February Reads

Here are the books I read in February. It was a jolly good month. I'd say more, but the Margalope just woke up, so I'll just toss these reviews up here!

Long Story Short - Margot Leitman: This book is a guide to storytelling, aimed at people who want to perform their stories on stage. I picked it up on a whim at the library and almost skipped it because I had so many other library books to plow through; I’m really glad I ended up reading it. Her advice, while not geared toward writers, was excellent for me. Most of the book focuses on discovering stories that will be of interest to an audience (obviously useful for the essayist), and learning to tell those stories with candor, emotion, humor and humility. Leitman discusses living the kind of life that generates stories, identifying universal truths (but not hitting the audience over the head with them), defining yourself as a likeable and relatable character, and creating multiple points of entry for the audience. The book has lots of exercises in it that I’d love to use in teaching (if I get to be a teacher again, I hope, I hope). If you are a current teacher of CNF, pick it up! It’s got some great stuff.

I Know How She Does It - Laura Vanderkam: Oh, I am so conflicted by this book. I want everyone to read it just so I can discuss it with you (I am making David read it for this very purpose.) The basic premise is that women can do it all—have big careers, children, time with their spouse, personal time, hobbies, projects, etc.—by prioritizing and using time more effectively. Simple enough. Vanderkam collects time logs from a variety of women whose jobs earn at leask 100k and who have at least one child. The book is an analysis of the ways these women made everything fit in 168 hours a week (including, interestingly, plenty of sleep; only a few of the women surveyed were at all underslept). The advice about time management is actually really wonderful, but I came to different conclusions than Vanderkam and many of the studies’ participants about what constitutes an adequate amount of time to spend with your children. I don’t know how to use a word like “adequate” in describing the time I spend with my kids. That’s not a judgment on how anyone else chooses to do it, by the way, and it’s annoying that I even feel like I need to make that distinction. But I really would recommend this book to any parent (including dads); I thought it was insightful, motivating, and empowering. That was a lot of buzz-adjectives right there.

The Art of Memoir - Mary Karr: A really, really excellent book about the craft of memoir. I’m a big fan of Karr (compounded by the fact that she dated DFW; I mean, holy cow)—in her own memoirs, her writing is vivid and crisp, and the writing in this book is wonderful, too. Her advice is also fantastic, and practical, and refreshing, and encouraging, and frequently intense. I’ve often resisted the idea that writing is good when it’s relatable; my freshman students always used that line when I asked them why they liked a piece and I thought it was a sign of immaturity to only like stories that remind you of yourself. Karr made me rethink this by pointing out that almost all great writing is relatable (she points out some exceptions, like Nabokov), but it captures us not because we’ve lived the same experience, but because we’ve experienced the same emotions. In other words, it probably is an immature reader response to say, “I liked this story because it was about Mexico and I’ve been there!”, but there’s nothing immature about liking a story because it wrote with such passion for a place that it called to mind a passion you’ve also felt. I could list all the things Karr discusses in this book, but really I’m just going to tell you that if you write any kind of memoir-y stuff at all, buy this. It is top-notch.

Thug Motivation - Bag$ of Money: Yes, this book is as amazing as its title and the $pelling of its author’s name suggest. A beautiful compendium of street wisdom from former convict and self-made man Bag$ of Money. David heard a chapter from the audiobook one day on the radio and we began hunting for the book in earnest. If it weren’t so horribly hard to find copies, I would pass them out like Christmas candy, both for its perfect zeitgeisty-ness and for its truly excellent advice.

We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I love Adichie. I didn’t love this quite as much as I thought I would because it seemed kind of obvious. But I suppose I should be thanking things like this talk for making these kinds of discussions seem obvious; I know they haven’t always. And yes, YES YES YES WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS.

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens: An odd experience reading this book for the first time, since its story and its dialogue are so absolutely familiar. I bought it last year and meant to read it before Christmas and never did, so here it is in February.

Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl - Carrie Brownstein: I would certainly have appreciated this book more if I had a working knowledge of Sleater Kinney or the Riot Grrl movement, but I still enjoyed it a lot. I expected Brownstein’s writing to be good because she’s just so dang smart, and it didn’t disappoint in that regard. But I am getting sick of memoirs by famous people; it’s completely my fault for continuing to read them—for some reason I feel compelled to, like my social literacy depends on it. I need to stop that.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz: An amazing book; hilarious, warm, wild, magical, heartbreaking. Junot Diaz is a master at bringing his characters to life, and the voice in this is just pure delight.

Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 - ed. By Daniel Handler: I love this anthology. David gets it for me every Christmas (I’m a year behind in my reading). Standouts from this edition included offerings from Adam Johnson, Karen Maner, Yumi Sakugawa, and the always brilliant Zadie Smith.

The Sellout - Paul Beatty: A brilliant, incisive, hilarious satire about race in modern America. I overuse the word brilliant, but not here. This Is BRILLIANT. AND SO HILARIOUS. I don’t have the experience to categorize it, but just know, it is so good.

A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara: Over 700 pages of suckerpunches to the emotions. A harrowing read that came highly recommended (the second most listed book on WSJ’s compilation of best of 2015 books, with six mentions, right behind Fates and Furies’ seven), and I sort of see why, but I wanted so many things to be different about it. It’s a saga and friendship and trauma, and it doesn’t capitulate to the typical formulas of redemption or moral-making (which is another way of saying it is depressing as all get-out). The writing is good, and graceful, and it is chock-full of insight, including a couple of passages that honestly knocked the wind out of me. But all in all, I thought its themes could have been treated more meaningfully if the characters’ highs hadn’t been quite so high and their lows quite so low. Without giving away too much, the main character suffers an insanely traumatic childhood; the novel is the after-story. But it almost seems to take away from the power of his story for the childhood experiences to be as horrific as they are (and they are HORRIFIC, and at the hands of so many separate perpetrators that it becomes very unbelievable). I guess what I’m saying is, I’d have liked this book a whole lot more if the trauma had been more nuanced. And if it were shorter. Super long books are the worst.

#Girlboss - Sophia Amoruso: Eh, I’m not sure why I read this. And you really shouldn’t bother either, if you’re over 15 or so.