July Reads

Most of this month's reading was wading through Infinite Jest, but I did take some breaks with a few other books (mostly very short ones), and finished a marriage book that I've been in the thick of for a year and that has been consistently blowing my mind all that time. Behold!

Pulphead - John Jeremiah Sullivan: Really, really excellent collection of essays. Entertaining and vibrant. Can’t wait for more from him.

And the Pursuit of Happiness - Maira Kalman: Kalman is just my absolute favorite. I met her once at the MOMA and I was a dorky mess, and that has nothing to do with this book, but anyway, #celebritysightings. I re-read this book to celebrate Independence Day, because her delightfully meandering observations and illustrations make me feel patriotic. I want to be her.

What the Most Successful People Do On the Weekend - Laura Vanderkam: From the same woman who wrote “I Know How She Does It”, which was an awesome book, comes this guide to making the most out of your weekends. If you like time management stuff, I think you’ll love this. I did (and, bonus, it’s short. I love short books.)

The Crucible of Doubt - Fiona and Terryl Givens: Their book “The God Who Weeps” is one of my absolute FAVORITE discourses on faith and doctrine anywhere. This book is just as perceptive, intelligent and soul-stirring, this time with doubt and struggle as its topic. If you’re a person of faith, even if you’re not of my particular faith, READ THIS.

The Brain in Love - Daniel Amen: Eh. Meh. How brain health affects relationships, particularly romantic ones. It was fine.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves - Lynn Truss: My Gram gave me this book for my birthday one year, and I read it when I miss her. It’s about punctuation and it’s very funny, and funny discourses on punctuation are just a perfect recipe for conjuring memories of Gram. She was the very best.

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace: I have been a DFW fan for years and was always too intimidated to pick up this 1100(ish)-page monster. I have read books about the writing of this book, is how ridiculous things got. For about a year, I reserved this July to be the month in which I finally tackled the beast, and IT HAPPENED. And after all that buildup, mostly what I have to say is that this is genuinely one of the best books I’ve ever read. Brilliant on so many levels. Innovative, hilarious, linguistically gorgeous, full of genius ideas, with a compelling narrative, fascinating characters, and intense commentary on our society. I can’t think of a better contemporary novel that I’ve read. It is incredibly DENSE. My brain is exhausted. But my primary feeling after finishing was that I can’t wait until I’ve recovered enough to read it again :).

Passionate Marriage - David Schnarch: THIS BOOK. AHHHHHHHHH. Ok, I have to disclaim that while I have come to believe this book holds the answer to all life’s problems, it is largely about sex. Intimacy. Sex and intimacy, which are not synonyms, you know. I mean, it’s not, like, titillating or anything, but it’s very frank, and I just feel like I need to put that here so if you read it on my recommendation you won’t be shocked or anything. BUT. But but but. If you are a person and you are married, you should absolutely read this. David started reading it last summer and couldn’t stop talking about it; I started it probably a full year ago and obviously just finished it. It required some major digestion of themes. It has been totally mind-blowing. I’ve been trying to figure out how to boil it down into a major concept that I could touch on here; basically the crux is that true intimacy requires that its participants be differentiated from one another, a term Schnarch goes into a lot of detail on, but I guess I’d best describe it as emotional independence and balance. The in’s and out’s of that are fascinating and important and have changed the way I approach every relationship in my life. Maybe it just really struck David and I for some reason, and it won’t carry the same punch for you. But read it just in case, and then call me so we can talk about it, and also know that I was like a red-faced 12-year-old when reading all the candid sex stuff. I’m sure your response will be much more mature. (Also, although its ideas carry over into all kinds of relationships, I don’t think it would be super helpful for the non-married crowd [even a sexually active non-married crowd], because a lot of the issues surrounding intimacy and personhood really only seem to crop up in that particular sort of union and I don’t think it would have been as meaningful if I’d read it before I got married, or even soon after. To my sister-in-law who is getting married this summer, I recommended Brene Brown’s “Daring Greatly”, because the major idea behind all of this is that deep, selfless love requires vulnerability and openness on a level that must be consciously practiced and not shied away from, and I think Brown’s work [all of it, really] is just awesome for delving into those concepts.)

