Tremmpleton Family Book Reviews: Becoming by Michelle Obama

Hi Everyone! For this post we will be doing another book review for Becoming, the memoir from Michelle Obama, whom we are going to assume needs little introduction.

We read this book together on Audible, read by Michelle Obama herself. It took us a while (to Carrie's frustration... remember she's been reading >100 books per year lately! She is used to going fast...) because we primarily listen in the car. Without a big trip happening, our listening was confined mostly to the drive to/from work (~15-20 minutes per day) and to/from the grocery story (~30 min total each weekend). Michael also is not quite as good at listening to audiobooks as Carrie, who can go at 1.75x speed or even faster on her own. For this, Michael convinced Carrie to keep it at 1.5x speed, which was still a bit fast for him. The difference in speed preference aside, we do enjoy listening to audiobooks together and will probably be posting about some more in the future!

Keeping in mind that both of us are pretty liberal and fans of the Obama's, we really enjoyed the book, which told the story of Michelle's upbringing on the south side of Chicago through her time as First Lady of the United States and everything in between.  There were a lot of things neither of us knew about both Obamas and things that occurred in the background of President Obama's Senate and Presidential campaigns. Overall it was an incredibly interesting read!

Michelle grew up in a working class family and attended a prestigious high school and college (Princeton). While her educational path does feel somewhat normal for someone of such social stature, her perspective is refreshing, as literally no one writing from her position as a former First Lady also understand first hand the struggles of middle and lower class families of color. The challenges she faced, both externally and internally, are something we all need to recognize (and attempt to empathize) more, particularly those of us coming from positions of more privilege... white people, and white men in particular.


A fascinating aspect of this book is that the reader gets to see Michelle Obama develop and grow as a person. Such a sense of growth can be difficult to achieve in a book about a person like this, but Michelle accomplishes the task with great success, in part probably because of her unique trajectory compared with many other prominent politicians and first ladies. 

Around the middle of the book, after Michelle has become a successful lawyer and has just begun her relationship with President Obama, she faces an internal struggle to align her true interests with her career. This was a part that was particularly interesting to Michael who, similar to Michelle, always had a planed trajectory for his education and career path. In part because of the contrast with how President Obama planned (or didn't plan) his own career path, Michelle questions whether she is truly happy doing what she is doing. The fact that she was able to question this, and even decided to make a huge career shift, was really interesting to Michael, who often finds it difficult to really evaluate such things or even consider a deviation from "the plan". This is something that Michael is constantly trying to be better about and, while he is happy with his career as it is currently, the fact that people like Michelle Obama have had to face similar questions and overcome their own preconceived notions of success was really powerful to read about. 

Another very interesting aspect to Michelle's story is her perspective on Barack's presidential campaigns. The reader gets a look at the role of a (potential) First Lady in the campaign process and the specific challenges Michelle faces because of her race. We often discuss how Barack faced specific challenges and different levels of scrutiny because he is black, but Michelle also faced the specter of racism and in a different way because she is also a women. The challenges and very real fears around raising black children as such a prominent family was also really interesting and not often discussed.

One challenge that Michael faced while reading was his own cynicism. Given that Michelle is involved in politics, though not running for any office herself, it is easy to assume that some things are written in order to develop particular optics for Barack, Michelle, and even the Democratic Party as a whole. While reading Michael often find himself questioning the authenticity of statements, or the motivation behind telling certain anecdotes. In the end, and even as he was thinking these things, Michael believes his cynicism was largely uncalled for, but good to be aware of. If the reader is not careful, such cynicism can ruin the possibility of getting anything out of Michelle's story, and there is a lot to get out of it!

Similar to Carrie and Michael, Michelle and President Obama's relationship seems to thrive in a balance between compromise and determination. We could relate in many ways to the strong willed choices and thoughtful choices made by the Obamas over the years. It was eye opening and quite enjoyable to be able to see the former president and his wife as relatable people, who lived a normal (aka not easy) life before walking through the doors of the White House. 

This book gets a high recommendation from both of us. For learning more about different cultures. for American (recent) history, and for self reflection. The story of the Obama's journey is what so closely connects them to the American people. Life doesn't have to be easy to help you in Becoming something great. 

Tremmpleton Family Book Reviews: Recursion by Blake Crouch

This is exciting! Our first book review on this blog... this is something we hope to do more regularly. Just a bit of an intro, since this is our first one... Over the last couple years Carrie has gotten back into reading voraciously. That means that between audio books, normal books, and graphic novels, she has read 165 books over the course of 2018. But it has been a progression. The year before she read 52 and before that, well, she didn't really keep track. Reading wasn't really a part of either of our routine any more, but a couple years ago between a good friend adding her to an amazing bookish community on Facebook and Michael's encouragement, she dove head first back between the pages of book after book. She warned him that once she started, she may not be able to stop!

Carrie's tenacity for reading is (slowly) rubbing off on Michael. While previously Michael would have been lucky to have read 10 books in a year (obviously we don't count academic journal articles here... but even those Michael admits he often just reads the abstracts and looks at figures!), last year he read 30 books and this year so far he has read 7! No, before you ask, Michael is definitely not jealous of Carrie's ability to read so much so quickly....

You can also find both Carrie and Michael on Goodreads, an awesome site to keep track of your own reading and to find new books to enjoy. You can also follow what Carrie is reading (on a less consistent basis on her Instagram page @booksbrewsandbanjocat!

And this brings us here to our first book review blog post! We hope you enjoy! Any and all feedback is welcome (as it always is). We hope to provide a unique viewpoint on books we read and hopefully give you some ideas for books you want to read yourself!

The Book: Recursion

For this first post we are reviewing a book we both read from one of our favorite thriller/suspense authors, Blake Crouch, best known probably for his Wayward Pines series (recently adapted to a TV show that neither of us has watched). Pines is a fantastic series that we both highly recommend. Another book he has written that we both like is Dark Matter (which we read during our 5 day journey from Seattle to Connecticut a year and a half ago).

So, we have a history with Crouch's work. When Crown Publishing granted Carrie access to an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) of his newest book, Recursion, set to be released June 11, 2019, we were super excited! A quick side note about ARCs... Carrie and Michael both have accounts on NetGalley, a site that publishing companies use to distribute ARCs of upcoming books for free in order to generate buzz about them (through, e.g. Amazon and Goodreads reviews) prior to release. Michael is only just getting into NetGalley, but Carrie has been working on building a reputation for herself as a reader and reviewer of ARCs. So, she requested an ARC of Recursion, she got lucky and Crown Publishing accepted the request! Thanks to both Net Galley and Crown Publishing for making this early review possible!

Recursion tells the story of Helena, a seasoned scientist trying to cure Alzheimer’s with a novel invention she has developed over years of research. When on the precipice of losing funding and forced to leave her work behind, Helena finds herself bankrolled by a mysterious, wealthy business mogul, Marcus Slade. Of course, things are not as they appear and it becomes clear that Slade has his own plans and that there are aspects to Helena's work that even she doesn't understand. A parallel story is told about Barry, a divorced and lonely NYC detective, still grieving for a long dead daughter. The stories told side-by-side helps to steady the pace of the story while drawing the reader into the world, as Barry’s story starts out more than 10 years later than Helena’s. Crouch shifts between telling us the origins of the story’s central mechanic/mystery/threat and its effect on the world, which is brilliantly done. To put it simply (and avoid spoilers), the central theme of the book surrounds memories and their connection with our perception of reality. In the book, characters experience false memories of an entirely different life they never lived. The main characters are trying to figure out where these false memories are coming from and put an end to them. Of course, the plot gets much thicker from there, but we will avoid spoilers for now.

