Eduardo Santiago

Not what I was expecting. The preface and the scholarly essay appendix are suitable for adults but the main text and artwork seem incongruously targeted toward grade schoolers. Simple declarative sentences. Illustrations that feel like they came out of a Chamber of Commerce brochure. Unrated, because I am not the target audience.

Exquisite writing, both in terms of language and emotional power. Many sentences I had to pause to savor. Peters is a gifted writer and empath.

It is impossible to say much about this book without revealing spoilers, so here's a quick safe rundown of key points. First, Peters got the tone right. There were many angles she could've taken: misery porn, rage, handwringing. The way she crafted it was moving and effective. And second, I really want to talk about some aspects of the book, so please just read it and let's chat over coffee or a walk?

A welcome addition to the canon. Much more readable than Supercommunicators and less dated than Nonviolent Communication. Well organized and referenced. Written with compassion, sensitivity, and humor.

This is probably going to become my first-choice recommendation for people waking up to the importance of listening. Even though it was published in 2019, it's well tuned to the problems of 2025: loneliness, attachment theory, cell phones, identity politics, and the importance of silence (both ambient noise and not speaking). I lurrrrved the opening of the last chapter, When to Stop Listening: a pompous blowhard professor mansplains humor to her. I'm quite sure that person is by now aware of this book and his presence in it, and I wonder: is he cringing in shame now, striving to become a better person? Or is he digging his heels in defensively? Because that's really the root of the problem: those who most need this book are the least likely to read it.

She has a Recommended Reading list at the end, books she considers masterpieces of the art of listening, and War and Peace is first on it—a choice that delights me, because I thought the same thing when I read it. Unfortunately, Middlemarch, a book I found insufferable, is also on that list. I will have to grit my teeth and give it another try.

More a collection of amuse-bouches, some WTFs, and a few genuine delights, and I would expect nothing less from someone who acknowledges Montaigne within the first ten pages and concludes with a tip of the hat to Galeano. These are, after all, essais, and even the masters didn't putt 1000. It is, on the whole, an uplifting way to end this year. (Aside: Gay wrote the essays between August 1, 2016, and August 1, 2017. The careful reader may note some uncomfortable parallels between that timeline and today.)

This is a book to read slowly, and I did. Gay is obviously a poet first and foremost and second and third too. Even at a gentle pace, a good number of essays needed a reread: some because of Gay's circumloquaciousness, some because his cultural references are just too obscure for me. I found myself enjoying even the rereadings. And the delights, those were mostly simple reminders to observe and be present as we go about our days.

And with that, farewell 2024!

I'm not quite sure what this was. Elements of generational trauma; the violence chronically inflicted on Turtle Islanders; addiction; hopelessness; searching for meaning; with occasional didactic history lessons wedged in. Characters (and chapters) had unique voices, mostly third person, occasionally first, and once second, most of them too rambling or stream-of-consciousness for me to follow clearly. It felt experimental, avant-garde, intended for people much smarter than me. The first half covered many characters over a long time span, with not enough exposure to get to know any of them. The second half was contemporary, fewer characters, tighter focus, but most of that focus was on two teenage males who were ... uninteresting.

The first book was fresh and intriguing; this one felt much too long. It dragged on. The side plots felt forced. The romance angle got to where it just felt tedious. The cutesy oppressed creatures were depicted in a way that seemed cringily Samboish. The lookism was awkward. Yes, I will read Kingfisher again, her heart is huge and loving. Just not for a while.

Kinda wish I'd DNF'ed. The first half was intense, with Many Valuable Elements crammed in: Plucky Young Woman Gets Rude Awakening, check. Horrors Of War, check. Despair Over Senseless Tragedy, check check check. Sexism Racism comma Suitable Outrage Expressed, check. The second half changed focus, more toward reintegration and Meaning and PTSD, all crafted with Sensitivity And Tact, all of it carefully engineered to manipulate your ire and sympathy and tears.

This could've been a knockout. A lighter touch, a little less bathos; sometimes less is more. Maybe the protagonist could've been a tad less rich talented beautiful privileged. Or the romance angles less predictable, the plot elements less formulaic. the auxiliary characters more real. And that's the word I was looking for: Real. There's not enough of it. This just felt like it was assembled from a kit. The pieces are all there, they snap together right where and when they should but the life is missing.

Please disregard anything I say, though: I'm a crotchety old insensitive male jerk.

Strong start, and the momentum persisted: tension, discomfort, wonder, tenderness, loss, discovery. Pritchett has a knack for understanding that end-of-life despair where we realize our life has been mostly wasted, and we can never fix it, but we might have a small chance to give meaning to the little that's left. Ammalie—her protagonist—is intensely figuring out how to do so. Her decisions are not ones I would make, nor (I hope) would you, but even so I get it. I could relate and deeply empathize and even love her. Love everyone, actually, because that's the sort of book this is: All the characters are kind and wise and wonderful; all the conversations are Real; all the vistas are breathtaking and are mindfully appreciated. (If you're getting a Lake Wobegon vibe, you're not too far off). Gently antiracist and ecoconscious without being heavyhanded. Emotionally powerful and sensitive. Satisfying conclusion.

