What I Happen to Be Reading At the Moment

"A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.”

 

While not 13 anymore, the desire to read almost anything and everything in order to read for fun and for experience is still around. I'm currently working on my PhD in a physical science, but I love to read and books are one of my non-science hobbies.

With or Without You - Domenica Ruta Another gem recommended to me by Powell's Indiespensable, and while at times I was frustrated with the memoirist, With or Without You fits in to the perfect medium between historical figure memoir and tell-all. Domenica Ruta chooses to open her memoir with a scene where she is riding in a car with her mother. Her mother, Kathi, has a baseball bat and proceeds to stop to bash in the windshield of a rival's car. Kathi and her dubious choices form the major events within this memoir, from the taxi driver future husband to drug dealer roommates and her harassment of Ruta once Ruta decides to leave her mother's home. At the same time as the readers learn of Kathi's outrageous behavior, they are also shown a complex mother-daughter relationship where Ruta obviously still cares for her mother despite her out of control behavior. Kathi does not become a wholly unsympathetic figure until the end of the memoir, which was about when I'd begun to grown tired of anecdotes of her behavior beginning to harm or embarrass Ruta. While all children known the feeling of being embarrassed by their parents, the end the complex relationship that had been previously portrayed turned into Ruta's story of trying to break away from her parents and strike out on her own. Ruta's mother is certainly cringe-worthy, and how Ruta makes this relationship work for as along as it can makes this memoir worth reading.

Currently reading

Native Son
Richard Wright
The Great Glass Sea
Josh Weil
The Elder Edda
Andrew Orchard, Anonymous