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March Reading Wrap-up

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I’ve been so focused on reaching my reading goals these past few months that I have completely neglected blogging. So, in an attempt to catch up… here’s my reading wrap-up from March!

Books read in March: 8 // Total books read in 2018 so far (as of the end of March): 28

Favorite book from March: Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith (⭐⭐⭐)
In Smith’s The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, three narratives are woven together to create a story that revolves around a painting, a landscape by Sara de Vos, a Dutch artist living in the 1600’s. The thread of de Vos’ art and life is interlaced with that of a man living in 1950’s Manhattan who has the painting hanging on his wall, and that of a young Australian forger living in Manhattan hired to replicate de Vos’ masterpiece. While the novel is rich in detail and description, the plot never fully captured my attention.

Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton (⭐⭐⭐)
I picked up Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter prior to my trip to New York and visit to her restaurant, Prune, in March. Once a foodie hot spot, Prune is now a New York mainstay with overpriced dishes that are simply fine. Hamilton’s memoir about discovering her love of food and becoming a chef made my mouth water various times, but the narrative verged on tiresome when she repeatedly divulged details of her painfully awkward marriage to the father of her children, a man she seemingly fell into a relationship with and didn’t love.

White Houses by Amy Bloom (⭐⭐⭐)
White Houses frames the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and reporter-turned-friend and lover Lorena “Hick” Hickok with tenderness and insight. It’s an intimate portrait of two women looking for love and companionship, both in sync and at odds with the marriage between Franklin Roosevelt and his first lady, Eleanor. Throughout, we are offered a peripheral view, removed; we gaze in as if from a window, separate from the story and the characters. I was left wanting more.

I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell (⭐⭐⭐⭐)
In Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, the author offers up haunting glimpses of near-death experiences that have shaped the trajectory of her life. In prose that is as beautiful as it is raw, she exposes a dangerous encounter on a secluded path, instances of nearly drowning, complicated childbirth, heartbreaking miscarriage, and more. These seventeen “brushes with death” leave the reader thankful for every breath, every moment of being alive.

Winter Kept Us Warm by Anne Raeff (⭐️⭐️⭐️)
Winter Kept Us Warm, Raeff’s novel about family, war, desire, parenthood, and independence, follows three characters, Ulli, Isaac, and Leo from the moment they meet in post-war Berlin through the rest of their lives as their paths intersect and diverge again and again. While I wasn’t wowed by this book, there are nice bits of writing throughout and Raeff is a skillful storyteller.

Back Talk by Danielle Lazarin (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
I picked up Danielle Lazarin’s Back Talk off the front table at McNally Jackson in New York, and I’m glad I did. Lazarin’s stories, which are refreshingly satisfying and smart, revolve mostly around middle-class white women in NYC in the process of wanting, desiring, becoming. A lovely, well-written collection.

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
While the cover of Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time did nothing to sell me on the book, the blurbs did. “Marvelous,” said Deborah Harkness. Jeanette Winterson: “Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.” Tom Hazard is a man who ages slowly, his body and his face hardly change year after year allowing him to live for centuries. Not aging soon becomes problematic as peers and love interests change and mature; those around Tom start to take notice. The plot is far-fetched, with Hazard placed at the right (or wrong) places at various points in history, and the end felt a bit messy, but the book is an entertaining page-turner that will keep you engaged and reading until the very last page.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (⭐️⭐️⭐️)
Home Fire, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017, and my book club’s pick for March, is a modern telling of Sophocles’ play Antigone. Shamsie’s story follows three British Muslim siblings as they encounter prejudice and extremism in Britain, and explores how they negotiate family, politics, betrayal, and matters of the heart. I wanted to love this book but sadly found the characters bland and the writing mediocre. Though that cover is GORGEOUS.

February Reading Wrap-Up

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Books read in February: 9 // Total books read in 2018 so far: 20

Favorite book read in February: André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name


The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck (⭐️⭐️)
Jessica Shattuck’s The Women in the Castle is a historical novel set in post-WWII Germany. A group of women, widows of resistance fighters, grapple with the aftermath of war, struggle to come to terms with their troubled country, and piece together their lives. I usually love historical fiction, but this book just plods along, the characters read like unsympathetic caricatures, and the plot never fully grabbed me.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (⭐️⭐️⭐️)
Binti, a young Himba woman who is the first of her people to be accepted to the best university in the galaxy, flees her homeland and boards a spaceship that will take her on an eye-opening and life-changing journey. The first novella in Nnedi Okorafor’s sci-fi trilogy, Binti is a quick, engaging read that tackles ideas of race, identity, black power, and “otherness” in a fantastical, outer space setting.

