Four Stars

Best for:
Anyone who likes a good comedic memoir but also appreciates some sincerity.

In a nutshell:
Comedian Ali Wong shares stories from her life through the convention of letters to her two daughters. She also gives her husband the afterword to tell some of his perspective.

Worth quoting:
“You have suffered enough.” That became my mantra for motherhood from there on out. You have suffered enough. If you can make it easier, make it easier, and don’t feel guilty about it.”

Why I chose it:
Humorous memoirs are my favorite. Plus, I knew that over the holidays most of the podcasts I listen to on runs would be on break, so I needed something to listen to.

Review:
I’ve seen both of Ali Wong’s Netflix specials and watched Always Be My Maybe. The latter had me in near tears at times, the former two are funny for sure but a bit bluer than I like. It’s not that I think she shouldn’t be so vulgar or anything — it’s just not favorite type of humor. And while there is definitely a fair bit of that vulgarity in this book, I enjoyed it all quite a lot.

The convention Wong uses has each chapter take the form of a new letter to her daughters, who are still very young. Every once in awhile I’d get a feeling like when I’d think too hard about an episode of How I Met Your Mother: you really want to tell your kids THAT? Huh. Okay. But the convention relies on her daughters not reading the book until their 21, and frankly it’s kind of cool to think about kids who will know a lot about their mother’s life. How many of us have the kind of relationship with our parents where they tell stories of their wild times in college? If so, good for you, but that’s not really my experience of the world.

No single chapter / letter stands out to me as a must re-read; I think it was an even book with hilarious and sweet parts spread equally throughout. If funny memoirs are your thing, this is probably already on your radar; if not, I think you still might enjoy it. And definitely get the audio version – it’s great to hear Wong (and, at the end, her husband) read their own words.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Keep it (but if it were in paperback and not audio form I’d definitely pass it to a friend)

Five Stars

Best for:
Those looking for a cookbook filled with gorgeous photos as well as stories from the people who prepare the recipes.

In a nutshell:
Travel and food writer Khan visits cities throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories, meeting with Palestinians to learn about their food, as well as their lives under occupation.

Worth quoting:
‘I stay hopeful because I believe apartheid will eventually be defeated.’
‘I understand that you want to share our culture, but you can’t discuss Palestinian food without talking about the Occupation.’

Why I chose it:
We spent Christmas at the home of a friend’s mother, who kindly gifted us this book, with the only knowledge that we were vegetarian and liked to cook. While the book itself does have some meat recipes, it is primarily full of delicious vegetarian fare.

Review:
This cookbook is unlike any I’ve ever read before. In addition to being filled with recipes that I cannot wait to try out, the author focuses on the lives of the people who create this delicious food. As evidenced by the quotes above, which come from people Khan met with in her travels across the OPT, it is great to share these recipes with the world, but the stories of the Palestinian people need to be shared. And that includes the stories of the challenges they face under occupation in keeping their way of life.

Khan visits Palestinians living in Haifa, Akka, Jerusalem, Nablus, Jenin, Gaza, Bethlehem, Nazareth and The Galilee, and shares recipes for mazzeh, salads, soups mains, and desserts. There are so many that I want to eat right now, from roast red peppers with olives and capers, to seared halloumi, to lentils with chard and tahini to pomegranate passion cake. I plan to get started on making them this weekend.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Keep it

Three Stars

Best for:
Anyone who might enjoy a 1950s time capsule of fashion terms and ideals.

In a nutshell:
Christian Dior provides definitions and opinions on everything from collars to tweed in this 65-year-old gift book.

Worth quoting:
“However much you admire a certain frock or coat on somebody else before you wear a similar one yourself you must think to yourself ‘What will this do for me?’”

Why I chose it:
In April of this year I was fortunate enough to attend the Dior exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum in London. It was amazing. I wanted some memento and so purchased this little book, started it, and then promptly buried it in my nightstand pile, resurrected this week as I attempt to start 2020 with no half-read books.

Review:
I think my title for this review says it all: one can definitely tell it was written in the 1950s. Fur features prominently in here (fox, sable, mink – all are discussed, and the various virtues compared), the styles mentioned revolve heavily around skirts and skirt suits (I’m not sure trousers were mentioned at all), and every picture is of very tiny white woman. Additionally, Dior makes many mentions of what is appropriate for ‘plump’ women in terms of prints and color which, frankly, I have no interest in. Wear what you like!

