★★★★★

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

/ ★★★★★, Essays, Reading

★★★★★ | Essays | Audio | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

How to sum up this wise, wonderful book? Cheryl Strayed, writing under the pseudonym Dear Sugar, wrote a weekly advice column from 2010 through 2012. The questions covered the gamut of the human experience: grief, love, infidelity, abuse, parenting, estranged families, friendship, wedding planning, divorce, you name it. Sugar’s response often included heartfelt sorrow or sometimes an upbraiding, but almost always a story from her life that fit the situation perfectly. These weren’t two or three-paragraph responses. These were beautifully crafted, thoughtful, deeply moving essays. This book collects the best of those essays.

I listened to this while driving and taking walks around the neighborhood. Since this book is narrated by Strayed, the feeling of a personal connection was amplified, especially when her voice cracked with emotion as she related her own stories.  There were times I would stop on a walk and marvel at this raw emotion wrapped in unconventional yet utterly appropriate advice. 

On one long drive, I was feeling a little down and growing weary of the foolish worries of the last few advice seekers. I told myself I would listen to just one more before turning off the book. And then came a letter from a bereaved father who had lost his 22-year-old son in an automobile accident. Living Dead Dad‘s loss stuck very close to home. “Sometimes the pain is so great, I simply lie in my bed and wail,” he wrote. I knew this kind of loss as only another grieving parent could.

I thought, “Oh no, Sugar. Don’t. Don’t answer this.” So many times, I have been counseled by well-intentioned but clueless people on how to get over the loss of my son. They lean on their experience of the death of a pet or a grandfather as an appropriate benchmark for grief. But answer, she did. I sat up as if about to watch a trainwreck in slow motion. And yet … and yet her advice to this grieving dad was just about as perfect as you could ever wish from someone who has never lost a child. You don’t get over this, she said. You grow around it:

You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.

For me, this letter to Living Dead Dad was the acid test for the book. If Sugar could comfort and help a person suffering this kind of loss, so empathetically and yet infused with constructive advice on moving forward, then she could help anyone.

When I finished the book, I wondered whether all the time I’ve spent reading the ancients about how to be a good person and how to lead a purposeful and happy life might have been misplaced. Maybe I should have just asked Sugar.

Foster by Claire Keegan

/ ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

Another masterpiece from Claire Keegan, this one about an unnamed child who spends a summer with her aunt and uncle on a farm on the coast of Ireland. We soon learn that the child has been utterly neglected and is in dire need of love and attention. Her aunt and uncle have their own grief, and we bear witness to a summer of tremendous healing for this newly formed family.

Her hands are like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

It’s astonishing how Keegan crafts so much story with characters of real depth in so few pages. The language is economical, yet lyrical. And moving. I did not want this to end. When I finished, I turned back and read it again to savor it more slowly and pick up on things I missed.

Related: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Favorite Highlights

‘Are the child’s clothes still hanging in the wardrobe?’

‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’

‘See, there’s three lights now where there was only two before.’ I look out across the sea. There, the two lights are blinking as before, but with another, steady light, shining in between. ‘Can you see it?’ he says. ‘I can,’ I say. ‘It’s there.’ And that is when he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his own.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

/ ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

Because of the subject matter, the death of a child, I read this highly acclaimed novel with trepidation. O’Farrell writes beautifully, and she lulled me into a world of a quasi-fairyland of evil step-mothers, abusive fathers, young impossible love, magic forests and elves, and the joy of life in harmony with nature.

While there were inklings and premonitions, the book carries on for two hundred pages before anything truly awful happens. When the tragedy finally strikes, the writing tone and structure shift from a conventional novel to short, trance-like visions of a mother’s inconsolable grief. Most people can only imagine the mere surface of grief like this. O’Farrell writes with brutal honesty as if she knows exactly what this is.

How is anyone ever to shut the eyes of their dead child? How is it possible to find two pennies and rest them there, in the eye sockets, to hold down the lids? How can anyone do this? It is not right. It cannot be.