June Reads

This summer I resolved to stop getting books from the library and read the books we own. I have a problem with book immediacy, where I have my own copies of a bunch of books I'm really excited to read, but then I always have a ton of books out from the library, which I have to read before they're due, and when I go to return them I see more library books that I want, and in the end I have all these books that I own but haven't read. This is post-Kondo-ing our books (I tried; I didn't do super well, but culled the library by about a third, maybe a little more.) So it had reached a point where I had about 100 owned and un-read books, so I made my summer no-library-books resolution, and here I am. As a preamble to this list, that was all totally unnecessary information.

Hamilton the Revolution - Lin-Manuel Miranda & Jeremy McCarter: If you, like me, are one of those dorky Hamilfans/Lin-Manuel Miranda enthusiasts, you should read this book. It’s a really fascinating look inside the making of the musical, and it’s downright inspiring on the pursuing-your-creative-passions front. Seeing Hamilton last summer ranks right up there in the best nights of my life. Really. It’s SO GOOD.

Small Wonder - Barbara Kingsolver: A gift from a dear friend, this book of essays covers basically all the things we should care about—family, faith, environment, home, food, humanity; you know, just all those crucial things that I often feel are falling to pieces. Kingsolver is wise and empathetic, and she does not back down from complex issues (actually just like the friend who gave it to me, MEL IS QUEEN.) It made me think A LOT and the writing is also delightful.

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline - George Saunders: Hilarious, dark, and SO WONDERFUL. Saunders is one of my all-time favorites; this is his first collection of short stories and it is 10000% worth the read. The Author’s Note at the end is worth the price of admission alone. He talks about how he figured out his own style and stopped trying to write like Hemingway; I was hanging on his every word.

Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott: Well, somehow I managed to get an MFA in Creative Writing without ever reading this, the bible of writing instruction. Finally got to it and it is AWESOME. If you are a writer or want to be a writer or any some such thing, read it now.

I Am America (And So Can You!) - Stephen Colbert: The company David works for did the design on this book (pre-David, of course), so we had a copy hanging around. I love Stephen Colbert; this was quintessential him.

The Whole-Brain Child - Daniel J. Siegel & Tina Payne Bryson: An excellent, easily digestible guide to kids’ brain development and practical parenting skills to help navigate intense emotions (your kids’ AND your own.) The focusing is on helping kids connect and develop different parts of their brain: left and right (to balance strong feelings with reason and logic); higher and lower (to learn how to make choices with empathy); and fragmented memories (to process fears and connect to stories.) The presentation of the concepts is super useful; there are cartoons of dialogue examples, breakdowns of key points by age, and a refrigerator sheet to keep everything close at hand. I’d really recommend it, especially for parents of toddlers to school-age kids.

Buddhism Plain & Simple - Steve Hagen: A good, simple guide to the philosophy of Buddhism (as the title promises).

What Should We Be Worried About? - ed. John Brockman: This is a collection of essays by experts of various stripes that attempt to answer the titular question. Super interesting, kind of a downer. I was telling my parents about something I read in this and they were like, “WHY ARE YOU READING THAT?” I’ll summarize for you: what we need to be worried about is old people. All our systems rely on people dying younger and quicker than they do. Also, if the Internet shuts down, we’re all screwed. So worry about those two things. And if you need more, read the book.

May Reads

I read books in May! Drum roll . . .

The Once and Future King - T.H. White: I wanted to read this after reading H is for Hawk, because so much of that book is about the life and falconer-ing of White. I expected to know it was objectively very good without really loving the experience of reading it, if that makes sense, because I just didn’t think it was my thing. A pox on having a thing. This book is INCREDIBLE. Funny and tragic and just achingly beautiful, and wise! Oh man, I think I could start reading it again right now and I never feel that way after reading anything, especially not something so dang long. If you haven’t read it, please read it, and know that I am jealous of your getting to discover it for the first time. ALL THE STARS.

When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi: This book is the true story of Kalanithi as he grows up marinated in literature, turns to medicine to experience real life so he can attempt to find meaning in it, and then is diagnosed with lung cancer and (spoiler) dies. It is beautiful and (clearly) heartbreaking, and it’s a quick and easy read, if “easy” can be used to describe the reading experience of something so sad. I really liked what he wrote about meaning-making, and even more than that I liked his straightforward view of struggle—in short, that struggle, sickness, calamity are all ways to further our experience, to understand life a little better. Really good stuff.

