Bookish Thoughts

This book was a gift, and a perfect one. The author is a professor at MIT whose research is focused on the search for exoplanets. She's also a widow who lost her husband to cancer and found herself suddenly juggling her career with her two young sons all be herself. I related to this book much more than Joan Didion's memoir. Getting through the day to day when every little thing is overwhelming, learning new skills because you suddenly have to do it alone, finding your grief all mixed up with gratitude for the things you do have, these are all deeply familiar experiences for me now. Interleaved with that was a fascinating look at Dr Seager's career and research, her pursuit of planets outside the solar system that might support life. I loved reading about her work. Not just because it was so interesting, but also because it was this subtle reminder that life just keeps going on. I'm so glad I read this book. It was a big reminder that I'm not alone, that other peopl...

It was a long wait for Allie Brosh's second book, but it was worth it. A lot happened to her in the years between books - a divorce, the sudden death of her sister - and the really informs her new stories. While her earlier work was hilarious and relatable, it also tended to stay on the surface. She started digging deeper at the end of her last book, and that same depth is present in nearly every story here. I'll be honest: I wanted a bit more of the surface hilarity. These stories hit hard, and I wasn't always ready for the raw grief that showed up. I also got unreasonably upset at the fact that her new husband was named Kevin, like she'd stolen him from me somehow. But I'm sure I'll keep revisiting these stories in the future, and I'll keep getting more out of them in the coming years.

Joan Didion's memoir of grief after losing her husband felt like something I should read after I lost my own husband. I wanted a book that I could see myself in, something that would feel familiar and let me know I'm not alone.  I wish I'd connected to this book more. There were a few small things that rang true, but there was also a lot that I just didn't connect with. Maybe that's a sign that everyone is different and every loss is different. Maybe it's just a difference between me and Didion. Either way I wanted something from this book that I didn't quite get. But I'm still glad I read it.

I've been following Stevenson's career since she was an art student with a tumblr making fun of Lord of the Rings and The Hunger Games. I loved watching her get her big break and launch into the stratosphere. I watched her start to make the sort of stories she wished she'd read as a child. She accomplished a lot at a ridiculously young age. She's also had some struggles,and I've always been impressed by the way she's open about them while maintaining her privacy. Because I've been reading her blog for so long, I'd already read most of the comics in this book over the years. But it was nice to see it all pulled together in a single place. Stevenson has a long career ahead of her, and I'm excited to see what she does next.

This was an incredibly difficult book to read. I came very close to not finishing it. Not because it was bad. It was just so hard to see a family treat their children the way Tara and her siblings are treated. Tara was raised in an extremely fundamentalist Mormon family. Her father trusted almost no one, so the kids didn't go to school. They never went to the doctors. The family lived off the grid as much as they could, avoiding other people and preparing for the rapture. A large chunk of the book is about Tara's childhood, and particularly the various injuries she and her family members suffered. For a while it was like every chapter was detailing a horrific new injury, and I had to walk away from the book for a bit. But I did return to it, so I got to read about Tara's decision to go to college, where she blossomed and was finally able to cut ties with her abusive family. She goes into some detail about her ultimate decision to break with her parents and brother and the t...

This was a book club pick that I never would have picked up on my own. I knew virtually nothing about Sally Field going in. I've seen Mrs. Doubtfire and Forrest Gump , but none of the movies that she's more famous for. And having read it, I'm not that interested in seeking out more of her work. Field weaves a theme of birth and rebirth through the memoir. She structures it on what she learned in her Lamaze classes when she was pregnant and makes a case that she has been constantly giving birth to new iterations of herself throughout her career. This tracks with the fact that she clearly subscribes to the method acting school of thought, without ever using those words. But reading the book gave me the impression of a deeply passive woman who has a hard time with both accountability and control. Things keep happening to her. And no doubt a lot of awful things did happen to her. She suffered some serious traumas and never received help for them. Nor did she seek help. It seem...

The Girl Who Smiled Beads  is the memoir of a Rwandan refugee who spent six years in various refugee camps before making her way to America with her sister, niece, and nephew. Clemantine left her home and family behind before she had any concept of war or genocide or any of the things she was running from or the reasons people wanted her dead. Traveling with only her sister from camp to camp, she became incredibly tough in order to survive. And when she finally made it to safety in America, it took a long time for her to make her way back to normalcy. The book alternates chapters between her time in camps in various African countries and her time in America, learning to trust her safety and stability. It's a very stark account of her experience, and it's clear that Clemantine herself is still processing a lot of what she went through. She became a sort of poster child for Rwandan refugees in America and has been doing what she can to shed light on her experience while also c...

