Julia

This is a page-turner if there ever was one. So much going on in this book–a fascinating account of circus life in Depression-era America, for which a lot of really excellent research was done, and a sometimes deeply saddening account of aging in America as we do it now, in nursing homes and “assisted living.” The circus chapters really sparkle; they are action-packed yet still wholly believable. It's not the deepest book ever (some of the characters lack a little depth), but I'm totally willing to forgive that because after all the excitement, I wasn't hoping for a happy ending, but got one anyway :)

I stole this book from my little brother, who took a seminar on existential and humanistic psychology during his last semester of college. Lucky duck!

Anyway, Carl Rogers is badass. I taught Introduction to Psychology this summer for the third time, and whenever we discuss his person-centered approach, I get bemused questions such as, “So he just...listened to his clients? Really listened to them? And it worked?” Well, yes. Essentially, Carl Rogers articulated the idea that what makes a therapist helpful is not how many degrees a therapist has, or how many fancy and completely non-parsimonious theories they espouse, but how well they connect to their clients, and if they can actually provide unconditional positive regard–the idea that a therapist doesn't have to like or condone things that clients do, but does have to accept them as worthwhile human beings, no matter their circumstances or actions. This is not just some warm and fuzzy idea; decades after Rogers first started writing, we now have a strong body of evidence that the type of therapy matters far, far less than how much you like and trust the person you're graciously allowing to help you.

This book is a mash-up of memoir, academic writings (one special treat is hearing him get super sassy while addressing his naysayers in the American Psychological Association after receiving some fancy-schmancy award), and philosophical treatises explicating his perspective. It's really fun. Not “light reading” fun, but I would definitely recommend it if you're a mental health professional, or if you'd like to read something that's continually optimistic about the potential for growth present in all human beings.

Two quick quotes. First, Rogers is all about the freedom that comes from finding and maintaining your own integrity:

“To be a person...this would be painful, costly, sometimes even terrifying. But it would be very precious: to be oneself is worth a high price.”

Second, this is Rogers' telling therapists that real therapy requires bravery, on the part of the client, but also on the part of the therapist, as well. I hope I eventually get to a place where this is what I consistently do:

“We are deeply helpful only when we relate as persons, when we risk ourselves as persons in the relationship, when we experience the other as a person in his own right. Only then is there a meeting at a depth that dissolves the pain of aloneness in both client and therapist.”

First work of fiction in three months. Lordy.

Anyway, I stole this from my mom; it was one of her beach reads. For me, it was a fantastic “sneak in chapters between writing a final paper” read. Sunley's clearly done her research on Icelandic mythology, which was new & fun territory for me to experience, and keeps the pace & plot lively. I'm always impressed when a writer manages to capture the nuances of different psychological disorders, which Sunley also does quite deftly. The story is ultimately about family secrets, and in that regard, I wish I hadn't figured the secret out so quickly, but that didn't diminish my pleasure in the ending.

Good fluff, with a bit more thrown in.

Okay, first of all, J. K. Rowling is unrepentant about her transphobia, so I won't be buying her books or reading her stuff in the future. But September was really stressful, and I confess that I comfort re-read Half-Blood & Deathly Hallows, which normally function as my yoga blocks. I could just not put this re-read on goodreads, but that wouldn't be very honest! So here we are. I think my favorite part of this one are the Harry and Dumbledore interactions, definitely the deepest and most complex of the series. One irony there is that relationship is all about wisdom, compassion and mentorship, so it feels pretty ironic that she's not using her platform for more inclusive good. TERFs, sigh.

I think this excellent book suffered from being the first thing I read after finishing The Broken Earth Trilogy; I suspect most books' sheens would be somewhat dulled in comparison to the dazzle of TBET. Still, I raced through this and enjoyed it, with two caveats. First, there's one relationship between two main characters that grated on me for most of the novel, and I have a pretty high tolerance for interpersonal tension both in real life and fiction. After a plot twist, however, it becomes clear that the reader was supposed to be squirming reading those interactions, and I wish Johnson had been willing to give me a reprieve a bit earlier. The other caveat is there's another plot twist late in the novel that relies on the first person narrator failing to disclose a significant decision with the reader. That felt a bit sneaky to me, and is a good example of the success of TBET, which involved Jemisin deftly navigating second person narration without committing narrative errors of didactic commission or tricksy omission.

STILL! I'm just being picky! I believe this is Johnson's first novel, and based on how much I liked this, I'm hoping she keeps putting great stories out there in the world. Cara, her protagonist, is a nuanced and powerful character who will stay with me for a long time.

Wow. Read this in one day (today, actually). I'm intrigued how I picked it up after another big prize winner, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” and felt that Strout accomplished for me what I kept wishing Marquez had–written a book I literally could not put down. Not because the plot is so gripping, because it's purposefully not. The novel is full of a large cast of characters, though, all of whom at some point briefly glimpse the truth that a lot of the terrible things people do are really just because we're all lonely, but who then lose their grip on that truth in the muck of day-to-day living: from being on the causing and receiving ends of that loneliness. An excellent book to read in order to remember that everyone deserves empathy.

I've read a bunch of historical romances, at this point, and I hate to give 2 stars to the most explicitly feminist one, but here we are. First, I'll just say it plainly: not sexy enough! The protagonist and her love interest do have a genuine emotional connection, which is lovely, but this is by far the lowest ratio of eroticism to endless dialogue I've encountered. Second, I really do genuinely like that the protagonist balks once she realizes clearly that she's intended to transition from guardianship of one man to another (although her respectful-of-women-and-their-intelligence intended is a huge improvement from her tyrannical and bigoted father) and how trapped by convention women are even in the best of circumstances, but then...I dunno. I wish Balogh had pushed the limits of that tension further. Let Alex actually go off and be a governess! Then have a sexy reunion! Or have her challenge her fiance more directly about how they could fashion an egalitarian marriage! Instead we get a lot of her internal hemming and hawing, and not much actual plot. I am probably asking too much of something written in 1989, but a girl can dream.

Finished this while at the beach, and then promptly forgot about it. Jacob and I started it out loud on a trip to Great Basin NP in Nevada, then finished it while drinking beer and squeezing sand between our toes in NC. I haven't read any P.D. James in a long time, but my mother (rightly) adores her as the most droll (drollest?) contemporary mystery writer. Only three stars because it's actually fairly difficult to read a mystery out loud & still keep the proper pace required to maintain suspense. Five stars for James' use of the adjective “mullioned” to describe a great many windows.

Let me be clear: this is a teen vampire romance. Yup, and I'm standing by it as a good page-turner. In fact, since I'm already on book three of four, it appears that I'll stand by several thousand pages of teen vampire romance. I read most of this by camping lantern in the Needles section of Canyonlands, because I couldn't wait to get back to civilization to finish. It is fluff, but fast-moving, interesting fluff. My one complaint is that the teenage heroine, who is obviously beautiful, smart, compassionate, and mature, is very insecure. LAME! Give me Anne of Green Gables, give me Hermione, give me Alanna the knight from Tamora Pierce's “Song of the Lioness” quartet (Anyone? Anyone? They were awesome...and had sex in them!) I used to read in middle school, but self-conscious and second-guessing Bella? Barf. However, the female vampires are badass, and this writer is Utahan who has captivated the whole damn state with this series, and as new Utahan, I'm going to play along.

A really fun book. One of my pet grievances is when serious psychopathology is misrepresented in literature, but perhaps because of Haddon's experience working with autistic youth, or maybe just because he is a caring person and careful researcher, the portrait he paints of high-functioning autism is spot-on...nuanced, and without condescension. I was totally attached to the imperfect but still well-intentioned characters by the end, and had been thoroughly amused by Haddon's light, easy writing and quirky creation.

Let us just say that this did not age well. Plus, the number of times Douglas Lord called Whitney “sugar” appeared to be limitless and limitlessly annoying, and Whitney's “spoiled brat” persona reached truly absurdist heights when a cotton dress she wore while they were fleeing paid assassins was unfortunately “ugly” for her. And yet I still finished this! I can offer no logical explanation.

Wow. Summertime. Right after graduating from college. Chabon deftly captures the uncertainty, hope, sense of rootlessness, messy love affairs and the rapid alternations between feeling like summer is going to laze on forever, and the sense of urgency about wanting something exciting & earth-shattering to happen RIGHT. NOW. Plus it's sexy. Sometimes desperate, sometimes tender, but really, really sexy. And, perhaps oddly, the ending reminded me a bit of Brideshead Revisited, one of my most favoritest books of all time. So of course I'm sold.

