Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage and Manners by Therese Oneill (read 9/25/19 to 9/29/19)

This was a library hold that came in unexpectedly.
From Goodreads description "Ladies, welcome to the 19th century, where there's arsenic in your face cream, a pot of cold pee sits under your bed, and all of your underwear is crotchless. (Why? Shush, dear. A lady doesn't question.)  UNMENTIONABLE is your hilarious, illustrated, scandalously honest (yet never crass) guide to the secrets of Victorian womanhood, giving you detailed advice on:
~ What to wear
~ Where to relieve yourself
~ How to conceal your loathsome addiction to menstruating
~ What to expect on your wedding night
~ How to be the perfect Victorian wife
~ Why masturbating will kill you
~ And more"

I like the tone of the writing, it is informative and a bit snarky.  It provides and insight, I mostly already knew,  life was hard in the 19th century.  But is also provides some tidbits I didn't know.  Pantaloons were crotchless!
I know that for the most part women had little say over their own lives, but even one of the worst mysoginistc writers of the time, felt they should have some say.   “Of all the rights to which a woman is entitled, that of the custody of her own body is the most indubitable.”  Ladies' Guide in Health and Disease: Girlhood, Maidenhood, Wifehood, Motherhood By John Harvey Kellogg, published 1884
Maybe some of our politicians etc should listen to that wisdom.
I learned that the Comstock law of 1873 changed what could and could not be mailed. No advertisement for products relating human sexuality or contraceptions. It didn’t make contraceptions themselves illegals but the ability to obtain them was. It started the idea that contraceptions were in equal footing with abortions, an idea we are still having debates over 146 years later.
On cooking in the 19th century “Unless you are excruciatingly careful and sometimes even if you are, look forward to intestinal worms, lead poisoning, and four-day-old unrefrigerated pork with a side of botulism.”  Well no one said good food easily obtained.

Overall it was a fun book, I enjoyed the facts, nothing was really mind-blowing news though.

War of Honor by David Webber (read 9/18/19 to 9/28/19)

This is the 10th book in the series and it is quite the tome.
I'm glad to be back in the Honorverse, but I feel like I missed something. There is a big thing about genetic slavery and it's affecting the political landscape, but I missed what genetic slavery actually is. Some of the players I'm having a hard time remembering who they are...mostly I'm frustrated with the current RMN’s Lords games. They remind me too much of the Tump administration. The deeper I get in the book the more this frustrates me. I know as the reader I can see the bigger picture easier than the characters, but the civilian politicians narrow minded decisions really frustrate me. It actually makes me angry that they are looking so intently at their own careers that they put the nation at risk. Again I am sure our own US political environment right now feeds into that anger.
Again I feel that we are so busy talking about the political machinations of the RMN and the Peeps that we forget to talk about our main character. So much so that I actually began to tally when we had an Honor chapter versus a chapter about politics, other navies etc. Out of 60 chapters only 25 maybe 26 involved Honor and her actions. This is one of the reasons I have struggled so much with the last few Honor Harrington books, they have moved more to being about the Honorverse world and politics and not so much about Honor herself. But Honor is why I read them, the politics etc are only background noise in my mind, but Webber has moved them to the front line and Honor seems to be the background noise.
Things finally start to heat up around page 643, we got one chapter of excitement in and went back to political machinations. Things started moving again around page 800 and still there was only 1 maybe 2 chapters that were about Honor.
Another issue I am beginning to recognize, is that every time a minor character dies, even this far into the series I still flinch, I keep hoping the devastation won’t happen. I’m not sure I’m cut out for war novels, but the characters such as Honor, Mayhew, Lefollet, Nimitz etc keep me trudging on through the blood and the loss. And Webster isn’t afraid to kill a major character either we have seen that so many times. I am about at the end of my limit though, the cost benefit is shifting for me. There is getting to be too much politicking, war and death, and not enough focus on the characters that keep me coming back.  I have some other books on my TBR shelf and for book clubs, so I think those will be my next choices, but if the next book isn't about Honor more, the final 3 may go unread by me.

Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks (read 8/30/19 to 9/3/19)

I got this book as an advanced reader copy from LibraryThing. I won this in December of 2018, and I admit it got lost in the shuffle of life.

GoodReads Description: “The martial Sainnites have occupied Shaftal for fifteen years but every year the cost of resistance rises. Emil, a scholar officer, Zanja, the last survivor of her people, and Karis, a metalsmith, half-blood giant, and an addict … together, perhaps they can change history.”

When I looked this book up on GoodReads I was confused because it showed that it was published in 2002, yet my copy said Advanced Reader Copy January 2019. And when you google it, it says it is being published in June 2019...very confusing.

I had a hard time with this book. I felt like the writing was masterful, Marks has created a complex and beautiful world. But, I also felt like I was coming into the middle of a story. She creates this world but then doesn’t adequately explain it to us the reader. The first few chapters I felt very lost, I wanted to understand the social structure of the characters but there just was not enough information and I wasn’t sure how things fit together.