This is going to sound bad, but this was an excellent book to help me get through the insomnia caused by my husband's leukemia diagnosis. It was just dry enough, just interesting enough, just enough of a remove from my own life, that a single chapter would help me turn my brain off enough to get some sleep. Which is why it ended up taking over a month to read. (I also picked up The Hypnotist's Love Story  during a round with insomnia and ended up reading until I finished it at 2 in the morning.) Cold Starry Sky  is the memoir of a woman who moved to Fairbanks, Alaska with her husband immediately after WWII. The book follows their first few years: trying to find gold, learning to survive winter, making friends, starting a family, and falling in love with their new home. It was interesting to read about the early frontier town, where the harsh conditions were a great equalizer.

I miss the years of the Obama administration. It's not that Obama was a perfect president, but he was a great one. He was thoughtful and deliberate and really cared about people. He did what he could to make life better for all Americans. And if he didn't always succeed, he spoke more to the complex nature of the problems, his own limited time, and the nature of the obstacles he was facing than his motives or character. Reading Michelle Obama's memoir was an excellent way to revisit those years and remember what hope and change feel like. To take a step back and recognize all the seeds they planted that will hopefully reap positive benefits in the years to come. Change is slow, but it's constant. This book was delightful, and it really left me in awe of Michelle Obama. She goes to great lengths to emphasize that she's just another person. That she faces a lot of the same struggles as everyone else. But she also had a lot of advantages, from a family that never f...

I saw The Reason I Jump  on The Daily Show back when I still watched The Daily Show (back when Jon Stewart still hosted it), so it's been years that this book has been floating around in the back of my head as something I should read. And then I found it at the library's used book sale and snapped it up. My impulsive book purchases are rarely quite as impulsive as they seem. This book was written by a thirteen-year-old, nonverbal, autistic boy in Japan. He explains his day-to-day life to a neurotypical audience, in a effort to make himself and people like him better understood. All he really wants is understanding and patience and the opportunity to have a fulfilling life where he isn't constantly pitied and made to feel like a burden. This was more of an interview than a story. Actually, it was more of a questionnaire, with Higashida briefly given answers to a bunch of questions. These are interspersed with a handful of short stories. The book was interesting and insig...

The second volume of March  closed on John Lewis' speech at the March of Washington, and then included the original text of the speech, which was edited moments before he gave it. In that speech he points out that the Civil Rights Act, while a step forward, did not do enough. Specifically, it did not guarantee African-Americans the right to vote, thus allowing individual states to continue to deny them full citizenship. The third volume focuses on the fight to get the Voting Rights Act passed, ultimately ending back where the first book started, with the inauguration of President Obama. Once again, this book doesn't shy away from the hatred and violence that John Lewis and his cohorts faced in trying to secure their rights. The endless protests trying to get people registered, inevitably followed by beatings and arrests. And more than a few deaths. This book maybe be John Lewis' memoir, and it's certainly skewed towards his perspective, but it functions more as a hi...

The second volume of John Lewis' graphic memoir spends most of it's focus on the Freedom Riders. During this time, John Lewis rises through the ranks of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), eventually becoming chairman. He also becomes a bigger presence in the Civil Rights movement in general, and the book ends with the March on Washington, with Martin Luther King Jr's famous "I Have a Dream" speech and John Lewis' own speech at the same event. This book really drives home how much work and organization went into the Civil Rights movement. And how much hate and resistance they faced. Learning about these things in school or online, it's easy to distance yourself a bit and focus on the results rather than the process. We always hear about Rosa Parks and her famous refusal to give up her seat. We don't hear about everything else that went into to both creating that moment and leveraging it. By telling his story with pictures, Lewis a...

I finally got my hands on the second and third volumes in John Lewis' graphic memoir, March , so I had to go back and re-read the first one. The memoir as a whole is about Lewis' experiences in the Civil Rights movement, and the first volume is specifically about how he came to be involved with it and his participation in the lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee. It goes in depth with the training Lewis and his fellow students received before the sit-ins, which was quite extensive. And it also shows a lot of the hatred and violence they faced, including attempts on their lives. The story as a whole is told through flashbacks, both John Lewis' memory and the stories he tells a couple of young constituents who come by his office in the Capital. In the present, this is all happening on the day that Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. The frame provides a nice counter-balance to the story, showing how far we've come and how ...

I've been hearing good things about Jacqueline Woodson's memoir in verse since before it came out. It won so many awards that you practically can't see the original cover anymore. I'm so glad I finally got around to reading it. While this book is technically marketed towards children (it's recommended for ages 10 and up), it works incredibly well no matter what age you are. Woodson focuses on her time as a child. She was born in Ohio, but she left when she was barely a year old. She and her siblings lived with their grandparents in South Carolina for several years before her mother moved them all to Brooklyn. But this isn't just about Woodson either. There's an incredible sense of family and history in these pages, and it's clear that this has had a profound effect on Woodson and her sense of place in the world. A lot of the book takes place before she's even born or could possibly have memories, which is a bit unusual for a memoir. She talks abo...

