6/20/23

 Next batch of books is in!

• The Girls Who Went Away - Ann Fessler

This didn't quite do it for me. I rated it 5/10. The subtitle of this is: "The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade." I found this pretty repetitive. A large portion of the book consisted of relatively short narratives or snippets of narratives of women who gave up babies for adoption. So, so many of their stories, however, were almost indistinguishable. Being pressured into doing it, facing banishment from their families, being sent away to a home for expecting mothers. It got repetitive reading basically the same personal stories dozens and dozens of times. Maybe that sounds harsh. I think the point, to some extent, is emphasizing how many women had this same or similar experience. But I didn't need to read the same narrative over and over again for that point to get across. I was eager for the book to conclude.

To its credit, I did learn a bit about some things. I wasn't particularly familiar with the 50s and 60s era homes for expecting mothers. There was literally an industry for this. Young women would be sent to these homes to reside for months on end until they had their babies. It was an expensive affair, and the girls were sometimes told that if they "changed their minds" and decided to keep their babies, they'd have to pay the homes back for all the care they received during their stay. The girls, often high school or college age, had no money to their names, so they felt they had no choice. 

Sometimes these homes were hours away from where the girls lived with their families. Families would tell relatives and friends that their daughters had gone away for illness or to care for a relative out of town. The girls all seemed to understand that everyone in town pretty much knew the truth of the matter, but that people just didn't really acknowledge it. 

After having their babies, sometimes the mothers were able to stay with them for several weeks, but some had only days. Some were told they were not allowed to see the baby at all. The book talked about some mothers who joined networks later in life, decades later, to try to reconnect with their lost child. 

• All the Single Ladies - Rebecca Traister

This was another one that I thought for sure I would love, and then I just didn't. I don't know if I just wasn't in a non-fiction mood, or if the book really was dull. For whatever reason, I just could not keep my eyes from glazing over while reading this one. I kept trying to fight it because I thought the subject matter would be interesting to me. But I'd "read" a paragraph or two, and then realize I hadn't actually read it or absorbed it at all, so I'd go back and try again. I did that over, and over, and over again. I usually don't struggle with that so much. So I think something about the way this was written just did not grab me. I rated it 5/10.

The main theme of this one is the increasing prevalence of women who choose to remain single and unmarried.

I took down some quotes:

"Sociologist Bella DePaulo has repeatedly pointed out that there are more than one thousand laws that benefit married people over single people."

"Always choose yourself first. Women are very socialized to choose other people. If you put yourself first, it's this incredible path you can forge for yourself."

"In the late 1860s, Myra Bradwell petitioned for a law license and argued that the 14th Amendment protected her right to practice. The Illinois Supreme Court rejected her petition, ruling that because she was married she had no legal right to operate on her own. When she challenged the ruling, Justice Joseph Bradley wrote in his decision, 'It certainly cannot be affirmed, as a historical fact, that [the right to choose one's profession] has ever been established as one of the fundamental privileges and immunities of the sex.' Rather, Bradley argued, 'The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.'"

"The early American attitude towards marriage, and men's and women's roles within it, corresponded to a doctrine of English common law known as coverture. Coverture meant that a woman's legal, economic, and social identity was 'covered' by the legal, economic, and social identity of the man she married."

• The Surgeon's Daughter - Audrey Blake

This was an enjoyable piece of historical fiction, and I rated it 7.5/10. The story alternates in perspective between a woman, studying medicine and endeavoring to become her country's first licensed surgeon, and the woman's partner, a man who is already licensed as a doctor and accepted in the community as such. The woman was mentored by one of the country's foremost surgeons, who raised her and taught her at his side. But because of her sex, the woman is forced to study medicine in another country. It is a gamble as to whether her own country will even allow her to work as a doctor, even after obtaining her medical degree.

• NSFW - Isabel Kaplan

This was a piece of modern fiction. It wasn't rated super, super well, but I did enjoy it. I rated it 8/10.

The story follows a 26-year-old woman trying to make a career for herself in TV and film production in California. She works first as a temp, then as an assistant to an executive. The woman struggles with her image and self-worth, with patriarchal standards and issues in her workplace, and with her relationships. Her relationship with her mother is poor and largely toxic. 

What I liked about this book was that it felt realistic. I could resonate with some of the internal struggles that the main character had about how to react to the things happening around her, about her image and role in her workplace, and her frustration about being anxious about these things in the first place. The main character is the same age as me, and although I didn't share a lot of the same struggles, I could find her relatable in some respects. She was funny, too.

"'Beautiful class,' Gemma tells the teacher, and I nod in agreement, though I didn't understand half her comments. Move your elbows so your third eye rests on the mat. You are not your thoughts, and you are not your feelings. The hips are the garage of the body. I figure it's like religion. You don't have to believe everything to get something out of it. I feel like a wrung-out towel, but in a good way, sweaty and subdued."

"'You have to stop saying sorry so much,' he advises. 'Never say you're sorry if something isn't your fault. As soon as you say sorry, you take on responsibility for it, whatever it is, even if you couldn't have had anything to do with it. Say, "That sucks" or "How shitty," whatever you want. Just don't apologize.'"

"This is the part where you say hi, how are you? I've typed into my phone, only to then delete it. If I have to tell him to ask, I won't want to answer."

• The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O'Farrell

I enjoyed this piece of historical fiction, and I rated this 8/10. This book is based loosely on the life of a very young Italian duchess who, at roughly age 13 or 14, is married off to a 24-year-old Duke. The Duke was originally meant to marry the young girl's older sister, but when the older sister passes away before she can be wed, the girl's family is relieved to discover that the Duke has taken a liking to their younger daughter as well. 

The young daughter is not so sure. She is nervous to leave her family and everything she's ever known. One of her caretakers, an older woman, helps her hide her period for a while so that the family does not discover that the daughter has become a "woman." But once the family discovers the daughter has begun her period, the marriage moves forward.

The two are married, and the young Duchess moves away with the Duke. She never sees her family again. When their union has, after nearly a year, failed to result in a pregnancy, the Duke conspires to kill her so as to replace her with a new wife.

