books

It’s become an annual tradition for me to reflect, at the year’s mid-point, on my favorite books that I’ve read so far.  Nina Badzin started this and inspired me, and I’m grateful for the touchpoint. You can see my 2016 and 2015 posts here.  I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading and loving so far this year.

My favorite books of 2017, so far:

Fiction

Saints for All Occasions, Courtney Sullivan.  I adored this book, which is about family and faith and secrets and loyalty, and have thought about it daily since I finished it.  Highly, highly recommend.  My review at Great New Books is here.

Commonwealth, Anne Patchett. I have mixed feelings about Patchett’s fiction (Bel Canto is one of my Reader Shame books – I just can’t get into it!) but I really enjoyed Commonwealth.

Conclave, Robert Harris.  I include this mostly to show you that I read a lot of books that you might describe as airport books.  Also, I have many strange interests, including the papal conclave. If those things are both true for you, this story is engrossing.

I clearly need some good novels in my life!  Put another way, I’ve been focusing on the aforementioned airport category (Grisham, Baldacci, Connelley) to the exclusion of much other writing, which I need to remedy.  What fiction have you loved lately?

Non-Fiction

Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage, Dani Shapiro.  I adored this book, which is, “fundamentally, about what memory means.” It’s also about long marriage, adulthood, and the ways in which our younger selves both shape and echo through us as we age into midlife. My review is here.

The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, Nina Riggs. Another gorgeous, gorgeous memoir, which is about a 39 year old mother facing her own death but also, and more powerfully, a vibrant, funny, glorious book about how to live. My review is here.

The Rules Do Not Apply, Ariel Levy. I could not put down this book. Levy’s writing is as urgent as a freight train, full of both candor and power. One caveat is that I found the end strangely indirect, for a book that was so much about looking straight ahead and speaking truth.  But Levy writes beautifully about being a woman in the modern world, and I highly recommend this book.

A Country Between: Making a Home Where Both Sides of Jerusalem Collide, Stephanie Saldana.  A lovely, luminous memoir of marriage, early motherhood, and Jerusalem.  My review at Great New Books is here.  I loved this but loved Stephanie’s first book,

Between Them: Remembering My Parents, Richard Ford.  This slender recollection is warm and real and I closed it feeling like I had had a truly up-close introduction to Ford’s parents.  It made me consider how Grace and Whit will reflect on the family that framed their childhood, and how they experience Matt’s and my relationship.  A fascinating, salient topic that, at least as far as I’m concerned, is somewhat ill-explored.

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me, Bill Hayes. I love Oliver Sacks, and loved this loving, intimate portrait of him by his partner, Hayes. This book feels like a long love letter to Oliver, and he emerges from its pages as lovably erudite and intellectual as I imagined.  A wonderful book.

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The Bright Hour, Nina Riggs’ posthumously-published “memoir of living and dying” is about every mother’s nightmare and what I view as this life’s most essential, un-answerable question: how do I leave my children?  It’s also about saying goodbye to her mother after a long illness, and of doing that while facing cancer herself.

Depressing, right?

Of course the material is difficult, but The Bright Hour is not a gloomy book. I promise. It’s full of vibrant life and vivid details, written in clear, often-humorous prose, and I did not want it to end.  I did not want Nina to die, of course, but I also did not want to stop hearing a voice that had become as familiar and beloved as that of a friend.

This book is beautiful.  Walk, don’t run to order and read it.  As Will Schwalbe (another beloved author, find his lovely Books for Living here) says in his blurb, The Bright Hour belongs alongside Being Mortal and When Breath Becomes Air as a book about dying that “has powerful lessons for everyone about how to live.”

Oh, yes.

The Bright Hour begins with a scene of Nina running behind her son the first time he rides a bike, tripping, and discovering that her breast cancer (previously just “one small spot,”) has spread to her spine.  It’s a chilling, gorgeous scene that holds within in the rest of the book: living and dying, beginnings and endings, children spreading their wings as our own flight comes to an end.

The book is peopled with unforgettable characters, some of whom are also fighting cancer.  Most of all, there is Nina’s brave, book-loving mother, whose own death from cancer comes in the middle of the Bright Hour, and which made me cry (the scenes of her last days in the house) and laugh (the scene with Nina’s father considering an old Tupperware pitcher, in which they made lemonade, as a container for her ashes). Of her mother, Nina says, “her life’s work has been looking straight at things,” which seems like it applies to our narrator, too.  During Nina’s mother’s service, during an uncomfortable moment of silence, her brother observes, “It’s about honoring the unknowing and the awkwardness and the mystery of dying … it’s unsettling – and that’s okay.”  And the reader gasps, because that’s what The Bright Hour is about, too.

