Danielle

In Howard's first memoir, Feast, she navigates her eating disorder in her early adulthood and the beginning of her career in the food industry. Now in recovery, Howard recounts the next phases of life (getting married, trying to get pregnant, getting pregnant, getting a dog, buying a house, etc.) through her relationships with other women, mostly in the food industry, that have inspired her through their strength, determination, and love of food.

I'll be honest, I didn't enjoy this. I enjoyed her first memoir well enough, but this one was just kind of boring. She weaves her personal narrative into chapters about inspiring women she's met in the food industry – who honestly, felt more like convenient or happenstance choices vs actually impactful or inspiring to her. This structure detracted from the memoir; it reads more like interviews done for a magazine. The bits about her life, though personal and vulnerable, felt disjointed with the other content. And I hate to say it, but the author just wasn't particularly interesting or likable. I can totally appreciate that she is a sensitive woman, and has faced hardships, but it really seems like she crumbles into tears at the slightest provocation, and generally doesn't have much personality. I don't want to be mean, but it felt like this book was rushed together & poorly edited to get done just after her pregnancy.

This is a unique collection of poems with a distinctly queer, playful, slightly anxious, self-aware voice. Settings range from a cat cafe to a former lover's apartment to visiting a prison. The collection is an interesting mix of heavy and light. I never got that sock-punch to the gut feeling though, the feeling of a poem really resonating.

If, like me, you're a ripe combo of English major and Harry Potter fan, this is the book for you! It's a close reading of all seven books from the perspective of Snape, framing him as the true protagonist. While I think the author made some leaps, it's a wholly well-constructed work, and I'll take any excuse to be transported back into this world. Hit me in the feels all over again.

I was looking for a new audiobook when I read (er, skimmed) an article in the NYT about the stoics, and this book was mentioned as a recommendation. The snippets of stoic philosophy I read seemed like the perfect way to start 2022, so I nabbed this audiobook and Seneca's Letters (on Kindle, bc it was $1.99!). I was expecting this to be a memoir that incorporated bits of Seneca's text, but no. This was more like some queasy mix of textbook and self-help book. Spare yourself the read by jumping to the last chapter, where he summarizes the entire book in a numbered list. Note – I did really enjoy, at least conceptually, the stoic teachings. This was just a boring package for them. Looking forward reading the first-hand version when I get around to the Letters.

4.5 stars, I think. Excellent, impactful writing.

This collection is really something. In the beginning author's note, Beard explains how some of these stories are true, and some are fiction – but that all fiction is truth, and all stories fiction. And so the collection unfolds, thematically and tonally consistent, a spell-binding melange of essay and short story in which one type is indistinguishable from the other.

Beard's voice reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Munro, but a bit more sprawling and poetic. Each piece has death at it's center – or rather, the approach to death – and the moments, days, months, and years in which we evade it, stare it in the face, shepherd loved ones to it. Each piece is so poignant that I couldn't put the book down until that particular narrative came to its (beautiful) conclusion.

Another fun read from Jen Lancaster. At first I felt like there wasn't a theme to this book, and that random stories were slapped together to try to make a buck. But the there is a theme: each story deals with aging, and how the author is dealing with moving into the latter half of her life, wondering how to stay relevant as an author while still being herself.

Definitely not her best, but I still had a decent time. I do take issue with how obsessed she remains with appearing younger and losing weight. Very out of tune with the rest of the book. Not a fan of reading chapters entrenched in diet culture but with a “it's for my health” BS. She owns up to vanity being a driver for her, but still lacks some self-awareness in my opinion.

This is a great book on sports psychology. Through inspirational tales of triumph over adversity interwoven with psychological theory, the author makes a compelling case for the power of mental resiliency in sport, and better yet, offers very concrete advice to build that resiliency. Broadly, that advice can be boiled down to:
1) Accept the situation - clearly see what is happening
2) Embrace the situation - make a plan to do the best you can in light of what is happening
3) Commit to executing the new plan

As a chronically injured runner, hearing stories of amazing comebacks of all kinds was exactly what I needed to get me through some punishing cross-training sessions as I take time off of running to let a nagging injury calm down. I have been able to apply these steps to re-frame my perspective and adjust my training the best I can to accommodate the injury, even though that training is lonely, boring, time-consuming, and overall way less fun than running.

A quote that really stuck out to me “Find a way, don't force a way [sic].”

Definitely recommend this for anyone who loves endurance sport, but struggles with injury (or any other setback).