• All the Living and the Dead - Hayley Campbell

I rated this piece of nonfiction 9/10. I really enjoyed this book's subject matter and the writing style. The author meets with different sorts of folks who work, in some capacity, in the industry of death. She meets with morticians, funeral home directors, autopsy technicians, grave diggers, and an executioner. She hears about their work and how it affects their lives. The executioner seems to be the last favorite individual with whom she meets because he distances himself from the responsibility and the role he played in the death of many incarcerated individuals. He disassociated himself from the act through religion, by saying that it was up to God, and he points back at the people being executed, saying they did what they did to put themselves in that situation.

She also speaks with a midwife whose sole job is to assist in delivering stillborn babies. Something about that one seems worst of all. A midwife who deals solely with families who know the baby they had been expecting will be delivered unbreathing. I don't know how someone could get through that, day after day. 

Here are some quotes:

"It's also because of these appearances in pop culture that 'cryogenics' gets confused with 'cryonics'--the former is a branch of physics that deals with the production and effects of very low temperatures, while it's only the latter that preserves corpses for later revival. The confusion annoys both parties."

"Joan Didion wrote in The White Album, 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live . . . We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.'"

"It seems that everyone on death row, from the prisoners to the wardens, to the politicians and judges who refused the pardons, shifted the weight of responsibility onto God. I've always been wary of anyone using religion as a shield, or a proxy; to me, they're choosing not to think too deeply on whatever it is they're doing because it doesn't matter, it's someone else doing it. They're only following orders from above."

• The Dark Net - Jamie Bartlett

This was a relatively interesting book. Not a lighthearted read, nor would it be reasonable to expect it to be. I enjoyed some sections more than others, and I rated this 6/10. I wanted to read about the dark web because I work in the legal field and am exposed to/work on criminal cases, some of which involve the Internet and child sexual abuse material (child pornography). 

I learned about a browser named Tor that folks use to access the dark web and better hide their activity online. I also learned about an online drug market called the Silk Road. On it, you could buy a myriad of different kinds of drugs to be shipped to you. And on the Silk Road, you have to pay with Bitcoin, which is apparently a more secure currency. The Silk Road has apparently been infiltrated and shut down by authorities on a couple of occasions, I think, but a new updated version just takes its place.

The book talked about accessing pornography (both adult and child) on the web and the lucrative but risky business of being a cam girl. It talked about people who troll others online for no particular reason except for the sake of trolling. It talked about the risk of trying to exist confidentially on the dark Web and being doxxed (having your identity exposed). Specifically, the author recounted a situation in which a new and inexperienced cam girl showed her medication bottles in her live stream, which allowed ill-intended viewers to see the name of the prescribing physician and ultimately to identify the cam girl herself. She was then basically bullied (to put it mildly) off the dark web. 

The book also discussed how the dark web is a place for radical/non-mainstream groups of people to gather and discuss things on forums. Specifically, I remember reading about forums advocating for and supporting self-harm, suicide, and eating disorders. 

"According to research conducted by the charity the Lucy Faithful Foundation, nine out of ten internet sex offenders did not intentionally seek out child images, but found them via pop-ups or progressive links while browsing adult pornography."

"The most well-known of these groups, which has been in operation since long before the Web, is called the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Founded in the United States in 1978, their goal is to 'end the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships,' although in truth it's hard to see how that really amounts to anything except the right of their members to fulfill their wish of having sex with children. NAMBLA members consider themselves to be misunderstood and persecuted in the same way homosexuals once were."

• The Rabbit Hutch - Tess Gunty

This was a somewhat bizarre book. The plot was very strange. I genuinely don't know how somebody came up with this plot. At the same time, however, the writing was quite good and at times poignant. I rated this 6.5/10.

Here are some quotes that stood out to me:

"Listen to me very closely: being looked at is not the same as being seen. If I can teach you anything before I die, let it be that."

"She feels like a demanding and ill-fated houseplant, one that needs light in every season but will die in direct sun, one whose soil requires daily water but will drown if it receives too much, one that takes a fertilizer only sold at a store that's open three hours a day, one that thrives in neither dry nor humid climates, one that is prone to every pest and disease."

"'Each man is an expert on himself, so--

'Person.'

'What?'

'Person.'

'When I say "man," I mean "mankind,"' explains Moses.

'Your speech is codified in patriarchal microaggressions.'"

"To have a nationality, a lover, a family, a coworker, a neighbor--the mother understands these to be fundamentally absurd connections, as they are accidents, and yet they are the tyrants of every life."

"'And just when things were looking up for Maria--demons gone, a spot of safety, a taste of health--she had a vision in which Jesus slipped a ruby ring on her fiance finger.' Blandine pauses. She normally tries to avoid saying in which out loud, to minimize the number of people who find her insufferable."

• The Maidens - Alex Michaelides

This was stupid, and I rated it 3/10. I'd say at least 65% of the time when I read something from the mystery genre, I end up regretting it. This was one of those times. I did not initially realize this was a mystery. I am stupid, and therefore I foolishly mistook this author for a different Greek author. I thought "oh cool, that author has another book out that I didn't know about." I started reading it and I was like "Hmm. The writing style is really, really different. Something is off." But by that point, I was already into it and figured I'd finish it. Questionable decision. This author is trash compared to the author for whom I mistook him (that other author is Jeffrey Eugenides, author of a fantastic book called Middlesex). 

This plot was stupid and made no sense. I got towards the end and got the reveal of what's going on and was actually like "are you shitting me." I see now, too, that this same author wrote The Silent Patient, which I also thought was mediocre. Don't both wasting your time reading this book. Don't let the cool cover fool you.

4/29/2023

 What have I been listening to?: Smartless Podcast

What have I been watching?: Better Call Saul

I can't keep up with all the books I'm reading! This post covers my first batch of books from 2023.

• We Were Never Here - Andrea Bartz

This was my first book of 2023, and I really liked it. I was really hooked on it, always very eager to get back to reading. It is a very anxiety-inducing read, in ways that I can't really describe without spoiling. I could vicariously feel the stress of the characters while I was reading this, particularly as an already-anxious person, I could physically feel the anxiety as I was reading these tense passages. Basically the main character and her "best friend" get into a couple of horrible, life-altering experiences that they can't get out of their heads afterwards, and they have to figure out how to move forward without essentially destroying their futures. Bonus for me was that the main character lives in MKE and a decent portion of the book takes place there. I rated this 9.5/10. 