What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton (⭐️⭐️⭐️)
Hillary Clinton’s memoir What Happened was my book club’s pick for the month and supplied interesting fodder for conversation, though we agreed that the writing was, at best, very mediocre, and parts read like a shout-out/hand slap to the various folks who’ve helped/hindered Clinton along the way. While the rehashing of the lead-up to the 2016 presidential debacle was more emotionally grueling than fascinating, the most engaging bits were the descriptions of the Clinton’s interior lives, their family gatherings, dinners with friends, their favorite television shows, their private chats. Being invited into these quiet, personal spaces, moments that speak to the importance of family, community, and survival, grants the reader some kind of social catharsis against the tumultuous, razor-sharp political situation we inhabit today.

Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
Heart Berries is a beautifully written memoir by Native American writer Terese Mailhot. In it Mailhot puts big, messy emotions on paper, exposing her life – missteps and triumphs, bouts in a mental hospital, jealousy and rage – and her huge heart. She writes with a fearless pen about identity, colonial whiteness, and the trauma that persists in the body after the generations of violence against her people. A strong, powerful book.


The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton (⭐️⭐️)
The Miniaturist, a historical novel set in 1886 Amsterdam, follows the young bride Nella Oortman as she moves into the house of her newly-wed husband. He is often absent and his strong-willed, cruel sister rules the roost. The first half of the book was well-plotted and the story of Nella’s maneuvering within her new, strange world was an interesting one; the second half of the book fell flat and the plot moved off into predictable yet ridiculous territory.


The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory (⭐️⭐️⭐️)
I decided to take Oakland-based Jasmine Guillory’s breakout romance The Wedding Date on vacation to Mexico and am happy I did. It’s the perfect beach read. After meeting in a stuck elevator, Drew Nicols asks stranger Alexa Monroe to be his guest to a wedding, his ex’s. She agrees, and their biracial romance blossoms. It’s a playful, easy book with a huge dose of food porn thrown in to whet the appetite.

Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
My favorite book so far this year has been André Aciman’s 2007 coming-of-age novel, Call Me By Your Name. Set in Italy during a summer in the 1980’s, the novel centers around the charged romance between 17-year-old Elio and the 24-year old American scholar/student, Oliver, staying at Elio’s parents’ villa. It’s a gorgeously evocative glimpse at the endless possibility of youth, the disarming intensity of first love, and the blind need of infatuation. I wept through the last 40 pages, and upon finishing I went back and read those last pages again, heart aching and feeling all the feels.


The Idiot by Elif Batuman (⭐️⭐️⭐️)
Where Call Me By Your Name is electric with passion and longing, Elif Batuman’s ambitious coming-of-age novel, The Idiot, is emotionally bereft. The heroine of the book is Selin, a bookishly smart young Harvard student who stumbles as much through her academic life as she does through her emotional one. Batuman satirizes academia and shines a light on what it meant to be on the cusp of adulthood in 1995 when email was new and missing a phone call on accident was still a thing. Satire is not my favorite genre and I kept expecting to be wowed by this book, to find some gem in the narrative that pulled it all together, to feel something deeper for the bland main character, but it, and she, ultimately left me cold and indifferent.


Defectors by Joseph Kanon (⭐️)
Stilted dialogue. Uninteresting characters making baffling decisions. Slow plot.
Hard pass.

2017 Favorites

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Top 10 Books of 2017 Brief Book Reviews(5)

I read so many really great books this year. Books that broke my heart, made me laugh and cry, books that terrified me, books that enchanted me and made me wonder, books that made me fear the future and books that carried me into the past, books that grounded me in the present and books that transported me to magical worlds.

Of the 104 books I read this year, these were my favorites:

Top 10 Books of 2017 Brief Book Reviews(1)

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
This book astonished me. Within the first few pages, I knew that it would be one of my favorites of the year. A favorite for always. It is just. that. GOOD. It’s hilarious and smart, touching and bizarre, and I fucking LOVED it. A truly remarkable read.

