All in My List of Required Reads

When We Cease to Understand the World

The late nineteenth and entire twentieth centuries reeked of industry and human innovation as humankind observed, dissected, and theorized about the nature of the universe, matter, everything vast and miniscule. In effect, mathematical and scientific theory attempted to define everything, everywhere, all at once (to borrow the phrase). The impact, as Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut demonstrates in When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), led to immense suffering on mass scale (WWI and WWII). This novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021 explores the cracks between fact and fiction, between progress and destruction, between genius and madness. Labatut’s book also investigates the private anguish, the inner misery of some of the world’s greatest minds. By interweaving history, math, physics, chemistry, and mathematics with a healthy dose of fiction, Labatut creates a wildly readable book that both educates and troubles, confounds and inspires. It is the perfect book to read in tandem with watching one of this summer’s blockbuster movies Oppenheimer as we consider the question of where that invisible line ought to be exist in the figurative sand of human innovation.

The Coddling of the American Mind

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018) came out five years ago and yet its message seems even more relevant today. Published before pandemic fueled parents and youth to even greater levels of anxiety and fear, The Coddling scrutinizes the generational shift on the part of society, schools, and parents that matches the advent of smart phone technology and the rise of social media. Those cultural transformations, the authors argue, led to a generation that equates physical safety with freedom from differing opinions and world views. Their thesis, that American families, universities, and society generally have lost sight of three fundamental truths when it comes to youth; in so doing we have fostered a climate of fragility and safetyism that undermines human resilience and encourages anxiety, us-vs-them culture, and rebrands discomfort and disagreement as unsafe. If their book was a must-read pre-pandemic, it is utterly imperative today.

Be Holding

Rarely does a book-length poem hold its reader as tenderly and intimately as Ross Gay’s Be Holding (2020) held me. I never would have thought I would encourage everyone I know to read an ode of sorts to basketball legend, Julius Erving (famously called Dr. J.), and yet here I sit, enthusiastically doing just that.

The Underground Railroad

works that envision various possible experiences of enslavement and the Underground Railroad like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2017), provide modern Americans with ample food-for-thought when considering race relations, questions of reparations, and more. Whitehead’s novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017 and the National Book Award, provides an alternate history of slavery in the American South, not in terms of downplaying its brutality, but by exploring various means of dealing with its consequence.

Red at the Bone

Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone (2019) is gut-punch of a book. Set amidst the Brooklyn brownstones (similar to previously reviewed A Woman is No Man), but in Woodson’s family drama novel, the families are African American. The family central to Red at the Bone is three generations deep that has carries many more generations’ trauma and stories, including the Tulsa massacre of migration out of 1921, the great migration north, teenage pregnancy, and the importance of saving for the future.

Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) is a beautiful novel about two Nigerian kids who fall in love but whom life separates as young adults.  Adichie’s novel follows the young adult lives of Ifemelu and Obinze, as they grow up in Nigeria, study at Nigerian university, and ultimately find ways to leave Nigeria in the hope of making a better life. Their love story, coupled with their individual experiences maneuvering new cultures and countries, make this novel compelling and illuminating. 

Moth Snowstorm: Joy and Nature

In Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (2015), British naturalist writer Michael McCarthy mixes memoir and nature writing to present a stimulating, beautiful expose on the link between human joy and the natural world.  The book evolves from McCarthy’s environmental argument that nature is the one place in which humans may truly find joy.  Looking back at his 1950s childhood in northern England and the ways communing with nature soothed the traumas and chaos of human existence, McCarthy begins this work of nonfiction through memory and memoir. 

The Water Dancer

Book review of Ta-Nahesi Coates’ debut novel The Water Dancer (2019). From its first sentence—the rambling, fluid 100-word sentence/paragraph—Coates establishes The Water Dancer (both in diction and style) as a story about memory and one closely tied to water. This novel eloquently re-frames the Underground Railroad story, placing it in the intimate and profoundly personal experience of his protagonist, Hiram Walker.

The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction

Part memoir (as Gurdon shares her family’s favorite read alouds at various points in her children’s maturity), part science of reading, The Enchanted Hour (2019) proves that reading out loud connects humans in a way that few things can.  And in the digital age of information, when we are so often distracted from the ones we hold most dear, that connection is paramount.