The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe: Another book that attempted to broaden my understanding of space past the idea (unfounded, I’ve found) that boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider and girls go to Mars to get more candy bars. This book is fantastic, a real-life thriller. The writing is wonderfully over-the-top; it is a very fun read. And I learned stuff about space and astronauts and machismo and history and I loved it all.

Styled - Emily Henderson: We moved to a new apartment last November and it’s the first place we’ve owned and planned to stay in more or less permanently. I am lucky in that David and my tastes align really well, but our ways of developing those tastes in our house are different; mainly I want it all to be done right now and I keep thinking if we could just really be dedicated one Saturday, we could get it all done. David is better at contentment. Anyway, we’ve both spent a lot of time in the last year or so thinking about house stuff and how we want to decorate and I’ve looked at a lot of books in that category and this is by far the best one I’ve read. Maybe just because I really like Henderson’s style. But I think the advice is also really solid. I know our house will never look exactly the way I want it to, but I’m excited to try out the ideas in this book. Probably won’t be able to do them all in one Saturday, but I will try.

Citizen: An American Lyric - Claudia Rankine: Lyrically gorgeous prose poems that cut to the heart of the black American experience. This book is haunting and crucial and the writing is so richly rhythmic. Much of the book concerns itself with ordinary day-to-day encounters that reveal a pervasive racism that’s easy to overlook when you aren’t its victim. I’m really interested in what race means in 21-century America, and particularly what the black experience is like, but I feel some conflict in writing or talking about it, since anything I read about it will fall far short of actually experiencing it, and since even my reading is colored by my own tremendously privileged experience; basically, I don’t want to seem like I’m engaging in readerly Rachel Dolezal-ing. But I do want to understand, and I do want to be aware, and I thought this book was tremendous. Please read it.

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown: I saw this book in the space gift shop at the Natural History Museum and knew I needed to read it because I had no idea why Pluto got kicked out of the planet lineup and Graham kept asking me (I knew enough to tell him it had be reclassified as a dwarf planet and a few weeks later, while we were looking at an old illustration of the solar system in a Magic School Bus book, he said to me, “But Pluto’s just a dorf planet, right Mama?” and I decided he is a genius child.) Anyway, this book was really fun and surprisingly readable and I learned a ton and laughed some, too. So that’s a win.

M Train - Patti Smith: Ugh, Patti Smith’s life. She just pads around her apartment feeding her cats and donning her watch cap so she can go sit at a cafe and think about things until someone asks her to give a speech at an exotic location, and she goes and she takes Polaroids and drinks more coffee and comes home and feeds the cats and goes to the cafe and gets invited to speak at another exotic location, and that is the whole thing, and I really loved it, but man. That really is the whole thing. I need to read “Just Kids.”

Wonder - R.J. Palacio: Really good YA fiction, with sort of a “Fault in Our Stars” crossed with “Stargirl” vibe. If you liked those books, I think you’ll really like this one.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua: Dang, this book is fascinating. It’s worth a read to understand the context of the “tiger mom” social shorthand; Chua’s writing is funny, honest, and brutally self-aware. I am intimidated as heck to be raising kids in this kind of society, because while I do agree with many tiger mom premises—that most things aren’t fun until you’re at least a little good at them and getting to that point can be kind of painful; that parents need to arm their kids with skills; that the ultimate goal of parenthood is not to protect children’s egos; that kids can and should be challenged; and that expecting a lot of kids is good for them—I can’t get down with the idea that self-esteem should be based on accomplishment. Maybe the problem is the idea of self-esteem generally; I think “worth” is a better term and “self-validation” is a smarter concept. And while entitlement concerns me a great deal, when it comes to feeling one’s own worth, I think the entitlement paradigm is the wrong lens to be looking through. Tying worth to competitive accomplishment seems to guarantee that shame will be in play somewhere along the line, and if there’s one thing I'd like to avoid as a mother, it’s teaching my kids shame. I don’t know what all this means for getting my kids to practice the piano, which I’d like them to do someday, but anyway, I’m going to be thinking about this book for a long time.

Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy - Dinty W. Moore: A delightful collection of short, funny pieces by the Everyone’s Favorite Uncle of essay writing. Every time I’ve talked to Dinty (a small handful of times, I’m not that cool), he has seemed super serious and I somehow didn’t know before that he is hilarious.