I liked this! Family drama plus murder, what's not to like? One piece of nepotistic strangeness is that the narrator is the son of a Scotland Yard person, and engaged to a member of the family that experienced the murder, and yet, all the family members spoke freely to him without totally questioning what the hell he was doing in the house post-murder asking such nosy questions? That's a minor point, however. I felt surprised, although not shocked, by the end, and appreciated the clip at which this little mystery moved along.

AH! HYSTERICAL! WONDERFUL! The photos are goofy & weird, the layout is dizzying but fascinating, and my only complaint is that the recipes are scattered throughout instead of lumped together in a more traditional cookbook style–you have to work a little to find what you want, but really...this book is fabulous.

A really enjoyable read, as I suspect any book that includes a four year old who refuses to wear anything but a Batman costume and to be referred to as Batman might be. I'm going with three stars instead of four because things fell apart for me a little at the end; Cleave's strength is in his mordant observations of the minutiae of modern life, in this case as observed through the very proper English of a Nigerian refugee, and the pace of the last chapter or two leaves no room for the original, completely engaging prose of the rest of the novel. Nonetheless, I'd recommend it to a friend.

I was in Krakow a few years ago with a dear friend, and we spent one morning touring Auschwitz and Birkenau. I cannot imagine I am likely to ever find myself in another place with similarly eerie energy. It is, of course, both sobering and horrifying to contemplate the Holocaust, let alone to attach a now beautiful spot in the Polish countryside to the genocide that took place there. Beyond that, though, the remains of Auschwitz and Birkenau have gravitas. I think that feeling (and it sounds a little woo-woo to say, but it's the perfect word) of gravitas just might stem from the dignity of the individuals who lived (and the many who died) there. Frankl spent four years in concentration camps, including these two, and emerged the sole surviving member of his family. He then went on to dedicate his career to found and then practice existential psychology–the idea that, counter to everything Freud ever said, it's not food, sex, and power that make us tick. It's our ability to create meaning out of our own lives, whatever the circumstances may be. When we lose sight of our own personal meaning, nearly every modern psychological malady has fertile ground to grow. Frankl found that not even concentration camps, however, can make a person lose sight of their purpose if they don't let them. If the idea that our humanity lies in our ability to make our own choices and create our own meaning sounds interesting to you, do not miss this book (and if you're a psychologist, just do not miss this book). It is an extraordinary memoir of an extraordinary man, and the foundational text of existential psychology. I hesitate to quote Frankl, although I found much of his writing deeply moving. He's just so quotable that his thoughts can come across as pithy at a glance, although they often made me teary-eyed with their power in the rich and nuanced context the book as a whole provides. So, a few favorites:

“If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.”

“I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.”

“After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”

How can you not love Jane Austen? I think I'd read both S&S and P&P twice before deciding to tackle her novels in their entirety, and loved them both even more the 3rd time. Mansfield Park is one of my least favorites, but in Austen terms, that means I was still fully engaged and entertained. My personal verdict is that Elizabeth Bennet is the most wonderful Austen heroine, not to mention one of my favorite protagonists of literature generally, and the sparkle of the dialogue in P&P is unparalleled.

If you'd told me at some point while I was reading the first half that I'd give this a 4-star rating, I would have been skeptical. I couldn't tell if it was tragic and sort of pedantically so, or comic and a little too amused at its own cleverness, but really, Greer laid out his protagonist's dilemma explicitly (“The tragicomic business of being alive is getting to him.”), and then built skillfully to a point when his protagonist, the brave and hapless Arthur Less, embraces the tragicomedy in a way that I found neither sentimental nor fatalistic. Less is a lovely love story, and I can't recall a “serious” novel that made me laugh out loud this frequently. Great Pride Month read, great summer read.

Although the back of the book attempts to summarize without hinting at content, my friend Cecily actually recommended this to me specifically because it was about childhood sexual abuse. If that is something you prefer not to spend free time thinking about, then don't read this. After working at a sexual assault crisis hotline for 3+ years, however, I'm sort of inclined to think that because silence surrounding child victims is almost as significant a form of oppression as the abuse itself, that we'd all do well to make ourselves feel nauseated by this reality sometimes (and truly–you will feel ill). In that respect, this is a great book. Kittle has obviously done boatloads of research, and the perps in this book are not old men driving big white vans; they are, like real pedophiles, the people you would least expect, and when the horror is revealed, everyone is ready to be angry, but no one is ready to acknowledge that for every child whose story is told, countless others are silent. Her treatment of how one small community is affected by the abuse is spot-on, and she is tremendously sensitive to all the nuanced types of havoc this can wreak, especially on children not directly involved, but still having to comprehend the abuse. As a novel, it's not the best, simply good. So, expect a quick read–there is a happy ending, and I found myself racing towards it desperately (the whole read took probably 6 hours). And I do applaud Kittle for creating a work of fiction that does some consciousness-raising to boot.