Once again I'm impressed and moved by how huge a heart Pritchett has and how effectively she paints the kind of world I want to live in. Or, if I'm very lucky, to help shape, in the company of the kind wise wonderful loved ones in my life.

(Can't quite justify five stars because the dialog is so stilted and cringey. Plus the dei ex machina, eyeroll. Please don't let that put you off from reading this. Just have a grain of salt on hand.)

Beautiful and moving and heartbreaking. If you listened to the podcast you remember the tension and the fascinating, disturbing history of greed, abuse, pillage and murder. It's all in here, and much more: photos, extra history, updates.

Nagle is a great storyteller, in both podcast and book mediums. Her prose kept me on edge and engaged. She is honest. She sticks to facts; and those facts are damning.

One month from now, greedy white predatory lawbreaking immigrant cockroaches will begin looting and pillaging the U.S., destroying an entire country and killing millions of people. Possibly including you and me. We will all get to find out first hand what it's like to be hunted and crushed and slaughtered. Some will survive and, perhaps, get to write stories like this one.

Charming! Not a whole lot of new material for anyone who's been cooking a while, but enough to read (not skim) the whole way through... and worth doing so for the sense of joy that infuses the book. Nosrat is a storyteller, an ebullient one; all of her lessons are illustrated via memorable tales of her experiences and mishaps and successes. She uses humor judiciously: as a seasoning, if you will. Every page is filled with delight.

Well written and organized. Informative and engaging. Much of what she wrote in 2016, it's not that it's "still relevant" today, it's that it's worse. Chapter 5, on corruption, was chilling. The next pandemics will hit a U.S. whose medical and clinical institutions have been decimated; a U.S. with subhumans in charge of all national offices and with an economic depression or possibly full collapse. Information gathering and sharing, research, prevention, treatment, will all be up to states or isolated universities. And, as Shah clearly describes, violent mobs will likely strike at the latter. Interesting times. I feel sorry for the few who might survive.

All I felt was dismay that a book like this would even need to be written: nothing in it is new or even unusual. It's simply how a human being lives day to day, with integrity and decency.

Then I started thinking about two books I read in the past week, [book:Mountain Time|201358084] and [book:Thunder Song|185767242], both dealing in part with the Turtle Island genocide, and in particular illustrating historical interactions between individuals. Both books reinforced a belief I've long held: inferiors are <i>incapable</i> of understanding honor. It's not that they scorn it or use it selectively, it's that their brains genuinely don't have the ability to register it. Sort of a corollary to Jonathan Haidt's work. Anyhow, that makes it challenging to reach them... and impossible for a book like this. So who is Snyder's target audience then?

A little too breezy for my taste but taken in small doses, such as one chapter per night, it was enjoyable and informative. The most distinctive element—something I’ve never seen before—is a blurb covering the history and evolution of each mark. Also useful are notes detailing the differences in opinion between Chicago, AP, and other style guides, and why those matter.

UPDATE, two months later: I tried again and finished it. Thank goodness that’s over. It was tiresome, heavyhanded; the dialog blathery and often unreadable. The only reason I kept at it was to better read and understand Demon Copperhead, so I ended up just skimming the second half. It often helped to fantasize about Copperfield stabbing a rusty knife in this-or-that evil person’s throat and watching them slowly drown in their own blood. The hope that “next page he’ll do it, for sure!” kept me going more than once.

Ten years separate this from [book:A Tale of Two Cities|1953] and it really shows: although this one shows hints of Dickens’s compassion and sense of justice, he grew up a lot in that time.

Now I eagerly go forward to Kingsolver!

Fierce and powerful and disturbing. LaPointe's life, and her ancestors', is filled with traumas that most of us will never experience. Also tremendous good fortune, if we can call it that to escape attacks from a predatory exploitative system that shouldn't exist. Would you call yourself lucky to walk through a park without being kidnapped/murdered? To survive domestic abuse and negligent medical care? The book had me constantly reflecting on my privilege.

Hers is a life I will never truly understand: 90's punk scene, queer, rage, neglect, fear. LaPointe gets me to see, hear, and feel more intimately than perhaps I ever have. Gives me a new deeper sense of the generational trauma of Coast Sailish people, of the racism and violences against them, of the daily weight of loss.

This isn't just a rage-etc book. LaPointe is an adult now, with a huge and beautiful heart. She writes of transformation and reconciliation and hope and growth. Deeply moving.

Strong recommendation: look up <b>Vi Hilbert</b> before you begin reading.

Piggyback note: reading this in December 2024 is especially painful. Being reminded of the disease, destruction, violence, and suffering inflicted upon good people by a much smaller group of white monsters; of Chief Seattle's courage in the face of indescribable loss; I'm imagining some wise old souls bowing heads sadly and thinking, here we go again.