The 4-Hour Body - Timothy Ferriss: A fat tome of body hacks; if you like Ferriss’ human guinea pig style, then . . . you’ve probably already read this. I’m sure the diet stuff works, but I was a lot more intrigued by the sections on exercise. Ferriss is a devotee of the Pareto principle, wherein 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort, so he focuses on maximizing gains with minimal effort, which I think is awesome. There’s also a good section on sleep and some skill-acquisition business. It’s huge, so it’s a good candidate for selective reading, an approach Ferriss himself advocates in the introduction.

All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque: I mean, the last thing this book needs is a recommendation from me, but it’s got it. This is a really extraordinary book about war, appropriately horrific and wonderfully written.

Bluets - Maggie Nelson: Nelson’s writing is just ridiculously gorgeous and insightful. This book is about the color blue, and takes off from there to discuss love and loss, perspective and longing. I really want to get my hands on all of Nelson’s books.

The History of Rock n Roll in Ten Songs - Greil Marcus: This took me a little while to get into, but when I got into it, I REALLY loved it. Marcus’ writing weaves together cultural, historical, personal, and, of course, musical aspects of a bunch of songs that builds into a fascinating history of rock, which is sort of a history of 20th century Western culture as a whole. It took me a while to read because I had to stop every few paragraphs to look up and listen to various songs, which made it all the more fun. Two thumbs up.

April Reading

Here I am, sending my reading list into the void again :). Someday I'll get my pretty blog up and running again and maybe then I'll write something other than book reviews, but for now I'm stuck on this sort of embarrassing blog that still has all my super poorly edited Jerusalem photos on it. Oh, the Internet is such a great time capsule of awkwardness.

Siblings Without Rivalry - Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish: My pediatrician said this is the most helpful parenting book he’s ever read. It was awesome; I feel like I need a pocket version to carry around and consult moment to moment. Graham and Margi obviously aren’t fighting with each other yet, but I’ve been trying to use the principles during playdates and such to practice. Quick read, highly recommend if you have kids.

Daring Greatly - Brene Brown: Brene Brown may be my spirit animal. This book is about vulnerability and shame, which is something everyone struggles with (at least according to Brown, and I really hope she’s right because I struggle with it HARD). I especially loved the chapter on embracing vulnerability in parenthood. This is one of those books I think I’ll return to again and again.

Brain Rules for Baby - John Medina: I read this book a few years ago and really liked its practical advice on what is actually scientifically proven to help your kids be happy, smart, and moral. I’d forgotten how fluffed the writing was in parts, but the advice is still really good and usable.

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini: This book was a gift from a friend who is herself a gorgeous writer, and who has gorgeous taste. This book felt stylistically similar to Jhumpa Lahiri’s books, with the woman power amplified AWESOMELY. Loved it.

My Life On the Road - A memoir of Steinem’s work and travels; really fantastic. Worth reading for the historical overview of the fight for equal rights alone, but it’s also beautifully written and powerfully insightful. Plus Emma Watson picked it for her feminist book club. So read it.

Outline - Rachel Cusk: This book sort of defies categorization; it’s a novel, but there’s barely a plot. Instead, it lays out a series of conversations the protagonist gets into over the course of a week. It’s sparse and insightful and utterly delightful; I really loved it and I recommend it highly.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret - Judy Blume: There was something so wonderfully refreshing about reading this book—I don’t normally seek out YA lit., but it is so good to know that honest and loving people are writing it. It makes me very happy to know that my kids will have this kind of reading at their disposal, because I remember very well being young and being a young reader especially, and I needed books like this, I needed to know that I wasn’t alone and I wasn’t so strange and I suppose I still need that, and what else is literature for?

The Game - Neil Strauss: I had long been aware of this book as one that every man (apparently) has read, even if none of them admit it, although David actually really hasn’t read it. It’s the story of Strauss infiltrating the world of pickup artists and ultimately becoming one of the best artists in the world himself; there are exploits and betrayals and eventually the whole thing crumbles. Part how-to, part narrative, entirely disturbing. Don’t read it unless you want to lose your faith in (at least a portion of) humanity.

