Breaking Up With God: A Love Story by Sarah Sentilles

I accidentally double booked tours today! If you are here for the Thoughts Without Cigarettes post, check back later this afternoon. I want to spread out the posts to give them both the attention they deserve.

___________________________________________________________________________

I love memoirs. I believe that every person has a story to tell, the only question is if you can tell it well. I don’t hold much to the idea that a memoir should only be for someone who has had a truly remarkable life. Honestly, I believe any life is interesting. I know that there are plenty of people out there who disagree with this, but I have an insatiable curiosity for other perspectives and other people’s lives.

Breaking Up With God is the kind of religious memoir that I was hoping The View From the Back Pew would be. Originally very faithful, to the point of attending seminary school, Sentilles eventually cannot square the God she grew up with, a decidedly man-in-the-sky who punishes and rewards image, with the feminist perspective she has gained in seminary school.

Sentilles covers a lot of ground here, laying her entire life out on the table for us to see. It almost reads like a confession sometimes, with Sentilles revealing that she had anorexia and an abusive relationship before she left college. Later she goes on to talk about becoming a feminist and also a vegetarian, a supporter of gay marriage and a social activist.

I think Sentilles’s story is interesting and worth hearing. Her journey from a religious scholar to completely unsure in her beliefs is something that I relate to. So the question remains: how well is Sentilles’s story told? As I said, it’s confessional in nature, almost like an internal monologue, which ultimately makes sense. She is sharing an incredibly personal journey with us, but one that she had made a career of making public. In a way, Sentilles is accomplishing exactly what she went to seminary school to do, to minister, though admittedly a significantly different type of preaching than she imagined.

At times I thought the narration to be a little disorganized, and if I’m honest, sometimes melodramatic. But at the same time, much of this story takes place when Sentilles is a teenager and young adult. She reflects that age very well, where every decision you make seems like the most difficult and you’re never sure of yourself, even if it is frustrating to read sometimes.

Overall, I enjoyed this memoir. I learned about theology and at the same time got to see the transition and journey that Sentilles makes. I think that’s a successful memoir, even if the writing is not perfect and at times it drifts into melodrama.

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for sending me this book to read and review! For more information about the tour, please go to this link. 

Weekend Update

Oh, April and May. Every year, Regular Rumination gets quiet as spring turns into summer. I wish I could blame it on BEA, but yet again I was unable to go! Next year, though, I WILL be there. That’s a promise. But it’s not like I’ve been sitting here moping about not being at BEA. No, I’ve been at the beach and starting a new internship and started looking for jobs for the fall when I make a big move. Life has been busy, but every day I feel more and more like blogging, so I promise things will get more active around here. Some people lose their blogging mojo in the depths of winter or when spring is just beginning, but for me it is always when summer is around the corner and suddenly exams are over and I shed all obligation, including my blog.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading, or getting super excited for some events on the horizon.

First, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m a judge on the Poetry panel for the Indie Lit Awards. I hope you all are reading your books of poetry so you can nominate in September what you think is the best book of poetry published in 2011. Please nominate things!

If you’re interested in finding recently published books of poetry, please see my previous post on the Indie Lit Awards with a handy Amazon tutorial on finding recently published books, including poetry.

 

Second, it’s Nerds <3 YA time!!! I’m so excited about this. I had so much fun participating last year. I was in the first round and actually chose the book that ended up being the runner up. This year, I’m a second round judge and I am so excited. The short list has been posted and you can enter to win some amazing prize packs from the authors whose books are in the tournament.

Nerds <3 YA was started by Rene, of subverting the text, to showcase young adult books that don’t get as much publicity as they deserve. It’s a “Tournament of Books” bracket-style competition and for the past two years has a had a focus on diversity, by featuring books that are written by authors or feature characters who fall under one of the following categories: persons of color, GLBT, disability, mental illness, religious lifestyle, lower socioeconomic status, and/or plus size.

As for what I’ve been reading, well I re-read Harry Potter, which was absolutely delightful. I think I will post on that eventually. I’ve also read The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker, which was out of this world amazing. I’m also in the middle of The Mists of Avalon. It’s fabulous, but long. It’s a lot longer than its page count, considering how tiny the writing is and how big the pages are!

Anyway, see you soon! This week I should be back to posting regularly.

Where She Went by Gayle Forman

I admit, when I first heard that Gayle Forman was writing a sequel to her lovely If I Stay, I was not on board. If I Stay is, in many ways, an unbelievably good book. The description of the novel evokes more Lifetime movie than intelligent, character-driven story, but If I Stay is exactly that. Mia, her boyfriend and her family felt so real to me and the story of their tragic car accident was not simply a conceit to manipulate the reader, but rather a storytelling device that allows the readers to explore the deepest grief possible with Mia.

