I began the year perusing the lovely used bookstores (UsedBooks Librería and Carolina Bookstore) and book exchanges in the cafés of Cuenca, Ecuador. Shortly thereafter, I moved to the bookstore capital of the world – Buenos Aires – where it’s completely normally to sit and read in public. This city has around one bookstore for every 4,000 residents. The ones on my must-visit list were Libros del Pasaje, Feria de Libros Plaza Italia, Librería Guadalquivir, and El Ateneo Grand Splendid. Of course I had to check out Walrus Books, appropriately located on United States street since it’s one of the English language bookstores. There are also bookstores on every other block in the theater district down Avenida Corrientes: Cúspide Libros, La Catedra Bookstore, Librería Saturno, Librerías Libertador, Librería Thesauros. And there are ubiquitous chain stores, like Yenny Books and Librerias Lavalle, that I didn’t bother with. Who knew it was possible to have too many bookstores?
Then I went to New York City. While you don’t see many people sitting around reading in cafés and parks in New York like you do in Buenos Aires, the bookstore experience was far more thrilling since it’s my language and culture. I went to a reading at The Strand and another at McNally Jackson, where I got to meet a writer I took an online class with last year. I also went to Rizzoli Bookstore, Shakespeare & Co, and Argosy Book Store. In addition to bookstores, I went to Grolier Club (whose objective is: to promote the study, collecting, and appreciation of books and works on paper) and the Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures where I saw one of Charles Dickens’ writing desks, a letter from Alice Liddell to Lewis Carroll, an original copy of the Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s farewell address letter, the entire handwritten manuscript of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, some original handwritten pages of The Secret Garden, and so many more fabulous literary artifacts.
Finally, there was the George Peabody Library in Baltimore with an opera performance and a showing of rare Poe books, and then the Bauman Rare Books shop in the Venetian in Las Vegas. It’s been a dreamy first half of 2022 for this lover of the written word!
Title: The Secret Life of Bees
Author: Sue Monk Kidd
Date Finished: 1/9
Finished: Yes
Format: Paperback
Ranking Out of 10: 10
Acquisition: Used Books Libraría in Cuenca, Ecuador
Notes: I think I might have tried to read this once before and given up, but this time, I went through it in just a few days. Such a great story! Not a mindbender or literary masterpiece, but a good read about a girl in South Carolina in the 1960s who hasn’t had the best home life and makes her own family against a backdrop of racism and the civil rights movement. Despite the prominence of bee keeping in the story, I think the book didn’t make much sense, but that doesn’t matter to enjoying the novel.
Title: Infinite Country
Author: Patricia Engel
Date Finished: 1/9
Finished: Yes
Format: Kindle
Ranking Out of 10: 9
Acquisition: Recommendation from something I read, don’t remember where.
Notes: I love this book. It’s along the lines of American Dirt (Jeanine Cummins) or Enrique’s Journey (Sonia Nazario), but it’s more about the emotions and the difficulty of the separation of family and the varied and sad reasons that make people go to America illegally than about the journey of getting to America itself. In fact, the main character (a teenage girl) is an American citizen by birth living in Colombia. But she still has legal trouble, just not what you’d expect. The story provides a new perspective on a timeless issue, an interesting look into a Colombian family and how their lives in two different countries affects their connection to each other.
Title: Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
Author: Kristen Iversen
Date Finished: 1/15
Finished: Yes
Format: Paperback
Ranking Out of 10: 9
Acquisition: Used Books Libraría in Cuenca, Ecuador
Notes: How funny that I had to go to Ecuador to read this book. I saw Iversen speak a few years ago at the now closed (and much beloved) Innisfree Poetry Café in Boulder. She was speaking out against the reopening of the Rocky Flats nuclear site for recreation. In my mind, Rocky Flats had been closed for decades. Oh no, my dear, this is not the case. It’s barely been a decade since the clean-up operations happened. Clean up of a place that was wildly mismanaged, had far too many accidents and fires, caused cancer in countless numbers of people, and contaminated the ground forever. And supposedly it’s safe to recreate on now, though I don’t know why you would since it’s just flat and hot ground. Iversen grew up downwind of Rocky Flats and even worked there for a brief while. This memoir does an excellent job of detailing the influence of the site on the region and the people who lived there, while keeping the reader engaged in her personal narrative as well.