Packing for Mars - Mary Roach: Graham is obsessed with outer space and I know hardly anything about it, so I’ve been looking for books that could teach me. The first ones to come into the library were astronaut/space exploration-related, and I could not have started with a more delightful one than this. Roach is hilarious and digs deep into the questions I didn’t even know I had about space travel (lots of information about pooping in space! And who knew what a complicated enterprise that is without gravity!). I guffawed many times. An excellent investigation into the bizarre world of space travel. Highly recommended.

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth - Col. Chris Hadfield: Hadfield is SO COOL; if you don’t believe me, go watch his Bowie in space video. He makes space travel out to be much more graceful and noble than Roach does, and it’s heavy on the life lessons (which, to be fair, is clear from the title), but I really enjoyed reading it. Also I hope Graham is never an astronaut.

Gratitude - Oliver Sacks: This is a tiny book, just four essays written by Sacks in the final years of his life. It is a perfect and graceful little book.

Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist - Sunil Yapa: Holy cow. This book is so incredibly stunning; please go read it. It’s a novel about the 1999 WTO protest in Seattle, something I knew almost nothing about, but now want to learn everything about. The writing is intense and incendiary and I don’t know how someone could read it and come away without some kind of fire burning inside. Be warned that the violence is brutal, but it’s also important; I couldn’t put it down.

March Reads

Such a good month for books! Honestly I would recommend any of them, and I recommend everything from Year of Yes on really, really highly!

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess: This is an intense—as in, intensely violent—book. But the language Burgess creates is so whimsical that it tempers what physically happens. I thought it was a fascinating read.

Sick in the Head - Judd Apatow: This is sort of like a book version of the “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” series, except on one side of the conversation you have Judd Apatow talking over and over again about his parents’ divorce instead of having Jerry Seinfeld’s untempered cockiness (no shade on Jerry, I love Jerry). It’s pretty inside baseball—fans of comedy history and particularly comedy film will find a lot more of interest here—but even as a me, who only understood maybe 40% of the references, I thought it was really good. As with “Comedians in Cars”, the interviews with the women, from Amy Schumer to Sarah Silverman, were my favorites; that’s not a consciously feminist choice, I just found them to be more interesting and insightful.

Animal Farm - George Orwell: I’m trying to read a bunch of books I probably should have read in high school, this being one of that lot. I really enjoyed it. Snowball forever.

Year of Yes - Shonda Rhimes: I have mixed feelings for Shonda (who has been in my living room enough that I think we’re on a first-name basis here)—I love her shows, but they suck me in so much that I end up wasting way too much time watching. I binge-watched two seasons of “Scandal” one week before I woke up from my daze on a Saturday night, thinking “WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE???” I mean, I guess that’s to her credit. She’s the queen of Thursday nights for a reason. Anyway, I ended up really liking this book. Rhimes likes writing in sentence fragments. Like this. For emphasis. A. Lot. Of. Emphasis.

Seriously.

The whole book is like this.

Short paragraphs everywhere.

So it’s a fast read.

The premise is that Rhimes’ sister accused her one fateful day of never saying “yes” to anything, Rhimes realized her sister was right and that her fear was causing her to miss out on great social opportunities, so she decided to start saying yes to everything she was invited to do, from Jimmy Kimmel Live to commencement speeches to being late for work so she could play with her daughters. It was actually really inspiring, and reminded me of Stephen Colbert’s interview for Esquire in which he talks about being a volunteer for your own life (that interview is my FAVORITE.) Also, Rhimes is a bad-A feminist and has awesome things to say about women.

One great (and long—sorry) example:

“I don’t think it ever occurred to me before how much and how often women are praised for displaying traits that basically render them invisible. When I really think about it, I realize the culprit is the language generally used to praise women. Especially mothers. ‘She sacrificed everything for her children . . . She never thought about herself . . . She gave up everything for us . . . She worked tirelessly to make sure we had what we needed. She stood in the shadows, she was the wind beneath our wings.’ Greeting card companies are built on that idea. ‘Tell her how much all the little things she does all year long that seem to go unnoticed really mean to you.’ . . . This is good, we’re told. It’s good how Mom diminishes and martyrs herself. The message is: mothers, you are such wonderful and good people because you make yourselves smaller, because you deny your own needs, because you toil tirelessly in the shadows and no one ever thanks or notices you. This all makes you AMAZING . . . I’m not saying MOTHERHOOD shouldn’t be praised. Motherhood should be praised. Motherhood is wonderful. I’m doing it. I think it’s great. There are all kinds of ways and reasons that mothers can and should be praised. But for cultivating a sense of invisibility, matyrdom and tirelessly working unnoticed and unsung? Those are not reasons.”

