Sunday, December 31, 2023

My 2023 Reading List

Now that New Year's Eve has arrived, with only a couple of hours before the ball drops, it's safe for me to post my list of books I read this year. I don't think I'll have time to read one more. I fell a few short of my last year's total (86), but I also completed (and published) my dissertation this month, so I think I'll give myself a pass. 

Compiling the list I am reminded pleasantly of books I loved, and occasionally I have trouble remembering the plots of one or two. Some of the books on the list (especially the poetry) are written by friends. I suspect I may have failed to add a few poetry collections or chapbooks that I read. 

Over the next day or so, I will give some brief reviews of my favorites. I look forward to comparing my lists to those of other readers whose taste I trust. (You know who you are.)

2023 Book List

1. Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

2. Louse Penny, World of Curiosities

3. Rick Bragg, The Best Cook in the World

4. Kimberly Belle, The Marriage Lie

5. Dana Malone and Laura Suzanne, Mother, Grave, Ghost (poetry)

6. Fredrick Backman, Us Against You

7. Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures

8. Annie Lyons, the Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett

9. Fredrik Backman, The Winners

10. Patti Callahan, Once upon a Wardrobe

11. Stanley Tucci, Taste: My Life through Food

12. Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

13. Aanchal Malhatra, The Book of Everlasting Things

14. Rachel Joyce, Maureen

15. Jane G. Garrett, My Fractured Life

16. Jennette McCurdy, I’m Glad My Mom Died

17. Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost

18. Ana Reyes, The House in the Pines

19. William Kent Kruger, The Levee

20. Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

21. Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire

22. Jeanette Walls, Hang the Moon

23. Donna Tartt, The Secret History

24. Kevin Wilson, Now Is Not the Time to Panic

25. Wayne Flynt, Afternoons with Harper Lee

26. Gin Phillips, Family Law

27. K.B. Ballentine, Spirit of Wild (poetry)

28. Charles Frazier, The Tracker

29. Clyde Edgerton, Walking across Egypt

30. Tom Hanks, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture

31. Luis Alberto Urrea, Goodnight Irene

32. Ada Limon, Carrying (poetry)

33. Elizabeth Letts, Finding Dorothy

34. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

35. Ian McEwan, Nutshell

36. Lynda Rutledge, West with Giraffes

37. Elizabeth Berg, Earth’s the Right Place for Love

38. Hendrik Gruen, Two Old Men and a Baby

39. David Brooks, The Road to Character

40. N.T. Wright, After You Believe

41. William Martin, The Lincoln Letter

42. John McPhee, Tabula Rasa, vol. 1

43. Raymond Carver, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love

44. Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

45. Wiley Cash, When Ghosts Come Home

46. Christine Galib, Etched in Stone

47. Brendan Slocumb, The Violin Conspiracy

48. J. Ryan Stradel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest

49. Jessica George, Ma’ame

50. Matthew Mumber, Attending (poetry)

51. Kevin Wilson, Perfect Little World

52. Hadley Vlahos, The In-Between

53. Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married

54. Lisa See, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women

55. Kevin LeMaster, Mercy (poetry)

56. Dolly Parton & James Patterson, Run Rose Run

57. Lindsay Lynch, Do Tell

58. Geraldine Brooks, Horse

59. Annabel Smith, Whiskey and Charlie

60. Melody Wilson, Spineless: Memoir in Invertebrates (poetry)

61. Ron Rash, The Caretaker

62. Thrity Umrigar, Honor

63. Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die

64. Linda Parsons, Valediction (poetry)

65. J. Ryan Stradel, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club

66. Sheila Johnson, Walk through Fire

67. Dolly Parton, Songteller

68. Lydia R. Hamessley, Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton

69. R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

70. Scott Owens, Prepositional (poetry)

71. Allison Pataki, The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post

72. Ammon Shea, Reading the OED

73. Ken Follett, The Armor of Light

74. Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows

75. Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

76. Charlie Lovett, The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge

77. F. Lagard Smith, ed. The Chronological Daily Bible


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Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Ron Rash: The Caretaker


As close as I follow book news, I am rarely surprised when one of my favorite writers publishes a new book. I had been disappointed when I checked to see if Ron Rash would be appearing at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville in October and did not see his name. 