Title: The Heart Goes Last
Author: Margaret Atwood
Date Finished: 1/18
Finished: Yes
Format: Paperback
Ranking Out of 10: 7
Acquisition: Book exchange at the Café de Ñucallacta in Cuenca, Ecuador. I only had one book to exchange and chose this over The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead) and Euphoria (Lily King).
Notes: If I’m going to keep dipping my toe into science fiction, I might as well do it with a master. Just like the Blake Crouch books I’ve read, I was super into this for the first two-thirds of the book. The concept really drew me in, and I read the whole thing over two days while traveling from Ecuador to Argentina. But honestly, when it got too much into the nitty-gritty of the plot leading up to the climax, I didn’t care as much and did a lot of skimming. Too many science fiction-y details and less about the human connections in the book anymore. Serious conflict and drama were happening to the main characters (a married couple) but I felt like their emotions were kind of glossed over, too simplified. I realize that’s the just the genre, though, so if you do like SciFi generally, I’d say this is an excellent choice.
Title: My Year Abroad: A Novel
Author: Chang-Rae Lee
Date Finished: 1/22
Finished: Yes
Format: Audio
Ranking Out of 10: 5
Acquisition: Library loan on the Libby app
Notes: I borrowed this from the library three times before I finally gave up. It’s over 17 hours long, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that it’s one of those books with two narratives: the narrator’s past in China with a character named Pong and his present in suburbia with his girlfriend Val and her son. I was invested in the latter storyline (which is why I kept borrowing the book) but completely tuned out during the Pong sections. This New York Times review describes it as having a “flash-bang tone” and the characters have “goofy jargon” and the author has a “tic of enlisting nouns as adjectives and verbs to inject his sentences with a steroidal boost…stylistic flourishes like these don’t express character so much as they flatten it, cartoonishly.” I agree with all this and I think that’s why I didn’t like it. The parts with Pong felt like a cartoon to me, and I’m not a fan of cartoons. I decided not to renew after the third time my loan expired.
Title: Why We Left: An Anthology of Women Expats
Author: Janet Blaser (Editor)
Date Finished: 1/28
Finished: Yes
Format: Kindle
Ranking Out of 10: 10
Acquisition: Probably read about it somewhere or heard about it on a podcast. Here’s the companion website.
Notes: While this book is only about women living in Mexico, I related to this so much. The essays are written by a wide range of women: women in their twenties to retirees; women who went to down to Mexico on a whim with no money and women who planned their move for a decade or more; women who went alone and women who moved their entire families; women who’ve only been there for one year and women who have already been there fifteen years. They discuss the good and the bad and everything in between. And while I’ve never met any of these people and never will, I felt a lot of kinship with them the entire time I was reading their experiences and a whole ton of happiness for them. I highlighted at least 50 passages that describe how I feel living in a foreign country, and I’ll quote a few that really ring true for me:
- Taking yourself outside your comfort zone helps you learn who you are as you can see which traits travels with you across these borders and which are simply left behind.
- I was born with wanderlust and had to follow my dream or die little by little each day.
- Did I really have any other choice but to fall in cultural love?
- To all the young people aspiring to travel or live abroad yet hesitating due to fear, social pressure, career norms, or any other reason, I urge you to fully listen to that yearning rather than ignore it.
- I’ve started to consistently live in this different mentality of “You don’t know if you’ll ever get to experience this again.” It’s why I dive into the waterfall instead of simply observe its majesty. Why I kayak by myself even though it scares me. Why I don’t mind living with lizards.
- I’m not as attached to material things and am more open to plans changing or having to wait. When I think about who I would be if I’d lived the last 12 years in the U.S., I’m so grateful and so glad I didn’t, and that I’m not that person.
- I realized then that I just felt happier, more myself, in a country where the people – and the climate – were warmer.
- But mostly we’ve wondered and considered, time and again, what the heck we were doing and how glad we were to be doing it.
Title: Affinity
Author: Sarah Waters
Date Finished: 2/18
Finished: Yes
Format: Paperback
Ranking Out of 10: 4
Acquisition: This book was originally sold in the UK (the list price on the back is only in pounds), made its way to the Litera-té bookstore in Tanganga, Colombia (there’s a stamp from this store on the cover), then to Craig’s Book Exchange and Fine Arts Gallery in Vilcabamba, Ecuador (another stamp), and then I got it from a book exchange from Wunderbar Café in Cuenca, Ecuador. It was the only thing on their shelf that vaguely interested me. Also, pretty lame but they actually charged me $2 for the exchange. And I had bought dinner there! Not sure the German owner knows what “exchange” means. Anyway, I left this book in the seatback pocket of a flight to Salta, Argentina so it can continue traveling.
