Book 2: The Jolliest Bunch by Danny Pellegrino

I picked up this collection of essays about the holidays after watching and enjoying a Hallmark Christmas movie that the author had also written. It is a fun, light read of stories about a variety of aspects of holiday remembrances: our experiences as children vs. adults, the sometimes bizarre people who get thrown into our lives around Christmas, how important the Scholastic book fair was to many of us who were born in the '70s and '80s, and the way end of year celebrations often make us melancholy and think of people who are no longer in our lives for many reasons. A well-timed read for right after the season has ended. 

Grade: B

Book 11: Wild by Cheryl Strayed

I don't know why exactly I decided that I needed to read this book now, since it's not exactly a new book. It's also a style of book that was once dominant in publishing (memoir of How Someone Dealt with Trauma) that's become less common, and I had the thought that maybe when it felt less like the entire world was in one constant state of trauma, we had more space for equally real and valid individual traumas. Do we have the capacity for a memoir about how someone dealt with the unexpected death of a parent to cancer, given the global pandemic and failing democracy and climate change and war?

Possibly I don't have the capacity for that, but I still found this book fascinating. It's a book about a woman leaving her marriage, selling everything she owns and flying to California to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone, despite the fact that she had done very little hiking (and no thru hiking), because it felt like it was what she had to do to process her mother's death. The author is so extraordinarily lucky; the degree to which she was unprepared for the reality of this task was very stressful for me just to read about, let alone experience. But it also made me think about how infrequently I do anything without doing everything I can in my power to be as prepared as possible, in order to not appear like I don't know what I'm doing (even when I don't), and how exhausting that is, too. It's also a book about a time that's totally different in many ways; it was published in the early 2010s, but her trek took place in 1995, when if you left for a hike like this, you were simply out of contact except for when you pick up your supply boxes at the small towns in between multiday hikes. 

It made me weirdly nostalgic for the '90s, an era which had its own laundry list of Bad Institutional Things (and which contain the seeds of many of the worst aspects of today's problems), but which also feels like a time when it was more possible to just do things! Anything! Try something else! This is less a "boy weren't things better in the '90s" reflection, because while I'd rather not live in a pandemic, I don't actually think that things were better or simpler or whatever. Maybe I'm just reflecting on the fact that I was never the kind of young adult that Cheryl Strayed was, for better or for worse, and it feels less and less likely that I will ever be that kind of adult in any age, and sometimes that feels like my own loss. 

(Also, I reread part of A Walk in the Woods, which is a book by Bill Bryson about his own ill-planned hike on the Appalachian Trail that same year, and which was undertaken for wildly different reasons, and boy is that a great compare and contrast of what it was to be a young white woman in the '90s and a middle age white man in the exact same time period.) 

Grade: A  

Book 6: How to be Alone by Lane Moore

 This is another book I ended up taking out from the library as a result of a podcast, and man. It's not the easiest of reads? It's a book about trauma, and how the specific lessons you learn about love as a child and teenager stay with you, and how to create a life within that, if not exactly in spite of it. It's not a trauma porn book; while some of the elements of her experiences are specified, a lot of it is referred to rather than laid out for the reader's perusal, which definitely shifts the emphasis away from being one of the standard mid-2000s memoirs that were all anyone (or me in any case) read for a while. 

It's a book that feels challenging to me in a very 'well you just have to sit with this, you can't fix it even if you want to' way. The format is a series of essays, which could be read as individual pieces (and some of them were published that way), but for me the strength of the book is the cumulation of all of them. The weight of the last essay is built upon all of the rest. I'm glad that I read this book after I read Thanks for Waiting, because this is a book that doesn't have a neat narrative ending; this is a book about a woman who desperately wants a found family, and a soulmate, and to know how to have 'normal' emotional connections with people, and it doesn't end with her married and/or fixed. But it still ends in a place that leaves you with hope and a sense of possibility, rather than despair or a nice, pat narrative destination. I don't know. This book kind of fucked me up, and I'm glad I read it. 

Grade: A 

Book 3: Thanks for Waiting by Doree Shafrir

One of the sources for new to me books (usually but not always nonfiction and memoirs) are the various podcasts I listen to. This was a book discussed on an episode of Longform last year, and it sounded pretty interesting and like it might be something of an encouraging read for me, a person who at times cannot believe she's in her early forties simply because I didn't have any idea that this is what being 40 (or 41 or 42) could look like. 

