Good morning!
Today’s edition: a monthly summary of books I’ve read, for your perusal. Titles with links will take you to my notes!
Some clusters to note:
- Books on the immigrant experience in America: The Undocumented Americans (a glimpse into the lives of undocumented immigrants); Transcendent Kingdom (a novel about a family of Ghanaian immigrants, told by the daughter— a PhD student at Stanford) ; Conditional Citizens (part memoir, part cultural criticism, on the second-class status of immigrants); Love, Loss, and What We Ate (Padma Lakshmi’s memoir)
- Spontaneous picks that were surprisingly good: A Gentleman in Moscow (an uncanny story of Russian aristocrat is banished to a hotel for life, as he tries to make the most of his life despite the circumstances (sound familiar?)); On All Fronts (journalist Clarissa Ward’s memoir on becoming a international correspondent and the uncomfortable role of being a journalist in a war zone)
- Ones I won’t forget any time soon: Women & Power (a brief history of women and public speech, and redefining “power” beyond masculinity); Chatter (why our internal voice is so negative, and how to get some distance); A Life on Our Planet (written and read by David Attenborough, a dire witness statement to our dismal situation, and a hopeful call to action around the power of biodiversity)
I’ll leave you with some interesting links I’ve collected lately…
- Choose a country, a decade, and a tempo, and let Radiooooo play you a song. Who knew what Malian music in the 1980s sounded like?!
- Write a letter (well… an email) to yourself on FutureMe, to be delivered in a year, five years, or ten years. Looking forward to the day when I wake up to: “I hope your now is better than my now.”
- If you have a GoodReads, see what The StoryGraph says about your literary tastes. Apparently, I mainly read “nonfiction books that are reflective, informative, and challenging.” Not untrue (except for the occasional beach read thrown in the mix).
March 2021 books
- The Undocumented Americans — Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Always captivated by an author reading her own book. A work of “creative nonfiction, rooted in careful reporting, translated as poetry, shared by chosen family, and sometimes hard to read….,” an honest portrait of the people behind the labels, and of herself. Villavicencio’s narration beautifully captures the intricacies of language and of story, giving voice, dignity, and humanity to the people she meets. More than journalism, this is a story of people made truer and realer by a consciousness of the person behind the pen, too.
- There There — Tommy Orange
- I’ve been reading a lot of stories recently, both fiction and non-fiction, of lives that seem very far removed from my own. And I think each time that this is the power of writing, of story-telling— to share the inner lives of others, to remind us that that running voice of consciousness, perception, and experience in our own heads exists all around us. Here, Tommy Orange adds an essential tangle of stories to the mix— those of an urban Native American community, rarely ever told— closing with a jarring, cinematic ending.
- Title alludes to the Radiohead song, and to Gertrude Stein’s quote on Oakland (applicable also to Native people, across the country): “There is no there there.”
- Transcendent Kingdom — Yaa Gyasi
- A frictionless read, and another portal to a life I have not lived — this one with one familiar twist, though: the narrator is getting her PhD in neuroscience at Stanford! Overall, this book was somewhat more quiet than I’d expected, but carried well by complex, sympathetic characters, some interesting philosophical musings on neuroscience and religion, and themes of family, love, loss, and hope.
- Land — Simon Winchester
- As usual, Winchester writes with breathtaking detail about a seemingly basic, simple part of society. His comprehensive presentation of the concept of land ownership through personal, historical, or fictional stories ranges from the formation of the continents to the invention of boundaries to the minutiae of his own plot of land, and he somehow made me care about it all.
- Women & Power — Mary Beard
- A powerful, direct, and digestible explanation of women and power. I don’t think I’ll forget what this 30 minute read taught me any time soon. Go read it!
- The Great Believers — Rebecca Makkai
- Another dive into a world I’ve never known, this time the Chicago art scene in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Makkai writes a nonlinear narrative following characters both then and in modern-day Paris, her words subtly building the contrasting settings. It took me a few chapters to get into the story, but I quickly grew attached to Yale, Fiona, and their quests for goodness. By the end, the book reminded a bit of Jonathan Lethem’s with how embedded it was in its setting, but Makkai balanced her allusions and references in a much more digestible and thus effective way, at least for someone with my background knowledge.