• The Midcoast - Adam White

This was clearly well written, and I thought it was good, although I knew at the time that it wouldn't end up being a favorite. The plot is fairly intricate in terms of character perspective and timelines, so I found it difficult at times to keep track of where I was in the story and what was going on. The story centers around a lobster fishing family in Maine and an intertwined criminal enterprise that eventually unravels. I thought the setting was very interesting and fun to read about. I have never been to Maine or anywhere close, and I enjoy reading about the coastal-town vibe. I rated this 8/10.

• Hester - Laurie Lico Albanese

This was an enjoyable piece of historical fiction. The story is set in 1800's Salem and features a woman who has to hide her synesthesia so that she is not suspected of witchcraft. Synesthesia runs in the women's family through its women, and an ancestor of hers was persecuted on suspicion of witchcraft because of it. I don't know the precise definition of synesthesia, but I know the gist of it is that your senses are kind of intertwined--for example, some people associate colors with certain voices or personas. It manifests differently for each person.

The main character here finds an outlet in sewing and tailoring, and she strives to build a business as a seamstress. I found this particularly interesting to read about as I have recently purchased a sewing machine and begun the practice of quilting. 

I rated this one 9/10.

• The Maid - Nita Prose

I loved this read and rated it 9.5/10. I'm not sure that others would enjoy it quite as much as I did, but I found the main character relatable in a lot of ways that others probably wouldn't. The main character is a hotel maid with what I suspect is autism of some form. She is fantastic at her job and takes tremendous pride in her work. She takes it very seriously and is extremely attentive to the details. I personally love cleaning and the feeling of getting everything tidy and organized, so I can relate to the feeling of satisfaction associated with cleaning. The main character is extremely sharp and witty, and she takes everything very literally. 

Her tendency to take things literally and at face value, plus her dedication to her "craft" of housekeeping, gets her into a bit of trouble with some folks at the hotel where she works. People try to take advantage of her, but luckily it doesn't work out for them in the end. She is aided by some good people who, with her help, turn the tables. This was a really fun read. It made me smile and laugh. P.S., the main character's favorite restaurant is Olive Garden, and I loooove Olive Garden. I was like "oh ok twin!"

• The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Oh my gosh, this read is so heavy. The setting is post-apocalyptic. There are no institutions or stability of any kind. Just some folks who have managed to survive whatever it is that happened and are essentially roaming aimlessly until their inevitable deaths. Some just kill themselves instead. 

The main character and his young son are trekking across the desolate, largely abandoned landscape in hopes that where they end up will be better than where they began. But it is all so hopeless and desolate. You cannot trust anyone. Some of the remaining humans have banded together to take advantage of others in horrific, horrific ways. There is trafficking of humans for their flesh and as slaves. You can barely sleep at night for fear that someone will stumble upon you in the night and steal everything you have--or worse. There is no hope for salvation or relief.

My favorite line that I read in this book was: "By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp." I rated the book 9/10.

• A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology - Mike Rinder

This was a very interesting read, but it was also intensely detail-heavy about the illogical intricacies of Scientology, to a point that I found off-putting. Because it was just too much to keep track of and made no sense. This book--and, I assume, any other that describes the truth of Scientology--reads like terrible science fiction. The basis of Scientology is, truly, a fictionalized plot involving aliens. Scientology basically has its own language--they have words and phrases for unique concepts in Scientology, and it is difficult as an outsider to keep up with what means what. 

The main character was born into a Scientology family, and as a teenager he signed a literal billion-year contract committing himself to Scientology. He worked on a ship of Scientology's for a while--apparently Scientology confined itself largely to a big ship for a while, literally because they were essentially on the run from the governments of various countries, and being at sea was like an escape.

You can't question anything in Scientology. If you question its origins or validity even slightly, there may be consequences. The main character--and many others--were essentially imprisoned in a building at one point for "misconduct." You could be put there for seemingly any arbitrary reason. While imprisoned there, they are forced to perform intense manual labor and live in terrible conditions.

In Scientology, apparently the goal is to basically continue "educating" yourself on the various levels of Scientology, to continue to move upward. This is an extremely costly endeavor--Scientology is basically a huge money-making scheme. The founder of Scientology basically created its dogma and created these "levels" which Scientologists are expected to complete. They are like courses. But there is no actual end in sight--it is not entirely clear when, if ever, these "levels" stop. 

Eventually, the author, as an adult with a family in Scientology, managed to escape. In doing so, however, he lost his whole family. He also was subject to harassment and stalking from Scientologists who wanted to ruin his life for committing the ultimate sin--leaving Scientology and questioning its validity.

I honestly didn't particularly enjoy reading this, just because it's so utterly bizarre and oftentimes makes no sense. I rated it 5/10.

• The School for Good Mothers - Jessamine Chan

This was an interesting commentary on society's expectations of mothers and the lesser expectations of fathers. In this story, neglectful or abusive parents are presented with two legal options: have your parental rights flatly terminated, or attend (and excel in) a new, futuristic training camp/correctional institution for parents. Mere attendance and participation at the training camp, however, is not in itself sufficient to get your kid back. You have to not only participate and do well, but you have to be among the best.

After being deemed neglectful of her daughter, the main character is forced to decide between these two options. She chooses the latter, and is bussed off with many other mothers to the facility (the fathers are at a separate facility). Unbeknownst to them, their "training" will involve a futuristic, technological advancement. The mothers are watched at all times and criticized for every misstep. They are ranked in their exercises and only the most successful will receive the opportunity to get their children back. The training and evaluating are intense and emotional. Some mothers can't handle it. I rated this 7.5/10.

• Dopesick - Beth Macy

This is a non-fiction book about the serious and pervasive opioid epidemic in the United States. I found it repetitive at times, but the subject matter is very important and timely. The epidemic seemed to take hold most strongly, originally, in Appalachia. The book had so much good information and statistics. I took down a ton of quotes, which I will provide here:

"The culprit was fentanyl, once a popularly diverted opioid prescribed in patch form for advanced-cancer patients that was now being illicitly imported from China and mixed with heroin or manufactured into pills."

"In June 2017, the DEA recommended that first responders wear safety goggles, masks, and even hazmat suits to avoid skin contact with fentanyl and other powerful synthetics after reports of officers having to be Narcanned when they inadvertently brushed up against them on calls."