And well, it's KIND of an encouraging read in that way, but also not at all? The author is a very young GenXer, as opposed to be squarely in the no-man's land between the generations the way I am, and the main basis of her feeling like a late bloomer is that she wasn't married by the time her younger sister was, who also became a lawyer straight out of college, and I don't know! From a millennial standpoint her experience of grad school and chronically underpaid work in her twenties followed by good media jobs that were nevertheless unstable and fraught with sexism and old boys' clubs because: the media in her thirties followed by marriage and an eventual baby in her late thirties and early forties feels pretty standard! And I know that a memoir isn't about the technical reality of one's situation necessarily, it's about how it feels, but it was also the second book in a row that I read and had a feeling of....do I just not get how straight culture feels anymore. 

So yeah! A perfectly readable book, but not one that spoke to me the way I had anticipated or hoped for. 

Grade: B

Book 17: Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom

I picked this up because I want to read more nonfiction and fiction written by Black authors, specifically women. I was familiar with her general writing style from twitter, and I knew she was a professor of sociology, but I was really blown away by this collection of essays. One of them that stuck with me was about her relationship to the word beautiful, and her knowledge that she wasn't beautiful, and how mad it makes people to hear her say that. She's either denying the possibility of a Black woman being beautiful by not acknowledging her own beauty, or unable to see it. But she takes the larger view of that kind of term, and contextualizes it as the exclusionary concept that it is. There is an understood definition of beauty in this culture, and if you are outside of it (and specifically, if you are dark-skinned), then you will never truly reach it. There's no pithy answer to this, either; the lesson is not that our beauty is inside us, or that it's only through not participating that you can be free. It is simply an acknowledgement of something that culture spends a lot of time denying exists at all.

Most of the essays have this clarity of vision between the societal and the personal, and it made me remember why I loved my sociology courses in college, and wish very much that I could take a class taught by her. It's wonderful writing and her point of view is sharp and clear and I am grateful for it.

Grade: A

Book 10: How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones

When I put this book on hold at the library, it was with the optimistic belief that at some point in the future, I would be up for reading a memoir that deals with growing up in the south as a gay black boy being raised by a single mother with a heart condition. I had read Jones's work before, so I knew it would be written well, but also that is a lot to handle! But his light touch in exploring his past and his memories and what he did and what was done to him made it so easy to read, until it suddenly punched you right in the gut. It seemed to float until it landed, and you realized it had been on that trajectory the entire time, and you just didn't know.

So much of his experience discovering who he was as a queer man felt familiar to me, and part of that is in reading about someone coming of age when I did, too - the '90s are now a decade of self-reflection, of origin stories, and that lodged in my chest in a particular way. But of course, so many of his experiences don't reflect my own, and he teases them out and holds up a mirror to them all. I loved it.

Grade: A

Book 7: Know My Name by Chanel Miller

I didn't know if I was going to be able to read this. It's a memoir written by the woman who was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who got six months of jail time by a judge who didn't think he should be punished for a 'mistake.' I hadn't read the buzzfeed publication of her sentencing letter to the court, or looked for much information on the case beyond celebrating when the judge in the case was successfully removed by the voters in his county. But I felt like it was something that I wanted to read, if I was able to, and I'm so glad that I could.

The writing is beautiful, and painful, and shows how wide the gulf is between what you know before you're in the middle of a sexual assault trial, and what you know after: what you know about how the justice system works, and doesn't, and what you know about public opinion, and about having a voice, and living a life that's yours. It's the power of the repetition of how unfair our culture's expectations are for women, and their pasts, and what can be blamed on them, and the hypothetical future of the men, whose ruined futures are always referred to in a passive tense - his future was ruined - rather than an active - he ruined his future. A woman is raped, rather than a man raped someone.

It is a hard book to recommend, except that it's not, because it is beautiful and real and fairly devastating, and I hope very much to be able to read works by this author in the future. If there are other stories she wishes to tell, I want to hear them.

Grade: A

Book 27: Just Kids by Patti Smith

This is a classic book of the past couple of years, in that I borrowed it to read for one of my book clubs, wasn't able to attend the meeting, but still finished the book after the meeting had already happened. Patti Smith is a musician and poet I knew of, but didn't actually know the work of; this book is a memoir of her lifelong relationship and friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work I was familiar with but whose life I knew little about.

The two of them met in the late sixties in a park in New York, and spent the next five years together living in artistic poverty together, first in Brooklyn (in my old neighborhood) and then in the village at the Chelsea Hotel and then a loft space, back when loft living in New York was actually how young and mostly broke artists lived. They were romantically and sexually involved during these years, even as Mapplethorpe's awareness and understanding of his sexuality came into focus, until they each found new partners and their relationship shifted into friendship and collaboration. 

