of a wrought iron gate about ten feet above the ground. Apparently it had been dropped from above and lodged there. Leah jokingly said to Cammy (the athletic sister), "Hey, Cammy, climb up and get that book!" And the next thing we knew, Cammy was scaling the gate and had grabbed the book. It was a hardback copy of The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street . It had been there for a little while before Cammy rescued it but w...

Category 18, Short Story: "Novostroika" by Maria Reva This was quite an entertaining story published in The Atlantic in December of 2016. (We had a subscription to The Atlantic for a year around then and have kept the old issues around for leisurely perusal. It's a good magazine with well-researched, good writing.) The story is about a man in Ukraine who tries to get the heat turned on in his apartment only to hear from the official that his building doesn't exist. I'd say it's funny and tragic in a way similar to A Confederacy of Dunces . Category 19, Graphic novel: El Deafo by Cece Bell I like that these memoir-type graphic novels kind of expose the immaturity and self-centeredness of the pre-teen/early teen protagonist. This one's about a deaf girl and was interesting and fun. Category 20, About an animal: The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket or The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo 🎧 The first has various reptiles in it, incl...

Category 10, Vintage mystery: The Bookman's Promise by John Dunning 🎧 I admit that this isn't really vintage mystery, but I'm justifying it because 1) there were too many mystery-type categories in this challenge (next year's categories are an improvement), 2) the protagonist/detective guy was kind of old himself ("vintage," you could say), and 3) there is a lengthy flashback to 1860 or thereabouts because the mystery involves a lost or unknown manuscript by explorer Richard Burton. I liked that the detective is a retired detective who is now a bookseller. I didn't like as much that he is yet another older man who has romantic flings with younger women. But that's everywhere, I guess. Category 11, Historical: Our Town by Thornton Wilder I'm sure I read this long ago, but I didn't remember much of it. It's a lovely and sweet play, though pretty heartrending at the end. The passing of time isn't my favorite thing to think abo...

I have finished my fifty books for the year — in fact, I’m up to fifty-six, I think — and this is a surprise to me. I had been reading less in the last few years, so I wasn’t sure I’d make it to fifty. I think I succeeded because tracking things tends to improve performance (so I’ve heard) and because I’ve started listening to books, which I had not done very often before. Thanks to Jim Dale and the Harry Potter books for showing me how enjoyable listening can be. Category 2, Snow: The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living by Meik Wiking This is indeed a little book, which was something I was looking for at the beginning of the Challenge, because I was worried that fifty books would be ... uh ... challenging. Anyway, I liked this. Lots of good ideas about making your surroundings and life cozy and happy-making. Kinda makes you want to go live in Sweden or Denmark or Finland. Category 3, Fairy Tale: Dornröschen auf Deutsch ( Sleeping Beauty in German) 🎧 I li...

Our local library (where I'm lucky enough to work part-time) is doing a program this year called The Ultimate Book Geek Challenge. The challenge is to read 50 books in 50 weeks and they have to fit into a list of 50 categories supplied by the library. I didn't think I'd do it because I don't read as much as I used to and I wasn't that interested in the category idea. But I started keeping track of my books, found that I was reading more than I would have expected, and thought it would be good to support my friend and fellow librarian, Rasheil, who is running the program. She said I could be kind of creative with the categories, too. Plus, if you succeed at the 50 books in 50 weeks challenge, you get a sweatshirt! And Rasheil said I could get one that zips in the front. So I'm going for it, and at this moment in August of 2018, I've read 33 of the 50 books. In this post, I'll write about five of the books I've read and the categories they fi...

I thought it would be fun to read this series, since there is a British TV show based on it that looks interesting. But after reading the following, I'm done: Hildegard Staunton was paler than he remembered from her husband's funeral. Her short hair was blonde and curly; her eyes were large and green. Her eyebrows were pencil-thin and she wore no lipstick; as a result, her face looked as if her feelings had been washed away. So, it's only possible to read feelings on a woman's face if she's wearing lipstick? I had no idea! If the book had been written in the '50s or something, I probably could have overlooked this, but no, it was published in 2012. I may be overreacting, but there's a lot of good stuff to read and this time, I choose not to spend my time on something that implies that women absolutely must wear makeup or they can't get along in society.

I realize that I'm nowhere near my twenties anymore, but this book is fantastic and has joined my short list of required reading for my kids and anyone who has anything to do with young people. I read it. Then Jon read it. Then I sent copies to my sisters who have older kids. I made Zed and Phin read it and Jacob is partway through it. Even though my kids aren't working dead-end jobs or trying to "find themselves" while we support them, the book resulted in some good decisions for one kid in particular. He knows who he is. Here's a Ted talk by the author to get the gist. I highly recommend both the book and the talk.

Back in May we went on a long road trip to Oklahoma City to visit Erin's sister, Ivy Skinner, and her family. We had a great time with the Skinners, and also got to spend time with Brian Dunn and Ron & Crystal Phipps and their kids. At a used bookstore in Edmond, the suburb of Oklahoma City where the Skinners live, I came across several Bulgarian books from the 1970s and 1980s: The one on the left is Ray Bradbury's I Sing the Body Electric , and on the right is a collection called "Black Sun" with Karel Čapek's R.U.R. , Yevgeny Zamyatin's We , George Orwell's Animal Farm , and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 . That's the title page of Ray Bradbury's I Sing the Body Electric . That one is The Trip of Icarus by Bulgarian science fiction author Lyuben Dilov. The Wikipedia page about him says the story adds a Fourth Law of Robotics, extending the original three laws proposed by Isaac Asimov: "A robot must establish its identi...