"[T]he doctors were increasingly aware of studies showing that long-term opioids in fact created more pain in many patients, a condition known as opioid-induced hyperalgesia."

"In The Odyssey, Homer described a drug that would 'lull all pain and anger and bring forgetfulness of every sorrow.' A Victorian poet said taking opium felt as if his soul was 'being rubbed down with silk.'"

"Doctors didn't trust people of color not to abuse opioids, so they prescribed them painkillers at far lower rates than they did whites. 'It's a case where racial stereotyping actually seems to be having a protective effect . . . .'"

"Some dealers encouraged underlings to 'hot pack' their product, giving superhigh potencies to new users to hook them quicker. Once the user is hooked, the product gets titrated back, forcing the person to buy more."

"[T]he same way four out of five heroin addicts come to the drugs: through prescribed opioids."

"Americans, representing 4.4% of the world's population, consume roughly 30 percent of its opioids."

"The prosecutor's Obama-era marching orders, according to a road map written by then attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., was to use discretion in filing criminal charges, preserving the harshest penalties for serious, high-level, and/or violent drug traffickers. Responding to a nearly sixfold increase in the national prison population between 1972 and 2008, Holder wrote: 'Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for truly no good law enforcement reason.'"

"Across the nation, police chiefs and sheriffs were beginning to lament, 'We can't arrest our way out of this epidemic.' That sentiment illuminated the folly of the decades-long War on Drugs, in which users were arrested four times more often than those who sell the drugs."

"People whose parents or grandparents were drug- or alcohol-addicted have dramatically increased odds of becoming addicted themselves, with genetics accounting for 50 to 60 percent of that risk . . . she noted that the correlation between family history and depression is much lower, 30 percent."

"Diacetylmorphine--aka, heroine--was more than twice as powerful as morphine, which was already ten times stronger than opium."

"Bickel went on to scientifically quantify the indifference of the typical opioid user, comparing the average nonaddicted person's perception of the future--calculated to be 4.7 years--against an addicted user's idea of the future, which is just nine days."

"[H]e touted the makers of the painkiller Talwin, who in a 1982 reformulation had added a narcotic blocker, or antagonist, called naloxone, to the mix--and immediately reduced the drug's diversion and misuse."

"Forty to 60 percent of addicted opioid users can achieve remission with medication-assisted treatment, according to 2017 statistics, but sustained remission can take as long as ten or more years. Meanwhile, about 4 percent of the opioid-addicted die annually of overdose."

This is critical, critical information. So many people are affected by opioid addiction. And to know that pharmaceutical companies could remedy the problem by adding the narcotic blocker to their products, but choose not to do so, is extremely upsetting.

I rated this 7.5/10. I think I would have rated it higher except that I was conscious of the repetitiveness at times.

I think this book was particularly important for me to read in light of my work in the judiciary. The vast majority of the criminal cases that come before us are drug and/or gun related. They are often drug trafficking + felon in possession of firearm charges. Some defendants are charged with distributing products that, unbeknownst to them, contained fentanyl. To see, alternatively, a white collar crime, is less common. Those that work in criminal justice and in the justice system need to better understand the realities of drug addiction. 

• Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout

I did not really love this, and I apparently didn't even bother to rate it. It is apparently a Pulitzer Prize winner, which, again, I hypothesize means little. I feel that reading this book put me in/extended a bit of a reading rut.

I did copy down one quote from this book:

"She said over her shoulder, 'At least I'm not prejudiced against homosexuals.'"

"No," he called. "Just white men with money."

Damn right, she thought.

• The Passenger - Chaney Kwak

I described this as "[l]ow key a little boring, nothing to write home about." The author writes about his experience on a cruise ship that nearly goes down. He is there on a writing assignment--a younger passenger compared to the largely middle- and older-aged folks on board. I rated this 5/10.

• Insane - Alisa Roth

This was another really important book to read as someone working in the judiciary. This book discusses the concerning prevalence of mental illness in the justice system. I rated it 9/10.

"The mental health crisis is especially pronounced among women prisoners: one study by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 75 percent of women incarcerated in jails and prisons had a mental illness, as compared with just over 60 and 55 percent of men, respectively."

"[T]he average length of stay on death row is now at least twenty years . . . ."

"We are also a country that is willing to send people with mental illness to their death but insists on restoring them to competency first; a person on death row who attempts suicide will be patched up before he is killed by the state."

"Indeed, about half of the people executed between 2000 and 2015 have been diagnosed with a mental illness or substance use disorder at some time in their adult lives."

"[P]people with mental illness are less likely to make bail--according to one study done in New York CIty, only 12 percent of those with mental illness versus 21 percent of those without. And for those 12 percent who do manage to make bail, it takes much longer--forty-eight days versus nine days for those without mental illness."

"More than half of all prison suicides occur in solitary confinement."

Being afflicted with mental illness as a person incarcerated worsens the experience in almost every possible respect. And the number of people who are charged with crimes who are mentally ill--and whose mental illness, oftentimes, contributed to the commission of those crimes--is concerning. I see this firsthand in the court. Many of the criminal defendants who come before the court suffer from depression, anxiety, substance abuse disorders, and schizophrenia. They often have traumatic histories and suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. 

I recently dealt with an issue of competence at work for the first time a few weeks ago. There is Supreme Court precedent that not only says that defendants can't be tried or sentenced while incompetent, but also that if a court has a bona fide reason to suspect that the defendant is incompetent, the court has to sua sponte (spontaneously, without prompting) inquire into the defendant's competence. The difficulty, as noted here, is that many, many defendants suffer from mental illness, and a line must be drawn between those whose mental illness renders them incompetent and those for whom it does not.

• Lady Justice - Dahlia Lithwick

I loved this book, and I learned a lot. I found it very powerful and relatable and inspiring. I rated it 9.5/10 and I took down, again, a lot of quotes. But before I get to them, I will admit that reading this book was the first time I heard of Anita Hill. Anita Hill, I learned, testified against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. She alleged that he engaged in inappropriate behavior against her when she worked for him. I was honestly embarrassed to discover so late in my life that this happened. I am a female lawyer, how could I not have known? I hadn't realized that history was essentially repeating itself when Dr. Ford testified against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. To be fair, this happened well before I was born, in Anita Hill's case. But still, I was shocked that I had not been familiar with it.