Nina is also, unsurprisingly, surrounded by wonderful friends.  Her text exchanges with Ginny, who is also fighting cancer, made me laugh. There is Tita, her best local friend, whose support and loyalty steady the book.  And of course there are her two crackling, fully-human boys, Benny and Freddy, and her steadfast husband, John.  I was particularly moved by the way she wrote about John, for example about their private joke that “at least I’m here with you,” a line from a baby’s LLama Llama book.  The intimate details of their life together made me ache, and reminded me of some of the private little things Matt and I share (the way we pronounced A-aron, or how we’ll once in a while say, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”  With these vivid, small details Nina evokes life itself.

The Bright Hour is not sardonic in the way of some books that are are about seeing the hilarious in bleak times.  No.  Instead, it is unabashedly in love with life, and Nina herself is extraordinarily clear-eyed in her ability to see the glory, beauty, and humor in her own life. Towards the end, she muses “I never stop being amazed by how simultaneously cruel and beautiful this world can be,” and I nodded through tears, because that is as clear as a neon sign to the reader.  The loss of Nina to cancer at 39 was a huge loss, for her family, her friends, for the readers who will flock to her words, for the world at large.  I urge you to read this gorgeous book, and plead that you not be afraid of it. Nine is a once in a lifetime person, and though I regret not knowing her while she lived, I’m hugely grateful that I read her words, that she put them down, and that I experienced, however briefly, the world through her eyes.

I was thrilled to read an early copy of Dani Shapiro’s Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage, which was also an easy choice for my most-anticipated book of 2017 on Great New Books. I’ve read all of Dani’s books, and I love her fiction and her memoir both.  Hourglass, in both tone and structure, reminded me most of her most recent books (and my favorites), Devotion and Still Writing.  It is a series of small pieces, both memories and essay-style reflections, delivered not in chronological order but in a way that makes seamless sense and in which the ways in which the stories jostle up against each other means as much as the content of each.

Hourglass, for me, is most fundamentally about what memory really means.  Dani explores this topic – which is central to my life – in multiple arenas: her own life, her marriage, with others she knows.  The progression of her husband’s mother’s Alzheimer’s is a salient and powerful reference point, and serves as another illustration that time and memory can evolve in ways that are neither linear nor easy.

Like all of Dani’s books, I underlined copiously and wrote in the margins of Hourglass as I read.  She refers to other quotes, literary works, and passages, which is something I love in other books, because it makes clear that the single volume I’m reading is a part of a larger, longer, broader conversation.  Which Hourglass (and all of Dani’s works) is.  In particular, Dani refers to Wendell Berry’s In the Country of Marriage, a poem I have shared here before and return to again and again.  Matt and I celebrated our 16th anniversary last fall, and I relate intensely to how Dani describes the landscape and vocabulary of long(ish – I realize 16 years, while it feels like an eternity, is not yet truly long) marriage.  Towards the end, she writes,

But I can no longer say to M. that we’re just beginning.  Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.  That solid yet light thing – our journey – is no longer new.  He identified my mother’s body. We took turns holding our seizing child. We have watched his mother disappear in plain sight. We have raised Jacob together. We know each other in a way that young couple couldn’t have fathomed. Our shared vocabulary – our language – will die with us. We are the treasure itself: fathoms deep, in the world we have made and made again.

Dani’s reflections on marriage were reassuring and resonant to me.  She returns to a phrase M. said long ago, “I’ll take care of it,” unpacking the various ways that feels true and not true over the years.  This triggered a memory for me, and that very action is at the core of why Hourglass is so powerful – isn’t that how life works?  We hear or experience something that sets off a recollection, and the collision between reality and the past enriches and informs how we live our daily lives.  This is the process that Dani so beautifully captures in Hourglass.  What I recalled, when M. said he’d take care of it (whatever it is), is a conversation with my father about the Dixie Chick’s lyric that I wanted someone to “keep the world at bay” for me.  Of course that is impossible, and my reading of Hourglass, and of Dani’s return to M.’s comment, tells us that in fact only we can “take care of” life’s true tasks for ourselves.

The scenes accrue in Hourglass, and the reader skips back and forth in time, witnessing Dani’s mother-in-law’s dementia and the growing of Dani and M’s son.  The pieces add up to nothing less than an adult life, and while this beautiful, lyrical book has many messages one of my favorite and the most powerful is the way that we are all the selves we’ve ever been, and we carry our pasts with us as we walk through the world.

I understand that I am comprised of many selves that make up a single chorus.  To listen to the music this chorus makes, to recognize it as music, as something noble, varied, patterned, beautiful – that is the work of a lifetime.

More than anything else, Dani Shapiro’s writing makes me feel less alone in this life.  She brings to life that great C.S. Lewis quote, “we read to know we are not alone.” I’ve told her this many times, and Hourglass is no exception.

There is no other life than this. You would not have stumbled into the vastly imperfect, beautiful, impossible present.

