Other Women's Stories: What I'm reading this week (12/16/19)

I'll be on Christmas vacation this week, next week, and part of the week following. I plan to read to my heart's content and put together a number of jigsaw puzzles. We'll likely have my (step)son, daughter-in-law, and grandson over on Christmas Eve for pizza and presents, and then we'll go to my mother's on Christmas Day. So here's wishing you and your family a blessed Christmas and a fantastic New Year's holiday.

Last week I finished:

This is my second reading of The Color of Water, one of the first of the memoirs about race and identity that I can remember. It is kind of the gold standard for such books. This is the story of James McBride's childhood as the eighth of twelve children born to a white Jewish mother and a black father and stepfather in the 1940s and 1950s. The children grow up with very little information about their mother's past. When asked by her children why she and they don't look alike, she evades the question. She makes it a point to not address race with her children, instead instilling a love of God and church and the importance of education. Stop asking silly questions and educate your mind, is her response. And all of her children did very well for themselves. All twelve of them went to college. But as the 1960s became a hotbed of civil rights protests, and as the black power movement swept them along, race came to the forefront of the siblings' minds, whether it was on their mother's or not. The chapters alternate between McBride's mother's sad life story and his own. McBride is a very good writer, and I enjoyed this book as much on my second pass as my first, years and years ago. My rating: 4 stars.

Earlier this fall I thoroughly enjoyed Judy Blume's In the Unlikely Event (read my review here), so I added her other recent novel for adults to my TBR. Summer Sisters is the story of two girls who spend their summers together on Martha's Vineyard. The book begins in the late 1970s and works its way up to present day (late 1990s). It details (boy does it detail) their romances and sexual encounters and their lives together and apart for the next 20 years. I did not like this book nearly as well as In the Unlikely Event, finding all the sex unseemly and the characters all rather unlikeable. Regardless, the book was a huge hit when it came out, so I know many women liked it a lot. It just seemed to lack the subtlety and character depth of In the Unlikely Event. And there was so much sex. Perhaps a perfect beach read, but I didn't care much for it overall. My rating: 3 stars.

The last of the "Killing..." series of books by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard is Killing the SS. This is the detailed account for the hunting down of the most notorious members of the Nazi SS after World War II and their subsequent trials. All members presented in the book, it seems, went to their deaths unrepentant of their atrocities. Many felt they were not responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews in the Holocaust because they did not personally execute them--they only gave orders to have it done. While it was a good book, it was by no means my favorite of the series. I did learn some interesting things, such as that the newly-formed country of Israel went in search of the SS members that eluded capture after the war, and that many took refuge in Argentina, where the government was sympathetic to their cause. I was disturbed by the revenge sentiment of many toward these SS men (and women). I cannot judge the Jews in the new Israeli state for wanting justice. I cannot know what my reaction in a similar situation would be, but I would hope to be able to separate my society's need for justice from my desire for revenge. It was an interesting thing to ponder while listening to this book, especially having read it right on the heels of The Diary of a Young Girl. The audiobook was narrated by Bill O'Reilly, who is not my favorite narrator, but it was what it was. My rating: 3 stars.

Last week I abandoned:

I didn't dislike either of these, they just weren't right for my current mood. Ahab's Wife was perhaps too slow and too long at the moment. I'm not sure what my problem with The Ten Thousand Doors of January was, because I enjoyed the writing.

I wasn't particularly interested in Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered. I don't know their podcast, and the part of the book I listened to was a little too gritty, and the language a little too rough, for me.

I still need to finish: