LeVar Burton's Quote of the Day, The Last Bookstore in Hong Kong Closes, Quote of the Day #2, Amazon Waives Shipping Fees for the Holidays, Shelf Awareness Review, Good Luck With That by Kristan Higgins and Raised in Fire/Fused in Fire by K.F.Breene

I love LeVar Burton, from Reading Rainbow and from Roots and Star Trek The Next Generation, he's an amazing actor and reading advocate. And I agree with his words here, that reading needs to be a part of our daily diets, just like food. I know I can't go for very long without either.

Quotation of the Day

"But what we simply need to do is make sure we include the written word

as a part of our regular diets. We need to create a balance as best we

can as our modes of consumption change for our own benefit. We're

certainly living in an era where the paradigm has shifted away from the

written word into the moving pixelated image. But it's not like when

writing entered the fray, we just suddenly stopped talking [laughs].

There's no reason why we should stop reading y'all. We gotta keep

reading."

 --Actor and longtime reading ambassador LeVar Burton

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz38738314

in a q&a with Vice

This makes me sad, as it signals the end of an era, where there was at least one part of China that had freedom of the press and other freedoms that are now disappearing while the mainland Communist government takes over Hong Kong, now that it has been wrested from British rule.

Bookshop's Closure Signals New Era in Hong Kong

People Book Cafe in Hong Kong's

Causeway Bay district--the last bookshop in Hong Kong selling titles

banned by the Communist Party on the mainland--has closed

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz38796696,

"marking the last chapter of the city's historic independent publishing

scene," the Guardian reported. Human rights activists and publishers

"have raised grave concerns over the closure," which follows the

disappearance and detention in 2015 of five city booksellers.

Paul Tang closed his shop "under pressure from the government,"

according to sources contacted by the Guardian, one of whom said the

city "was once the place where mainland readers came looking for the

truth. But today, you're afraid to even mention these forbidden topics."

Benedict Rogers, co-founder and chair of the NGO Hong Kong Watch,

observed: "Hong Kong used to be a window onto China, a sanctuary for

books that tell the truth about the mainland. But freedom of expression

and of the press have been significantly eroded in recent years, and the

closure of bookshops selling banned books is a further example of this."

"This is a very worrying situation," said Agnes Chow Ting, social

activist and member of the pro-democracy party Demosisto. "A lot of

chained bookstores and book publishers in Hong Kong are controlled by

liaison office of the Chinese government."

Quotation of the Day #2

Yes! Readers are one people! Everyone who loves books and reading has something in common with readers halfway around the globe. 

Book People 'All Speak the Same Language'

"In Frankfurt, I began to understand that the role the bookstore plays

in each of our communities is the same around the world. This

universality was validated as I visited bookstores in other cities

during my trip. In Paris, Frankfurt, and Berlin, shops of different

sizes, specialties, and styles reflected their environment, and all were

busy. In Paris, Shakespeare and Company even had a velvet rope to

regulate the line of people waiting for admittance.

"Returning home and sorting through business cards, notes, and book

recommendations written on bar napkins, I realized that although I had

so many new experiences as a Bookselling Without Borders fellow, I was

always engaged and at ease among these book people from so many

countries. In a sense, we all speak the same language."

--Lyn Roberts

of Square Books http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz38796684 in Oxford, Miss., who received a 2018 Bookselling Without Borders

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz38796685 scholarship, recalling her

Frankfurt Book Fair experience in Bookselling This Week

This will doubtless add to Amazon's already bulging bottom line, and take money away from brick and mortar bookstores and companies, but I think it is still a smart move on Bezo's part. 

Amazon Waives Shipping Fee for the Holidays

This morning the company announced that for the first time it is

offering free shipping with no minimum purchase on orders for the

holiday season. The promotion waives the $25 minimum for free shipping

for non-Prime members, and shipping will take an estimated five to eight

business days. According to Seeking Alpha, Amazon will end the offer

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz38824767

when deliveries can no longer reach destinations before Christmas.

This seems to be the theme of this post, dieting, food and how society treats eating and women's bodies in particular. If you are a larger person in America, you are always the target of those who are prejudiced against your size, including doctors and nurses, EMTs and politicians and company hiring managers (and just about everyone else). This book seeks to find some answers after the author has to deal with her daughters inability to eat due to an illness. As usual, answers on the "perfect" diet are hard to come by, as there really isn't such a thing in today's food culture that is so skewed by fad diets and those whose goal is to make money off of people's fear of fat.

 

Shelf Awareness Review: The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

Good food, bad food, right food, wrong food. For many people, external

pressures and ideologies inform how they eat--so much so that they can

lose track of what their bodies are telling them. Virginia Sole-Smith, a

writer and editor, began to re-evaluate her ideas about food when her

baby daughter, Violet, suffered a medical trauma that made her stop

eating for two years. The Eating Instinct is her memoir of this

experience, given broader context by her research and interviews.