Notes: I read a Sarah Waters book a few years ago and I didn’t remember how much I really didn’t care for it. This was more interesting, but it had the same problem – there was no plot until the very end. The main character had some tension in her life and emotional turmoil, but nothing happened in the book. When the action finally happened in the last 50 pages, the final twist was good, but wow these books are slow. They are written for people who enjoy the atmosphere of this style of book. Also, in the diary sections of the book, the use of & instead of “and” drove me insane. It was really distracting. But at least there were few of those parts.
Title: The Last Giant of Beringia: The Mystery of the Bering Land Bridge
Author: Dan O’Neill
Date Finished: 2/21
Finished: Yes
Format: Paperback
Ranking Out of 10: 8
Acquisition: AirBnB bookshelf in Oregon in June 2021
Notes: This writing style of this book was a bit too science-y for me to really get into it, which is why it took me eight months to finish, but it was super interesting and I wanted to finish it. It’s about the scientist Dave Hopkins who proved that there was once a land bridge between Russia and Alaska over which all kind of creatures traveled into the new world. What made it so interesting to me is all the nuggets about biology, things I would never think about or know because I don’t work in that field. So many little passages in this book revealed how scientists think, what they look for as evidence, how they draw conclusions, what makes valid evidence or not, how they can prove things they can observe, test, or measure directly. That was fascinating. Here are some examples:
The various ungulates may have grazed the same feed patch, but in a complementary way. A bison could feed where a horse had been, for instance, because the horse was a stem clipper and left a lot of stalk standing. The bison grabbed the grass with its tongue, tearing it some inches above the base and leaving the lip feeders (saiga and mountain sheep) to mow down the stubble.
…
Today’s wet tundra is so boggy and yielding that running is nearly impossible without special foot adaptations, like a split hoof that splays apart to distribute the load over more surface area or a leg that lifts vertically out of the mud. The presence of saiga, horse, bison, and mammoth, which did not have these adaptations to any substantial degree, suggested a firm substrate where grassed might do well.
…
Cultural traits, like a particular technique for knocking out stone tools, can be passed to unrelated groups and may not be indicative of a common genetic heritage at all. Even when these practices have not been exchanged between groups, there still can be remarkable resemblances in the fabrication of houses or of hats or of fishhooks simply because of the common objective, the similarity of materials at hand, and similar problem-solving strategies.
Title: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
Author: Philip Gourevitch
Date Finished: 2/21
Finished: Yes
Format: Paperback
Ranking Out of 10: 9
Acquisition: Feria de Libros, Plaza Italia, Buenos Aires
Notes: The Rwandan genocide of the 90s was largely ignored by the international community and allowed to happen. I remember hearing a little about it in high school, but this book was a highly informative look at the terrible reality of those hundred days. The book goes far beyond the genocide into the aftermath and what happened in refugee camps and what it was like for survivors and perpetrators to go back to living side-by-side. He also goes back decades before the genocide to analyze the factors that led up to the moment. This will come as no surprise to anyone, but colonial powers shoulder a large portion of the blame. They held up the Tutsis as refined and noble, while viewing the Hutus as coarse and bestial and deserving of disenfranchisement. Gourevitch doesn’t shy away from calling out the European powers that both created a situation in which this mass slaughter could happen and then failed to stop it. Still, he doesn’t excuse the Hutus themselves who were so willing to brutally slaughter other human beings, including people they are lived and worked side-by-side in harmony with for years. Including religious men who gave up their congregations to the violence. This book is political and historical and informative, but also highly readable. The author did a great job and I’d highly recommend this for anyone who wants to understand that situation more.
Title: Saving Fish from Drowning
Author: Amy Tan
Date Finished: 2/27
Finished: Yes
Format: Kindle
Ranking Out of 10: 9
Acquisition: Remember how famous Amy Tan was from The Joy Luck Club? I saw this and decided to give it a shot.
Notes: I was a little worried that this book would be too philosophical or slow, but it wasn’t at all. I was also a little worried from the opening that this would be magical realism, but it really wasn’t. Just the teeniest, tiniest amount. This is a brilliant travel tale of a group of friends going to Myanmar, but the person who organized the trip is no longer with them and it doesn’t go as planned. It’s written in omniscient point of view, allowing you to enter the heads of all the characters and that of the dead narrator. Each character has a strong, unique personality and Tan does a great job balancing out how much page time each one gets and what they bring to the story. This was an honest-to-god page turner for me, and I haven’t read a book like that in a while. There were a few story-within-a-story parts that I skimmed over, and the ending was one of those “here’s what happened to everyone after” whirlwind kind of endings, which I don’t like so much, but the story was excellent.
