February 2023 books

The Measure by Nikki Erlick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

3.5 stars. This was a pleasant book to curl up with but I get very skittish about books that want to MAKE you feel things. So I think it depends on your mood: if you need a feelings midwife (sometimes I do, including very recently!) then it might hit different but right now, for me, I was tempted to roll my eyes a few times as I read.

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The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought I liked the first book pretty well but this one was even MORE fun. A full five-star rating for all the things: characters who are a blast to hang out with, a twisty mystery, Eccentric Bad Guys, and BOGDAN. Freaking love Bogdan.

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Spare by Prince Harry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book metaphorically reads like: one member of an extremely dysfunctional family goes to therapy and becomes his fully realized self and instead of being happy for him, the rest of the family is...mad that he went to therapy instead of remaining oblivious and miserable like them! Plot twist: it not only metaphorically reads like this, it LITERALLY reads like this.

There are moments of "sir, this is a Wendy's" in this book but on the whole it's engagingly written and an interesting insight into a rotten system. If Harry writes another book someday, I wonder if he'll be able to condemn the monarchy as an institution. In this book, toward the end, he explicitly says he has no problem with the monarchy but is upset with how he was treated as an individual. I think time will probably (look at me, the armchair expert) give him more space to be angry not just in the sense that "they were [truly, incredibly!!!] mean to me and my wife," but also "this is a problematic institution that has inflicted centuries of harm on marginalized people throughout the world."

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Well Traveled by Jen DeLuca
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This installment wasn't as charming as the one right before it (Well Matched) but it is still a delightful book in a fun setting!

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Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS by Azadeh Moaveni
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Second reading February 2023. Still fascinating and devastating and the kind of book I want to hand out to strangers on street corners - just a really important story, told extremely well.

First reading October 2019:
This is another WOW book - I gasped, I cried, I had to put the book down for a few moments every once in a while to just let it all sink in. I am reminded of another book I just read (The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper), where simply because of the book's topic, we know that things don't turn out well for these women. And there is a special kind of heartbreak that comes from reading about young girls (with variably bright futures to begin with, to be fair) who we know will eventually get sucked into ISIS and then spat out at the end extremely worse for the wear, if at all.

And the level of detail and analyis here is mesmerizing. I started the book and saw that we would be following 13 (!) separate women and thought it was a bit much, but it absolutely wasn't. Each woman is so vividly drawn that it was never difficult to tell them apart as we followed the thread of their lives. And reading about such different women with different life histories gave the author many opportunities to talk about the diverse reasons women joined ISIS in the first place, and what it all means for Islam, millennials, and radicalism in general.

This book also does a stellar job of painting the "before" so that we really get a sense for what these women lost and the often impossible choices they faced.

A note about the content: I think it's easy to get sensational when you're writing about ISIS, but this book thankfully never does. There are really terrible things that happen in this book but the women as human beings take center stage and the author is tremendously respectful to their lived experiences.

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