That said, it was a bit of an interesting time capsule, to read Dior’s thoughts on different aspects of fashion. Unfortunately, many of the definitions are less, well, definitions, and more paragraphs about how said item fits into Dior’s view of fashion. Which is fine, but it’s hard for me to assess Dior’s thoughts on pique when I’m still not entirely sure what that is. Additionally, many sections (such as hemlines) would have benefited from drawings showing the various types and their names.

Still, it’s a fun little read, and I’ll put it on my bookshelf along with my other fashion and etiquette books.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Keep it.

Three Stars

Best for:
Anyone looking for some fresh ideas for their home.

In a nutshell:
Author Postel-Vinay has lived in France (and married into a French family), and offers up her thoughts on ways the French home is set up.

Worth quoting:
“Having food that is fresh is more important than food that is convenient, and the French cuisine reflects this.”

Why I chose it:
One of my dear friends has themed Christmases, and her gifts match the theme. This year? French Christmas.

Review:
I love home improvement books (as in, ones that talk about home decor, cooking, and cleaning, not, like, learning how to rewire the house). This is a perfectly fine one, although there isn’t a ton in here that I will be putting into action, mostly because a lot of it relates to the actual construction of the house, which I’m not able to alter.

For example, the first chapter talks about creating an actual entrance area to one’s home. In our apartment in London, the entrance is a a square with sides the width of a door frame, enclosed by wall on one site, the front door on another, the stairs on the third side, and the door to the kitchen on the forth. There’s no room to put a bench or shoe storage area. Another chapter talks about having the kitchen and dining areas separate. Granted, she offers suggests for how to create that separation in an open plan, but again, I’m not able to throw a wall up in the middle of my rented flat.

Some of the suggestions are great – like immediately cleaning up after using kitchen utensils (which should have a reasonable, dedicated location in the kitchen), or some ideas around improving our bathroom. But a lot of it isn’t necessarily my style, and that’s okay! I’m never going to fill my house with loads of fancy objects found for a bargain at a flea market, because I don’t really like that look. That’s what I love about books like this though – there’s something in there that other people will like, and I can mix what I want with things I’ve picked up from other books.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Keep it

Four Stars

Best for:
People wondering how on earth everyone else can have such misconstrued ideas (hint: you do too!).

In a nutshell:
Author Duffy explores areas in which people tend to vastly over- or underestimate facts, and why that might be.

Worth quoting:
“Our misperceptions can provide clues to what we’re most worried about – and where we’re not as worries as we should be.”

Why I chose it:
I’ve known that I — and others — will often overestimate how bad things are, or underestimate how good things are, and that often in the face of facts that don’t match our beliefs, people will just … double down. I wanted to learn more about why that is.

Review:
There is a lot going on in this book, and I won’t be able to do it all justice, so I hope if the topic interests you you’ll consider checking it out. But here is my attempt!

Have you seen “Sleepless in Seattle”? I have. It’s one of my favorite films. There’s a scene near the beginning, where Meg Ryan’s character Annie is in the office talking with her colleagues about that statistic about how a woman over 40 is more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married. And Annie says that the statistic is not true, and Rosie O’Donnell’s character Becky responds with “That’s right, it’s not true. But it feels true.”

So much of what we get wrong about facts stem from this idea. If it feels like, say murders are on the rise (perhaps because you see murders reported on the news each night), or members of a certain religion are immigrating to your country in large numbers (because many politicians keep pointing out the locations of their houses of worship as a threat to their idea of the dominant culture), you might not believe it when people tell you that murders are down, or the population of that specific religion in your country is about five times less than your guess.

Duffy discusses this, as well as the idea that our errors in answering questions about verifiable facts often reflects our worries. We might overestimate how much of our nation’s budget goes to foreign aid (extremely small amount) by dozens of percentage point because we fear that not enough money is being spent at home. We might overestimate violent crime because we are worried about walking home in our own neighborhood at night. We are factually wrong, but our perceptions are based in our emotions, and those are hard things to adjust.

