📕 Book Report: Q1 2024
Much ado about vanishing forests, psychedelics, infidelity, political extremism, and other tame topics
When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.
Desiderius Erasmus
I had it all plotted out. I would arrive to the airport two hours before my flight, put in a mobile order for my Starbucks Flat White, zip through security (God bless TSA pre-check), pick up my coffee, and make a beeline for my favorite place in the MSP Airport: Open Book.
An outpost of an incredible local literary organization, Open Book is one of those bookstores with exquisite taste, the kind where you float through the aisles and discover carefully curated titles and staff recommendations that expand your reading horizons.
Giddy with anticipation for the indulgence of bookstore time, I planned to spend a solid half hour perusing and sipping my coffee. I granted myself advance permission to buy two books: a new release I’ve been excited for (Slow Productivity by Cal Newport) and a yet-to-be-discovered title inspired by my browsing.
I asked a woman on staff for her top recommendations. She pulled from the shelf a small memoir with haunting cover art, a swirling, blurry flock of brown and black birds. The book was called When Women Were Birds (Terry Tempest Williams), and by the time she’d finished describing it, I felt an inexplicable lump in my throat that I took to mean, “This book holds something important for you in its pages. Reading this book is….your destiny.” (Ahem, I do have a flair for the dramatic.)
For me, the joy of reading involves the joy of discovering. If you share that sentiment, consider this post your invitation to browse my bookshelves from the first quarter of 2024, to share your own beloved titles in the comments, and even perhaps to find….your destiny.
Coffee is optional, but encouraged.
FICTION: The Highlights
The Overstory (Richard Powers). I read this book slowly over many months. It’s no page-turner, but it is a soul-shaker, and that’s what kept me coming back. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, The Overstory follows the stories of nine characters and their connection to trees. Powers’ writing draws deeply from the fields of biology and ecology, and the results are (1) an education in the wonder of trees as a life form, including how they communicate with each other via a sort of “internet of the soil” and (2) a crushing despair over how quickly we humans are eradicating forests. If you are in the market to experience existential hopelessness, this book is for you! Truly – I have thought about it so often, including on the flight following my bookstore visit, as I surveyed from my window seat the hundreds of square miles of barren land once populated with old forests. The Overstory was, for me, a sacred wake-up call. Highly recommend.
“We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. …this is so easy to see when you’re by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.”
- from The Overstory, by Richard Powers
Other Q1 Fiction reads: Small Things Like These (Claire Keegan), The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield), and Beloved (Toni Morrison)
MEMOIR: The Highlights
I Take My Coffee Black (Tyler Merritt). I love listening to memoirs read aloud by the author (my go-to genre for Audible), and Tyler Merritt blew me away. He colored outside the lines of “audiobook” to create a piece of true performance art. He tells gut-wrenchingly vulnerable stories of personal triumphs and failures. He shares the mic with Jimmy Kimmel, Jen Hatmaker, his mom, his dad, and a Tony-Award winning pal. He cracks jokes, goes off script, sings, cries… I’m sure the print version of the book is great, too, because at the heart of this work is a black man letting us into his beautiful, complicated story as he grapples with identity, grace, stereotypes, and community. To get a flavor of Merritt’s work, check out his viral video “Before You Call the Cops”.
How to Stay Married (Harrison Scott Key). Holy crap, this man can write. Key tells the “brutiful” (shoutout to Glennon Doyle for the fake vocab word) story of what happened after his wife confessed to an affair. The twists, the turns, the betrayals (on both sides), the humility (on both sides) – Key shares it all with an unusual blend of wry humor and spiritual reflection that somehow made me giggle (not what I expected given the subject matter) and weep. I love a book that takes me to surprising emotional territory, and this one did just that.
“That’s all faith is - an enthusiastic maybe. A passionate probably. A hopeful hopefully.”