Men Explain Things to Me - Rebecca Solnit: I have long LOVED the title essay of this book, so I was excited to see this collection of some of Solnit’s other writing, including a great treatise about Virginia Woolf that discusses the need for hope, and a bunch of awesome feminist essays. Loved it; please read it. It’s short and wonderful.

Notorious RBG - Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is QUEEN. I love this woman, and I love her even more after reading this very entertaining, very wonderful biography. She is a feminist pioneer and has done such incredibly important work. An excellent read.

White Girls - Hilton Als: Good heavens, this is an extraordinary book. Junot Diaz called it “the read of the year” in 2013, and who am I to argue with Junot Diaz? A mesmerizing, breathtaking collection of pieces that examine race, gender, art, and relationships in sometimes uncomfortable, always brilliant ways. The first piece (which reads as memoir) is worth the price of admission alone, but then it’s followed by essays on fascinating figures from Truman Capote to Michael Jackson to Eminem to Richard Pryor to Andre Leon Talley, all of whom Als categorizes in various ways as “white girls”—a phrase that builds in meaning throughout the book until it comes to signify a sort of complex and insecure relationship with privilege. I should insert a caveat here that one of the themes of the book is sexuality, and the language around that topic can be pretty strong. But if that doesn’t make you uncomfortable, I would really recommend reading this.

A Manual for Cleaning Women - Lucia Berlin: This book is delicious. I love short stories and these were exceptional. They remind me very much of Amy Hempel, which is basically the highest praise I can give. Funny, heart-wrenching, deep, precise, crisp, flawless.

On Immunity - Eula Biss: I don’t know how Eula Biss does it, but her stuff just knocks the wind straight out of me. In trying to tell David about it, I ended up reading half the book out loud to him, because everything in it is so flawless and necessary. It’s a small book (I LOVE small books), and it’s spare and gorgeous and I want EVERYONE EVERYONE EVERYONE to read it. I think one of the marks of great writing is that it not only presents you with epiphanies, but leads you to an entirely new set of your own epiphanies. This book did that. Totally knocked my socks off. Read it.

H is for Hawk - Helen MacDonald: Beautiful memoir about MacDonald’s training of a goshawk while dealing with her father’s death. I now know things about hawking. The threads of this book are woven together so exquisitely, and the reflections come so gracefully, that this was a tremendously lovely read. Also, it was widely considered one of the best books of 2015, so there’s that. I’m not alone in my love.

Operating Instructions - Anne Lamott: This book is Lamott’s journal from the year her son was born. It’s hilarious and refreshingly honest—if the purpose of memoir is to make us feel a little less alone in the world, then this book does its job perfectly. It’s also really beautifully written, and a quick read. If you’re a parent, read it and laugh and weep and remember you’re not the only one who is convinced your kids have died in their sleep and then curses them as soon as they wake up ;). (Or maybe that’s just me and Lamott? Oh well, reasonable company.)

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.

January 2016 Book Reviews

After posting my 2015 book list, I realized that I am beyond terrible at remembering the things I’ve read enough to make any kind of trustworthy review or recommendation on them. So I decided to do it by the month instead, primarily for my own benefit in the hopes that writing about them will preserve my memories a bit longer because my brain these days is basically made of Jell-o.

This month was excellent for reading because I got a bunch of recommendations from end-of-the-year Best-of-2015 book lists, particularly this one from WSJ which compiled the most frequently mentioned books on those lists. I still have a lot that I’m on hold for at the library, but I did manage to get my hands on several.

Big Magic - Elizabeth Gilbert: An excellent examination of what it takes to live a creative life. My favorite thing about it was that it didn’t treat creativity as precious, but still, as the title suggests, imbued it with magic. I really love Elizabeth Gilbert, and I really, really loved this book. In fact I’m planning on buying it when it comes to paperback, and that is kind of a big deal for me because I have been trying to Kondo the crap out of my books. If you want to spend your life making things, read this.

