The Leaning Stack of Books: March 2019

I had a request from a reader for an update. I had planned to do a monthly update this year, but here it is March. March! How did that happen? I was sidetracked by the plague in January and by the snow in February and by our family’s first college touring trip (which of course is an existential journey for me, because how did I become the middle-aged woman with the questions about financial aid on those tours instead of the cool, twenty year old with all the dreams and the bright future? Also, my babies are going to leave home, and there aren’t enough potato chips in the world to fill that upcoming hole in my heart).

But I digress. While I haven’t been writing (except for updating on Goodreads, and you can follow me there if you want. My Goodreads feed updates on the sidebar of the blog), I have been reading a fair amount. Since the new year began, I’ve read five nonfiction books, so here’s my early spring nonfiction update. I will do a fiction update next.

My favorite piece of nonfiction so far this year has been Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood. Priestdaddy is a memoir by an adult daughter who moves home to live with her right wing, domineering Catholic priest father (yes, there’s a story there) and vaguely batty mother. I don’t usually love memoirs by young people, because “back when I was a kid” should not be ten minutes ago. But this was an exception to that rule. I loved it! It is at once a book about living with and in a complicated family ecosystem and living with and in Catholic culture (or probably any community culture). The author has a lot to say about being complicit – when you speak up and when you don’t, when you’re honest and when you’re not, and when you continue to affiliate and when you break away. Also, it was often laugh-out-loud funny.

I also read two books about food culture. I checked out both of these books for my son, who is writing a big paper about food culture for school. I go a little bonkers with my library card, as evidenced by my enormous late fines. My kids roll their eyes at how many piles of books I check out “for them.” I leave the books in tantalizing piles around the house, growing irritated as those piles go untouched. This time, my own hunger drove me to read Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley. Now that I think of it, Relish is another memoir, this time a graphic memoir of the author’s life growing up the daughter of a chef. I also read Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef’s Journey to Discover America’s New Melting-Pot Cuisine by Edward Lee. This book is part travelogue, part culinary lesson, and part meditation on what it means to be an American.

Speaking of travelogues, I also read Our Towns: a 100,000 Mile Journey Into the Heart of America by James M. Fallows and Deborah Fallows. The authors do a version of William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways trip, but this time in a single engine plane. They set out to evaluate the thesis that everything in America is terrible these days by travelling to small cities and towns that have reinvented themselves. They talk to civic leaders, local business people, and regular residents about the processes of change. And SPOILER: they find that there’s a lot of vibrant, engaged stuff happening, often across political, ethnic, and economic divisions. I liked this book, and it felt good to be hopeful. But I also wondered if a different set of questions would have led to a more complicated narrative in some of the places that the authors visited.

Finally, I read White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America by Margaret A. Hagerman. Though it reads a bit more like a dissertation than other books I usually review, it is a compelling conversation-starter about how communities talk about race. The author follows 36 white kids in a midwestern metropolitan setting, hanging out with them in their homes, going with them to their extracurricular activities, and interviewing them and their parents. Hagerman points out the ways they talk indirectly about race as they perpetuate segregation (e.g. saying “diversity” when they mean Black) and how they negotiate the school system to their own advantage. If you want to look the idea of “social justice” in the eyes, this book might get you there.