books

Best Books of the Half-Year

Last year my friend Nina Badzin wrote about her favorite books at the year’s halfway point.  I liked the idea, blatantly copied her, and thought it was a good idea to do it again.  So, here are my favorite books so far for 2015.  If you have read any of them, or if you do, please do let me know what you think. And I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading and liking lately.

I haven’t read many novels that have hugely struck me so far this year, but two have, and I’m recommending them to anyone who will listen.

A Window Opens by Elisabeth Egan.  I adored this novel, which made me alternately nod in ferocious identification (refusal to cut off sandwich crusts?) and tear up with profound relatability.  I will be giving this novel to many women I know who will find the protagonist, and her middle place loves, losses, and thoughts deeply moving and familiar.  I was happy to review this book here.

The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan.  This book is laugh-out-loud entertaining and has a hopeful, emotional core that I found touching in unanticipated ways.  For anyone interested in the royal family or who already knows and loves the hilarious voices of Go Fug Yourself, this is a must-read.  The Royal We is my next Great New Books recommendation.

Most of what I’ve read that’s impressed me so far this year has been memoir.

Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso.  This spare, powerful book touches on many topics dear to my heart: time, memory, motherhood, loss.  I reviewed Manguso’s gorgeous book in more detail here, and I absolutely adored it.

The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits.  This book shares with Manguso a preoccupation with the ordinary moments of our lives and with how we record, collect, and remember them.  Julavits writes simultaneously about nothing and about everything, and in so doing reminds us that the meaning of human life exists in its most humdrum, mundane details.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.  I’m not at all familiar with falconry, which lies at the heart of Macdonald’s book, but it is a testament to the extraordinary, shimmering beauty of her writing that I felt I could relate to much of the story.  The word I’ve read most often in reviews of this unusual, bonfire-bright book is feral, and it is perfect.  Macdonald uses her relationship with Mabel, her hawk, to walk the line between domestication and wildness, and in so doing illuminates the way humans need both to be rooted and to fly.

Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann.  Another book which muses on the topic of memory and how we capture the experiences, both mundane and magic, of our lives.  I loved it.  Sally Mann’s prose is easy to read and musical.  Hold Still is a love letter to her husband, her children, and to the gloriously beautiful landscape and complicated history of the south.  Mann’s story reminded me, somehow, of Faulkner, and brought to mind silvery green Spanish moss hanging in trees; the south is its own country.

The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander.  This memoir gave me goosebumps.  Elizabeth tells the story of her whirlwind romance with Ficre, an Eritrean chef and artist, and of the year that follows his sudden and tragic death.  I loved Elizabeth’s voice, which echoes like poetry (she is a poet and an academic).  Over and over again, I gasped as I read and underlined madly.  This is a quick read but one that stays with you long after you close the cover of the book.

Everything You Ever Wanted by Jillian Lauren.  Jillian’s account of trying to get pregnant and ultimately pursuing adoption, and the first few years with her son, made me both laugh and cry.  Her voice is familiar and friendly, and the story is powerful.  I loved this book (and Jillian and I share a birthday, a coincidence I love). 

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A Window Opens

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Elisabeth Egan’s A Window Opens is both entertaining and poignant, a page-turning read that managed to move me to tears even as it made me laugh out loud. I’ve rarely read a book that felt so familiar, and I realized when I closed it that’s because Elisabeth managed to touch on so many topics close to my heart in this particular moment of life: aging parents, school-age children, marriage, work-home tensions, and the challenging ways that new and “revolutionary” retail intersect with those who love old-school, and traditional books.

A Window Opens follows a year in the life of Alice Pearse, a 38 year old mother of 3 who goes back to work full-time when her husband’s law career hits unexpected skids. She faces the return of her father’s throat cancer and juggles her new, demanding professional job with the needs of her three school-age children. Finally, Egan’s book makes some salient and provocative points about businesses that purport to change the world but, perhaps, are not quite all they seem on the surface.

Alice is a tremendously likeable protagonist, and I was immediately swept into her world. So much of what she’s dealing with is intensely known to me, and more than once I gasped out loud. For instance, Alice quotes my favorite Thornton Wilder quote (“do any human beings realize life while they live it – every, every minute?”), mentions that parenting small children can be like dealing with terrorists (Matt and I used to laugh that putting Grace to bed was like “negotiating with the Khmer Rouge at gunpoint”), and refuses to budge on the issue of cutting crusts of sandwiches. She won’t do it, and neither will I.

