August '23 Mid-Month Wrap-Up

I've read 5 books already this month. They were all quite small, so I don't know what that means for the rest of the month, but I figured I'd wrap them up now and save us all some time at the end of the month.

The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman - I couldn't find my copy of this, but we had a copy of it at the library so I read it on my late evening. I think it's good, but I'm bad at poetry.

#NeverAgain by David Hogg and Lauren Hogg - This was a tough read even though its pages numbered in the double digits. Lauren lost 3 close friends in the event at MSDHS. Her description of hiding in a theater closet and hearing gunfire and footsteps is terrifying. She was 14 years old. David had journalism hopes and was in front of the cameras, demanding change and justice. This is kind of a memoir, and a call to action.

In Praise of Good Bookstores by Jeff Deutsch - I really did not like this book. I read the whole thing though. Mostly I hate-read it, looking for more reasons to dislike it. The title would make the reader think it is about bookstores as a collective group, but it's actually about one singular bookstore in Chicago that caters to a seminary that it is connected to. It does not sound like a bookstore I would have any interest in entering. Each chapter talks about a positive aspect of bookstores, and then tells how this particular bookstore is the epitome of that attribute. It's pretentious and annoying.

G'Morning, G'Night: Little Pep Talks for Me & You by Lin-Manuel Miranda - This started as Twitter posts. Back before Twitter became a dumpster fire. Every morning Miranda would tweet something positive in the form of a little poem. At night he would tweet a rejoinder, a completion of the poem. This made me almost giddy with happiness. His little poems are so interesting and positive and supportive, I just couldn't help but smile and feel uplifted. I will be reading this again and again.

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold - This is fascinating. This is not about Jack the Ripper. There are no guesses about who he was or what motivated him. The only thing said about the killer of these women is that he murdered them in their sleep and that he was not a killer of prostitutes. Only one of the women was a confirmed sex worker. The lives of these women are so minutely described: where their parents were from, where they were born, where they worked, how they got to London. So many records are still available to put these lives together. Just really well done.

And there are the five books I've read so far in August. Mostly a pretty good crop of books. What have you read?