As I say every month, I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Jessica Lahey. She has a recurring monthly date where she reviews all the books she read that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better about doing this.

So. I’m going to review them here and also online, but I’m going to do it a little differently. I’m only going to review the stuff I really liked. I don’t see a reason to spend my time writing about something I didn’t love; it’s just using up more of my energy. So only positive reviews.

These are the books I liked (or mostly liked) from May.

Skipping the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes because, yes, I love Sherlock Holmes, but no, you don’t need a review of each short story collection. But since I technically liked it (vs. felt meh about it), I’m mentioning it.

And just in case you read this post and are worried that you’ll learn the name of that book, don’t worry. I don’t list it below.

All Your Twisted Secrets (Diana Urban): I am not the right audience for this book, but I promise you that 15-year-old Melissa would have loved this. It’s a fun young adult mystery with a locked room, ticking bomb, and poorly behaving teenagers. It was like a brain soda: zero nutritional value but totally delicious on the right day.

Just One Damned Thing After Another and A Symphony of Echoes (Jodi Taylor): These are the first two books in the Chronicles of St. Mary’s series. They were both good fun, and I will pick up another book in this series in the future. They’re time travelers—sort of Doctor Who meets Jasper Fforde—and the plotting feels like she was being chased while typing. In other words, a lot of random things happen, one after the other, and each story feels like four books smushed into one. But, again, really good fun, and the perfect read for right now.

Chosen Ones (Veronica Roth): Were there major plot holes in this book. Yes. Was the whole thing set up to be a series and doesn’t completely work on its own? Yes. Even with those two damning facts, I still really loved this read. It wasn’t what I thought it would be, which made me a little disappointed for the book I hoped to get and also pleasantly surprised with the book I got. Think of it like a more realistic epilogue to Harry Potter—what happens to the heroes after the bad guy is vanquished and they’ve saved the whole world? I have something specific about this book to unpack, but I promise no spoilers.

What did you read last month?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Do you know what I’m not on right now? A train. Do you know what I was supposed to be on this week? A train. Not a fancy train like these dream trains. Just a normal Amtrak one that would have delivered me at my sister’s house.

I love train travel as much as I hate air travel. Car travel is between train travel (at the top) and air travel (at the bottom). Boat travel is slightly (very slightly) above air travel.

I miss my sister. I also miss trains. (Thank you, Amtrak, for the refund. I will rebook when I travel again.) New life goal: Ride on the Belmond British Pullman next time we get to London. Did you see where it goes?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

There is a grandmother pageant every year in New York. It actually sounds like a sweet event, celebrating elderly ladies. They make a chicken soup, they wear a national costume, and they perform a talent. I read the article because I miss my grandmother, and it seemed like the type of article I would have brought up during a visit.

Towards the bottom of the article, there’s a paragraph I kept re-reading.

The MC introduces each grandmother by reading a short bio she has provided. There is an almost willful omission of some fairly important information in these introductions. For example, in lieu of something as significant as “She survived the Holocaust,” Mara Goldshtein prefers “Mara has two granddaughters and loves to read and dance.” They lead with their passions, not with their hardships.

What they include, of course, is their choice. It’s their bio. That’s the best part about a bio: you hopefully get to write your own and decide which facts about you are important to tell others about and which ones can be tucked away. So I guess I support it as long as tucking away hardships is not celebrated. That someone who wishes to lead with “She survived the Holocaust” feels encouraged as much as someone who wants to talk about reading and dancing. Maybe it worried me because it sounded like positivity gone awry?

Or maybe I’ll see that paragraph through entirely different eyes when I’m competing in the 2060 Your Highness Grandmother pageant. Not as a grandmother, mind you. But as a bad-ass gate crasher, still in my combat boots, shrieking, “Old ladies rule!”

It was a week. That’s the best thing I can say about it. I helped the ChickieNob process JK Rowling’s transphobic tweets—that was a hard one to wrap her brain around because Rowling’s words seemed to run counter to Harry Potter’s central message. It was an excellent reminder that even people who imagine fantastic, magical wizarding schools onto the page can hold hurtful, harmful views.