I think this book touched on such important topics. I find myself becoming more and more of a feminist with each passing year, and I found validation of that in this book. Everyone can benefit from reading this book. A thought that has been prominent in my mind recently, and which I felt reflected in this book, is that those who insist on universal tolerance and understanding and not rocking the boat often do so from a place of security and privilege and do not always understand that an issue or policy may be so peripheral and hypothetical to them that it is easy to merely be tolerant of it. But for others, that issue affects them directly and negatively, and to suggest that people should be tolerant of it is to encourage complacency and is offensive and sometimes dangerous. In other words, as Anita Hill says, we do not all live under the same sky, and to insist that we do is ignorant.

"'When you've never had to think about the hardship of voting, then yes, these conversations on voter suppression seem absurd to you. When you have never spent more than seven minutes in line, it is nearly impossible to imagine that there are poor Black people who stand in line for eight hours, miss an entire day's wages, risk losing their jobs simply to cast a ballot in an election that may or may not have any benefit in their lives.'"

"There is no widespread crisis of in-person vote fraud in America. None. There is also no widespread crisis of mail-in vote fraud or early voting fraud. None. Based on the most generous set of data collected by the Heritage Foundation, the incidence of voter fraud in the two decades before the 2020 election was about 0.00006 percent of total ballots cast. That's about twelve hundred cases dating back to the 1980s. The nonpartisan Brennan Center's massive study from 2007 put that number at somewhere between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. THat same study famously concluded that it's more likely an American will be 'struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.'"

"Hill's formulation--that we don't all live under the same sky--is an elegant encapsulation of what the Trump era, the COVID pandemic, and the #MeToo movement unpeeled for millions of women who believed that the American system of justice was forever changing along on its own steam to a more perfect, just union: that despite claims of fundamental and foundational equality and access to justice, the sky was cloudless and blue for many Americans from 2016 onward, and for many others it wasn't just bucketing down endless suffering and misery, but they were also being told, over and over again, that they weren't actually getting wet."

"Those who persistently demanded that Judge Kavanaugh receive 'due process' didn't understand that he wasn't being deprived of any rights; he was interviewing for a job."

"[T]here is virtue in screaming into the face of deafening indifference, if only because the sound of my voice reminds me that I have not yet succumbed to it."

"Christine Blasey Ford, in a 2021 podcast with Anita Hill, disputed the utility of telling victims of sexual harassment and abuse that you 'believe' them. As she explained, when you tell someone your name, the correct response isn't usually 'I believe you.'"

"Two sitting Supreme COurt justices have been credibly accused of harassment and assault in episodes that have never been thoroughly investigated or adjudicated beyond background checks and a Senate hearing."

"In 2001, Kozinski and another judge jerry-rigged an internet security system the federal courts had erected in the wake of a review of the court's use of bandwidth after it was determined that judges were downloading porn on government servers. Nearly 4 percent of the sites visited had included images of sexual abuse. The work-around allowed hackers to beach the court's security. The then director of the Administrative Office of the US Courts described the results as prompting 'the unfettered ability of all judges and court employees to illegally download pornography and view it in federal courts.'"

"[I]n late November 2020, the Senate confirmed a thirty-three-year-old woman to a lifetime appellate judgeship. The Trump nominee had taken part in only two one-day trials in her career, both conducted while she was an intern."

"It probably won't surprise you to learn that of the top feeder judges to the Supreme Court virtually all are white men. It probably also won't surprise you to hear that male clerks outnumber female clerks two to one at that court and that--as of the most recent study, done in 2018 by the Supreme Court reporter Tony Mauro--'since 2005, 85% of all Supreme Court law clerks have been white.' Women, representing 50% of law school graduates, still constitute a third of all Supreme Court clerks. This, too, should surprise nobody. As of August 2019, 73 percent of all sitting federal judges were men."

"Of that day in 2018, when Dr. Ford testified about being assaulted, so many of us who sat in the hearing room felt something I have since heard from hundreds of women. They believed her. They saw her. And when Kavanaugh began to shout, they started to feel the prickling of genuine fear. Some sheathed violence or threat of it was in that room. And watching Dr. Ford testify, followed by Kavanaugh's angry response, changed everything, both because Brett Kavanaugh would take a seat on the Supreme Court as Trump followers chanted "Lock her up" about his accuser, and because we all saw something in that dynamic that we had recognized in our own lives."

"[F]or many women in America, the right to control their own body was always merely a paper right, dependent on geography, income, race, and the courts. It could be taken away by judges in due time. In 2022, it was."

"An extensive review undertaken by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law showed the Trump administration's win rate at about 17 percent in federal courts, in the summer of 2019. The usual win rate for the government stands at about 70 percent. Why all the losses? Shambolic, hasty legal work, indefensible new rules, attempts to fast-track lawsuits that ended up backfiring, failures to comply with basic administrative demands of the federal Administrative Procedure Act. Trump's own tweets and statements had been the basis for adverse rulings in multiple lawsuits."

"I mean, to me, getting a law degree is just about using the master's tools to destroy the master's house."

"Women make up just 35 percent of all lawyers, but 60 percent of public interest attorneys are women."

"Researchers have been studying the data on women judges for several decades, trying to ascertain whether women make different kinds of judicial decisions from men. The bulk of this research suggests that having women on the bench leads to different results in cases that have to do with gender; that when appellate judges sit together on three-judge panels, a single woman can impact the opinions of her male colleagues on cases about gender discrimination or sexual harassment."

"At the end of his presidency, Trump's federal judicial nominees were 76 percent male. Barack Obama's judicial nominees were 58% male."

"In the asylum context, the General Accounting Office has found that having a lawyer makes you 400% more likely to be given refugee status."

"Women are sometimes better than men at recognizing that the law isn't an immutable, timeless cathedral and at recognizing that just because it travels with a yellow pad doesn't mean it's doing justice. We know that because until relatively recently, the law insisted that women couldn't have their own credit cards."

"Yates showed us that the best government lawyers do it for the sake of the law itself, and not for personal glory or for some other guy's personal glory. The best government lawyers don't serve as yes-men ensuring that the president gets whatever the president wants. Attorneys must answer not just to the client but to the law itself, as abstract and old-fashioned as that may seem."

