Virtual Book Club

We want to know what you’re reading while you are safely tucked away at home!

Participating is easy:

• Write a book review: be sure to include the title, author, and your name (could be your whole name, just your first name, or a fun pseudonym!)
• Email it to nicolew@ci.st-helens.or.us using subject line: Book Review Club.

Sweet Salt Air by Barbara Delinsky; Reviewed by Melisa

This book was a breath of fresh air! It is about two old friends that get together after many years to collaborate on a book celebrating the coastal island, they spent summers on as children. They not only reconnect but help each other through unexpected tough times and find new beginnings. There are lots of little moments that are delightful and not only bring you into the story but make you want to stay. The characters are real and heartwarming. The book speaks of hope, and forgiveness, and not judging a person or a town by the first glance. This book is for people who love food, for people who love the ocean, for people who love small towns, and for people who love love. I give it four solid stars shining brightly over the blue ocean.

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Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens; Reviewed by Melisa

This book tells the story of a lady who has grown up almost entirely on her own in the outskirts of a small town in North Carolina and people call her the Marsh Girl. She was first abandoned by her mother and then eventually her older siblings and her abusive father, until she is left to fend for herself. She befriends the birds and other wild animals in the marshes surrounding her dilapidated shack and is able to hold body and soul together foraging and falling in love with nature.

As an adult she is put on trial for the possible murder of the local golden boy more for her odd nature than the facts of the case. While this book gives you plenty of cause to feel sad, I felt it to be more hopeful and a sort love story between the girl and the land around her. It almost made me want to run away and live in a shack in the marsh away from people and collect feathers and rocks. I give it a five shining stars and would recommend it to anyone especially in this time isolation.

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A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza; Reviewed by Michele

A Place for Us is a poignant story of family that illustrates what it is that holds us together and what tears us apart.  While the events in Rafiq and Layla's family are of deep importance, they unfold gently and with a sense of familiarly. There is so much in the lives of this immigrant Indian-American Muslim family that touches on what makes us individuals, what makes us family, what makes us American and what makes us human. 

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My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite; Reviewed by Cameron

We couldn't stop listening to My Sister, the Serial Killer once we started -- special thanks to LCC librarian Maryanne for recommending it! It's a quick read and quick-witted to match. The book follows Korede and her sister Ayoola. When Ayoola kills her boyfriend (and the boyfriend before that), Korede is the one who must help her clean up the mess. What follows is a well-woven tale of family, the complexity of sisterhood, and the toll of keeping someone else's secrets. Despite the references to murder it's not a violent or gory book. Instead it mixes a bit of pulp intrigue with sharp humor and an excellent look into the Lagosian culture. Adepero Oduye does a fantastic job of giving voices to these characters, balancing personality and a sense for how the words feel on the written page.

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The Medium is the Massage By Marshall McLuhan; Reviewed by Dan Dieter (c) 2019

After surviving all of the regular childhood reading adventures, and getting through a number of dry textbooks, I came across an old used copy of this book.  I was instantly hooked.  The style of McLuhan’s writing is different, mostly a ‘probe’ followed by some wild conjecture that really comes from left field.  The kind of writing that makes you stop and think.  Years later I found a good quality first edition at Powell’s Books and saved up for the purchase.  It is a book that was really ahead of its like many of McLuhan’s books, it leaves an impression that he was forecasting much of what we see today (i.e. Global Village.)  He remarked on the response to one of his earliest books, The Mechanical Bride, that it was a wedding invitation buried in concrete to be discovered a thousand years in the future.  Yeah, just like that.  It was because of his writing that I discovered many of my other favorite authors.  Thanks Marshall.

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indf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the plot to break America by Christopher Wylie; Reviewed by Dan

This book is a real eye opener.  A fascinating look at how big data can be used, data that is being gathered by so many applications now.  All in an effort to ‘get to know you better’, to provide a better shopping experience, a better browsing experience.  But that effort comes from feeding the data into algorithms that are used to predict your behavior, which can lead to more than just a better shopping experience.

