Pop Culture Homework Assignment for Beth

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Any basic analysis of this site will clue you into one fact: Beth reads (and reviews) way more than I do. For the past few years or so, she has been my go-to for book recommendations. First, because she has really good taste and knows how to sniff out hits (she recommended Hunger Games and Divergent to me before they were big. She also got me hooked on Bone Season and the Shades of London and countless other series that, ultimately, I’m thankful for even if I’m annoyed after I’ve finished a book and have to wait for the next one). And, second because she is honest and she will not sugar coat it that when a book doesn’t live up to expectations. I have read a lot of really fun books because of her suggestions so suggesting books to her is a real responsibility.

When we proposed this challenge, Beth and I asked each other about a number of different books and authors. I found out that Beth has never read one of my favorite travel memoirs, A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. This led me to a theme for my books: travel.

Bookending the assignment are two travel memoirs that feature hiking. Since we don’t come from a hiking kind of family, these will both probably feel like a way weird choice for her. But, hiking is the backdrop to the story in these narratives. Beth will be starting with Wild by Cheryl Strayed and ending with A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. Both of these books I enjoyed immensely but I am interested in her opinions on them. The middle two books are both from different genres (and don’t involve hiking). I picked Wild because I think it is a beautiful narrative about family and personal growth. Book 2 is Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott (travel as a metaphor for spiritual growth!). I picked this because I thought this book was full of essays that were funny and touching. Book 3 is 13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson, a fictional tale of a young adult doing some traveling to say goodbye to a loved one. So, travel, family. This book is funny and touching and full of adventure. A great summer read! Finally, A Walk in the Woods is a fun story about two middle aged dudes walking the Appalachian Trail. It is funny, it is touching, and it is informative.

So, the list is:

Book 1: Wild by Cheryl Strayed
Book 2:Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott
Book 3: 13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson
Book 4: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.

There you go, Beth! I hope you love them as much I did! Or, not! Whatever! I can’t wait to hear what you think!

Pop Culture Homework Assignment for Kate

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So Kate,

I’ve thought long and hard about what your assignment was going to be.  At first I thought I would assign you a series that I’ve recommended to you.  I know over the years I have given you books that you haven’t read or finished but I’ve sort of lost track of what you have read and what you haven’t.  So then I thought maybe I would assign you to a new series I have read that you would like but I wanted to assign you a series that has been completed.  Which narrows things down quite a bit.  I’ve gone all over the pros and cons of each series and couldn’t come up with a clear favorite.  So, then I thought maybe I would assign you to finish a series that I know you haven’t finished like the Mortal Instruments and Infernal Devices by Cassandra Clare but I think it’s only the last book in both of those series left for you to read and that’s not enough for summer.  Plus, that might be kind of mean, since I know why you haven’t finished the Mortal Instruments and I respect your decision not to.  It wouldn’t be right for me to force you to do so that idea was brushed aside.  Then I got a brilliant idea, thanks to twitter.  Well, a tweet from Rainbow Rowell.  Now, I don’t actually remember what she actually said or what it was about but she is usually thoughtful and clever. It made me think, have you read any of her books? I didn’t think so and well that needs to be corrected.

So, Kate your Pop Culture Homework Assignment is to read all four of her books in order of them being published (if possible).  All of her books are standalone with the only thing common with all of them is the state of Nebraska.  What I like about them is that even though they are in the most romances, they never feature your classic beauties.  All her leads are curvy, tall, have big foreheads and such.  They are very much set in reality with characters who are dealing with the same issues as you and I that they seem so real and well, since most take place in the Nebraska there are a lot of Midwestern humor that only those of us who grew up here could really appreciate.  You’ll  start with Attachments and get to know Lincoln and Beth (what a lovely name!) then go on to Eleanor and Park and probably cry over both of them and then laugh and cry with Levi and Cath in Fangirl and then end your summer with Landline with Georgie and Neal.  I know you will love all of them and I can’t wait to read and hear all your observations.

There you go, get to work.

Highs and Lows of Fandoms by Cassandra Clare and Maggie Stiefvater

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I’ve actually never really been apart of a fandom per se.  There are a lot of books, movies, TV shows that I love and care about.  Despite my love for Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Magnus Bane, Katniss Everdeen and more, I’ve never signed up to any message boards or read fan fictions.  I may have time to time read other fans blogs and theories about why a certain character did this or what they think will happen next but never really participated in it personally.  Once upon a time, I was very involved in a i guess you could call a  fandom for tennis player, Andy Roddick.  Do athletes have fandoms?  I started posting on a fan site called Roddickrocks.com.  Soon, I was a board moderator and then I started writing recaps of Andy’s matches and got more involved from there.  I spent a lot of time on Roddickrocks.  It was the first site I checked in the morning and the last before I went to bed.  It was almost a job, keeping up with the demands.  After a year though, the site splintered.  I have forgotten the exact details but some of us wanted to take the site in one direction and others wanted to keep as is.  Feelings were hurt and relationships severed.  A few of us started a new fan site but it didn’t last very long.  I think the official reason in most of our minds was that we all got too busy. Most of us were in school or had real jobs and that started to take priority but really, as much as we tried, we could never recreate what we used to have.