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
I had the great pleasure of hearing Jesmyn Ward read from Sing, Unburied, Sing with my friend Guinevere a few months back at East Bay Booksellers. As far as I am concerned, Jesmyn Ward can do no wrong. She does things with language and narrative that are magic. The characters in this book, their story, will amaze you and break your heart. Read it, it’s so worth the heartbreak.

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti
I loved this story of complicated father figure Samuel Hawley and his teenage daughter Loo navigating their way through the world. It’s a tale full of adventure, danger, suspense, and heart. Tinti keeps you hanging on every sentence, every word, up until the glorious end.

Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
Idaho is a gorgeously written debut novel about family, memory, and loss. The narrative pivots around the murder of a child and is both haunting and lovely, with a line of suspense that keeps the reader turning page after page. I was so moved by Idaho, by the characters and the writing, and I can’t wait to see what Emily Ruskovich comes out with next.

Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard
What amazes me, again and again, about Knausgaard’s writing is that there is a pedestrian everyday-ness about it. He catalogs and peels apart the world around him in seemingly ordinary prose. And then, in peeling back and exposing ugliness and the ritual of the mundane, he shows us such great beauty and insight. That beauty is, at times, simply breathtaking.

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent
This book stole my heart, broke it, and stitched it back together. It’s the story of an all-consuming tangled mess of love and violence, of growing up, of survival. It’s brutal and terrifying and beautiful and brave, and completely riveting. An absolutely stunning debut. Read it.  Trigger warning: rape, incest

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
I can’t believe I waited so long to read Pachinko, my 104th book of the year. It’s a saga about multiple generations of a Korean family in Japan, about identity and duty and honor, about love and longing and loss, about the triumphs and hardships of life. It’s a great read, a page-turner, and Lee is a wonderful, seemingly effortless storyteller.

Hourglass by Dani Shapiro
Dani Shapiro’s Hourglass is a memoir peppered with old journal entries, and rich with memories, observations, and realizations. It is intimate and insightful and achingly beautiful and I loved it.

Hunger by Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay is a powerhouse. Hunger traces the before and after in Gay’s life. Before she was raped, and after; before she used food as a salve and after, when food filled the void of hurt and pain left by the boys who raped her when she was 12, when hunger built her body into a massive impenetrable fortress. Gay is consistently smart and insightful, and her look inward in Hunger is fastidious and unflinching. Her look outward, towards the way women in society can never escape the weight of their bodies, their worth constantly measured by their ability to disappear into thinness or reviled for their audacity to take up space, is dead-on.

Shades of Magic trilogy by V.E. Schwab
I sing the praises of V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic fantasy trilogy to anyone who will listen. As I mentioned in my review of the third book, A Conjuring of Light, “these books are the perfect escape.” And they are! They are a pleasure to read because they’re FUN and full of magic, and they make me happy. Start with book one, A Darker Shade of Magic, and you won’t be able to stop. I’ve been trying to find a magical series that replicates the feelings I was imbued with while reading this trilogy but I haven’t found another fantasy series that I’ve loved as much. Let me know if you do…

More great reads of 2017:
Silk Poems by Jen Bervin
The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis
The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne
We Are Called to Rise by Laura McBride
Her Body and Other Parties stories by Carmen Maria Machado
The End We Start From by Megan Hunter
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui
Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen
Human Acts by Han Kang
The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Look poems by Solmaz Sharif
300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso
Norwegian by Night by Derek B. Miller
Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift
Ways to Disappear by Idra Novey
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
News of the World by Paulette Jiles

What were your favorite books of 2017?

Give Books: A Holiday Gift Guide

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Give Books Brief Book Reviews Instagram Post

There were books I loved this year, books that were amazing and/or difficult reads, that didn’t make it onto this gift guide list because either the subject matter isn’t for everyone or those titles are on so many gift guide lists already (looking at you, Lincoln in the Bardo and Sing, Unburied, Sing). So I’ll be compiling my top books of the year in another post.

Happy gifting!

FOR YOUR MOM

1.) FOR MOM: Dani Shapiro’s Hourglass, $22.95
Hourglass is a stunner, a deftly braided memoir peppered with old journal entries, and rich with memories, observations, and realizations. In it Shapiro excavates the girl she was, examines the woman – mother and wife and writer – she is now, and speculates about the woman she is constantly becoming as her life inches closer, ever closer, towards death. Shapiro has packed so much into this slim book, the fast abandon of youth, the intense love and weight of years of marriage, the anxiety and joys of parenthood, and the sweet sting of memory, of aging.

