Books and light painting, April - June 2019

Books and light painting, April - June 2019

Light painting is when you take glow sticks, wave them around in a dark room ,and photograph with a long shutter time.  My great photographer friend took all these and they were so fun to do!!

-by Lianne Moriarty

The Hypnotist's Love Story:  Learned about hypnotherapy-cool!

Three Wishes:  Triplets!  I really like this one.  A family with public drama.

-by Lisa Genova

Every Note Played:  Inside the life of a man with ALS.  Well written, intense, I can't read too many of these, especially back to back.

-by Jesmyn Ward

Sing, Unburied, Sing:  Immersed me into a world so different from my own.  Great job making me sympathetic to all the characters even though some are not very likeable. 

- by Roxanne Gay

Bad Feminist:  Collect of essays, I like her writing.  Didn't get to finish this because I got it on audiobook from the library while travelling...but I got the gist.

-by Lois Lowry

The Giver:  Read this decades ago. Sooooo good. Sci-fi intro for young readers.

-by Liu Cixin

The Three Body Problem: This is a trilogy that has some good buzz around it so I got the ebook out of the library.  Timing wasn't great so I only got halfway through. Decided that was good enough and I don't need to read the whole thing!  Read the summary online, boom, done.  It is heavy science sci-fi and while it is a good story, there is less character development and world building, so it feels a little flat to me.  Read the summary of the rest of the trilogy.

-by Craig Johnson

Cold Dish:  The first of the Longmire mysteries.  I watched the whole series and then learned of the books.  The pace is super slow which works on tv but didn't keep me engaged in the book.  

-by Jason Fung
The Obesity Code:  A couple folks in my life are working on changing their eating habits and recommended this book.  The argument is that people become overweight because of hormones, which then causes them to overeat.  His solution is intermittent fasting, super popular right now and it seems to work for some people.  I found the actual writing terrible and suspect that he cherry-picked his data, but not invested enough to hunt it down.

-By Dan Gilbert

Stumbling on Happiness:  Follow up reading from my Happiness class.  In retrospect the info was mostly what I had read before and I have a hard time recalling the actual details of the book.  But the summary is that our brain is not the best.  The book is good for the science but others are better for tactical suggestions about what to do about it.

-by Hannah Tinti
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley:  Father Daughter story.  Dad is a criminal so the lives are complicated.  Great characters (recommended by Chris H. otherwise I would not have picked it up)

-by Alix Christie

Gutenberg's Apprentice:  Historical fiction about the first printing of the Bible.  Mostly well written and enjoyable.  Easy to swallow history lesson. (another Chris H. rec)

-by Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights:  I remember enjoying this back in the day.  It is still a gripping tale.  The best thing is that I read it on the Serial Reader App.  It breaks the book up into 10-15 minute pieces, so Wuthering Heights took me 43 days.  The app has classics and it is free!

-by Sojourner Truth

The Narrative of Sojourner Truth:  Autobiography of Sojourner as she goes from a slave to freedom and becoming an evangelist.  It is quite short and afterwards I read the Wikipedia article to get more details.  Clearly an amazing person. (Loving Serial Reader app!)

-by Tamora Pierce

Song of the Lioness quartet:  I got into reading fantasy later in life and am enjoying reading up the classics. This is the story of one young woman's journey to becoming a knight complete with magic, light romance, coming of age, quests and palace intrigue.

I read a bunch of super short books this quarter.  Not sure how to count them in my quest to read 100 books this year, will bundle 3-5 makes sense.

Oregon Trail Choose Your Own Adventure: Pure fan service to those of us who played the Oregon Trail video game back in the day.

by Haruki Murakami

The Strange Library:  hmm, the title says it all.  If you don't already read Murakami, maybe check it out at the library.

Books that I bought at an elementary school book fair. 

The Princess in Black is a whole series - Love these writers!!  Excellent intro to masked heros. 

Hex Vet is the beginning of a series, witches being vets to magical animals-cute! 

Because you can never know too much about your favorite terrible tv!  This is not recent, all season 1 info.

-by Tom Gauld

Moon Cop: Short and sweet graphic novel - really like the art.

-by Jennifer L Holm

Turtle in Paradise: Little stories about growing up in 1935 in Key West.  Randomly picked it out of the e-library.  (Got a mention in the Library book below!)

-by Donald J. SobolEncyclopedia Brown Sets the Pace:  I love love love Encyclopedia Brown and memorized the books I had. There must be a ton of them, here is one I didn't read-yeah!

-by Chris Grabenstein

Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library: Fantasy for book lovers.  Willy Wonka of libraries.  Fun, but maybe not awesome enough to read the whole series.  It did give me a long list of children's books to read, many of which I already love, but it is good to keep up to date.

-by Carl Hiaasen 

Scat:  Picked it because of the Library book.  Quite good!  YA mystery, fun style, not sure I have read Hiaasen before but recognize the name.  There is a whole set with one word titles.  Scat is about a big cat, Slither is about snakes, etc.  Great cover art

Free Comic book day will get its own post!