The Reading Room

Sociopath

“I dont care what other people think. Im not interested in morals. Im not interested, period. Rules do not factor into my decision-making. Im capable of almost anything.”

Summary - Sociopath: A Memoir is at once a jaw-dropping tale of a life lived on the edge of the law, and a moving account of one woman’s battle to gain a deeper understanding of people who, like her, are sociopaths.

The first hmm maybe half I was all in, I loved learning about how non-existent the term sociopath is/was when Patric Gagne was researching and attempting to learn more about sociopathy and psychopathy. Learning about Gagne’s upbringing and childhood was also fascinating.

Oye

“Pay attention. This is how people end up with pain and illnesses. They go through difficult things, and then they dont find a place to put those feelings. So their bodies take it all for them.”

Summary - Structured as a series of one-sided phone calls from our spunky, sarcastic narrator, Luciana, to her older sister, Mari. As the baby of her large Colombian American family, Luciana is usually relegated to the sidelines. But now she finds herself as the only voice of reason in the face of an unexpected crisis: A hurricane is heading straight for Miami, and her eccentric grandmother, Abue, is refusing to evacuate. Abue is so one-of-a-kind shes basically in her own universe, and while she often drives Luciana nuts, theyre the only ones who truly understand each other. So when Abue, normally glamorous and full of life, receives a shocking medical diagnosis during the storm, Lucianas world is upended.

Ordinary Human Failings

Really, who would care about a family like theirs? Theirs were ordinary human failings, tragedies too routine to be of note.

Summary - Set mostly in the early 1990s, it tells the story of the Greens, a family of Irish immigrants who have moved to London in the hope of escaping the social stigma of daughter Carmels teenage pregnancy and her brother Ritchies escalating alcoholism. Judged reclusive and odd by their new neighbors, the Greens are easy scapegoats when trage visits their estate.

The Bastard of Istanbul

I’m a part of the Elif Fan Club!

“The past lives within the present, and our ancestors breathe through our children.”

Summary - The story is centered around the characters of Asya Kazanc and Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian. It is set in Tucson, Arizona; San Francisco, California; and Istanbul, Turkey. The novel deals with their families and how they are connected through the events of the 1915 Armenian genocide.

Most summaries make this book seem more complicated than it actually is. You follow Asya. You follow Armanoush. Then you wait and see how their stories connect. It was beautiful. I absolutely love Shafak’s writing. What I wasn’t expecting was that ending, wowzers, it was GOOOOOD.

Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books

“How can you come to know what’s right when all the information you’re ever given is wrong?”

This quote is actually from the author’s note but I find that it sums up the book so well. The fact that I typically only read that overview first paragraph of summaries (because full summaries give away too much) made this one quite the surprise for me. I thought it was going to be light-hearted and an easy read – boy was I wrong.

This much country

“One day all of this pain will transform from a stumbling block into the foundation for a new life. This winter will make way for a sunny day in May during which the spring cleaning of my soul and mind will take place. Then those new dustless shelves will be so welcoming to the bigger and better love coming to occupy my heart.”

Who knew I could love a book about dog sledding so much. Well it isn’t all about dog sledding but it is what makes the second half so intense.

This Could Be Us

“Ill never take solace in a fake fine again.”

This Could Be Us is book 2 in the amazing Skyland series by Kenne Ryan.

Summary - From the ashes of a life burned to the ground, something bold and new can rise. But then an unlikely man enters the picturethe forbidden one, the one Soledad shouldn’t want but can’t seem to resist. She’s lost it all before and refuses to repeat her mistakes.

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

“What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing. Just as a word can have many dimensions, many nuances, great complexity, so, too, can a person, a life. Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor. Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable.”

This quote isn’t from Roman Stories but just something that Jhumpa Lahiri has said and to me, this is the reason that her voice resonates so well with me.

Family family

“The one thing she knows for sure is what makes a family isn’t blood. And it isn’t love. No matter how they’re formed, the truth about family is this: it’s complicated.”

If I liked the beginning and I loved the ending but thought the middle rambled and needed focus where does that leave this review? Three stars?

I appreciated the discussions around family and adoption, basically the entire ending but how the story got there was almost a DNF for me. And ultimately, the main character felt very inauthentic which is interesting because I think her “uniqueness” was an attempt to make her seem authentic

Blood brothers

A story of people, not politics…

Summary - Blood Brothers illustrates Elias Chacour’s own incredible life in Palestine as a refugee. The book describes the hardships Elias and his family had to go through. The story opens in the 1940s in the village of Biram, where Chacour spent his early childhood.

I had attempted to read The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine last month but its level of nonfiction was just too dense for me to absorb anything. Blood Brothers read like a memoir but with history mixed in, which allowed me to absorb the history in a much more accessible way. Chacour looks at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a Christian lens and his journey was one that taught me a lot.