Everything Sad Is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri

 

9/10

This was a very enjoyable book. Told from the perspective of a child, it covers the author/narrator's life growing up in Iran, becoming a refugee, and living in Oklahoma, with a lot of family/cultural history weaved throughout. This was a very unique book where the author's voice was very distinctive. I enjoyed the weaving of the stories and patchwork presentation and how it tied to the imagery of the weaving of the Persian rugs and patchwork story and memories of a refugee and the telling of the stories in the 1001 Arabian Nights. I also liked how the book title came from The Lord of the Rings, surprisingly. He mentions the part where Sam sees Gandalf come back after thinking he was dead, "And Sam thinks maybe all the sad parts of the adventure will come untrue." That was a fun little discovery. Very solid and very enjoyable book. Another one I would highly recommend to really any reader of any age.

Lots of great quotes and thoughts throughout; here's a few:

"If we can just rise to the challenge of communication -- here in the parlor of your mind -- we can maybe reach across time and space and every ordinary thing to see so deep into the heart of each other that you might agree that I am like you. I am ugly and I speak funny. I am poor. My clothes are used and my food smells bad. I pick my nose. I don't know the jokes and stories you like, or the rules to the games. I don't know what anybody wants from me. But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw. Like you, I want a friend."

"It's a miracle that anyone would ever fall in love with someone else and -- of all the people in the world -- that person loves them back. Like if you fell off a building and landed in a pillow truck, somehow."

"Making anything assumes there's a world worth making it for."

"[H]ow many Christians do you know who give a tenth to the church?"

"It seemed so obvious that everything was already eternal. That something made all of it."

"[T]he only way to stop believing something is to deny it yourself. To hide it. To act as if it hasn't changed your life."

"Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love."

"He's a God who listens as if we are his most important children, and I think He speaks to tell us so."

"[A]bove all other laws is the law of love."

"Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you've never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it's a loving thing to do. You speak someone else's words to yourself, and hear them for the first time. What you're doing now is listening to me in the parlor of your mind, but also speaking to yourself, thinking about the parts of me you like or the parts that aren't funny enough. You evaluate, like Mrs. Miller says. You think and wrestle with every word."

"[W]hat you believe about the future will change how you live in the present." 

Carthage Conspiracy by Dallin H. Oaks and Marvin S. Hill

 

10/10

One of the easiest 10 out of 10's of all time. I loved everything about this book. I never remember really learning anything about what happened legally after the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum. So pretty much everything in this book was new to me and it was super fascinating. It was so extremely thorough but never boring and never a simple recitation of data/information. It was told in such an enjoyable and readable narrative. It really was impressive when you consider all the moving parts and characters in play, but everything was kept in perfect order and was never confusing. As for the history itself, there were five men ultimately indicted and put to trial for the murder of Joseph on the legal theory of conspiracy and not that they were the actual men who fired the bullet(s) that killed him. Thomas Sharp and Levi Williams seemed to be the biggest scumbags of the five. The book provides so much detail about the legal maneuverings of both the prosecution and defense; but again, it was never boring. The defense pulled an unprecedented move on the day the trial was supposed to begin by submitting affidavits from the indicted murderers saying that they felt prejudiced against by the local sheriff and county commissioners. The Judge went for it and got Elisors to select a new jury and the final jury had no Mormons even though Mormons were a huge portion of the population of Hancock county. The prosecution did a pretty poor job overall, but was put in a very tough situation, including Mormons not wanting to help or be involved at all. Basically, there were three main witnesses for the prosecution that provided enough details, that if believed, was enough to convict four of the five men. The problem was that two of the three witnesses were discredited pretty easily by a very good defense team. The prosecuting attorney unexpectedly during closing arguments removed all three witnesses from consideration even though that was the entirety of his case. When all was said and done, there really wasn't any way a jury could convict any of the five men even if there were Mormons in the jury. Another shady character was Franklin A. Worrell who pretty obviously was committing perjury by not being fully truthful on the witness stand. He was the lieutenant in charge of the Carthage Grays which were the guards at the jail who pretty clearly were part of the orchestrated effort to kill Joseph, including most likely having his men fire blanks into the mob. There are a thousand other details I could mention. The last thing I'll mention is that it was interesting that the same five men were going to have a trial for the murder of Hyrum right after they were acquitted for the murder of Joseph. The prosecutor asked for more time and was granted it. He then went to work and had several promising leads with new witnesses but randomly didn't even show up on the day of the trial. The trial was continued to the next day and he didn't show up again and so the case was dismissed. The authors conclude based on a letter from the prosecutor to Governor Ford that Ford basically was satisfied with the trial for Joseph's murder and didn't need the prosecutor to push any further for a trial for Hyrum. Also, the book had a bunch of interesting details about what happened after the trial and leading up to the Mormons exodus from Nauvoo. Such a great book and really a must read. Highly recommend.

Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie

 

8/10

A month ago I made a post about Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party and mentioned how I have done a poor job selecting which of her books to read and that my next one would need to be one of her well-known books. Well, for some reason, I still didn't do that. Not sure what comes over me sometimes with my book selections. Fortunately, I really liked this one. A fun part about this one is that it did not involve either Poirot or Miss Marple. The story is set in Egypt around 2,000 B.C. The father's unlikable, scheming concubine gets murdered. Agatha does a great job setting this story up and then making everyone appear to have a motive which makes for a great murder mystery. It also had the unique element, at least in the Agatha books I've read thus far, where the murderer keeps on murdering. This happened in my favorite, The ABC Murders, but the others have had just one murder that is trying to be solved. There's an added element of excitement when murders continue to happen. There was this one moment where the main character Renisenb gets isolated with the character that I suspected was the murderer and it was rather intense, but it turned out that he was not the killer so all was well. The scene where the killer is finally revealed at the end is also really well done.

 One quote:

 "[O]nce the heart is opened to evil - evil blossoms like poppies amongst the corn."

Agatha Christie rankings:

1. The ABC Murders
2. Death Comes as the End 
3. 4:50 from Paddington
4. Elephants Can Remember
5. At Bertram's Hotel
6. Hallowe'en Party

Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum

8/10

I read this one a little over two weeks ago. And with this post, I am officially all caught up on posting the books that I have read. Some said it couldn't be done. It's been decades since I've been caught up. Hopefully, moving forward, I can post my book here as soon as I finish it. And maybe now I can make updates to my baseball stadiums blog. But back to the matter at hand. This was a fun book. Slocum details his solo trip around the world. The first person to ever sail around the world alone. He did this from 1895 to 1898. It was a very fascinating read. He departs from Massachusetts and crosses across the Atlantic to Gibraltar, with some stops here and there on islands along the way. Interestingly, he was planning to sail through the Mediterranean Sea, through the Suez canal to the Red Sea and out into the Indian Ocean, but he got too worried about pirates and decided to reverse course entirely and cross back over the Atlantic and go around the world the other way through the Strait of Magellan at the bottom of Argentina, which seemed like the most dangerous part of the entire trip. He had some close calls with some natives down there, and interestingly had to re-enter it and try again when his first attempt to exit failed due to stormy seas. His ability and willpower to make on-the-fly adjustments and massive decisions is actually very impressive. He then crosses the Pacific, again stopping at some islands along the way, including the Robinson Crusoe island in the Juan Fernandez islands. He again changes plans and reverses course when he decides to not go around Australia to the south, but instead the north. He eventually makes his way around Cape Town South Africa, across the Atlantic again for the third time, and all the way back to the same spot where he first departed. It was interesting that much of the book is actually about his time spent on land at his various stops. Massive months' long trips across the seas are often covered in a few paragraphs or less. He had his tiny little boat so well built and prepared that it largely steered itself while he sat in the cabin and read books all day long. He is a good writer and quite funny at parts. He also wrote this book in such a way where none of it came off as boastful or arrogant, often going out of his way to draw attention to his mistakes, which made the book more enjoyable to read. A part of me is quite jealous of people like him who got to experience and see so much of the world. I knew nothing about this adventure, so I was very glad to have read this one.
 

The Fallen Star by Claudia Gray

 

7/10

I read this one a little over a month ago. It was my last book of 2025. It was decent. As I was reading, I kept feeling like there were earlier stories or a prior history that was being referenced but not explained. I was about 1/3 of the way into the book before realizing that it is the third book in a trilogy and I hadn't read the first two, so that stunk. But I feel like I got the gist of it for the most part. The majority of the story takes place on a falling space center that was sabotaged by the bad guys. And all the Jedi's were for some reason not able to connect with the force because of some mystical creature that was on the ship or something. We didn't really get an answer to why that was happening as far as I can recall. Not much really happens in this book. It's mostly a lot of discussing plans amongst each other and coming to terms with their feelings. I was waffling on giving it a lower rating, and it maybe should have gotten a 6/10 from me, but the story was interesting enough for me that the lack of action or forward progress with the storyline didn't bug me too, too much. The other complaint is that this huge space station isn't very well described. I'm wondering if it was described in the previous books so it wasn't entirely necessary to do that here? But I got the sense that it's this huge space station but it just felt tiny in reality based on the story and it seemed like there were only handfuls of people responsible for running the thing. This book was fine. Just not one to go out of your way for.

