What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day

What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage (1997) 244 pages

Ava is HIV positive and isn't sure what to do with her life now. She closes her salon in Atlanta and returns to her childhood home in Idlewild, a small town in Michigan where her older sister still lives, with the intent to stay for a couple of months before moving to the West Coast. Idlewild is no longer an idyllic resort community. The young people haven't jobs or education and crime is increasing, along with the pregnancy rate. Ava's sister Joyce is newly widowed and is finding new purpose in trying to bring resources to young women. Her dead husband's best friend Eddie is an amazing resource, as well. When Joyce is finally about to get a grant to accelerate her work, the pastor's wife throws a wrench into the works. Ava gets pulled into her sister's interests and ‒ well, read it and you'll be pulled into the action as well! It was my second time reading this novel, and it was every bit as good as I'd remembered.

Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America

 

 Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America by Gregory D. Smithers (2022) 332 Pages

I read this book for a paper in my Cultural Anthropology class. Having anthropological historical and modern accounts of two-spirit people is incredibly important as there are very few that exist. The accounts span multiple cultures and tribes, throughout the southwestern and northern areas of the present-day US. The historical accounts that do mention two-spirit people are mostly from the white settler-colonial point of view, which mostly reflects ethnocentric biases and does not reflect the true lives of these people. Native Americans have always struggled with anthropologists and ethnographers in this way, and this book goes to the source and talks with those who are two-spirit and how they exist in modern society today, and historically. This book recounts historical archaeological evidence, oral storytelling traditions, art and written accounts. This reclamation of the two-spirit identity gives a voice to those Natives who have been silenced by the colonizers.

The Priory of the Orange Tree

 

 The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon (2019) 804 Pages

I won't review this as most people are probably still reading for the book challenge! 😊

I will say I loved this book and couldn't stop reading. An excellent fantasy story, I always love reading about dragons!

Once There Were Wolves

 

 Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy (2021) 258 Pages

Inti Flynn, doctor in conservation specializing in wolves and rewilding, arrives with a pack of wolves to reintroduce them to the Highlands of Scotland. With her is her identical twin sister, who is mute having been through some traumatic incident. We don't learn what happened until later, as most of the story is intertwined with these events. The small town is up in arms, literally, about the new neighbors, the wolves. Many are terrified their livestock will be attacked. Inti is frustrated with the community, she knows the wolves will keep clear of humans and tries to explain if the wolves are reintroduced, the Highlands ecosystem will once again thrive. Inti becomes involved with the local police chief. A local man, Stuart is known for beating his wife, but nobody does anything about it. Inti cannot handle the complacency and fights with Stuart, when Duncan, the police chief also gets involved. That night Inti is taking a walk in the woods and discovers Stuart's body, gutted. She makes a decision that will change the course of the next 8 or 9 months. 

I enjoyed this book as it wasn't entirely about trauma and healing, but those themes were tied in nicely with the storyline.

Tale of Genji: A Reader's Guide

Tale of Genji: A Reader's Guide by William J. Puette 199 pp.

Since I've been reading the eleventy-billion pages of The Tale of Genji as part of the Summer Big Book Challenge, I found this relatively short guide on Kindle to append the sometimes confusing novel. It does give explanations of some of the content that is unusual to Western readers. It includes a chapter by chapter summary of the story, a list of the characters and their connections, maps of the story's locations, and the emperor's palace. Unfortunately this guide is written specifically for two other translations of "Genji", by Arthur Waley and Edward G. Seidensticker so not all the interpretations match up with the Dennis Washburn translation we are using. However, I did find it helpful and will refer to it as I complete the novel. Too bad I didn't find it sooner.

Planet of the Apes Omnibus

Planet of the Apes Omnibus by Daryl Gregory with art by Carlos Magno (2019) 512 pages

I love this franchise. I read this on Hoopla. The movies all seem to take place in America. The story in this graphic novel series has an international scope. It takes place after Caesar leads the apes to form their own civilization, but before the events of the first movie with Charlton Heston. I enjoyed the art work and the steampunk touches in the design here. At the center are two women, an ape and a human, who were raised as sisters. Their grandfather was an idealist ape who led a small city where apes and humans were treated as equals. Now the sisters are grown and leading their respective groups as ongoing fighting continues. Alaya is the Voice of the council of the Apes. Mayor Sullivan leads the humans in their segregated part of the city. The characters and shifting power dynamics kept me engaged through the five different adventures. The fifth part of the series has a new artist take over who simplified the characters a bit, which I did not enjoy. However, the growth of the characters by writer Gregory was still entertaining.
 

