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ALL LADY JULY 2018- Book review: "It Ended Badly: 13 of the Worst Breakups in History" by Jennifer Wright

Oh did it ever!

This book wouldn't be my usual fare, but the author wrote another book I read recently about plagues and the heroes who fought them and her writing style was so fun and entertaining I knew I had to see what else she had written. So here we are! I knew I was in for a treat when Henry the 8th didn't look like the most insane person in this book. I mean, he's pretty bad when it comes to breakups (and by breakups we mean let's murder current wife and get us a new one that can give us a boy child!)

I'm not going to go into all of the couple but here's a few random highlights:

-Oscar Wilde has a chapter with Lord Alfred Douglas, if you know 2 things about Oscar Wilde it's probably that he is super quotable and witty and that he gay. A thing that I learned in this book was that Lord Alfred Douglas had an ancestor who was a cannibal. She was caught roasting a servant on a spit. (Just because you have money doesn't mean you have mental stability or class, amirite?) Also, Lord Alfred Douglas was NOT a good boyfriend.

-Did you know that when people use the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" they are talking about Edith Wharton's family? Super duper rich. Also, literally no one would explain to her what sex was so she thought on her wedding night her husband would perform some kind of concert. Yeah. Money apparently won't buy you sex education either. That part kind of broke my heart a little. She has a happier ending then most though.

- Duckys is 16th century slang for breasts, so feel free to use that one at the bar

- Lord Byron was just the worst in so many ways. He ghosted a woman he said he was going to marry and she sent him bloody locks of her pubic hair. Feel free to NOT use that one at the bar.

- There was a Russian ruler named Anna Ivanovna and she was apparently one of Russia's worst rulers (which is saying something because, OH LORD there have been some doozies. I mean it's an old country so law of averages but yikes.) I can't wait to learn more about her. Hopefully my local reference librarians can dig me up some books about her.


This was a quick, fun book that had me laughing and made me so glad that Henry the 8th never saw the dawn of online dating.

Announcement - All Lady July 2018!

Hi everyone!

So excited to share that it is that time of year again, All Lady July!

A time on the blog where we celebrate all things books and ladies!

There will be fun lists, things to blow your paycheck on, guest bloggers,  and obviously book reviews!

I am out of town on vacation for the first bit of July (coming atchu Houston and Austin, please don't melt me into a puddle before I get to see the Space Center!) so we will hit the ground running on the 6th when I get back (so, slightly abbreviated All Lady July!

We hope to see you around the blog!



via GIPHY

Book review: "Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog and the Strangling of a City" by Kate Winkler Dawson

I'd heard from several other book bloggers who enjoy nonfiction like I do rave about this book, so I decided to pick it up for myself. It was okay. I learned a lot but I didn't find myself rushing through whatever I was doing to get back to this book. There are two stories told in parallel, the fact that there is a terrible fog that is metaphorically strangling London and a serial killer who is literally strangling people in London. 

It was weird, but it seemed like all of the things that I liked the most about this book were little throw away sentences, not things that were part of the big overarching story. Like, a prayer starts each parliament meeting and instead of the parliament members kneeling to pray they turn and face a wall, which is because 400 years ago they were all wearing swords and that makes kneeling hard and you know, potentially dangerous.

So this fog, it was bad. It was if you were standing on your doorstep you couldn't see the sidewalk bad. It was so bad they had to shut down the subway bad. It was so bad that over the course of 5 days it killed 12,000 people. (Mostly the very old, the very young, or people with pre-existing respiratory conditions. Like, say, men who had encounters in the first world war with mustard gas.)

I found the serial killer bit less compelling. He was creepy and bad and killed a woman and her baby and his wife and several others.

I almost think that these would have been better as two separate books. Or maybe as the same book but the stories given less equal footing like they were here.

Book review: "The Shadow of the Sun" by Ryszard Kapuscinski

This book was unending in how interesting it was and how incredibly readable and approachable it is. If you were like me and thought "I should know more about African history, I wonder what I can read that won't be 600 pages and overly specific to a time period/place/topic" I can't recommend this book fast enough. I can't recommend this book fast enough, period. The author is obviously a journalist, his writing is simple and high impact and I loved it. (He talks about crossings were sometimes just a burned out shack and a bullet riddled sign and said - "The kinds of borders for which blood is spilled were still to come into being". He would get much scarier crossings later in this time there).

So the author of this book is a Polish journalist who is sent by his Polish newspaper to chase stories all over Africa in 1957. This is a huge deal because no Polish newspaper has ever done this before and he really wanted to succeed.

