January Books

January: the month of cold gray darkness. Thank goodness for sweet bubblegum books to keep it at bay! This month I especially appreciated my happy fluff-books because they balanced out the heavier topics I encountered in my non-fiction reading. Balance is essential when it comes to learning about the social injustices in our world. Based on my reading list this month, it takes six happy fluffy books to offset one heavy nonfiction book.

Books I read in January 2022! (* = re-read)

Fiction:

1. Snowed in at Canyon Creek Ranch by Holly Stevenson: a clean Christmas romance. Not stellar, not awful, just mid-grade writing and storyline. The title basically summarizes the plot, haha. This time it's the maid of honor and best man at a Christmas wedding who are the love interests.
2. *Faceoff by Rebecca Connolly: after doing a lot of ice skating on our canal, I reread my faves from this hockey series because I was in the mood for more skating.
3. *Powerplay by Heather B. Moore: another hockey series re-read
4. *Crosscheck by Rebecca Connolly: my favorite book from this fun hockey series.
5. So Not My Thing by Melanie Jacobson: 12 years after a rock star humiliated a teenage fangirl by dismissing her, the girl becomes his commercial real estate agent, helping him find a place to open a jazz club in New Orleans. Trust issues and sparks fly equally, haha. I liked this one. It has lots of music and food references and made me feel like I was visiting New Orleans. I did not like how the main character kept equating falling in love as an adult to her teenage fangirl obsession. The music and New Orleans food and completely new setting made this a fun read.
6. The Terrible Personal Shopper by Laura Burton: a movie star invites a substitute personal shopper on his press tour. Funny at times, but the main character was so flighty it was hard to care enough about her and relate on any level. Also, I thought the kissing scene was too over the top and the romance in general was not subtle at all. Not a re-read.
7. The Smuggler of Camden Cove by Kasey Stockton: handsome smuggler moves into the cottage next door and girl falls in love with him...and helps him smuggle? This was an oddly ambiguous regency period story. The characters weren't very developed so the story kind of fell flat. The writing was good, but the story was confusing.
8. Compared by Kortney Keisel: widower falls in love with his son's 2nd grade teacher. This book was adorable. I laughed out loud over and over while reading it. The characters were so well done and the romance was delicate--finally no overdone kissing scenes! I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Worth purchasing for sure.
9. The Rejected King by Kortney Keisel: commoner girl gets a job organizing the king's wife-finding event at the palace and they fall in love. It's a dystopian setting but there wasn't quite enough explanation to get me into it. Why didn't they have electricity or even cameras or sketch artists so people would know what the king looked like? Weird. It was a medium quality sweet story, but I didn't like it enough to read the other 3 books in the series.
10. Loving the Ladies' Man by Kristin Canary: clean office romance with a few under-explained unexpected twists. I liked the characters, but overall this book was mid grade. I wish this was dual point of view instead of just the girl's perspective. I do want to read the next books in this series about friends, because I keep thinking this author has more potential, and a lot of times authors improve over time. [Cringe-worthy title]
11. Desiring His Dating Coach by Kristin Canary: loved it! So sweet. For once the guy wasn't all huge, confident, and muscly. He was the quiet nerdy manager of a coffee shop. No fanfare. Loved it.  Much better than the first book in this series. Plot summary: guy asks the girl he has a crush on to coach his dating skills so he can spend time with her. This author does tend to favor a dramatic separation before the couple comes back together at the end, but at least this one made sense. The kissing scene was nice and short, but still could've been a bit less descriptive. That's my preference; this was still nice and clean. [Also: zero points for the title. Gag, haha]
12. Saving the Secret Prince by Kristin Canary: Incognito prince takes vacation in southern California and falls in love with a girl who saves him from getting hit by a car. Silly and sweet. Kristin Canary is a new-to-me author, and she did alright.
13. The Buy-In by Emma St. Clair: new release by a beloved indie author. This is a spinoff of another series she wrote. Second chance romance between former college sweethearts, set in small town Texas. A sweet story, minus one thing: the guy had all of the skills--cooking, home repairs, even hair braiding--and the girl had no talents. It just seemed strange that she was so hopeless. She was barely making ends meet and raising her niece, so maybe it was all just survival mode rather than an actual lack of life skills, but it bugged me. I loved all of the other characters, though! Well done overall. 

