Congrats to Liz Gilbert on being the first author to make me cry and laugh all on the same page.

I feel like if I had read this book five years ago I would not have appreciated it, but in the way of many good things, this book came to me exactly when I needed it. Don't be put off by the title, as I was initially - Gilbert is not maudlin or proselytize-y. She is absolutely laugh out loud hilarious and the people she meets are fascinating and outrageous. This book will definitely make you cry, but in a good way.

It's the end of the world as we know it, written as if it were a novelization of historical events taking place 5000 years in the past. Yep, it's that wild.

Basically, because of some chemicals leaked into the water during WWII, women circa 2017 are growing/being born with a skein: an extra piece of muscle across the collarbone that can provide an electrical shock. And, like men in our own real history, they use this power to subjugate the weaker sex and try to remake the world in their image.

But the really trippy part? Is that this all happened 5000 years before the book was written -- so instead of being a dystopian, it's like a meta-history written by people who can't imagine a world that isn't run by women.

If your head hasn't exploded yet, I highly recommend it.

This was pretty damn boring. It felt like Blum wanted to write a book about the advent of poison murders in the twenties, realized there wasn't a lot to say, and switched her focus to the politicking of New York with a lot of page-fill on non-deliberate poisoning, like CO2 leaks and nicotine. It's a great biography of Norris and Gettler, and very well-researched, but it isn't very fun. I would only recommend it if you're actually trying to study historical forensics.

This is a really fun beach read: plenty of action and destruction, very little depth. I liked that it was taking place in the Southwest. The expedition has a lot of colorful characters which makes it fun; I'm usually pretty terrible at telling people apart in books like this (Is he the veterinarian? Which one hated bananas? Who slept with whose girlfriend in college? etc) but they are all very lively.

Thanks Jaime for the birthday gift :D

A goofy, light-hearted book about male friendship, fabulous Italian food, and finding yourself. Despite knowing literally nothing about football I found this really charming. There was not a lot of depth, but it was a fun read and I thoroughly enjoyed all the gripes about Cleveland (my hometown, happily abandoned three years ago). A good book to check off my first John Grisham and a reading challenge sports book.

This book had such great potential. Set in an alternate world where the Civil War never happened and there are still slaves in parts of America, there could have been so many stories and histories and details and ideas. Instead we get a story of a personality-less former slave who works for the government to catch runaway slaves. I think it was meant to be a thriller, but it's hard to be thrilled when the protagonist doesn't care what happens to himself. It took me two weeks to read this because I was so bored.

A century ago a drug lord convinced the US and Mexico to give up tons of land for him to have his own country where he can grow drugs (of course promising, wink wink, to not let those drugs to go to the US or Mexico) and he has spent the intervening time making clones of himself so that he can harvest their body parts and live on indefinitely. The main character is one of these clones. This should have been a recipe for science, excitement, and thrills.

Instead it's a boring tale of a boy who is too useless and blind to the drama around him, is too young to get involved in anything, and is too religious to see beyond his own feet. A protagonist should want something, but Matt just hangs out for the vast majority of the book. I also hated Maria so every time he pined over her I hated him a little more.

I just felt like there was no point to anything.

This book made me laugh out loud and cringe in equal measure. Lawson is a spirited wildebeest of temper and imagination, and her adventures include living in the Texas wilderness, fighting vultures with a machete, collecting taxidermied animals and naming them, and somehow acquiring a husband and baby along the way. If you are an insane person you should read this book to find a friend, and if you are a sane person you should read this book to remind yourself that really, your life could be so much worse.

A trasncendently Lawson-esque book on mental illness and life.