Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about an overlooked woman in history.
Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement, by Wendy L. Rouse

This book was very academic in tone for my taste, but extremely informative. I'd heard of Carrie Chapman Catt, but had no idea that after losing two husbands, she spent 38 years with a woman companion, Mary Garrett Hay, and was buried next to her rather than one of the husbands. Similarly, I'd heard of Black suffragette Angelina Weld Grimké, but had never seen the letter urging another woman to be her "wife," nor the passionate poems addressed to women.

Passionate "friendships" between women were accepted at the time, sometimes termed "Boston Marriages" (apparently after The Bostonians, an anti-suffrage novel by Henry James). Such relationships were outwardly portrayed as nonsexual, even as the women lived together for years and spoke of each other in romantic terms. Suffragettes were attacked with the usual anti-feminist stereotypes: ugly, masculine, man-haters, etc. (The same tired attacks get recycled every generation.) The suffrage organizations tried to counter this with respectability politics, keeping wives and mothers in the forefront, with any deviation from standard gender roles pushed to the back.

There were a number of other interesting women discussed. Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, whose photo appears on the cover, was an early advocate of dress reform. And Annie "Dan" Tinker, who was apparently bisexual, also wore men's clothes and led mounted cavalry in suffrage parades. It was definitely worth the textbook-like writing style to learn about such fascinating women.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book by the oldest writer on your to-read stack.
Little Novels, by Wilkie Collins.

I'm interpreting "oldest" as "born first," regardless of how long the author lived, so it's Wilkie Collins, 1824-1889. The "novels" are actually short stories, around 20 pages each, usually with a twist ending. There are some mysteries, lots of romance, and a couple of ghost stories - including more than one where the "ghost" turns up very much alive.

As in most Collins stories, the right couple usually winds up together at the end. There are a couple of tragic exceptions, including a grimly accurate portrayal of domestic violence. One rather surprising theme in multiple stories is the jilted lover who becomes the friend and protector of his beloved and the man she rejected him for.

The one clunker for me was "Mr. Captain and the Nymph," which has all the tired tropes of the "exotic" brown maiden who lives among the savages until she falls for a white man who wants to carry her away."


My favorite was "Mr. Lepel and the Housekeeper," in which a dying man marries his best friend's beloved, so that she can marry the friend as a rich widow. But the "dying" man suddenly gets better after his wife accidentally drops the tray with his medicines on it. (The unlucky friend had warned him all along that his housekeeper was poisoning him.)

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book in which an adult character changes careers.
Act Your Age, Eve Brown, by Talia Hibbert.

This is the final book in Hibbert's Brown Sisters trilogy, and it's a grumpy/sunshine, enemies-to-lovers romance. This one is more over-the-top than the other two, starting with a ridiculous meet-cute where she accidentally backs her car into him. This results in him having to hire her as the cook at his bed-and-breakfast.

They annoy each other a lot at first. Eve is irresponsible, dropping and picking up one job after another. Jacob's autism manifests in an extreme need for order, and being blunt to the point of rudeness. Later, we see Jacob's wounds from having parents who rejected him, and Even figures out she's likely on the spectrum as well.

As the two fall for each other, there's occasional mention of the ethical problem of Jacob being her boss, but then it's just shrugged off. (To be fair, Eve's wealthy & not dependent on the job.)

The third-act breakup is a little predictable, but believably rooted in the character's insecurities. And the reconciliation is as over-the-top as their meeting, and once again involves traffic.

 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book you got for free.
Schindler's List, by Thomas Keneally.

This is technically a novel, but the author sticks as close as he can to the known facts of Schindler's life. Where something is unknowable, the author offers possibilities but not answers. Foremost among the  unanswerable questions: why did businessman Oskar Schindler risk everything to save his Jewish workers, when almost all of his colleagues cooperated with the Nazis?

Schindler didn't seem attached to any particular political or religious ideology (he was nominally Catholic but not observant). There was no formative childhood incident that would have made for convenient storytelling. He and his wife had Jewish friends, but as Himmler complained, "every" German had that one Jewish friend that they assumed would be an exception to the persecution. Yet Schindler chose to live the Talmudic saying that his manager Itzhak Stern quoted to him: "He who saves a single life saves the world entire." 