This book looks at other reasons why we are so wrong – including that we think other people are more like us than they actually are – but I found those two aspects the most compelling.

I was also intrigued by the fact that while there are definitely issues with the spread of bad information on social media, we aren’t necessarily more poorly informed than we were, say, 80 years ago. Our perceptions are generally pretty bad all the time – but perhaps now people are noticing it more.

The book ends with ten suggestions for how we can improve our own perceptions and understanding of the world. My favorite was ‘Accept the emotion, but challenge the thought.’ I might hear a statistic or fact that goes against my beliefs. And its okay to have a reaction to that. But then I need to start thinking through it critically and explore why I’m having the reaction I’m having, what it means if that fact is correct, and how my values and worldview are impacted by that, instead of just saying ‘that can’t be right, I don’t believe it.’

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Donate it

Three Stars

Best for:
People who enjoy a bit of humor with their how-to books.

In a nutshell:
Author Griffin would like you to get some fucking manners.

Worth quoting:
‘As soon as we assume our needs are more important than someone else’s, then everything descends into utter fucking chaos.’

Why I chose it:
I love etiquette books. I use a lot of profanity. Seemed like a natural fit.

Review:
This is a quick read and a mostly pleasant little book. I get the gimmick — there will be swearing! — but it seems that the author forces the work ‘fucking’ into way too many sentences. Not in an offensive way; it just doesn’t flow naturally in a lot of places.

That aside, how’s the advice? Honestly, it’s pretty basic. Not horrible. But the book only gets three stars from me because of the slight undercurrent of ‘both sides are bad’ that runs throughout. Like, this isn’t a particularly political book, but sometimes when the author gives examples of bad behavior, it feels like he’s comparing things that maybe aren’t comparable. Like, in the introduction he talks about ‘hearing both sides’ and how there’s always another side, and I can’t tell if he’s serious that this applies to all the things. Because if that’s the case? Does he recognize that some of those sides are super bad and wrong?

I thought it was maybe just a slight mismatch in tone, but then one of the quotes he uses, at the start of the chapter on manners IN THE WORKPLACE, is from Clarence fucking Thomas. You know, the guy who harassed Anita Hill and ‘found’ a public hair on a coke can that he asked her to come look at? That’s the guy we’re quoting in a book on manners? Come the fuck on, dude.

So yeah, the book isn’t awful, and were it not for the above bits I’d think it’s fine as a cute Christmas or birthday gift, but in the end I can’t recommend it.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Toss it.

Three Stars

Best for:
People who like science and humor.

In a nutshell:
Author Munroe takes on everyday problems like ‘How to Move’ with increasingly absurd advice like ‘get a bunch of helicopters to do that’, and then explains the science behind it.

Worth quoting:
When discussing using trained birds of prey to knock drones out of the sky: “…but any plan that calls for countering rogue machines by training animals to hurl themselves at them is probably a bad one. We wouldn’t enforce speed limits by training cheetahs to leap onto motorcycles.”

Why I chose it:
I enjoyed his previous two books.

Review:
This book is absurd. That’s not an insult; it’s literally in the title. But absurd is delightful, as Munroe uses physics and other science to offer up silly solutions to problems. For example, what if you need to knock a drone out of the sky? Why not ask Serena Williams to see how many tries it takes a professional tennis player to hit a tennis ball at it? (He did, and she obliged, because she continues to be amazing.) Or what if you need to charge your phone at the airport – any way to harness the energy from the moving escalators?

You aren’t going to actually use any of the advice in this book, but that’s not the point. The point is to incorporate science into our understanding of the world. And it’s once again a clever way to do that. Munroe is a talented teacher, and I’ll probably always buy his books, though Thing Explainer is still my favorite.

I lost a bit of steam reading this book. I started out reading a few chapters before bed each night, and I should have stuck with that. It’s PERFECT for that. It’s not a political book that’s going to rile you up so much you can’t sleep and while some chapters are so funny that you want to keep reading, it’s not like a novel where you just need to know what happens next. My issue came when I tried reading it at other times of the day. I just couldn’t get into it. So, definitely check it out if it sounds interesting, but consider it an ‘over time’ not an ‘all at once’ read.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Pass to a Friend (my partner)

Three Stars

Best for:
Those who enjoy a bit of trivia about common things; those interested in graphic design.

