Tonya's Book Blog: February Reading

Hi friends,

We’ve been enjoying getting to know our new house and community in Colorado. Of course, moving during a pandemic is weird when it comes to getting to know people, but we’ve had lots of door-step visits from members from our local Church group, and have spent some time with family. It’s really nice to be back in Colorado. We love the mountains, and are looking forward to exploring them more when the weather is warmer. Some people are winter-weather outdoor enthusiasts, but we are not. We’ve also enjoyed seeing family more frequently, and will enjoy it even more when we don’t have to worry so much about giving each other COVID. One day…

I read a lot of novels in February, including sequels to a few books I read in January, and a Science Fiction series that started well and then got way too dark and I didn’t finish.

As always, let me know your thoughts about any of these books, and if you have recommendations for future reading.

Thanks,

Tonya

Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes! For anyone wondering how and why their brain works the way it does

Review: I read Barrett’s How Emotions are Made a while ago to learn more about how my brain works, and most of it went over my head. However, this book is much more accessible. It’s a compilation of 7 fairly short essays and one introduction about how your brain processes the world around you and converts that into your reality. It’s fascinating. Here are a few quick take-aways:

· -The oft-heard assertion that we have a lizard brain and a human brain is rubbish, and anything you read that talks about it is just wrong or outdated.

· -The world that we experience is a carefully controlled hallucination as the brain receives electrical inputs and converts them into the world that we see, hear, touch, taste, an interact with.

· -Our brains are shaped by the brains of people around us, and we are dependent on them for remaining healthy and alive.

· -There are a few things that make human brains unique from other brains, and size is not one of them. The ability to construct a social reality with other humans is one. Humans have the amazing ability for abstract thought on a species-wide scale that allows us to cooperate and create laws, money, democracy and traditions, etc. which become reality simply because so many humans accept that they are real.

Highly recommend for anyone interested in learning more about what really makes us human.

Heart of Flames by Nicki Pau Preto

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: if you liked the first, yes

Review: I read the first book in this series Crown of Feathers in January. This was a pretty solid sequel, and in some ways I liked it better than the first. It is the second book in a trilogy, so there was a lot of setting-up the last installment, particularly at the end. However, it still delivered some solid plot and character development, and we got a new point-of-view character, the villain. I was frustrated at times with the main character and some of the dumb choices that she made. The phoenix riding was on point, and I will probably read the sequel when it comes out later this year.

Written in Starlight by Isabel Ibanez

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: if you liked the first, yes

Review: I read the first book in this series, Woven in Moonlight, in January. This is more of a spin-off than a sequel as it follows a different set of characters. In this one, the contessa who failed to regain her throne in the first book is banished into the foreboding jungle where literally everything can kill you—even the butterflies… I haven’t spent much time in jungles, but the little time I did spend in one in Thailand made the whole everything-is-trying-to-kill you message crystal clear. After a 15 minute stroll on a trail right off the road, my friend and I had leeches all over our legs, which explained the long plastic tube socks everyone else was wearing. Anyway, this jungle is worse than real ones because there are also magical indigenous people trying to kill you. Luckily the contessa is quickly rescued by her childhood crush, who is now all grown up and hunky. Half of the book is them trying to survive the jungle, and the other half is them trying to figure out what’s killing the killer jungle and ends with what is the most literal deus ex machina scene I’ve ever read. The contessa is fairly annoying at the beginning, but does grow a bit and reduces her annoyingness over the course of the book. Highly recommend for anyone looking for a unique fantasy novel and who liked the first.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes, if you liked Hunger Games or Ender’s Game

Review: Most people compare this book to the Hunger Games because it features a battle-royal-esque setting where lots of genetically modified killer teenagers try to, well, kill and/or enslave each other. The beginning of this sci-fi series is set in a world where humanity has terraformed the solar system and created a strict color-based hierarchy with genetically modified near-God like beings known as Golds at the top and Reds serving as slaves at the bottom. It’s told from a first-person perspective with only one point-of-view character, our hero, Darrow. He dies pretty early in the book after his wife is executed for singing a forbidden song of uprising and sneaking out of their mining tunnels where they're kept imprisoned and forced to mine helium-3 onto the surface of Mars. Darrow is resurrected after his fake death by an insurrectionist group who through intense surgical modification turns him from Red to Gold with the eventual plan of having him infiltrate Gold society and rise to command spaceship fleets for their rebellion. It’s a fairly solid story and hard to put down. I didn’t like how the female characters in the book were predominantly treated as motivation for the male protagonist to act either through their deaths, rape, or threat of rape. It’s also somewhat dark, but I would put it on par with the Hunger Games. Recommend for anyone who likes sci-fi and wants to explore a fairly-well developed world, good prose, and excellent action sequences.