Title: Cultish
Author: Amanda Montell
Date Finished: 2/28
Finished: Yes
Format: Audio
Ranking Out of 10: 8
Acquisition: One of those recommendations that I can’t remember the origin of. Perhaps because while I was in Savannah I went on a few dates with a guy who had been in a cult. Or perhaps because I was obsessed with anti-MLM videos on YouTube for about six months.
Notes: This was a binge-able listen. The author covered some of the classics – like Jim Jones, Scientology, and Heaven’s Gate – but she also went into more modern phenomena, such as how boutique fitness with its spiritual affirmations became so popular. She wove in some personal stories and interviews, and easily kept my attention so that I listened to the whole thing in only three days.
Title: American Wife
Author: Curtis Sittenfeld
Date Finished: 3/7
Finished: Yes
Format: Paperback
Ranking Out of 10: 10
Acquisition: The Book Lady Bookstore in Savannah, Georgia
Notes: I think this is the fifth Sittenfeld book I’ve read, and I knew in advance I would like it. Still, it’s fascinating to me that a book that’s just about someone’s ordinary life can be so fascinating. That is, obviously, what makes Sittenfeld a great writer. This 600ish page novel covers five or so decades in the life of a fictionalized Laura Bush (it took me too long to figure that out). But unlike Rodham, this one was a page turner for me. I’m not one to read the biographies of our presidents or their lives, and while I know the bigger picture details of how W’s life panned out, I know nothing about the first lady. So the plot of this book kept me riveted. Interesting that writing fictionalized versions of our first ladies now seems to be a trend for Sittenfeld. I wonder who is next. It did feel at times that Sittenfeld gave the main character views and attitudes that were too modern. They felt anachronistic, progressive ideas that seemed unlikely for a woman in the 60s or 70s to have, but that’s why it’s fiction. Why not make our characters the idealized version of themselves?
Title: The Cold Vanish
Author: Jon Billman
Date Finished: 3/27
Finished: Yes
Format: Audio
Ranking Out of 10: 9
Acquisition: Recommended by someone I met on my Patagonia trip who is also as obsessed with missing persons as I am. Downloaded to listen to on our bus rides during the vacation.
Notes: This book revolved around one particular case (one I hadn’t heard of) but covers lots of other cases (some well known, some less) along the way as the author goes with the father of the missing man on the journey to find him. The book also covers laws around missing people and the work of others who are famous in the world of the missing, like David Paulides. Billman shines a strong and important light on the problems with searches and jurisdiction conflicts on public land.
Title: Mirrorland
Author: Carole Johnstone
Date Finished: 4/1
Finished: No
Format: Audio
Ranking Out of 10: 5
Acquisition: This must have been a recommendation but I can’t remember from where.
Notes: I also downloaded this for my Patagonia trip, but as often happens with books I download for travel, after the travel is over, I stop caring. I got about halfway through this and wasn’t invested enough to continue. It’s not that it wasn’t good – it’s more that mysteries aren’t really my thing and they generally have to be exceptional for me to get want to finish them. I think anyone who habitually enjoys the genre would like this book.
Title: Born a Crime
Author: Trevor Noah
Date Finished: 4/15
Finished: No
Format: Paperback
Ranking Out of 10: 9
Acquisition: On the bookshelf in my Manhattan AirBnB. This was a true AirBnb (not a professional one) where the owner really lived there. It’s interesting the things you pick up about a stranger from the objects they have, and this person is definitely super interested in South Africa. I would guess he’s visited at least once.
Notes: I’m not into celebrity culture and while I’m vaguely aware of who Trevor Noah is, I would never pick up his memoir on my own, but wow am I glad I did. I only knew the basics of apartheid but this memoir goes into a level of detail that is shocking and horrific. The firsthand account of what Trevor (as a mixed race person) and his mother (as a black woman) went through in his youth brings the reality of that time in South Africa into terrible detail. Read through Noah’s voice, the events and circumstances are so personal. I’d recommend to anyone to read this book to understand better was apartheid was like. I’m a big fan of using memoir over textbook to understand history, and this is a great example. The only reason I didn’t finish is because it was time to leave NYC and didn’t want to steal this guy’s book. I had about 50 pages left that I do want to read, so I’ll borrow a digital library copy at some point.