Then I had a message from a friend and former teaching colleague, telling me to be sure to read his latest novel, The Caretaker. I didn't hesitate. 

I have read everything Rash has written--full-length fiction, short stories, and poetry, since his novel One Foot in Eden won the Novella prize at the Charlotte festival. Though there is often a darkness in his stories, it is never gratuitously so.  He also has the power to evoke some of the most memorable images of anyone I have read.

My students always responded to the stories in his collection Burning Bright. A favorite former student who discovered a love for reading after graduating high school read Saints at the River and The World Made Straight, then contacted me to say thanks for the recommendation.

This new novel by Rash is set during the Korean conflict, set in part on the battlefield, but primarily in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, the caretaker at the local cemetery, is semi-reclusive after his facial disfigurement, a result of polio, makes his the victim of stares at best and mockery from some of his more cruel peers. 

Initially, Jacob Hampton appears to be the protagonist. He disappoints his parents first by choosing to work in his father's mill rather than attend college. Then, against their wishes, he marries 16-year-old Naomi, who came from Tennessee for work in the Blowing Rock Inn instead of the local girl everyone expected him to marry.

Rash's artful plot timing keeps suspense throughout the novel. He also keeps his characters' integrity (or the lack thereof) consistent through the story, even when readers might expect a sharp plot twist. As I finished, I felt satisfied that Rash had been true to the people he created.


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Friday, August 4, 2023

Ann Patchett's Latest Novel: Tom Lake

 

I am predicting an uptick in readers of Thornton Wilder's Our Town now that Ann Patchett's new novel is out. The play is central to the novel's plot, first as Laura (who becomes Lara) decides at the last minute to try out of the role of Emily in a local production of the play after seeing the abysmal auditions of the other potential Emilys and then as she goes on to play the role in summer stock theatre in Michigan. 

Now in her late fifties, Lara is telling her three daughters, in episodes, about that experience at Tom Lake near the cherry orchards of Michigan. The three grown daughters are waiting out the pandemic at their parents' home, something Lara admits to herself she enjoys. Central to the narrative is one of her co-stars, Peter Duke, with whom she had a summer fling. Duke has gone on to achieve movie star status, leading to curiosity of her girls, particularly Emily, the oldest, who at one point believed he might have been her father.

The full role of the girls' actual father Joe, who has inherited the Nelson orchards, becomes more apparent as the story unfolds. As one would expect in a story woven around a play, Patchett has assembled a curious cast of characters--Lara's understudy Pallace, a Black dancer to whom Duke's brother "Saint Sebastian" is drawn; Uncle Wallace, a former TV star now playing the Stage Manager; Mr. Ripley, who chanced to discover Lara while watching his niece in the play and brought her to Hollywood for a movie role.

The three daughters are also distinctly rendered--Emily has been preparing her whole life to take over the family farm along with Benny, literally the boy next door. Maisie has not completed veterinary school, but the neighbors call on her for all their animal emergencies from birth to death. Nell, the youngest, wants to be an actor.

The impact of story--those we want to hear, those we are expected to tell--is an important part of the novel, including the impact of different perspectives on the interpretation of an event--or of a play. Lara says, "I learned so many things that summer at Tom Lake, and most of those lessons I would have gladly done without." 

Perhaps the most universal lesson, both for the novel and for the play it is wrapped around, is the one Patchett noted at her book launch: Life is so brief, just a piling up a little moments. Before you know it, you're in Act 3.


