Tonya's Book Blog: April and May 2024

Hi friends,

It’s been a minute. I think it’s safe to say that I skipped blogging in April, but I did not skip reading. We’ve had a few projects around the house that have taken the 1-2 hours that I would normally spend writing this blog. So, this will be a long post with a variety of books from both April and May.

We’ve had a good time on the home front too. School just got out for summer, and I’ve been battling a cold that is lingering on with annoying congestion for weeks.

In any case, let me know what you think about these books and if you have suggestions for further reading.

Best,

Tonya

Rhythm of War (Stormlight Archive #4) by Brandon Sanderson

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: This book finished up my Stormlight Archive re-read. It was the first time I’ve re-read it, and I really enjoyed it more the second time. My favorite plotline is for sure Navani and Kaladin in the tower of Urithiru. I love Navani’s interaction and relationship with her arch-rival/enemy/research partner, Raboniel. I also really enjoyed how the Singers and even the Returned were given more context and back story. Sanderson does an excellent job writing villains and fleshing them out to be more than just your typical epic fantasy big bad. I also really enjoy Kaladin’s arc in this book. It seems unusual for your primary hero-figure to somewhat willingly seek retirement instead of going out in a blaze of glory; although that may still yet happen in Book 5…. Compared to Book 3, Dalinar kind of takes a back seat to Navani, which seems appropriate, but my least favorite plotline in this book is Shallan. I really hope that she’s done with the split personalities and major secret reveals and then subsequent denial and hiding. I just want to see her character do something else for once… In any case, I’m super excited for Book 5 and have even looked up fan theories and predictions for what will happen. It’s pretty fun to speculate.

Journey Into Space: The First Three Decades of Space Exploration by Bruce Murray

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: Murray is a former Director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. This book is part-memoir and part-history of the US’s journey through planetary exploration, which has mostly been performed by teams at JPL. Murray personally worked on many of the most well-known of these projects including Voyager and Mariner missions. It’s fascinating to get the inside view of the politics and budget wars that go into getting these projects approved and executed. Murray definitely bears a grudge for NASA’s iconic space shuttle. During its development in the 1970s and 1980s, NASA nearly zeroed out its planetary exploration budget to support cost overruns on the shuttle, which never delivered a planetary launch capability as promised. During that time, JPL struggled to stay open and turned to defense work to retain its employees. I found this particularly interesting now because JPL has been laying off its contractors and even employees recently in response to budget constraints across all of NASA and the federal government and because of uncertainty in its Mars Sample Return mission, which JPL was going to be leading. This book provides some great context for understanding what’s going on now in space policy and planetary science. Turns out NASA’s been planning a Mars sample return mission for decades, and they’re still struggling to get to an affordable and feasible plan. Nobody said that space is easy.

The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentlemen Bastards #1) by Scott Lynch

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: I’ve seen this book recommended a lot on BookTube, so I decided to check it out. It’s described as grimdark, a subgenre of fantasy that features morally gray characters and tends to reject the typical happy and triumphant ending associated with most stories in the fantasy genre. This book was true to that characterization. It took me a long time to get into it because I didn’t really like any of the characters for the first half of the book and found it hard to engage with the story because of this apathy. I’m glad I stuck with it though, because the second half of the book really showed some interesting character growth and choices. Our protagonist is the titular character Locke Lamora, an orphan who was brought into a small adopted family and taught the ways of professional conmen. It’s a very Robin Hood idea, but instead of robbing the rich and giving to the poor, Locke just robs the rich and uses the money to continue to finance his long-game type cons. My favorite characters actually ended up being the couple that Locke was conning throughout the book and the head of the secret police who is trying to bring Locke in. The last half of the book is really action-packed and moves fast. It is a lot of fun to watch Locke’s genius unfold throughout the book and overcome the plethora of problems that arise. I would recommend for those interested in a more dark hero.

The Warped Side of the Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel and Gravitational Waves by Kip S. Thorne and Lia Halloran

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: I actually bought this book for my husband’s birthday seeing as he’s a physicist and also has an appreciation for art, but I actually ended up reading it before him. This book is a beautiful combination of verse describing Thorne’s research into all the things listed in the title. Thorne has a Nobel in physics for his work on the gravitational wave observatory that spanned three decades from original concept to detecting the first waves. He partners with visual artist Lia Halloran to describe the research and how black holes, wormholes, and gravitational waves are born and propagated throughout the universe. Thorne’s sections are written entirely in verse, which forces him to explain things succinctly and clearly. Halloran’s paintings beautifully expound on the verse and helps the reader visualize the concepts being explained. It was both a beautiful and insightful book, and while I didn’t understand the entirety of what was discussed, I definitely enjoyed the reading experience.

Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present by Fareed Zakaria

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: Zakaria looks at past revolutions to help explain the modern world and the several revolutions that we’re living through. His historical analysis includes the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the first liberal revolution that took place in the Netherlands in the 1700s. When Zakaria uses the word liberal, he doesn’t mean the progressive left of American politics. Instead, he’s referring to the liberal world order that’s built on capitalistic free markets, democracy, and respect for human rights. He provides a brief overview of how this liberal world order came to be first in the Netherlands in the 1700s and then spread to England and the rest of Europe and America. Then, he examines four revolutions that we’re living through: globalization, technology, identity, and geopolitics. He talks about how globalization has not been friendly to many of the middle- and lower-income people in America and the rest of the Western world; how technology has changed the way we work and live; how politics are now defined by identity more than rational interest; and how the US is no longer the monolithic super power it was following the end of the Cold War. He provides interesting insights that helped me understand the moment and world that we’re living in. I always find it helpful to learn about other times in human history that experienced a lot of turmoil and change. Although how people responded to that turmoil and change is not generally encouraging for our present moment. In any case, I found the book a bit slow in places, but it was largely engaging and Zakaria is definitely good at writing for a general audience and explaining academic concepts for a lay reader.

