A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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If you enjoy books that tackle ambitious projects, play with historical trends and technologies, dig into themes of contemporary import, and end hopefully, I encourage you to pick up Cloud Cuckoo Land and then keep reading.
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.
Timothy Egan’s The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016) tells the life story of Thomas Francis Meagher (pronounced Mar). Egan’s work is a biography albeit one brimming over with adventure. Meagher’s story winds through Irish poets and liberation politicians to the penal colonies of Australia, and finally to life in the United States.
So much about Ellen Webb’s coming of age in Mildred Walker’s Winter Wheat (1944) is bound to the land of central Montana. Few novels place a reader so solidly in a landscape like Walker’s Winter Wheat. This novel is both inspiring and heart-breaking, as Ellen becomes a woman amidst the backdrop of WWII.
Tom Robbin’s Jitterbug Perfume (1984) tells the wild, at times bizarre, story of a number of characters scattered across geography and ages: a Dark Ages king-peasant-philosopher, Alobar; his beloved, Hindu Kudra; a misfit waitress in Seattle, Priscilla; a pair of French cousins whose family has worked in the industrial perfume business for centuries; and two women who comprise a small, even seedy, New Orleans perfume shop in the French Quarter. A wacky, philosopher/swindler, Dr. Dannyboy Wiggs, somehow manages to unite them all with his Last Laugh Foundation. To make the story even more zany, beets—yes, the root vegetable—show up randomly throughout the narrative.
ristin Lavransdatter is Sigrid Undset’s three-part epic chronicling the life of the titular character from early childhood to medieval old age. Originally published in 1920-1922 as The Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby, and The Cross, Undset’s trilogy follows the life of its fourteenth-century Norwegian heroine. From maidenhood to death, Kristin’s life weaves together details from northern Europe’s medieval history, politics, religion, and family life.
Unlike most of the myriad books available about parenting, Senior’s All Joy No Fun focuses on what the act of parenting does to modern parents (rather than what various parenting styles do to modern kids). Breaking with the style of many parenting books, in which the author/parenting guru seeks to convince the reader that a specific technique, outlook or turn of phrase will transform their children into cooperative, obedient children, Senior’s book investigates parenthood from all angles. She mixes interesting historical facts (like the creation of “teenager” as a concept) with social science data to create a well-researched and engaging portrait of the modern American parent.
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.
Through a melting pot of storytelling traditions that explore the uncanny, the prophetic, Shields’ The Cassandra, scrutinizes the sheer inhumanity of Hanford site’s project, the nuclear arms race, and environmental contamination, both in Washington state and across the world in Japan, that followed.
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.
Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) is at once beautiful and base, philosophical and depraved, epiphanic and mundane; in a word, it is quintessentially postmodern.
Anyone struggling with the massive disconnect between the amount of information today’s parents have available and the amount to which modern kids misbehave will likely find this book worth reading. Parents today face the troubling statistics that the majority of children today mature into addiction or mental illness by the time they reach adulthood and are grasping to find successful ways to raise strong adults. Lewis’s model of taking the time to connect and communicate with our kids effectively, in order to grow their capability (which can only be done by teaching them skills and giving them the independence to practice, fail, and grow) offers an insightful alternative to the antiquated overly-authoritative and the reactionary overly-permissive modes of modern parenting.
Last week I listened to the audiobook of Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman narrated by Reese Witherspoon (HarperAudio, 2015) as I finished a baby quilt. As I stitched and cut and ironed, Witherspoon’s lovely reading brought Jean Louise Finch to life. And some of Lee’s passages were so moving, I paused in quilting to listen to them over and over again, writing them out for use here.
Diane Setterfield’s Once Upon a River: A Novel came out in 2018, but as I began to float through its pages, it felt very Victorian in style. Appropriate for its nineteenth-century setting, Setterfield populates her lyrical narrative with characters who embody archetypal roles: good or evil, liminal or privileged, young or old. Also, like Dickens or Hardy, Setterfield’s novel unravels slowly as she introduces various characters whom the story eventually brings together—like tributaries of the river Thames—and it took me a while to get into the flow of the story.
Diane Smith’s Letters from Yellowstone (1999) is a delightful, compelling and educational story about a fictional botany expedition into the wilds of late-nineteenth-century Yellowstone National Park. Smith inserts historically accurate details about the early years of Yellowstone National Park including cavalrymen stationed at the park and a young Native American family living quietly in its back country.
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).
Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (published by W.W. Norton Co. in 2015) is at once witty and outrageously bright. Norris stirs professional and personal memoir in with grammatical how-to and literary trivia.
