Short and Sweet

 Struggling to focus. Reading short books. Under 200 pages. Why don't magazines count? 😭😭😭

Drowned Country by Emily Tesh

Mopey wild man. Mopey vampire. Mopey fairies. 

Wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.

Heartbreakingly beautiful. 

Excited for her next book.

157 pages

The Hundred Penny Box by Sharon Bell Mathis

Reread, still sad. 

Family history is so important. 

Seniors deserve respect and dignity. 

47 pages

Rage by Stephen King

Controversial, out of print.

Teenage angst, trauma.

Teens also deserve respect and dignity.

Hard to put down, not really scary. 

130 pages

Somebody Give This Heart a Pen by Sophia Thakur

Real, raw writing. 

Love her spoken word poetry.

Give, grieve, grow. 

99 pages 

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

Beautiful Asian fantasy world. 

Fierce queer women. 

I want to try black salt. 

NEED the next book. 

(No, I don't want to wait a month)

Read Harder Task #11

121 pages

Missouri's Mad Doctor McDowell by Victoria Cosner

Why rob graves? For science!

Who doesn't want to preserve their family members? 

He could view his wife across the river, how sweet.

Now I have to visit Hannibal.

142 pages

"The Hour I First Believed" by Wally Lamb

Susan M. lent me this book because I had read "Columbine" earlier this year.  At the beginning, the fictional narrator and his wife are working at Columbine High School when two of its students go on a killing rampage in 1999.  The book deals not only with its aftermath and how they each cope but how their lives unfold once they leave Colorado and move back to the narrator's boyhood home, a former dairy farm down the road from a women's prison founded by and named for his great-grandmother.

Part family saga, part historical fiction, this novel is Forrest Gump-ian in the way some of the characters meet and interact with well known figures, such as Mark Twain and Dorothea Dix, and have their lives influenced by real historical events, like Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq.  Throw in a bit of chaos-complexity theory, family secrets, and unpredictable plot twists, and I was hooked.  I don't usually read fiction written by men, but I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed this story.  It took the author about 10 years to write it, and he did a great job.  725 pages (including notes from the author).

"Columbine" by Dave Cullen

The first thing you notice about this book is its cover.  One word in white floating in an overcast sky far above a lonely, modern-looking school.  There is no clue to give the viewer an idea of what happened inside that building nearly 12 years ago, except that one word . . . Columbine.

I remember when the massacre at Columbine High School happened back in 1999.  The mass media was all over the place; unfortunately, they got most of the story wrong.  Writer Dave Cullen was there from the beginning interviewing the survivors, their families, the school staff, the killers' friends, law enforcement, and even journalists covering the story.  All of the myths that grew out of the massacre really were just myths perpetuated by the mass media.  For example, the boys did not target jocks, they did not belong to the Trench Coat Mafia, and they did not ask one of the victims if she believed in God before they killed her.  Cullen tries hard to get the details right with a timeline before the massacre, a large notes section, and even a bibliography naming his sources.  He also has a web site with more information:  http://www.davecullen.com/columbine.htm.  In the end, two very different boys committed mass murder at their school for very different reasons. 

The book jumps back and forth between planning for the massacre, carrying it out, and the repercussions that followed.  The writing is straightforward but captivating.  It's hard to imagine the terror and sorrow that so many people experienced because of these two boys, but a few good things did come out of it.  I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the true story behind this tragedy.  358 pages.