All Hillerman's characteristic elements are here: nicely sustained pace without gimics to create suspense, a meandering tour of Dineh geography, and Leaphorn & Chee's observant, analytical minds. I've read these all out of order, so it was fun to see them circling each other warily in this book, not yet accomplices so measuring each other's virtues and vices. There are also some interesting subplots here related to the insufficiency of translation and the ongoing settler-colonialism of academia.

Another Airbnb beach read. I don't think I've ever read Evanovich before, and was pleasantly surprised. Although this is #9 in the Stephanie Plum series, you can definitely hop in without prior knowledge and still enjoy.

The pros: A more diverse cast than is typical for these types of novels, which felt both true to the New Jersey setting and refreshing. Evanovich has a good sense of humor, so the novel doesn't take itself too seriously, either, which is always a plus. Finally, the heroine gets to enjoy two different love interests with no pressure to make a choice at the novel's end. Good for her!

The cons: A weird amount of fat phobia, actually? Which caught me by surprise. There are also moments when character diversity gets flattened into caricature, especially at the intersection of race/size/past history of sex work in ways that I don't think would have been funny when this was written, and certainly aren't funny now. Also, while Stephanie is a great protagonist in many ways, she is actually written as too smart to have it be fully believable that she missed the plot twist that the reader can clearly see coming at least as early as halfway through.

So, I don't feel a need to dip my toes in these waters again, but don't regret that I did.

Wow! Reminded me a little of Jeffrey Eugenides and J.S. Foer in her willingness to entertain notions of the miraculous. It's a very quick & sumptuous read.

I'm familiar Maté's more recent work on addiction and the myth of normality, but was so happy to realize this older but still so useful book existed. Attachment and its related interpersonal sequelae are my main ways of viewing/conceptualizing the clinical work I do, so his attachment/attunement-based perspective on ADHD was just a breath of fresh air. It's maddening, however, to realize how non-mainstream his perspective still is. Anyway, this is a great book for clinicians, people with ADHD, and people who love people with ADHD (I fit in both the first and third categories). Maté is wise, COMPASSIONATE, and always aware of how the way we view “problems” can also circumscribe our solutions. Will definitely read more of his book-length work based on this one.

So if you've read anything that Barbara Kingsolver or Michael Pollan have written about food recently (which is quite a bit), you'll find that reading Wendell Berry is like going straight to the source, but about the larger picture of food production, agriculture, communities, society, and life in general. Berry wrote “Unsettling” in 1977, and it is absolutely terrifying and surreal how prescient he was then, and how important what he said still is for us today. Berry is a holistic thinker–interested in interrogating how we define health for ourselves and for our earth, and how really, the two are inextricably linked. “The body,” Berry writes, “cannot be whole alone.”

(I will say that he makes a slightly odd digression mid-book about monogamy & marriage, and I'm just not sure I'm ready to have even the great W.B. tell me not to have not-totally-committed-sex. But obviously that has a lot to do with me.)

I think part of the reason this book resonated so deeply with me was that I had the pleasure earlier this spring of hearing Berry live, right at a critical juncture where I didn't even know that I was dying to hear a southern drawl, but most certainly was. Into his 80s, he is just as thoughtful, funny, and wise. But, mostly, I think Berry is a revolutionary thinker, and “Unsettling” is a revolutionary book, which is a rarity of our times, to say the least.

This was another find from one of my neighborhood lending libraries, and I delayed on starting it for the silliest reason: I loved Americanah so much, how could Ngozi Adichie's skill from two novels before that be comparable? Like I said, silly. Calling things “coming-of-age” stories tends to flatten them a bit, and that's only the starting point here: this is a coming-of-age story that is also about all kinds of violence: domestic, religious, political/governmental, colonialist. The character studies are beautiful, Ngozi Adichie has apparently always been tremendously skilled at visual imagery, and the complex emotions ring true. My one complaint, which may actually reflect that this was her first novel, is that the denouement is paced differently than the rest of the novel, in a way that feels a little off-kilter. Still, such a great book.