Yearning for the Living God: Reflections from the Life of F. Enzio Busche by F. Enzio Busche and Tracie A. Lamb (Compliler)

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: if you’re a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and like reading about missionary work

Review: My father-in-law gave us this book for Christmas. It’s a memoir of Elder Busche, who joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Germany in the 1960s and went on to lead a dedicated life of service including serving as a mission president, then a temple president, and finally a General Authority. Busche grew up in Nazi Germany and provides interesting insights into post-war Germany and his brief experience as a prisoner of war at the end of the war. He joins the Church in his 30s and manages to run a successful printing business while also serving as the leader of his congregation and literally helping build the church in Germany. It’s an inspiring story, and I enjoyed his insights, and the many faith-building stories he told. Lamb did her best to compile his stories, but it was still fairly obvious that Busche isn’t a native English speaker, and the stories aren't connected very well in places. There was also a short bit where I felt like Busche man-splained why women don’t hold the priesthood that I found fairly annoying. Otherwise, I recommend for any Church members who want an uplifting and interesting read.

Golden Son (Red Rising #2) by Pierce Brown

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: if you liked the first book, yes

Review: Golden Son follows Darrow as he leaves the Gold institute and tries to make his way to starship fleet commander while maintaining his secret identity. It’s fast-paced and action packed with lots of political intrigue and betrayals. Brown writes really good action scenes, and I really liked the secondary characters that he introduced in this one, including Ragnar. Being the second book of a trilogy, there’s a lot of set-up for the final installment, and the ending is definitely a cliff-hanger, but it’s still a solid, enjoying read.

Morning Star (Red Rising #3) by Pierce Brown

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: if you liked the first two books, yes

Review: This is where the Red Rising series started to get a lot darker, I thought. The novel opens with Darrow escaping a year-long imprisonment and torture at the hands of his rival and enemy, and the book spends a good deal of time dealing with his trauma from those events. Golden Son set the stage for the civil war, and Morning Star executes it. Darrrow’s Red-to-Gold transformation is secret no longer, and the rebellion against the Gold slave-lords is underway, but going poorly. As before, the action sequences are captivating, and there’s some amazing character development including some tragic deaths and how the characters respond to them. The end was thrilling, but to be honest, I felt it was kind of a cheap trick that didn’t do justice to the scope of the world and setting that Brown created. I’d be interested in your opinion on how it ended if you have one.

Iron Gold (Red Rising #4) by Pierce Brown

Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes, if you liked the first trilogy

Review: This trilogy starts 10 years after the events in Morning Star, and things aren’t going well for anyone, including the rebellion-turned-Republic that’s still battling against the Gold Society supporters in the inner solar system. The big change from the previous series is that we have multiple point-of-view characters that take turns telling the story including our hero Darrow’s potential arch-rival. So that’s interesting. The action sequences are captivating, but I was somewhat disappointed with how dark the story was starting to get. I was also hoping that the addition of a female point-of-view character would resolve some of the issues with female characters I had in the first series, but it didn’t. To be honest, I was kind of hoping for more, or maybe different, from Brown after the success of the first trilogy. I really only kept reading because I was attached to the old and new characters, so that’s one thing that he did well. Despite being the first book in the series, this installment also felt like a lot of set-up for the future story, and a lot of the content was probably unnecessary or could have been abbreviated a lot.

Dark Age (Red Rising #5) by Pierce Brown

Rating: 1 of 5 stars

Recommendation: no

Review: I don’t usually review books that I don’t finish, but this book really annoyed me, and I want to rant about it a little. This book, as the title implies, is pretty dark. The Red Rising series has always had a lot of somewhat graphic action sequences, but this book was overwhelmed with them. I read some other reviews that indicated that the dark stuff continued, but I really wanted to know what happened to the characters. However, after plodding through the first 100 pages or so, and seeing that there were still 600 left, I decided to just read a synopsis online. Sounded like most of the book was filled with death, violence, drug-use, teenage brides, mutilating babies, and badly resurrected bad guys. I don’t know why Brown decided to take the story this way, but I was super disappointed, especially after having invested all the time to read hundreds of pages in this series already. I probably won’t pick up the final installment that comes out later this year if it’s going to be more of this.

Mommy Corner

We had fun with cousin Lawrence when he came to visit.

My cousin got married, and since we live in Colorado now, we could actually celebrate with her. We didn't get to go to the sealing since there were strict COVID-19 limits on how many people could be in the room, but we did take pictures outside with them.