This month has been quite the reading kick-off to 2021- being confined to my home has given me the opportunity to get through 26 books in their print, electronic and audio forms. I picked whatever I was in the mood for at the moment, and was pleasantly surprised by some of the interesting clusters that emerged:
- Books about families in suburban America with significant trees involved
- The Most Fun We Ever Had - Claire Lombardo
- A Good Neighborhood — Therese Anne Fowler
- White Elephant — Julie Lanfsdorf
- Fire in Paradise - Alastair Gee
- Books about the Muslim experience in America and circumstances driving immigration
- Homeland Elegies - Ayad Akhtar
- Mornings in Jenin — Susan Abulhawa
- The Other Americans — Laila Lalami
- Books with Christian missionaries
- Dissident Gardens — Jonathan Lethem
- Fieldwork — Mischa Berlinski
- Books about Americans traveling abroad, more generally
- Dirt: Adventures, with Family, in the Kitchens of Lyon, Looking for the Origins of French Cooking — Bill Buford
- Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name — Vendela Vida
- The Lovers — Vendela Vida
- Books discussing, at some point, the complexities of our sense of smell
- Proof: The Science of Booze - Adam Rogers
- The Reason for Flowers - Stephen L. Buchmann
In other news… some of my favorite quote-of-the-days:
- “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” — Carl Rogers
- “We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.” — Marcel Proust
- “A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life.” — Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies
- “Whatever you do won’t be enough… Try anyway.” — Barack Obama, A Promised Land
And an random selection of other highly-recommended links, articles, and the like I stumbled across:
- “There Are Two Kinds of Happy People” — Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic
- I’m definitely one of these more than the other, and it’s a good challenge to try to live a little more in the Epicurean tradition, too.
- “Where Camels Take to the Sea” — Shanna Baker, Hakai Magazine
- What can this camel, a creature that is apparently native to my ancestral homeland, teach us about surviving in an extreme world?
- “The definitive case for ending the filibuster” — Ezra Klein, Vox
- Made me more informed, hopeful, and frustrated, all at once. It’s always satisfying to feel any increase in understanding of how my world works.