Essays

Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue by Lee Gutkind

/ Essays, Reading

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

An interesting selection of essays from the print run of the Creative Nonfiction literary magazine. There were some essays that appeared to stretch the boundaries of truth, but that’s the creative part I guess.

Highlights

If things could be undone, if time could be wound back, like a film, if the past could be kept alive to compensate for the deficiencies of the present: these are the wishes that form character, that grow out of events that form character. It does not take much. The tree bends once, twice, then does not bend again. It grows now as it always will. — Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

There are many things that capitalism produces, and noble behavior on either end of the rich/poor spectrum is not one of them. But we admonish only the poor. — Brian Broome

The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl

/ Essays, Reading, Travel and Nature

★★★☆☆ | Travel and Nature | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

This one didn’t meet my high expectations. The essays feel too forced and contrived, like the author is trying too hard. Lots of handwringing.  Her circle of concern is very very large. I don’t know how many essays reference the sad departure of her children from her once full home. I have no patience for mourning the loss of a child who has simply moved across town.  If only.  I read a half dozen of her short essays in the hot sun, wanting to be done with the book and move on to something more comforting. The essays went down easier out of doors, even if I don’t subscribe quite so much to her views.

You can’t come back to something that is gone. — Richard Powers, The Overstory

Sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett

/ Essays, Memoir, Reading

 ★★★★☆ | Essays, Writing, Memoir | Audio + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

I enjoy Ann Patchett’s novels, but I love her essays.  She writes with such clarity and compassion.  My first book of her essays was These Precious Days, which was written upfront as a collection of essays.  This one came together after the fact as a compilation of essays Ann had written in magazines over many years. Only later did she decide to publish them as a book. As a result, there isn’t much of an underlying theme, other than Ann herself.  I came for the essays on writing, but stayed for her views on RV life, dogs, opera, marriage, friendship, and defying all odds, the opening an independent bookstore in the post Amazon era.  Ann narrated the audiobook, which added to the personal voice of these essays.  After reading this and These Precious Days, I will basically read anything she writes.

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Somehow by Anne Lamott

/ Essays, Memoir, Reading

★★★☆☆ | Essays, Memoir | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

I loved Lamott’s Bird by Bird memoir on the writing craft. The writing here was good, but forced. Too many similes, too many quotes from others. Great life advice: be kind to yourself & others, all we need is love, etc., but it felt repetitive to me. Her advice on sobriety and community is heartfelt and immensely quotable.

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Consolations by David Whyte

/ Essays, Philosophy, Reading

★★★★★ | Philosophy | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

Ah, what a treasure. Two to three page poetic essays on 52 commonplace words or themes like Curiousity, Heartbreak, and Forgivness. I’ve been ruminating on this definition of Beauty for the past month:

Beauty is the harvest of presence.

Whyte often shared a take that surprised me, and sometimes changed my very paradigm of a long-fixed, but one-sided belief. I can see spending a year with this book, one theme per week, and digging deep, deep, deep into the purpose of life. This one is a permanent addition to my bedside table.

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A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut

/ Essays, Reading

★★★☆☆ | Essays | Audio | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads

A cranky, comical book of essays written in the last years of Vonnegut’s life.  He is depressed about the state of the world and our short-term minded treatment of it.  He reminds you that everyone, even those experts in power only just got here, like everyone else and no one really knows anything.

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These Precious Days by Ann Patchett

/ Essays, Reading

★★★★☆ | Essays | Audio | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads

A wonderful collection of essays across a variety of topics.  I read her essay “Three Fathers” in the New Yorker a while back, but it’s so much more engaging to hear Ann read it aloud in her own voice.  Her writing reminds me of my own if I were better — and that it’s possible to write and essay and still be impactful.

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