Now that I think about it, this might be why I’m not much of a joiner online but really just a lurker.  It’s not how I want to spend majority of my time online, these days but also it can get rather negative pretty quickly.  I follow many authors on twitter and tumblr and there I get the gist of what is going on in the fandoms they created.  I can see the other creative things my fellow readers are making and read thoughts and theories without have to truly have to participate.  I’m not sure what that says about me but I do think it has lessens some of my online stress . Fandoms are great at uniting  people from all over the world with like interests but it can also be toxic.  I don’t regret the time I spent on Roddickrocks because it introduced me to some of the best people in the world that I still am friends with but I definitely do miss the negativity that surrounded the ending.

So why am I bringing this up?  An author I follow, Cassandra Clare, decided to take a break from social media after the fandom she inspired sort of turned on her.  Her books, The Mortal Instruments have been turned into a movie and now is being turned into a show.  There was apparently a rift between fans who loved the old cast and fans who love the new cast.  Clare decided not to take sides and was threatened by fans for it.  Recently, she with another favorite author of mine, Maggie Stiefvater did an interview about the good and bad of fandoms and it’s a great read.  They talk about how fandoms have changed.  How twitter and tumblr help and hamper them.  How they both want to accessible to fans but being too assessable comes with a price.  How they are now treated by fans.  They also talk about how that women in general are treated.  It’s a well thought out discussion that I think is very valuable to read.

So please read it here and leave comment below about what you think?  What are experiences in being apart of a fandom?  Are like me and just lurk on the outside or do you actively participate?  Sound off below.

Review: Penryn and the End of Days by Susan Ee

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I was first turned onto Angelfall by our friend Stephanie back in 2012.  Like her, I was immediately taken with Penryn and Raffe and their struggle to keep their families together litereally and figurely.  Her mother schizophrenic and her sister is in a wheelchair.  After her father left them, it’s been up to Penryn to take care of them.  It was hard enough before Angels descended on the earth an caused a massive breakdown of civilization.  For Raffe, he just wants to stop his people from an all out Civil War.  Raffe and Penryn team up as they help each other and discovered that the Angel’s appearance of Earth may not be divine intervention after all. Spoilers Ahead! Continue reading →

Library Books

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As you know from reading my tags (which I’m sure you all do), I get a lot of my books from the public library. This is strategic on my part. As a graduate student who is a year away from having her PhD, I’m hoping (and working my butt off so) that in a year I will be packing all of my belongings and moving someplace else for a job. So, the fewer books I buy (and I love buying books) the fewer books I have to pack and move.

Plus, I have a lot of fun on the library’s website. I like to make lists of books I am interested in and then work my way through the lists. Recently, many of the books I’ve wanted have had waiting lists, so it is fun to put yourself on the list and then anticipate the book. You get an email telling you that it is your turn. It is a little like Christmas! So, this is the trade off. I don’t get to buy endless stacks of books but I do get to create lists and then pick up books at the library. As far as trades go, it is not bad.

There is one problem with this, though. When everything you’re waiting for becomes available at the same time. I currently have five things checked out from the library that our due in the next 5-12 days. They were all on waiting lists so I had to check them out or lose my spot on the list. I’ve only managed to start three of them and so far only managed to finish one of them. I guess I just need to read faster!

Also, I feel a little guilty that I have books checked out that I haven’t gotten to start yet that other people are waiting for.

Of course, if I don’t make it to the end of all of the books before I have to return them, I can always put myself back on the waiting list. This is something I had to do with Gilead. It doesn’t bother me to break up the reading of a book. I’m pretty well trained in reading more than one thing at a time and spreading the readings out.

Do you check books out from your public library? How do you feel about waiting lists? Are they a source of anticipation-creation or frustration? What is your favorite part of your public library? Join us in the comments!

Pop Culture Homework Assignment

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Summer is upon us, Dearest Readers! Ah, summer, those halcyon days when school is out, the days are long, and you can read whatever you want all day long! Or, you could as a child but now you are adult and have them same constraints in the summer as you had in the winter. (Before someone points that I am, in fact, still in school let me preempt you stating that *because* school is out, this is prime data collection time for me, which means I have even more work to do now, all of it work I have to do someplace not where I live. Lucky me! (No, really, Lucky me!) Also, apologies about that crazy run-on sentence.)

