It's Tuesday at the Leaning Stack of Books!

I’m a day late for my weekly update! So sorry! Can I blame it on the fact that I received another inexplicable recommendation from Goodreads?

Based on my reading preferences??????!

My intent last week was to read one book: News of the World by Paulette Jiles. I did that, and I also got through 2 more: An American Marriage by Tayari Jones and Rise Up!: Life and Literacy in an Urban First Grade By Linda Katz.

An American Marriage is, of course, the most recent Oprah book club pick. And I have lots of thoughts – ones that I should turn into a longer post. This book is about a marriage, sure, but the title, “An American Marriage,” is significant. My take is that the novel is as much about what our obligations are to each other as Americans as it is about our obligations to each other are in intimate relationships.

A fun tidbit about Tayari Jones – she once shined her famous writerly gaze on this blog. Here’s a screen shot of our exchange on Twitter after I posted my thoughts about her previous novel, Silver Sparrow.

In the spirit of setting small goals, I will be reading one new one this week: Force of Nature by Jane Harper. I read Dry, the first in Harper’s Aaron Falk series, in January, and I’m excited to return to the Australian setting and the fast paced plotting of these mysteries.

For those of you looking for new things to read, here’s a link to The Millions’ list of new books coming out in March. I just added The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea to my enormous leaning stack.

(It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Book Date)

Staying Upright in a Messed Up World

My ability to get things done is very affected by the news. I recently wrote about how destabilized I was by the 2016 election and its aftermath, and how my reading and writing life suffered because of it. Watching the news these last couple of weeks has also unsettled me. But I’m trying to stay upright. I bought a happy light. I put highlights in my hair. And yesterday I went to the gym for the first time in eons.

While on the treadmill, I listened to Will Schwalbe’s new podcast, “But That’s Another Story,” which features different authors talking about their reading origin stories.  Schwalbe is most famous for his book, The End of Your Life Book Club. The first episode spotlights Min Jin Lee, who wrote Pachinko, a book I received at my book club’s holiday book exchange (and which is perched atop my leaning stack!). And at the outset of the episode, Schwalbe reads the famous James Baldwin quote about empathy:

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

I don’t know why Baldwin's insight struck me so much at that moment (somewhere around mile 2, at the point where I remembered that I hate running on the treadmill). There have been so many times recently when I have wondered if it matters that I read books or talk about them or write about them. And that set of questions very easily shifts into, “Why bother?” Baldwin reminds me that reading is a bridge to greater understanding of the world, an understanding that I so desperately need right now. So you can thank James Baldwin (via Schwalbe via the gym) for my first "It's Monday!" post in over a year.

The good news is that I finished two books last week. First I read Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 2017. I will write about that book shortly, because I think it's an important one for those of us grappling with questions about why things in the world seem so messed up.  I also read Girl at War, by Sara Nović, which is a fictionalized account of the Balkan Civil War in the 1990s.

This week I am reading News of the World by Paulette Jiles. This book has been recommended to me by so many people, which is weird because I wouldn't pick it up on my own in a million years ("for lovers of Texas historical fiction"). I have checked it out from the library 5 times, and the fifth time is going to be the charm. In addition to all the praise the novel has received, it has the added bonus of being only 200 pages. I’m all about small goals these days. 

Before I leave you, I have a random question. Can anyone explain the logic of Goodreads’ algorithm for picking recommendations? Today I woke up to this:

I can guarantee that I don’t have a single cowboy romance on the list of things I have read – no offense to cowboys, of course. Also, the blurb says, “Luke like his life – and his women – uncomplicated.” Luke would not like me at all.  Goodreads, I’m feeling a little bit misunderstood.

(It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Book Date)

It's Monday! And I'm Back At It!

Well, hello.

It turns out that I took a three month hiatus from my blog. I can’t really explain it. It started with a struggle to find a good book to read, and then that struggle spread into writing. Suddenly, I couldn’t put words to paper. Thinking about the blog made me feel badly, and reading everyone else’s blogs made me feel even worse.

So I un-blogged for a while, but the need to start again has been tormenting me like an itch on the bottom of my foot. I can’t ignore it any more.

Here’s a list of some of the things I read during my hiatus. There are no reviews up for any of these, and there might never be. I do hope to go back and discuss them, but I’m also wary of getting stuck in the past.

Stoner by John Edward Williams (a character portrait of an academic that I liked more than I thought I would!)