Title: Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London
Author: Mohsin Hamid
Date Finished: 4/16
Finished: Yes
Format: Audio
Ranking Out of 10: 10
Acquisition: Library loan. This is my fourth Hamid book. He’s a regular on my reading list now.
Notes: Rather than a novel, this is book of essays, but they were every bit as engaging as Hamid’s novels. You probably won’t be surprised to know that a lot of them were political in a nature, dealing with his status as a Pakistani and living in London and New York, but others were about his life as a writer and few other topics. They were all excellent.
Title: The Underground Railroad
Author: Colson Whitehead
Date Finished: 4/22
Finished: Yes
Format: Paperback
Ranking Out of 10: 10
Acquisition: Taken from my Manhattan AirBnB bookshelf. Not sure why I felt okay taking this one but not the Trevor Noah book.
Notes: This was only my second Whitehead novel but he is definitely now also on my list of “I-will-read-anything-by” authors. This novel follows the story of Cora, a slave who runs away from a plantation in Georgia on a literal underground railroad. The reader gets to see her varying experiences at different stops and along the route. Whitehead provides some terrifying scenes or the horrors of the American south during slavery, some interesting glimpses into parts of history we didn’t learn at school, and some hopeful realities too. It’s mostly Cora’s story, but the book is peppered with tiny chapters that let us peek into the lives of the some of the people she meets along the way, and I liked that. What I didn’t like was the ending. That’s not to say it wasn’t satisfying and appropriate; I just wanted it to be different.
Title: The World Without Us
Author: Alan Weisman
Date Finished: 4/27
Finished: No
Format: Audio
Ranking Out of 10: 6
Acquisition: Recommendation from something I watched on the Real Science or What If YouTube channel. Can’t remember which. I think I tried to read this once before. Or maybe it’s in my long book wish list on Amazon.
Notes: In a lovely coincidence, this book opened up in Ecuador, a country with lots of people tuned into climate change and environmental destruction, which is why I kept borrowing this book over and over, even though I’d barely listen to it every time I downloaded it. I couldn’t get into it beyond the first few chapters and I think this Amazon reviewer describes why “For a book that is supposed to discuss the future and what would happen to the world if humans were to suddenly disappear, you would think it would discuss what would happen in great detail. Instead, this book spends 80% of its pages discussing history, pre-history, and how humans have ruined everything. … I wanted to learn about infrastructure and how nature will take back the world, but this book goes off on so many unrelated tangents that I gave up.” So, it’s not that the book was bad – it wasn’t! – it’s that it wasn’t what I (and that reviewer) was looking for. Plus, overall, I haven’t been in the mood for something this serious. I finally gave up, returned it, and probably won’t try again.
Title: Work Horse
Author: Kim Reed
Date Finished: 4/27
Finished: Yes
Format: Audio
Ranking Out of 10: 8
Acquisition: I heard something about this book, the restaurant it’s about initially, and the restauranteur and some of his big ventures while I was in New York City, even though I never made it to the places mentioned.
Notes: Even though I’m not into restaurant culture, I enjoyed this memoir immensely, just as I did with Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. It’s far more about the writer than the restaurant industry and culture anyway, and for more than half the book, she’s out of the restaurant and on the corporate side. It’s about Kim Reed, who began her adult life engaged in social work, but became completely wrapped up in a crazy-busy life as the executive assistant to Joe Bastianich, someone I’d never heard of, but who is apparently very well known from multiple television shows and his food empire. Reed opens up this all-consuming world to her readers and takes us along on all her highs and lows, successes and failures managing this man’s world. It’s total escapism into a specific corner of New York City and Italy.
Title: Those Who Walk Away
Author: Patricia Highsmith
Date Finished: 5/1
Finished: Yes
Format: Paperback
Ranking Out of 10: 5
Acquisition: On the bargain book table at McNally Jackson in New York City. I had to buy something but there were so many amazing books that I had to limit myself to one cheap item. And maybe a notebook. And possibly a literary journal…or three.
Notes: It’s the half year of going back to previously read authors. I’ve seen The Talented Mr. Ripley three or four times, and I read The Price of Salt a few years back, so I was certain I’d enjoy this book. Well, I guess I enjoyed it because I finished it, but maybe I finished it because it was an easy read. I didn’t find this book very impressive, mostly because I couldn’t buy into the basic plotline – a father is so distraught over his daughter’s suicide that he tries to kill her widowed husband. The character development wasn’t there for me to understand why the father (with presumably no previous criminal record) suddenly became a murderer. There were some other things I found hard to buy too, but like I said, I still finished it. Is it worth noting that this is one of Highsmith’s novels that actually hasn’t been made into a movie? So many have.