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Saturday, July 29, 2023

More Reasons to Love Historical Fiction

 

My reading this summer has been as eclectic as ever, but I find that when asked to recommend a book to someone, I often turn first to historical fiction. Often I am not sure until I finish and read the author's notes whether the story is based on fact. A good story can stand on its own, after all, but the historical basis gives me a good excuse to do a little digging.

One such novel I particularly enjoyed is Lynda Rutledge's West with Giraffes, a journey tale in the spirit of Towles' The Lincoln Highway or Krueger's This Tender Land--or Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Set during the Dust Bowl, with a frame story in the near future, this is the story of Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Nickels, who as a boy left his Texas home after losing his family, victims of the Dust Bowl. He makes his way to New York to find a cousin about the time a hurricane hits the area. 

At the same time, two giraffes on their way to the San Diego Zoo are caught in the hurricane, which injures the female "Girl." Woody, at not quite sixteen, convinces the zoo employee charged with taking the exotic beasts across the continent in a rickety truck that he is capable of driving them. Rutledge also introduces a female photographer desperate to publish her photos and stories of the trip--one of many items on her bucket list--who follows the truck and strikes up a friendship with Woody.

In the frame story, Woody at 105 lives in a nursing home where he fantasizes images of the giraffes peering in his window while he works desperately to write his story before his time runs out. 

Even without the historical basis, Rutledge weaves a compelling story. Background details (and photographs) of the giraffes en route, as well as details about the iconic Belle Benchley, the zoo's first female director, accessible online, add to the story's charm.

When I heard Luis Alberto Urrea had a new book, I was eager to read it, having thoroughly enjoyed his novel The House of Broken Angels. One thing that struck me about the earlier novel was his convincing portrayal of his female characters. 

In Good Night, Irene, Urrea draws from his own mother's experience as a "Doughnut Dolly" working for the Red Cross about a Clubmobile during World War II. The title character Irene is a city girl who leaves behind a wealthy but abusive fiancé to join the war effort. She is paired with Dorothy, strong-willed and sharp-witted Midwesterner. 

Rather than staying back out of harm's way, the women follow the troops through France after D-Day, often witnessing horrific warfare at risk to their own lives. While Urrea includes a cast of characters, these two friends are central to the story, and they are evidence of the author's skill at characterization.

Again, the author's notes that follow the narrative explain how much of the story was inspired by Urrea's mother's story, offering a glimpse into one of the rarely highlighted roles in keeping up the spirits of the troops. With Urrea's skill at taking inspiration from his own family experiences, his readers will hope he has a vast well of stories from which to draw for his next novels. 



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Thursday, July 6, 2023


 Like most voracious readers, the last thing in the world I need is to add to my "to read" list, but I can't resist someone else's reading suggestions. This week, at the bottom of a list of suggestions of short books, I came across mention Ian McEwan's novel Nutshell. I have no idea how it escaped my attention this long, since it was published in 2016.

The protagonist of the novel is Hamlet--as a fetus--in modern-day London. He is the ultimate insider--pun intended. The action covers two or three days in the last couple of weeks before his mother Trudy is due to deliver. Young--very young--Hamlet, with his ear pressed against the uterine wall, is privy to the conniving of his mother and her lover Claude, whom he realizes is his father's brother.

His father John is a poet who runs a small publishing house, while his younger brother has more financial success. As the book opens, Trudy has moved her husband out of the house while she is "on a break." 

One could probably read and even appreciate the novel with only passing familiarity with what is arguably Shakespeare's most famous play, but for those who have studied the play or taught the play (dozens of times), the pleasure of recognizing not just lines lifted from the play, but suggestions of themes. Hamlet's world-weariness is, in this case, fed by secondhand exposure to his mother's podcasts. He also experiences secondhand exposure to her increasing alcohol intake as the situation grows more complicated. 

Considering the book was published pre-Covid, some of the references to current issues are fascinating--including conflict between Russia and Ukraine, gender ambiguity, climate issues, and increasing violence. McEwan's unborn protagonist with his astute sense of observation, self-awareness, and impressive vocabulary comes across as far more than a gimmick. 