I also read Rowling’s personal essay, but I didn’t find a lot to hold onto with the exception of the last line: “All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.” No one should receive threats or abuse. That said, people also shouldn’t present their unfounded fears as facts.

I read her say; I still don’t agree with her.

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School is ending. Our high school, unlike middle and elementary school, operated fairly independently, similar to college. Students got assignments and exams on Monday, and turned them in mostly by Friday. They now enter summer homework, and we told them they need to create a summer project for themselves. In other words, next week will not look appreciably different from this week. Everything is blurring.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Zum Nachdenken” (Elaine ohne Kind)
• “I Can’t Breathe” (Finding my Plan B – The Black Women in the Room)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Searching for Our Silver Lining reminds us of the important act of shutting up and listening. She talks about how much can be gained by hearing someone else’s thoughts. She specifically addresses the conversation around feminism. Go read her words.

The Barreness also writes about Black Lives Matter and systemic racism, tying together yoga practice and the hard work of sitting with uncomfortable truths. She writes, “Many days it is like pulling myself through taffy, other days it is total joy. This practice is healthy for me, as things are upside down in my country. I am ashamed, angry, heartbroken and yet still hopeful.” I love this post and the analogy it contains.

Lastly, My Lady of the Lantern wonders how it could be so long between posts. She writes about the pandemic: “Something I discussed as a remote instance with my students in February, is now the reason why I have been home for a couple of months now.” Isn’t it so weird to think back to how we were thinking and moving as recently as February? Again, the one nice thing in the pandemic is that old familiar voices are popping up to check in.

The roundup to the Roundup: It was a week. School is almost over. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between June 5 – 12) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week? Read the original open thread post here.

I recently read a book with my cousin for our book club of two. I want to talk about why I don’t think it should have been published, but I don’t want to name the book. Of course, if you want to know the book, send me an email because I’m happy to tell you. But I (1) don’t want to ruin it for someone who doesn’t feel the same way I do and (2) I don’t want to shame the author because I believe she proves my point by repeating a myth that she probably learned from reading books.

So two things. (Well, there are more things, but these are the two big things.)

The first reason is the less problematic but annoying trope that keeps popping up in books. It’s the modern-day version of “the butler did it.” If there is a woman who is behaving erratically or irrationally or rudely, she is, without a doubt, infertile. And if there is a perfectly nice infertile woman in a novel, she is—without fail—the murderer. And she murders because of her baby obsession. The infertile woman has become the new Chekhovian gun. If you introduce an infertile woman in the first act, she needs to murder someone by the third.

In this book, it is particularly offensive because the character is described as “obsessed” simply because she is struggling with infertility. Other characters trying to build their family are presented as strong and maternal. An infertile woman doing the same thing is “on a mission for a baby… It’s like she’s possessed.”

The second reason is much more problematic, and it is the real reason I think this book shouldn’t have been published in the first place. The first reason is annoying. The second reason is dangerous.

People reading fiction knowing it’s not fact, but it also informs their understanding of the world. Think about all the cultures or professions or places you’ve learned about—not from a textbook but through fiction.

So in this book, a woman has a child out of wedlock. The man she marries (while the child is a baby) decides to present himself as the child’s father because he just loves him so much, and the mother goes along with this idea, keeping the child’s history a secret from the child.

There are no consequences to this decision. The decision is not presented in the book and then used later to show why humans have a right to know their history and how detrimental it can be to withhold adoption information from a child. The child never learns their origin story, and the family never grapples with destroyed trust. Instead, his parents die—saints who just loved their son to bits—and the book ends with no comment on this myth. It never loops back and explains that parents shouldn’t pretend adoption never happened.

And so another book is out there, perpetuating this myth. Which, by the way, had zero impact on the plot. It didn’t need to be there and didn’t move the story forward. Such a frustrating read.