2.) FOR DAD: Derek B. Miller’s Norwegian by Night, $14.95
While Norwegian by Night is, at its core, a book of suspense, it also provides a fascinating look at Jewish identity, the frailty of memory, language and the ability to communicate without words, war and the effects of violence on the brain, parenting, aging, and death. It’s great.

3.) FOR YOUR BEST FRIEND: Hannah Tinti’s The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, $27
This is a fantastic read full of adventure, suspense, and heart. I just loved it, as did my book club, and most all my friends who’ve read it.

4.) FOR YOUR SPOUSE: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Autumn, $27
In Autumn, the first in The Seasons quartet, Knausgaard, already a father of three, writes to his unborn daughter about the mundanity of our world, about the place she’ll soon be entering into and some of what she’ll encounter. As only Knausgaard can do, he describes for his daughter: Apples, War, Infants, Autumn Leaves, Lice, Vomit, Pain, Flaubert, the Labia (holy shit, read it), Forgiveness, and more. In each description, there is knowledge to be imparted and a personal connection being made, to others and to the world. And at the core of it all, fleshed out and laid bare, a deep and gorgeous truth.

Gift Guide 5-8(1)

5.) FOR YOUR MOTHER-IN-LAW: Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, $27
Little Fires Everywhere is a beautifully rendered novel about family, identity, art, friendship, and the fire-spark of love. Throughout, I was struck by Ng’s excellent ability to get inside her characters’ heads. All different, each character feels true and distinct, emotionally complex without being contrived. Ng’s characters grapple with issues of belonging and betrayal, with what makes a “good” or “bad” or “worthy” parent. We witness the desperate acts of parents attempting to hold onto their children, and family dynamics pulled taut by fear, expectations, and deep affection, and the evidence that sometimes family isn’t the one we’re born into but the one we choose.

6.) FOR YOUNG KIDS: Carson Ellis’ Du Iz Tak?, $16.99
A favorite picture book in my house, Du Iz Tak? is a beautifully illustrated story about the seasons, nature, and the cycle of life from the incredibly talented Carson Ellis, illustrator of the Wildwood Chronicles.

7.) FOR THE COOK: David Tanis’ Market Cooking, $40
Fresh, seasonal produce takes center stage in David Tanis’ gorgeous new cookbook. My sister-in-law, who knows I love to buy vegetables seasonally at our local farmers’ markets, gave me this cookbook for my birthday in November, and there are so many recipes I can’t wait to try, including: Yellow Beet Salad with Mustard Seeds, Celery Salad with Pistachios, Sake-Steamed Kabocha with Miso, Roasted Coconut Carrots, Tomato Chutney, and Fennel al Forno, to name just a few.

8.) FOR THE BOOK LOVER: Guinevere de la Mare’s I’d Rather Be Reading, $12.95
This little volume fits into a stocking and is perfect for lovers of book stacks, libraries and indie bookstores, reading nooks, and that amazing new book smell. Compiled by Silent Book Club founder (and personal friend) Guinevere de la Mare, I’d Rather be Reading is an ode to books and the reading life.

#85 Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard

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34362982When thumbing through the book review section of The New York Times a few weeks ago I wasn’t surprised to read in Celeste Ng’s By the Book Q&A that she’s not a fan of Karl Ove Knausgaard: “I have never been able to get into Knausgaard, though many, many people whose opinions I trust adore his work. It’s just not for me.”

Knausgaard is a polarizing author. Based on conversations I’ve had with friends and fellow book lovers, it seems you either love him or you just really don’t. I’m solidly in the LOVE category. My husband, however, having never read a lick of Knausgaard’s writing, derides him with passion any chance he gets (most recently over dinner with friends at Leo’s Oyster Bar) because of an instant dislike of Knausgaard’s seriously earnest author photo and a general mistrust of anyone who pens a six-volume, many-paged autobiography. I’ve read the first two volumes of My Struggle, by the way, and they’re fantastic. I particularly loved volume 2.  Most of the people who dislike Knausgaard refer to his navel-gazing, a meticulous dissection of everyday life, calling his writing boring, misogynistic, banal.

