Welcome!
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t reading at least one book. I devour them, make time for them, hunt for bargains, and love to talk with other readers like you.
When I was trying to sum up my favorite 2016 reads, I realized I read mostly in three categories: books I learn from, books I use to relax, and books that are about resisting patriarchy, racism, and the status quo. So, that’s how I’m organizing my blog posts here. (I hope you’ll check out my favorite 2017, 2018, and 2019 reads also.)
I’m also the author of the Amazon best-selling Kick Pain in the Kitchen, about how to find holistic pain relief.
Find me at Goodreads and on the Litsy app as BarbaraTheBibliophage!
Book Review: Zone One by Colson Whitehead
Zone One from Colson Whitehead isn’t your typical zombie novel. Not that I’m a regular reader of the genre. But I know my fantasy and horror. What Whitehead does is show us the mind of one man in his post-pandemic world. (Yes, I read another pandemic book.) This world...
Book Review: We Are Indivisible by Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin
We are Indivisible: A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump is all politics. Authors Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin started a grassroots movement in the wake of the 2016 election results. In this book, they explain what led to those results, and what the potential...
Book Review: Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion
Joan Didion invites us into late 1960s Hollywood in her novel Play It as It Lays. Maria (pronounced Mar-eye-ah) Wyeth is a struggling actress, whose fledgling career is in a stall. Although she’s married to a connected and somewhat powerful man, Carter Lang, they’re...
Book Review: And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts
Randy Shilts creates a tour de force history of the early years of the AIDS epidemic in And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic. It’s 600 pages of intense details, drawn from thousands of interviews with 900+ people. Despite being published in...
Book Review: Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
Carol Rifka Brunt created a debut novel with a huge emotional wallop. Tell the Wolves I’m Home hits the pain of teen years, family tensions, grief, and a looming virus. It’s set in the 1980s, when AIDS was just coming into the national consciousness. June, our 14-year...
Book Review: The Bourbon Thief by Tiffany Reisz
Tiffany Reisz combines one part romance, one part mystery, and two parts family dysfunction in this Kentucky bourbon themed novel. At its center are Paris and Tamara, both women driven to have what they want, logic be damned. It pulled me along like the distillery...
Book Review: Hiding in Plain Sight by Sarah Kendzior
Sarah Kendzior has done it again with Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America. This is 320 pages of hard truths, and may or may not feel like healthy quarantine reading. Especially considering how much scarier everything has...
Book Review: Attention, A Love Story by Casey Schwartz
Casey Schwartz writes a memoir and social history mash up in Attention, A Love Story. She’s a thirty-something woman who started using Adderal, a drug to treat ADHD, in college. But she took it without being diagnosed. It’s just one of those things college kids do,...
Book Review: Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell
Author David Morrell skillfully blends history and mystery in his 2013 novel, Murder as a Fine Art. Morrell uses real-life historical figures and inserts them into likely situations. Plus, he bases events on the history surrounding their lives. In addition, he...
Book Review: The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker
Marcus Goldman and Harry Quebert are New York-based writers in this mystery from Swiss-born Joël Dicker. But none of the action takes place in Manhattan. Instead it is set at Harry’s New Hampshire home, in the small town of Somerset. Goldman is a former student of...
Book Review: Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Tressie McMillan Cottom tells it like it is in Thick: and Other Essays. This one sentence from the titular essay encapsulates her perspective for me. “I do not paint ethereal black worlds where white people can slip into our narratives and leave unscathed by judgment...
Book Review: Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore
Elizabeth Wetmore crafts a multi-layered debut novel in Valentine. To me, it reads like a book written by a more experienced author. She takes many points of view and melds them together into a narrative as slick and sticky as unrefined oil. Which is fitting since...
Book Review: Notorious RBG by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik
Look no further than Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg if you’re hungry for inspiration in difficult times. The authors, Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik, pull together stories, photos, drawings, and even text from Supreme Court decisions. The...
Book Review: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Angie Thomas inhabits her main character Starr Carter’s voice in The Hate U Give. Starr is an African American teen living in a rough neighborhood. But her life is so much more than that. She’s got two younger brothers, plus a mom and dad who work their fingers to the...
Book Review: Dopesick by Beth Macy
Beth Macy tells hard truths in her 2018 book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America. To me, it’s about the way capitalism allows one group of people to harm another, all in pursuit of the almighty dollar and in the guise of treating a...
Book Review: Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
Dear Kevin Wilson: Thank you for giving me something to laugh at while on lock down in my house. Nothing to See Here offered me hours of escape, into the world of kids who catch on fire and the pliable definitions of parental love and family. It was a life saver for a...
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I will definitely recommend Kick Pain in the Kitchen to my patients: Those who are looking to avoid pharmaceutical treatment and those who want to combine western medicine with alternative therapies.
Jane A. Swartz
ARNP, MSN, Rheumatology Nurse Practitioner
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