Tegan & Sara: Junior High

Tegan & Sara: Junior High by Tegan & Sara Quin, art by Tillie Walden, 298 pages

Canadian indie rock duo Tegan & Sara is one of my favorite bands, and when I heard they were teaming up with the amazing artist Tillie Walden for this middle school graphic memoir, I knew I'd have to check it out. (After all, I loved their adult non-graphic memoir, High School.) 

This one presents the trials and tribulations of being a girl in seventh grade, switching to a new school, finding new friends, puberty, and all the good and bad stuff that comes with it — as well as managing all of that with a twin sister. While the Quins went through this back in the early 1990s, I appreciate that they reset their junior high years in the 2020s, as that will certainly help the kids who read this connect with it (cell phones and Taylor Swift and Netflix certainly have more impact with today's kids than corded wall phones and Nirvana and VCRs). 

I really dug this book, and appreciated the clever color-coding way that Walden distinguished between the twins in her artwork — Tegan is blue, Sara is red, and most pages that take place outside of their bedrooms are a wash of pale purple. There's another book on the horizon (focusing on eighth grade), and you can bet I'll pick up that one too.

Everyone in My Family has Killed Someone

Everyone in My Family has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson  372 pp.

Yes, the family featured in this book have killed someone either intentionally or unintentionally. The one son who hadn't when the story starts manages to before the end. They all meet for a family reunion at a ski lodge which immediately gets deluged with massive, non-stop snowstorms. A dead body found outside in the snow brings up the possibility of a recent serial killer being in the locale. The story is very convoluted but highly entertaining. The family is highly dysfunctional but takes care of its own. I actually figured out who the killer was only to discover the killer was not who they said were. Kidnapping, robbery, blackmail, substance abuse, murder, suicide, you name it and it's probably in this story. It's odd to say this is a fun book but it is.

The Birth of Loud

The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry that Shaped Rock n' Roll, by Ian S. Port, 340 pages

This is a fantastic read for music lovers, guitar players, and pop-culture historians alike, documenting the early lives and creative lightning bolts that brought us the beginning of the modern guitar era. In the 1930s and 40s, after archtop guitars had been electrified with pick-ups and became regular fixtures on big band stages, it became clear that the electrified, hollowbody archtop could only be turned up so loud before the guitar would begin to produce the awful, overloaded signal known as feedback. Western swing guitarists especially, who wanted to compete more with the other instruments on stage, would typically try to crank up the volume on the amplifier to get a louder, more distorted sound, but it always ended in ear-crushing noise. Leo Fender, not a musician but more of a self-described engineer and tinkerer, began to workshop an idea for a solid body guitar. At roughly the same time, Les Paul, a top-jazz and swing player at the time, was also having a similar epiphany. He began workshopping his own ideas, hoping that a more solid-body style guitar would end the feedback problem. Fender's guitar designs would revolutionize the instrument landscape in the mid-1950s, while Paul got a sweet deal with Gibson guitars, sponsoring their newest solid body guitar that bore his name (the Gibson Les Paul) that would eventually become an iconic piece of equipment for 60s and 70s hard rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Cream. This book reads easy and action packed, with short chapters and guitar inventions that quickly became canon for any aspiring player. As much as these two did for guitars in this era, country-picker Merle Travis might be most responsible for the solid body design. He sketched his idea on a bar napkin and gave it to his friend Paul Bigsby, another musician and inventor, who essentially created one of the first solid-body designs. The same design that Leo Fender would shamelessly steal from. With Fender's designs sweeping the country, they stole the market share out from under Gibson and helped influence the golden age of guitars. 

The Number Ones

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits that Reveal the History of Pop Music by Tom Breihan, 342 pages

This reads like a book of non-fiction short stories. Like a VH1 Behind The Music episode for the literary crowd. Each chapter focuses on a seminal single from the Billboard Hot 100, which began in 1958 and still continues today. Every single is an outlier; a song that came from nowhere to dominate the charts and influence the culture. Breihan, senior editor at the music blog Stereogum, dives briefly into the backstory of hit songs like Chubby Checker's The Twist, Prince's When Doves Cry--all the way up to Korean pop phenomenon BTS and their hit "Dynamite." As with most behind-the-scenes stories, there are so many interesting anecdotes and trivia-like bits of information that really help inform the popularity of a song. Some notable surprises for me included Vanilla Ice inadvertently funding the label Death Row Records, Brian Wilson spending $13,000 to record "Good Vibrations," (at the time the most expensive single ever made), and the  runaway success of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" finally forcing MTV to play more African-American music. You can follow along with Breihan as he continues to blog about every #1 Billboard hit in history, but this book is a really fun dive into some songs we all know and love.