Reading Update

Book #13 of the year was Stone Blind, by Natalie Haynes. It's the story of Medusa, and it's weird and great.

 

Book #14 was Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age, by Bruce Feiler. The main thing I got from this book is that life isn't linear. There are no predictable stages that everyone goes through. At all. The book is made up of an enormous series of interviews with people who have gone through every imaginable life change. Check out his website here. This is a truly fascinating book about how people navigate change.

Book #15 was The Leftover Woman, by Jean Kwok. It's a story of cross-cultural adoption and it's just all-around sad. Nobody comes out very well.

Book #16 was The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhon. I read this with my book club, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. The main character is a midwife, so that's always a plus, and the historical setting was fascinating and well-handled. It was a mystery, and there were lots of characters, and it's based on true events (plus there's a detailed author's note at the end explaining what's real and what's not). I recommend this one!

Book #17 was The Rachel Incident, by Caroline O'Donoghue. The incident referred to in the title is just awful, messing up several lives in permanent ways. The reviews make it sound light-hearted and sparkling, but I didn't really find it either. Plus there's so...much...drinking.

Book #18 was Momentous Events in the Life of a Cactus, by Dusti Bowling. I read the first one in this series last year. The protagonist has no arms, and in this book she starts high school. It's painful. 

Book #19 was Jhumpa Lahiri's Roman Stories. Lahiri wrote this book of short stories in Italian (her third language, I believe), and then translated the stories back into English with a translator. I mean - that's just so amazing. The characters in these stories all live in Rome, but they are all from other places. Living in Rome is beautiful but also difficult. The writing is wonderful, but I feel like I should read the stories again, because they all ran together a bit. Here's a taste:

"Regardless, she thinks that it's good to live in a place that's both familiar and full of secrets, with discoveries that reveal themselves only slowly and by chance."

And another:

"It's strange that maternal anxiety grows with time, that you get worse with the years. I'd have thought the opposite, but how can we bear the distances, the absences, the silences our own children generate?"

Book #20 was You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Maggie Smith's memoir about poetry, divorce, and recovery. I liked this, because it's so much the way we - or at least I - process trauma. It's very recursive and she tries on one metaphor after another. I enjoyed reading it, and it made me want to write.