Non-fiction:

1. The Girl With Seven Names: escape from North Korea by Hyeonseo Lee: book rec from Mel. Astounding story of escape and scraping a living illegally for a decade before finally finding a home. A fascinating firsthand account of all of the trials along the pathway to becoming a legal resident/citizen of a new country. Right when I thought she had it made, something else happened! Over and over and over! I learned a lot about North and South Korea too. I didn't know close to 90% of what I learned about North Korea, and it is astounding that a country like that exists in our world. 
2. Evicted by Matthew Desmond: Pulitzer Prize winning, stunning survey of how eviction is at the foundation of perpetuating poverty in America. This was a sad hard read, but also one of those "good human" books that taught me so much about poverty. Set in Milwaukee, which is one of the most segregated US cities, the book follows the story of several people as they struggle to keep up and keep a roof over their heads. Rent has climbed so high that people who are poor are paying over 70% of their monthly income for rent. Even the smallest disruption to their life/job can cause  The author's solution to begin ameliorating poverty: make it a basic right for tenants to have to lawyer in housing court, regulate landlords in order to lessen the exploitation of the poor, and overhaul the housing voucher system to create a universal housing voucher for all whose income is below a certain level, so nobody has to pay more than 30% of their income for housing.
   
   The author says he was affected deeply by his research for this book, to the point of being depressed for years after finishing. He wrote with such compassion and hope, no wonder he won the Pulitzer Prize for this book. The sheer amount and different types of research that the author did for this book is staggering. He lived in a trailer park, he lived in an inner city boarding house, and he got to know the subjects of his research so well that he still counts them as dear friends. 
   
   The author did a beautiful job of centering the experiences of the people he wrote about. This was not a first-person account. It is written in third person narrative, which was an extremely effective way to showcase each person's experience. The author was so humble, he didn't even explain how he gathered the stories and quotes in the book until the very end. 
   
   This book settled into my heart and made me really think. I was able to see my own privilege so clearly, and it made me extra thankful for a solid family support system which guaranteed that no matter how spread thin our finances were for the first 7+ years of our marriage, we were never actually desperate like so many people living below the poverty line. 

Quotes from The Girl with Seven Names

"Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey." 

"Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all." 

"North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Kim worship is the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour." 

"It is mandatory from elementary school to attend public executions. Often classes would be cancelled so students could go." 

"So much light. So much wealth. All this had been going on while I was growing up, less than 300 miles away to the north. I shook my head as the full realization of where I was struck me. For a moment I felt so excited I could hardly breathe. I was on the other side of my divided country. I was in the parallel Korea. It was vital and real: compared with the sloth and gloom of the North, the energy and light everywhere was astounding me." 

Quotes from Evicted by Matthew Desmond

"If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out."

"Who had time to protest inequality when you were trying to get the rotten spot in your floorboard patched before your daughter put her foot through it again?"

"The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure."

"A universal housing voucher program would carve a middle path between the landlord’s desire to make a living and the tenant’s desire, simply, to live."

"Families crushed by the high cost of housing cannot afford vocational training or extra schooling that would allow them to acquire new skills; and many cannot stay in one place long enough to hold down the same job. Affordable housing is a human-capital investment, just like job programs or education, one that would strengthen and steady the American workforce."

"Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle. Eviction was such a process." (from "About this Project, at the end of the book)

"I have been blessed by countless acts of generosity from the people I met in Milwaukee. Each one reminds me how gracefully they refuse to be reduced to their hardships. Poverty has not prevailed against their deep humanity." 

Quotes from fiction

"Can you act even a little bit stressed? It would make me feel better." ... "I don’t have to. You’ll stress enough for both of us." --Lucy McConnell, Snowed in at Canyon Creek Ranch

"The chorus of a song always told the truth." --Melanie Jacobson, So Not My Thing

"My heart skips a beat. Who knew Google Docs could be so romantic?" --Kortney Keisel, Compared

"Give me a dentist’s drill every day of the year over this conversation. Throw in an OB-GYN visit too." --Emma St. Clair, The Buy-In

How many reading selfies is too many? :)