"None of our legal and constitutional progress happened in a straight path from dark to light, although that is the narrative we favor. It is and has always been a ciaroscuro journey through a legal system designed chiefly by men, for men, for the principal purpose of advancing the lot of men."

"If you're a woman who went to law school, or if you are a woman at all, or know one, or respect one, of it you are anyone with any conception of what the rule of law means, a rabid crowd screaming for the incarceration of a woman for imaginary 'crimes' ranging from a terorrist attack in Benghazi, to the misuse of a private email server, to the management of a fictional pizza-parlor-based child-sex-slave ring is chilling."

• The Way From Here - Jane Cockram

I rated this book 7.5/10. We alternate back and forth between a woman's past and her sister's present. The book switches between these two womens' perspective. The main setting is cool--a small coastal town in France. The gist of the story is that a woman passes away and her sister discovers that she left her letters instructing her to visit places from her past. One such place is the French town where the woman had spent a summer as a teenager.

• Code of Silence - Lise Olsen

This was a highly relevant book for me as an employee in the federal courts. I found this super interesting and rated it 9.5/10. The book talks about the problems that arise when federal judges--largely male--are appointed lifetime positions in the judiciary, from which they cannot be removed except in extremely narrow, exceptional circumstances. The book focuses on a couple of particular male federal judges who came to be known for their inappropriate, harassing behavior inside the federal courts. Their appointment for life, with little risk of removal even for serious misconduct, lends itself to an environment in which the judge is essentially a monarch, an all-powerful authoritarian of his court and chambers. His employees retain their tenure at his will. 

"In a law review article called 'Bullying from the Bench,' Lubet wrote that Kent had used the word 'asinine' at least thirteen times, while all thousand other US judges combined had used it only twenty-three times in the same period."

"The diversity numbers were so low that if the federal courts had been a private employer subject to Title VI of the 1964 Civil RIghts Act, the Supreme Court justices could have been sued for discrimination in the hiring of their clerks 'based on the statistics alone,' Stetson University law professor Mark Brown told Mauro in 1998."

"At the hearing, the only percipient witness that Judge Scirica wanted to hear from was Judge Kozinski. Thus, in a judicial misconduct proceeding brought by Alex Kozinski against Alex Kozinski, the sole witness for the prosecution and defense was Alex Kozinski. Not surprisingly, Alex Kozinski was largely vindicated."

"Discrimination on the basis of 'race, color, religion, sex and national origin' had already been banned in 1964 under Title VII. Under that law, employment could not be denied on the basis of gender alone. But that protection had first been extended to ban sexual harassment in the workplace in 1977, in an opinion issued by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, only after Paulette Barnes, a former employee of the federal government, sued the Environmental Protection Agency. Barnes presented proof that her EPA position was eliminated after she repeatedly refused to grant sexual favors to her boss, who happened to be the head of the agency's office of Equal Employment Opportunity and thus its point man for running antidiscrimination and hiring programs."

"In March 1804, John Pickering became the nation's first judge to be found guilty of impeachment charges an removed by the Senate."

"Indeed, there's no way for the press or the public to 'follow the money' to learn about the judicial misconduct system, which generally covers legal fees for accused judges but not for complainants, even when the alleged victim is a federal court employee."

"The Houston Chronicle later found that Kent was one of only seven judges to receive any formal disciplinary action in response to more than six thousand complaints filed from 1999 to 2009."

"Porteous filled a post vacated by US District Judge Robert Collins, who was convicted of bribery in 1991 after a dope dealer paid cash to win a lighter sentence. Collins collected his $133,600 annual pay as a prisoner until 1993, when he resigned under threat of impeachment."

"On June 9, 2009, a few weeks after Kent's sentencing in Texas, he and other members of the House of Representatives introduced a resolution to launch impeachment proceedings. In all of American history, only thirteen federal judges had ever been impeached, but in 2009, the House had two impeachments in the works. Members of Congress had already established a task force to consider impeaching Porteous. Now they would look at Kent too."

1/16/23

 What have I been watching?: Welcome to Chippendale's

It's the final book post for 2022's books. 

• To Shake the Sleeping Self -- Jedidiah Jenkins

I rated this one 7.5/10. This book was about a guy, a lawyer, who decides to leave his job and his life as he knows it to bikepack from Oregon to Patagonia (tip of South America). For most of the trip, he is accompanied by a male friend. He and his friend have different styles--his friend is fairly unprepared, underpacked, under financed. This causes some tension between them as they go on. 

I really liked the wanderlust aspect of this book. They are living out of bags on their bikes and making their way across multiple countries on their bikes powered by themselves. This allows them to intimately experience their environments and be immersed in the scenery. They alternate between camping and staying in hotels depending on where they find themselves and how they're feeling. It was a very cool adventurous, seize the day sort of vibe. 

The only thing (and unfortunately it was a pretty prominent thing) was the very persistent religious themes and rhetoric throughout this book. The author and main character is Christian and that is a huge part of his life. It comes up pretty frequently as he is discussing his experience. I am not religious and didn't enjoy the persistent religious ponderings.

• The Guest List - Lucy Foley

A modern mystery. The setting of this book is pretty cool--a small island in Great Britain home to a historic little manor turned event venue. The island is also accompanied by its own little cemetery plot and creepy swamp. It's a quiet, dreary, rainy place, which sets the perfect creepy vibe for the story. A wedding is being hosted at the island and tensions are running high among and between both the guests and event staff.

I've said it once and I'll say it a million more times: mysteries are not my favorite and I tend to be wary of them. Nevertheless, I thought this was decent. There were twists I didn't see coming, interweaving threads lingering beneath the surface that didn't reveal themselves until the end. I didn't know how things would end up. I rated this one 8/10.

• Everything I Know About Love -- Dolly Alderton

I adored this memoir, and I rated it 9.5/10. It was funny, honest, and genuine. It was real. Here are some quotes I found noteworthy:

"I've watched it time and again--a woman always slots into a man's life better than he slots into hers. She will be the one who spends the most time at his flat, she will be the one who makes friends with all his friends and their girlfriends. She will be the one who sends his mother a bunch of flowers on her birthday. Women don't like this rigamarole any more than men do, but they're better at it--they just get on with it."

"A week into my big New York adventure, I realized that places are kingdoms of memories and relationships; that the landscape is only ever a reflection of how you feel inside."