I read this right after City of Girls, and it felt in so many ways like a continuation of the New York that was explored in that book, with neighborhoods and cultures that felt familiar but also completely cut off from my own experience. Both books have key scenes and moments that take place a block or two from places I go to frequently, and yet. There has been a serendipity in the order I've read books this past month, where one seems to inform the next one. I think of Mapplethorpe as being such a quintessentially queer artist that it was almost confronting to have his life told through the perspective of a straight person, even someone who by any reckoning was as close to him as anyone else during his adult life. But it was also a really fascinating exploration of how the counterculture of that era ran in opposition to so many norms, and on a purely personal level, it reaffirmed for me how extremely poorly I would have done as a starving artist in any era. 

Grade: A

Book 25: Educated by Tara Westover

I read this book because both of my parents read it for their book clubs, and I had seen it mentioned all over as well. It definitely affected me more than I had anticipated; I started reading it thinking it would be a bit of a throwback to the dominant memoir genre of the mid-2000's (compellingly written memoir about the author's abusive/unique/uniquely abusive childhood, and how they recovered), and while it is that, what's lasted for me about the book goes far deeper.

The author grew up in a fundamentalist, survivalist Mormon home in Idaho in the nineties, and was homeschooled until she was accepted at Brigham Young University. She wasn't actually homeschooled, though--there was almost no actual formal teaching, and most of her time was spent either helping her father in his wrecking yard, or her mother as a midwife and naturopath. Her parents were abusive primarily via neglect; she was injured repeatedly because of her father's unwillingness to take any basic precautions with her safety, and any kind of medical treatment from outside the home was viewed as rejecting God's help and therefore evil. But she suffered more deliberate abuse at the hands of one of her older brothers, and I think the biggest shock about this book for me is that everyone in her immediate family actually survived.

The break from her family that she finally achieves via BYU and then eventually Cambridge and Harvard isn't as neat and as clean as I wanted it to be, nor is her anger at them as fully expressed as I desired it to be on her behalf. But her analysis of how her family existed within Mormonism and America is so cutting and much more nuanced than the instinctive blame I have of the structure of her family's faith for her young life--the Mormon church was also what got her out of her family's abuse, via education and a world outside of her mountain. She wrote a dissertation about how Mormonism fit into American culture as a whole in the 19th century, and I genuinely hope that eventually it is released as a popular history book, because this book made me want her perspective on the topic within an academic context. Her story of academic success is extraordinary for its uniqueness, but I think there's so much more that can be learned from her work than merely the ultimate 'overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to achieve something' life lesson.

Grade: A   

Book 30: Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs

Man, it's really fascinating to read a memoir of essays like this in 2018. Possible Side Effects is the fourth collection of personal essays based on his life that Augusten Burroughs published in the 2000s, and there was a period of time for five or six years when that style of writing dominated book publishing, in large part due to the success of his first memoir, Running with Scissors. I had read his first three books around the time they were published, and enjoyed all of them, but I had purchased this book back when there was still a Borders next to Penn Station.

The book is only twelve years old, and depicts events that take place in the 1970s through the mid-2000s, but it's remarkable just how dated it feels. That datedness isn't necessarily a problem; my reaction wasn't exactly 'oh this didn't age well,' but it was more an awareness of the fact that it was describing a different time, both in terms of the settings of the stories and the time in which those stories were written. I was reminded of a couple of essays in The Salmon of Doubt in which Douglas Adams described how he interacted with technology in the 1990s and how he expected technology and life to evolve as a result. It wasn't even that he was wrong about everything, but I had to grapple with just how differently the world I was a teenager was from how today is. We adapt so quickly to changes, even ones that feel (and, truly, are) monumental, and Burrough's descriptions of dating via personal ads and then craigslist postings and other methods of the trade feel simultaneously very familiar and completely foreign.

This book feels like a fourth collection of essays, which is to say that while the writing is still as inventive and compulsively readable, the stories being shared don't feel like the big jewels anymore. There's still something to be discovered in them, and I don't regret reading them as well, but I didn't really engage with them as a reader so much as I engaged with them as someone who is approximately the age now that Burroughs was when he wrote them, and that's an interesting place to be when thinking about the stories. I discovered from reading them that I still deeply care about whether the person of Augusten Burroughs is doing okay now; he's married, although not to the man who he was dating while writing this book, and he's working on a couple of projects, although nothing too major, compared to his earlier successes. But I really hope the life behind the wiki entry about him is happy.

Grade: B

Book 20: The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams

What a delightful, bittersweet book.