What amazes me, again and again, about Knausgaard’s writing is that there is a pedestrian everyday-ness about it. He catalogues and peels apart the world around him in seemingly ordinary prose. And then, in peeling back and exposing ugliness and the ritual of the mundane, he shows us such great beauty and insight. That beauty is, at times, simply breathtaking.

In Autumn, the first in The Seasons quartet, Knausgaard, already a father of three, writes to his unborn daughter about the mundanity of our world, about the place she’ll soon be entering into and some of what she’ll encounter. As only Knausgaard can do, he describes for his daughter: Apples, War, Infants, Autumn Leaves, Lice, Vomit, Pain, Flaubert, the Labia (holy shit, read it), Forgiveness, and more. In each description, there is knowledge to be imparted and a personal connection being made, to others and to the world. And at the core of it all, fleshed out and laid bare, a deep and gorgeous truth.

One of my favorite books of the year.

With beautiful illustrations by Vanessa Baird and translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey

#79 I’d Rather Be Reading by Guinevere de la Mare

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33606660If book stacks, libraries and indie bookstores, reading nooks, and that amazing new book smell thrill you to the core, this lovely little volume is for you. Compiled by Silent Book Club founder (and personal friend) Guinevere de la Mare, I’d Rather be Reading is an ode to books and the reading life. The book, an elegant package with muted colors and a beautifully curated selection of words and images, includes an essay by Guinevere on becoming a reader, plus additional essays by Ann Patchett, Gretchen Rubin, and Maura Kelly, as well as contemporary illustrations and artworks by Jane Mount of Ideal Bookshelf, Lisa Congdon, Sophie Blackall, and many more.

If you happen to be in San Francisco this evening, August 24th, go to the book launch party for I’d Rather Be Reading at Green Apple Books!

Thanks to Chronicle Books (my old employer) for my copy of I’d Rather be Reading.

#58 We are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby

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35272259Samantha Irby is funny and acerbic, and her candid personal essays cut the bullshit and get right to the meat of life.

In We are Never Meeting in Real Life, Irby, author of the blog bitches gotta eat, writes about growing up poor and black outside of Chicago, about her sick mom and her loser dad, about being a smart but underachieving student and going to a middling college. She also tackles sex and dildos, shit, stomach issues and body aches, eating and fatness, mental illness, and her love of television and staying indoors. She writes about how the world, in so many ways, asks her to apologize for her size and for her appetite; over and over her essays give the world the bird: No way, fuck you. That doesn’t mean she’s immune to self-doubt, complex body issues, and the constant struggle to be. She just doesn’t owe anyone an apology.

Irby’s humor, while honest, witty, and raw, isn’t for the faint of heart. She is sarcastic and cutting, as hard on those around her as she is on herself.

#35 South and West by Joan Didion

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32842454Some books just don’t need to be published.

Joan Didion’s newest, South and West, is one of those books. I like Joan Didion, but this small book reads like an afterthought, an unnecessary side note to her other wonderful works.

Comprised of fragments from previously unpublished notebooks, “South” is a laundry list of observations, anecdotes, and conversations formed on a road trip Didion took through the South (Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) in 1970. Didion’s notes do evoke the South, the heaviness of the air, deep porches, water moccasins, and the echoes of slavery are everywhere, but the section feels incohesive and incomplete.

The book weighs heavily on the South; “West” is just a few pages tacked on before the end of the book. These notes are even more fractured, jumping from memory to observation without much reason or deeper meaning.

#24 Ongoingness by Sarah Manguso

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22244927Like my copy of Manguso’s 300 Arguments, nearly every page in this slim book is dog-eared; Ongoingness is full of passages I want to return to and sentences that bring on all the feels. In it, Manguso, an avid diarist, writes about the act of keeping a diary. For her, the diary is not only a record of life, but the proof of every day. In an attempt to live with complete awareness, to ward off death, she actively archives experience, builds a document that leaves a trace and pins down memory. This is not the diary itself, but a series of meditations on the act of writing daily, on the formation of identity and how it changes, on parenthood and aging, love and loss, and ultimately the ongoingness of time.

Manguso’s passages about being a new mother, nursing, and the body as vessel struck me at the core:

“In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time.

I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him.

My body, my life, became the landscape of my son’s life. I am no longer merely a thing living in the world; I am a world.”

It’s so good.

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