I listened to the audiobook, which was probably a mistake. I could not stand the narration, particularly Louisa’s strident voice, which made me cringe for much of the book. How these teenage characters spoke, acted, and thought rang false far too often. The author’s continued use of literary device cheats grew tiresome by the end. I loved the book’s ideas and themes, but not its execution. As was repeated often, this was a really long story. Too long for me.
I have a strange weakness for novels that involve chess. I adored The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis (the book was so much better than the Netflix series). It’s the utter brutality of the game, but without the bloodshed, where wits matter, not brawn, or wealth, or greater numbers.
Surely it is championship chess, and not boxing, that is our most dangerous game—at least so far as psychological risk is concerned.
Joyce Carol Oates
This short, tight novella is about chess, yes, but it’s also an examination of the lengths the human mind will stretch and strain without variety or socialization.
Nothing on earth exerts such pressure on the human soul as a void.
A good chess story, but an even better story of the psychological dangers of extreme isolation and single-minded focus.
What a fun, creepy book! I loved the slow build of suspense and the unexpected twists. And the ending … Whew.
It’s hard to believe this was written almost sixty years ago. So much of it still feels fresh. Levin created a blueprint for generations of suspense and horror writers to follow.
I came to this book with high expectations. The New York Times considers it one of the best books (so far) of the 21st Century.
The story is simple enough: a professor with a background in amateur falconry retreats from public life after the death of her father to train a goshawk. I enjoyed the descriptions of the hawk, the English countryside, and the fringe customs of falconry.
The book bogged down for me in two ways: the author’s overwrought descriptions of her descent into near madness over the loss of her 67-year-old father, and the inclusion of a quasi-biography of the writer T.H. White. I think this book would have been better without the deep dives into her fascination with White. And the emotional punch would have been more effective had she let her actions speak for her feelings of grief. We all approach grief in different ways, so I know this is an unfair judgment on my part. This one just missed the mark for me.
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.
Having heard about bullet journaling for years, I decided to finally read Ryder Carroll’s well-regarded book. I didn’t expect to adopt the practice. I have a well-established journaling habit, both in a physical notebook in the mornings and in a digital journal app at night. However, I did pick up some interesting tips on ways I could make my notebook scribbles more accessible after the fact.
What surprised me was how well Carroll writes about the benefits of journaling for work and personal fulfillment, particularly how daily reflection can help you make time for those important but not necessarily urgent things in life.
This was a worthwhile read, no matter your stance on bullet journaling.
I love a great short story, but I don’t read enough of them. I decided to read one every night alongside my other reading. And what better source than this mammoth treasure of short fiction from the New Yorker Magazine’s first hundred years?
There are some well-known stories here that I had read before, and many from authors I knew well, but not their shorter works. Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” still amazes me for how much story can fit into just a handful of pages. And Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” continues to shock and fascinate me no matter how many times I’ve read it.
Out of the remaining 76 stories, there were a few that missed the mark, but most were very good, and some were fantastic. My favorites:
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.
Alain de Botton and his School of Life organization are on a mission to help otherwise bright people become more emotionally intelligent. We have lost touch with the instructive benefits of organized religion and the traditional family unit. Without this foundation, our quest for knowledge through technical and technological means has left our souls barren and empty.
De Botton suggests we need to study culture and art as a replacement for the calm and perspective religion once gave us. Without this, we will continue to seek our happiness in brash consumerism or destructive behaviors.
Buying expensive things can feel like solutions to needs we don’t understand. Happiness may be difficult to attain, but the obstacles are rarely financial.
And so, the book represents “a crash course” in emotional maturity, and by necessity, it must gloss over big swathes of psychology, philosophy, art, and literature. I didn’t pick up much new from the book, though it was a nice refresher in some areas. The British writing style, with its dry humor and roundabout sentence structure, was initially a delight, but it grew tiresome by the end.
For a recent college graduate, this might be just enough of a primer to tease a lifelong appetite for the arts and offer advice for being a better human being.