There were a number of stunning moments that were translated faithfully into Spielberg's movie: sadistic camp kommandant Amon Goeth on his balcony, casually using prisoners for target practice. Goeth killing a Jewish engineer because she told him, accurately, that the construction work had been done wrong. One of Schindler's workers giving his gold fillings to make a ring as a parting gift to Schindler. Unlike the movie, the book has space to give Schindler's wife Emilie her due: they had been separated, but when the factory relocated to Czechoslovakia she joined Oskar's  efforts, getting contraband food and medical care for the people under his protection.

Schindler had little success in business before or after World War II, leading some to speculate that the skilled businessmen were Stern and others working with him. Schindler's talent was working with people: glad-handing, flattering and bribing high-ranking Nazis to get what he needed from them. He was so good at it that after the Allied victory, Goeth tried to call Schindler as a defense witness - apparently he imagined they were friends.

The author makes several mentions of Schindler's womanizing, and seems surprised that there were never any public scenes with his wife and assorted mistresses. Schindler certainly wasn't the first powerful man with that sort of arrangement. But it's noteworthy that he wasn't some plaster saint. Oskar Schindler was a man who might have lived an ordinary life - but when he came face to face with evil, he found the courage to fight back, to save those lives and do what he could to save the world entire.

 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about a person of color experiencing joy and not trauma.
Black Joy Unbound: An Anthology, edited by Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle.

This book's premise overlaps with This Is the Honey, edited by Kwame Alexander. But while This Is the Honey is strictly poetry, Black Joy Unbound includes fiction and essays as well. It's a short but warm, fun and moving book.

All the authors were new to me. The joys discussed range from the big stuff ("Joy Delayed," a short story by Penny Mickelbury about two lesbians finding love in their later years) to more transient pleasures ("Subway Therapist," an essay by Merlee Miller about a dancer brining joy to NYC subway riders).

In Regina YC Garcia's poem "TO: Whom It May Concern RE: Black Joy," she attempts to define what makes Black joy unique:




While yet another layer of joy plants the seeds 
     of the knowledge
     that there are golden pieces of Black gifting,
     of Black strength, even of Black
     prophecy that cannot be removed from
     Black existence.
That is that Black joy -
     knowing that even in derision, there is provision
     in this joy that secrets us
     and the gifts that save us
This joy that reminds us that
     trouble don't last always
     weeping endures for a night
     joy comes in the morning light

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about a character with chronic pain.
The Spare Man, by Mary Robinette Kowal.

This is a murder mystery set aboard the space equivalent of a luxury cruise liner. Scientist Tesla Crane is the sole survivor of a terrible accident that left her with chronic pain and PTSD, she has a pain-suppressing implant (this is a real thing, the author mentions in the afterword), and an irresistible service dog named Gimlet. Tesla's varying levels of pain and her techniques for managing PTSD are a natural part of the story.

Although it's set in the future, the book has a very 2020 feel. Travelers from earth are accustomed to using "courtesy masks." It's the norm for people to include their pronouns when introducing themselves, the generic title is Mx., and everyone is referred to in the narration as "they" until they specify otherwise.

Tesla is on her honeymoon with Shal, a retired detective. Then there's a murder, and Shal is framed. Everyone has a secret, there are multiple crimes involved, but the how and why of the murders turn out to be pretty straightforward. Now, if they could just get that hostile security chief to listen... 

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book mentioned in another book.
Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich is set in a bookstore, and includes several lists of favorite books at the end. This book isn't on the list of Native American poets, but on a separate list simply called "Sublime books." I'm inclined to agree.

Diaz writes about being Indigenous in a country where Native people are being killed in horrifying numbers. She writes about her brothers' addictions, described as an anthropomorphized bullet in "Catching Copper."

My brothers feed their bullet
the way bulls fed Zeus -
burning, on a pyre, their own
thigh bones wrapped in fat.
My brothers take a knee, bow
against the asphalt, prostrate
on the concrete for their bullet.

She tackles real-world spirituality, not the romanticized Hollywood version. If you believe "Water is the first medicine," she says, you need to be on the ground protecting the water supply.

There are grief counselors of site for those who realize
they have entered The American Water Museum not as
patrons but rather as parts of the new exhibit.

Best of all were the love poems. Sexy, passionate, powerful, and very lesbian. From "These Hands, If Not Gods:"

Aren't they, too, the carpenters
of your small church? Have they not burned
on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread
of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,
to nectareous feast?

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: Second of two books with the same title.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann.