Alice is also a lifetime reader, a passionate lover of what her new employer calls “carbon-based books.” Her best friend owns an independent bookstore in their New Jersey town and Egan beautifully traces the ways in which their relationship changes as Alice joins Scroll, whose blazing, ambitious agenda is to revolutionize how people read.

There are many storylines woven together in A Window Opens, and each of them touched me, both at the level of a nerve and at that of the heart. While the book is clearly Alice’s, there is a rich and well-developed population of supporting characters around her.

Egan beautifully evokes the intimacy that exists between Alice and her long-time babysitter, Jessie. The scene of Jessie leaving on her last day made me cry, because it reminded me of our own long-time babysitter’s final departure. I was devastated, so much so that I had to take Grace and Whit on a walk around the neighborhood and trail them, hoping my sunglasses would at least partially mask my torrential tears. The genuine bond that develops between a mother (and, probably, a father; I just don’t know) and her trusted babysitter is a deep well of trust and love.

Alice’s parents, who live in a neighboring town, are also major characters in the book. Her father uses a device they’ve nicknamed Buzz Lightyear to speak after throat cancer caused the removal of his larynx years ago. He communicates often with Alice through text and email, and these appear in the book as well. During A Window Opens Alice’s father’s cancer returns, and his ensuing illness sends substantial shockwaves through the story. Towards the end of the book, as Alice finds herself in a difficult situation at work, her father’s cancer and the metaphor of voice echo in her mind. You have a voice. Use it, she tells herself, and I got goosebumps. Legacy and family and inheritance all combined in that single moment, and Alice, emboldened by the thought of her father, makes an important choice.

Most of all, though,  A Window Opens is a love letter to motherhood. Over and over again, I blinked back tears as I read details of Alice’s life with her three children, Margot (11), Oliver (8), and Georgie (5). Towards the end of the book, an architect who is drawing up plans for a kitchen renovation tells Alice that hers is “one of the ten happiest houses I’ve worked in.” This is abundantly clear to me, too, as I read the book, even though that happiness is shot through with challenge and struggle. There’s nothing simple or smooth about the year of Alice’s life that we witness, but her abiding love for her family shines through.
A Window Opens is replete with telling, vivid details. We see Margot catching her mother’s eye at an event at school, her glance telling her mother everything she needs to know about a certain tricky friendship. We see Oliver walking down to meet his mother at the train station every night when she comes home, sometimes in his Halloween costume and sometimes coming a little too close to a speeding car. We see Georgie’s face light up at the school nurse’s office when Alice shows up, having taken a taxi from Manhattan because nobody else was available.

Alice Pearse is a true heroine as far as I’m concerned. Her story is wildly entertaining – I could not put A Window Opens down and read it in a couple of days – and deeply affecting. Alice’s love for her husband, her children, and her parents is the beating heart of the book. Her narrative reminds us that sometimes all we really need is right in front of us, and makes palpable how almost painfully precious this ordinary life can be. After a long and difficult year full of questions and challenges, on the last page of the book Alice finds herself on a roof deck on the Jersey Shore at sunset. She looks around at her family, all of whom are still reeling from big changes, and observes to herself, “I was in the exact right place and I knew it.”

A Window Opens is about the reckoning that results in this knowledge.  It’s about figuring out who we love and who we most essentially are.  I adored Elisabeth Egan’s book and know you will do.  It comes out in August but you can preorder it now!

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Knowing the tide’s coming in, but still celebrating the sand castles we can build before it does

So many people told me to read Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso.  Tens and tens of them.  So many I lost track.  And I finally I did.  And wow.

Ongoingness is spare and sublime, a meditation on time and memory and motherhood and the meaning of life.  “The book’s themes are your themes,” said one friend, and I’ll just say that if that’s true, consider me honored.  Manguso writes a slender, powerful volume about the 800,000 word diary she kept obsessively for years without quoting from it once. On the book’s first page, she says “I wrote so that I could say I was truly paying attention,” which is the best answer I have to the answer of why I write, too.

I have many preoccupations in my life – and in my writing – but arguably the two chief ones are the speed with which my hours (particularly those with my children) fly by and the slippery, inchoate nature of memory.  I’m fascinated in a troubled, deeply-melancholic way by how swiftly my days pass, and I’m often nostalgic for my life even as I live it.  And I’m equally fascinated in a confused way that senses that there’s an order beyond my understanding about why I remember what I do.  It’s often the smallest, most mundane experiences that cement themselves in my memory, becoming the stones I turn over and rub in my pockets until they gleam, whereas the big, shiny “life moments” often recede into the slurry of my history.