Title: Conversations with People Who Hate Me
Author: Dylan Marron
Date Finished: 5/16
Finished: Yes
Format: Audio
Ranking Out of 10: 9
Acquisition: I saw his first talk to promote this book at The Strand in NYC. Fun fact, his name didn’t ring a bell at all – the book just sounded interesting – but it turns out he was the voice of Carlos in Welcome to Nightvale, and did the live west coast tour of that podcast in 2014 or 2015. And I was there at the Denver show with my sister, who also was a big fan.
Notes: From his talk at the Strand, this book was not what I expected because that conversation was so narrow. Plus, his co-host at The Strand was annoying and dominated the conversation, so I decided not to buy the book. But I was still curious, so I got the audio version from the library. Well, I really admire Marron after reading this. The book is intensely personal and self-reflective. We get a lot of his current history up to how he ended writing this book, and how he reveals it all to us is astonishingly introspective. He opens up to all the good, bad, and ugly. To the scary, the exciting, the internal struggles. The book is deep and I have a lot of respect for what he’s tried to accomplish through his work. It’s refreshing to have someone on the left willing to talk to the other side (even in the face of massive opposition from his own friends and acquaintances) and recognize there is common humanity that brings all of us together if we stop screaming at each other and trying to “cancel” everything we don’t agree with. His underlying premise is, empathy is not endorsement. It’s a great message.
Empathizing with someone is the simple acknowledgement that they, like you, are a human. Empathizing with someone does not suddenly permit them to say and do awful things; people will do those things and think those things whether you empathize with them or not. Empathizing with someone does not cast a vote for their candidate; only they can do that. Empathizing with someone doesn’t turn their beliefs into a contagion.
Title: Wall Street Created a Nation: The Untold History of the Panama Canal
Author: Ovidio Diaz Espino
Date Finished: 5/27
Finished: Yes
Format: Paperback
Ranking Out of 10: 5
Acquisition: Recommendation from the reading list in my Panama Insight Guide.
Notes: This is hard for me to rate because I never read books like this about historical events that are meticulously researched and jam packed full of details. This is the kind of book you’d read in a college course. For readabilility, this is about a 4. For doing what the blurb promises to do, it’s a 9. The history of how Panama came to be is quite interesting and I read this book while I was living there, but I got really lost in all the players and plans and treaties and military actions. I ended up doing a fair amount of skimming toward the end. Still, it’s pretty shocking to realize the extent to which Panama as we know it today was engineered by the United States.
Title: Having and Being Had
Author: Eula Biss
Date Finished: 6/5
Finished: No
Format: Kindle
Ranking Out of 10: 6
Acquisition: I saw this in McNally Jackson books in New York City and it looked interesting, but not interesting enough to buy. I got a digital library loan.
Notes: This book is made up of a ton of short essays, all centered around consumerism as we in America live it. The author explores what it means to exist in a such a wildly capitalistic society where we’re constantly encouraged to buy more and more, and how this makes us feel. It’s interesting, but not interesting enough to sustain a whole 336 pages. I read about one-third of that and felt like I got it and there wasn’t anything to be gained by reading further. Maybe I’m wrong, but I guess I’ll never know.
Books I Started But Didn’t Get Far Enough Into to Rate Before I Quit: Too Much Lip (Melissa Lucashenko), Super Volcanoes (Robin George Andrews), Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat (Hal Herzog), The Worst Journey in the World (Apsley Cherry-Garrard), The Lincoln Highway (Amor Towles), Talking to Strangers (Malcom Gladwell)
Books I Read for Professional Development: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (David Epstein)
YA Books I Read for Research: She Drives Me Crazy (Kelly Quindlen), The Henna Wars (Adiba Jaigirdar)
Books I Reread:
- Confessions of an Economic Hitman (John Perkins). I first read this 12 years ago in grad school and it fundamentally changed the way I view the world. Being in Panama – which is prominently featured in the book – felt like time for an essential re-read.
- Fates and Furies (Lauren Groff) Yeah, it’s kind of sick how many times I’ve read this book, especially when I have several other unread Groff books, but I really love it.
Books I Read on the Craft of Creative Writing: Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (Jane Alison)
Jennifer A Swallow 