The 25 in '25 Reading Challenge!

#1

Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat

(Finished January 3rd)

I remember our teacher reading this to the class in grade 3 as part of a whole unit on owls. We got to disect an owl pellet and everything. Kind of cool, but kind of gross too. Anyhow, I decided to check it out from the library on a whim to see if it holds up. Like the title implies, it's about a boy in Saskatoon who finds two orphaned owls and adopts them as pets. Hijinks ensues. It was fine I suppose. Lots of young-boys-playing-rough-and-having-adventures-in-the-great-outdoors type stuff that isn't super up my alley, but they seem to be having a good time. So far as I can tell, this story takes place in the 1930s sometime and well, let's just say we've come some way as a society on how to properly treat animals. Domesticating wild owls as family pets doesn't really vibe with modern sensibilities. There are a few scenes where side characters veer into outright animal cruelty and it's only portrayed as a bad thing in the most glaring instances. I raised an eyebrow or two here and there. Still though, it was alright. The ending did make me feel something a bit, so it did the job.

#2

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell

(Finished January 14th)

A friend lent me this one. Like the title suggests, it explores lingustics and the impact society has on language and vice versa. All from a feminist perspective. It certainly gave me plenty to consider here and there. I enjpyed the chapters on how women speak among other women and how a lot of vocal affectations and slang adopted by girls are at first mocked and derided before being picked up by society at large over time. The chapter going into gay culture was also quite enjoyable (Finally, someone acknowlesges that the gay "lisp" isn't actually a lisp!). There's a chapter as well focusing on languages with gendered verbs and how that can present a challenge for feminists, and how other languages hardly acknowledge gender at all. That's something I might want to look into more eventually. However, finishing this book 6 days before the start of Donald Trump's second term as U.S President really hit home how much this book feels like a relic of a bygone era. It was only published in 2019, but the feminism that was culturally ascendent in the 2010's - even through Trump's first term - that this book represents died brutally and suddenly on November 5th, 2024 as the results rolled in. The future she posits where people might someday introduce themselves witht their pronouns as naturally as they do their name? Yeah, that's not happening. The tone of confidence that women are on their way to their place in the sun and that things are on the right track long term rings rather hollow as I write this. It feels like the whole idea of "civil rights" was just an experiment we tried for 60 or so years and now we're going to scrap it all in favor of extremely rigid hierarchy and outright facism. Yes, Trump was president when this book was written as well, but there was a sense that it was a very rough, four year setback to progress. Now that he won again, the sense of complete and utter defeat is palpable. The incels, the alpha bros, the talibangelists, the straight up Nazis. They won. We felt like we were pushing them back for a couple generations, but we failed. Nothing but a boot stomping on a human face forever now. Until climate change kills us all anyhow. Yeah...

#3

Beyond Getting By by Holly Trantham

(Finished January 25th)

A personal finance management book with a left wing perspective. I watch the Financial Diet a fair bit on Youtube, so this book published by them was an easy pickup at the book sale. A lot of the advice is specific to the United States and I've always estimated myself to be good with my finances, so not all of it was relevant to me. It did inspire me to check my monthly spending though, -and yeah- I could stand to eat out less often. Props for inspiring a positive change in my habits.

#4

Just My Type by Simon Garfield

(Finished February 12th)

A 340 page book about fonts? Who the hell would want to read that. Me. I am exactly the kind of person who would read that. Lots of fun touches with this one. When a font is mentioned, its name is printed in that particular font. Some chapters dedicated to particularly famous fonts are written in the font as well. Turns out typography is a very complex and fascinating topic with more depth than you could possibly imagine. The book is a little all over the place in structure. Jumps from subject to subject each chapter without the clearest of throughlines, but still a pretty interesting read with great presentation.

#5

Real Life by Sharon Salzberg

(Finished March 11th)

A book about spirituality and self healing with some Bhuddism on the side. I'm usually all for these kinds of books, but this one just didn't hit right for me. Not a mark against the book itself. it just might not have been the time in my life I needed to read it. The author mentions she was friends with bell hooks though, and bell hooks I can say changed my life without exageration. That gives her some bona fides in my estimation at least.

#6

The Hidden Staircase (Nancy Drew #2) by Carolyn Keene

(Finished March 27th)

Hey. They can't all be War and Peace. Nancy Drew makes for a nice, light before bed read. I'm quite fond of the enterprising young detetctive. Didn't really like this one too much though. Lots of padding in the middle of Nancy and her friend unsucesfully solving the mystery, only for it to be quickly wrapped up in the last ten pages; a substantial part of which is done so esentially off stage. Considering this is only a 180 page book in a pretty decently sized font, this ghost writer must have been under a real time crunch to have this much padding. Not an all-timer this one.