Golden Age by Jane Smiley (I eagerly read this last book in the trilogy but felt it needed momentum and suspense, just like the others)

Class Reunion by Rona Jaffe (read this and loved it in high school; now I think it’s terrible)

 

The Smell of Other People’s Houses by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (compelling YA that works well for adult readers)

I’ll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson (compelling YA that drips with adolescent angst)

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld (shockingly entertaining given how little I enjoy Jane Austen. It’s a modern re-do of Pride and Prejudice)

How To Raise An Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims (this would be a great book to discuss with other parents, assuming everyone is willing to be self-reflective)

Britt-Marie Was Here by Frederik Backman (the charming quality of A Man Called Ove turns sticky sweet in this one)

Happy Family by Tracy Barone (deeply depressing subject matter but such engaging writing)

In the spirit of moving forward, here’s what I’m reading right now:

Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives by David Denby

Here’s the description from Goodreads:

Can teenagers be turned on to serious reading? What kind of teachers can do it, and what books? To find out, Denby sat in on a tenth-grade English class in a demanding New York public school for an entire academic year, and made frequent visits to a troubled inner-city public school in New Haven and to a respected public school in Westchester county. He read all the stories, poems, plays, and novels that the kids were reading, and creates an impassioned portrait of charismatic teachers at work, classroom dramas large and small, and fresh and inspiring encounters with the books themselves, including The Scarlet Letter, Brave New World, 1984, Slaughterhouse-Five, Notes From Underground, Long Way Gone and many more. Lit Up is a dramatic narrative that traces awkward and baffled beginnings but also exciting breakthroughs and the emergence of pleasure in reading. In a sea of bad news about education and the fate of the book, Denby reaffirms the power of great teachers and the importance and inspiration of great books.

And after that, I’ll be reading Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín for my book club.

Here’s the description from Goodreads:

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America -- to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland" -- she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, who loves the Dodgers and his big Italian family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.

I’ve missed you all! Thanks for sticking with me.

(It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Book Date)

It's Monday! And I'm Back!

So what in the world happened to me?

I don’t really have an answer for you. I just suddenly could.not.read. Two weeks went by, and I didn’t look at a single book. It wasn’t really a slump – it was a stop.

Today I picked up, once again, The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie. This is the book that I have been carrying around all this time and not reading. And guess what? I blew through several hundred pages this afternoon, and I feel almost like I have reading momentum again. The novel features a talking squirrel and lots of relationship drama. How could I resist?

So my goal for this week is simply to keep reading – because let me tell you, I don’t really know who I am if I don’t have a book in my hand.

( It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Book Date.)

It's Monday, And I'm Looking For Love!

This doesn’t exactly feel like a blogger’s slump, but it sure looks like one on paper (or, er, digital paper?  What is the internet? Gah.). I’m totally blaming Jane Smiley. I just finished the second in her Last Hundred Years Trilogy, and it took me eight days of pretty aggressive reading to get through it (review forthcoming). All I posted last week was my review of Weightless by Sarah Bannan, so I clearly did not have a very weighty blogging week.

In an effort to regain some momentum, I just picked up Karolina Waclawiak’s The Invaders, which is described as a novel about “the suburban abyss.” In addition to having the potential to scratch my ongoing suburban reading itch, this book has fewer than 250 pages! Compared with the Smiley tome, this is a fun sized candy bar.

In honor of the approach of Valentine’s Day, I’m looking for a good love story. Do you have a favorite?

And speaking of love, here are my  favorite bookish Valentines for this year, courtesy of the interwebs:

From Sea + Lake Paper Co.

(See last year’s choices here)

(It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Book Date)

UPDATE: The Leaning Stack of Books Diversity Challenge Bingo

This Monday entry will be slightly different than my usual update. I really need to discuss my 2015 Diversity Challenge Bingo Game, because it’s already the end of January. How did that happen? Plus, my traditional update would let you know that I am in the middle of a string of novels about sad white people (My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout; Days of Awe by Lauren Fox (review forthcoming); and I just started Early Warning by Jane Smiley). That, in its own way, is the perfect segue into a recap of my attempt last year to diversify my reading.

If you remember, I was interested in expanding my reading repertoire to include a wider variety of authors and points of view. At the end of 2014, I tallied up the books I read over the course of the year and found that only 8% of those books were by authors of color, and 3% had a main character that was a person of color. My “natural” book selection pattern – which was to choose books by whim alone – led to a lot of reading by and about white people.

My goal was to more intentionally – but in a fun way – improve those numbers. I truly believe that I am a better person when I experience the lives of people unlike myself through books and reading. So I created a bingo card for myself:

And I made myself a drinking game! The rule was that every time I filled a row, I had to take a drink and holler, “Blogtastic!” I’m really cool, can’t you tell? There is truly nothing more brag-worthy than being a lady who plays bookish games by herself and shouts weird things while drinking alone.

But in all seriousness, I did learn a little bit about the limits of my own intentionality. Don’t get me wrong, my reading choices were more diverse in 2015. 19% of all the books I read had authors of color. Of the fiction I read, 20% had a main character of color. 43% of the nonfiction I tackled centered on race or the racial dimensions of a problem.

