2023 Reading Round Up #2

My favorite memoir of the year, a bestseller that was not for me, a surprise rec from my sister, and a love story that I can't stop thinking about.

My 2023 resolution was to share more regularly about the books I read and to do so on a platform other than Facebook. It’s too late for consistency, but here I am on Substack fulfilling that second goal just in time!

I hope to send out my third and fourth round ups for 2023 early next year. I’ll finish the year just over 50 books. A record for me!

Anne Bogel’s reading journal helps me organize my reading and my thoughts, but I’m tired of living in fear of my children spilling something on my only record of what I’ve read. I started using Goodreads, just to keep track of the titles I finish. Look me up! (as long as you won’t mind when I bring up what you’re reading every time I see you)

---

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

The first of two Claire Keegan books I read this year! A working class Irish man in the 1960s discovers that the nuns in his community are abusing the “fallen” girls in their care, but speaking up would threaten his family’s financial stability. This story is short enough to read in a single sitting, and Keegan loads every line with meaning.

---

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foerr

My sister and I walked through Kailua Beach Park in February discussing which three books we’d list as our favorites if we applied to be guests on my favorite podcast What Should I Read Next. Without hesitation she named Moonwalking with Einstein. Seton has great taste (disdain for Normal People notwithstanding) so I read this immediately.

Journalist Joshua Foerr attended the 2005 US Memory Championship for a story and afterwards grabbed a beer with a few contestants who confessed that competing is actually not so hard.  They offered to coach him, and he agreed.  The book traces the history of memory as a discipline and our understanding of memory itself, but the best chapters document Foerr’s year of training and his participation in the 2006 championship.  The ending does not disappoint. On our walk, Seton coached me on building a “memory palace” for my grocery list.  She had me envision a bulb of garlic the size of an armchair sitting on my front porch, imagining the aroma and the crunch of the papery peel to engage as many senses as possible to help the memory stick.  I think this will be one of my most vivid memories for the rest of my life!

---

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

This gem came to me via the comments section on Cup of Jo.  Ask me about it in person and see if I can talk about it without clutching my heart.  At a British boarding school in 1914, Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood pine for one another without realizing that their longing is mutual.  Gaunt enlists in the army under pressure from his family and Ellwood joins his battered friend in the trenches several months later where the uncertainty and intensity of their circumstances ignite their relationship. Gaunt looks back on his life before the war, “He had been a coward, perhaps, or perhaps he had simply valued his heart intact.  It was only because he knew he would die that he could be so reckless with it.”  Of course, the same war that brings them together also threatens to destroy them.  The story mesmerized me all the way to its satisfying conclusion.

P.S. I searched for weeks for another love story that could compare to this one, finally discovering Talking at Night by Claire Daverly. These two were my favorite love stories of the year.

---

Broken Horses by Brandi Carlile

How had I never heard of Brandi Carlile until I saw her on SNL last year? What a performance. My friend Anne recommended her memoir shortly after, mentioning that Brandi Carlile reads the audiobook herself and even sings a song to go along with each chapter.  Sold!

Parts of her upbringing were hard, but the book is heartfelt, not dark. Recalling how she has maintained her childhood habit of dressing up to perform, she says, “I still can't bring myself to go out onstage in ordinary clothes.  I see it as a sign of disrespect to the audience and to the art of entertainment. It's not about having fancy clothes and being rich; it's about communicating to the crowd that you understand the evening is special.”  Charming!

---

We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman

Even though this is Catherine Newman’s first novel, I already knew I loved her.  In this story, forty-something Ash cares for her dying childhood friend Edi during the last few weeks of her life. Sometimes heavy but never bleak, the book feels deeply human. And funny. Like when Ash narrates her clumsy, uncertain efforts to comfort Edi: “She’s looking into my face, nodding, even though I am fully winging it now, panicking, words pouring out of me like I’m a hose on the weepy consolation setting.”

Newman knows too well that if we’re lucky enough to experience real love and a long life, great sadness will find its way in at some point; she lost her own friend of 44 years to ovarian cancer in 2015. She neither denies nor romanticizes this pain that most of us are destined for. “It’s monstrous.  It is too much to take.  Why do we even do this--love any anybody? Our dumb animal hearts.”

---

The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

I adored this book and would recommend it to anyone who likes memoir, even if they have no interest in writing one.  She clarifies what distinguishes a great memoir from a mediocre one, and I loved the multiple references to Jon Krakauer, who might be my favorite nonfiction writer.  Two books that she discusses in detail that I’m curious to try: Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov and Dispatches by Michael Herr (which informed the movie Apocalypse Now). 