Review

Between ourselves and Carrie's fellow bookish community admins, we had pretty extensive conversation surrounding Recursion. Put very simply, we were both completely enthralled VERY quickly and had a hard time getting much else done while reading Recursion, as per usual for us with Crouch's books. Suffice to say, the Tremmpleton's highly recommend Recursion for sci-fi/thriller lovers. If you struggle with reading (or being able to skim) science jargon, you may struggle with this one a bit. Michael enjoyed that science was used to give substance to the plot, but Crouch (mostly) avoided trying too hard to explain things in detail, which often leads to poor representation of science in fiction.  He hates it when people just throw out random quantum mechanics terms used incorrectly. Crouch does just enough to make things believable to the reader.

One of our bookish friends compared Recursion's plot to Chutes and Ladders, which we found to be both amusing and accurate. Each time you might feel confident you know what's about to happen in this plot, you are sent shooting down another course of memory. Told in part from both Barry and Helena's perspectives, you find yourself both jumping through timelines and narrations throughout the 300+ pages of the book. The shifts are subtle at first, then all of a sudden you are grasping to the dates at the top of each subsection to try to orient yourself in the story. It is a literary roller coaster ride through memories, possibly a way to mimic with the whiplash one might feel trying to keep up with someone suffering with Alzheimer's. The research Helena is developing is part of a perceived manic need to help her mother who is an Alzheimer's patient herself. While you work your way through Crouch's various stems of memory for Barry and Helena, you being to realize that something here is not quite right.

One thing Crouch has done in Recursion that was largely missing from his previous books was include a female main character that was not only strong and independent, but also interesting and flawed. Importantly, Helena's character is not only central to the story, but changes and grows as the story progresses. These are the characters we need more of in fiction (and science fiction in particular). Stories need to have women not only in positions of power and with strong, independent personalities, the also need women to be realistic and interesting to read about. So often (as is true in many of Crouch's other works) women characters are two dimensional. They are not developed as much and, even when they are, they are not given flaws or personal challenges to overcome. This was a nice departure from this and the fact that it comes from a male writer is important.

Now, let's get into the good stuff, be prepared if you read past this point, there may be spoilers, so stop now to hold onto your bookish innocence about Recursion.

We felt all of the feels for Barry throughout Recursion, going from his original tortured timeline to eventually growing with Helena to become a brilliant scientist and saving the day. This aspect of the story felt very cookie cutter for Crouch. Despite his work creating a female character determined to first meet her goal, then discover how to counteract her own work, Crouch did not enable Helena to finish what she started. Through discussion and further exploration of the book, we came to believe that this aspect may be an inexplicit reference back to the Alzheimers existent in Helena's family. A "que sera sera" moment to show why messing with time and memories is a bad idea, but come on Crouch. Why couldn't you let Helena figure out how to tie up the mess she made on her own?!

One other aspect of the story that didn't sit well with Carrie was the inclusion of two characters portrayed as drug users (implying they are both addicted). When traveling between timelines and memories, they all of a sudden without any support or treatment were able to live lives independent of their addictions. Now, don't get us wrong, we know that a time-traveling memory chair is not realistic, but in an otherwise realistic world, this felt like a massive plot hole. Slade going from being a self-aware addict in the first timeline, to going back and choosing to build an empire for himself instead is a sorely misguided idea. Addiction is a disease, not a choice. This could have given Crouch a great opportunity to stress the importance of support and treatment for addiction, but instead it is glossed over as something that can simply be corrected with a choice and force of will. In a very small percentage of people with substance use addictions this might be possible but for most it is just not realistic.

Final Thoughts:

 Both Carrie and Michael really liked this book. The story was gripping, the characters were interesting, and the concepts were creative and new. The inclusion of a fully fleshed out female main character was a welcome improvement over Crouch's other books, but still fell into the same old routine of letting the man save the day in the end. There were also some problematic representations of drug addiction that, while trivial to the overall plot, ended up misrepresenting the nature of addiction. Still, despite these problems, Recursion is a great read by an author who has become one of our family's favorites. A solid 5 stars from each of us. We highly recommend picking this book up when it hits shelves in June!