I tried to record each moment, but time isn’t made of moments; it contains moments.  There is more to it than moments.

With this pair of sentences, Manguso seems to wrestle with this complex fact.  I think all the time of Ann Beattie’s famous line from Snow, that “people forget years and remember moments.”  What we remember seems random, but surely it’s not.  Just like there must be some rhythm I can’t quite sense about why certain quotes and passages and poems come to my mind when they do, I’m certain there’s a vast design whose pattern I can’t yet discern in why I remember what I do.

Manguso goes on to say that she “started keeping the diary in earnest when I started finding myself in moments that were too full.”  Like Dumbledore’s pensieve, she writes when things are “all too much,” whether to understand or merely to record.  Somehow the practice of writing in her diary allows her to release the pressure in her living, and this impulse is one I understand at a deep, inarticulate level.

Much of Ongoingness reminded me of Dani Shapiro, both of her work and of her teaching, which I’ve been immensely fortunate to receive.  The pages of Ongoingness contain a lot of white space, and there short passages are in dialog with each other.  This is a format that reminds me of Devotion, and which Dani and I have spoken about at length.  The structure of Ongoingness
mimics memory itself; Manguso’s musings and recollections don’t follow a logical pattern, they’re interrupted, and they echo off one another.

At one point, Manguso reverses direction, considers the opposite of her premise (“I don’t need to write anything down ever again”), and posits that “everything that’s ever happened has left its little wound.”  This passage reminded me of the samskara analogy that runs so vividly through Devotion, and of the concept – which makes sense to me – that our life’s experiences accumulate in our bodies, invisible in many cases, but resonant, and eternal.

Having a child changes entirely Manguso’s relationship to time.  “It had something to do with mortality,” she says, and reflects that “I am no longer merely a thing living in the world: I am a world.”  One of the central themes of Ongoingness is the way in which having a child altered her dependence on the diary.  Her son has become, in so many ways, her diary.  In his body, in the “unbearable sweetness” of his growing hair and changing self, she can now see her life recorded, captured, remembered.

“…when I am with my son I feel the bracing speed of the one-way journey that guides human experience,” Manguso observes, and I nod so vigorously my neck hurts.  Yes, yes, yes, I think, as the tears course down my cheeks.   I don’t have an 800,000 word diary, but I can relate to this.  It was becoming a mother, I think, that made me so keenly attuned to life’s inexorable, drumbeat passage.

“Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity,” Manguso writes at the end of Ongoingness, and I think of my children frolicking on a sandbar at the end of the summer as the tide comes in.  Parenting – life itself – is like that, as I observed in This is Eleven: it’s knowing the tide’s coming in, but still celebrating the sand castles we can build before it does.

Do Your Om Thing

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I’ve been practicing yoga, with a frequency that has varied between daily and weekly, for over 15 years.  I’ve read parts of the Bhagavad Gita, I used to know the primary series by heart, and I’ve been on a week-long retreat that featured long periods of silence, a lot of vegetables, and 45 minutes of pigeon pose at a time.  All of this is to say that I’m somewhat familiar with yoga.  I’m not an expert, by a long shot.  But I’ve read a lot and practiced a lot and even written about it from time to time here.

Rebecca Pacheco’s Do Your Om Thing: Bending Yoga Tradition to Fit Your Modern Life is my favorite book about yoga that I have ever read.

Rebecca makes yoga tradition clear and compelling and unpacks things like the chakras and the koshas that I’d previously found confusing enough to be entirely off-putting.  She asserts something that we all know to be true but that I posit most of us have lost touch with: that yoga is about far, far more than the asanas.  But taking yoga beyond the physical poses is frankly hard, because the literature about yoga’s traditions and philosophy is opaque and difficult and because, especially in these days, we are all more distracted than ever.  In this book, Rebecca changes all of that.  These two quotes summarize what Do Your Om Thing is all about.

Yoga doesn’t manufacture a feeling of completeness; it offers tools for becoming present enough to realize it’s been there all along.

Internal quiet and connection to our deepest self form the essence of yoga.  It’s not fancy. It doesn’t balance on one arm.  But it’s the plain truth of yoga’s purpose, and it will change your life.

