I'm having fun drawing in a book! I'm not usually into self -help books, but this one is exactly what I need right now. I've been wanting to start doing creative things again, especially writing, but getting started is hard!

My fist audio book was just published! I hope I get to narrate a lot more! It was way more work than I expected, but it was fun!

I read this because one of the characters in Overstory is based on Julia Hill. I normally don't like memoirs, and wasn't particularly expecting to enjoy this one, but I actually really enjoyed it. Hill is very inspiring.

I finished this one a while ago, but I know it is going to stick with me for a very long time, and will be worth re-reading every few years. It starts slow and was frustrating for a while until all the stories came together. But in the end, it's very powerful. I loved trees deeply before I read the book, but now I respect them even more.

More snarky fun with Murderbot! I love this series.

I didn't necessarily dislike this, but it moved really slowly and didn't grab my attention, so I bailed about a third of the way in.

This was pretty fun and engaging, but the main character was really obnoxious, and all the worse because she kept pointing out her own obnoxiousness. I wish the author had done more research about what it is like to be a famous woman in the internet - the main character just shrugs off intent harassers, which felt very unreal to me.

This is maybe trying a little too hard to be profound, and the story is a little too tidy... But the world building is excellent, and it's refreshing reading about a future that is not a dystopia.

The only reason I stuck this one out is Erdrich's beautiful writing. It takes place during an apocalypse, but the apocalypse is never explained so the story makes no sense and ultimately doesn't go anywhere.

Engaging urban fantasy with good world building.

This is so good! I was afraid it would ruin Jane Eyre, but it is a delightful Gothic homage, deviously well-written, and lots of fun.

This should be required reading for anyone in the Pacific Northwest. The author is Native American, so the book is very sympathetic to their struggles.

This is total fluff, and it's delightful. Nostalgic Obama fan-fiction is a great antidote to the terrifying news. Sure, I could critique it, but that's not the point. It's pure escapism.

The concept was good, but the story rambled pointlessly.... This would have been better as a short story.

White people have a long history of whining until they get what they want.

This was engaging and fun, but not particularity insightful or original. The "collection of documents" format felt forced and unnecessary. I listened to the audio book, and I think I might have looked the book better with a different narrator.

Am accessible history of information theory. Reading this has definitely changed how I look at communication and information. There's a lot of dense stuff here, but Gleick is a good writer and makes it all make sense.

I usually find Greek myths tedious, so I was reluctant to read this, but I'm really glad I did! The characters are very vivid and believable, even though they are gods and heroes. I couldn't put it down.

This was fun and engaging, but also pretty unoriginal. A kids goes missing, and his grandmother, with the help of her best friend, discovers that his disappearance is an alien abduction. The best thing about the book is that the main characters are two old women. This would make a really fun movie.

It's easy for tales of Greek gods to seem petty and strange, but Miller is doing a great job of making them feel real and not corny or ridiculous.

I found this engaging, but ultimately it seemed pointless. The book has storylines for 4 characters, but they are pretty much totally unrelated - you could have removed any of them, and it wouldn't have made a difference to the rest of the book. The world building is fairly interesting, but I think the point the author is making is that human emotion and ambition is the same in any world, so the world building is somewhat irrelevant.

This is total fluff, and that's all it needs to be. It kept me entertained with a smile on my face, and that's just what I needed.

I really enjoyed the first part of this.... But then when Beauty started time traveling, I found myself arguing with the book all the time. I usually love time travel stories, but I didn't think Beauty's reactions to the modern world rang true.

This book is brilliant. It's noir with a delightful twist - funny and zany and creative and empathetic and diverse and wonderful. Most fun I've had in ages. The audio book is incredibly well done.

This was great for the first three quarters, but the end fell apart - it felt like Drayden bit off more than she could chew. It's about demigods living in a future South Africa. It has robots, genetically engineered monsters, gods, drag queens, gay teens, a dik-dik infestation, and hallucinogenic drugs.

This was a fun and quick read about a family who all have special talents. It's about the importance of family and standing up for each other and finding a sense of belonging.

Haskell writes beautifully about trees and the auditory environment around them, but from there he expands to talk about ecology, climate change, racism, war, horticulture, and, ultimately, how trees are a nexus of the interconnectedness of nature and humanity.

