Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic 50 Book Challenge 2020/What I've Read in 2021

#12 - My Teacher Is An Alien by Bruce Coville - Read this one to my daughters. It was a favorite of mine when I was just a smidge older than they are. 6th grader Susan Simmons discovers that her new substitute teacher, Mr. Smith, is actually an alien named Broxholm, who is here on Earth to kidnap 5 students to bring into space with him! But how can she expose the truth about him? Not exactly great literature by any means, but a cute story and the kids liked it enough to ask me to borrow the rest of the "My Teacher" series from the library.

#13 - The Cool Side of My Pillow by Bruce Campbell - A very different book from my favorite actor. I've already read both of his autobiographies and his fiction novel. This one is a book of short essays - whatever happened to be on his mind at the time, I guess. It covers everything from Princess Diana's death (and why people's insatiable demand for celebrity news/pics is at least partly to blame) to UFOs to getting lost in the desert while out biking. If you follow Bruce on any kind of social media, you'll know he's blessedly quiet on his political leanings/beliefs/thoughts, so I was surprised to see a chapter dedicated to Politics. And then I laughed like a lunatic at the fact that the entire chapter spanned two completely blank pages - totally his sense of humor! Overall, I found myself entertained, even if I don't share his views on everything.

#31 Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich


This was an interesting experiment. I thought she did a decent job of illustrating (within narrow parameters) the difficulties of surviving on $6-7 an hour wages. A lot of the author's bias came through with many insulting comments such: the rich people whose houses she cleaned 'really didn't read all those books"; the 'overweight caucasian population that frequented Walmart', her outrage of having to take a drug test for employment, her dismissive comments about people who hire cleaners (and, can you imagine, their houses were, gasp, dirty?).. And then she was hurt/surprised when people didn't react to her 'secret' that she was actually a journalist? These types of studies are much more effective when the author follows the lives of the people who live under these circumstances over a longer period of time.

#32 The Life Intended by Kristin Harmel


This was a quick read. I figured out where the story was going almost immediately but I still enjoyed it. It had some good concepts.

42)Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 by Odd Arne Westad this was an interesting looking to the rise of China in the modern era from the glory days of the Qing Dynasty through to its collapse and the formation the republic to what we know of it today. Insightful and well written

43)The Death and Life of Superman by Roger Stern this is the novelisation of the Death and Return of Superman comic series. All fans know the story, but this also fills in the blanks that the comics didn’t have and in comparison to the Lois and Clark novels which were based on the TV series this is better at showing their relationship.

#33 The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson


This book had a lot of potential - a woman overcoming lots of obstacles - poverty, teen pregnancy, racism, I wanted to like it. The book focused on a Ruth, 30 year old black woman and MIdnight, a 12 year old white boy. I didn't like either of them. After 12 years of ignoring that she'd given birth, suddenly Ruth is hell bent to claim her son, regardless of any consequences to him. I don't recommend this book.

I didn't quite realize how much reading I've been doing.

#45 Once Upon A Dream by Liz Braswell Another YF girl power retelling of a fairy tale. This one is about Sleeping Beauty. In this one, at least the guys weren't all schlubs. The prince does contribute materially to the successful conclusion (surely you didn't think Maleficent would win? Not in a YF novel!) and all is well by the end - mostly, anyway. These books are nice to cleanse the palate after digesting history or deep philosophy or a detailed biography, and since there's little or no rude language and no sex, they're quick reads.

#46 Tank Men by Robert Kershaw World War II revealed new and more violent ways to destroy one's enemies. The tank - an armored, self-propelled engine of death and ruin - was one of the foremost. The author delves into first-person tank combat accounts from Britain, Germany, Russia, Italy, and the U.S. Many of the British war authors I've read tend to use a lot of passive voice, which tends to distance the reader from the action. But this is still a gripping read, one I'm glad I picked up.

#47 Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis I was surprised that this book was not a Christian allegory. But Lewis often described himself as a "medievalist" in that his academic passion was in medieval times. This is a retelling the Cupid/Psyche myth from ancient Greece from a third party, Psyche's sister. It's interesting with that world, but had I known what it was I wouldn't have read it. It's not a bad story, just not my bowl of strawberry shortcake.

