Welcome to February! After what had been an unusually warm and snow-free winter here in the Northeast, we’ve suddenly acquired the year’s worth of snow in just the past two weeks. Here in Boston we clocked a good two feet last week and another foot or so today.
In case you’re having a hard time visualizing that much now, the snow in our backyard-area (I hesitate to call it a yard, but in lieu of a better word…), is up to the windowsills and door knob of our back door. It’s literally a sea of snow!
And as much as people like to complain about the snow, I have to say I continue to find it miraculous. When it snows in incredible amounts and leaves heaping white mountains on street corners it makes me feel giddy. Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up with snow, maybe it’s because I don’t own a car, maybe it’s just something in my blood — but what I know is that it makes me a very happy camper, despite having lived in Boston for going on 7 years now.
And so, without further ado (or proper segue), here are this month’s book reviews!
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Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
“If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must… the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words.” — Anne Lamott
As part of my vision for feeling like a “real” writer in 2015, I started the year off with a classic of the “books on writing” genre: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Bird by Bird is raw and honest and funny and contains some of the best description of the mess of self-doubt that lives inside our heads that I’ve ever read. Both inspiring and relentlessly helpful, I found Anne Lamott’s advice to be spot-on in so many ways. I think I highlighted more pages than not.
If you’re a writer or you want to be a writer I strongly recommend you read Bird by Bird posthaste!
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
“Everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
— Patrick Rothfuss
This month I finished reading The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Well “finished reading” might be an understatement — a more accurate description is probably “galloped madly from start to finish” or something. I couldn’t put this one down!
I don’t read a lot of fantasy any more, but I read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi growing up and I still like to curl up with a good tome now and again and lose myself within its pages.
If you, too, feel like curling up with a nice long book, I highly recommend this one. It’s an interesting and vividly imagined world and a rather brilliantly executed story-within-a-story. The only downside is that the third book in the trilogy hasn’t been published yet… alas!
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
“[Boheme] had believed in something he called ‘the signature of all things’ — namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity’s betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator’s love… Beatrix Whittaker had always been scornful of this theory, and Alma had inherited her mother’s skepticism.” — Elizabeth Gilbert
Having said that, I have mixed feelings about this book. The first half was breathtaking — a masterful dance between narrator and reader that left me feeling giddy. Gilbert managed to toe a delicate line between having things happen pretty much just as the reader anticipates at every turn, while still leaving us feeling delighted by events as they unfolded — a tricky balance indeed!
Unfortunately, I found the second half of the book disappointing — which isn’t to say that it was bad, but just that it didn’t keep up to the standard set by the first half. The characters weren’t as enjoyable, the narrator felt less charming, and on the whole the second half was just a bit dull after the book’s whirlwind beginning.
So my conclusion is that it’s not a bad book, and I did think it ended nicely. But the middle does rather drag on and so I’m not 100% sure it’s worth it. But it might be — because the beginning really was that amazing.
Expecting Adam by Martha Beck
“Living with Adam, loving Adam, has taught me a lot about the truth… As Adam’s mother I have been able to see quite clearly that he is no less beautiful for being called ugly, no less wise for appearing dull, no less precious for being seen as worthless. And neither am I. Neither are you. Neither is any of us.” — Martha Beck
In January I also picked up another book by Martha Beck (bringing my total up to three). This time I selected her memoir, Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic
There are a lot of pieces to this book, but at it’s core it’s a story about transformation and the way in which expecting (and choosing to keep) a disabled child called into question the intellectual elitism of higher education and caused Martha to begin to question the very foundations of her life. She writes:
“I was not looking for information to transform my child into a prize every parent would envy. I needed to transform myself into a parent who could accept that child, no matter what. There were not books for that in the parenting section of the Harvard Coop.”
It’s a book that had a lot of emotional resonance for me because the story of her growing disillusionment with Harvard neatly parallels my own disillusionment with the cult of higher education after five incredibly stressful years as a student at MIT.
With that said, I would have read the book in any case, because reading Martha Beck is a bit like getting to hang out with the awesome (if rather eccentric) Aunt I always wished for. Your mileage may vary.
What are you reading right now? Let me know in the comments below!
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