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Hey everyone,
This monthly reading club continues to be my largest and fastest growing email list. (Here are the others.) Thank you. I feel like reading is on trend right now. Right? Down with screens! Down with social media! Up with people. Up with books.
2. Birds Art Lifeby Kyo Maclear. I loved this fragile, unique, small memoir of discovering urban bird watching while dealing and wrestling with middle age. On its surface, this book may seem … strange. A memoir of urban bird watching? But there’s more here. Portlandia co-creator Carrie Brownstein says “We’re living on a million tiny stages. Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube. Dinner plates are showcases for our food, beds become venues for our slumber, selfies are curtain calls for our faces.” And as Kyo writes in this book “our economic growth model assumes if you make something small (unless it is boutique and artisanal, and thus financially large or monumentally miniature), it is because you are somehow lacking and frail.” Three years for small. Bring back small! This is a book about life’s tiny beautiful things. I loved it.
3. The Autobiography of Malcolm Xby Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley. I knew essentially nothing about Malcolm X before reading this gripping book. How gripping? Here’s the first sentence: “When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night.” Ultimately this is a story of US race relations through much of the twentieth century. Alex Haley interviewed Malcolm X regularly for years (years!) to put this together. Malcolm X was sadly assassinated just before it was published. (Btw, this is one of Angie Thomas’s three most formative books… she's my next guest on 3 Books!)
4. Zenobiaby Morten Durr and Lars Horneman. A graphic novel of the Syrian refugee crisis told through the lens of one little girl. This book takes ten minutes to read. And yet I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. Haunting. Chilling. A window into a world that most of us only touch from a far off place. This will zoom you right in. Highly, highly recommended.
5. Outer Order, Inner Calmby Gretchen Rubin. Years ago Gretchen told me she tidies her room for five minutes before she goes to bed at night. Put your toys n' things away before bed? How childish! How neurotic! But then I tried it. And it really does help me sleep better. So what is her complete list of tips to create inner calm then? This book. Just note: This isn’t a traditional Rubinesque deep, chatty, human exploration of a giant topic like happiness or habits. This is a smaller book – both physically and in spirit. It’s a giant listicle of ways to get organized.
6. How Parents Are Robbing Their Children of Adulthood. What comes after the helicopter parent? The snowplow parent. There’s a story within this New York Times article that made me laugh out loud. I’ll see if you can guess which one. (Hint: Sauce.) (Fascinating comments, too.)
7. Get In Troubleby Kelly Link. My favorite bookseller Sarah Ramsey recommended this book to me. A compilation of nine long-ish short stories steeped in magic realism. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, too. A couple of these stories stunned me. Bizarre, gorgeous, troubling, all at the same time. Some were just plain bonkers. All took forever to figure out like riddles printed upside down and backwards. And some I was just too dumb to understand and had to skip. Kids microchipped by parents. Pocket universes. A celeb couple popular for vampire makeout scenes reconnects years late under bizarre circumstances. A Vanity Fair blurb on the book says it best: “These stories soar and zing like LSD-tipped arrows shot into the farthest reaches of the imagination.”
8. Savage Seasonby Joe R. Lansdale. This book felt like a Quentin Tarantino movie. Two loudmouth, straight-talking friends down in Texas get sucked into a bumbling plot to find some lost money and everything goes horribly wrong. Fast-paced action, snappy dialogue, and a constantly swerving plot. You’ll feel dizzy and satisfied by the end. And like a Quentin Tarantino movie, it’s definitely Rated R. I loved this book.
9. The Secret Life of Cowsby Rosamund Young. Have you ever wanted to be inside a cow’s brain? Now you can! Rosamund Young has run a famous free-roaming farm in England for decades. This is a fun if slightly all over the place look at what cows are thinking told through deeply observed behavior.
10. How Mamas Love Their Babiesby Juniper Fitzgerald. Whoa! An exquisite, loving, totally open-minded poetic collage of the myriad of ways that mamas love their babies.