While Shakespeare is never named, his character represents an important counterpoint in the novel. He begins as an unhappy son with ambitions far beyond his father’s business, a suitor and newlywed, a fledgling playwright separated from his wife and family, and finally as a grieving father.

I won’t spoil it, but the ending is about as perfect as you could wish for a novel dealing with the loss of a child.

Favorite Highlights

Certainties have deserted her. Nothing is as she thought it was.

She, who has always known, always sensed what will happen before it happens, who has moved serenely through a world utterly transparent, has been wrongfooted, caught off guard. How can this be?

How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?

God had need of him, the priest says to her, taking her hand after the service one day. She turns on him, almost snarling, filled with the urge to strike him. I had need of him, she wants to say, and your God should have bided His time.

(and such a secret, private pain it is, to see a boy growing like that, from lad to man, effortlessly, without care, but he would never say that, never let on to anyone else how he avoids this boy, never speaks to him, how he hates to look upon him).

“O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!” murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

/ ★★★★★, Literature, Reading

★★★★★ | Literature | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

I chose this children’s story as my last read of the year after listening to an episode of the Old School podcast where musician Nick Cave shares how the book changed his life.

The volume I curled up with in my easy chair tonight was a Christmas present from an aunt and uncle back in 1971. The pages now brittle with age, the inscription to “Bobby” faded, felt both foreign and eerily familiar. I was a precocious seven-year-old when I read this, but I surely wasn’t prepared for all the violence and poverty and deceit. I remembered only vague outlines of the story, but found my hair standing on end a few times as long-hidden memories resurfaced. I wonder how many unconscious phobias and life decisions have come from reading this at too-young an age.

This time around, I brought a father’s perspective to the book. How Gepetto must have suffered during the many years of searching for his lost son; how helpless he must have felt. It also reminded me of all the crazy stuff I got away with as a teenager and young adult, and like Pinocchio, I lived to tell the tale. I thought about how some never get these second chances.

In the podcast interview, Cave chokes up when he shares how reading the book helped him during a time of intense grief:

I read this book a lot around the death of my son. The idea that the missing child ends up being able to save the grieving father, who’s been sitting in the belly of the beast on his own, became extraordinarily moving to me. It’s an inversion of the way it should be. The absent child returns to basically parent the parent.

Is this really a children’s book? Maybe. It is a fantastic story, and the language is simple enough for a child to understand. But only an adult could appreciate the religious symbolism, the moral quandaries, and the woes of loss. I’d call this timeless literature masquerading as a children’s story. I’m better for reading it.

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

/ ★★★★★, Memoir, Reading

★★★★★ | Memoir | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

There are levels of hell on earth that only a parent who has lost a child have traveled. YiYun Li, a successful novelist and mother of two, lost her oldest son to suicide seven years ago. Her youngest son, James, whom this memoir is loosely about, took his life last year in the same fashion as his brother. In this memoir, Li pays tribute to James and shares what it’s like for a mother to lose her children to suicide.

Li is a gifted writer. The language here is sparse and omits any emotional flourish. She is clear-eyed and honest about her experience. As someone who has lost a child, I could only read this in small doses. I can’t imagine how difficult this was for her to write.

Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone.

One of the incredible things about books is when an author writes something so beautiful and so recognizably true, but you could never have grasped the thought on your own. Most readers won’t understand, but a few, the ones who never chose to be part of this unfortunate club, will nod their heads, and cry, and set this book down in meditative thought many times during their reading.

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New York Sketches by E.B. White

/ ★★★★★, Essays, Reading

 ★★★★★ | Essays | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

I bought this little gem from the Midtown McNally Jackson bookstore on our last week of a five-month stay in New York. Collected here are witty commentaries, short stories, poems, and essays, all originally published in The New Yorker, and each an ode to what I’m sure White would agree is the greatest city on earth.

