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June 2014 Book Reviews

Welcome to the first of my monthly book reviews! For those of you who don’t know me, I read. A. Lot. My natural inclination is aided and abetted by a large number of hours spent commuting on the bus, which means I make it through a substantial number of books each month (I’ve read 30 so far this year). I love to talk about what I’m reading and I’m excited to bring this conversation to my blog so, without further ado, here are this month’s books.

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission for any purchases made using my links. 

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[/one_half][one_half_last]And the Mountains Echoed is a book that I enjoyed largely for the structure of the narrative. It’s a great example of a book that skillfully explores the ways in which human stories connect, across generations, decades, and continents. Because of its expansive timeline, the book has the opportunity to investigate how our pasts, our histories shape us, measuring the ripple-effect on human lives of choices made generations ago. I really liked this one, folks.
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[/one_half][one_half_last]Far and away the best book I read this month, The Orphan Master’s Son is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel about a North Korean man named Pak Jun Do, an orphan who grows up to lead an extremely improbable life. Both stunning and at times viscerally horrifying, the novel is a haunting and artful portrayal of a country and a culture so far removed from my own experience I find it hard to imagine. This was a fantastic book and I highly recommend it.
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[one_half_last]After reading and adoring Brene Brown’s most recent book, Daring Greatly. I was eager to get my hands on her previous book, The Gifts of Imperfection. Unfortunately, I suspect I should have read them in the reverse order, since much of the material is similar between the two books. Of the two, I’d say read Daring Greatly and maybe don’t bother with The Gifts of Imperfection unless you’re really looking for actionable strategies and more concrete direction on how to implement the ideas from Daring Greatly in your own life.[/one_half_last]

 

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[/one_half][one_half_last]I’m definitely more than a little late to the party on this one, but I picked this up from the library last week and wound up devouring it in less than a day. Great literature The Fault in Our Stars is not, but enjoyable YA fiction it most certainly is. With interesting characters and a somewhat more literary bent than most YA fiction, this is a story that I definitely enjoyed. Fair warning though: the end made me cry.[/one_half_last]

 

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[/one_half][one_half_last]This is the one I tried but didn’t finish. I wanted to like it; The Flamethrowers was a National Book Award finalist, and I can’t quibble with the quality of the writing itself, but I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t find any of the characters to be particularly compelling or relatable, and the story meanders through different places and points in time without any real sense of direction. Whereas And the Mountains Echoed was a brilliant example of how stories can be connected and woven across time and place, The Flamethrowers falls flat. I do, however, have to give a shout out to Rachel Kushner’s prose, because there are moments of brilliance in the book— just not enough to keep my interest.

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Have you read any of these? Got a great book recommendation for my reading list? Let me know in the comments below!

Tired of waiting for my monthly wrap-ups? I talk about what I’m reading each week in my email newsletter.

On a totally normal day at 6:27 o’clock

There’s a moment in the evening when the light slips between the city’s high-rises and side-streets at just the right angle.

A moment in the early summer when a gold/pink blush of lingering heat glitters with pollen from trees still so recently turned green— not yet browned and burnished by the summer’s (f)ire.

It’s a moment when time stops.

A moment when the world freezes to the pavement in a crystalline instant of gilded glory.

It’s the moment that captures you forever and is gone before you’ve known it, slipping past one second’s tick and into another’s tock.

It’s the moment when you feel the eye of the universe resting, just this once, upon a totally normal city block, on a totally normal day, at 6:27 o’clock.

Waiting for perfection 

I'm waiting for my moment
muscles coiled, knees bent.
Soon it will be my time
No longer biding —ready—
Muscles tensing —eager—
to explode from the floor.

They say practice makes perfect so
here I stand — perfecting my stance
waiting for some sign
of my higher power.

Waiting to be sure that this,
this time will be the one.
My best yet.
Higher, faster, farther —

Maybe this time I'll reach perfection.

In the beginning there was the word…

How does one start a poetry blog? What does one say to commemorate the moment of unveiling, of revelation? I do not know, and yet I cannot help but feel that something must be said. A setting of intention or a laying of foundation.

After all, must not all stories have a beginning?

And yet, I find myself struggling with speechlessness. Here lies poet, dumb. An entanglement which almost seems fitting: as few things define the artist’s creative journey so infamously as the struggle against emptiness, against the dearth of ideas that inevitably comes at the moment when the pressure to produce is greatest. At the moment when one’s own expectations are highest.

At the moment when one declares oneself to be poet and begins a blog.

At the beginning.

And at every subsequent beginning. At the moment of putting pen to paper to begin anew. A process that repeats inevitably again, and again, and again. Delineating the rhythm of an artist’s creative footsteps.

Thus begins my march.

The determined placement of one foot in front of the other. The journey into a vast and entirely uncharted new space. Here begins my journey into self and out of self, a trip that begins and ends in a single moment. A moment in which I press “Publish”.

A moment in which I plant my flag in the ground and declare the country of “Poet” in my own name.

A moment in which I claim my right to becoming something more than I am.

A moment like this one.

Welcome to my beginning.