#48 The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell Gladwell moves away from contemporary issues and situations in this one and delves into the men in both America and England who informed the bombing strategies to be deployed against Germany in World War II. The RAF favored night bombing against area targets, which resulted in fewer losses per mission but greatly reduced accuracy. The USAAF insisted on daylight precision bombing against strategic targets, which greatly increased losses but put more bombs on target than the RAF did per bomber per mission. But the statistical difference in the military result wasn't that dramatic, although there are German sources that report that had the U.S. bombed Schweinfurt effectively one more time, it might have knocked the German ball bearing production offline for quite some time. And high-altitude precision over Japan was useless - the B29s flew high enough to enter the jet stream, which gave them a ground speed that exceeded the limits of the Norden bombsight. The best tactic used against the Japanese was the low-level night bombing from B29s using high-temperature incendiaries. It seems the Bomber Mafia - the American true believers in high-altitude precision bombing - were wrong because the desired result exceeded the available technology.

#49 The Perfect Wife: Jessie Hunt #1 by Blake Pierce This is not the Perfect Wife reviewed a few weeks ago (I'll get to that one too). Jessie Hunt is the daughter of a deranged serial killer who left her tied to a chair, bleeding and hypothermic, for three days next to her butchered mother when she was six years old. Jessie becomes a profiler for the Los Angeles Police Department, and her first case is to solve a murder she thinks she might have committed. One of her resources is another serial killer, this one in custody, who idolized her father and patterned his murders after him. This isn't a police procedural, though - there are twists and turns and surprises throughout. And I was a little surprised at the actual killer.

#50 The Perfect Block: Jessie Hunt #2 by Blake Pierce Jessie makes a few friends and tracks down another murderer while barely dodging death herself. There's more about her father and her ex-husband and her new friends, along with more pretzel plotting. Again, I didn't pick out the killer until very late in the story, immediately before the reveal. Good stuff.

#51 The Perfect House; Jessie Hunt #3 by Blake Pierce Another Jessie Hunt novel. She tracks down killers and clues and sidesteps danger with the best of them. There are a bunch of these, plus a number of other series by the same author. I'm glad I can check these out to my Kindle, because I couldn't afford to buy them all and the local library doesn't have many of the physical volumes. Sometimes technology really is our friend.

#52 The Perfect Wife by J. P. Delany I like science fiction even when it's outside the bounds of reality (I write Superman fiction for fun - duh), so this tale of an android with the consciousness of a missing (or maybe dead) woman uploaded to it interested me. Most the novel is written in second person ("You see the door and you open it.") which jarred me a little at first, but there's a valid reason for it, which doesn't become clear until the end. There are also first person plural chapters ("We saw them come back from a date.") dropped in to give the reader more backstory than the android main character can access. I thought it interesting. Of course, the lingering theme is that if we make our machines too smart, they might decide they don't need us.

#53 Unbirthday by Liz Braswell This one shakes up the story of Alice in Wonderland by delaying Alice's return from her seventh birthday until her eighteenth. Lots of changes in the story, lots of intrigue, lots of drama and danger and of course the Jabberwock makes an appearance. Girl power with some romance mixed in.

#54 Conceal, Don't Feel by Jen Calonita Twist on Frozen. Elsa and Anna are separated as preadolescents and magically made to forget each other by the Rock Trolls, along with the entire kingdom. As a bonus, if Anna gets too close to Elsa before the spell is broken, Anna will freeze from the inside out. The bad guys and the good guys are all familiar, and Kristoff has a bigger role that I expected when I first started the story. This isn't great literature, but it's nice mental candy, easily digested and not really upsetting. I haven't read all twenty-something books in the series, but I begin to suspect that they're all girl power tales. And there's nothing wrong with that as long as the men aren't deliberately marginalized or demonized.

44) From Yalta to Vietnam: American Foreign Policy in the Cold War by David Horowitz interesting looking the complex world of international diplomacy during the Cold War. This of course is a product of the time of publication and so deep analysis isn’t really present though so I found myself reading this with a different perspective.

45) Japanese Taiwan: Colonial Rule and its Contested Legacy by Andrew Morris (Editor) and Christopher Gerteis (Editor) in the 21st century world, colonialism and imperialism are not viewed in a positive light and rightly so. In the case of Taiwan though, this is also where colonialism and the brutality of it has also left a cultural mark on the country and for those who are not ‘mainlanders’ a term the Taiwanese (people who are of Hoklo, indigenous or Hakka descent who were the three main groups on Taiwan at the time of Japanese colonisation) use to describe people who are descended from Chiang’s KMT forces who fled to Taiwan in 1949 we consider it as part of our heritage using it to distance and separate ourselves from mainland Chinese. This is an academic study, so it is very detailed and certainly not to everyone’s reading tastes, but as someone whose maternal roots (being Hoklo) are from this period of history I see it more as a study of my personal family history and ended up with a greater understanding of the period as well as deeper understanding of what it means to be Taiwanese. In addition to this, demonstrating the ever deepening divide between the Beijing friendly KMT and pro-independence movement as this publication is fairly recent in terms of Taiwan’s recent history and the ever increasing threat from Beijing. Another interesting aspect of this was learning about Taiwan’s indigenous population of which I knew very little about not only in colonial times, but also during the years under the thumb of Chiang Kai Shek since of course unlike my mother’s family and the Hakka people who if you do go back far enough do have mainland Chinese roots and come from today’s Fujian and Guangdong provinces respectively (the Taiwanese language is the dialect spoken in Fujian) are of course the original inhabitants of the island known at that point as Formosa. It now seems fitting that the current President of Taiwan Tsai Ing Wen is of indigenous and Hakka ancestry and that Taiwan’s first elected Lee Teng-Hui was the first president of Taiwan to be born in the island, but also during the period of Japanese occupation as a testament to the changing scope of what it means to be Taiwanese