Highlights
Almost universally, without anyone intending this to happen, somewhere in our childhood our trajectory toward emotional maturity can be counted upon to have been impeded. Even if we were sensitively cared for and lovingly handled, even if parental figures approached their tasks with the highest care and commitment, we can be counted upon not to have passed through our young years without sustaining some form of deep psychological injury-what we can term a set of “primal wounds.”
The causes of our primal wounds are rarely outwardly dramatic, but their effects are rarely insignificant. Such is the fragile base of childhood that nothing outwardly appalling needs to have happened to us for us to wind up inwardly profoundly scrambled.
What properly indicates addiction is not what someone is doing, but their way of doing it, and in particular their desire to avoid any encounter with certain sides of themselves. We are addicts whenever we develop a manic reliance on something — anything — to keep our darker and more unsettling feelings at bay.
Most of what we are remains a secret to the world, because we are aware of how much of it flouts the laws of decency and sobriety we would like to live by. We know that we would not last long in society if a stream of our uncensored inner data ever leaked out of our minds.
Philosophical meditation seeks to lend us a structure within which to sieve the confused content that muddies our stream of consciousness. Key to the practice is regularly to turn over three large questions:
What am I anxious about right now? What am I upset about right now? What am I ambitious and excited about right now?
Kindness is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.
The tragedy of every sorry argument is that it is constructed around a horrific mismatch between the message we so badly want to send (“I need you to love me, know me, agree with me”) and the manner in which we are able to deliver it (with impatient accusations, sulks, put-downs, sarcasm, exaggerated gesticulations, and forceful “fuck you”s).
People don’t change when they are gruffly told what’s wrong with them; they change when they feel sufficiently supported to undertake the change they-almost always—already know is due.
We must beware too of the “incumbent problem”: the vast but often overlooked and unfair advantage that all new people, and also cities and jobs, have over existing―or, as we put it, incumbent-ones. The beautiful person glimpsed briefly in the street, the city visited for a few days, the job we read about in a couple of tantalizing paragraphs in a magazine all tend to seem immediately and definitively superior to our current partner, our long-established home, and our committed workplace and can inspire us to sudden and (in retrospect sometimes) regrettable divorces, relocations, and resignations.
The way to greater confidence isn’t to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it’s to live at peace with the inevitable nature of our ridiculousness. We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past, and we will be idiots again in the future-and that is OK. There aren’t any other available options for human beings.
We tend to become ironic around things that we feel disappointed by but don’t think we’ll ever be able to change. It’s a maneuver of disappointment stoically handled.
There can wisely be no “solutions,” no self-help, of a kind that removes problems altogether. What we can aim for, at best, is consolation—a word tellingly lacking in glamour. To believe in consolation means giving up on cures; it means accepting that life is a hospice rather than a hospital, but one we’d like to render as comfortable, as interesting, and as kind as possible.
I read this one before, some twenty years ago, but I didn’t remember much of it other than the setting: a log cabin set on a lake in western Maine. I had a hankering to revisit this place long locked away in my memory.
This is a classic haunted house with enough mystery and spooky parts to keep the pages turning. We meet many of the residents of this lakeside Maine setting, and King captures both the joy and discontent of multi-generational life in an isolated community. Having spent over twenty years on a rural island in Washington state, I laughed and cringed at the similarities.
But, like most good Stephen King novels, it’s the exploration of the deeper human condition that lingers. In this case, the grief of losing a soulmate and how a loss like that changes you.
Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.
The narrator is a well-known writer who suffers from a debilitating bout of writer’s block. Through him, we learn a lot about the highs and lows of the publishing industry. The title is borrowed from a Thomas Hardy quote after he stopped writing novels: “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.” It’s a humble admission from our generation’s greatest storyteller that, as effortless as the final product seems to readers, writing is a tough business.
Highlights
I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.
This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things – fish and unicorns and men on horseback – but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.
