2022 ONTD Reading Challenge discussion

Feel free to comment here and let us know how your reading went this month, if you had trouble completing this month's task, if you enjoyed the book you read and whether you'd recommend it.

I read When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. I would recommend it, although I didn't love the book.

I ended up reading:

Never Have I Ever: My Life (So Far) Without a Date (3 stars - meh)

Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed - A Memoir of the Cleveland Kidnappings (holy shit what a hard read but Michelle Knight is an incredible human being)

Crazy Love (pretty good - other than a few nitpicky issues i took with some of her descriptors of her community, i found this to be pretty engrossing)

I also just started Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture which i'm not sure if it counts for this month or not. I only read the first essay and i cant stop thinking about it.

I read 4 memoirs this month!

A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea - 4 stars - really disturbing account of what life in NK is like, but also discussed Korean-Japanese tension and how he was treated as half-Korean in Japan and as half-Japanese in Korea. A couple odd editing/translation mistakes, but overall very good.

Lakota Woman - 4 stars - really important memoir that highlights life on reservations for American Indians and the clashes they had with the US government in the 70s. I learned a lot from this book, though it was written in an oral history style, so it jumped around and some things were mentioned briefly and never expanded upon. Still, a great read.

Wishful Drinking - 3.5 stars - I was really hoping I'd enjoy this one more than I did. There were some glimmers of brilliant writing, but I found myself wanting a lot more because the book was very short. I think the stories would have been funnier seeing her live instead of reading them, as I think some of them needed the right delivery to have the right impact. I did enjoy it though.

Saving Alex: When I Was Fifteen I Told My Mormon Parents I Was Gay, and That's When My Nightmare Began - 5 stars - Wow. This book made me so emotional. I was so sad for Alex and so angry at all the adults who either failed her or outright abused her. I think this is an extremely important book, and as soon as I finished it, I texted my mom to tell her to order it for her library (she's a high school librarian). It's a must-read, in my opinion.

Okay, time for me to read a bunch of fluffy stuff next month :)

You'd think I would have had all the time in the world to read last week when I was vacationing on the beach...but not with two small kids. XD

The only book I finished for the challenge was Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, which was actually really interesting and got me thinking about death in a different way than I did before. It helped me in a few small but important ways that are really hard to explain, and I recommend it. Note that the event that caused her interest in death was her witnessing the accidental death of a little girl at a shopping mall at 8 years old - I found that to be a tough event to read about.

I started re-reading Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 for kicks (and I have mixed feelings; Luttrell's story is absolutely worth telling and reading, but I could do with less Texas and Bush worship and less "liberal media" bashing), but I'll probably wander off to something else since I've read it before and July brings a new challenge.

I also cheated a little and read Afterwar, a weird-ass book I'll come back to in...October, is it? When we have the post-apocalyptic/dystopian challenge.

I read The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt. It was a wild ride, ancient Egypt was crazy ya'll.

I read Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl. It's the first of his (I believe two) memoirs. I really like Dahl's books and this provided an insight into his background that I thought was really interesting. You can definitely see where he got those awful adults in his stories from.

It's written in pretty simple language, and I think even children can read it (it's published by Puffin after all), but like everything by Dahl it did get pretty dark sometimes.

If you are not a Roald Dahl reader, I would say this book would be of little interest to you, but I personally enjoyed it!

I read Geisha, a Life and it was interesting, although I found her writing style too kind for my taste. I guess it makes sense for her to be so nice since her memoir served to dispel the idea of the geisha as put forth in Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha (she won a lawsuit against his lying ass).

I also read A House in the Sky. It follows this young, idealistic woman who wants to travel the world. She decides to go to Somalia of all places and is held hostage for over a year. This memoir is her account of what happened during that year in captivity. It's disturbing and terrifying.

I read Almost a Woman which I really enjoyed. It's the second part after When I Was Puerto Rican. It's a woman's memoir starting as a girl in Puerto Rico to a woman in 1960's New York City. I find it interesting relating to a lot of things she experienced, being a Mexican-American and moving to the city.

I read 2 memoirs and 1 biography this month.

Saving Alex: When I Was Fifteen I Told My Mormon Parents I Was Gay, and That's When My Nightmare Began - This was good but also really heavy. While I'm aware of gay conversion camps, especially as they are still common in the US, I had never read a book about someone's experience in one. My heart broke for Alex.

Lakota Woman - This is probably one of the most important memoirs I've read. Mary Crow Dog had been through so much. I learned so much from this book. I believe every American must read this.

Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter - This one was tough. What happened to Rosemary Kennedy was downright despicable. The treatment she received from her parents, as well as the aftermath of the lobotomy she was forced to have is going to stay with me. I was sad and angry while reading this.

I read Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness which I found really interesting. There's so much we don't know about the human brain, which is fascinating, because all of the possibilities, and terrifying, when something goes wrong. The author recounts, to the best of her abilities seeing as she doesn't remember part of it and looking at tapes, interviewing people, etc. her "month of madness."

The part that stuck me, is that this event unfolded in 2009, (view spoiler)[and by that time she was 200+ person to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. By 2010 it had doubled. (hide spoiler)] How long has this disease been around? How long has it been misdiagnosed?

(that's prob not a real spoiler, lol, but just in case)

I decided to go easy for this month and read Spinning by Tillie Walden. It's a young lesbian's graphic novel memoirs of her 12 years doing competitive figure skating, with coming of age, coming out stories all intertwined. It was really poignant and moving, but also a really quick, engaging read!

I read and enjoyed Wishful Drinking. It was a quick, short read, and jumps around a bit like a stand-up routine, which makes sense. Carrie was funny and clever, and I appreciate her candor about addiction and bipolar disorder, and her life in general. I’m a bit sad now, but it’s somehow not as bad as I thought it’d be, probably because of that bluntness and a pretty varied picture of her life despite how short the book is.

I've been reading The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics but it's really slow going. I'm going to shelve it for a bit and read something for July's challenge and come back to it.

Super late but I'm catching up slowly. I read Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America. It was super easy to listen to (I got the audiobook) and made me laugh at times. I love having someone speak about their life, their family, and their culture.

I read As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride which was really cute, especially listening to Cary read the book! It was interesting reading some backstory