Hi friends,
July was a busy and hot month for us. I’m ready for the girls to go back to school, and definitely ready for the heat and smoke to go away. I did get some good reads in July including finishing the Thursday Murder Club series, which was excellent.
I've decided to discontinue the Mommy corner portion of this blog. I've just become increasingly uncomfortable posting pictures of my kids on the internet for a variety of reasons. You can DM me if you want more information about what our family's up to these days.
Let me know what you think of these books, and if you have suggestions for future reading.
Best,
Tonya
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
Rating: 5 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: This book is one of the most famous fantasy works and is listed on the New York Times best 100 books list. I think it justly deserves its place as both. This book shows that fantasy doesn’t have to be enormous fights and quests for damsels in distress and kingdoms. It is beautifully written and tells the story of the last known unicorn’s quest to find out what happened to all the other unicorns. Along her journey she meets friend and foe, and in the end must confront her greatest fear. The story explores themes of love, loss, and sacrifice beautifully, and while some characters surprise you with their goodness, others disappoint you with their self-centeredness. I highly recommend for anyone looking for a good read. You can see this story’s influence throughout fantasy from the 1980s on.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide by Peter Allison
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: This book was a recommendation from my sister. It’s a nonfiction account of an Australian safari guide’s experiences leading safaris in Botswana. It feels like the author collected his favorite stories to tell around the campfire and at parties and then compiled them all into a book. Each story is a chapter, and they’re mostly about 4-5 minutes each. Allison is, as you can imagine, a great storyteller, and I really enjoyed reading about his exploits with safari guests from all over the world. There are lots of lions, leopards, birds, and warthogs, not to mention a plague of mice! I highly recommend for anyone looking for a fun and entertaining read about the realities of safari life in Africa.
Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curious Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hucthinson
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: I’ve found myself thinking about this book a lot as I watch the olympics as it focuses on the limits of human endurance and how to expand them. This book promises that its not a running book, but it definitely has a lot of running in it as the author was a runner in school and loves to compete, just not professionally. The main take-away I had from this book was that the mind-body barrier is non-existent. All of these sport physiologists spend oodles of time and money researching if the limits of human performance reside in the brain of muscles, but a recurring finding across the studies Hutchinson cites in the book is that such a distinction is meaningless. I don’t think he ever explicitly states that, but that was my takeaway, and it rings true to my own experience.
Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading by Chris J. Anderson
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: This book was a Bill Gates recommendation, which wasn’t surprising considering that the author is a very rich man talking about the best ways to improve the world through philanthropy. Anderson is the head of TED, as in TED Talks. He talks a lot about how many of the world’s biggest problems in public health, education, and climate change could be addressed by the donations of individuals to non-profit groups working to solve those problems. As a government employee, I recognize that I’m biased, but he explicitly removes any discussion of public policy from these suggestions, which just made the whole thing a little doubtful for me. I don’t think that you can solve any of these wicked, large problems without policy makers, which Anderson doesn’t claim is the case, but feels like a big hole in his argument. In any case, he advocates that people pay a “tithe” on their income to an organization doing work in an area they feel passionate about. As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I already do that, so I felt like I had that box checked.
The Man Who Died Twice (Thursday Murder Club #2) by Richard Osman
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: The wait list for these books at the public library was ridiculously long, so when the third and fourth book came in at the same time, I just bought the second and read all three of them in a row. In this second installment, we get to learn more about Elizabeth and her backstory, which was only hinted at in the first book. In this one, the events of the first book lead an old flame back to Elizabeth as he searches for help amid a mess of international crime and corruption. The stakes have never been higher for our team of senior citizen investigators, and I loved watching them piece together the mystery. The best part of this book was again the amazing character work Osman does with each member of the Thursday murder club. They have such distinct and real personalities and voices that I feel like I know them, and I would love nothing more than to be pulled into one of their adventures. That being said, I think the first book packed a bit more of an emotional punch for me. There were moments in the first that made me want to cry, and while this one was fun and well written, it just didn’t have the same amount of emotional work and elegance that the first one had when every suspect had their own story and guilt.
The Bullet That Missed (Thursday Murder Club #3) by Richard Osman
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: In this third installment featuring our septuagenarian sleuths, we go on another adventure directly tied to the one from the previous book. In this one, a mysterious cybercriminal called the Viking is blackmailing Elizabeth to kill an old enemy turned friend. Meanwhile, the team is working on an old cold case featuring an up-and-coming news anchor who was presumed dead after her car was found at the base of a cliff. The team has to juggle both of these plot lines as they expose a decade old case of attempted murder, actual murder, and corruption. Ibrahim goes through a traumatic event while he’s trying to live more actively, and his arc in this book is mainly about working through his own trauma, as opposed to coaching other people through theirs. I love watching Elizabeth competently navigate both challenges, and in classic Thursday Murder Club style, the situation is never what it seems.
The Last Devil to Die (Thursday Murder Club #4) by Richard Osman
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: This is the only Thursday Murder Club book where I felt like I guessed the mystery’s resolution before the end of the book, so that was kind of disappointing. I like to be surprised, but this book had a very different tone than the first three. Although all of those aptly employed tragic themes and scenes for our team of friends and sleuths, this one punched them straight to the heart. A good deal of the book is devoted to a plot about dealing with dementia, and supporting those with dementia. Osman examines the ethics and choice and dignity while also not shying away from the fallout that these choices have on loved ones. It was a very different angle than the first three, much less playful and much more somber, but Osman is such a great writer that I think it worked. I particularly enjoyed seeing Joyce take the lead with solving the mystery. As Elizabeth turns inward to deal with her tragedy, we get to see that she does make mistakes and needs her Murder Club friends just as much as they need her. One of the great themes that runs through all of these books is that we need friends and other people. They enrich our lives and give us purpose. We won’t get our next installment of the Thursday Murder Club until 2025, and you can bet that I’ll be picking up that one too to see how our team of friends is getting on.