I am glad I encountered the audiobook first, but I suspect I will need to add a hard copy of the book to my library so I can revisit the story to see how many allusions I missed.


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Friday, June 16, 2023

Gin Phillips' Family Law

I've been reading Gin Phillips' books since  The Well and the Mine, her debut novel. I'm fascinated that the Alabama author writes such a range of fiction. Come in and Cover Me is centered primarily around an archeological dig, with the protagonist collecting remnants of pottery of a particular indigenous woman. That novel incorporated elements of magical realism and Springsteen lyrics. Phillips' novel Fierce Kingdom places the protagonist and her son at a zoo (I'm assuming the one in Birmingham) with an active shooter on the loose.

Her latest novel Family Law is set in Alabama in the 70s. The primary protagonist Lucia is a successful family lawyer, a role that often puts her in the crosshairs of angry spouses. 

Rachel, a girl whose mother comes to the law office to discuss the possibility of a divorce, finds Lucia's home and the two develop a friendship, putting both of them, as well as Lucia's husband, in danger. 

Once Rachel is introduced, Phillips alternates between her point of view and Lucia's. Rachel's navigation of high school dynamics and life with her distracted mother show a mature but believable self-awareness.

Phillips develops interesting characters and addresses challenges to a woman who chooses a career path unusual for females at the time in history, but she doesn't make her characters into stereotypes. The nuances in her marriage are well-drawn. Even Lucia's dog has a significant role. 

This book will appeal to readers of Joshilyn Jackson, who also reads the audiobook of Family Law, a bonus, in my opinion.

I will confess that I was particularly intrigued when one of Rachel's school friends shared a name with one of my former students, a young woman who just happens to be a friend of Gin Phillips. Coincidence? I think not.




 


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Thursday, June 15, 2023

Fear Not! I'm Still Reading


 First, let me allay any fears that I have abandoned reading. Not so. I am ashamed that I have fallen so far behind on posting about my reading exploits though. I'm at that stage in my dissertation process that when I write, it's often academic. The end is in sight, though.

I may not be sharing what I am reading, but I never stop reading. I admit I have relied on audiobooks more, taking advantage of time in the car, at the gym, working around the house to listen. My latest such experience gave me a chance to hear audiobook reader extraordinaire Tom Hanks.

I had already enjoyed his reading his collection of short fiction Uncommon Types, as well as Ann Patchett's The Dutch House. While he has other actors reading parts for this newest book, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, including his wife Rita Wilson, he does most of the reading, and he does it well.

We've all heard the old advice, "Write what you know." Hanks certainly followed that rule, pulling together disparate threads to weave the story of Knightshade: The Lathe of Firewall, the movie adaptation of a comic book, looking back at the late 40s childhood of the graphic artist and the uncle for whom he was named but who made himself scarce after returning from the way. In present time, readers meet Bill Johnson, the producer/director of the film, and a delightful cast of characters--literally. 

Some of the best characters in the story are women, particularly Alicia (Al) McTeer, Johnson's assistant director, whom he discovered working at a Garden Suites, and Ynes Gonzales-Cruz, a rideshare driver, who lands a job with the production. Both have found success by being good problem solvers in what might have seemed dead end jobs. Equally well-drawn are the lead actors in the film as well as such minor characters as the makeup artists, spouses, and bit actors.

While Hanks' strength is his character development, he also has a filmmaker's eye for sensory details. Lone Butte, the North California town where the movie is filmed, becomes so real, I think I could find Clark's Drug Store. He also has a knack for building suspense, but sometimes letting his characters elude disaster without use of deus ex machina. 

Most refreshing is the way characters genuinely care for one another. Yes, there are antagonists, but most often, those in power take the high road or give opportunities to people they might have overlooked, This may not be an accounting of "the making of every major motion picture," but I like to think the process could be more like the one in the story.


