It’s been a while – no real excuses except feeling too distracted to write – but not to read. I have a list I will share, but first – Joan Didion. I remember reading The White Album years ago, and when I heard of her death, I had to stop reading my current book to find an old copy. Her first line lives on as one of the best first lines of a book – “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Enough to inspire me to reread it to discover what Didion’s words might mean to me now, forty years and a never-ending pandemic later, and if they would have the same impact. I struggled to think of a current writer who has the same impact with her clarity of observations.
Zadie Smith in her tribute to Didion in The New Yorker, noted:
“It is a peculiarity of Joan Didion’s work that her most ironic formulations are now read as sincere, and her sincerest provocations taken with a large pinch of salt. Perhaps when your subject is human delusion you end up drawing that quality out of others, even as you seek to define and illuminate it. How else to explain the odd ways we invert her meanings? We tell ourselves stories in order to live. A sentence meant as an indictment has transformed into personal credo.”
Joan Didion’s name may be more familiar to modern audiences than her work, except perhaps for “The Year of Magical Thinking,”(she wrote five novels, six screenplays, and fourteen works of nonfiction), but it’s never too late to read books guaranteed to inspire, jolt, and perhaps persuade you – “…while everyone else drank the Kool-Aid, she stuck to Coca-Cola …”
Books I Have Been Reading Recently
Never by Ken Follett – slow start but picks up into a roller coaster ride – watch out for the ending
The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffman – the fourth book of witchery – fun to read and wish you were part of the Owens family of witches
Cheese, Wine, and Bread: Discovering the Magic of Fermentation in England, Italy, and France by Katie Quinn – a better version of Eat, Pray, Love with the author’s tongue-in-cheek memoir, good information, and a few great recipes.
Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen – the first in a trilogy. The book made the Washington Post’s top ten for 2021. The story revolves around an associate pastor at a Protestant church in suburban Chicago who’s troubled by his own envy and adultery. “The novel presents an electrifying examination of the irreducible complexities of an ethical life.” Take the time to savor Franzen’s use of words, and the inevitable thoughtfulness he will instill in you, as you read.
The Party Crasher by Sophie Kinsellla – read just for fun – book candy
What I am Reading Now
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weil – I hope it has a happy ending…
Books on My To Read List
- Gilded by Mariss Meyer
- Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
- The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
- These Precious Days by Ann Patchett
- A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris
- The Fran Lebowitz Reader by Fran Lebowitz
- The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier
- Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune
- The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
She suggests you start your 2021 reading with Abigail Dean’s Girl A – a psychological drama about a girl whose new life starts when she escapes from an abusive family. “It’s a riveting page-turner, and full of hope in the face of despair.” Publication: February 2
Fans of Kristin Hannah will be happy to know she has a new book – The Four Winds – set in the depression era of 1934 Texas. Elsa Martinelli must make the choice between the land she loves and moving west in search of a better life. Publication: February 2, 2021
Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishaguro focuses on what it means to be human in his new novel Klara and the Seed. Klara, an Artificial Friend, smiles and nods to customers in the store while tracking each day by the sun’s arc. When a mother and daughter adopt Klara, repressed emotion springs open, fleshing out Ishiguro’s themes of resilience and vulnerability in our crazy world. Publication: March 2, 2021
Remember The Nest? The author Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney returns with her next novel in Good Company, a tale of a marriage in mid-life and the secrets that threaten to upend the relationship between Flora and her husband, as well as with her best friend, Margot. Publication Date: April 6, 2021
Chris Bohjalian returns with a new thriller in Hour of the Witch. In Boston in 1662, A young Puritan woman plots her escape from an abusive marriage while being careful to avoid any accusations of witchcraft. April 20, 2021
The first novel in nearly a decade by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahira, Whereabouts is set in an unnamed city with the story’s first-person narrator a single woman in her mid-40s. Lahiri wrote the novel in Italian and translated it into English. Publication: April 27, 2021
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead is an historical novel about a female aviator at the turn of the twentieth century whose disappearance becomes the basis for a big Hollywood production a century later. Publication: May 4, 2021
Jean Hanff Korelitz, whose book You Should Have Known became the basis for the HBO series The Undoing, returns with another tale of deceit and betrayal. Jake, looking for his next bestseller, tries literary theft to rise to stardom in The Plot. Publication: May 11, 2021
Finally, back to author Sophie Hannah for a final recommendation – The Enchiridion by Epictetus
Here is my list of twelve books read and reviewed (click on the title to read the review) throughout the year. My favorite has a star.
I desperately needed to get away and quietly sitting on my shelf for over a year, Liam Callanan’s Paris By The Book‘s red cover finally caught my attention and gave me a first class ticket to my favorite city. Callanan’s descriptions of Paris were as real as being there, as I relived walking the cobblestones streets, climbing up to Montmartre, and eating the buttery croissants.
The No Charge Book Bunch 