"I was more honest; I told people when I was upset or offended or angry and valued the sense of calm that came with integrity, paid with the small price of an uncomfortable conversation."

• The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle -- Stuart Turton

This was a fabulous mystery. It feels like it can hardly just be described as a mystery, though. There was murder, there was blackmail, there was suicide (or was there?), a ticking clock, a stranger in a plague mask. It was giving The Good Place, it was giving Groundhog Day, it was giving Clue, it was giving Happy Death Day. Set again in a somewhat remote historic castle/manor, our main character finds himself unwittingly placed as a pawn in a sick sort of race against time to solve a murder. He has only so many opportunities to do so and must figure out how best to use his time before he runs out of it. As time goes on, he must re-evaluate who is friend and who is foe. I rated this 8/10. If there is one thing this book wasn't, it's simple. It was a complex story with so many interwoven layers across characters and across time. A bit difficult to keep up with at times.

• Want Me -- Tracy Clark-Flory

I didn't like this memoir as much as I thought I would. I couldn't shake this sense of hypocrisy from this author. She was a sex author, writing regular columns about sex and giving sex advice, all the while faking her own orgasms for years and years. She made her career off of sex advice but wasn't being truthful with herself or with her partners about her sex life, and that came across as so disingenuous to me. Something about that really bothered me. I guess this book was all about that journey. I think the author could have been a bit more explicit in acknowledging her hypocrisy, though. I just didn't find myself resonating with her at all. I gave this 6.5/10.

Despite not loving the author, I did find parts of the book valuable and took down some quotes:

"It would be many more years before I had any inkling of how white women in particular use hip-hop to cast off the strictures of 'pure, chaste' femininity, as the author Brittney Cooper argues, and just how profoundly race and class factor into constructions of innocence. 'The ability to take on and peel off the parts of Black culture that you like at will is exactly what is meant by the term "white privilege," she writes.'"

"My mom had recently told me, 'Many women confuse fear with attraction.'"

"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."

"As John Berger famously wrote in Ways of Seeing, 'Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.'"

• Beheld -- Tarashea Nesbit

This didn't do it for me. I was so drawn to the gorgeous book cover, and I ended up much preferring the cover to the book's contents. I didn't really take anything away from this, and I rated it 5.5/10.

• Flowers for Algernon -- Daniel Keyes

I read this in middle school, I believe, and decided to read it again for the first time since. I recalled it being good and remembered the gist of the plot. But I'm so glad I decided to read it again, despite knowing generally how it would end. It is an emotional and thought-provoking book. I highly recommend that everyone read it. I rated it 9/10. It's hard to describe the substance of the story without giving away critical things. Basically, the main character is mentally challenged and becomes a participant in an experimental study in which he is the first human participant. The experiment is in some ways successful but in other ways very damaging. We read about the experiment's effects on the main character's life through his own journaling. A super cool aspect of the book is how the main character's writing, vocabulary, and grammar change throughout the course of the book.

Here are some quotes I took away:

"I say it, because you have no gratitude or understanding of the situation. After all, you are indebted to these people if not to us--in more ways than one." "Since when is a guinea pig supposed to be grateful?" I shouted. "I've served your purposes, and now I'm trying to work out your mistakes, so how the hell does that make me indebted to anyone?"

"The problem, dear professor, is that you wanted someone who could be made intelligent but still be kept in a cage and displayed when necessary to reap the honors you seek. The bitch is that I'm a person."

"He asked me dd I have any friends or relatives and I said no I dont have any. I told him I had a friend called Algernon once but he was a mouse and we use to run races together."

• Cultish - The Language of Fanatacism -- Amanda Montell

This was a cool read. I learned a lot from it and rated it 9.5/10. I learned about Jonestown and a lot of other American cults I hadn't heard of before. I learned that there were very few survivors from Jonestown because the cult members were essentially sequestered and forced to kill themselves. There was one cult in which all the members lived together in a large house and they were all found dead in their bunk beds following a mass suicide. If I recall correctly, they were all dressed in matching clothes and thought they were going to ascend together to some other realm. This kind of stuff is so intriguing and captivating. It's like all the true crime podcasts I listen to. Some of the content is creepy and devastating, but you still find yourself so drawn to it.

In addition to talking about some well-known, typical cults, the author also discusses some other trends, hobbies, and pastimes that are cult-like.

Here are some quotes:

"Commodifying the language of Eastern and Indigenous spiritual practices for an elitist white audience while erasing and shutting out their originators might not seem 'culty'--it might just seem commonplace, which is exactly the problem."

"In June 2020, Greg Glassman shot off a series of racist emails and tweets (in one, he responded to a post about racism s a public health crisis with 'It's FLOYD-19'), prompting white CrossFitters to finally start coming around to what many Black folks had known for decades: The place was not really 'for everyone.' And the linguistic red flags had always been there. By glorifying the police in the names of its Hero WoDs, CrossFit had been telling on itself all along."

"But while MLMs talk a lot of smack about corporate America and corporate America thinks of MLMs as a scammy joke, they are ultimately both derived from the same Protestant capitalist theory."

"To this day, unemployed women, especially those living in blue-collar towns, continue to make up the majority of MLM recruits."

"Amway's two deeply conservative founders were Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos, who died in 2004 and 2018, respectively. That second name should sound familiar. The DeVoses are a Michigan-based family of politically influential billionaires; Rich was the father-in-law of Donald Trump's secretary of education, Betsy. With a personal net worth of over $5 billion, Rich DeVos served as the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, was BFFs with Gerald FOrd, secured special Amway tax breaks for hundreds of millions of dollars, and funneled prodigious sums into Republican presidential candidates' coffers. Amway funded the campaigns of Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, and, naturally, the most direct-sales-friendly president of all time, Donald Trump."

"The term 'gaslight' originates from a 1938 British play of the same name, in which an abusive husband convinces his wife she's gone mad. He does this in part by dimming the gaslight in their house and insisting that she's delusional every time she points out the change."

• There There -- Tommy Orange

I had no expectations of this book and didn't know what it was about. I discovered that it was very well-written, eloquent, and emotional. I rated it 9.5/10. The story was told from the perspective of various different Native characters who at first don't appear to have any connection apart from being Native. As the story goes on, it turns out that they are not totally random, unconnected individuals. The book gave me a little bit of insight into being Native in modern America. I found it a little bit difficult to keep track of who was who since the perspective regularly switched characters, but it was worth it. Here are some quotes:

"As for your mom's side, as for your whiteness, there's too much and not enough there to know what to do with. You're from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You were both and neither. When you took baths, you'd stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub."