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Saturday, February 25, 2023

Home Cooking: Rick Bragg and Stanley Tucci

I have always loved cookbooks. I even turn first to the recipe section when I read Southern Living or, for that matter, the Costco ad booklet. When food makes an appearance in books I love, all the better. 

My teaching friend Valerie on the North Carolina coast organized her summer school English class around food last year, inviting guest readers to share favorite food writing. I joined them by Zoom to read passages from Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain.  I believe I chose Inman's cooking a bear cub he had hoped not to kill. I could have chosen the goat woman chapter. 

 Since that time, I continue to find great food writing I could have selected. A favorite book club nonfiction choice a few years ago was Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton. I wanted to visit her New York restaurant.

Two food memoirs crossed my radar this year. I love Rick Bragg's writing, whether he is telling his own family tales or writing about Jerry Lee Lewis. I had his book The Best Cook in the World for awhile--waiting its turn--when my sister started raving about the audiobook. If there is anything that can improve on reading Bragg's writing, it's hearing him read it himself.

Going back at least three generations, he weaves stories and food throughout, noting that the two are rarely separate. Since his family lived along the Alabama-Georgia border and he is almost my age, the connections were palpable. The food he is describing is the food of my people. In many ways too, his people were much like my own. I might  have finished listening sooner if I hadn't kept stopping rewinding and making whoever was around me listen to Bragg's singular delivery of his prose.

When I mentioned Bragg's book to reading friends, Tucci's food memoir invariably came up. I chose to listen to him read his story as well. The son of an Italian American family rooted in the Calabrian region, he describes in delicious detail the meals he enjoyed as a child (even explaining how the evening's meal ended up in his daily school lunch, which he sometimes exchanged for his classmate's sandwich of marshmallow creme on white bread.) He also describes his own cooking experience and favorite restaurants--so many out of business.

Tucci peoples his book not only with his parents and grandparents but he also introduces his children. His story includes his first wife's cancer death. He tells how he created a new blended family and moved to England with his second wife. He shares his own cancer ordeal, which threatened his life, his acting career, and his ability to enjoy food.

I know I'll end up adding a hard copy of Tucci's book to my library, but I'm not sure where it will go on my bookshelves. I may need a new section for food memoirs.



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Thursday, February 16, 2023

Backman's Book Two and Three: Nothing Lost in Translation

 

I can trace my first Backman novel to A Man Called Ove. One of my favorite public librarians met me when I entered and said, "I've held this one of you." Anyone who has read the novel knows that it takes a while to warm up to Ove. As I read the first chapters, I wondered why she thought of me. Then as I read, I figured it out.

Anxious People, a story nothing like Ove, captured me immediately too. Backman caught me by complete surprise in that book, and I couldn't wait to talk to someone else about it: "Did you guess?!"

I listened to the audiobook of Beartown a while ago, but somehow missed the second in what would become a series, Us Against You, until book three The Winners was added to my book club list for 2023. I knew I needed to read the second book first.

Even though I cheer for the Nashville Predators, I am by no means a big hockey fan. But reading this book no more requires that I be than reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin requires that I know or care much about video gaming.


Backman knows how to develop characters--complicated,  flawed, multi-layered characters. The Andersson family is at the center of much of the narrative, but the threads that connect all the characters, even across the rival towns borders, are so complicated: Ramona at the Bearskin Pub; Teemu and the Pack who control the standing area of the rink, the grocer Tails, Bobo and Amat, Mumble and Alicia, the young prodigy who finds an alternate family in the hockey club.

As I barreled my way through these two books, hardly able to slow down, I kept reminding myself that I was reading in translation from Backman's original Swedish. How interesting, then, that I have probably taken more notes of favorite quotes from these books than many others I've read recently. 

