The Last Word On Nothing

We’ve done this before, talked about the books we’ve liked. Here are our lists from years gone by. And if you should be so moved, we also offer books we ourselves have written.

Helen: The most entertaining reading I’ve done lately is a pair of young adult novels set in the near future: Catfishing on CatNet and its sequel, Chaos on CatNet. In the first book, a teenage girl keeps getting moved around to different small towns by her mom, who’s trying to hide them from her dad, who may or may not be evil. Since she moves so much, all of her friends are on the internet – specifically, on a website devoted to cat photos. The friends have real-life adventures with danger and cats. A sentient AI narrates some of the chapters. The high school’s sex ed class is taught by a robot. I started the first book out of a sense of obligation, because I went to college with the author, Naomi Kritzer, then raced through it in a few days and immediately got hold of the second one.  

Jane:  My favorite way to read is to receive a recommendation and then resolve to know absolutely nothing about the book before I start reading. This is how I came upon Beth Morgan’s A Touch of Jen, so I will do you the same favor: just dive in, because it’s much better if you know nothing to start. The only thing I’ll say is that at no point did I know where the book was going, and I dropped everything for 48 hours to finish it. Morgan is darkly funny, and her characters are so deliciously hateable, yet uncomfortably relatable. Just be prepared to make little noises of surprise or disgust as you’re reading and set aside an hour to process once you’ve finished reading. 

Ann:  I just read Colm Toibin’s The Magician because I read all his novels. His range is rangier than any writer except maybe Penelope Fitzgerald: he has Brooklyn/Ireland novels, antiquity novels; and now with The Magician, novels whose main characters are novelists telling not other peoples’ stories but their own real lives.  The other novel like this is The Master.  In these two, master and magician, the characters are Henry James and Thomas Mann, respectively — and Toibin is good enough to get away with this.  But The Magician, the Mann book, seemed rote, as though Toibin was working card by card through his research notes. So I reread The Master, the James book, to see if it was also rote and no, it’s not, not a bit of it.  Now I have a theory that Toibin crawled inside his characters, and the Henry James character talks with James’ real voice — wordy, over-subtle, way too perceptive, personally reserved. And the Thomas Mann character uses Mann’s real voice which is also wordy and reserved, but not subtle, not perceptive, plus self-impressed, pontifical, and pedantic, like he’s talking from note cards. Or maybe Toibin just got tired, sometimes a person can get tired.  Still, both books are fascinating and I like them better than I do the biographies that satisfy the same need: who are these people, these authors?

Rebecca: Giving birth and then raising a baby is the most primal thing I’ve ever done, twice. So many times in the past few months, I have held my infant daughter and thought, “Look at this primate.” That’s what she is, just another in the chain of primates, repeating the cycle. I have felt in my bones that I am a mammal. I realized that all of the mammals who have gone before me have held and beheld their children in just the same way that I do. Nothing has changed through all of human evolution, except maybe the clothing. We are all just mammals. So I was drawn to the concept of this book Nightbitch, which, I thought, was about a mother who turns into a werewolf. Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder, is actually about much more than the animalistic experience of becoming a mother and raising a baby. It’s about expectations, the patriarchy, solitude, fear, love, dogs, meat, despair, anger, mommy cliques, and the necessity of art. I don’t want to give anything else away; I’ll just say that I bookmarked every other page until I finally gave up and just started telling every mother I know to read it, as soon as possible.  

Christie:  At some point in my life, I realized that most of my attempts to reorganize my to do lists or better manage my work time were really just ways of procrastinating just doing the work. Still, I’ve given a lot of thought to how I want to manage my time, and Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals is the best damn book on the subject I’ve ever read. What makes it good is that it doesn’t promise that your life will be perfect if only you master the pomodoro method or learn to swallow the frog. Instead, Burkeman gets to the heart of the matter: our lives are finite, and time management is an existential crisis. He delves right in and helps the reader navigate the difficult questions underlying our struggles with time and asks us to face the reality that doing this inevitably means not doing that. It’s got plenty of deep philosophy, but Burkeman also ends the book with some truly helpful tips and a list of questions to ask yourself to get a better handle on how you want to spend your time.

Christie:  I discovered The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell on a friend’s list of must-read sci-fi books, and I understand why it’s such a classic. The novel, published in 1996, tells the story of what happens when the Jesuits send a mission to find out who is broadcasting the haunting music they detect emanating from Alpha Centauri. Let’s just say that some of the worst outcomes arise from best intentions. The sci-fi premise is just a way into a deep exploration of philosophy, religion and humanity. 

Christie:  Our very own Cameron told me about Bonnie Tsui’s captivating book, Why We Swim, which I devoured in two days. It made me want to start swimming again. The book beautifully describes the joy and meditation of swimming, but it’s also packed with fascinating science and history. 

Cameron:  Oh, I was going to re-recommend Why We Swim, along with Wintering, which is a very nice thing to read in a winter, especially if you’re feeling like hibernating, like I am right now. Winter lovers might also love Powder Days, by Heather Hansman. Every time I’ve finished one of these books I’ve loved, I feel so sad–will there ever be another book that I love so much? And then, of course, there is. Most recently, it was The Shame, by Makenna Goodman. I read it during a rare afternoon at a coffeeshop when all I had to do was read. I also recommend coffee shops. 

Christie:  I read a lot of novels this year, and one of my favorites was Lily King’s novel Writers & Lovers. The story is about a young woman pursuing a creative life while many of her peers go on to corporate jobs and other lives. The descriptions of the creative life are so true to life, and how could I not love a story that brings together two of my favorite things—writing and spatchcocking? 

Jessa:  Walter Isaacson’s biography Leonardo Da Vinci accompanied me for multiple months and enriched that time in ways that have stayed with me. I know he has done a number of others, including a recent work on Jennifer Doudna, and the Da Vinci book convinced me I would always have time for his take on a person’s life and times. 

Ben:  Sierra Crane Murdoch’s astonishing Yellow Bird is one of the finest pieces of reportage I’ve ever read — I’m beyond impressed by the depth of Sierra’s embeddedness in North Dakota’s Native communities, and the elegance with which she weaves together her narrative’s many threads. And Lissa Yellow Bird is one of the truly great protagonists in the history of literary nonfiction: funny, brash, honest, resourceful. I also think Wild Souls and Beloved Beasts, by People-of-LWON emeriti Emma Marris and Michelle Nijhuis, respectively, would make a really thoughtful holiday gift package. 

_______

photo of the Peabody library in Baltimore, by Matthew Petroff; of books, by Dietmar Rabich; both via Wikimedia Commons