- Harrison Scott Key in How to Stay Married
Other Q1 Memoir reads: I Miss You When I Blink (Mary Laura Philpott), Private Equity (Carrie Sun), I Wrote This Book Because I Love You (Tim Kreider)
NONFICTION: The Highlights
How to Change Your Mind (Michael Pollan). Ok, people. If you’d told me a few months ago that I’d soon be writing about psychedelic drugs in my newsletter, I would have said, “No way. Never. Too controversial.” But then I read a book about psychedelic drugs, and WOWZA. I’ve loved some of Pollan’s other books on the industrialization of food (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Food Rules), but I have to say, this book blew those out of the water in terms of how much it gripped me and challenged my thinking. Bottom line: psychedelic drugs were widely embraced as promising mental health treatments (and more) by the scientific community and the U.S. government until the culture wars of the 60’s shut down all research. In recent years, the tide is turning, and a new wave of research shows early but astounding results in treatment trials. Additionally, the book delves into the neuroscience of mystical experiences and explores what happens in the brain during a psychedelic trip, which often results in lasting spiritual impacts and significant shifts in consciousness and beliefs. Pollan even details his own “personal research” 😉 into various psychedelics in a portion of the book he calls “Travelogue”. As someone fascinated by psychology and spirituality, color me cautiously intrigued.
“It is not the pharmacological effect of the drug itself but the kind of experience it occasions – involving the temporary dissolution of one’s ego – that may be the key to changing one’s mind.”
-Michael Pollan in How to Change Your Mind
The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (Tim Alberta). Well, since I braved the topic of drug use, I might as well follow it up with a couple of other dicey topics that are sure to get me some unsubscribes: Politics! Religion! I grew up in the Evangelical church, and though my own spiritual beliefs have expanded quite a bit as an adult, and I no longer identify as Evangelical, I do still consider myself Christian, and the Church still feels like home to me. I’ve been lamenting the trend of (some, not all) Evangelicals losing track of “the main thing” for years, and my concerns have deepened big-time over the last decade. In this book, journalist Tim Alberta - a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Christian himself - builds a compelling case for why these striking shifts have happened among so many Evangelicals. I won’t give away the punchline, but I will say this is an informative read in what is sure to be a tumultuous election year.
On Writing Well (William Zinsser). I’ll bet you can guess why I read this one! Subtitled The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, this book is packed with practical tips and incisive writing wisdom. Zinsser’s not afraid to get provocative with his guidance, either, such as when he urges writers to abandon the elementary school rule, “never start a sentence with the word ‘But’". (Wow, I am just stirring the pot in this post, aren’t I? Getting hotter by the minute, folks!) For anyone looking to sharpen up their writing, cut some fluff, and strengthen the impact of their written words, this is a great read. Bonus tip: Even those of you not aspiring towards writing careers might enjoy the chapter on Business Writing, which outlines how to cut the corporate jargon and “speak plainly” when writing at work.
Other Q1 Nonfiction reads: The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe), The Second Mountain (David Brooks) which I referenced in my happy little post on loneliness
🔮 My Crystal Ball of Books
What books might you hear me talking about soon? Allow me to reveal the future.
I’m thrilled to be reading, for the umpteenth time, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (J.K. Rowling), this time with my daughter. I wanted her to know a bit about THE BEST SERIES OF ALL TIME in preparation for our recent visit to Harry Potter world at Universal Studios (more to come on that in a future post)! She’s quickly become one obsessed little witch, which makes me one happy mama.
Other current reads includeThe Liars’ Club (Mary Karr), Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver), and The Dutch House (Ann Patchett). And I’ve got some “slow burns” in motion – books that I will probably take many moons to read: The Dawn of Everything (David Graeber and David Wengrow), a book of Rumi’s poetry, and Reinventing Organizations (Frederic Laloux).
In addition to my two new books from the airport bookstore, I’ve also got my eye on this one as a priority read in the next month: At the Root of this Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst (Carol Lee Flinders).
Et Tu, Fellow Reader?
Your turn! If you were a bookstore, what recent reads would line your shelves? What delicious books await you on your To Be Read list? Any recommended titles you think should soon be….my destiny?
Until next time, keep on riding that Reading Rainbow. (That is not a reference to a psychedelic trip.)
OMG, have you read When Women Were Birds yet? Love. "My mother left me her journals and all of them were blank." seriously?? gutted.
I just want to share that I really like how you've continued to experiment with the newsletter - career, leadership, poetry, book recommendations. It's all wonderful and inspires me to keep experimenting too. :)