I didn't plan to read eleven books this month! I thought six would be good. When I got to eight, I thought that would be a good number, too. At ten, I was sure that would cap off the month, but it was only January 26, and I was reading a Richard Osman book, and I thought it was possible I might not finish it until February 1, but I finished it in the morning on Friday, and here it is Saturday, and I am half-way through another book! I just keep reading, and I suppose I should be doing other things. But I seem to have an insatiable appetite for reading these days!
I was always happy when my children were reading, because that meant they weren't just sitting there watching television! But my own mother was always just a little bit annoyed when I would "waste time" by reading when there was work that could be done. She wasn't against reading; she was against too much reading while leaving work undone. She may have thought I read too much this month!
1. I finished reading It's Great to Suck at Something: The Unexpected Joy of Wiping Out and What It Can Teach Us About Patience, Resilience, and the Stuff that Really Matters (2019) by Karen Rinaldi on 1/1. I had received this book through ILL several months earlier, started it, but kept making other reading choices, until I looked at the due date and realized that I had to return it, so I had better finish it if I was going to! This book is about the joy of imperfection--for Rinaldi, it was surfing. She was not good at it, rarely did it "right," but kept on doing it, which meant she kept on sucking at it. If you stop doing it because you suck at it, then...what? You miss out on the trying. This book is about not taking yourself too seriously, having self-compassion, not caring what’s cool, because you can decide your own cool. It is about the power of belief, acceptance (that you might indeed suck at something, but that is not the same thing as failure), about being comfortable with discomfort. Quote on page 202: “All along this sucking business turns out to be about something much bigger than riding a wave. It’s about ritual and meaning, beauty and pain, connection and loss and how it all ties together. Life is not for figuring out. It’s for living. It’s for succeeding and sucking. And while we are inclined to seek comfort, we are sure to meet with discomfort. Sucking at something embraces that discomfort and turns it into something beautiful.”
2. Aru Shah and the End of Time (2018) by Roshani Chokshi is about a girl named Aru who accidentally releases a demon when she is showing off for some of the cool kids from school who do not really like her, and this action puts everyone in the museum to sleep, except for Aru, who is then off on a time and place bending adventure, with her Pandava sister Mini, to recapture the demon and make things right again. I liked that this book uses Hindu mythology to tell a story--there are plenty of stories about Greek or Roman or even Norse mythology interwoven into plots, so this book (this series, actually) does that with Hindu mythology. I read it because my friend James posted that this is his son's favorite book series. So I thought I would give it a whirl.
3. My Family Divided (2018) by Diane Guerrero is the version of her book for younger readers, the adult version being In the Country We Love: My Family Divided (2016). Interesting book to read at this time of so much backlash against immigrants. But I have to say, her mother--deported three times! Like, she was the energizer bunny of coming back, and coming back. While I agree it was shocking that ICE took her parents as they did, leaving her alone as a minor in this country, it was also unsurprising because, well, look at them. Pretty heartless. What was saddest to me was the deportation of her brother--it was not his fault that his mother brought him into the US as a very young child, where he grew up and it was the only country he knew. However, he did okay for himself back in Colombia, teaching English. I liked Diane's father too, who was never comfortable with his wife's insistence on entering the US illegally. I have read other books about immigration problems that made me feel more compassionate, because honestly, her mom!! Her decisions were...interesting.
4. The botany of desire: A plant's-eye view of the world (2001) by Michael Pollan. The author investigates four desires of people by looking at a particular plant. Sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control are the desires. He looks at the history of the apple as a window into sweetness. This was fascinating--how we get apples by grafting, not really by planting a seed and then eating the fruit of the plant after it grows. For beauty, he describes the history of the tulip. For intoxication, he looks at marijuana (and points out that within the word intoxication is the word toxic, so let that be a warning). And for control, the potato. I learned so much from this book, much of which I can no longer explain with any degree of clarity, so I know that I still have a lot to learn! But it was fascinating! Go here for an interview with the author.
5. The Hurricane Girls (2023) by Kimberly Willis Holt follows three girls, all born during Hurricane Katrina, back in New Orleans as junior high students, who are best friends coming apart at the seams due to various challenges that each faces individually. One of them thinks their friendship can be salvaged if they team up for a junior triathlon, and this decision has its ups and downs, almost falls apart, but they do end up fulfilling their goal, which is not to win, but to do this hard thing together.
6. Spamalot Diaries (2024) by Eric Idle. Eric Idle is a diarist, and this book collects all of his diary entries related to the writing of and staging of the musical Spamalot. It was so interesting to me, because I really like this musical (mostly because my son David was in a community theatre production of it that was delightfully funny!) and so understanding its genesis was appealing to me. Just like in any kind of writing, sometimes the creators had to cut their favorite parts, and they had to be so aware of what works with the audience, and though some parts work amazingly well from the cast point of view, they don't work from the audience point of view. It isn't just write it --one and done-- nope. It is rewrite, revise, rewrite, etc. Work, but work that was loved by its creators.
7. Taste: My Life through Food (2021) by Stanley Tucci. One of the most delightful things about reading this book (a recommendation from our HBLL book group in November) was that I had no clue who Stanley Tucci was. I thought he was just some dude writing a memoir about food. And then it slowly dawned on me that he was an actor who people actually know about (though I did not, and honestly, he looks so ordinary--I have probably seen him in things but didn't pay attention to him). It was a fun read, and I grew to really like him as a person. He is a good husband, a good dad. He was very clear about loving his first (dead) wife and loving his second (live) wife, and loving his children and his parents and his sisters. I liked him a lot. His book did have a lot of recipes, all of which were long and involved, and so I glanced at them, but I will never make them! Unlike Mr. Tucci, I am not a foodie.
8. I am not alone (2023) by Francisco X. Stork. Alberto, the main male character in this book, is an undocumented immigrant who is having his first onset of schizophrenia, which is super inconvenient, interfering as it does with his understanding of so many things. Goodreads says, "This is a page-turning thriller and a sensitive story about mental health, love, and community that will appeal to anyone who has struggled with their place in the world, from award-winning author Francisco X. Stork." (I might add that, having looked up the author on Wikipedia (which I do with all authors, honestly) I really think he is a good person and I am interested in reading more of his books.)
9. Everyone in my family has killed someone (2022) by Benjamin Stevenson is my neighborhood book group's chosen read for February. I was not there when they chose it, and at first I didn't like it, but then I got hooked! And I ended up liking it, and reading it quite quickly, even though it is not a short book. Another Australian writer to watch--he took a whole bunch of characters, developed them very nicely, and took the story in a bunch of unexpected directions, even though everybody was stuck in one setting--a ski lodge--for the entire book.
10. Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (2023) by Jesse Q. Sutanto is another one of my neighborhood book group's chosen books for a month somewhere down the road from now--I can't even remember what month, but I am good; I have read it. It was a very fun read. She decides that a death, written off by the police as due to an allergy, is actually a murder, and she sets out to get close to all the possible suspects (she is always hoping it isn't this one or that one, because she really likes them) and they build a kind of chosen family because of it. And then it really was a murder, and whodunnit is quite a surprise. Fun read, I thought.
11. We Solve Murders (2024) by Richard Osman is his first book that is not a Thursday Murder Club Book. And I liked it. It took me a while because I did not immediately love the characters the way I did the TMC characters, but they grew on me. Like in the TMC books, Richard writes well-developed characters who build up a sense of community around them that is quite cozy and comfortable. So even though he writes about murders, there is a feeling of safety. At least for me. Makes the books more appealing for me, because I don't like feeling unrelentingly scared. So I finished this book more quickly than planned, making a total of eleven books for the month.