But could Gayle Forman really pull that off twice? I should have had more faith in her, because Where She Went is just as good as If I Stay, and sometimes, it’s better. At this point, if you have not read If I Stay, I suggest you stop now. There will be unavoidable spoilers for If I Stay in this review. Where She Went picks up three years after Mia’s accident. Instead of being narrated by Mia, Where She Went is narrated by her boyfriend Adam, a brilliant move. Adam has become a famous rock musician and Mia a famous cellist, but they are no longer together. While Adam originally poured all of his grief and emotion into writing a best-selling record, now he’s being forced to face the reality of what happened between him and Mia.

Where She Went takes place over one night and there are plenty of coincidences. There are many plot points, from the fame that Mia and Adam have found to their coincidental run-in, that are unbelievable, but I’m not really sure that’s the point. The point is not that Forman is telling a believable story plot-wise, but rather an emotionally realistic story. There is not an easy happy ending in either If I Stay or Where She Went, life is not that simple. Mia and Adam both deal and speak of grief in a way that feels so real and palpable. I am consistently amazed by what Forman can do as a writer and storyteller. When you are reading it, Forman makes you feel it and that is the mark of a talented writer.

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

There are plenty of reviews of this around the web, so please check out the book blog search engine to see more!

Comic-A-Week: Apr 24-30 – Refresh, Refresh

Refresh, Refresh is the comic that completely derailed the Comic-A-Week project. It’s not the only reason I had to take a break. It was April, after all. Life is always so busy in April, between holidays, exams, and working out summer plans, but you would think that would mean I would be reading more comics, not less. The last comic I read though was Refresh, Refresh and I’m so conflicted about it, I have been letting it stew for a few weeks before writing about it or reading any other comics.

Refresh, Refresh is about a group of boys who all have fathers in the military. The stories take place in the years after September 11th when the US was at war with Afghanistan and Iraq. The town the boys live in is small and there aren’t a lot of opportunities, so many of the young men are off at war. Some don’t come back, others return injured.

The comic begins when the boys are seniors in high school and they start a fight club. But the fight club is really only the beginning of the violence in this comic. There is nothing hopeful, beautiful or good about this story. What I’m truly grappling with is if there should have been.

I saw on Goodreads someone claiming that they didn’t like this comic because it glorifies the military. I think it does the exact opposite. The military is the driving force actively destroying the lives of these boys and their families. I should rephrase that: it’s not the military, it’s war. It’s the violence that’s such an intrinsic and natural part of their life that is destroying everything beautiful in their world.

If you can’t tell, I had a strong, visceral reaction to this comic. It made me sick to my stomach, quite literally. But… I was reading a review at books i done read of The Things They Carried, one of my favorite books of all time, and I was reminded of this:

A true war story is never moral.  It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done.  If a story seems moral, do not believe it.  If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

You will probably have a strong, visceral and negative reaction, like I did, to Refresh, Refresh. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a true war story. Thanks Raych and Mr. O’Brien for that reminder. I also didn’t realize that this was originally a text-only short story. That makes a lot of sense, but I think this works well as a comic, too.

Reading Rants also has a post about the comic Refresh, Refresh. Do you? Include your link in the comments and I’ll add it here.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser

The Filter Bubble has made me want to crawl into my virtual bunker and never let another picture of myself grace the internet. I sat down to read this casually one night and never stopped, reading portions out loud about how even the bank knows what I am doing online and will probably use it to tell me if I can pay back a loan or not. But as Pariser explains, even though the bank and Google and Facebook and all the other websites we visit might be privy to this virtual identity, we rarely are.

And that is the thesis of The Filter Bubble. It is not inherently wrong that websites and technologies want information about the people who are using them, but that there is no transparency. If Google is collecting mass amounts of information about me and then is personalizing my search engines, how will I ever know if they got it right?

The concept behind The Filter Bubble is that with all of the personalization happening around the web, thanks mainly to Google and Facebook, we are moving closer and closer to visiting the web in homogeneous neighborhoods of sorts that have been filtered using our information and various algorithms. Different websites do it differently, but many of the companies that Pariser described were organizations that I had never heard of, that all have disturbingly dystopian-sounding names. They collect, curate and sell our information to the companies that can afford it.

But, as Pariser is quick to point out, technology is neither good nor bad. It has no inherent leaning towards one or the other, it is a neutral thing that can be used for good or bad, like anything else. There are ways that this technology can be used for good and not evil. Fortunately, Pariser points a lot of the good that can come out of this towards the end of his book.

Pariser is a good writer who makes this interesting conundrum into an even more interesting story. The Filter Bubble is more than just a collection of evidence, it’s a history of how this technology came into existence and how websites like Google and Facebook, specifically, transformed from their original sites into the monoliths that they are now. The scope of The Filter Bubble goes beyond those giants and explores other aspects of the web, though they are the big players in the book. Pariser’s writing style is clean and readable and he makes this book relevant to a wide scope of readers. This is something that impacts those of us who have a presence on the web, which is nearly everyone.

Now, the final question is, how will the fact that I’ve posted about this book affect my personalized results on the internet? I’ll let you know.

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for sending me a copy of this book to review. For more information on the tour, please click here. 