In a nutshell:
A history of fonts, with a focus on some of the better-known ones.

Worth quoting:
“If all letters were exactly the same height they wouldn’t appear so: round and pointed letters would appear shorter.”
“They established that it is a lot easier to read lower-case letters than capitals when travelling at speed.”

Why I chose it:
I love this kind of shit.

Review:
There’s not a ton I can say about this book that isn’t just be sharing interesting trivia I learned. Like, as referenced above, researchers have determined that it’s better to put location names on road signs with upper case starts followed by lower case letters. It’s because one looks for the shape of the word, not the individual letters. And so can spot the shape they’re looking for before they can read the word.

Do you find that nugget of information interesting? Then this book is for you.

Author Garfield takes us on a trip that isn’t so much chronological as focused on subject areas. He shares the history of some well-known fonts (starting with Comic Sans!) and why they come to be. He also looks at issues like: do fonts have a gender? A nationality? Do they evoke a time period to you?

He also shares some of the more technical things about fonts. For example, what makes a font easier to read online makes it more difficult to read on paper and vice versa. Which is super annoying for me in my work, as I produce many documents that need to be readable in both formats.

This is a fairly niche book but it’s also accessible. If you’re looking for a gift for someone who you think might enjoy this type of thing, they probably will like this one.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Donate it.

Five Stars

Best for:
People who want essays that critically explore politics and pop culture while making you laugh your ass off.

In a nutshell:
Author Lindy West follows up her Bestseller (and TV show!) Shrill with this book of essays exploring the Trump era, the Me Too movement, and many other aspects of political and pop culture.

Worth quoting:
“We need to start calling things by their real names: racism is racism, sexism is sexism, mistakes are mistakes, and they can be rectified if we do the work.”
“Watching otherwise rational human beings rhapsodize about [Ted] Bundy’s ‘charm’ and ‘brilliance’ while furrowing their brows over Elizabeth Warren’s dubious ‘likability’ creates a particularly American kind of whiplash.”
“Both sides, inasmuch as there are two ‘sides,’ are not equally stupid or equally bad. The notion that they are is human-extinction-level dangerous.”
“…if you are a person who is unable to access abortion for any reason, your state is total disenfranchisement and your right to life has been stripped from you.”

Why I chose it:
West is a fantastic author.

Review:
There’s something wonderful (dare I say magical?) about the way Lindy West writes. She can cut to the chase quickly while also providing hilarious analogies and examples to illustrate her points. She shares parts of herself that she doesn’t owe to anyone as a way to personalize stories. She takes a critical eye to things that maybe one has been thinking about and nails down the exact components one should be taking away from them. And she writes like a person might actually talk! Her asides are hilarious, and I can definitely picture her saying many parts of these essays in conversation with her friends.

The first essay of the book is the inspiration for the title – the US president’s insistence that he is the subject of a witch hunt. West explains why that is absurd, but turns the concept around, claiming that we are witches, and we are the ones doing the hunting. Hunting down horrible, dangerous political leaders, manipulative and rapey Hollywood figures, the patriarchy.

I love it.

The essays range in topic from her love of the movie Clue, to a critical exploration of Adam Sandler’s films and what they say about what white men aspire to / get away with, abortion access, the ridiculousness of South Park’s ‘both sides are equally bad’ rhetoric, and so much more.

She even went to one of GOOP’s events!

I think my favorite is the one where she explains why she left Twitter. It sums up so much of what is deeply wrong with that social media platform (among others) while also acknowledging the ways it can be so important to different groups. I also enjoyed her takes on other pop culture folks I grew up exposed to, such as Adam Corolla and Joan Rivers – they were genuinely different and interesting to read.

I did not know this was coming out – I saw it mentioned in passing somewhere and immediately purchased it. There were only four copies available on Amazon UK, so I’m thinking maybe it doesn’t have a distributor here yet? Anyways, if you’re overseas, keep checking, and maybe ask your indie booksellers if they’re planning / able to carry it.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
As with Shrill, which made the trip across the ocean when I moved here from Seattle, I will Keep it. And also buy copies for friends. Maybe give it as Christmas gifts.