David Grann's best-known book, Killers of the Flower Moon, was history that read like a thriller. This is history that reads like an adventure story. Grann reconstructs what happened from the journals, letters, and eventual testimony of the survivors. The accounts sometimes contradict each other, of course, and Grann gives what he believes to be the most plausible version of events. 

In 1740, five warships, including the Wager, departed England to capture a Spanish galleon bringing treasure back from South America. The mission was ill-fated from the start. While press gangs kidnapped any man they saw with tar on his hands, figuring he had sailing experience, they still didn't have enough crew. Elderly and disabled sailors were dragged out of nursing homes to fill up the numbers, and those men were the first to fall to scurvy and other illnesses along the way.

Two ships had to turn back on stormy seas, one sank, and the Wager wrecked on a small island with little to eat besides wild celery. (Apparently even fish were scarce.) As months passed and hunger took its toll, infighting grew among the sailors - to the point where the increasingly erratic captain, David Cheap, shot an unarmed man.

Eventually, a plan came together to build small boats with the remnants of the ship. But while almost all the men wanted to find a way back to England, Captain Cheap remained fixated on somehow completing their mission. When the survivors met up back in England, the court martial was a bit of an anticlimax.

Grann gives a clear look at men in desperate circumstances, struggling against each other, an unforgiving sea, and their own psyches. The story raises questions about law and chaos: Navy law was the one thing providing order for the marooned men - but what happens when the person in charge of that order no longer has their trust?

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: First of two books with the same title.
Wager, by Adele Elise Williams.

My first preference for poetry is that it be understandable. Especially at the beginning of the book, I could tell she was talking about some form of trauma, but it wasn't clear to me what. I'm still not sure what the "wager" in the title refers to. The collection came together more for me with this one:

I DON'T KNOW HOW TO WRITE PRETTY POEMS

about being an addict. I keep trying but the moon
won't show, and holy colors refuse their help. It is all
puke and blah, sad mom and sad me and blah, blah and
drunk sex, blah and the details are stark and dark and 
failures...


Some of the poems use visual effects, like "Violence," in which the word "red" repeats over and over to form the shape of a gun.

While a lot of the images are grim, some defiance and triumph shows through. My favorite poem in this volume was "Matriarchy":

I come from a lineage of beast women.
Women who cannot sleep at night but obliterate the day.
Nana stole a stick shift in 1948.
Mother walked a mile to and from school alone at age six. 
Epigenetics - it's not just genes that make us.
The sea spray of the Gulf Coast can whittle a railroad tie into stale ribbon.
We have an affinity for the underdogs, the crazy dogs, the dogs
​with one leg that bite and won't let go.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book rated below 3 stars on Goodreads.
Passenger to Frankfurt, by Agatha Christie.

Some of these Popsugar categories are head-scratchers. In addition to this category, there's one for "a book you've always avoided reading." I get that part of the challenge is to expand your horizons, but it seems weird to choose books that I'm not expecting to like.

I did like this one, but in a campy, so-bad-it's-good way. Agatha Christie is the queen of mysteries because she knows where she's going, and all the clues come together to give us a satisfying and  believable (even if wildly improbable) conclusion. With spy novels, however, she just gives us a shadowy enemy, and the story wobbles around without ever really going anywhere. (I had the same problem with The Big Four, but at least that one had Poirot.)

I'm going to include spoilers, but not the identity of the villain, because it really doesn't matter.

Passenger to Frankfurt starts with a mysterious woman approaching a British diplomat in an airport. She tells him that her life is in danger. Noting that they have similar faces, she asks that he hand over his wallet, passport, and bulky cloak, so she can impersonate him. How will he get home? No problem, she'll put something in his drink, and he can tell the authorities he was drugged and robbed. He says sure, why not.

After his return to England, they have a couple of furtive meetings (pass each other in the crowd, pretending not to know each other while she slips him a note, etc). But then they meet at a party, with her using her real name, so the secret meetings simply added risk for no discernable reason.

There's a subplot where it's claimed that Hitler survived the bunker, by a scheme too harebrained for me to describe, and escaped to South America and fathered a son to be the new Aryan champion. Mercifully, this gets debunked.

Then the book veers to a whole other plot, in which a scientist has created something called Benvo, which causes people to want to make others happy. The inventor isn't sure anyone should have it, but the good guys want it, and so do the bad guys, helpfully identified in a Venn diagram that...

​...you know, it really doesn't matter. Just suspend your disbelief and go with it.