Four Stars

Yes. More please.

Seriously, I loved this book. I know some folks have reviewed it on here, but I can’t recall if they liked it or not. I hope they did. I was in the midst of reading an exceedingly boring book on Camus (shocking, I know) when I got to the airport Thursday night. I saw this at Hudson News and bought it. I started reading at the gate, put it down when I got off the plane, stayed up way too late reading it that night, and finished it tonight after dinner. It’s 450 pages long. It’s just that easy to read.

It’s fun and interesting. The main plot point is that Alice Love is 39, has three kids, and is going through a divorce. But the book opens with her waking up from hitting her head on the floor of the gym, thinking she is 29, expecting her first child, and madly in love with her husband. Yikes.

I love the ideas explored in this book. Are the little hurts people cause us, when put together over time, enough to make us want to not be with them? Should they be? If you woke up tomorrow in the same predicament, would 10-years-younger you approve of current you? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? And, most importantly, how freaky would it be to go home to three kids you don’t know and be expected to parent them?

There are a lot of relationships explored in this book – Alice and her sister, her mom, her grandmother, her (soon-to-be-ex) husband. Her and other mothers. Her and old friends. It’s mostly told from Alice’s perspective, but her sister and grandmother contribute in interesting ways that (usually) work. I was satisfied by the end, but mostly because I think the journey to get there was, for me, believable. A bit complicated and interesting, but believable. And it makes me want to read more by this author, for sure.

Three Stars

This book is not what I expected it to be. I think I was looking for something slightly less memoire and containing some measure of humor. That isn’t to say that Ms. Bolick isn’t a great writer; she managed to take a book that I probably would never have read had I truly understand what I was in for and make it interesting. But in case you thought this would be an out-loud feminist discussion, it’s not that. At least, it isn’t entirely that.

This is a very subtle book. At times I wasn’t really certain where it was going. Ms. Bolick chooses to tell us her own story of not desiring marriage by sharing the life stories of her “five awakeners” (a term that, I should say, had my rolling my eyes each time it appeared). All white women with some economic means, these women are certainly interesting, and do a passable job of demonstrating the challenges women have faced when choosing a path that doesn’t match the one that it seems most everyone else is both taking and expecting them to take.

This book can’t help but be a very narrow study, as it is a memoire of sorts; it is about Ms. Bolick’s life and struggle with her desire to have control over her life on her own terms. She isn’t asexual; she has many relationships, and experiences love. She just doesn’t think that marriage is on her list. And while this is about her experiences, I have to say I wish that one of her “awakeners” had been a woman of color. Ms. Bolick also makes some comments regarding women in the workplace that I don’t necessarily think hold true for non-white women, even though they are presented as universal truths. Hmmm.

Like I said, it’s not what I was expecting. If the title and a couple of two-sentence synopses made you interested in the book, I suggest reading a few more reviews before picking it up to make sure it’s where you want to spend your time.

Four Stars

My husband knows me well. I came back from a trip a week ago, and this book was waiting for me. I hadn’t heard of it, but if I had, I would have bought it myself. Ms. Norris works at The New Yorker, where since the mid-1970s she has copy-edited (copy edited? Shit. I should know this by now) many articles and features. Part how-to (and how-not-to), part history, this book gives the reader some insight into the challenges we face when trying to come up with the best ways to communicate in written English.

I’m still not sure how best to categorize this book. I’m sure it will be compared to Eats, Shoots and Leaves, but its tone isn’t nearly as scolding. I don’t get the sense that Ms. Norris is judging those of us who make improper use of punctuation; instead I think she is genuinely interested in helping people better understand punctuation so that they can communicate better.

The book provides some insight into work at The New Yorker, including some quirks of its style guide. For example, magazine staff makes use of the diaphoresis, that double-dot bit you see over words such as naïve, in words like cooperate. Staff members also use a double consonant when adding a suffix (travelling instead of traveling, for example). Fascinating. And really appealing to someone like me. This book isn’t for everyone, however. I think there are some folks (I’m thinking of Mary Roach) who can take a topic and make it interesting to literally everyone. I think that to enjoy this book, you need to have at least some passing interest in language. But it can be the slightest of interests. If you ever wonder whether to put a comma in a sentence, for example, you probably have sufficient interest to find this book enjoyable.