Backman is also the master of the red herring, doling out just enough information to give the reader a smug sense of dramatic irony (or a foreboding sense of what may have just happened) and then spinning the story. The third book The Winners open with this sentence: "Everyone who knew Benjamin Ovich, particularly those of us who knew him well enough to call him Benji, probably knew deep down that he was never the sort of person who would get a happy ending." Then readers have to wait for it. Because we do feel like we know him well enough to call him Benji.

Backman balances the foreboding by letting us know a few will make it. Maya will have her music career, for example. Alicia will go on to be a hockey champion.

Us Against You had much to say about masculinity. The Winners examines family relationships, the never-finished job of parenting, the phases of a long marriage, the identify of home, family ties that develop without the biological benefit of blood kin.  At one point, the narrator points out that this is "a story about...love that was like organ donation."  Maybe that's it: painful, sacrificial, but live-giving.

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Monday, January 9, 2023

Back to ThreePines: Louise Penny's A World of Curiosities

 

For anyone who knows me as a reader, it should come as no surprise that I've just finished Louise Penny's latest novel in her Three Pines Series featuring Chief Inspector Armande Gamache. The only surprise is that I didn't read the book as soon as it came out in November.

This book moves back and forth between the past when Ganache first met the headstrong Jean Guy Beauvoir while investigating a murder and present day when the son and daughter of the murdered woman arrive in Three Pines.

I love so many things about Penny's books, particularly the character development, but I also enjoy how she weaves literature, music, and art into the narrative. In this case, a hidden room is discovered above the book store in which they find what at first appears to be a work of art known as "A World of Curiosities" or the Pastan Treasure. Closer inspection, though, shows that while at first glimpse the painting resembles the seventeenth century painting, it actually includes myriad details from modern day, from a digital watch to scratches that are found to be made in shorthand. Soon Gamache recognizes them as messages from a serial killer he put behind bars.

In addition to the beloved recurring characters from the village, Penny also reintroduces Amelia Choquet from a couple of years back, a tattooed and pierced young woman who survived life on the streets and was eventually brought into Quebec law enforcement. 

After spending so much time in the homes in Three Pines, I can recognize the smell of sandalwood, the family pets, and even Rosa, the profane pet duck of the crotchety old poet Ruth. 

When I read Louise Penny's books, I find myself tearing through them, pulled along by the suspense, but then sad when they end, knowing I'll have to wait until November for my next visit.


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Sunday, January 8, 2023

Demon Copperhead: Kingsolver Always Delivers

 


I know I promised to share highlights of my 2022 reading, but I finished Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel, on New Year's Day, and I am still thinking about it.

The title (and the author's notes) invite comparison to David Copperfield, but in anything but a derivative way. Set in a poor town in what had been Virginia coal mining country in modern day, the title character is one of the most compelling narrators I've read in awhile.  I wouldn't go so far as to call Demon a naive narrator, though his  youthful perspective is part of the attraction. I'm tempted to listen to the audiobook to see how that voice translates.

I've long been a fan of Kingsolver's novels. I've read everything she's written, including her poetry, starting with The Bean Trees. Reading her novels always led me to slow down and pay attention to her writing chops. Unlike some books I read when the author's process gets in the way of the story, Kingsolver's novels make me just a bit envious of how she uses literary elements in a way that seems so effortless and natural.

The protagonist was born to a teenage mom and named Damon, which naturally was changed to the nickname Demon by the time he got to school (as his best friend was stuck with the nickname Maggot.) In a series of misfortunes, he experiences abuse and neglect by his mother and stepfather, leading to a years or rejection and loss. Demon shows the dark side of foster care abuse and pitfalls of the systems intended to protect children.

This is also a story of drug and alcohol abuse, which is often so rampant in areas of economic decline. I recently read Margo Price's memoir Maybe We'll Make It, in which she writes candidly of some of the similar patterns of addiction she fell into. 

