Book 43: The Cooked Seed

A few years ago, I read Anchee Min's memoir of her early years in China, Red Azalea. This second volume recounts her experiences coming to the United States as a student and making her way as a writer.

If you have had cross-cultural experiences or you work with international students, you might find this interesting and relevant.

Book 24: What to Look for in Winter

I found myself asking, "What is this book about?" quite frequently. That doesn't seem like such a good sign.

Candia McWilliams began to lose her sight when she lost the ability to hold her eyes open for most of the day, a condition called blepharospasm. Her memoir is an attempt to explain to herself and others how that might have happened. There were some compelling parts of this book, but much of it left me scratching my head.

Book 23: Prague Winter

Madeleine Albright only discovered her family's Jewish heritage 50 years after World War II, when she became Secretary of State for the Clinton administration. She then learned that a number of her relatives had died in Jewish internment camps in Czechoslovakia.

This book is a mixture of personal remembrance, family history, and the history of the Czech people and Czechoslovakia, focusing particularly on the years leading up to and including World War II. There was much that was new to me.

The writing was lovely. The reading was done by Albright herself, which was nice in a way, but sometimes the pausing was odd or confusing.

Book 19: My Dyslexia

Philip Schultz has dyslexia, and he's also a poet. He only discovered his dyslexia when his young son was diagnosed with the condition. This book describes some of his experiences with an undiagnosed learning disability.

In my ignorance, I expected a bit more of a nonfiction expository feel to this. Instead, it's much more poetic descriptions and images of his experiences learning to read and struggling in school. I enjoyed the descriptions and yet was appalled at the way he was treated in school.

Book 7: The Girl Who Fell to Earth

I really enjoyed the beginning of this book and its view of a part of the world I don't know much about, and how someone from Qatar and someone from Tacoma would go about having a family together. The descriptions of people and places were detailed and colorful.

But after a while, it began to read more like adolescent navel gazing, and I'm just not that interested in adolescent navels--but hey, give me ten years when I'm sharing my house with many adolescent navels and and I might be really into them.

Book 75: The End of Your Life Book Club

This was a very interesting memoir about a mother and son who read and discuss books together as the mother is terminally ill.



I put a lot of books on my To Read list after reading this. And it was quite lovely to read about the relationship between mother and son.

Book 73: Shakespeare Saved My Life

I forgot to post about a book!



This one was excellent. Laura Bates reads and discusses Shakespeare with inmates in solitary confinement and supermax prisons, what our society considers its most dangerous criminals. Many of these men dropped out of junior high school, and yet I'm afraid in many cases their Shakespearean analysis puts me, someone with an English B.A., to shame.

This was such an amazing look into prison life, and what can be done to rehabilitate inmates.

Book 43: The Book of Mormon Girl

Hey, look, another religious book!



This one was great, though sometimes a little disconcerting. Joanna Brooks is just a few years older than I am, and attended BYU just before I did. True to my usual obliviousness, I was not all that aware of some of what went on during the early and mid '90s at BYU regarding feminists in the English department.

Anyway, Joanna's experiences are both similar to and different from mine. My upbringing does not seem to have been that much that of other Mormon girls who lived in the Mountain West. I suppose growing up in central Canada will do that for you. But I remember having many of the same questions and thoughts.

Book 32: Little Princes

This was another unexpected pick, chosen out of a bit of desperation. It turned out to be surprisingly good.



Conor Grennan sounds, at first, like a Gen X-er without much to motivate him except pleasure, but an off-hand decision to volunteer at a Nepali orphanage changes that forever.

Although the book seems simple, it discusses some of the very complicated issues of reuniting trafficked children with their families.

Book 20: I Am Nujood

I picked this for our neighborhood book club because it looked reasonably interesting and it was a book club set available immediately from the public library.


It turned out to be an interesting story that gave me a view of Yemen, which is a place I don't know that much about. It was a bit simplistically written, but it was the account of a child.

While I live happily in my bubble of literacy and self-determination, there are many women and children around the world who are not so fortunate.

A book that doesn't count: About Alice

This one was only 96 pages long, so it doesn't count toward my 52 books goal. But it was worth reading anyway.



Calvin Trillin wrote this little book as a remembrance of his late wife, Alice. It was lovely.

Book 11: Teacher Man

I am so glad I gave this a try. I read Angela's Ashes and 'Tis many years ago and while I appreciated Angela's Ashes, I think I was too young and ignorant to really understand 'Tis. I'm inspired to give it another try later on.



Teacher Man is about Frank McCourt's years of experience teaching (mostly) high school English. I think much of the reason I appreciated it was from my own goofy teaching experiences.