The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer

My rating: 5/5 stars

“I think there are two kinds of feminist. The famous ones, and everyone else. Everyone else, all the people who go and do what they’re supposed to and don’t get a lot of credit for it, and don’t have someone out there everyday telling them they’re doing an awesome job.”

The Female Persuasion

This had been on my TBR for foreverrrrrrr! & I’m so glad I finally got a chance to read it because there wasn’t a single thing I didn’t like about this book. It held my attention from start to finish.

The Female Persuasion follows Greer Kadetsky’s life from high school into adulthood with particular focus on her relationship with a well-known feminist Faith Frank and the impact she will inevitably have on Greer’s life. A good number of pages also focus on Greer’s other relationships such as the ones with her high school boyfriend Cody and college best friend Zee.

This is the second book by Meg Wolitzer that I’ve read and once again, there’s just something about her writing that I love! I feel she has an ability to capture the ‘every day’ things about life in a way no one else does. I honestly can’t even explain it but wow this was a fantastic read! The more I read Wolitzer’s writing and other similar stories the more I realize I loveee stories that stretch through different decades/ years. There’s just something nice about being able to witness a character’s development over a lengthy period of time.

Last Night A Superhero Saved My Life by Liesa Mignogna, Austin Grossman, Carrie Vaughn, Brendan Deneen, Neil Gaiman, Leigh Bardugo, Ron Currie Jr., Jodi Picoult and more.

My rating: 3.5/5 stars

“The most compelling and dangerous villains in life and literature aren’t so terribly obvious—it’s the ones who might try to do good, before fate deals them one too many blows. The ones who continue to believe, even in their darkest moments, that their motives are pure—that any destruction they cause to the ones they genuinely love is unavoidable.”

One of the most unique essay collections I’ve read. I sometimes feel like my love for superheroes and the comic book genre is something I can’t explain so to see a whole collection of essays from numerous writers talking about their favourite superheroes— how these heroes changed, saved, or impacted their lives was something I was really excited to read.

Some stories were more light hearted than others. Some were extremely personal and deep. The book is actually broken into six sections:
– Superheroes and Being Human
– Superheroes and Love
– Superheroes and Writing
– Superheroes and Gender
– Superheroes and Childhood
– Superheroes and Trauma

Even with those who wrote about the same super heroes (and as I’m sure you can guess, some heroes show up more than once: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman), each story was different.

My favourites from this collection were:
– Everything I Know About Love, I Learned From Gambit and Rogue by Karina Cooper
– The Hero I Needed by Liesa Mignogna

Overall a very refreshing read & a nice reminder that fictional worlds and stories can indeed change lives.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara

My rating: 4/5 stars

True Crime isn’t usually my cup of tea but I found myself throughly invested in this story. McNamara is an incredible writer and her accounts of the Golden State’s Killer’s attacks are hauntingly detailed and terrifyingly vivid.

A feeling I felt often throughout this book was “disbelief”. A single man had murdered over ten people and raped over 50 women in California, all within a decade and yet, had somehow managed to avoid ever being caught? I just couldn’t believe it. So many witnesses, so much evidence, close-calls and yet this man managed to avoid escape every single time.

When I think about the research and time that went into this book, I’m blown away. McNamara interviewed many of the detectives that worked the case and took trips to the scene of the crimes. She lived and breathed this mystery.

Unfortunately, McNamara passed away in 2016 before she could finish writing this book – so parts of it were pieced together by her colleague. At the time this book was published (February 2018), the Golden State Killer still had not been captured. However, two months later, on April 24, 2018 – he will finally be arrested. I only wish that McNamara could have lived to see it.

The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others by Tali Sharot

My rating: 3/5 stars

This book is packed with lots of information but is written in a way that’s easy to digest without feeling like information overload.

I learned some really interesting perspectives, concepts and ideas. To name a few that stuck with me:

– Confirmation bias – meaning we are more likely to believe data that supports things we already believe and question data that validates things we oppose.

-It’s easier to change people’s beliefs if you appeal to their emotion rather than pulling statistics or valid data because our brains simply just don’t really register numbers in that way.

– As humans we can sometimes deliberately choose to ignore negative information that can make us feel bad and seek positive information that can make us feel good.

– Our ability to change other people can also depend on those people’s emotional mind-set at the time. Their reaction to you can basically vary depending on what kind of day they had etc.

– I also found the discussion about the whole “two heads is better than one” concept very interesting. How people tend to agree with the majority because theres this notion that if more people are saying ‘xyz” then they must be right. Which is kind of frightening when you think about it because as Sharot says in this book:

“There are numerous examples of ideas that were once accepted by the majority, in a specific time and place, but are now considered false–for example, the idea that women are not fit for higher education and the belief that the world is flat”.

It’s always fascinating learning about the brain, how it works , what it’s capable of, what it tolerates, what it willingly chooses to ignore. Overall this was a pretty interesting book. I didn’t finish this thinking “wow I’m ready to go change minds and influence people” but I definitely left with a better understanding about why we are the way that we are and how we can continuously improve ourselves.