The two moments when New York seems most desirable, when the splendor falls all round about and the city looks like a girl with leaves in her hair, are just as you are leaving and must say goodbye, and just as you return and can say hello.

I had to stop myself from gulping this down in one sitting. I read it slowly over a few evenings, savoring, reminiscing, and laughing aloud in places. I loved “The Rock Dove,” a piece on the roosting habits of New York City pigeons, and “Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street,” an essay on the challenges of leaving a city he loved. But honestly, every piece in this collection is great.

See also: Here is New York by E. B. White

Self-reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

/ ★★★★★, Essays, Reading

★★★★★ | Essays | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

Ah, Ralph Waldo Emerson: what a treasure. I’ve read most of these essays before, but never so deeply, and never with such illumination.  His wisdom is simple to understand, yet difficult to practice in a world of popular opinion and distracted thinking. Trust your own thoughts.  Be yourself. Don’t try to impress or copy others. Cherish your friends. Most of all: be present. Life is here, now; life is not studying the people or times of long ago or so-called leaders preaching hate and divisiveness.

Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.

Self-Reliance is his most famous essay, and it reads as fresh today as in Emerson’s time.  I enjoyed lesser-known Circles, which contends that all our knowledge and enthusiasms are temporary, soon to be replaced by even greater knowledge and better enthusiasms. To find truth, embrace change and nature. And Compensation, which celebrates the neutrality and balance of nature, even in grief:

The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.

Emerson wrote Compensation before the death of his five-year-old son Waldo. His take on grief would turn bitter in his follow-on essay, Experience.

Alongside these essays, I’m slowly reading through a collection of Emerson’s journals. It’s amazing to watch him shape his thinking as these roughshod ideas appear and evolve over time in his private musings.

Favorite Highlights

Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with the shadow on the wall.

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.

Prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness.

People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

/ ★★★★★, Literature, Reading

★★★★★ | Literature | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

Ah, Gatsby. It’s been a moment. I last read this book in college, and although I remember the story, I’m fairly sure I missed the point. It has been good for me to go back and reread these perennial classics that I thought I knew.

Here we have a true American tragedy, wrapped in social wit and irony, stewed in alcohol and disillusionment, where wealth, whether old or new, buys not love, but misery, where the strong moral values of the Midwest prove all too corruptible, where the very premise of the American Dream is nothing more than a cheat, a scam.

Other than maybe Gatsby, there isn’t a trustworthy or likeable character in the bunch. Ungrateful, snobbish, and vain, they look at people as novelties to play with and discard. Even Nick, our narrator, is cruel and two-faced. While her husband, Tom, is despicable, Daisy Buchanan is the real villain of this story. Her voice is full of money, Gatsby tells us. Not love, not empathy, not kindness. Money.

…

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Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney

/ ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads

I didn’t like this book at first. I felt claustrophobic, there in the first chapter, squeezed in at the kids’ table surrounded by a large group of strangers at a Manhattan apartment dinner party. These guests were too witty, overly confident, and entirely full of themselves. Who talks like this? And more pressing, who would want to read an entire novel with these assholes?

But I persevered. In fact, it was the Manhattan setting of this book that initially drew me.  I lived in New York in the mid-1990s and recently returned to an apartment on the Upper East Side, where much of the story takes place.  McInerney’s first book, Bright Lights, Big City, helped to convince me to move to New York when I read it in college. The descriptions of the city, its magic, and absurdity were spellbinding. The city itself becomes a character in the story, which we follow over a year, from the bitter cold of winter through the languor of summer to the bracing beauty of fall.

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Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

/ ★★★★★, Literature, Reading

★★★★★ | Literature | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

Rereading a book you haven’t read in 40 years is an interesting experience. I remembered only the bleakness but little of the story itself. I enjoyed most of the book, though all the decades of Hemingway parodies and copycats stole some of its luster. Still, it is a timeless classic that reinvented the novel. Makes me want to go back and read all those books I read when I was young. If this one is any guide, it will be like reading them again for the first time.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

/ ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

What a beautiful and poignant book. Hopeful and joyous at the possibilities of life, but bookended by the realities of disappointment and loss. 