While Demon Copperhead is a hard read, it is not without hope. A number of caring, though flawed, people offer him surrogate family, encouragement, and opportunity. Two of his teachers, a mixed-race couple with whom he maintains contact, are examples of the power of educators who not only see their students but are willing to be seen as people. And who can't love characters who name their dog Hazel Dickens?

As I made my list of books I read last year, I was struck again how some slip away right after I read them, and others stick with me. I think I'll be thinking about Demon Copperhead for a long time, and I can't wait to have the opportunity to talk about it with my reading friends.



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Monday, January 2, 2023

My 2022 Reading List









When I sat down this week with my wall calendar where I write the authors and titles of the books I read during the year, I found that even with the classes I am taking and teaching, I still managed to read 86 books during 2022. A few on the list are textbooks--at least those that I actually read in their entirety. You'll notice none of my statistics textbooks are listed. That does not mean I didn't spend a lot of time with them. I also focused on poetry one month, which was such a pleasure. 

Over the next few days, I will add a few posts focusing on specific books, but for now, here is the exhaustive list. Just going through and writing down the titles was a nice mental journey.

 

Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question

Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships

Hyeonseo Lee, The Girl with Seven Names

Kirk Wallce Johnson, The Feather Thief

Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

Nick Courtwright, The Forgotten World (poems)

Jane L. Rosen, Nine Women, One Dress

Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

Deb Spera, Call Your Daughters Home

Sophocles, Antigone

S.J. Bennett, The Windsor Knot

Rothstein and Santana, Make Just One Change

David Epstein, Range

Charmaine Wilkerson, Black Cake

Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

Nita Prose, The Maid

Elise Hooper, The Other Alcott

Jennifer Egan, Candy House

Bruce Neidt, The Bungalow of Colorful Aging (poems)

Rosemary Sullivan, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation

Joseph Mills, Bodies in Motion (poems)

Diane Chamberlain, The Stolen Marriage

Carole King, Natural Woman

Ted Rose, The End of Average

Mary Laura Philpott, Bomb Shelter

TJ Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

Hernan Diaz, Trust

Anne Tyler, French Braid

Lily King, Five Tuesdays in Winter (short stories)

Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land

Ann Patchett, These Precious Days

Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights

Emily Henry, Book Lovers

A J Jacobs, Puzzler

Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Louise Erdrich, The Sentence

Elizabeth Stout, Oh William

Marie Benedick and Victoria C. Murray, The Personal Librarian

Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

Danusha Lameris, Bonfire Opera (poems)

Dorianne Laux, Facts about the Moon (poems)

Jeff Hardin, Small Revolutions (poems)

Kathryn Stripling Byer, Descent (poems)

Peng Sheperd, The Cartographers

Linda Anas Ferguson, Dirt Sandwich (poems)

Yasmin Kloth, Ancestry Unfinished (poems)

Michael McFee, Shinemaster (poems)

Scott Owens, For One Who Knows How to Own the Land (poems)

Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the Water (poems)

Wendy Cope, Two Cures for Love (poems)

Ron Koertge, Geography of the Forehead (poems)

Kate Quinn, Diamond Eye

Rodney Jones, Elegy for the Southern Drawl (poems)

Michelle Shocklee, Under the Tulip Tree

Cathy Smith Bowers, The Candle I Hold up to See You (poems)

Margaret Verble, When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky

Dan and Chip Heath, Switch

Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

Silas House, Southernmost

Susan Rivers, The Second Mrs. Hockaday

Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

Peter Drucker et al., The Five Most Important Questions

Richard Osman, The Bullet That Missed

Liese O’Halloran Schwarz, What Can Be Saved

Stephen King, Fairy Tale

Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

Ruta Sepetys, I Will Betray You

Nelson Demille, The Book Case

Lois Lowry, The Giver

Elizabeth Stout, Lucy by the Sea

Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

Gary Paulsen, Hatchett

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Nicki Erlick, The Measure

Stephen Fry, Mythos

Jennifer Evans, Kitchen Front

Margo Price, Maybe We’ll Make It

Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait

Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of This Book


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