A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
All in Nonfiction
You don’t need to be a social psychologist to recognize the social crisis of modernity. It seems particularly visible among the generation currently coming-of-age with record high levels of mental illness and increasing instances of “failure to launch.” If you happen to be a social psychologist, however, you might find yourself better equipped to unpack the underlying reasons for the generational shift. In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024), Jonathon Haidt, famous for previous books like The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American (2018, see previous review), zooms in on the questions of why Gen Z faces such unique challenges.
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.
Hana Videen’s The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English (2022) is a book exuding etymology and interesting factoids about what life was like during the days when Brits spoke Old English. This is a book about words, their usage, and definitions. The Wordhord is approachable and readable for a work of nonfiction that tackles a subject like Old English; Videen is clever and humorous as she unravels the onion of Old English for contemporary readers. While The Wordhord is certainly well-researched and academic, it does not lull its reader off to sleep as many books about medieval language and history might do. On the contrary, I found The Wordhord a compelling and entertaining read, one abounding with Old English words and tidbits I hope to remember long after reading.
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.
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice (2012) by Terry Tempest Williams is both moving and masterful in its craft. This just-over-two-hundred-page memoir is a small book that fits easily in a purse or a large pocket. It is one designed to be taken along when you leave the house. When Women Were Birds weaves Williams’s personal and family histories with that of the land on which she came of age. As any fan of Williams will expect, this slender volume includes many a powerful metaphor, startling anecdote, and compelling social-justice perspective.
Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s part memoir, part translation A Ghost In the Throat (2020) is, as she states from the beginning, “a female text” (3). In fact, lest her reader fail to absorb this, she titles her first chapter “a female text,” her first line of the first chapter (after the epigraph of a few stanzas of Eiblín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” or “Keen for Art ó Laoghaire”) is all in caps (“THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT.”), and then her memoir concludes: “This is a female text” (282). It is clear, she means us all to associate her text, and Eiblín’s as well, with the female. As such, it is both organic and circular, dynamic and complex.
In an effort to read books that might help shake off the writer’s block I had suffered since May, I picked up a copy of Gilbert’s book, and I must say, as fall merged into winter this year. I am pleased I did. While Gilbert’s literary voice grates at me from time to time, I thoroughly enjoyed nearly all of her points and assertions in Big Magic and will encourage other creatives to give it a readthrough if they have not already. Big Magic provides readers with no-nonsense suggestions and best practices for shedding the fear of failure and endeavoring to create if called to do so.
Michele Duster’s Ida B The Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B Wells (2021) is at once a powerful, aesthetic biography of Ida B Wells and the Civil Rights Movement generally, and a coffee table book brimming with engaging photos and moving graphics accessible to every member of the family.
J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) is memoir punctuated by social commentary. Thirty-something Vance tells his life story, which, no doubt, starts out like many kids who live amidst broken families and poverty in the American Midwest. Growing up in Ohio, the grandson of Kentucky hillbillies, Vance’s memoir becomes an elegy for all the Scots-Irish of Appalachia, all the hillbillies.
Humankind interweaves anecdotal evidence and extensive research to prove that humans are, in fact, kind, cooperative, and trusting, even if we are doubtful of that fact ourselves.
Zadie Smith’s Intimations (2020) is a collection of six essays in which she ruminates upon her myriad mental wanderings during this unprecedented year.
Alexis Coe’s You Never Forget Your First (2020)b was a fast read and an enjoyable refresher of eighteenth-century American history. Coe humanizes Washington, acknowledging the ways in which he positioned himself to become a prominent citizen, a revolutionary and a leader among men while recognizing the avenues in which his greatness fell short.
Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (2016) is a beautiful, and at times heartbreaking, ode to the meaning of life. At the age of 36 and as the final year of his neurosurgical residency began, Kalanithi faced a terminal cancer diagnosis. His response, as embodied by this book, is both brave and thoughtful.
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.
What the Eyes Don’t See (2018) by Mona Hanna-Attisha tells the story of Flint, Michigan and its toxic water. The author, Dr. Mona, is the woman who found scientific proof that Flint’s water was indeed toxic; through her position as the head of the pediatric residency at Flint’s Hurley Medical Center, she was able to access blood-lead levels of Flint’s children. Her courage and tenacity, her family’s background and her long-established love of social and environmental justice primed her to step out as a leader for Flint. This book is her story.
In the weeks leading up to Halloween 2018, my family headed east to Boston and coastal Massachusetts. In addition to the Boston downtown (and all its Freedom Trail historical glory), we visited both Salem and New Bedford, Massachusetts. In preparation for our trip I chose to read Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife: or, the Star Gazer (1999).