"Roosevelt said, 'I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.' 'Damn, TS. That's messed up. I only heard the one about the big stick.'"

"We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread--which isn't traditional, like reservations aren't traditional, but nothing is original, everything coms from something that came before, which was one nothing. Everything is new and doomed. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere."

"Our heads were on the penny first, of course, the Indian cent, and then on the buffalo nickel, both before we could even vote as a people--which, like the truth of what happened in history all over the world, and like all that spilled blood from slaughter, are now out of circulation."

• Unbroken -- Laura Hillenbrand

I read this over the course of, gosh, literally several months because my partner and I took turns reading it out loud to each other on car rides, while cooking in the kitchen, etc. Reading a book out loud takes forever and is exhausting. He had wanted to read this book and so I said okay, I'll read it to you. I ultimately had to renew the e-book loan like three times because it took so long to finish reading it out loud. 

As I think I've mentioned before, reading a book out loud rather than in your head really exposes the writing. Everything is laid out bare--every word articulated. When you read in your head, in contrast, you are able to omit what your brain interprets as unnecessary things. Maybe this allows you to not only read faster, but also to enjoy what you are reading more. Maybe our brains just have a way they like to read and they alter the writing to accord with that. Anyways, this book really dragged on and my brain wasn't really able to omit was it interpreted as unnecessary words and whatnot. The story, based on a real man's experience as an Olympic athlete (track), American soldier, and prisoner of war in Japan, was very interesting. From it I learned a lot about the horrors of being a prisoner of war under Japanese control. They were starved, regularly beaten brutally, tormented both physically and mentally, were left to succumb to treatable diseases, and were worked essentially to death.

• Heart Berries -- Terese Marie Mailhot

I regrettably did not care for this memoir much at all, and I rated it 5/10. I found it very difficult to understand. The writing style was so obscure, like poetry, that I couldn't understand the story very well. It was just so abstract, too much so for my liking. I honestly could barely even tell you what this book was about. I'm sure there was much of value in it, but I unfortunately was unable to see it.

I took down one quote:

"When I gained the faculty to speak my story, I realized I had given men too much."

• Wordslut -- Amanda Montell

This was my second Amanda Montell book of this batch of books. Another lovely piece of nonfiction. I rated this one 9/10. Here's some cool bits I saved:

"It's a dialect of sorts, which one can drop into or camp up whenever the situation calls for it. This is called 'code switching,' and sexuality aside it's actually something almost all English speakers do. Most of us speak more than one dialect of English, which we might learn from our ethnic community, the geographic region where we grow up, or a new region we transplant to (think of, say, a native Texan living in Los Angeles who speaks Standard English around Californians, but drops into their hometown accent the second they're around other Texans). Consciously or unconsciously, we all adjust our codes depending on the context of the conversation."

"In recent history, acts of verbal dominance have gotten worse, not better. A 2017 study analyzing Supreme Court oral argument transcripts from 1990, 2002, and 2015 determined that as more female justices were added to the bench, interruptions of women did not improve but escalated. Using the logic that more female justices would normalize female power, you might expect the opposite result. 'Interruptions are attempts at dominance . . . so the more powerful a woman becomes, the less often she should be interrupted,' the researchers wrote. Instead, they found that in 1990, when Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was the only woman on the bench, 35.7 percent of overall interruptions were aimed at her (which, out of nine justices, was already a high percentage); twelve years later, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg was added, 45.3 percent were directed at the two female justices; and in 2015, with three women on the bench (Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan), 65.9 percent of all court interruptions on the court were aimed at female justices."

"In the Dominican Republic, there happens to be a high incidence of a rare genetic intersex condition called 5-ARD. Babies with 5-ARD are born with what appear to be female genitalia, but at puberty, their bodies--from their faces to their nether regions--start to masculinize, and by adulthood, they look like hairy, barrel-chested men. In Dominican culture, people with 5-ARD are labeled guevedoces, which literally means 'penis at twelve.' In this community, people with 5-ARD are raised as girls, but after puberty, they are considered men for the rest of their lives, and they often take on new, masculine names."

"All the while, some people still use the word gender when what they really want to talk about is sex--like when pregnant parents reveal the 'gender' of their unborn babies. (My theory is that some Egnlish speakers continue to do this simply because prudish Westerners are too afraid to say the word sex out loud)."

"In the 1990s . . . a gender theorist at UC Berkeley named Judith Butler . . . came up with a theory called gender performativity, which essentially says that gender isn't something you are, it's something you do."

• The Butcher and the Wren -- Aaina Urquhart

This book was authored by a co-host of one of my favorite true crime podcasts. I thought it was a pretty decent crime thriller, and I rated it 7.5/10. The book is set in New Orleans and features a medical examiner who is called upon to help solve the case of what turns out to be a serial killer in New Orleans. The serial killer leaves clues at the scenes of his crimes and the medical examiner and police are always figuring them out just a moment too late. It turns out the medical examiner has a secret history of her own. The book was concluded in a way that makes me think a sequel will follow.

• Book Lovers -- Emily Henry

This was a cute and funny rom-com. Parts of this book truly made me chuckle out loud, so that's something. It's a feel-good read and it made me smile. Of course it was quite cheesy as well at times, but that's to be expected. The main character is a publicist for authors and she helps coordinate between them and their publishers. She takes a trip with her sister to the small town that inspired the setting of one of her client-author's books. The small town turns out to not be quite as dreamy and picturesque as the book portrayed it. Nevertheless, aspects of it draw them in and they integrate themselves nicely into the community. I rated it 7.5/10.

• The Paris Apartment -- Lucy Foley

My final book of 2022 was The Paris Apartment. This is another mystery/thriller, and I enjoyed it, although it featured a lot of typical-cliff hanger type language. In this story, a somewhat estranged sister shows up at her brother's apartment in Paris for a rather impromptu visit. She is surprised, however, to find him absent, despite having informed her just earlier that he was expecting her. With nowhere else to go and with few others in the world apart from her brother, she sticks around and starts investigating the other residents of the apartment building. I rated this one 8/10.