---

Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter by John Hendrickson

John Hendrickson, senior editor at The Atlantic, who has spoken with a severe stutter since early childhood, received a lot of media attention a few years ago in the wake of his essay about Joe Biden’s stutter.  After he gave an interview on live tv (his personal nightmare at the time, understandably) he received a flood of messages from fellow stutterers inspired by his courage.  His memoir recounts both the pain of living with a stutter and the solidarity and peace that came from connecting with people who share his experience.

He paints his family gently in the book, even though they made his childhood harder than it needed to be; his parents avoided the topic for years, mystified by his struggle, and his older brother overcame his own stutter only to use his success to humiliate Hendrickson.  At his Jesuit high school, the famed Kairos retreat served as a turning point when he worked up the nerve to give a speech in front of his peers.  His newfound courage propelled him toward satisfaction and peace in adulthood where he pursued healing in his family and found meaning in his marriage and his career.

There is no question that this was the best memoir I read all year. I usually give several people my favorite book of the year as a Christmas gift, and this year they all got copies of Life on Delay.

---

Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff

Michaeleen Doucleff wonders why conventional Western parenting so often produces children like her annoying, entitled preschooler.  In search of a solution, she and her daughter make extended visits to three remote communities with cultural (read: parenting) practices that have remained fairly constant over the last century (or several).  Her advice is useful, if obvious.  Children crave connection and actual responsibility, and cultivating these instincts creates a sustainable culture of shared responsibility at home.  If I teach my little ones to watch the iPad and stay out of the way while I clean up dinner, then of course they’ll embrace their special, work-exempt status in our household.  And ok, yes, I’m still often cleaning up dinner alone (it’s faster if I just do it myself!), but I’m congratulating myself for at least revamping our laundry procedure (Zoe removes clothes from the dryer and sorts them into the siblings’ baskets) and assigning Robby to coffee making duty since he’s up before 6:30 anyway.

---

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

This novel sat on my to-be-read list after I heard Tayari Jones on a podcast (should I just start saying the podcast?  Is it clear by now that I only listen to one podcast?) and I finally read it after Jillian gave me a copy for Christmas last year.

Growing up in Atlanta in the 1980s, Dana Lynn Yarboro lives with her mother, and her father visits them for dinner every Wednesday evening.  He lives nearby with his other family: a wife and a daughter Dana’s age who have no idea that Dana and her mother exist.  The bigamist father might sound terrible now, but good luck trying to hate him as his backstory unfolds.  His two daughters’ lives become intertwined in adolescence, with Dana aware they share a father while her half sister is not.  The complex characters here felt similar to those in Jones’ other novel, An American Marriage, an all time favorite of mine.

---

The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

Like Winchester’s other book, The Professor and the Madman, this story focuses on the making of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. He reads the audiobook himself in his brilliant British accent. Two fun facts:

• There were comprehensive dictionaries for other romance languages at the time, with one major difference. The others served a prescriptive purpose while the OED sought to be descriptive. It’s harder to dig up quotations to document how every single English word has ever (!) been used than it is to just declare what they mean and call it a day, like the French did.

• The first edition left out exactly one word, apparently by accident. I won’t spoil it. Go read it! :)

  ---

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

My first re-read of the year!  I needed some fiction that felt like an escape after reading so much nonfiction, and this delivered.  I doubt I need to summarize since this series and tv show have been around forever. If you’re nursing an Iron Flame or ACOTAR hangover, this just might be the cure.

---

Reminders of Him by Colleen Hoover

Colleen Hoover books are just not for me. Now I know!

---

Next Up

I like to maintain a pile of options from the library. Not sure which of these I’ll actually get to or in what order, but these are stacked up on my nightstand. Let me know if any of them belong at the top of the list!

• The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi (for book club)

• Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (considering a re-read)

• Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Anonymous (an anonymous memoir…? I started this in the summer and the library wanted it back and I’m a rule follower even though they’re fine free. This was weird and also compelling so I want to get back to it)

• The Great Believers by Rebecca Makai (Christmas gift from 2022 that I wanted to read before the year is over)

• Trust by Hernan Diaz (Anne Bogel’s write up caught my attention, but this doesn’t sound like the books I normally like)

• You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi

• The Woman in Me by Britney Spears

---

Thanks for reading. Were any of these on your radar already? Will any of them make it on your TBR? It would make me so happy to hear that anyone read this besides Michael, who kind of has to.