#14, 15, 16 - My Teacher Fried My Brains, My Teacher Glows In The Dark, My Teacher Flunked The Planet by Bruce Coville

Sequels to My Teacher Is An Alien, these books follow the adventures of the other kids involved. In Fried My Brains, we see how Duncan Dougal, school bully, has his brains fried, making him much, much smarter than he normally is. We also get and up close and personal look at his abusive family and miserable home life. Duncan winds up discovering evidence that the "alien invasion" of the previous year isn't over after all...

In the following two books, we are taken into space along with Peter Thompson, the kid who willingly went along with his alien teacher in the first book. As it turns out, the whole galaxy has its eyes on Earth, wondering in dismay what they should do about us (ie, should they blow up the planet or not) because of how much they fear us getting out into the galaxy at large while still being "uncivilized." (That is, we wage war and pollute the planet and allow people to starve to death and all those other unpleasant things we allow to happen here.) Peter and his friends, as well as a select few alien allies, must convince the Interplanetary Council to allow the Earth to continue to survive.

I know I read these all when I was about my daughters' age, but it was a little like reading them for the first time again, because I seriously didn't remember any of them. My girls loved the series though.

#17 - Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

After winning Halliday's contest and becoming the "heir" of the entire OASIS (an entire virtual world where people create avatars of themselves and can access any number of nearly infinite "worlds" to quest on, Wade Watts discovers yet another "Easter Egg" left behind. Not only that, but a prototype headset that allows a person to control their avatar in the OASIS with their mind, rather than by climbing into a haptic rig and physically moving. Wade and his friends (all equal partners in owning the OASIS, since they all worked together on the first Egg Hunt) decided to allow this new tech to be mass produced, allowing people to experience the virtual world as fully as real life - they can smell, feel, taste, etc everything around them. AND it allows users to record real life memories and experiences, upload them, and allow others to experience exactly what they did. Wade is naturally drawn to this new Egg Hunt - A quest to find the "Seven Shards of the Siren's Soul," but as soon as the first shard is retrieved (with help from new friends), a new, dangerous villain appears - one who takes the brains of every person using the new headsets hostage. Wade and his friends have a whooping 12 hours to retrieve all seven shards before they hit their headset usage limits, slip into comas, and die.

I found it to be a pale companion to the original book. The first 100 pages are bleak and depressing (a lot about how Wade screwed up his relationship with Sam, aka Art3mis and about how immature he is). Random social issues make an appearance with no consequence or reason and feel like they were thrown in just for the sake of the author patting himself on the back for being "woke." The actual shard hunting is boring in places and uneven - The shard on the planet dedicated to Prince has a gazillion things that need to be done before they can get the shard while the shard on the educational world is literally "I did all the quests here, I'll just ask the Queen nicely for the shard and have zero work to do." The villain made little to no sense and the ending felt like too much of a push to give that hot mess of a villain some logic. I was underwhelmed and disappointed with this book.

Deadly Chakram, I'm disappointed to hear Ready Player Two isn't as good as the original.

#34 The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That's Pulling Apart by Noreena Hertz


This book was well researched and had a global perspective. It introduced many concepts I was already familiar with. While I'm interested in the topic, it wasn't a compelling read.

I wouldn't say it's not worth reading, but for me, it fell far short of the original. If you haven't already read it, Armada was pretty decent. Also, I really wish I'd re-read Ready Player One before diving into this one. I had forgotten how vastly different the book was from the movie!

#35 Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

I'm with you Deadly Chakram, it wasn't a bad read but not nearly as fun as the original and the pacing was off. I wasn't as interested in some of the trivia. As with the original book, I felt like they had a great opportunity to make some social commentary but they didn't go there.

