April means it should be Spring and yet as of two days ago I encountered snow falling in Boston. Apparently breaking the record wasn’t good enough!
As much as I look forward to warm weather and the day the dry skin on my hands finally, finally manages to heal without the assiduous application of hand cream, I can’t help but hold some fondness for this topsy-turvy springtime weather. Spring never lasts long in Boston — we seem to go from snow flurries one week to t-shirts the next, so this time next month I’m likely to be singing a different tune.
And on that note, here are this month’s book reviews!
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The Fire Starter Sessions by Danielle LaPorte
“A revolution is a way of being that becomes a significantly better way of doing. And it shifts and lifts people up along with you and keeps the universe on the edge of itself. A Course in Miracles defines a miracle as “a shift in perception”. Revolutions can feel miraculous.”
While Simon Sinek’s book was a satisfying and intellectually convincing read, I think The Fire Starter Sessions may actually be more useful when figuring out what to do if you’ve lost track of your WHY. And as someone still emerging from the battlefield of a total loss of WHY, it’s a subject that happens to be near and dear to my heart.
“You will always be too much of something for someone: too big, too loud, too soft, too edgy. If you round out your edges, you lose your edge.”
For me, this was a transformative book. Full of wisdom and straight-talk, Danielle LaPorte manages to both inspire and cut the crap. I liked it enough that I’m even considering buying myself a copy to keep — a state of affairs that’s basically unheard of. It’s worth mentioning that the Kindle version is crummy — I’m sure the book is beautiful in print, but there are a lot of aspects to the layout that don’t translate well to Kindle. FYI.
It’s always hard to tell when a book feels transformative if it’s the book itself, or if it just happens to be the right book at the right time. I’d guess it’s usually a combination of both — a good book at the right time is probably the most common recipe for brilliant breakthroughs. In any case, this one really worked for me!
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
“People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realize. You see someone in school every day, or at work, in the canteen, and you share a cigarette or a coffee with them, and you talk about the weather or last night’s air raid. But you don’t talk so much about what was the nastiest thing you ever said to your mother, or how you pretended to be David Balfour, the hero of “Kidnapped”, for the whole year when you were thirteen, or what you imagine yourself doing with the pilot who looks like Leslie Howard if you were alone in his bunk after a dance.”
This month I also read Code Name Verity
The book is about two girls who become friends when brought together by a combination of circumstance and WWII. One of the girls works as a pilot for the British Air Transport Auxiliary and the other is recruited by the British intelligence service as a spy. The book is the story of their friendship and of their intertwined fates when a covert mission goes awry.
The beginning of the book triggered two of my biggest pet peeves — on the one hand, the POV was third person limited (i.e. told from a single character’s perspective) and yet STILL she had verbatim knowledge of conversations at which she was not present. The reasons for this tie in to my second peeve — which is that we are probably supposed to conclude that she is making these conversations up, and yet it’s never clear to the reader what exactly she’s lying about or whether she’s lying at all and I found that irksome. (Plus, she’s entirely too glib about her capture and torture at the hands of the Gestapo.)
However, with that said, the book did grow on me as I went and the second half of the book clears up a lot of the mysteries and irritations of the first part. By the time I managed to get all the way to the end I found I was almost willing to forgive the book its inauspicious beginning.
The Best American Short Stories 2011, edited by Geraldine Brooks
“You wind up at an after-hours club Bix knows about on Ludlow, crowded with people too high to go home. You all dance together, subdividing the space between now and tomorrow until time seems to move backward.”
— Jennifer Egan, “Out of Body”
That remains true of this collection. Some of the stories were breathtaking and had me careening through the pages like I’m drowning. Others left me cold.
“You don’t know what hurts more: the swirling moral turbulence of the book or the belated discovery that everything you thought about it was wrong. You missed it all: register, mood, irony, ambiguity, subtleties of characterization, narrative arc, even basic plot points. You can’t read. It’s like finding out, at thirty, that you’re adopted.”
— Richard Powers, “To the Measures Fall”
A few notable highlights:
- By far my favorite story was “Out of Body” by Jennifer Egan, and which I was delighted to discover is excerpted from her book, A Visit from the Goon Squad
. The story is a stunningly-wrought example of a second-person POV that really works and I loved it and cringed with it and had to take a few moments to sit with it after I’d finished. I’ll definitely be reading the book, so keep an eye out for that!
