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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 #283

On The Blog Last Week

• On Tuesday I shared funny quotes from the Incorrigible Children series because I'm obsessed.

On The Blog This Week

• On Tuesday we talk about which bestsellers are worth reading.

In My Reading Life

Nonfiction November continues! Last week, I finished The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest To Transform The Grisly World Of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris. "Grisly" is the perfect word to describe this book. There are detailed descriptions of surgeries-gone-wrong. Don't read it if you're squeamish. Also, don't read it without Google. I think the target audience has slightly more medical knowledge than me. I had to Google a few diseases because I'm not a doctor, and the author doesn't explain.

If you couldn't tell from the title, the book is a biography of Joseph Lister. He was a surgeon/professor in Scotland in the 1800s. His life goal was to figure out why wounds get infected and how to stop infections. Spoiler alert: He eventually figured it out. Then his challenge became convincing the medical world that you shouldn't slice people open without disinfecting stuff first. I like that the author and Joseph Lister both acknowledge that discoveries don't happen in a vacuum. Lister couldn't have made his medical advancements without building on the work of other scientists. Biographies sometimes glorify one person and ignore everybody who helped or influenced that person. This biography spreads the credit around.

The book is extremely focused on Lister's medical career. I wish we'd learned more about his life outside of work. We learn a tiny bit about his family and his Quaker beliefs, but that's it. Lister said he didn't want his personal life written about, so maybe information about his day-to-day life doesn't exist? I don't know. His fascination with germs gets slightly tedious to read about after 200+ pages of it. Still, I highly recommend this book if you're interested in medical history. It'll make you grateful that you don't live in the 1800s. That stuff was nasty. (The top hats were cool, though.)

Then I read The Last Girl: My Story Of Captivity, And My Fight Against The Islamic State by Nadia Murad. This memoir will make you want to punch people in the face. Seriously. Why is this stuff still happening?! The author was raised in a small Yazidi village in northern Iraq. In 2014, when she was 21 years old, ISIS invaded the village. They slaughtered most of the villagers, including many of Nadia's family members. Nadia was kidnapped and sold into sex slavery. She eventually escaped and made her way to Germany. There's a quote on the back of the book from The Economist that says "horrific and essential reading." I'd agree with that. Why are genocides still happening in modern times? And, why are terrorists using Facebook to sell sex slaves? (Seriously, WTF Facebook?)

For me, the most interesting part of the memoir is Nadia's observations about people who see problems and choose to ignore them. Here's a paragraph for you:

"Maybe, I thought, it was asking too much of a normal family to fight back against terrorists like the men in ISIS, men who threw people they accused of being homosexual off rooftops; men who raped young girls because they belonged to the wrong religion; men who stoned people to death. My willingness to help others had never been tested like that. But that was because Yazidis had never been shielded by their religion, only attacked. Hisham and his family had remained safe in ISIS-occupied Mosul because they were born Sunni and therefore were accepted by the militants. Until I showed up, they'd been content to wear their religion as armor. I tried not to hate them for it, because they were showing me such kindness, but I didn't love them." - The Last Girl

If I was forced to find something to complain about in the book, it would be the lack of a family tree. Nadia has a big family and a lot of friends. Sometimes I had a hard time remembering how they were all connected. That's a small complaint. This book should be required reading.

I'm currently reading Cursed Objects: Strange But True Stories Of The World's Most Infamous Items by J.W. Ocker. It's a nice change from the depressing books I've been reading! The writing style is upbeat, and the objects are weird and fascinating. I'm enjoying it.

In The rest of my life

Five things that made me happy last week:

1. I have blog posts scheduled for the rest of November. It's been a long time since I was organized. Nicely done, me.
2. I got a new mattress! The old one had springs poking through it that cut me while I slept. I've now gone 3 nights without waking up because something was stabbing me.
3. I brushed the dog. I procrastinate grooming the dog because the dog and I both hate it, but she's a lot less disgusting now.
4. Christmas shopping! I love buying gifts. I'm happy that stores are having extended Black Friday sales instead of making us all rush out on the same day.
5. I unfollowed a bunch of people on Twitter. Now I'm seeing more content that I actually want to see. I don't know why, but sometimes my feed becomes 90% book advertisements. I know that self-published authors need to make money, but I want to see people talking about books, not just trying to sell them. (If you think I unfollowed you by mistake, let me know and I'll refollow. I've been known to get overzealous with the unfollow button.)

If you talk about books, I want to be friends

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