Poetry Wednesday – Sci-Fi by Tracy K. Smith

Welcome to the return of Poetry Wednesday! I know, it was a little ridiculous of me to let Poetry Wednesday slide during National Poetry Month, but April is always so hectic. Plus, National Poetry Month is probably the one month of the year where you are seeing a lot of poetry elsewhere, so I didn’t feel too bad. In any case, here is today’s poem in a happy nod to Star Wars Day! Science fiction poetry isn’t really something you see very often. Clearly it exists and someone is writing and reading it, but I’d love to see more of it. I love the concept behind this poem and the way it really plays with some of the more common tropes of science fiction, like curved lines, but then makes its way into something unique. There are one or two couplets that don’t really convince me, but as a whole, this poem is well-crafted.

_____________________________________________________________

Sci-Fi by Tracy K. Smith

There will be no edges, but curves.
Clean lines pointing only forward.

History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,

Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.

Women will still be women, but
The distinction will be empty. Sex,

Having outlived every threat, will gratify
Only the mind, which is where it will exist.

For kicks, we’ll dance for ourselves
Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs.

The oldest among us will recognize that glow—
But the word sun will have been re-assigned

To a Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device
Found in households and nursing homes.

And yes, we’ll live to be much older, thanks
To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged,

Eons from even our own moon, we’ll drift
In the haze of space, which will be, once

And for all, scrutable and safe.

Mini Reviews!

Friends, it is April. April is always busy. Couple that with starting a job in June, interviewing for internships, moving in May (and then preparing to move AGAIN in August), I am behind on the book reviews. That is because I am still reading (to escape my too-busy life), but not finding time to get my thoughts in a coherent blog post. I try and it sounds like I don’t know what a sentence is or how an intelligent person puts them together. The answer? Mini reviews! My blogging self might dislike me for this later, but my reading self will be much happier after I post this.

Solo by Rana Dasgupta

This book really deserves its own post, but I have let it sit and linger for too long. I have a hard time writing long posts a few weeks after reading a book. I like to write my reviews as soon as I finish reading the book. Then I like to let that review sit a week or so to make sure I still feel the same way. THEN I post the review. Unfortunately with Solo, I just don’t know that I’m going to really be able to do the book the justice it deserves so long after I read it the first time.

Let me put it this way, I loved Solo so much, that I immediately ordered Dasgupta’s only other novel Tokyo Cancelled. Solo is the story of Ulrich, a Bulgarian man at the end of his life. When he was younger, he was full of ambition, but life got in the way and he eventually ended up caring for his aging mother until her death and never becoming the musician or chemist that he dreamed of. The first half of the novel is the story of his life that some people would consider a failure. It is also the story of Bulgaria, from the years before WWII to the years of communism. It is a sad story, but one that is wonderful to read about. Dasgupta is a gifted storyteller and writes beautiful prose that I just couldn’t resist.

What elevates Solo as truly unique is the second half of the book when we leave Ulrich’s real world and enter the world he imagines. There are new characters, though if you read carefully you can see the links between the two worlds. I don’t want to give anything away, but please read this book!

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

I really didn’t expect to love The Awakening as much as I did. I have a sort of informal book club with a friend of mine and he wanted to read a classic, so this is the one I suggested. I expected to really be disgusted with Edna and her plight, but actually I was so surprised how much I supported her. Beyond the plot, Chopin is a wonderful writer. There were so many passages that I marked just because they were beautiful.

My friend didn’t love it as much, but I think I convinced him of its merits in the end. Turn of the century US literature always surprises me with how much I love it and how relevant it can feel. I want to explore this era and read more books published then. Any suggestions?

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

The  Autobiography of an Execution by David Dow

This is the book that changed my mind. I used to be on the fence about the death penalty, leaning towards being opposed to it, but still not sure. Thanks to David Dow, I am absolutely, 100% opposed to it. I heard David Dow on NPR and I never wanted him to stop talking about his experiences as a death row lawyer. The same was true for his memoir, The Autobiography of an Execution. I can see why some people would not like this book. Dow is not always the most likable guy and he doesn’t really claim to be an amazing writer. But he writes exactly as he speaks and I like the way he speaks, so I could look over a lot of that. Also, it’s a memoir, not a non-fiction book about the execution process. Dow has already written a lot of those and you can read them, this is his personal experiences and emotions as a death row lawyer.

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

Black Juice by Margo Lanagan

This is another one that I would easily be able to write an entire post about. I loved it. The first story was absolutely amazing and then every story after that (with the exception of only one or two) were equally amazing. I don’t know that I have ever read a short story collection this beautiful and strange. I read and liked Tender Morsels, but I did not love it as many people do. This I loved unambiguously. It is amazing and I want everyone to be reading it. I also learned something that I already knew but had forgotten: fantasy short stories are so good. I almost like it better than full length fantasy.

To top it all off, I had a complete fan girl moment. I tweeted something along the lines of how weird and wonderful it must be to live in Margo Lanagan’s mind. And then this happened:

What. That is amazing. Thank you, Twitter, for making things like this happen.

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else