There is a lot of comments on other reviews about how great the protagonist is a powerful woman of color. The fact that she is a woman of character was immaterial to me, what I liked about her was she was put in a position for her tribe that laid an unimaginable amount of responsibility on her shoulders at a young age. Zanja did the beat she could to help her tribe, she faces horrific loss and still she never gave up. She had her doubts about her abilities as anyone would, but she never shirked her duty to her people despite the cost to herself. Zanja is a beautifully written character that is relatable to all of us.

The Girls of Atomic City: The untold story of the women who helped win World War II by Denise Kieran (read 8/23/19 to 8/29/19)

GoodReads description “This is the story of the girls/women of Oak Ridge Tennessee who unknowingly helped to create the Atomic Bomb. The Tennessee town of Oak Ridge was created from scratch in 1942. One of the Manhattan Project’s secret cities, it didn’t appear on any maps until 1949, and yet at the height of World War II it was using more electricity than New York City and was home to more than 75,000 people, many of them young women recruited from small towns across the South. Their jobs were shrouded in mystery, the penalty for talking about their work—even the most innocuous details—was job loss and eviction. They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb "Little Boy" was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The shocking revelation: the residents of Oak Ridge were enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. Though the young women originally believed they would leave Oak Ridge after the war, many met husbands there, made lifelong friends, and still call the seventy-year-old town home.”

From the very start I was excited. I like that there is a listing of who everyone is at the start. Sometimes I get names mixed up in historical books, and it is great to have a reference when I ask myself “who is this again.”

This book contained lots of facts, but a good mix of personal storytelling as well. Still never kept all the characters straight, but it was a really good read. I enjoyed the flow of the book, it really kept the events moving along and never got too bogged down with facts, yet I learned a lot at the same time.

I liked that the authors choose to follow different women from different social and economic backgrounds throughout the book, how were things for a scientist, a secretary, an operator and a janitor. White versus black? It let the reader know what was the same across the board, and what was not. Sometimes the differences were mind boggling.

I also really liked that the last chapter and some of the notes at the end of the nook told more of what happened to the women after the project was wrapped up, a sort of where are they now.

Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond by E.J. Dionne Jr. (read 8/11/19 to 8/22/19)

I am on a roll of political analysis books, this should be my final one for a bit. Well until the election really heats up. Then I will want to read about candidates and books from candidates. This is a history of the Republican party and their politics. As you could guess, I am really trying to understand why our government is functioning/or not functioning the way it is. I don’t want to just vote party lines, but I feel the need to understand what the other side is trying to achieve. This was obviously written by a liberal trying to understand the conservative side of things. I had good information, but there was just so much of it. I had a hard time reading it and digesting, it was so dense. And as a result I didn’t enjoy it, and at about halfway I just wanted it over so everything at the end was lost on me.

*Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of the US Government. None of the ideas expressed in this blog post are shared, supported, or endorsed in any manner by my employer.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris (read 8/12/19 to 8/13/19)

I choose this book as the first book of a new book club I have started.  I choose it because my boyfriends mother recommended it to me, and wow was she right, I could hardly put it down.  I think I read it in every free moment I had in a 24 hour period.
This is a true story, with a little historical/fictional embellishment.  All the major historical details are correct, but some of the timelines are a little changed for ease of reading.  Additionally since this is story in dedication to love it has a little of embellishment on the romance I am sure.
Lale is a jewish man who becomes the tattooist of Auschwitz, a privileged but dangerous position, he tattoos the number on the arm of a beautiful girl, Gita, and he spends the rest of his time romancing and protecting her as best he can.  This is the type of story I love, WWII always draws me in, the audacity of the Nazi's and the human carnage they left in their wake.  Yet there are just as many stories of human kindness and bravery fighting the horrors as there are horror stories.  I admire the survivors of the concentration camps, not only for surviving but because many did not allow their humanity to be taken from them.  I admire the stories of those that helped smuggle and protect the Nazi persecuted people, not just Jewish, because they did not say it's too hard.  They said this is wrong, and it's hard, but what small things can I do, and often the small things compounded to greatness.  This story encompasses all those. It was beautifully written and real pleasure to read.

The Shadows of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafron (read 7/25/19 to 7/30/19)

This was a BOTM read for August, but my library copy came in early, so I had
to read it early.
It starts off so dark and dreary and mysterious, and then a secret library with books nobody remembers are stored and still read and loved. And on Daniels first visit he adopts the book title, so it can never go extinct.  I loved the premise behind the story.  There was a great mystery and what happened to the  author Julian?  There were parts of the story that were very slow for me, particularly in the middle, I didn't really see how it added to the plot.  The ending had a bit of a twist, most of it I had figured out, but the shocker part I did not. But it did wrap everything up nicely in the end.   Overall it was an ok book.