Set in 1959, Lies We Tell Ourselves follows the integration of Jefferson High School in Virginia. Specifically, we see how two girls — Sarah Dunbar and Linda Hairston — witness the events around them, and learn to coexist. “For eighteen years I’ve believed what other people told me about what was right and what was wrong. From now. I’m deciding.” Sarah Dunbar and her younger sister, Ruth, have been selected to integrate at Jefferson High, along with about a dozen other black students. Sarah agrees to do […]
Road Trip!
One of y’all recommended this one, and I can’t remember who it was, but thank you. It was a great read and I’m definitely going to see if the library has anything else by this author, because she cracked me up. “Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.” So Sarah Vowell kind […]
Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Ah, this book was so much fun! I’ve read Munroe’s comic strip — xkcd — on and off for years, and have seen some of his “what if” questions online when they’ve gone viral. Here, he’s collected a bunch of weird, wonderful questions and answered them with an excellent combination of math, science, and humor. “They say there are no stupid questions. That’s obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. But it turns out that trying to […]
Quadruple Cannonball! And some chicks on a boat.
My goal this year was a triple cannonball. I seemed to have exceeded that. “He was met by a collective shriek as the brides parted like biblical waves around him.” A few others have reviewed The Ship of Brides here, but in case you’ve missed it, here’s a plot summary. At the end of World War II, hundreds of women in Australia had married British servicemen and then ended up separated from them during the course of the war. In 1946, these women took airplanes and […]