"Violet taught me that eating well cannot be about following rules; it

has to be about trusting our own instincts, which value safety, comfort

and pleasure just as much as nutrition, and sometimes more."

When her daughter drank chocolate milk or ate a cheese cracker,

Sole-Smith felt horrified, even though the goal was to get her to eat

anything by mouth, the higher in calories the better. Many parents fall

into anxious micromanagement of their child's food intake, often with

unexpected results. And when disconnection from instinct turns into an

eating disorder or obesity, "we reach a crossroads: Do you try to

correct the behavior--learning to eat according to a prescribed set of

external rules and conditions--or do you try to rediscover those

internal cues that tell us when to eat or when to stop? It's a divisive

question among doctors, therapists, and anyone who studies food."

We search for a perfect set of rules, "a way to feed ourselves that...

feels simple and right. That doesn't make us feel guilty about

everything we put into our bodies." But Sole-Smith discovers that the

wellness and nutrition professionals we look to are as susceptible to

diet culture as the rest of us, and often struggle with their own

disordered eating. Though her emphasis is on the experiences of women,

Sole-Smith explores U.S. food culture across lines of class and race.

Restrictive diets, the popularity of weight-loss surgery and fads for

"clean eating" and "detoxing" are among her targets. She talks to food

professionals and people grappling with eating disorders, including the

growing category of "orthorexia," in which a person's obsession with

healthy eating actually damages their health.

To demand a program from her would be to miss her point, but if

Sole-Smith has any advice in conclusion, it is to take a risk and trust

yourself more with food. --Sara Catterall 

Good luck With That by Kristan Higgins was a very difficult book for me to read, not only because, as a larger woman (and chubby child), I've dealt with most of the difficulties, prejudices and harassment by family and the general public (and classmates from school) for my entire life, but also because I've gained weight in recent years due to the side effects of medications I'm required to take for Crohn's disease, Sjogrens Syndrome and arthritis, (and prior to that I had to take steroids for asthma and allergies for decades). I am heavier now than I've ever been in my life. Yet doctors still constantly harranged me, over the years, about my body size, as if losing weight would somehow cure the diseases I am struggling with, when that is not the reality. (There was a recent cartoon posted to Facebook of a woman going into a doctors office because her arm fell off, and she's told by the doctor that she needs to go on a diet and lose weight. So she yells "Why do I need a diet to reattach my arm? Seriously?" and the Doctor goes on to chart that she's an "uncooperative" patient. I would imagine that my own chart from various doctors has the same kinds of notations on it, because I've been denied medical care that I needed for things like pneumonia because of my weight, which the doctor's prejudice couldn't see past to treat me.)  

So I understood the frustrations and anger and fear and body hatred of the three main protagonists, Emerson, Georgia and Marley, whose POV is switched for each chapter. But the book, which I gathered was about learning to love and accept yourself, no matter your size, begins with the terrifying event of Emerson literally dying because she weighs in excess of 600 pounds, and her organs are failing. Her posthumous diary entries catalogue her failure to take control of her eating and to stop a "feeder" boyfriend from using her as a fetish by enabling her to overeat. This kind of extreme is rare enough that making it a focal point of the story felt like a scare tactic to me, to get women to hate and fear fat even more, and put themselves on more diets that don't work. (There is a statistic that says that 98 percent of diets don't work, and the dieter gains all the weight back and then some within 4 years of losing weight. We have been, as a gender and a society, fed a line of bullcrap by the diet and exercise industry, who make billions off of the false promises they make to  women everyday. Yo-yo dieting, with your weight going up and down over and over is worse for your body than maintaining a stable weight). Here's the blurb: New York Times bestselling author Kristan Higgins is beloved for her heartfelt novels filled with humor and wisdom. Now, she tackles an issue every woman deals with: body image and self-acceptance.

Emerson, Georgia, and Marley have been best friends ever since they met at a weight-loss camp as teens. When Emerson tragically passes away, she leaves one final wish for her best friends: to conquer the fears they still carry as adults.

For each of them, that means something different. For Marley, it's coming to terms with the survivor's guilt she's carried around since her twin sister's death, which has left her blind to the real chance for romance in her life. For Georgia, it's about learning to stop trying to live up to her mother's and brother's ridiculous standards, and learning to accept the love her ex-husband has tried to give her.

But as Marley and Georgia grow stronger, the real meaning of Emerson's dying wish becomes truly clear: more than anything, she wanted her friends to love themselves. A novel of compassion and insight, Good Luck With That tells the story of two women who learn to embrace themselves just the way they are.

