A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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Reading The Call of the Wild, originally published in 1903, is fast. The novella is only 164 (in the edition I read), and yet, its brevity is part of its magic. Jack London follows the life of Buck, his canine protagonist, from a life of luxury in sunny California, to one of toil in the harsh world of the Alaskan Klondike.
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.
Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child (2012) brings a Russian fairytale amidst the Alaskan wilderness. The novel begins in the 1920s when Mabel and Jack, recently transplanted from their native Pennsylvania, face their second winter on their Alaskan homestead.
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.
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.
Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 novel, The Great Believers, explores themes of trauma, lost generations, parenting, death, emotional inheritance, and the repetition of generational struggles as its weaves two stories throughout. One storyline begins with Yale Tishman in Boystown, Chicago circa the mid-1980s as AIDS lays waste to the gay community. The other takes Fiona (who was a very young woman affiliated with Yale’s world in the mid-‘80s) to Paris in search of her missing adult daughter, Claire, in the year 2015.
Eleanor Oliphant is certainly a socially-awkward, vocabulary-rich, first-person narrator, but her story is not just a witty one. It becomes quickly apparent that Eleanor Oliphant is not completely fine.
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.