Returns (The Library Trilogy #1.6) by Mark Lawrence

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: This volume includes two short stories written to fall between the first and second books in the library trilogy. Both stories focus on side characters from the main book, and I really enjoyed getting to spend more time with them. The world that Lawrence has created allows for an infinite amount of settings, worlds, and time periods that this characters could explore in short or long form, and I loved the nested story-telling that he uses in the first short story, which features our favorite library deputy, Yute, and Livira’s teacher from the first book as a boy. The second story is Livira’s take on Catcher in the Rye and brings Clovis into the story. Highly recommend for folks who like the original series, but not necessary to read to know what’s going on in the main series.

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn (The Library Trilogy #1) by Mark Lawrence

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: This was a re-read for me in preparation for the release of the second book earlier in May. I’m really glad that I read it again because I had forgotten a lot about the secondary characters who play a more prominent role in the second book. It was as good as I remembered, and I really enjoyed seeing the hints that foreshadowed some of the big twists. I would say I liked it even better the second time around.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Recommendation: sure

Review: This book was kind of a slog, but I’m glad I read it because I learned a lot about how my own brain makes decisions and processes information. Kahneman is a researcher and Nobel prize winner in economics. The book is mainly a summary of his and others’ research in the fields of psychology and economics. I learned a lot about how easily influenced my choices are by the manner and order that information is presented in. One of the things I found most interesting was that the self that experiences things is different from the self that remembers them. No matter how I felt about an experience while living it, how I remember the experience might differ a lot and has more weight in my future decisions. I would recommend for people who are very interested in psychology and understanding how humans are not at all, never rational actors, in the economic sense.

Funny Story by Emily Henry

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: Henry is the only adult romance author that I read regularly, and this latest annual installment did not disappoint. The twist for this romance is that the male and female leads have recently been dumped by their significant others because their SO’s had been best friends since childhood and discovered that they were actually in love with each other practically on the eve of our female lead’s wedding to him. In the wake of these devastating break-ups the ex’s move in together as our male lead now needs someone to help with rent and our female lead has been kicked out of what she thought would be her forever home with her now ex-fiancee. I like Henry’s romances because she focuses on more than just the relationship between the two romantic leads, and that was definitely a strong theme in this one. Daphne and Miles are our male and female leads respectively, and the story is told in first person point-of-view from Daphne’s perspective. Her arc mainly focuses on her learning how to build a life for herself outside of a romantic relationship and building strong friendships after a life of frequent uprooting and moving around. Her relationship with her somewhat estranged father is another focus as Daphne learns how to finally talk to him and express her actual feelings. I generally don’t like books where the main conflict is lack of communication, but this one landed pretty well with me as Daphne and Miles never got too ridiculous. I would recommend for those who like Henry’s work.

I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons by Peter S. Beagle

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: This was my first foray into Beagle’s writing, and I liked it so much that upon finishing I immediately picked up his most well-known work The Last Unicorn, which I’m also enjoying. I really liked the soft sarcasm and wit that flows throughout the story. It’s not the focus of the story like you would find in Pratchett’s Discworld, but it does make the whole thing feel lighter and more enjoyable. That being said, I was expecting more cozy fantasy when I started this book, so I was surprised when things got really real and the stakes got pretty dang high. Specifically, there was one traumatic experience that I feel our characters never really processed, but you can see how the consequences from that experience influenced their actions in the rest of the story. I was pleasantly surprised, though, because I really liked where Beagle took both the story and our three main characters. Each character is struggling with meeting the unchosen expectations that are placed on them by family, birth, and class. This internal conflict is the main focus of the story, and it was really fun to watch each of them grow as characters while also discovering their own courage and powers. The ending is pretty open, but I didn’t mind. I don’t know if Beagle is planning to write more in this world, but I would definitely read it if he did. If not, I have no problem imagining my own future adventures for our characters.

The Book That Broke the World (The Library Trilogy #2) by Mark Lawrence

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: This was one of my most anticipated releases this year following the amazingness that was The Book That Wouldn’t Burn. However, this is a very different book than the first. We’re introduced to two new point-of-view characters, one of which is from a different species that we didn’t encounter in the first book. The first half of the book is dominated by her point-of-view, and I found myself never really engaging with her because I just wanted to know what happened to our leads from the last book. I think I understand what Lawrence was trying to do with this new character, and all the disparate threads and characters came together really nicely at the end, but I generally preferred the time-crossed lover story that was the focus of the first book. I did like that we got more emphasis on some of the side characters from the first though. I’m definitely looking forward to the next book. What I really want to see is our male and female leads working together to solve all of the huge problems they’re confronted with, but I have a feeling that’s not going to happen. That being said, this book was really well paced. It moved fast, but it can be confusing to keep track of where and when all the characters are. There were some great action moments, and some moments where Lawrence pauses to talk about philosophy. Definitely recommend for fans of the first book.

Mommy Corner

We celebrated my birthday in April, and Dan made me a beautiful and delicious cake again!

My parents visited us for Memorial Day, and we spent part of their visit at my in-law's cabin. This puzzle was a group effort from Dan, my Dad, and Chloe.

At the end of every year, Chloe's school does a huge art show that covers all the walls in the school. The kids get to show off all their art projects. It's super fun!