Modern Romance - Aziz Ansari: I love that Ansari wrote this. Interesting research, with a pretty thorough examination of what it’s like to date these days (if you’re middle-class, hetero, and based in a city, at least). I’ve read the same kind of information in articles, but Ansari’s writing was fun to read and I loved his asides. Recommended, especially if you are currently part of the dating world. (And, oh man, if nothing else, this book made me so glad to not be dating anymore. Sounds way too complicated.)

The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson: A lyrically gorgeous meditation on gender, relationships, motherhood, identity, and the body. It’s a pretty short book, but the prose demands to be savored; also, Nelson is a critical theorist, so it can get heavy (not in a bad way, just in a decidedly un-beach-read way.) Highly recommended for my MFA friends.

Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates: An incredibly important, vivid book, one that should be required reading for everyone. The prose is gorgeous, and being inside Coates’ experience and thought-process is absolutely wonderful. This book demands reflection on the meaning of race in our society and generation, and that’s a reflection we should all have anyway; let this book be your guide :).

The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins: Well-written mystery with great characters and pacing. Super enjoyable read and, unlike a lot of the other books I read this month, the content is not challenging; just a straight-up fun book.

The Bassoon King - Rainn Wilson: I’ve read a bunch of comic’s autobiographies, and they usually aren’t my favorite. The ones I’ve read (with the exception of Bossypants) just didn’t seem funny enough or essayistic enough to justify all the navel-gazing. I still enjoy them enough to give them a shot, but I wasn’t expecting much from Wilson’s book. So maybe that’s why it blew me away. Wilson is freaking WISE, his story is kind of bonkers, and there were more than a few laugh-out-loud moments. It lost a little magic for me toward the end, but only a very little. The beginning is especially superb, and I loved how into the craft of acting Wilson is. Super good stuff.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web - David Lagercrantz: It’s been a while since I read the original Millenium series, so it took me a while to put my finger on just what this book seemed to be missing from Stieg Larsson’s books. In the end, I think Lagercrantz just didn’t quite capture the compelling oddness that Larsson’s narratives had.  I still thought it was good, just that the energy wasn’t quite so captivating.

Fates & Furies - Lauren Groff: This book is the story of a marriage told from the perspective of both participants, and it is downright lovely. Maybe a titch pretentious, but I didn’t mind, and the writing is excellent. I absolutely loved it and I’d highly recommend it.

The Martian - Andy Weir: The science and math get pretty dense, but this is a fun, fast read. (I also really loved the movie, but read the book first.)

Hold Still - Sally Mann: This is a memoir that makes heavy use of photographs and visual content. I was aware of Sally Mann’s photography before I read this, but only vaguely. Now I am kind of crazy about it, and her writing is pretty great, too. My favorite parts dealt with the American South, which I am super fascinated by, and with Mann’s ideas about mixing art and family. More reflective than narrative, and also sort of haunting (especially when you consider that there are a TON OF PICTURES OF DEAD BODIES. Just wait til you get to that part. Decaying corpse photography—gnarly stuff.) If you read it, please call me so we can talk about it. I just have thoughts. (Also, just as an aside, she foreshadows the whole “dad is obsessed with death” thing way too heavily and then never really delivers with it. That was my main issue with the book, but it was a minor thing.)

Lovable Livable Home - Sherry & John Petersik: Basically a bunch of Pinterest-y blog content.

Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart: Excellent, bizarre, thought-provoking, disturbing. This book isn’t quite like anything I’ve read before. It’s critically acclaimed, but it seems like kind of a polarizing book for readers; at least, it has very mixed reader reviews. It’s dystopian satire (not a satire of dystopian literature, just a satire that is also dystopian), and has a lot of say about our culture, but says it so subtly that it requires quite a bit from the reader, even though it’s ostensibly easy to read.

Better Than Before - Gretchen Rubin: I have mixed feelings about Rubin’s books. The information is great, but there’s something off-putting about her writing, especially the way she uses dialogue. She just doesn’t seem like a natural storyteller and it made this book choppy—not unpleasant to read, though, and much better than Happier at Home. This book focuses on habit-formation, and particularly on how different personalities need to approach habits and goals differently. Her examples are largely to do with diet and exercise, but the principles are more broadly applicable. Overall it was useful, and right up my alley. It made me want to read The Power of Habit again, which I liked better.