What I Recommend

One of the questions I get most often is:  "I'm looking for a new book!  What do you recommend?"

It's been a while since I've updated this blog regularly, but here are some favorites from the past two years:

1)  Station Eleven:  This book really got under my skin.  It's been over a year since I've read it, but passages still come to me at random moments.  The novel is about human survival after an apocalypse, and while we all know that I would go down in the first wave, it made me think about how much we depend on modern conveniences.

2)  Modern Romance:  It's been years since I've dated and so much has changed since then (hello, Tinder!).  I thought that the authors did a wonderful job of discussing the data behind dating trends, and the impact that technology has on how we communicate and connect with one another.  (I highly recommend reading the print version for the graphics.)

3)  Re Jane:  Jane Eyre was one of my favorites as a teenager, and I loved the adaptation to modern times.  It's not perfect - it's overly wrought at times - but I still enjoyed it.

4)  The Expatriates:  I read this right before giving birth, but I've found that I can't stop thinking about it since then.  There's a gripping plot line involving a young child, plus I identified with the descriptions of living abroad:  the displacement that comes with being in another culture, along with the expat friendships that spring from muddling through the unknown together.

The Story of the Lost Child

From The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth - and final - installment of the Neapolitan novels:

"It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute."

Also:  

"Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them." 

And so I'm done with the series.  I deliberately waited to start the novels until I gave birth -- among other things, I wanted to read them without interruption (ha!).  Finishing the series feels especially poignant, coinciding with the end of the so-called fourth trimester.

I've given no background about the novels, but, in brief, they trace the friendship of two women over fifty years.  And while the friendship is the heart of the series, the novels also explore class struggles, female identity, the complexities of motherhood, the impact of communism on Italy, the violence of Naples, and what feels like dozens and dozens of other themes.  

And though I grimace at the Trump-like overtones of the word, I can only describe the books as being tremendous.  Highly recommended!

Two additional thoughts:  

• Its scope reminds me a bit of A Suitable Boy, which I also highly recommend.
• Though Ferrante is a pseudonym and the author's identity remains unknown, we all think that the author is a female... right?

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

From Elena Ferrante's Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (the third book in the Neapolitan series):

"Become.  It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realized it for the first time only in that situation.  I wanted to become, even though I had never known what.  And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.  I had wanted to become something - here was the point - only because I was afraid that [my friend] would become someone and I would stay behind.  My becoming was a becoming in her wake.  I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her." 

Also, I love this description:  "There is no woman like you, you throw yourself into life with a force that, if we all had it, the world would have changed a long time ago."

The Story of a New Name

From Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name (the second book in the Neapolitan series):

“...I had arrived there full of pride and realized that -- in good faith, certainly, with affection -- I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won.  But she had known from the moment I had appeared, and now... she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.” 

New words learned!

• excrescence:  a distinct outgrowth on a human or animal body or on a plant, esp. one that is the result of a disease or abnormality
• philologist:  the branch of knowledge that deals with the structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or languages

My Brilliant Friend

From Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend:

“Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.” 

The Goldfinch

After watching "Blue Jasmine" (which was extraordinarily good), my friend A turned to me and stated, with the utmost confidence, that Cate Blanchett would be nominated for -- if not win -- an Academy Award.  It didn't matter how tremendous other actresses' performances were in the upcoming months:  Cate Blanchett was simply that good.

This is how I felt about The Goldfinch.  It was extraordinary, and I can already tell that it will be one of my favorite books of 2014.

There are many, many things I loved about it:  the dark humor, how vividly Tartt painted (no pun intended) New York City and Nevada, the unexpected twists and turns in the tale.  It's a long read, but a rewarding one.

Some favorite passages:

• "And her laugh was enough to make you want to kick over what you were doing and follow her down the street."
• On Greenwich Village:  "It was a little weird being in the Village on my own because it wasn't a place where you saw many kids on the street on a weekend morning; it felt adult, sophisticated, slightly alcoholic."
• On his mother's death:  "Every new event - everything I did for the rest of my life - would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us.  Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away."
• "And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky -- so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly the middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime."

And this entire passage:

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts.  We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people.  We don't get to choose the people we are. 

Because -- isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture --?  From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do?  How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart." 

Only here's what I really, really want someone to explain to me.  What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted --?  What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?

Best of 2013

Oh man.  Despite barely blogging in 2013, I still read a bunch.  It was the usual mix:  lots of fiction, some smutty books, a handful of non-fiction.  All around, it was a great year for reading, but here are my top five faves: 

1)  The Orphan Master's Son:  I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it.  Completely original and completely deserving of the Pulitzer.

2)  World War Z:  Courtesy of my friend Mark, I picked up this page-turner.  I also did not sleep for the entire month of September due to zombie nightmares.

3)  The Circle:  I get the criticism:  Dave Eggers' characters aren't fully formed and the 'plot twist' is pretty apparent from the first few chapters.  It doesn't matter.  The book does a great job exploring privacy, social media, and what we give up when we opt in.

4)  Americanah:  Hands down, my favorite book of the year.  I highlighted over a dozen passages, but I could have easily highlighted the whole book because it was that good.  

5)  Lean In:  I was a little torn about whether or not to include this one.  Like many others, I think that Sandberg writes from a position of incredible privilege, and that she seemed a little out-of-touch with some of her suggestions.  That said, I thought the book was thought-provoking with its discussions on work-life balance and how to make parental leave conversations more inclusive.

Happy 2014, everyone!