I can see the appeal: there probably aren't that many gentle murder mysteries. I liked the pacing, thoughtfulness, and compassion. I liked the depictions of scenery and culture. The characters themselves were onedimensional, but that's ok for a first work. And the plot contortions, ditto. Penny shows promise and I will probably read more of her work.

Exquisite. Holy Posole with Mole and Guacamole, what an astonishing collection. How can someone write about heartbreaking loss, so many forms of it, while leaving the reader feeling cocooned in warmth and love and hope? I think Golden gets it; understands the Big Questions and their pesky Answers that lie just at the edge of our vision. (See Gegenschein in the Glossary and Notes).

Read this book. Read it as soon as you can. Give yourself time and patience, because the first two essays are (sorry) not her best: awkward and clashy, informative but at a cost. Worth reading anyway. After those two, she really gets in stride and WOW. What a heart. What a talent for depicting the natural world, and human foibles. What an ability to show just how easy it would be to do the right thing, and how tragic it is that over and over we choose not to.

Read it. Read the Glossary (Seriously. Consider it required reading). Read the Notes (not quite as required reading). Give some thought to the questions she raises. Then give your copy (or a copy) to someone you love.

Unexpectedly comforting. Goodall is an amazing person: talented, smart, accomplished, kind, and, most importantly to me, not a bullshitter. She differentiates hope from optimism and from wishful thinking, recognizing that hope requires effort and awareness. She cites scientific research on hope, but mostly sticks to stories because they're more effective.

Our future was stolen from us on November 5. This book has helped me face that.

So, I read the English edition right after the original, and almost dropped it ten pages in. The tone feels all wrong: brusque and choppy, not the indescribable softer touch of Herrera’s oh-so-deliberate Spanish. English lacks sensuousness and depth sometimes. And reflexive verbs! Herrera makes delicious use of this property, and it’s completely lost in translation. I had to go back and reread parts of the Spanish just to remind myself of the flow and tone. I can’t call it a bad translation, it really is quite sensible, it just misses so much.

Demasiados niveles para mí. Tremenda obra, dificilísima, compleja, oscura pero poéticamente hermosa. Entre el dialecto mejicano y el vocabulario sofisticado de Herrera me tomó tiempísimo cojerle el golpe; perseveré y me valió la pena.

Sé que hay alegoría de mitos Maya. No los entendí, y probablemente nunca los entienda. No importa. Yo igual le encontré mucho valor: novela opresiva acerca de pérdida de identidad, sobre abusos y castismo y la importancia del tiempo. El valor y la necesidad de tener guias.

Aunque tiene elementos de Hero’s Journey a lo Campbell, no creo que eso sea tema principal: Makina ya es héroe por su cuenta, no tiene fortuna que buscar. Su encomienda es pretexto cuya razón confieso que no me hace sentido. Sus experiencias en su viaje conforman al modelo pero es el lector quien crece. Intento volver a leerlo.

Challenging but oh so worth it. I felt some irritation from the start, because there's a whole lotta It Does Not Work That Way: amateur radio, weather, island hopping, small-community economics. It annoys me when writers get fundamental, easily-verified facts wrong, and I almost DNF’ed each time a new logistical implausibility arose.

Then things took a wild turn and I realized it’s intentional. The story is not a dream, nor meant to be interpreted as one (IMO), but the tone is often dreamlike and there are fantastical, surreal elements that I found myself going with. I wish I’d known this ahead of time, so here you go. May my warning prepare you and encourage you because this is a worthwhile book with a beautiful soul.

The story centers around ambiguous loss. Klagmann explores it from several angles, and all I can say is they’re creative and compelling. Grief, acceptance, kindness, resilience, grit, and tons of compassion. Climate Change is a major character and that’s not the nonsequitur you think it is. This is a book I would love to group read.

Compelling. Powerful. Disturbing. Even though it’s clear from the beginning that this was historical fiction only in the loosest sense, it’s also clear that the bones of the story are solid and that Lawhon did a lot of research to flesh it out. Her characters are simplistic but not flat, if that makes any sense? The villains are villainous, the simple folk simple, the noble ones noble, and our hero, protagonist and first-person narrator, is too-perfect smart sharp no-nonsense competent warmhearted sensitive astute amazing ninja superwoman. Also, the drama is waaaaaaaay over the top. And somehow I found myself completely absorbed, recognizing these nits and not caring. See “compelling” above.

One reason I loved the book so much is that Lawhon pulls no punches. The details may be invented, but the circumstances are real. Life was inconceivably difficult for women in the eighteenth century(*), in ways that are different from the way life is difficult today. Lawhon shows much of their everyday life in often-cringeworthy detail. She shows the fortitude and grit needed to survive and thrive. And reminds us that there are people today, an entire political party, who would like us to return to those days.

VOTE.

* and nineteenth and twentieth and twenty-first. Possibly earlier centuries too.