books

Best Books of the Half-Year

I’ve written posts like this for the last several years, and I really enjoy pausing at the year’s midpoint to reflect on what I’ve loved (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018).  I am always interested in books you’ve really enjoyed lately, so please share!

Memoir

All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, Katherine Smyth – This memoir, about a giant of a father, his death, and the echoing importance of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, took my breath away.  I shared a few thoughts about it here.  This is among the most gorgeously written books I’ve read in years.

Running Home, Katie Arnold – Another memoir about the loss of a father, but couldn’t be more different.  Katie’s story, interweaving her childhood with her adult discovery of endurance running, is both moving and inspirational.  I loved it.

Novel

The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai – This book immersed me in a world I knew nothing about (the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the 1980s) and I fell deeply into it.  Makkai’s characters are nuanced and sympathetic, and this was a story I was very sad to see end.  Beautiful.

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi – This novel captures time, and the often-unseen ways in which the past animates the present, in an intensely lovely way.  The book is haunting and gorgeous, and I am so glad I read it.  This is Grace’s all-school read this summer, and I’m looking forward to talking to her about it.

Gone So Long, Andre Dubus III – I loved this book, which is bleak in many ways but profoundly humane at the same time.  Dubus writes some of the most thoughtful female characters of all, in my opinion.

Late in the Day, Tessa Hadley – There’s something about this quiet book, one of the first I read this year, that has stayed with me.  The characters, the complexity, the echoing absence of the beloved father.  It’s just lovely.

Other

Mostly Plants: 101 Delicious Flexitarian Recipes from the Pollan Family, the Pollan family – I rarely buy cookbooks these days (oh, internet, how you have spoiled me) but this one spoke so directly to how I want to eat these days that I did.  It’s also beautiful. Plant-forward, but with a little bit of meat here and there, recipes that are both inspiring and flexible.  I love this cookbook and have already used it several times.

The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid, Dylan Thuras – I love this book and gave it to all of my godchildren.  It’s not a surprise that I love maps and atlases, and this book is a fun, adventure-centric play on traditional books of maps.  It is a reminder that the world is large, and beguiling, and full of challenges and joys.

 

Disclosure: these are Amazon affilitate links.

Things I Want to Remember

I did my first podcast interview, with Zibby Owens, on the occasion of the release of On Being 40(ish).  Zibby asked about the impetus for starting this blog, waaayyy back in September 2006.  And my answer then reminds me of how I feel about this week: I told Zibby I started this blog to remember Grace and Whit, who were 1 and 3 when I began writing.  I already could sense that I couldn’t be able to recall every (or even most) detail.

That’s how I feel right now.  I want to remember what this week, since the release of On Being 40(ish), has felt like. While the book’s release has taken a backseat to my “real life,” and to my day job, it has been unquestionably, marvelously fun.  I think my single favorite thing over the last week is the texts I’ve gotten from friends with pictures of their books, or themselves with their books.  It feels so great to know that the essays I’ve so long loved are out in the world, and that people are reading them.

The events – in Brooklyn last week and in Cambridge last night – have been wonderful as well.  It’s a treat to meet the writers in person – I had never met any of them in person before, though we’ve certainly emailed.  They have universally impressed me by being as intelligent, wise, and down-to-earth in person as they are on the page (in my experience this is often, though not always, the case when I meet writers whose work I have read and enjoyed).

It’s also been incredible to hear from people as they read the book, and to read reviews, and to generally know that the pieces in On Being 40(ish) are touching people. Lesson for me: always be sure to tell writers when their words resonate with me (I often do, but not always).

Most of all, it’s those texts, though.

Publication Day!

I’m so thrilled that On Being 40(ish) is in the world today!  I’m really proud of this book and can tell you categorically that the pieces therein will make you laugh, cry, and relate.

There are two launch events scheduled, and if you live in New York or Boston I hope you will come! I will be at both and would love to see you.

February 5th (today) at 7:30 at WORD in Brooklyn.  Sophfronia Scott, Jill Kargman, and Lee Woodruff will be there.

February 11th at 7:00 at the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge.  Sophfronia Scott, KJ Dell’Antonia, Jessica Lahey, and Catherine Newman will be there.

I love the pieces in this book, and I’m incredibly pleased that early reviews suggest that others do too.  This book seems to be striking a chord!  Among many others, On Being 40(ish) was mentioned last weekend in The New York Times and in New York Magazine.

Three essays from the book have already been published, and I know they’ll give you a small taste of the wonders contained within On Being 40(ish)‘s pink covers:

I Became an Actress at Thirty-Nine by Jill Kargman ran on Bloom

Why I Didn’t Answer Your Email by KJ Dell’Antonia ran in the New York Times

What We Talk About When We Talk About Our Face by Sloan Crosley ran in Elle

 

a collision of IRL and online friends

I absolutely loved hearing Dani Shapiro read from and talk about Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love last week at Brookline Booksmith.  It’s not a secret that I adore Dani’s work and have reviewed many of her books here.  I’m also honored to call her a teacher.  She participated in my old Present Tense blog series many years ago.