Look! Lorelai from Gilmore Girls wrote a novel ! Okay, it's written by the actor who played Lorelai, but whatever. I will continue to refer to it as "that book by Lorelai." Apparently, Lauren Graham used her own experiences trying to become an actress in New York as inspiration for this fun story. It's funny and fun and sweet and enjoyable. I liked it a lot.

I loved this novel about an architect mother who goes missing. The story is told through emails, letters, notes, and journal-like entries compiled by her 15-year-old daughter. Sometimes it reminded me of Douglas Coupland's writing. Also, it made me think about going to Antarctica. Really good book!

I picked up this memoir several years ago at a used bookstore, not knowing if I would ever get around to reading it. I thought it would probably be pretentious and pompous, which is kind of how Sting strikes me, even though I'm a long-time fan of much of his music. Jon brought it up from our library a couple of weeks ago, because I was revisiting some of his albums after seeing The Last Ship in New York in October, and I thought I'd better give it a try so I could decide if we should keep it. It starts with a religious hallucinogenic drug experience that Sting and his wife Trudie had in Brazil, which might be off-putting to some, but it leads into his memories of his childhood and family in Wallsend, England, where he grew up. I loved this part. His childhood was more like something my grandparents would recognize than what my parents experienced, even though he's a few years younger than my parents. Lighting fires in the early morning, delivering milk with his dad in...

My friend Stephanie recommended this book to me. It's written by Braden Hepner, who taught a Creative Writing class she took at BYU-Idaho. The writing is vivid and evocative but not too wordy. The story is sad, funny, tragic, hopeful, and reminded me of a T.C. Boyle novel, which I think is a compliment.

I found a used copy of this at a library book sale and, feeling the need for some entertaining fiction, I picked it up and read it almost immediately and within a few days. The suspense starts up right away, with the husband's description of his wife that includes talk of her skull and what might be in her mind and brains. Entertaining it was, though it took a long time to end. It's sort of a mystery, but from the points of the view of the victim and the main suspect. Warning: contains plenty of language (by which I mean bad language, of course) and some sex. And violence. And creepiness.

I can't say much about this novel , except that it's bizarre and creepy and brilliantly written. I don't want to give anything away, and it's better to read it without knowing too much, so don't Google it if you think you'd like to read it, but it begins with a woman driving around in the Highlands of Scotland, creepily picking up male hitchhikers, but only the ones with great bodies. After that, it just gets weirder. Also riveting. Maybe don't read it unless you have someone to discuss it with afterwards. Warning: contains language, violence, creepiness, and not as much sex as you might think from the beginning.

I've dipped my toe in the pool of vampire popularity with the Twilight series (liked the first one and it was downhill from there), Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (loved them), The Vampire Diaries (gave up in season 2 or 3; too soap opera-y), and just a couple of episodes of Being Human (both UK and American versions; too graphic for me), plus The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (pretty good). I thought I'd try the book that sort of started the vampire craze anew , recognizing that vampire lore has been around for hundreds of years and is nothing new. Maybe I should say that Interview with the Vampire started the sexy/moral vampire as part of pop culture. I expected it to be gripping and suspenseful and maybe more graphic and sexy than I'm used to. Not at all. I struggled to finish it. The story wasn't bad, but I really disliked the way it was narrated. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to find that it's actually written as an interview, one t...

Book review of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory , by Jesse Walker. 421 pages excluding index. Published 2013 by HarperCollins . This book makes well its case that “The Paranoid Style Is American Politics”, as the name of the first chapter states. It covers pretty much everything, at least in passing: Presidential assassinations; slave uprisings; religious disputes; Indian conflict; influence by the French, English, and Spanish; overt devil worship; Freemasonry; Jews; Communism; the Illuminati; the Ku Klux Klan; later the FBI and COINTELPRO; the CIA and CHAOS; Rosicrucianism; Watergate; the Vietnam War; the tradition of paranoid movies and TV shows; Christian fears of devil worshiping and witchcraft and ritual mutilations and child abuse. Chapter 3, The Devil Next Door, includes detailed coverage of anti-Mormon paranoia about polygamy, harems, bloc voting, the Danites, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and treatment in novels by Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes ...

I thought I'd have to push myself to read this book about a Teton Valley man's ride along the Great Western Trail after he's diagnosed with cancer. I was wrong, though. I found it fascinating. Written in first-person by Chuck Christensen's daughter from his journals, newspaper articles, and interviews with people who rode with him, it's a day-by-day account of his two-part journey. Part one is from Teton Valley, Idaho to the Mexico border and part two is from Teton Valley to the Canada border a couple of years later. About halfway through the book, I suddenly realized that I know one of his daughters and a couple of his grandkids and I've met his wife a few times, which made the book even more enjoyable. I'm pretty sure I know others of his relatives, but the family trees in these parts, while well-known to the locals, are confusing and complex and have taken me years to even begin to understand and remember. But even before I recognized the connection,...