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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 #262

 

 

 

 

On The Blog Last Week

 

• On Thursday I made 5-star TBR predictions.

 

 

 

 

On The Blog This Week

 

• On Wednesday I talk about upcoming book releases for the rest of February.

 

 

 

 

In My Reading Life

 

I read a lot last week, so get your scrolling fingers ready.

I finished Ada Blackjack: A True Story Of Survival In The Arctic by Jennifer Niven. It’s about an Inuit woman in the 1920s who joined a team of Arctic explorers because they needed a seamstress/maid/cook for their expedition. Things went badly wrong in the Arctic. When a rescue ship finally reached the stranded explorers (two years after they left civilization), Ada was the only explorer still alive. I have massive respect for Ada. She didn’t know how to hunt or build shelters, but she figured it out real quick. Calling this book Ada Blackjack is slightly inaccurate because it’s about the entire expedition. For long stretches of the book, Ada fades into the background while the author focuses on the other explorers, their families, and the men who organized the expedition but didn’t go on it. I was kind of disappointed by the shifts in focus, but I understand why they happened. Ada rarely talked about her experiences in the Arctic. Other people never shut up about their theories of what went wrong. The author is just working with the information that’s available.

I loved the first half of the book. It’s a harrowing survival story. Even though I knew the outcome, I couldn’t put it down. The second half drags a little. It’s about all the backstabbing and finger-pointing that happened after the expedition failed. The pettiness is not as compelling as the survival story. Despite my complaints, I highly recommend this book if you’re interested in historical expeditions. I wish more people knew about Ada. I’d never heard of her.

Ada Blackjack was the highlight of my reading week. It went downhill after that.

I finished Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s mostly about lying and why we’re so terrible at knowing when someone is lying to us. The author talks about how we “Default to truth” because we need to trust each other to keep society functioning. Some people (such as police officers) learn to “Default to distrust,” which is why cops sometimes shoot people who don’t have weapons. The case studies the author discusses are fascinating, and I liked learning about them, but the book feels too surface-level. I think it needed to be longer and have a stronger conclusion. I wish the author had talked more about how people could apply the lessons in the book to their own boring lives. I’ll most likely never interrogate a Cuban spy or have sex with a drunken stranger at a party. I just don’t do those things. I’m profoundly boring! I suspect most people are profoundly boring. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was supposed to take away from this book except “You can’t always judge strangers by their body language.” That seems like common sense. The information in the book is attention-grabbing, but my reaction to finishing it was, “Um . . . okay?”

Then I read American Fire: Love, Arson, And Life In A Vanishing Land by Monica Hesse. This is a true crime book set in rural Virginia. It’s about a five-month arson spree that created chaos and stretched the resources of a small county to their breaking point. A boyfriend/girlfriend duo set 67 buildings on fire before they were caught. For me, this book was exceedingly average. I don’t know if that’s my fault or the book’s! Between TV shows, podcasts, and books, I consume an unhealthy amount of true crime content. If I wasn’t obsessed with crime junk, I probably would have appreciated the book a lot more. It was interesting to see the different methods the police department and the citizens used to catch the arsonists. The backstory of the arsonists and the struggling rural county is compelling. Since I consume so much true crime, I don’t think this book will stick with me. It’s just another crime story. I think it would have been more memorable if the arsonists had talked about their crimes. The boyfriend talked to the cops a little, but the girlfriend insisted she wasn’t involved. Since the arsonists wouldn’t talk, we don’t learn much about the psychology behind their actions. If you’re new to true crime, this book would be a good place to start. It’s a fast-paced read, and nobody died in the fires, so you don’t have to read about violence. If you read a lot of true crime, this book might get lost in your brain’s crime ocean. There’s nothing unique about it.

The low point of my reading week was Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood. I’m so disappointed, people! Margaret Atwood wrote some of my all-time-favorite books, but I don’t understand her newer stuff. I haven’t enjoyed any of her recent books. We just don’t have a similar sense of humor. Hag-Seed is about Felix, a play director who is forced out of his job by his coworkers. He gets a new job teaching Shakespeare to prisoners. Then he comes up with a stupidly complicated plan to get revenge on his former coworkers and manipulates the prisoners into carrying out the plan. Felix is a great character. He’s arrogant, and over-dramatic, and complicated, and insane. I enjoyed reading about him and the prisoners, but I couldn’t get into the plot or the writing style. The book is part lecture on Shakespeare, part idiotic slapstick comedy. I don’t get it.

Luckily, my current reads are better! I’m reading a short story collection called How To Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer. These stories are bleak and oddly fascinating. Have you ever read a plot twist that horrified you so much that you set the book down and backed away slowly? Yeah, that feeling sums up these stories!

I’m also reading A Great And Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray. It’s young adult historical fantasy about girls at a proper English boarding school. The characters are kind of insufferable, but I’m intrigued because the relationships are starting to get more complicated. It's no longer just a mean girls story.

 

 

In The Rest Of My Life

 

Five things that made me happy last week:

 

1. Happy Valentine’s Day!
2. I’m looking forward to tomorrow when the leftover Valentine’s treats go on sale at the grocery store . . .
3. Pizza! You can’t pass up Five Dollar Friday at the pizza place.
4. It’s Baby Brooklyn’s birthday in a few days. She’s turning two. I need to acquire a cake. I can’t believe we’ve kept a small child alive for nearly two years. Nicely done, us. I still feel so incompetent!
5. Speaking of Baby Brooklyn, she’s starting to say full sentences. She’s hilarious. Yesterday, she was jumping on my rolling desk chair. I looked over at her, and before I could tell her to stop jumping, she said, “Brooklyn, sit down.” Then she sat down. The child read my mind and said exactly what I was going to say! This raises an important question: If she knows she’s not supposed to jump on the wheelie chair, WHY WAS SHE JUMPING ON THE WHEELIE CHAIR?

 

 

 

 

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