An interesting thing about timing, in the late 50s that's when a lot of the white colonial powers - mainly Britain- were finally exiting the continent and a lot of folks were very bitter that their departure had taken so long. This rang true with our Polish author who tried to tell people that "You were colonized? We, Poles, were also! For 130 years we were the colony of three foreign powers, all of them white!" But no one he spoke to believed him.

He focuses on his interaction with people mostly, but I learned some about animals too. Especially what happens to male lions after the age of about 20 - they get a little slower, drop out of their packs and eventually starts to hunt and eat humans since we are (surprise surprise) easier to catch then gazelles. They are desperate, which makes them even more terrifying than normal lions.

He talks about witnessing violent coups and government takeovers and marvels at how life resumes to normal in a short-ish period of time. People have grown used to it. (In regards to a coup in Nigeria in 1966- "in a country with a surface area 3 times that of Poland, inhabited by 56 million people, the coup was executed by an army numbering barely 8,000 soldiers").  He talks about the places in Africa where the slave traders landed and took off with their human cargo and how those places still felt like cursed, haunted places all of those years later. He talks about Idi Amin in one chapter, who just holds a weird fascination for me. He was ruthless and terrifying and his secret police rained terror down on people....annnnnnnd he also like to coordinate his outfits to the car he was driving that day. Not that that should surprise me, dictators are VAIN AS HELL.

Towards the end of his time in Africa, the 80s, a new scourge was making it's way across the country, not a vain dictator, not a child soldier army, not colonial powers from abroad....AIDS.

Book review: "Unbury Carol" by Josh Malerman

A few Dewey's 24 Hour Readathons ago (which the next one is coming up right quick, so go sign up) I read an awesome, terrifying, imaginative, terrifying, great, terrifying book called "Bird Box" by Josh Malerman. And then my mom read it. And I think something in us both still shrieks a little bit when we think about it. It's great. Anyway, so the author recently released the book we are going to talk about today so I took a chance that I might be so scared I cry a little while reading a picked up this book. It's not as good as Bird Box but it was creepy and made me HELLA NERVOUS a lot of the time. So, not bad!


You never specifically are told this in the book, but with all of the talk of The Trail and people riding horses and their being saloons, this book has a very Wild West feel. Carol is a vivacious,. kind woman who plays hostess in their small town often, with her husband Dwight at her side. But there is more to Carol then meets the eye, she has this strange illness like the worst type of narcolepsy ever. She suddenly falls into a coma like state where she can here everything happening around her but she can't move. After the death of a close friend, only two people in the world know about her condition - Dwight and James Moxie, the first man she ever loved but who was too scared of her condition to stay so he ran off and became an outlaw on The Trail. This becomes a problem when Dwight, sick of being in his wife's shadow and wanting all of her money to himself decides to bury her alive during one of her spells. It's. Always. The. Husband. When James finds out and hurries to be save her, Dwight hires a hitman to take out James.

So, the hitman is the best/ scariest part of this book. His name is Smoke because he loves to burn people and things. There are more people who are killed in fires in this book then I think any other book I've ever read. It's kind of a lot. I'm getting the heebeejeebies just thinking about him, if I'm honest.

What I liked about this book was the magical realism element. Carol's illness, the fact that Smoke is like the literal devil, and the fact that James is rumored to kill people without actually drawing his gun. The downside of the book for me is that the ending, which is supposed to be huge and climactic felt like a little bit of a let down. And the big twist is kind of a deus ex machina.

This book would translate well into a movie. (Why do I feel like when I say that it's a bad thing? It's not!)

A good, solid 3.2 out of 5 stars for this book.

4 things I learned about monsters from "Medusa's Face and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters" by Matt Kaplan

1. Maybe the reason that some people believed in the cyclops is elephant skulls. When an elephant dies and their skin rots away the skull has a big hole where the trunk is connected, but without the flesh of the trunk it looks like a perfect whole for a big old eyeball.

2. The amount of native tribesman in the Philippine's who have terrifying, often deadly encounters with pythons is nightmare high.

3. So you might be familiar with the succubus, which is a female demon who bends men to her will through sex, which also slowly takes their souls. The male version of a succubus is an incubus. Incubus in Latin means "to lie on top" and succubus in Latin means "to lie under". Take that however you will.

4. Garlic is a super popular tool for warding off all kinds of monsters, not just vampires. Egyptians thought it could repel ghosts. In Asia you smear it on people to prevent them from being susceptible to charms and spells cast by witches and wizards.

There was a lot of talk about rabies in this book as well which is, of course a bonus for me because I'm more than a little nuts.

This book was okay. 2.5 out of 5 stars.