The past month has included orange (May) and yellow (June) books. Most of the books were worth the read, even if they weren't a favorite!
Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better by Brant Hansen: This was a true mixed bag; I thought Hansen was funny and engaging, and he has an important message for Christians who spend their energy being outraged about things that don't affect them or even hurt anybody. However, there's a huge gap in this book when it comes to systemic injustice and personal trauma, and that means its applicability is limited.
Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman: This was a great overview of the lifecycle of a friendship, as seen through the unique friendship of the two authors. In telling their own story, they bring in research about how friendships form, how they grow, and how they weather – or don't — conflicts and ruptures.
Radical Relating: A Queer and Polyamory-Informed Guide to Love Beyond the Myth of Monogamy by Mel Cassidy: This wasn't bad, per se, but I don't think I'd recommend it to many people. For someone with experience in relationship anarchy, there's too much 101 content combined with philosophizing that's not grounded in enough practical examples. And for someone completely foreign to this approach to relationships, it's too unapologetically radical to make a good starting point.
Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg: This is a bit more pure literary fiction than I typically read, but it was good. It's definitely the kind of novel you could mine for symbolism and motifs. Reading it simply for pleasure, though, it kept my interest enough to keep reading, but I don't anticipate it will stay with me.
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon: This book was quite the undertaking, and while I don't know that it needed to be as long as it was to make the author's point, it was a fascinating listen, read (well!) by the author. Solomon looks at "horizontal identities," those identities that children may have that are often different from their own parents. I would recommend it with the grain of salt that you need a strong stomach to get through some of the passages and you may take serious issue with the way Solomon portrays certain identities and experiences; I think it's worth reading nonetheless.
Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but Were Afraid to Ask by Anton Treuer: This is a fairly good overview of information on the indigenous peoples of the United States (and, to a lesser extent, Canada), if a bit dated. Treuer covers a wide range of topics, from tribal governments to casinos, from spirituality to the history of residential schools. At times he gets a bit lecture-y to his own community, which seems out of place in a primer for non-native people, but on the whole it's an impressively comprehensive yet concise read.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert: This is a well-researched look at the era we're currently living through, in which species are going extinct at a rapid pace, akin to five other periods in planetary history. Kolbert does a nice job of highlighting the philosophic tensions and complexities of the moment and walking the line between despair and hope, though I think she could have spent more time on concrete actions that the reader can take.
Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke: The book is relatively comprehensive for the fact that its primary aim is to answer Radke's central question: "Why do I have feelings about the way my butt looks to other people?" While I'm not sure I took anything hugely meaningful away from this read, I found it to be a well-researched and well-constructed work of nonfiction.
Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay: This story of four generations of Filipino American men, each told from when they were 16, is a great novel for both young adults and adults. There are important themes and motifs that students could dig into, but they aren't heavy-handed in a way that overwhelms the reading experience, and ditto for the history lessons. I don't think I've seen a storytelling format quite like this before, and I thought it was incredibly well done.
The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully by Joan Chittister: While I'm not the target audience for this book, I found a lot of valuable content in the reflections on how to think of one's life as a whole, how to integrate past experiences into one's present, and so on. I got frustrated with Chittister's seemingly limited view of her reader (their abilities, their prior experiences in middle age), but I'm grateful for the pieces here and there that I did take from it.
Looking back:
One year ago I was reading: You Know, Sex, Dracula, The Name of the Wind, More Than Two, Amelia, If Only, and Black Sun
Five years ago I was reading: The Road Trip, Boy Erased, Womanist Midrash, and The Case of the Counterfeit Painting
Ten years ago I was reading: Furiously Happy, Lies We Tell Ourselves, and All the Bright Places