This is a collection of works by Adams published after his sudden death in 2001. Most of the book consists of magazine essays and other short nonfiction, and introductions he wrote for other books, and short stories he had written that hadn't been published elsewhere, and one transcript of an absolutely incredible extemporaneous speech he gave on religion. The final part of it is the first nine or so chapters of the novel he had been working on (for almost a decade) when he died. 

This was the perfect book to read after finishing Ready Player One. What Douglas Adams did is everything that that depiction of geek culture doesn't understand about what can make geek culture fun and wonderful. The way Adams delighted in the world, and most importantly wanted to share what he found, and discuss it and play with it and reinvent it rather than just regurgitate it, made me want to engage with people and information and history like little else has in recent memory. He was so enthusiastic about so many things that it made me ache for how much he didn't get to see or do or experience, and it also made me feel (mostly in a good way) my own mortality in a way I don't always. I started to read this book the weekend after the 2016 General Election, but I didn't have the capacity for viewing his joy and delight in the world at that point. I do now, thankfully, and it's been a helpful if unintentional benchmark for my own outlook and emotional well-being to compare how much I struggled with this book then and how necessary it felt to read now. The world is so big and so vast and so absurd, as well as being tragic and brutal and sad, and Adams jumped into all of that, and now he is reminding me to do the same.

Grade: A 

Book 75: McLevy: The Edinburgh Detective by James McLevy

This book is essentially a memoir of detective stories, written by an Edinburgh policeman a few years before Arthur Conan Doyle began his medical studies in Edinburgh in the mid-19th century. He was one of the first writers of the true crime genre, and all of his stories are of his own experiences catching thieves at their own game.

I can't claim to be a huge crime writer, and all of these stories are more like vignettes than full proper stories, without a lot of suspense about whodunnit or any of that. The writing is thick and quite a bit denser than modern prose, but it definitely paints a picture of Edinburgh back in the day, and the narrator's pov is clear and distinct. Like a lot of short story collections, some of the stories are stronger than others, but the best of this bunch are really compelling and capture the era for the modern reader. I've been reading a lot of historical fiction written well after the fact, so it was nice to get to read something historical that was written during the time.

Grade: B 

Book 54: Thirteen Days by Robert F. Kennedy

Obviously one of the best kinds of books to read during turbulent times is an historical account of two weeks when the world danced with disaster. I'm being only somewhat sarcastic by saying that, honestly; in a lot of ways I find it deeply reassuring in a certain fatalistic way to remember that the world has always been on a knife's edge, and ever thinking that it's not is the dream. However, October 1962 certainly was a crucial time in the history and even sheer existence of humanity.

The construction of this book is fascinating. The central document itself was written as a memoir by RFK four or five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it is a fairly straightforward narrative of how JFK made the decisions he did and the rationale behind those choices. He also really drives home that in the moment, none of them knew that they would succeed in averting nuclear war. It's so easy to examine history through the lens of what we know will happen, and to forget that of course no result or outcome is actually inevitable.

In addition to RFK's writings and the relevant primary sources (including the correspondence between JFK and Khrushchev), there is both a foreward written in the late 1990s by a RFK biographer, and an analysis of RFK's writings from the early 1970s. The shift in our understanding and interpretation of the actions taken, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declassification of certain documents, is readily apparent in the two commentaries on RFK's memoirs. I'm glad I read this book both because it expanded my understanding of the U.S.'s relationship with and to the USSR (a topic which feels more relevant to the future by the day) and because it's a compelling reminder that history is constantly being revised, for better and for worse.

Grade: A  

Book 22: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Reading Fun Home was a fascinating experience. I have seen the musical adapted from this graphic novel (actually memoir) three times, and I also read collections of Bechdel's comics Dykes to Watch Out For back when I was a teenager and figuring out why her work resonated so deeply with me. So reading this book was deeply familiar from the very first page.

But it was also new, and unexpected, and it left me with an even greater appreciation for what an incredible adaptation the musical really is, because it is both unerringly faithful to the book and its own unique narrative. It's not just that there are parts of the book that aren't a part of the musical, although of course that's true, it's that the story changes with the form, and the relationship that theater (and musical theater in particular) has to its audience is different than the one an author has with their reader.

Bechdel uses so many different lenses to examine her father's life, and her relationship with him, and her future beyond him: the shared (yet tragically separate) sense of being an outsider, of queerness, their relationship and connection through literature and using the words of fiction and other people's experiences as a bridge between themselves, the use of design and art and maps, so many maps, to attempt to explain the unfathomable. She also shows how her own diaries attempted desperately to tell the story of her family in a way that made sense, either by omission or by telling the factual truth and avoiding all the emotion underneath. It's a brilliant, beautiful book.

Grade: A