Do Your Om Thing is structured in four parts.  Part I, Yoga: Ancient and Modern, briefly covers Rebecca’s own story and path to yoga and then describes the famous “eight limbs” of yoga.  Over and over again, Rebecca shows how the sometimes dusty-sounding limbs of yoga have relevance to today’s life, and reminds us that being a yogi in 2015 is about understanding yogic tradition in order to apply it to modern life.  She quotes Zen master Sheng Yen, reminding us that “practice should not be separated from living and living at all times should be one’s practice.” In Do Your Om Thing she emphasizes that while yoga may be a series of sexy poses that will give you sculpted arms, it is far, far more than that.

Yoga is a way of being in the world.

Rebecca discusses each “limb” of yoga briefly and offers concrete guidelines for readers wanting to incorporate them into their regular lives.  This is one of things I love most about Do Your Om Thing: the way Rebecca makes something as diffuse and difficult to grasp as yoga philosophy utterly understandable, real, and actionable.

Part II, The Body, talks about the chakras, the seven energy points that reside along our spines, and the koshas, the body’s five layers.  Once again, Rebecca shares specific intentions, mantras, and asanas (with beautiful photographs) to go with each chakra.  As in the rest of the book, Rebecca’s clear, lucid writing renders understandable (and fascinating) something that I’d previously found challenging.

Part III, The Mind, discusses meditation.  Rebecca reminds us that “the quality and direction of your attention is the greatest determinant of the quality of your life.”  This section, and the brief discussion of meditation in part I, showed me that much of what preoccupies me in my life is in fact quite yogic in nature.  When I read this, I shivered:

It will always be tempting to fidget, flee, or Facebook update instead of inhabiting the present moment, which can be challenging and uncomfortable, even tragic and terrifying, at times, but it’s this lack of consciousness that leaves us feeling like we need yoga in the first place.  The feeling of missing our own lives, as they are happening.

Oh, yes.  This feeling, of missing out on my own experience even as I live it is one I’ve long felt and often written about.  Rebecca shares some helpful tools for beginning meditators and describes several meditation styles.

Part IV, The Spirit, which makes suggestions for “spiritual sustenance,” is my favorite part of the book.  Rebecca tells personal stories, including about her grandmother, to whom the book is dedicated and who believed that “life itself is a spiritual practice.”  Parts of this section of Do Your Om Thing brought tears to my eyes and goosebumps to my skin.

Thomas Merton once wrote, “Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time.”  This doesn’t mean that life won’t be difficult of painful, characterized by change and loss; it means that a higher power, the wellspring for your spiritual life, whether you realize it or not, is holding a candlelight vigil or perhaps a roaring bonfire for you all hours of the day and night. It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t leave.

Is the loneliness of which I’ve written, whose shadow limns my everyday experience, an ache for this higher power, a longing to trust in that candlelight or bonfire?  I suspect so.  Rebecca shares nine “suggestions for spiritual sustenance,” each of which I found profoundly moving.  She incorporates quotations from literature, stories and thoughts from others living an engaged life, and questions from ancient texts (such as the Bhagavad Gita).

The last section of the book, titled love, opens with one of my all-time favorite quotes: “In the end only three things matter: how well we have lived, how well we have loved, and how well we have learned to let go” (Jack Kornfield).  Rebecca closes with reflections on love, for the self, for other, for the world at large.  She reminds us that while yoga doesn’t have to be our sole workout, it is our soul workout.  “Find a way to make life the practice – one of humility, gratitude, and awareness,” Rebecca urges us.  And with this beautiful, thoughtful, wise book, Rebecca has given us an incredibly powerful tool to do just that.

Do Your Om Thing comes out tomorrow.  I can’t recommend Rebecca’s book highly enough.  I hope you’ll read it.

 

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Great New Books: best books of 2014

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As you may know, I’m delighted to be a part of the Great New Books team.   Collectively we recommend books we’ve loved (“new” generally means recent though not brand-spanking-new).  I’m proud of the way Great New Books has stuck to the philosophy of only recommending books we truly love.  In a book review climate littered with not-so-genuine raves, I find this to be somewhat rare.

This week, we’re sharing our favorite books of 2014.  Spoiler: I wrote about one of my top 3, but the other 2 were covered by others on our team!

I hope you’ll click over and read about the team’s favorite reads of 2014.  In the next weeks we’ll also talk about our most-anticipated reads of 2015 and our favorite classic books.