#7

Elanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

(Finished March 30th)

A friend reccomended this novel to me when we were shopping at our local used book store. She mentioned that the author somewhat unintentionally wrote a very autism coded lead character; and I can confirm that rings very true. However, I went into this expecting a light hearted, quirky chick-lit romance novel. That was a... very incorrect assumption. This book is amazing - easily my favorite of the year so far - but it is heavy . There were a couple chapters that had me bawling my eyes out. As you might have guessed from the title, Elanor is not fine at all. She's in a really dark place when the book begins, and her journey out of it is a hard one that will break your heart more than a few times before it warms it. Highly reccomended. Just be prepared for the waterworks in the final third.

#8

Poirot's Early Cases by Agatha Christie

(Finished April 19th)

I have a fondness for a good ol' fashioned mystery. I figured it was time to give this Christie lady a shot and see what the hype was all about. Where better to start than a short story collection of her most famous character's early career? I'd say I got a kick out of it. Some might find it a little cliche, but is that really fair when she's the template those cliches come from? Scandalized upper class British ladies, scheming butlers, gentlemen in suits and sportcoats plotting heists and scams, it's all here. Some of them you can't figure out ahead of time because a key detail isn't revealed until Poirot explains how he figured it out at the end, which I wasn't sure how to feel about at first. I'm not sure if that's some iron clad rule of mystery writing though. It's a story, not a logic puzzle I guess. Still, Hercule Poirot is a charmingly eccentric little Belgian man with an immaculately well kepy moustache and it didn't feel like a chore to get thtough this one in the least.

#9

Darkness and Moonlight A Worldsmyths Anthology

(Finished April 26th)

This one's got a little personal back story to it. So I matched with this girl on the apps and I found out she is one of the co-founders of this tiny indie fantasy writing collective. Very cool. Very much my type. We text for a while, even play a few games online with some Discord voice chat. I paid two bucks for this e-book short story collection that she's got a couple stories in. A small investment to really impress her I figure. We reschedule a couple times before finally setting a date to meet up. I finished the book the day before so I could have all kinds of well thought out, considered opinions about it and really win her over. If I was a writer, I'd be impressed if my date actually read my stuff anyhow. So the date comes. I show up promptly on time and text her that I'm here. She replies "Oh shit! I got sidetracked and it completely slipped my mind! I'm so sorry!" Important to note that she lives the next city over, so if she wasn't even in the car yet, it wasn't happening at that point. Needless to say, I was not impressed and there was no rain check. Like, what the hell!? She mentioned having ADHD, but guess what? So do I, and I managed to show my ass up at the time and place we both agreed to the literal day before! Fortunately, she is a much better writer than she is a date. The whole collection is actually pretty good. There are a wide variety of stories and styles to enjoy here, and none of them are really a miss. The lady I was going to see's two stories were probably in the top half, but "The Grove" bt Erin Slegaitis-Smith was my favorite. A genuinely unnerving bit of fantasy horror that has stuck in my mind since. "The Gorgon Slayer" and "Of The Beast" were also some pretty damn gripping fiction as well. Nope. I don't feel like I wasted two dollars and several hours reading this thing all for a crappy non-date at all. I have every reason to hold a petty vandetta against this anthology and trash it, but I can't. Because it's good. How much more glowing can a reccomendation get?

#10

On Browsing by Jason Guriel

(Finished May 12th)

A collection of essays lamenting the glory days of physical media, brick and motor retail and what we've lost. He's not wrong. Tapping on a square on Spotify to play or hitting a button on Netflix does make an album or a movie less of an experience in many ways. Even the small act of putting a vinyl record on a turntable or loading a DVD into the tray makes it feel like something of significance is happening. Browsing through a used book store or shuffling through tapes and and LPs is a meditative, relaxing process that no algorithim or online retailer will ever replicate. It does veer a teeny bit into snobbery at points, but the author knows it and wears it as a badge of honour. I respect that.

#11

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

(Finished May 22nd)

Look at that. 25 books in a year and I even managed to fit some heady, high brow, classic literature in there. Did I enjoy it? Ehhh, yeah I'd say so. There are some gripping and suspenseful chapters. There are some very pointed and intense exchanges of dialouge. There are deep psychological themes and social commentary. It's a renowned classic for a reason. A 150 year old book that had me eagerly turning the page to find out what happened next is no small feat. But there are also a good number of chapters that are just two people talking to each other in a room; and often there are quotes that take up an entire page of solid text. In some cases they're two side characters with a fairly tangential relationship to the main plot waxing on about some political or social topic that I'm sure was very pertinent to 1860s Russia. I know some will write me off as a blasphemous, anti-intellectual simpleton for this, but I skimmed over some of those monolouges. Like many novels of this era, it was originally serialized in several parts in a magazine. Also like many novels of this era, I felt like a few sections were padded out to meet a deadline and/or the word count for that month. I feel you could take a few chapters out completely and not lose the overarching vision and plot at all. I never said I was an English major. I mean, I read the fucking thing more or less front to back. That's more than most people could say.