- In Love with the World — Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
- Simultaneously, the story of a Tibetan monk’s wandering retreat and experience with death, and a crash course in the fundamentals of Buddhist philosophy. Mingyur Rinpoche conveys the principles through memories of his past and practices in the present, epitomizing the constant state of becoming that underlies so much of his teaching. Recommended by George Saunders.
- Under the White Sky — Elizabeth Kolbert
- The pioneering climate journalist strikes again. Kolbert proposes a new era of “the control of the control of nature” as the backwards-looping response that humanity must take to manage the changing world. I felt a deep sense of attachment to each location and community (whether of people or pupfish) she visited, learned many a random and significant fact, and immensely enjoyed listening to this audiobook.
- Love, Loss, and What We Ate — Padma Lakshmi
- Padma Lakshmi shares the parts of her life that women are trained to never mention, and it relieves a burden I didn’t know I carried to read it. Her bravery and authenticity here lend credence to the idea that shame heals when spoken.
- Cool Dogs, Cool Homes — Geraldine James
- Exactly what it sounds like. A relaxing collection of images of interior design and dogs, some of my very favorite things to look at. Kind of brings the same joy as Zillow-scrolling, I think.
- The Inland Sea — Madeleine Watts
- A quiet read, told in moments more than scenes, Watts manages to convey a range of emotion— especially the overwhelming anxiety of living in our ultra-connected Information Age— and to capture my attention. Her style here reminds me somewhat of Vendela Vida, but her narrator comes across more sympathetically than the other’s. Some resonant lines:
- “The idea that [she] might have had her own inner life with all its vividness and self-doubt and vulnerability simply did not occur to me.
- “…emergency could not be avoided. Emergency would come for you no matter what you did.”
- “I was becoming aware of the fact that the fires were vicious and the waters would not abate. That the thousand-year storms were just going to keep rolling in.”
- “Our experiences are so frequently unbearable to us because real life is just sheer bloody continuity.”
- A quiet read, told in moments more than scenes, Watts manages to convey a range of emotion— especially the overwhelming anxiety of living in our ultra-connected Information Age— and to capture my attention. Her style here reminds me somewhat of Vendela Vida, but her narrator comes across more sympathetically than the other’s. Some resonant lines:
- How Do We Look — Mary Beard
- If only all history books were written by Mary Beard. Here, she considers the meaning of art depicting human and divine bodies, what the viewer of such art brings to the table, and what exactly it means (if anything) to be civilized. Thoroughly enjoyed.
- On All Fronts — Clarissa Ward
- Aptly subtitled “The Education of a Journalist,” Clarissa Ward’s memoir shares her experiences in the news industry and on the ground in war zones with refreshingly little editorializing. Ward recognizes her privilege and the ethical quandaries that come from the journalistic role (never interfering, only recording), but refrains from over-compensating or apologizing for her identity. Instead, the honesty and discomfort of working and living amidst tragic, complex, and nuanced conflict comes through clearly, made even more accessible to a reader who is similarly rooted in a different world. The latter part of the book also showcases the intense empathy and rigor with which she worked, particularly in covering the conflict in Syria, again allowing her humanity and career to reinforce each other to portray the impossible complexities of politics, religion, and culture. I have great admiration and appreciation for Ward’s story, and am lucky to have spontaneously picked this up!
- A Gentleman in Moscow — Amor Towles
- “… in the shapeless moments before the return to consciousness…”
- On discovering the inner workings of a place: “In the time Nina had been in the hotel, the walls had not grown inward, they had grown outward, expanding in scope and intricacy.”