I read these sentences and blinked away tears.  Yes.  How is it possible that Dani is speaking directly to me?  Of course, that reaction is a testament to her extraordinary skill: a great many readers feel this way, and they should.  Dani touches something universal in Hourglass, in her description of time’s elasticity and the ways that the past lives on in the present. I loved this book.  I know you will too.

I think books are the best present, always!  Here are some of the books I’m wrapping for those on my list this year.  I’d love to hear what books you’ll be giving for this year’s holidays.

Novels and memoirs:

Moments of Seeing: Reflections from an Ordinary Life, Katrina Kenison – This book glows with wisdom and glimmers with the traces of magic that can be found in our regular existence.  These essays make me feel grateful, and aware, and less alone in the world.  I look forward to sharing that with others.

Catastrophic Happiness: Finding Joy in Childhood’s Messy Years, Catherine Newman.  Newman, one of my favorite writers, captures the particular blend of startling heartbreak and riotous joy that animates every day of motherhood (for me, at least).  This book made me laugh and made me cry many times.  I have given this already a lot and have no plans to stop.

 The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead.  This novel lives up to every superlative that’s been heaped on it. Powerful, riveting, essential, Cora’s story has stayed with me in a visceral way since I finished it.

Mothering Sunday, Graham Swift – such a glorious book, small, written with lapidary beauty.  About how our lives can radiate forward from a single moment, about secrets and identity and being a writer.

Sweetbitter – I reviewed Stephanie Danler’s beautiful first novel for Great New Books, and I think often of its atmospheric, sense-soaked rendering of early adult life in New York.

The Atomic Weight of Love, Elizabeth Church – I loved this story of a woman’s growing into her own identity, strength, and wisdom, set against the landscape of New Mexico and with the backdrop of science, birds, and nature.

Picture books, cookbooks, and other:

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, Randall Munroe – This has been one of my favorite books to give to kids and adults alike for a while now. It’s funny, thought-provoking, and beautiful.

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, Randall Munroe -Makes a great pair with the Thing Explainer.  Whit reads this book almost every night.  He’s fascinated by the questions that Randall asks and by the clarity, borne of deep knowledge and intelligence, with which he answers them.

How to Celebrate Everything: Recipes and Rituals for Birthdays, Holidays, Family Dinners, and Every Day In Between, Jenny Rosenstrach – This is the third of Jenny’s books that I pre-ordered and eagerly read and its’ by far my favorite.  The recipes are wonderful, but most of all I adore the philosophy that Jenny describes.  Ordinary life is full of occasions for celebration, and cooking is a great way to do that.  We’re not strangers to the random, just-because Tuesday night cake around here.

Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World, Rachel Ignotofsky – I love the visual element of this book, which features a drawing of a female scientist or engineer on one page and the story of her life on the facing one.  Both Grace and Whit were riveted by the book and learned all kinds of new facts.  I will be giving this to science-loving children I know of both genders.

I Wonder, Annaka Harris and John Rowe – I was moved to buy this book for the small children in my life based on Daniel Goleman’s blurb: “I Wonder offers crucial lessons in emotional intelligence, starting with being secure in the face of uncertainty….” I have since read it and agree with his enthusiastic support of the book.

Anyone who reads my work knows I revere Katrina Kenison‘s writing. Her books, which I’ve described as “a call and response chant with my own thoughts,” each touched me deeply.  I was thrilled when I read that Moments of Seeing was coming out.

I met Katrina years ago (the story of that fortuitous encounter is here) and since that day she’s become in person what she already was on the page: a reassuring, wise, thoughtful presence, a reminder of what my life might be, an inspiration, a mentor, a teacher, a friend. When I searched my archives for “Katrina Kenison,” I found fully three pages of posts that mention her. So I have been clear, I imagine, about my love for her work.  I’ve reviewed two of her books in full here: The Gift of an Ordinary Day, and Magical Journey .

On Sunday, November 13th, I went to see Katrina read outside of Boston.  I was still, I admit, feeling raw and emotional from the election and the days that followed.  I had not been sleeping well, and I generally felt a little quiet, more porous than usual, a little off.  Within minutes in Katrina’s presence I felt myself relaxing, reminded that there is still good in this world.  Katrina read a few pieces from the luminous Moments of Seeing and I sat quietly, letting her words wash over me.  The books’ two epigraphs are both quotes that mean a great deal to me. They are a mission statement of sorts, in my opinion, of Moments of Seeing but also of life itself.  Katrina embodies this philosophy, and so does this beautiful book.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

What is the meaning of life?  That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. – Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it’s the home of the extraordinary, the only home. – Phillip Levine

I’m thrilled to have a signed, personalized copy of Moments of Seeing to give away.  Please leave a comment here by 5pm on November 22nd.  I’ll choose a winner who will receive a copy of the book, with an inscription of your choice, from Katrina! For those of you interested in buying a copy (and I have a stack ready to give to friends for the holidays myself), you can purchase Moments of Seeing here.