Just in case you don’t read to the end, please tell me what you’re reading in the comments!
Currently Reading
The Archive of the Forgotten (Penguin, 2020) A. J. Hackwith
I ‘ve been reading The Archive of the Forgotten by A. J. Hackwith on my breaks at work. Because I’ve been avoiding eating in the staff break room since the pandemic began and it’s been too cold to sit in the parking lot in my camp chair, I usually leave the book (bought for myself with a Christmas gift card) in my car.
But on Saturday I realized I had left it in my bag inside the library. The day was so cold and windy, with snow on the ground and a one-hour lunch break never long enough, instead of going in for it, I borrowed it on my phone. The miracle of library e-books!
It was actually easier in a lot of ways to read on my phone than to balance the print book open against the steering wheel, as I have been doing. Plus, you don’t have to worry about spilling on the book!
And, as I write, I’ve just had a second brilliant idea – that I should sit on the passenger side instead cramming myself, my lunch, and my book in with the steering wheel on the driver’s side. (Whoever said blogging is a waste of time? Look how productive I’m being right now!)
Crossroads (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2021) by Jonathan Franzen
Everyone knows about Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen, the author’s first novel since Freedom was published in 2010. Since it’s set in the 1970s, the novel has been annoyingly called “historical fiction” in some places, including the library catalog. I beg your pardon?!?
The author is opinionated, full of himself, obsessive about his hobbies and interests, but I really like his sprawling dysfunctional family novels. Except for the youngest child, still an innocent, no one in the family is coming off too well in Crossroads so far as they navigate the seismic societal changes of the 70s – not the straying pastor father, not the mentally unstable mother, and most certainly not the three teenagers, wading self-consciously into life’s deep waters.
But You Seemed So Happy: A Marriage, in Pieces and Bits by Kimberly Harrington
From the Publisher – But You Seemed So Happy is a time capsule of sorts. It’s about getting older and repeatedly dying on the hill of being wiser, only to discover you were never all that dumb to begin with. It’s an honest, intimate biography of a marriage, from its heady, idealistic, and easy beginnings to it slowly coming apart and finally to its evolution into something completely unexpected. As she probes what it means when everyone assumes you’re happy as long as you’re still married, Harrington skewers engagement photos, Gen X singularity, small-town busybodies, and the casual way we make life-altering decisions when we’re young. Ultimately, this moving and funny memoir in essays is a vulnerable and irreverent act of forgiveness—of ourselves, our partners, and the relationships that have run their course but will always hold profound and permanent meaning in our lives.
Covering the reference desk the other day at work, a library patron asked where Kimberly Harrington‘s book of essays about motherhood, Amateur Hour, would be, and that made me check out her latest book But You Seemed So Happy, a memoir in essays about her marriage and divorce from our New Nonfiction section. It is turning out to be a good companion nonfiction to Crossroads.
Finding a New Normal: Living Your Best Life with Chronic Illness by Suzan L. Jackson
I’ve written before that I like to read self-help books every now and then! Finding a New Normal: Living Your Best Life with Chronic Illness is written by Sue Jackson, who blogs about what she and her family are reading at Book by Book, and about living with chronic illness at Live with ME/CFS. I admire her writing and her openness in explaining what she’s gone through and what she has learned from it, so when I saw she had published a book, I wanted to read it.
Recommended for anyone struggling with a chronic illness or knows someone who is!
Temporarily Not Reading
Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister
This one is still set aside for now, but not forgotten. Started the essay collection above instead (insert sheepish shrug here.)
Happy Holidays by Craig O’Connor
I’m reading Happy Holidays, a self-published collection of short horror by local author Craig O’Connor along with the 2022 holidays. The first story, “Magic Fingers,” was set on New Year’s Day, so I’m waiting till February to read “From Cupid, with a Vengeance.”