- The Count, like me, fills his time reading the daily papers— the repetitive, rather un-newsworthy news; playing categories…
- How’s this for a change of pace? A Russian aristocrat is sentenced to a life of confinement in a hotel overlooking the Kremlin during the years of revolution. He endeavors to live a life of purpose and meaning, circumstances be damned. This turned out to be uncannily relevant to today’s age of quarantines, and to my ongoing existential crisis. The novel is a celebration of noticing, capturing the magnified importance of observation when one’s physical space is limited— Towles manages to describe everything from a clock ticking by, second after second to a finely-crafted pair of scissors, in painstaking yet essential detail.
- Bird by Bird — Anne Lamott
- Gave some advice, some good quotes, nothing life-changing.
- A Life on Our Planet — David Attenborough
- Of course, read by the author. Attenborough gives his “witness statement” to the state of the world, told through the impressive history of his career and paralleled by the equally impressive human impact on Earth. Think of this as a verbal rendition of Planet Earth, conveying wonder and knowledge about the creatures we exist alongside, with slightly more emphasis on how we have screwed up and on the narrator himself. I’ve been listening to Attenborough since I was seven years old, and it’s been an honor learning more about the man behind the voice, especially in the first parts of the book.
- The latter sections, on the other hand, offered less of his personal insights, and instead echoed other environmental writers on the tragedy that lies ahead and what we can do about it. Well-written, not as uniquely captivating as Attenborough at his story-telling best, as in the initial Witness Statement.
- An Inventory of Losses — Judith Schanlansky, transl. by Jackie Smith
- A dense, philosophical, and introspective exploration of loss, through the stories of humans places and things that once were. In blurring the lines between imagination and history, Schanlansky beautifully captures the spirit and tragedy of her subjects, pulling moments of life and honor from the infinite mass of the forgotten… part of the time. At others, I just had no idea what was going on.
- Chatter — Ethan Kross
- I am increasingly skeptical about delving into popular psychology books these days, given my already treacherous tendency to look for ways to optimize every aspect of my existence. But I was refreshingly surprised by Kross’s lack of focus on productivity in Chatter, and in his holistic treatment of our internal dialogue in the contexts of neurobiology, social relationships, development, and performance; using both a scientific and personal approach. He didn’t offer any radical new life-hacks, but rather built insight by fleshing out the evolutionary purposes of our chatter, how it can go wrong in our modern world, and ways to take a few steps back.
- We Came, We Saw, We Left — Charles Wheelan
- A light-hearted travelogue starring a charismatic American family. This was a nice escape from reality— I was very aware of, yet guiltily grateful for the refreshingly positive mood of the Wheelans’ adventure. The story contained just enough social/political context and typical family bickering and momentary crises to be grounded in reality, while the worldly cultural experiences of the travelers shone brightly through.
- The World: A Brief Introduction — Richard Haas
- Haas aims to write a primer on… well, just about everything, to build “global literacy” in a world woefully lacking people it. He certainly does cover a lot, but at such a distant, impersonal level that I don’t know many people who’d be interested enough to read it.
- Conditional Citizens — Laila Lalami
- In a story of love and country, Lalami effectively frames an insightful, informative commentary on immigration and racism in America on her personal journey coming from Morocco.
- The New Heirloom Garden — Ellen Ecker Ogden
- Lots of interesting facts about gardens, resources to find/buy heirloom seeds, and information on plant families. Never knew that potatoes were nightshades, too!
- 28 Summers — Elin Hilderbrand
- Just for fun. Needed a break from reading about the disastrous state of the world. Kirkus Reviews got it right: “Print the bumper sticker: ‘I’d Rather Be Living in an Elin Hilderbrand Novel.’” Hilderbrand really does have a knack for building worlds just close enough to our own to feel possible, but sparkling with the alluring charm of sunshine, the sea, and (I hate that I’m saying this) true love. Makes me wonder if that’s what it’s really like for the Nantucketians out there.
- Piranesi — Susanna Clarke
- A sorta creepy, mysterious, fantasy novel— unlike anything I’ve ever chosen to read, but it came intriguingly recommended as “more like a puzzle than a book.” Given my recent cryptic crossword hobby, I thought I’d give it a try, and was tentatively engaged enough to keep reading.