I should have read this one on paper instead of listening to the audio book - it jumps between characters and times, and it w really hard to keep the timeline straight and I kept getting characters confused. It's a shame, because it's a charming book with beautiful writing about a group of people in a council estate in Northern England in the 1970s. There are a lot of mysteries in the community, and it feels like a mystery novel, but it isn't.

This is good - ambitious and well-written, but it's heavy and rough going. It's about Native Americans in Oakland, all trying to come to terms with their identities.

I'm really glad I read this on vacation, because I couldn't put it down. This is the most engaging book I have read in ages. A man travels alone in the wild west, becoming a legend in the process. Great storytelling, even when there were long lulls in the action.

This was just the kind of fun fluff that I was expecting. Middle aged woman finally finds herself, and meanwhile there are historical flashbacks to pioneer feminists who paved the way for contemporary women. Lots of laughs and warm fuzzies. Nothing profound, but fun.

Johnson weaves together a lot of threads here: David Wallace and Darwin, Victorian fashion, fly fishing, and the life of one kid who stole a bunch of feathers from a museum, followed by Johnson's own obsession with tracking down all of the stolen feathers. All of these threads are interesting in their own way, but ultimately I think Johnson has trouble pinning down any meaning in this narrative, for himself or for the reader.

One third of the way in, and I couldn't tell where this was going and didn't really care. The characters were all too one-dimensional, and one of them was intentionally really obnoxious but I couldn't stand reading about him.

#unpopularopionion I would like to think that someone who is 500 years old would be less self - absorbed and whiny. I really liked the parts where he waa teaching history class, but other than that, there wasn't much of a story here, and the main character was pretty annoying.

Great concept, terrible execution. Full review: http://www.librarything.com/work/18424385/reviews/159948809_344807575

I think the publisher didn't give the author the room she needed to tell the story she needed to tell. Ultimately, this book is not a history of indigenous peoples as much as its a history of what white people did to indigenous peoples. Full review here: http://www.librarything.com/work/15144374/reviews/160050911_344686087

This is overwhelming. How do we even begin to mend the damage?

😢😱😡

This was a fun read. Leckie's world building is wonderful, but the story got bogged down in politics a lot. The main character is a delight, and the book is light-hearted compared to the Ancillary series that is set in the same world.

I'm going to record an audio book version of this! I am so excited. I have read books out loud for years and gotten very good at it, but this will be my first audio book recording. Hopefully the first of many! #audiobook #narrator

This is so so so good. Delightful writing, amazing evocation of the Pacific Northwest, wonderful characters. This should be required reading for everyone in the Pacific Northwest.

Full review here: https://www.librarything.com/work/10489212/details/159636071

I absolutely loved the first two books in this series. This one was pretty disappointing, and would have been intolerable if I hadn't liked the first two. It took a long time to get going, and could have been a lot shorter. Still, Mieville's world building is astonishingly good.

American imperialism in a nutshell. This ideology has justified so much evil.

I'm finding that this isn't so much a history of indigenous peoples as it is a history of what Europeans did to indigenous peoples. In other words, I'm actually learning more about my own history than about the history of Native Americans. That's not necessarily a criticism: after all, there are a lot of Native peoples with complex histories, and it is important to tell the history of genocide and how it shaped the US.

Dunbar-Ortiz doesn't pull any punches, nor does she shy away from scathing (and justified!) criticism of colonization. This book is heart-rending, heart-breaking, and essential.

This is... strange.... The writing is delightful and evocative, but the book is very disjointed. I'm not entirely sure what Chatwin was trying to do. Still, it's an enjoyable read.

This was reasonably entertaining.... The best part was, of course, the baby elephant, but he's also entirely implausible. As a mystery this isn't great, because there's a lot of focus on Chopra and his wife, and the mystery is solved pretty abruptly. I don't regret reading it, but I also wouldn't regret skipping it.

I really enjoyed the first book, but this one totally failed to hold my attention for some reason. There was nothing I particularly dislike about it, but I had no desire to finish it.

I loved this! It's not for everyone - if I hadn't had to read Barthes, Foucault, Eco, and Butler in grad school, the whole book would have been pretty meaningless. This book is both an irreverent satire of and a respectful homage to the great French intellectuals of the late 20th century, and it is utterly delightful.

A bunch of men got together and decided to make programming sound manly so they could exclude women, make more money, and feel special.