August Reads

Parenting with Love and Logic - Foster Cline & Jim Fay: The most useful and empowering parenting book I’ve read. It totally made sense to me and I’m trying my darnedest to put it into practice.

Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson: My first Marilynne Robinson read! A poetic and haunting novel that deals with questions of place, transience and belonging. Lovely and lyrical.

Blindness - Jose Saramago: I’ve had this book for years and have been wanting to read it all that time and haven’t because there was a spider squashed between two of the pages and I didn’t want to deal with it. That is true, and it is pathetic. So I made David get the spider off and I read it and it was awesome. A truly literary thriller about an epidemic of blindness; most awesome is that the writing mimics the experience of being blind: no names, dialogue all run together so you’re not sure who’s saying what, long blocks of text with no concrete images to hang the details on (and none of this, I should add, is aggravating or cloying at all.) It’s disturbing and thoughtful and there were maybe a few moments of heavy-handedness, but mostly it was fantastic.

The Wonder Trail - Steve Hely: I cheated on my no-library rule because we were out and about one day and Graham had to use the bathroom and we used the one in the library and I ended up with this book. Hely is a comedy writer (30 Rock, The Office, American Dad) who traveled from L.A. to the southern tip of Chile, and this book is the story of that trip. Hely researched the heck out of the history of the regions he visited and gives a funny and quick overview of each place, which was super interesting. The problem with this book was that he did the trip in 3 months, which is WAY not enough time to thoughtfully cover what he covered. He was constantly saying that there was a cool opportunity to go do something else near him, but he had to get moving to the next destination. It could have been fine, I guess, but every section seemed like just a set-up for a great travel essay and then it stopped before it got to the meat. And maybe this too could have been fine, had he written about the placelessness of checklist travel, or parsed out his own intentions a little more. As it was, it was a funny, interesting, smart, and honest account, but it just left me kind of disappointed; I think it could have been way better.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany & Jack Thorne: I don’t know how I didn’t read this the day it came out. Shameful. Still, once I finally started I devoured it and it filled my soul with happiness and nostalgia and a super strong desire to go to London and see this on stage. I hear it’s coming to Broadway and my heart skips a beat every time I think about that. It sounds incredible. I loved the story and I’m going to make David read it immediately so I have someone to feel all the feels with.

The Empathy Exams - Leslie Jamison: A collection of essays centered around empathy; Jamison’s voice is engaging, honest, self-aware and intelligent. A few of the essays in particular struck me, while one or two kind of lost me. Overall, I really enjoyed it.

Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer: I picked this up at my parents’ house, read it pretty quickly, and then had nightmares about climbing/dying on Mt. Everest the rest of our time in Idaho. Fascinating, disturbing, and heart-breaking.

Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls - David Sedaris: I love David Sedaris. I think some of his pieces are definitely stronger than others, but he’s always hilarious and his voice is delightful.

Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank: This was another book I grabbed at my parents’ house during our visit; somehow, despite having the most Holocaust-heavy grade school curriculum I have ever heard of, I’d never read it before. I really wasn’t expecting it to be so incredibly enjoyable—in case you haven’t read it, Anne is awesome: thoughtful, funny, wise, charming. I loved her as a narrator, and watching her mature over her two years’ in hiding was so interesting. And then, of course, she dies. So the ending is the worst.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams: Genius.