Wow - the majority of people on Goodreads hated this book.

Oh wow! I haven't used Goodreads in ages and never thought to check the ratings! Sorry you also didn't really love it.

#36 The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins

This is supposed to be a loose update of Jane Eyre, now taking place in the South. While I like the original story, I didn't like any of the characters in this 'update'. They were all pretty nasty. Some of the twists pushed credibility.

A good read for a plane trip.

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It's fun to go to Goodreads and check out other people's reviews. I don't always agree with the majority but it can be entertaining in itself to read the reviews.

46) The Indochina Story: A Fully Documented Account by The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars my interest in the history of Indochina (and in particular Vietnam) stems from it being where my dad was born so I try to read as many books as I can on the subject. That being said most of what was written in the book with respect to colonialism is pretty obvious without the need to be told and while I understand the concerns of the authors, I don’t feel that leading you to draw the conclusion they want you to come to was the right way to present their arguments

47) The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall Marshall again delivers an outstanding book demonstrating his deep understanding of the complexities of international relations and diplomacy in his follow up to Prisoners of Geography. I know that geopolitics is not generally something that most people find interesting, but I always feel that to understand the world as it stands today we should keep try to keep up to date with everything that is going on. This in particular is especially relevant as it was only published this year and so mentions the ongoing health crisis with COVID as well as global warming and the geopolitical ramifications of it.

48) A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan another travel memory is visiting the small airborne memorial in the Dutch city of Arnhem dedicated to Operation Market Garden which faces the famed bridge. Dreamed up Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, it was designed as an invasion route across the Rhine into Germany in the hopes of ending the war. While the combined allied air and land would liberate several Dutch cities, the last of the seven bridges would prove to be ‘A Bridge Too Far’ the name in which the Battle for Arnhem would forever be known as. Having read his previous The Longest Day and thoroughly enjoying it, this didn’t meet my expectation. That’s not to say I didn’t like it, I just felt that it meandered more than was necessary.

#36 Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid


I liked that this book touched on social issues yet it was character driven.

#18 Go The Distance by Jen Calonita

Another Disney Twisted Tale, this one takes us to ancient Greece, at the very end of Hercules. Herc has proven himself worthy to rejoin the gods on Olympus, but refuses to lose Megara in the process, and instead opts to stay on Earth. This time, Zeus refuses, nor will he allow Meg to remain on Olympus with Herc. But Hera has a plan and sends Meg on her very own quest to prove herself worthy of becoming a goddess. Yet in accepting Hera's offer, Meg has to face her painful past, including a mother who died too young and the young man Meg once sold her soul to Hades to save.

I liked this one. As I've said before, I'm a sucker for anything mythological, so this was right up my alley. I do like the Hercules movie, though the straying from mythology bothers me (he's NOT Hera's son, she hates him, etc). The book follows the movieverse closely, right down to the descriptions of the gods being the weird color scheme the movie gave them. And it continues the vain of "tweak the mythology to be kid friendly" - ie, Persephone is depicted as desperately in love with Hades. It was still a fun read and it was nice to see Herc take a bit of a peripheral role. While Meg is certainly the star (that whole "girl power" vibe), we do get to see quite a bit of Pegasus and even the satyr, Phil. And for once, we get to see the tough-as-nails, ties-her-own-sandals-and-everything Meg be vulnerable and even a bit indecisive, but in a much needed way - after all, she's only known Herc just a short while, does she really love him in an I'm-going-to-risk-my-life-and-become-a-goddess-to-be-with-him-forever kind of way?

#19, 20, 21 Who Was Walt Disney? Who Is Jane Goodall?, Where Is Walt Disney World? by Various Authors

Read these to the kids and I found them actually very engaging and informative. Who Was Walt Disney was particularly interesting. Obviously, I'm a huge Disnerd, so big surprise there, right? But I had done a research project on Walt back in high school (we had to focus on one of our heroes and at the time I wanted to be a cartoonist and work for Disney) and I had never heard a lot of the stories of his yiouth. So all of them we interesting and taught me something new. I did, however, have to skip over sections in the Where Is Walt Disney World book where it talks about the differences between "face characters" like the princesses and the full body suit ones like Mickey. My daughters are still young enough (not quite 8 years old) to still believe that the characters are actually the characters and not actors. No way am I going to ruin the magic for them!

#37 A Million Reasons Why by Jessica Strawser



There was a lot happening in this book. It could've easily gotten into high DRAMA.. I was relieved to see characters making wise decisions.

#38 The Queen of Hearts by Kimmery Martin


I always like a good female friendship book. But the mystery here didn't fully make sense.