However, I honestly thought that I was going to fill my bingo card. And while I certainly created a robust scattershot card and was proud of that, I was only able to officially fill one row. That meant that I was a pretty sober blogger in 2015. My “intentionality” did not make me a bingo winner in any real sense of the word.

I learned that true intentionality around reading and diversity requires a bigger commitment on my part. I need to think more deliberately and choose more critically if I want to broaden my reading life in a big way. So this year, I plan to take on this bingo card again, just as it is, and I would love for you all to join me. Imagine us all raising our glasses and shrieking in unison!

My winning row is below:

And the books are (from left to right):

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

It's Monday! And I Fell Down a Rabbit Hole!

Oh, the blog posts that are left undone! It was the first week of the quarter, and somehow I found myself buried in problems and projects unrelated to this blog. But I’m not going to dwell. It’s a new week!

I did put out one post, a review of Laurie Colwin's A Big Storm Knocked It Over. Actually, it's less a review and more a consideration of re-reading.

Thanks to all of you for your curiosity about The Leaning Stack of Books Diversity Bingo Game Challenge. I said that I would write my 2015 update last week, but I haven’t done it yet. It’s coming! It’s coming!

I  finished Weightless by Sarah Bannan last week. We’re discussing it in my book club this month. We’ll be meeting at the end of January, so I won’t be posting a review until then. I find that sometimes my thoughts change through dialogue. I’m also about half way through Jane Smiley’s Some Luck, so hopefully I’ll have something to say about that book soon.

In the exciting news category, My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout just arrived for me from the library. I’ve been looking forward to it, even though I wasn’t a big fan of The Burgess Boys, Strout’s previous novel. As a special bonus to me, it’s a short book! As I mentioned in my Top 5 of 2015 post, my new reading year is all about short!

The other thing that I did last week was fall down a deep rabbit hole. I recently read in Brain Pickings about the collaborative book, Hurry Up and Wait, by artist Maira Kalman and author Daniel Handler. I had seen Kalman’s art on the cover of various New Yorker magazines, but I hadn’t really explored it. I checked out Hurry Up and Wait from the library and just loved it. It’s a hybrid book, containing Kalman’s paintings, photography from the Museum of Modern Art, and Handler’s text. It’s kind of a weird meditation on rushing and waiting.

My library has a bunch of books by Kalman, so I checked out a few, including another one in the MOMA series, Girls Standing On Lawns. This book considers all the snapshots people take (think: first day of school), where they are just posing on the lawn in front of their house. In the postscript to the book, the Photography Curator at MOMA writes that the photography in the book is “vernacular,” meaning “the messy diversity of objects created without artistic ambition.” Kalman and Handler play around with the idea that these posed snapshots make people permanent, freezing them forever in a moment of significance, though the significance becomes unclear over time.

Finally, my favorite of the Kalman book bundle I received from the library is My Favorite Things, which is both memoir and reflection on beloved objects, using the collection at the Cooper-Hewett National Design Museum as inspiration and guide.

Do you ever get lost on a weird reading tangent? I’d love to hear about it!

(It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Book Date)

It's Monday! And I Have To Get Out Of My Pajamas!

The decorations are down, and things are back to normal in my house. I spent much of last week in my pajamas, and I was kind of disoriented when the alarm went off this morning. Everything just starts again? How can that be happening already?

I have not made a 2016 reading resolution, nor have I joined any challenges (yet). The big one I joined last year – the Roof Beam Reader 2015 TBR Pile Challenge – was a disaster for me. It turns out that the reason why I don’t read many of the books on my leaning stack is that I don’t really want to. I suppose that’s good to know! And with that, I just came up with my resolution: I’m going to read what I feel like reading all year long.

(The one caveat is that I’m going to continue with my own Diversity Challenge Bingo. A post on that is coming soon.)

Last week I posted two reviews – one for The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora and another for Ghettoside by Jill Leovy. I also posted my Top 5 of 2015. I finished Laurie Colwin’s A Big Storm Knocked It Over, and my review for that book is upcoming.

Also last week I had seven books arrive for me at the library. I hate it when that happens. Now I have a difficult decision to make about which books to read and which to return untouched. 

I’m going to start by FINALLY reading the now-not-so-new Jane Smiley trilogy. Some Luck is one of the books that arrived from the library, and for the fourth time. I keep getting it and sending it back. Some of you have recommended it highly, and you know that I love a good intergenerational family story.

How about you? What’s the first book you’re going to read (or have already read) this year? Do you make reading resolutions?

(It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? Is hosted by Book Date. Now that Bill Gates is an official book blogger, do you think he’ll participate?)