The story being told involves politics, which as you can imagine, supplies a pretty scary backdrop to how predictive models can be used, but the science behind this modeling is absolutely amazing.  A study in 2015 showed that by using Facebook likes, a computer model was utilized to predict human behavior.  “With ten likes, the model predicted a person’s behavior more accurately than on of their co-workers.  With 150 likes, better than a family member. And with 300 likes, the model knew the person better than their own spouse.”  This study also concluded that “in some respects, a computer model can know a person’s habits better than they even know themselves – a finding that compelled the researchers to add a warning ‘Computers outpacing humans in personality judgment,’ they wrote, ‘presents significant opportunities and challenges in the areas of psychological assessment, marketing and privacy.’” [pg. 103]   With the help of Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, data that was gathered from Facebook, and some personality measurements, similar computer modeling was used to predict human behavior, and then messaging was designed to see if it was possible to ‘move the needle’ on public opinion.  And the results of their work would indicate that it is possible.  Welcome to the new world.

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Technopoly:  The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman; Reviewed by Dan

Neil Postman is one of my favorite authors.  After hearing him in person about the time this book was written, I now hear his voice whenever I read any of his books.  He was a professor of media ecology at New York University and died in 2003.  He wrote about many things, but in this book, he talks about how technology can be a blessing and a curse.  And by technology, he means all of the makings of man, from language to the stirrup to the computer.   Even though it was written in 1992 before much of what we think of today as ‘technology’, it is well worth reading.  

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Hard Eight and To the Nines by Janet Evanovich; Reviewed by Loretta

The books are about Stephanie Plum and her life as a bounty hunter. She juggles relationships with two men and has a co-worker/partner who get themselves into situations that rarely end well. They talk about foods they are eating or beverages that make you want a snack or cup of coffee or sometimes you want to gag. The stories are funny and light and a fast read. It helps to read the books in order, beginning with One for the Money, although you don’t have to. 

Hope this encourages you to check these out.

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Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World by Yang Erche Namu and Christine Mathieu; Reviewed by Margaret

Of all the books that I have read in the last ten years, Leaving Mother Lake is the one that I have most often recommended to others. I was completely captivated by this story of Namu, a Mosuo girl living in the Tibetan highlands of China’s Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces. In this matrilineal culture, often referred to as the Kingdom of Women - men live in their mothers’ households, property is passed from mother to daughter, and women have extraordinary freedoms including choosing multiple intimate partners. As an accomplished singer, Namu is allowed to travel. As she learns of the world beyond her tiny community, she is faced with choosing this new life or the one that awaits her as the next in line to run her mother’s household.

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Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True-Life Journey by Rachel Simon; Reviewed by Margaret

Rachel has a busy life as a writer and professor, but a recent break-up has forced her to confront her loneliness and reassess her life. Her sister, Beth, is a developmentally disabled adult with whom Rachel has only had minimal contact in recent years. Beth lives independently and spends almost every day riding the city buses in her Pennsylvania town. The drivers and passengers all across the city have become Beth’s other family. This book tells the story of Rachel’s holiday present to Beth – a promise to ride the buses for a year – and how this journey taught her to accept her sister and rediscover life.

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Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang; Reviewed by Margaret

My long-time book group recently decided to add titles about current events and issues to our usual reading list of best sellers and classics. The titles we considered first were about income inequality, race, immunization, gender equity, and immigration. We eventually decided to read Brotopia, a recent selection of Now Read This – the book club of the PBS News Hour and the New York Times.

Author, Emily Chang, anchor and executive producer of Bloomberg Technology, examines the frat house culture in Silicon Valley from its earliest days when a Playboy centerfold was used in research that would eventually lead to the creation of the JPEG (a format for compressing images files) to venture capitalists today who use hot tub parties as a venue for interviewing aspiring entrepreneurs.

The year that the Macintosh was introduced – 1984 - was the high point for women in tech when they received 37 percent of computer science degrees. Today, that number is 18 percent. Computer science is certainly not the only point of entry to high tech. Women today are earning 35 percent of degrees in STEM fields however, they only hold a quarter of the computing jobs in the U.S. today which is down from 36 percent in 1991.

From extensive interviews with Silicon Valley insiders, Chang describes venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, founders and directors who possess unparalleled wealth and power in an industry that for all of their professed forward thinking engage in harassment and discrimination that limits access by women and people of color to this high growth sector of our economy. The increasing influence of technology in our lives necessitates that we are all considered in its design, use, and the rewards of its creation. Chang concludes with solutions to change the culture of Brotopia.

If you are unfamiliar with Now Read This, it airs on the PBS News Hour on OPB Channel 10 near the end of the month when they host that month’s author and announce the next month’s selection.

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