One chapter that initially gave me a slight bit of pause was the one on gender. She tackles the idea of gender in nouns in other languages, as well as the attempts to create gendered nouns (e.g. dominatrix) in English. She also talks about the frustrating fact that there is no agreed-upon third person generic; you have to say him or her, there is no singular ‘they’ that is gender neutral. She also dives into the topic of using the appropriate pronouns for someone, as she has experience with this directly: her sister was assigned the gender of male at birth, and later shared with the family that she was in fact a woman. Ms. Norris talks about the early challenges she had with using the correct pronoun. Other than a word choice that I wouldn’t make (she refers to her sister as transsexual instead of transgender; although perhaps that’s the word her sister requested she use), the section is thoughtful and I think really drives home the importance of using the correct pronouns.

I was hovering between a three-star and four-star rating when I turned to find this chapter title: “F*ck This Sh*t.” Come on. That’s unexpected. The book isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but you can tell that Ms. Norris has a sense of humor and is quite self-aware.

Three Stars

This is kind of the perfect book to read following Station Eleven; the goal is to put the basics of everything we need to know to start bringing civilization back after the apocalypse in one place. My husband had already bought this book (thinking we’d both enjoy it), which was kind of perfect, because by the end of Station Eleven I had some questions about how long it really would take for technology and other things we’re used to having to start being available. Luxuries like electricity, and running water.

Some individual chapters are very interesting – especially the ones on medicine and on calculating time and location. For those who have a natural curiosity about how the world works, this book is perfect. Material that could be extremely dry in the hands of a less talented writer is … not as dry in Dr. Dartnell’s. He describes everything from making soap to how internal combustion engines work, as well as where we should focus our energy in the beginning (agriculture). As someone who spends more time than most thinking about the disasters that can befall us, this was a dose of reality that I mostly enjoyed.

But this book is really mostly helpful as something to sort of skim now, and then have on your shelf if, say, a pandemic sweeps through and cuts down the population. It’s really cool that someone put so much time and effort into researching this and putting enough detail to at least get started in one place. However, it’s still more of a manual than a book, so it’s probably not for everyone.

Four Stars

I read and reviewed Still Alice late last year, so a few days back Goodreads notified me that Ms. Genova had a new novel coming out this month. Inside the O’Briens tells the story of the O’Brien family and how they deal with the patriarch’s diagnosis with Huntington’s Disease. The book is primarily told from patriarch Joe’s perspective, a forty-something police officer in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston. He starts to develop symptoms and gets tested, not realizing that his mother had died of the same disease when he was young.

The rest of the book focuses not just on how Joe’s symptoms develop and the fact that he and his family have to deal with the fact that his life expectancy is only 10-20 more years, but also focuses on how his four children deal with deciding whether to get tested. It has some similarity to that plot point in Still Alice, but is handled in a slightly different way. Katie, the other point of view character in the book, is his youngest daughter, and the one whose journey we follow. She is very young (21) and a yoga instructor, trying to deal with everything that comes with deciding to know if in 15-25 years she’s going to start showing signs of Huntington’s Disease.

It is a very compelling book. I once again stayed up too late reading it, and even when I left my Kindle and another book I was reading at home (THE HORROR) I read it on my phone on my lunch break (praise the Kindle app). I’m not giving it five stars because, despite the hefty subject matter, it feels oddly light. It didn’t affect me nearly as much as Still Alice, and it left me thinking there could just be … more. Yeah, I’m not going to go down as a great wordsmith based on this review, but hopefully you know what I mean. It’s good, but for me, not as good as her previous work.

Three Stars

I’ve wanted to read this for a while. I haven’t read any of Ms. Didion’s other works, but this felt compelling. My sister had a copy at her house, which I was visiting this past week, so I borrowed it, reading it in a couple of days and finishing it on a particularly turbulent flight home. As I read the pages of her working through attempts to make sense of the fact that her husband was dead, I recognized a bit of dark humor in the thought that if this plane doesn’t make it home, the last thing I will have read will have been about death.

It’s an interesting book. It felt like a personal journal, and to a degree it is. It’s a very intellectual journal, filled with quotes from literature I haven’t read, allusions to culture that I can’t relate to. It somehow manages to be a meditation on grief without being particularly sad, and I mean that in a positive way. The book isn’t filled with pages where the reader must hold back tears (at least, a reader who hasn’t experienced that kind of loss – widows, widowers and parents who have lost children might disagree), it is instead filled with a bit of that stream-of-consciousness that you might expect from someone trying to figure out exactly what has happened, and what they might have done to precipitate it.

I don’t know if it’s a book for someone who has recently lost someone; it might be helpful to recognize things they themselves are experiencing. But I do think it’s something that we all can benefit from reading, filled with some information to be filed away to help start to understand when people we care about lose people they care about.