But, we here at StackExLifeEx are planning a summer time reading challenge. We’re calling it the Pop Culture Homework Assignment. (Hat-tip to our friends, B and E, who have been giving each other pop culture homework assignments for years.) The assignments will be different for each of us: we will be assigning each other things outside of our comfort zones. We’ll post reading updates this summer and you’re more than welcome to join us. (Either by challenging yourself or by reading along with one of us.)

So, Dearest Readers, what makes you excited for summer? What summer reads do you have in your queue?

This Month in Reality…. SPACE! SCIENCE! PHYSICS! WAY MORE ABOUT MY PERSONAL LIFE THAN YOU NEED TO KNOW!

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I’ve been going through a period of Spring Cleaning.  Really, it is a period of shucking possessions I no longer use (and, if I’m really, really lucky, also shucking habits that no longer serve me).  Basically, it is one big, painful cycle of creating piles of things to go to the trash or to AMVETs followed immediately by the creation of another pile.  (It is painful because I am unreasonably attached to my clutter.  But, that’s a blog post for another time.  Maybe I’ll review that Konmari book everyone seems to be in love with.)  While doing all of this I’ve been listening to books on physics, philosophy, and meditation.  The meditation and philosophy books are obvious and probably the subject of next month’s This Month in Reality.  The physics books seem obvious to me and I hope after you read this post they will be obvious to you, too.  I’m a pretty smart person but beyond basic Newtonian physics and some of the basic math of quantum physics, I’m stumped.  I don’t get it.  Or, I do get it but only after it has been explained to be in a metaphor.  And, since you have to use a metaphor for the universe why can’t that just be a metaphor for some aspect of life?  We’re already kind of stretching the truth.  And, why can’t I contemplate that while I’m trying to decide if I should keep a pair of heels I’ve only ever worn to vacuum in at home?
Anyway, this month I listened to A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and What if?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions By Randall Munroe. 
 tl;dr: these are both awesome. I loved them.  You should read them.
The best thing about A Brief History is that I got to spend a lot of time giggling like a 12-year old boy when the narrator said, “hot body”.  The bigger something is, the hotter it has to burn.  Whoa, Mamma! (Yes, I am aware of my incredible immaturity.)  But, I also got to marvel at a lot of things about the universe.  Like, time began when the universe began.  The concept of time, the scientific concept of time, literally has no meaning outside of our universe because it is a dimension of our universe.  There is no time before time.
That still gives me shivers.
And, I got to marvel at all of the cool physics stuff.  Like quarks come in the following flavors (yes, flavors):  up, down, strange, charmed, bottom and top and colors: red, green and blue.  It is funny that they have colors because we’re not talking about something that can be visibly perceived.  Wait…that’s not how I want to say that.  There are colors outside our spectrum of vision.  I want to say that this color property doesn’t go beyond the atom.  Color is just another metaphor here for how charges interact with one another.  There’s an entire theory of quantum physics that deals with chromodynamics.  In my mind, this involves an amazing light show.  That can’t possibly be the case but please don’t disabuse me of this notion.  And, did you know that protons have  2 up and 1 down quark and neutrons have 2 down and 1 up quark?  Yes, I was surprised by that, too! There are also gluons in there, too.  But, it is now unclear to me what gluons do (except maybe glue things together?)
This book talked a lot about time and how it moves and its place in the universe.  It also talked a lot about gravity (which is “always attractive” bada-ching!) Hawking is actually really funny in this book.  I found myself laughing that things that I’m sure I was supposed to laugh at (not just at the things my inner 12 year old would laugh at.)  For example, he tells an amusing anecdote about a talk that he gave at a conference at the Vatican where he proposed a framework that would do away with the notion of a divine creator.  Whoops.
But, my favorite part, and perhaps the most (possibly unintentionally) philosophical part of the book was when Hawking talked about if anything in quantum physics were different, we’d all be different.  That is fun to think about.
So, after I listened to this intense text of which I understood about 20%, I decided to move on to something that is meant to funny but is also very smart.  What if? by Randall Munroe is a book of hypothetical questions answered using modern science.  The audio book is read by Wil Wheaton.  This automatically makes it 50% nerdier (and if you’re a nerd about 20% cooler.  I am a nerd.  And, I like Wil Wheaton.  But, I LOVE xkcd, Monroe’s web comic.  This is why it’s only 20%).  Some of the scenarios are “What would happen if rain came in one gigantic drop” and “What if you built a machine gun jet pack”?  and “what if you had a mole of moles?”  I think you can see where this is going.  Munroe treats each question as if it were not absurd and answers it to the best of his ability.  The answers draw on real scientific data (the weight of a mole, gravity, heat, air speed, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, etc) and comes to what are hilarious and often horrifying conclusions.  The book itself has great illustrations (I immediately picked it up and re-read a bunch of it after I finished listening to it) and Wheaton’s performance is outstanding.
This month I got lucky:  These were two great books that I highly recommend!