This is a hugely divisive collection of poetry written by a young woman and dealing mainly with the trauma she suffered as a child and teenager. There's a lot of trauma to unpack - an abusive mother, an eating disorder, possible sexual assault, losing family members to cancer and suicide within a month of each other. And Amanda Lovelace does a decent job of distilling that to a handful of words, which I suppose is what poetry is all about. At the same time, this whole collection felt a little lazy and immature to me. These poems were reminiscent of the stuff I wrote in high school and posted on ffn. I'm honestly a little surprised this got published. It might just be that this is intended for a younger audience - like those Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul books. Remember those? If you liked Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul  and want basically that in poetry form, this is probably the book for you. If you're looking for something more mature or polished, skip this co...

Mara Wilson is one of those child actors who hit puberty and more or less disappeared. For a while it felt like she was everywhere, though she really only had a couple of big movies. But man were they big movies. Matilda  and Mrs. Doubtfire  were definitely staples of my childhood. And then she grew up and I grew up and I honestly didn't give her much thought until she resurfaced in the public eye a few years ago. She didn't make a big splash the way she did as a kid. She wasn't even really acting this time around. She was writing and becoming active on twitter. I started reading some her work and admiring her more. And then she wrote one of my favorite articles on the-toast (about Rizzo and Sandra Dee) and once I realized that I knew I had to get my hands on her book. Reading her essays was a joy. She's a fantastic writer with a subtle humor that I really appreciate. The book runs the gamut from growing up on film sets to dealing with mean girls in high school to le...

For World Book Day, Amazon gave away nine books in translation. Not one to turn my nose up at free books, I quickly downloaded all of them. It's a diverse group of books, each of the nine being from a different genre and a different country. The truth is that I probably won't get around to reading most of them. But A River in Darkness  caught my eye immediately, and I knew I had to read it. This is a short, harrowing memoir about one man's escape from North Korea. Ishikawa's father was born in Korea and brought to Japan to work in the war effort. But at the conclusion of WWII, he was basically abandoned, with no country to return to and no help to be found in Japan. In 1960, when Kim Il Sung formed the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and worked with the Japanese government to move millions of stranded Koreans back from Japan. Ishikawa's father jumped at the chance to move himself and his family home. But though they were promised paradise on Earth, a l...

This was a brief but very affecting memoir written by a Turkish lawyer and activist about discovering her Grandmother's origins. It's only in recent years that the Armenian Genocide is coming to be recognized as the atrocity it was. Turkey has done it's best to erase this part of it's history. But as Fetihye Cetin and others like her come to learn about and embrace their heritage, that denial is slipping away. This book is as much about Cetin's journey to process her grandmother's story as it is about that story itself. As such, it jumps around a little in an attempt to lay all the groundwork for the story. This mostly worked, though it was occasionally jarring to jump between Cetin's present and her grandmother's childhood. By the end it all comes together, and it makes sense why she explains the things she does. Cetin doesn't linger over the horrors her grandmother experienced on the death march to Aleppo, but she doesn't shy away from them...

Towards the end of Born a Crime , Trevor Noah talks about the time he was arrested under suspicion of stealing a car. He pauses to explain how this all works in South Africa - the difference between jail and prison, what a bail hearing is, what happens if you can't make bail. It's a shitty, rigged system. Then he points out that it's basically the same system we have in America. Noah's memoir of growing up in South Africa during and immediately after Apartheid is full of stuff like this. The racism there is formalized and explicit. His very existence is against the law, and he spends his childhood never quite fitting in anywhere because no one quite knows how to classify him. But he reminds the audience again and again, sometimes subtly and other times less so, that this is hardly unique to South Africa. They studied things that worked and didn't work around the world, and the US was one of their primary sources of inspiration. The book itself is really interest...

The Glass Castle  is the slightly horrifying memoir of Jeannette Walls, who was raised by a couple of dreamers who eschewed modern society and all its responsibilities and requirements. Her mother was an artist who bristled at the idea of holding down a steady job. Her father was a big dreamer, sure he was on the verge of making it rich. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic, who drank more money that he earned. The result was a family that was constantly on the move, running from debts and responsibilities, and a group of children who learned to be mature and resourceful beyond their years. Despite her unstable childhood, Walls clearly has a deep love for both of her parents. She introduces her father first through his ideas and his intelligence. He has big plans, and it seems like he has the brains to pull them off. He just doesn't have the patience. Or, it becomes more and more clear as the book goes on, the sobriety. This book was an incredible story of resourcefulness an...