Hi friends,
September is a great month to be in Colorado, and we enjoyed some time outside and with family. I also read a few good books. I’m trying to focus more on quality over quantity with my reading now since my reading time is really limited. I don’t want to avoid reading potentially awesome books just because they’re longer and will take more time because I’m focused on reading a certain number of books every month. That being said, I’m being more selective with the books I pick to read because I don’t like not finishing books. What process do you use to select books to read?
Happy reading!
Tonya
Critical Mass (Delta-V #2) by Daniel Suarez
Rating: 3 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes, if you liked the first a lot
Review: I was a big fan of the first book in this series, but I found many of the elements that I liked from that book missing in this one including a well-developed found-family trope. This second installment has lots of the techno-sci fi that I liked from the first book. Suarez does a good job of imagining a world just a decade or so from now, and describing the possible technological advances that have happened and weaving them into the plot. As someone who’s interested in space policy and space history, it was fun to see how Suarez envisioned a cislunar economy and the steps that are needed to actually make that materialize. However, some of my favorite characters from the first were completely missing, and the characters that were here had barely any development. Character development was also missing from the first, but I felt that Suarez offset it by using the found-family trope. This one also has pages of info-dumping exposition about cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, which I’m just not interested in.
Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World 1471 to the Second World War by Howard W. French
Rating: 5 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: French makes the case that Africa is central to the rise of modernity, and he does it very convincingly. He starts in the pre-Columbian exchanges days when Portugal “discovered” vast quantities of gold in western Africa, which helped feed its wealth in its ongoing contest with Spain and other European powers for dominance. He continues through the beginning of chattel slavery based on race and how the new slave system developed by Europeans on Sao Tome and then transported to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States fueled the economic development of all European power through the age of colonization. He talks about how run-away unregulated capitalism combined with racism led to plantation-based slavery, which contributed more wealth to Britain, France, and Spain than any other endeavor in the new world. He points out over and over that this vital contribution to the world that we live in has largely been erased from the history that most Americans and Britains learn in their school years as we continue to grapple with the uncomfortable reality that the great prosperity that western Europe created was built on a foundation of slavery. I particularly enjoyed learning about the Haitian revolution and how the rebel slaves of that country threw off French, British, and even American assaults multiple times. I’d love to learn more about this part of history. While the book is very repetitive in places, it was well paced, and French did a great job clearly explaining his point. He concludes by saying, “The main thought I would like to leave readers with is that of the crucial participation of Black people in their own liberation and in the preservation of the young American union.”
Mammoths at the Gates (Singing Hills Cycle #4) by Nghi Vo
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: This is the 4th book in Vo’s Singing Hills series that follows traveling Cleric Thien as they travel the world collecting stories to record in the Singing Hills archives. In this episode, Cleric Thien return home to the abbey to find that a lot has changed while they’ve been away including the presence of two humongous war mammoths at the gates. These novellas are fast reads that pack a big punch. I love learning more about the ancient China inspired world that Vo has created in each installment, and in this one we got to learn a lot more about the nixien, the talking birds with perfect memories that help maintain the abbey’s archives. Highly recommend for anyone who’s interested in a new take on a fantasy world with a great soft magic system.
The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts by Loren Grush
Rating: 5 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: I love a good book about the US space program, so I was excited to hear that Grush was publishing a book focused on the first 6 women astronauts that NASA selected in 1978. There are hundreds of books about all the Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo astronauts, but this is the first book on these history-making women. Grush did a great job telling their stories too. She followed each astronaut from when they were accepted as astronauts until their first flights. I enjoyed the narrative style that Grush used, and the book felt like reading a novel. It was also really well paced and had a great amount of detail about the Space Shuttle program. As someone who’s reviewing NASA’s programs that are replacing the shuttle, I thought this part was really interesting. The Challenger accident hangs heavy over the last part of the narrative as one of the original 6 died when the shuttle broke apart. These women completely deserve their trail-blazing and history making status, and I’m glad that their stories are finally being told here. One thing that comes across strongly throughout the book is how the media treated these women differently than their male counterparts. It’s infuriating that successful women in male-dominated industries to this day still have to deal with similar obtuse and insensitive questions. Also, the focus and pressure put on them to show that women could work in space as well as men was immense, and they handled it really well. |
| We had a super fund Labor Day! My parents were in town, and we went down to Colorado Springs to see the hot air balloon liftoff. Unfortunately, the wind was too hard for them to take off, but they did blow them up for everyone to see. The liftoff has become and annual labor day tradition for us, like it was when I was a kid growing up, so hopefully we'll have better luck next year |
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| We also went to the Denver aquarium. The girls loved this eel and all the sharks we say. |
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| Chloe wrote a story in school complete with illustrations. For her story, she chose to write about the day Lincoln was born. Here are some of the pictures that she drew of me in the hospital, and her holding Lincoln. |
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| Here we all are coming home from the hospital together. I think she got my hair perfect! It's so much fun to see all the neat things that she's learning at school. |
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| Chloe's first grade school picture. |
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| We had fun in the bubble room at the children's museum with our Flauding cousins! |
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| Maya is an infamous picky eater. She refuses most fruits and vegetables, so I had to save this picture of her actually eating an apple at school for their Jonny Appleseed activities. |
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| Chloe's enjoying the nice September weather at our nearby park. This is the closest we can get to playing at the beach here in Colorado! |