That last line is patently false. Georgia, whose mother so loathes herself that she is addicted to plastic surgery and is anorexic, as well as being a cruel and controlling parent to her bastard daughter, only accepts herself when she has lost all her weight due to a bleeding ulcer that is downplayed as being no big deal, when in reality, ulcers and ulcerative colitis is something that can kill you, or at the very least make you sick for the rest of your life. Yes, she learns to accept herself, but only after she's thin and anorexic. And while she notes that she's treated very differently by everyone in her life once she's thin, her nutball mother still thinks she needs to lose a few pounds to truly be acceptable to the world. Marley, meanwhile, is from a big Italian family, and has some self esteem, but as a chef is somehow seen as having a bad relationship with food, when I think the opposite is true..she is able to eat good nutritious food that she makes herself, from scratch, nearly every day. She's described as being more "rubenesque"  than fat, but she ends up with an agoraphobic, PTSD-addled and slightly autistic boyfriend who, compared to the ultra-hot chef that Georgia ends up with, is like the booby prize for the fat girl. Marley and Georgia put their inheritance from Emerson to good use, and they remove Emerson's horrible fatphobic cousin from her home and give it to some needy neighbors, but again, the idea that super obese women (and overweight/fat women) in general are wealthy or gainfully employed is a farce. A majority of fat women are poor, and discriminated against in the workplace, so much so that it is hard for us to not only find a decent job, but its even more difficult to keep it or get promotions/raises like our thin coworkers. Despite all of that, I did enjoy reading this story, with it's flowing prose and swift plot. I just wish that the author had really written a book where the fat women learned to accept themselves while remaining fat. I'd give this book a B+, and recommend it to those looking for romantic stories with plus sized heroines struggling with the demons that all women have in this prejudiced society.

 

Raised in Fire and Fused in Fire by K.F. Breene are the second and third books in her  Fire and Ice paranormal romance series. Since this trilogy is self published, I was hesitant to start reading them at all, having been disappointed in nearly all the self pubbed books I've read and reviewed in the past. However, the first book in the series, Born in Fire, wasn't half bad, so I decided to give the rest of them a try. While I enjoyed Raised in Fire, I was seriously disappointed in Fused in Fire, as the book just fell apart after the first 200 pages. Suddenly the author crammed a lot of boring description of the underworld and its denizens into pages rife with battles that were also described in minute detail. The plot slowed to a crawl and I got so bored I fell asleep twice while reading it. The ending also left a lot to be desired, and the whole "bonding with a thousand year old really possessive dead guy" was creepy and not at all romantic, IMHO. Suddenly the fiercely independent heroine is reliant on an overly controlling dead guy (whose real form is gross, but since he lives in his human glamour form, we're not supposed to be grossed out by her kissing and having sex with his decaying underlying self...shudder) to help her get where she needs to go and to rescue her from the bad guys. Really? So love makes you into a weak woman? Ugh. Here's the blurbs: 

Raised in Fire: It is a common truth in my life that when it rains, it pours. 

The killings that once plagued New Orleans are cropping up again in Seattle. The local office is stumped. I'm called out to lend a fresh set of eyes, and my unique magical touch.

 It's only when I get there that I realize the Seattle office isn't stumped at all.They're being silenced by the Mages' Guild, a corrupt magical institution that doesn't want word to get out of what is plaguing the city. Worse, news of my magic might've slipped down to the underworld, hitting the ears of some extremely powerful demons.
What I thought was a routine murder investigation turns into a fight for my life. With the help of Darius, my stalker elder vampire, and my dual-mage side kicks, I somehow have to dodge the Guild in order to stop one of the most powerful demons I've ever encountered. If I don't? It'll escape back down below with proof of what I really am.
My life hangs in the balance, and this time, I can't see a way out.

 

Fused in Fire: I thought the threat from Seattle was finished. That we showed up in time and took care of business.
I hate being wrong. It really ruins my day.
When Roger, the alpha of the North American pack, shows up at my door with the news that a demon has made it to the Underworld with knowledge of me, some hard decisions have to be made.
Do I stay above ground, with all my magical friends, and wait for the battle to come to me? Or do I seek the demon out, and pluck the threat out by the root?
I don’t want my friends to die on my behalf. I could never life with myself. But if I venture into the Underworld, it’ll be the most perilous journey of my life.
This time, it isn’t just my life hanging in the balance, it is my eternity.

I also noticed that Raised in Fire had about 5 or 6 typos, like the first book, but the third and final volume had more typos and grammar mistakes than you can shake a stick at. It also had more cliches and trope-moments that were taken right out of the "how to write a paranormal romance" handbook. Since I felt like the author just phoned it in on the last book, I will give these two books a C, and only recommend them to people who can't abide not finishing a whole series, no matter how bad it becomes.