books

I read a lot this summer.  At the outset of the season, as I wrote my mid-year reading review, I realized I hadn’t read much fiction this year.  So I swore to myself that the summer months would hold a lot of novels.  And they did.  I would love to hear what you’ve been reading, too!

Lab Girl, Hope Jahren – I loved this book, which is suffused with the wonder of the natural world.  Jahren’s beautifully-written story is a love letter to science.

Modern Lovers, Emma Straub – Straub’s book is entertaining, wise, and truly has its finger on the pulse of what it means to be in midlife.  I related to an uncomfortable degree.

The Spiritual Life of Children, Robert Coles – I’ve long wanted to read this book and I finally did.  A thoughtful perspective on the deep and rich interior lives that children often have.  My favorite passage is here.

Wilde Lake, Laura Lippman – Taut, page-turning mystery, with a complicated female protagonist to boot.  I’m in.

There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter, James Salter – Essays by one of my very favorite writers about the traveling.  Beautiful prose, short snippets, you can see parts of the world in these pages.  My favorite passage is here.

What Alice Forgot, Lianne Moriarty – An entertaining confection that raises a big question: what do we take for granted over time, and what do we need to remember?

The Weight of Water, Anita Shreve – I don’t know why I’ve not read this before, but I’m glad I did.  Womanhood, relationships, the ocean – so much story in here, and so gorgeously written.  My favorite passage will go up next week.

Before the Fall, Noah Hawley – Gripping from page one.  I couldn’t put this down.  I found the ending a little unsatisfying, I’ll be honest, but this is an excellent, fast-paced story.

Days of Awe, Lauren Fox – A recommendation from my sister, and she’s never wrong.  A lovely book about friendship, marriage, motherhood, and adulthood.

The Atomic Weight of Love, Elizabeth Church – A recommendation from Katie, who’s also never wrong!  I adored this book about being a woman in the mid 20th century, subjectivity, science, birds, love, and identity.

The House of Secrets, Brad Meltzer – My love of thrillers is well-documented, and I tend to read everything Meltzer writes.  This book, heavy on the Benedict Arnold history, was very entertaining.

It’s Okay to Laugh: (Crying Is Cool Too), Nora McInerny Purmort – That this memoir is both a tear-jerker and a laugh-out-loud page-turner is a testament to the lovely writing and the irrepressible spirit of the writer.  Highly recommend.

The Singles Game, Lauren Weisberger – Fun, light, entertaining. I enjoyed this look inside the tennis circuit.

Heroes of the Frontier, Dave Eggers – I loved this book, which managed to be both light and deeply wise.  Despite the way the story careens all over the place (literally and figuratively), it powerfully describes the love between a mother and her children. I rarely read the NYT Book Review, but I did about this book, and these lines (by Barbara Kingsolver) have stayed with me: “The heroes of this frontier are Ana and Paul, a dynamic duo who command us to pay attention to the objects we find in our path, and stop pretending we already know the drill … she (Josie) sees them learning to take what a human animal really needs, divining the crucial difference between genuine dangers and manufactured ones. She is learning to be the mother her life demands, rearing the sort of brave humans the future will require.”

The Girls, Emma Cline –  As wonderful as I’d been told.  Cline’s story is feral and fecund, powerfully evoking the vulnerability of teenage girls and their deep desire to be a part of something bigger than themselves.  I could not put this book down.

The Excellent Lombards, Jane Hamilton – A wonderful, bittersweet evocation of adolescence.  This book is an elegy for a way of life that’s receding (farming) as well as for the innocence of childhood.  Tear-jerking, thoughtful, and lovely.

Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint, Nadia Bolz-Weber – I loved Nadia’s wry humor and her clear-eyed ability to see the holy in even the most winding paths.  This is a beautiful, powerful book.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple – I laughed out loud while reading this.  Often. Another book I’m not sure why I waited so long on.  Hilarious and tinged with thought-provoking commentary on motherhood, identity, and conforming.

Truly Madly Guilty, Lianne Moriarty – Another successful page-turner by Moriarty.  Like all of her books this one circles around an event which is a mystery until revealed.  It is more tragic and less salacious than I expected, but the outcome is heartening, the message optimistic.  Entertaining.

Siracusa, Delia Ephron – Riveting writing on an unsettling topic.  Europe, midlife, marriage, parenthood, trust and the breaking of it … there is so much in this novel.

Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler – I love the writer’s voice and her beautiful, heartbreaking, raw depiction of young adulthood in New York.  I never lived in New York and I never waited tables, but even so, I found this book almost unputdownable.  A gorgeou way to close out the summer.

What have you read this summer that you recommend?  I want to hear!

Disclosure: these are affiliate links

A few years ago I copied my friend Nina Badzin in writing a post about the best books of the half year, and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on what I’ve read at the year’s halfway mark (my 2015 post is here).  I wouldn’t say it’s a been the best six months of reading (I need more fiction), but I have nonetheless read some excellent books.

The good books I’ve read this year so far have fallen almost entirely into the non-fiction category.  I need good novel suggestions, clearly!

Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age – I adored my friend Katherine Ozment’s book, which I reviewed here for Great New Books.  So, so, so wonderful.

Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living – Krista Tippett.  This book, which elucidates the richness of this life while holding its essential paradoxes – in listening we are heard, in grief there is gladness, and, my favorite, the interrelationship of light and dark – moved me tremendously.  Dense and beautiful.