Star Wars book rankings:

1.  Lost Stars
2.  Aftermath: Life Debt
3.  A New Dawn
4.  Battlefront: Twilight Company
5.  The Fallen Star 
6.  Aftermath

 

Roughing It by Mark Twain

 

3/10

I read this one a little less than two months ago. This was a very tedious read. I didn't hate the beginning about his journey out West and read with curiosity his impressions of the Mormons (spoiler alert: he's not a fan), but once he got to Nevada and the gold mining it was as far from enjoyable as you could get. It's clear that he's stretching the truth about his experiences throughout the book in an attempt to be humorous. But the same playful humor found in Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer isn't found in this one which is neither playful or funny, other than one funny paragraph about ugly Mormon women which I'll share below. It was a long, boring read that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. If you are curious of his Mormon impressions, which were the most entertaining part of the book, then just read chapters 12-17 and thank me later that you didn't have to suffer through the rest of this book that is much longer than it needs to be. This is the book where you get the fairly well-known quotes about the Book of Mormon being "chloroform in print" and the line about if you removed 'And it came to pass' then the book would have only been a pamphlet, which are harmless, funny burns. But it seems that he thinks his serious criticisms are fatal but they're just flimsy and conclusory. For example, he says that every sentence or two, the language grows too modern (without citing any examples) and so Joseph Smith had to throw in scriptural sounding phrases, using "exceeding sore," "hid up," and "wherefore" as examples, which is ridiculous. Suddenly the fact that the word "wherefore" appears in the Book of Mormon is worth pointing to as an evidence that Joseph Smith made it up? Laughably weak criticism. He also quotes the entirety of the witnesses from the three and eight witnesses and only sarcastically points to how they "hefted" the plates as a reason why he is now convinced of the truth of their witness. Weird. Then he flat out lies and makes fun of how Nephi built the ship in a single day even though the text clearly states it took many days which could be months or even years. Making chloroform jokes is fine, but clear misleading lies are just lame. He concludes one chapter by calling it "stupid and tiresome to read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings." The irony of saying this when the Book of Mormon is infinitely more interesting and entertaining than Twain's Roughing It which was a true slog to get through.

Some Mormon tidbits from Twain:

 "Next day we strolled about everywhere through the broad, straight, level streets, and enjoyed the pleasant strangeness of a city of fifteen thousand inhabitants with no loafers perceptible in it; and no visible drunkards or noisy people... a grand general air of neatness, repair, thrift and comfort, around and about and over the whole....intent faces and busy hands were to be seen wherever one looked."

"Salt Lake City was healthy - an extremely healthy city. They declared there was only one physician in the place and he was arrested every week regularly and held to answer under the vagrant act for having 'no visible means of support.'"

"Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had not time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter. I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here - until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly, and pathetically 'homely' creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, 'No - the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure - and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.'" 

I did like this insight during his gold digging time in Nevada, which, again ironically, reminds one of his negative judgment of the Mormon people from a few chapters earlier:

"Moralizing, I observed, then, that 'all that glitters is not gold.' Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold. So I learned then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only lowborn metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that. 

Rankings of Mark Twain books I've read:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
2. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
3. Roughing It 

The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain by Charles Dickens

 

4/10

I read this one a little less than three months ago. I recently discovered that Dickens wrote five short Christmas story books. The first was the well-known A Christmas Carol, but the other four I had never heard about. The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain is the fifth of those five books. While there were some nice moments, it was far too disjointed and difficult to process. I was surprised that it was the last of the five books written because it feels like a book he may have written early in his career before honing his craft. I wouldn't recommend spending time on this one unless you want to read everything Dickens wrote.

I liked this moment and idea of God remembering us as his little children similar to how parents remember their grown children still as their little children:

    "'There is hope,' returned the old man, 'for all who are softened and penitent. There is hope for all such. Oh!' he exclaimed, clasping his hands and looking up, 'I was thankful, only yesterday, that I could remember this unhappy son when he was an innocent child. But what a comfort it is, now, to think that even God himself has that remembrance of him!'

      ...

    "'Ah!' feebly moaned the man upon the bed. 'The waste since then, the waste of life since then!'

    "'But he was a child once,' said the old man. 'He played with children. Before he lay down on his bed at night, and fell into his guiltless rest, he said his prayers at his poor mother's knee. I have seen him do it, many a time; and seen her lay his head upon her breast, and kiss him. Sorrowful as it was to her and me, to think of this, when he went so wrong, and when our hopes and plans for him were all broken, this gave him still a hold upon us, that nothing else could have given. Oh, Father, so much better than the fathers upon earth! Oh, Father, so much more afflicted by the errors of Thy children! take this wanderer back! Not as he is, but as he was then, let him cry to Thee, as he has so often seemed to cry to us!'" 

 

Another quote I liked: "'May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us, to remember wrong that has been done us?' ... 'That we may forgive it.'"

 

And finally, Dickens straight up preaching eternal families:

"Children love me so, that sometimes I half fancy - it's a silly fancy, William - they have some way I don't know of, of feeling for my little child, and me, and understanding why their love is precious to me. If I have been quiet since, I have been more happy, William, in a hundred ways. Not least happy, dear, in this - that even when my little child was born and dead but a few days, and I was weak and sorrowful, and could not help grieving a little, the thought arose, that if I tried to lead a good life, I should meet in Heaven a bright creature, who would call me, Mother!"

My updated rankings of Dickens books I've read:

1.  David Copperfield
2.  A Tale of Two Cities
3. Great Expectations
4. Oliver Twist
5. Bleak House
6. A Christmas Carol
7. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
8. The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain