Reviews and Comments

I admit I mostly read this book because the title amused me. An introverted woman spends a year doing extroverted things (talking to strangers, public speaking, improv, throwing dinner parties). Angst and personal growth ensues. This book definitely fits the genre of book that was popular a few years back where writer does weird thing for a year, has personal growth, and writes about it. But it is a cute book and I learned things!

I really wanted to like this more, given how much I just love the Murderbot series. But for me it started confusing, got more confusing, and then resolved in a way that was slightly less confusing but I still don't really understand what happened. The world-building is rich but also extremely complicated, and the book regularly shifts between long past, middle past, and the present. There are several different kinds of people/entities and across and between them there are shifting alliances that change depending on where you are in the timeline. I usually love a really complex book but I just could not get a handle on this one.

Both "Prairie Fires" and "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States" gave me a much less rosy history of this era and ripped away many of the warm feelings of nostalgia I had for the Little House books, which I read over and over again as a child. So I was apprehensive about rereading this series.

This first book starts with the family before they started moving west, in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. It's a simple story, with long descriptions throughout of all the domestic homesteader farm tasks the family had to accomplish throughout the year, the planting, the harvesting, the hunting, the preserving, the cooking, but also includes joyful visits with family and the adventure of going into town. It goes along at a good clip and is never boring. I can totally understand why l loved it so much.

I continue ranging through the Girl Detective genre, with this book dating to 1915 and representing what seems to be the invention of the concept.

Violet Strange is a young upper class socialite who has a side job solving mysteries. The book is a series of shorter stories, roughly interconnected, with an ending that ties up the loose ends and fills in the back story. I enjoyed reading most of the stories, although a lot of the time the mystery or puzzle seemed to resolve itself either because Violet understood some aspect of the problem that was never revealed to the reader, or sometimes even resolved itself through no action of Violet’s at all. It improved toward the end, however, and a handful of stories were genuinely creepy.

I gobbled up everything I could read from Ray Bradbury when I was younger, and I still really admire his ability to tell a gripping story. I first read this book years ago and had remembered it as a collection of essays about writing and the creative process. It is indeed a collection of essays, but most of which seem to be forwards written for previous books. Mostly this book reads more like a memoir about Ray Bradbury's creative process (of which he is very enthusiastic!), and does not contain a lot of actual practical advice for other people. I was also somewhat dismayed that Bradbury always refers to the aspiring writer as "he," and the recommended authors are all the standard midcentury white male canon. Unless you are a huge Bradbury fan I think this is a skip. There are lots of better books about writing out there.

"Edith Van Dyne” is a pseudonym for L. Frank Baum, of Oz fame, and this book was part of a series that was in turn part of a craze in the 1910’s for girl detective stories. It’s…eh. The writing is breathless and melodramatic and the titular main character is kind of dull. There are ten books in this series but I think I got enough of a taste.

Ehhh, it was OK. I'm somewhat disappointed to find out that the evil protomolecule scientists are not plain old amoral, they have been chemically "enhanced" to specifically be amoral. For me this is a much less interesting twist than trying to explain the amorality of actual humans.

I think this is my favorite of the expanse side books, with a deeper back story into Amos' life on earth before space. I could really use a lot fewer uses of the word "amiable" around Amos in general, however.

I adored All the Birds in the Sky, and I was initially intrigued by this book, especially the world-building on a tidally-locked planet. But this book lost me pretty quickly. The main characters feel emotionless and dislikable, the secondary characters are barely even there, the plot moves way too slowly and there's too many events in the plot that just...happen... semi-randomly. I was also extremely surprised to find out that this is a stand-alone book, because it ends so suddenly I assumed it had to be continued in a second book. This is a Stephensonian level of abrupt unresolved ending. Really, really disappointed.

DNF. Mostly consists of the diary of the Dan and Jeff bus tour to promote Dan and Jeff's app for learning meditation. There is very little how-to about meditation here, and it reads like a long, tedious upsell for the app. One star because the title is really clever, and I wish it was what it said it was.