My favorite book of Dani’s remains Devotion, and it’s not an overstatement to say that that book changed real and substantial aspects of how I inhabit the world.  She gave me permission, in some ways, to live the questions.  I don’t have answers, and that’s ok.

It was a treat to attend Dani’s event with one of my very oldest and dearest friends, Jessica.  I’ve written about Jessica before, and it’s a huge joy that she and her family moved to a town near ours last year.  She has taken a class with Dani before too (I’m waiting for Jessica, a gorgeous writer, to publish a book!) and we went together to the event in Brookline.

The whole night was an interesting collision of real-life and online friends.  I sat next to a friend I’ve known since I was 12, long before the internet existed. Another friend I knew first in person and then online was there.  I was listening to a mentor who I met online and have since gotten to know in real life speak.  I saw and met several friends that I’ve first connected with online: Jessica Braun, Laura McKowen, Rebecca Pacheco, Jennifer Blecher.

The evening was a wonderful swirl of real and online life, and reminded me that there are real relationships to be made in each. The online world gets a tough rap, I think, and there are certainly risks to digital communication.  But I also think genuine relationships can be seeded there, and I’m grateful for the people I’ve encountered here and on Instagram and elsewhere who have become real friends.

What has your experience of online friendships been?

I highly, highly recommend Inheritance if you have not read it yet.

Holiday book suggestions

It’s become a tradition for me to post ideas for books to give this holiday season.  In my opinion, books are always the best gift! I wrote about my favorite books of the half-year in late June, and did not include any of those titles here, though I refer to that list as another resource for gift ideas.  Many of the books I give regularly don’t change year to year: Miss Rumphius, Space Boy, and Roxaboxen for small children, The Phantom Tollbooth for older children, Dani Shapiro and Katrina Kenison memoirs (especially Devotion and The Gift of an Ordinary Day) and Mary Oliver’s poetry for adults.  But each year there are current or recent reads (not always recent releases) that strike me as great gifts.  I wanted to share some of those here.

My posts about books for giving in the past few years are here: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

For teenagers (I asked Grace and Whit what their favorite reads were this year):

Grace: The Hate U Give – Angie Thomas.  Once in a great while Grace presses a book she’s read into my hands and says: this.  you must read this.  She did this with THUG and she was right.  Wow.  That’s all I can say.  Must.  Read.  Probably a lot of teens (and adults) have read this by now, but if they haven’t, I think it’s a great gift.

Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi.  Grace read this in school and loved it.  She described it as eye opening and said it made her think about feelings of identity and safety.

A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson. Grace read this over the summer and fell for Bryson’s voice, as did I when I read it.  He is funny and warm and inspiring all at the same time. What a classic.

Whit: Ready Player One – Ernest Cline.  Whit tore through this over spring break and I want to read it too (I have a surprising-to-some affection for sci fi as a genre).  We haven’t seen the movie yet.

The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain’s Journey – Linda Greenlaw. Whit read this this summer and really enjoyed it.  Entertaining and thought-provoking.

Memoir

North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail – Scott Jurek’s memoir is an inspiring story of persistence and determination.  Great gift for any athlete or person undertaking a large challenge.

There Are No Grown-ups: A Midlife Coming-of-Age Story – Pamela Druckerman’s book made me laugh, hard, and it also made me think.  This topic is one that’s near to me as I prepare for On Being 40(ish) to launch in February!

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love – Dani Shapiro.  This is cheating because it doesn’t come out until 2019, but pre-order it for those you love anyway.  What a read. This book is written in Dani’s trademark poetic prose, and it is full of questions about who we are, where we come from, and what family, love, and secrets really mean.  I loved this book and reviewed it here.

Fiction As we’ve established, I’ve been reading novels which entertain and engross me this year.  Some of those that rise to the top of my list and which I’d gladly wrap up are:

Charlotte Walsh Likes To Win– Jo Piazza.  Entertaining story about a female politician clearly inspired by today’s world.  I really liked this story.

How Hard Can It Be? – Allison Pearson.  The author of I Don’t Know How She Does It revisits her characters a decade and a half later.  I am grateful to be the same age as Pearson, because everything she writes rings an almost uncomfortably-familiar bell.  I’m right here, right now: teenagers, career, parents: midlife.  Juggle, juggle, juggle.  This novel manages to be both hilarious and deeply reassuring.  I loved it.

Laura & Emma – Kate Greathead.  This novel is spare and observant, managing to build a fully-realized world out of short vignettes.  Greathead’s musings on motherhood made me think.

I’m curious to hear what’s under your tree this year!  Please share.

Disclosure: these are affiliate links