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

…

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Laozi’s Dao De Jing by Lao Tzu

/ ★★★★★, Philosophy, Reading

★★★★★ | Philosophy | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

This short book oozes with wisdom with the help of Ken Liu’s wonderful translation and notes. Read this one slowly and set aside time for reflection. So much of the advice is contrary to conventional western views that it can seem non-sensical. But try, you must. ★★★★★ 

Can you open yourself to your senses—quieting the mind like water?

Death is good. Senescence is good. The beginning is good. The end is good. You are, like all things in the cosmos, swimming in the flux of Dao.

The Notebook by Roland Allen

/ ★★★★★, Reading, Writing Guides

★★★★★ | Writing | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

What a delightful book. The first chapter reeled me in with the story of how the Moleskin notebook exploded in popularity in the 1990s. The author clearly has been bitten by the same notebook fetish bug. He cites brand names of notebooks that are all too familiar to me. He decided to write a history of the notebook about ten years ago and proceeded to fill four or five notebooks with scribbles and quotes and references that ultimately became this book.

Allen used effective storytelling techniques to share dozens of examples of notebook usage over the past six hundred years from accounting ledgers in the 1400s, artist sketchbooks in the 1500s, Darwin’s field notes, to modern day journaling. Definitely a niche book, but great for any lover of notebooks and journals.

Rousseau and Revolution by Will Durant

/ ★★★★★, History, Reading

★★★★★ | History | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

The tenth volume of the incredible Story of Civilization series by Will and Ariel Durant. This one, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, provides an immensely readable history of Europe leading up to the French Revolution. Reading this series has been such an education. My only wish is that I had read them sooner. 

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The Age of Voltaire by Will Durant

/ ★★★★★, History, Reading

★★★★★ | History | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

Continuing my quest to read all eleven volumes of Will Durant’s Opus, The Story of Civilization. Volume IX centers on science and philosophy overtaking religion through thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot. The church did its best to stop it, but in the end, the French Enlightenment steered the faithful away from religion toward the beginnings of existentialism. While this movement addressed religious corruption and the horrors of inquisitions, there is also a feeling of great loss as civilization let go of its rudder of morality and faith.

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The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner

/ ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

Stegner must be my spirit author. The Big Rock Candy Mountain affected me on a deeply emotional level because of the many similiaries from my own life that that novel explores.  This one touched me as well, but for diffrent reasons. The narrator is 69, retired to his dream home in California, and deeply unhappy. He looks back on his life as pointless, a spectator.

The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark.

…

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The Age of Louis XIV by Will Durant

/ ★★★★★, History, Reading

★★★★★ | History | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

My straight-through reading of this mammoth 11-volume history continues. Volume VIII shares a detailed view of Europe in the 17th Century. So much war and bloodshed and atrocity, and yet brilliance too.

Let us agree that in every generation of man’s history, and almost everywhere, we find superstition, hypocrisy, corruption, cruelty, crime, and war: in the balance against them we place the long roster of poets, composers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and saints. That same species upon which poor Swift revenged the frustrations of his flesh wrote the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Bach and Handel, the odes of Keats, the Republic of Plato, the Principia of Newton, and the Ethics of Spinoza; it built the Parthenon and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; it conceived and cherished, even if it crucified, Christ. Man did all this; let him never despair.

Will Durant

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis

/ ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

I loved everything about this book. Who knew it was possible to write a novel filled with intricate chess games and make them exciting?!  Consider this:

She steeled herself, kept her eyes from his face, and played the best chess she knew, developing her pieces, defending everywhere, watching every opportunity for an opened file, a clear diagonal, a doubled pawn, a potential fork or pin or hurdle or skewer.

…

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