- I also enjoyed the story “Housewifely Arts” by Megan Mayhew Bergman, about a woman (a mother) who takes her son on a road trip to go see the parrot that once belonged to her own (now deceased) mother because she wishes to hear her (mother’s) voice. I found the story to be a fascinating and artful exploration of motherhood as she considers her simultaneous identity as daughter to her mother and mother to her son.
- I enjoyed the second story I’ve quoted as well (“To the Measures Fall” by Robert Powers), which makes two stories in second person that I loved! The thing that’s fascinating about Powers’s story is the way in which it explores a woman’s changing relationship with a book (To the Measures Fall by Elton Wentworth). One of the best things about being a reader is that sometimes you come back to a book many years later and find it’s nothing like the book you remember. Robert Powers captures this experience beautifully in his story.
As a student of writing and literature, I was especially thrilled to discover the contributor’s notes at the end of the book — which I found a fascinating peek into other people’s writing processes, as well as an interesting look at how the ideas for the stories came about.
The Fear Cure by Lissa Rankin
“There’s a wonderful line often attributed to Anaïs Nin: ‘And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.’ I understand that the risk it takes to blossom takes a lot of courage. This is your invitation. What will it take for your longing to outweigh your fear of the unknown? What will it take for you to find the courage to blossom?”
As someone who has realized just how much of a role fear plays in my own life, I felt like the timing of this book’s publication was perfect. (Actually I feel a bit like the universe is conspiring… both Brene Brown and Liz Gilbert also have books on fear coming out this year whose publication I eagerly await.)
In The Fear Cure, Lissa suggests that our Western culture operates under the guise of what she calls the “Four Fearful Assumptions”:
- Uncertainty is unsafe
- I can’t handle losing what I cherish
- It’s a dangerous world
- I’m all alone
She suggests that we replace these limiting beliefs with what she likes to call the “Four Courage-Cultivating Truths” and guides the reader through a series of exercises to write their own personal “Prescription for Courage”. The truths she suggests are:
- Uncertainty is the gateway to possibility
- Loss is natural and can lead to growth
- It’s a purposeful universe
- We are all One
While I am agnostic regarding the factual accuracy of some of these “courage-cultivating truths”, I do feel that approaching life from such a perspective would encourage me to acts of greater courage. What about you?
I’d love to know what you’ve been reading. If you’ve read any great (or not-so-great) books lately let me know in the comments!
Tired of waiting for my monthly wrap-ups? I talk about what I’m reading each week in my email newsletter.
This month I finally got around to reading 
If you’ve never read Simon Sinek’s 
by Anne Lamott. It’s a wonderful book and clearly a classic for a reason — no doubt I should have picked it up years ago.
is the first book by her I’ve read — although I’ve seen and enjoyed her 
, a story about the havoc wrought on her life when she learned that she was pregnant with a Down syndrome baby while a PhD student at Harvard.
As a scientist, I’m leery of speaking on topics religious, but I kind of think I’m on to something writing-related that’s potentially fascinating…
is that the way to enlightenment is through harnessing the power of Being in the Now. It’s not a revolutionary thesis — that one should focus on the present, not worry about bad things until they actually happen, or allow painful remembrances to taint the enjoyment of present bounty. It all sounds like rather common sense.
This might be the most interesting book I’ve read this year. 
by Peter Matthiessen is a short novel and a quiet one. It’s the story of Clements Olin an American academic (of Polish extraction) who attends a meditation retreat at Auschwitz, a gathering of souls from around the world “to bear witness” — to what the assembled group is there to bear witness to, Clements Olin is not so sure.
My pick for reading in preparation for the new year was 
, which is taking much longer than powering through a quick and easy novel, means that I’ve not finished nearly as many books as I usually do in a month.
means I’m officially two for three. Reading 
? Yes, of course. The characters had aged, matured, and changed, just as characters ought to do. Was the book darker than the first Dune novel? Yes, but again the characters were older and more mature and were faced with problems on a much larger scale. Personally, I found the story as compelling, the world building as careful, and tale as enjoyable as the first Dune novel.
by Elizabeth Lesser. The book teaches lessons about facing life gracefully (particularly life’s downturns) through the medium of story. Both Lesser’s own personal story and the stories of friends, family, and several of her workshop students are explored. It’s a lovely book and I’ve decided to allow Lesser to speak for herself: