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The Sunday Post is a chance to recap the past week, talk about next week, tell you what I’m reading, and share news. It’s hosted by The Caffeinated Book Reviewer, Readerbuzz, and Book Date.

 

 

 

The Sunday Post #250

 

 

 

 

Public Service Announcement

 

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On The Blog Last Week

 

• On Tuesday I talked about the best baby and toddler books I’ve read in 2020.

 

 

 

 

On The Blog This Week

 

• On Saturday there’s a book haul.

 

 

 

 

In My Reading Life

 

It’s still Nonfiction November, so I continued plowing through the chunky nonfiction books on my shelf.

I finished The Radium Girls: The Dark Story Of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore. It’s about a group of female factory employees who worked with radium in the early 1900s. The factory owners knew radium was deadly, but they refused to admit it, even when the women were dying from radium poisoning. This book is terrifying! The women were growing massive tumors, and their glow-in-the-dark bones were disintegrating and poking through their skin, and they were spending all their money on medical care that wasn’t going to save them. It’s a worst-nightmare situation. If you’re interested in books about medicine or workers’ rights, pick this one up. It’s yucky at times, but it’s also fascinating and worth reading.

Then I read Evicted: Poverty And Profit In The American City by Matthew Desmond. (Damn, my books were depressing last week.) This one is a sociological study of grinding poverty and slum landlords. I respect how this book is written. Sociology books are tricky because the author goes into a community that isn’t theirs and studies what’s happening. The author can’t ignore their own presence because a writer with a camera will change how people act, which will influence the study. The author has to acknowledge their own influence. But, some authors acknowledge it too much and make the book about themselves. Then the book comes across as disaster tourism, which is gross. I think Matthew Desmond handles the dilemma perfectly. He keeps the focus on poverty and the people who experience it. He waits until the end to discuss how his presence may have altered the interactions between landlords and tenants. I can see why this book won awards. It’s compassionate, fair, detailed, and well-researched.

My journey through depressing nonfiction continued with Rage by Bob Woodward. I’m trying to get all the Trump books off my TBR shelf so I don’t have to think about him anymore. This is the follow-up book to Fear, which I read last year and found both thought-provoking and unsurprising. Fear covers the first two years of Trump’s presidency; Rage covers the last two. (Well, it stops at the end of summer 2020. Woodward could write a whole new book on the last six months of this year. I would title it Exhaustion.) If you follow the news every day, then there’s nothing new in Rage, but Woodward has some interesting observations about people’s reactions to Coronavirus. He talks about how he’s a rich white guy, and his parents were rich white people, and that has shielded him from America’s problems. Coronavirus is the first time in his life that the government’s actions (or inactions) have severely impacted how he lives. I think his fear of the virus occasionally makes him overstep boundaries. His virus-related interviews with Trump come across as arguments or efforts to influence the president. As an American citizen, I was uncomfortable with this. Woodward is a journalist, not a Coronavirus advisor. Trump needs to listen to scientists, and the media needs to stay in its lane. That’s my opinion. I recommend this book, even though a few of the interviews made me grind my teeth.

Right now, I’m reading a memoir: In The Days Of Rain: A Daughter, A Father, A Cult by Rebecca Stott. It’s beautifully written. I love her descriptions of the English countryside. I’m also reading a wilderness survival book called Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why by Laurence Gonzales. The nature in this book is much less beautiful.

 

In The Rest Of My Life

 

Five things that made me happy last week:

 

1. Lots of reading.
2. I’m very close to being able to run 10k without walking up the big hills or having a near-death experience. Yesterday I ran 5.2 miles in below-freezing weather and didn’t feel like a microwaved corpse at the end of it.
3. Christmas shopping. I love buying presents.
4. Thank you to everyone who has entered my giveaway so far! Please enter if you haven’t. You can win cool stuff.
5. It’s almost Thanksgiving! Bring on the food.

 

 

I’m Stuffed With Holiday Cheer

 

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Take care of yourselves and be kind to each other. See you around the blogosphere!