It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War – Lynsey Addario’s powerful book was transporting and riveting and made me think of Whit’s godmother, my dear friend Gloria.

Between the World and Me – There’s not much I can say to add to the extraordinary chorus of voices celebrating Ta-Nehisi Coates’ beautiful book.  I’ll just say this line, which encapsulates how I think about parenting, still runs through my head on a daily basis: “My work is to give you what I know of my particular path while allowing you to walk your own.”

The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship – I flat-out loved Paul Lisicky’s gorgeous memoir of friendship, love, loss, and life itself.  I reviewed it for Great New Books here.

Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood – I have been recommending Untangled to everybody with a daughter, teen or not.  Damour’s book is thoughtful, well-researched, and I found it profoundly reassuring.

A few novels that I’ve really enjoyed:

Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe – I loved Dawn Tripp’s story, inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe.  I wrote more about the book and how it touched me here.

The Course of Love – I’m about 3/4 of the way through Alain de Botton’s novel and I love it.  This book’s steadfast determination to honor married life, and the many joys and challenges that make up Adult Life remind me of another book I loved years ago, Carol Edgarian’s lovely Three Stages of Amazement.  “We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue,” says de Botton early on, and the book unpacks this question beautifully.

Age of Consent – I devoured Marti Leimbach’s new novel last weekend, and closed the cover feeling uneasy and informed at the same time.  About mothers and daughters and the nature of desire and obsession, this book combines a courtroom drama with an intimate emotional story about wounds and recover.  Really good.

And a wonderful children’s book that we recently discovered:

Feynman – Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick have created, in Whit’s view, the perfect book.  It’s a comic about science.  I plan to give this to everyone that I’ve already gifted with Randall Munroe’s fantastic Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words.

What have you been reading that you loved?  I am very interested!

Disclosure: these are affiliate links

I am so happy to have review of Katherine Ozment’s gorgeous Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age on Great New Books today.  You can read my full review, and I hope you will, here.

In short, I loved Ozment’s book.  I hope you’ll read my review, but I also wanted to share a few additional quotes here.

“When we begin to tap into that connectedness, we sense the potential to participate in some bigger purpose that both humbles and elevates us.”

“I felt the rush I always get when I see my family before they see me, as if I’m holding a precious photograph. They are my solar system, my closest and most lasting tribe … I had felt a bit of what I thought of grace – an abundance of gratitude for something I never asked for – that day gazing at my tulip and, later, at my family from across the street.”

“What was sacred was that very moment.  I wanted to celebrate the smooth skin of my children’s curious faces, the roof over our heads, the rich traditions and great good fortune of being alive here on earth in the first place. I savored the way our voices, however unsteady, lifted as one. If I was going to celebrate anything, it was going to be the crooked, imperfect path of life that I and my part-Christian, part-Jewish, mostly nothing family had found ourselves on together.”

“Whether we call it science or religion, we’re all after a framework for understanding the mysteries inherent in being alive and the wonder we experience when we start to grasp them.”

“The key is not to flee ambiguity, shutting the door because we can’t answer the questions of why we’re here. Instead, we consider how we are here, how we exist in the world. We do this by embracing the messiness, the poignancy, and the knowledge that life will end.”

“I still don’t have answers to all the big questions. But I’m starting to see that becoming more comfortable holding the questions is the only way that makes sense to me.”

“Meaning came from the intense awareness of the moment itself, from my reverence for her, for this life we were joined in as family. I simply needed to remain still enough to notice.”

I loved this book.  My review is here at Great New Books.  I hope you will read the review and then order Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age, which comes out next week!

I love the dedications of books.  I’ve written about that particular interest before.  I’ll also admit that I had figured out the dedication of a book I’ve written, a book that will live forever in a box under my desk.

I am similarly interested in the last lines or paragraphs of books.  Some of my favorites (some are famous, some are less) are below.  What are your favorite last lines?

Abide with Me– Elizabeth Strout

“All gone,” she said. He kissed her cheek, and she put her head against his neck. And everything seemed remarkable, the familiar scent of his child, the snarl in the back of her hair, the quiet house, the bare birch trees, the snow on his face. Remarkable.

The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot

They had gone forth together into their life of sorrow, and they would never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares.  They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had forever closed behind them.

Vanity Fair – William Thackeray

Ah!  Vanitas Vanitatum!  Which of us is happy in the world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? – Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.

Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner

Wisdom, I said oh so glibly the other day when I was pontificating on Shelley’s confusions, is knowing what you have to accept. In this not-quite-quiet darkness, while the diesel breaks its heart more and more faintly on the mountain grade, I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather.

The Great Gatsby –  F. Scott Fitzgerald (perhaps the best known last line of all, I think – I’m including more here because I adore the sentence about something commensurate to man’s capacity for wonder)

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Sun Also Rises– Ernest Hemingway

“Oh Jake,” Brett said, “We could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf

She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred.  With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre.  It was done; it was finished.  Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

Moon Tiger – Penelope Lively

The sun sinks and the glittering tree is extinguished. The room darkens again. Presently it is quite dim; the window is violet now, showing  the black tracery of branches and a line of houses packed with squares of light.  And within the room a change has taken place. It is empty. Void. It has the stillness of a place in which there are only inanimate objects: metal, wood, glass, plastic. No life. Something creaks; the involuntary sound of expansion of contraction. Beyond the window a car starts up, an aeroplane passes overhead. The world moves on. And beside the bed the radio gives the time signal and a voice starts to read the six o’clock news.