All said and done, this is a pretty standard running memoir: “I had a dream, I went for it, I learned some stuff along the way.” The author's dream was to PR in the marathon even though he was over 40. He went for it by playing professional runner with NAZ Elite in Flagstaff, acting as a member of the team and receiving all the amenities the pro runners are afforded: training at altitude, training partners, professional coaching (including strength coaching), daily massages, time for an hour-long afternoon nap, access to a sports psychologist, etc. For the 16 weeks (I think?) leading to the Chicago marathon, the author's only job was to become a better runner - and by doing this, he hoped to PR.

SPOILER: He did. Apparently when your entire life is centered around running and you have virtually nothing else to worry about and state-of-the-art facilities and the best places to run and extremely talented people to run with and a whole team of the best professionals in the biz boosting you up, you can PR in the marathon. Shocker!!

Sarcasm aside, I think there were some useful “it's the journey not the destination” nuggets that I appreciated. He ended with a bit about goal setting that I found really useful: setting time goals is absurdly common in running, but is quite arbitrary and often leads to a lot of frustration. Ultimately, we're all just trying to be the fastest version of ourselves – so why not make that the goal, and let the time come to you? This is absolutely how I'll be approaching my next marathon block.

I also enjoyed some of the insights into pro training life, but TBH I've gotten a lot of that from podcasts, instagram, and vlogs so there wasn't anything groundbreaking here.

Also, I listened to the audiobook to have a little inspiration on flat recovery runs and grueling elliptical sessions; however, the narrator's (the reader, not the author) monotone performance made me feel low-energy. Wouldn't recommend it.

Overall, just an okay read. Giving it 3 stars because it inspired me nonetheless.

This collection about farm country at the base of the mountains in North Carolina uses aspects of farm life to carry weighty themes of cyclical obliteration and regeneration, the constancy and power of nature that ties us together through it all, and the deep ancestral ties we share by virtue of sharing in the sustenance of that land. In one poem, Morgan explains how old barns are burned to the grown to make room for more land, and the nails are all that is kept: “As though all husbandry and home/were carried in that charred handful/of iron stitches, blacksmithed chromosomes/that link distant generations.”

At once rugged and sensitive, Morgan writes beautifully about the intersection of man and nature, and how wonderful and complex “simple” farm life can be when you look at it from the right angle; he even dedicates a whole poem to the smallest particles of dust catching light: “Each/particle is an opal angel/too small to see but in the glare/of this annunciation.”

My friend Kate, who went to Cornell (where Morgan is a professor), dropped off this book for me and I'm glad she did; it's an escape into a different time and place that has you breathing manure and fresh grain, seeing dancing particles and twinkling fireflies and explosive fireworks, and feeling a return to the earth.

A Very Readable Book, though it's less standard memoir than it is a slew of jokes about the milestones in the authors' life (mostly as it pertains to comedy). From the outset, the jokes come on strong, and most of the time they deliver. I chuckled, if not laughed out loud, throughout. You would think a pretty white guy in the entertainment industry who's from Staten Island, went to Harvard, and is married to Scarlett Johansson would be a cocky asshole. But he's just the right amount of self-deprecating, self-aware, and seems like an okay guy (and a funny writer, which one hopes is prerequisite for being the Head Writer at SNL for so many years).

I do wish he went beyond the surface level, but I get that this is not that kind of book. The chapter about his mother felt like a departure, even though it was interesting to read. The chapter on commuting in New York City, which I read on the subway, is probably my favorite. Too accurate. I didn't like the inclusion of footnotes, because I kept missing the asterisk and having to backtrack to then read a joke that wasn't that great. But that's a minor complaint.

Anyways, if you like LOLs, and especially if you like sketch comedy, I recommend this one. Not a life-changing read by any means, but definitely a fun, quick one.

A lovely, short read for anyone looking to better understand spirituality, mysticism, and our individual spiritual journeys. Rohr's pragmatic and unassuming approach to spiritual development is refreshing and inspiring and makes aging into the second half of our lives something to look forward to. While Rohr is Catholic and speaks more to that audience, the messages in Falling Upward are applicable to anyone with a spiritual practice, and I think that's part of its charm.

This book is a delightful string of awfully well-written anecdotes from the experience of the author and his unlikely hiking mate. I think I actually laughed out loud at parts, and was definitely chuckling to myself most of the way imagining these two bumbling, tubby men with dry, sharp wits trudging through one of the longest, oldest, and certainly difficult trails to hike. Just enough facts and history combed throughout to learn most of what you need to know about the Appalachian trail, this book was charming and fun and would make anyone want to hike the AT.

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves.”

This book serves to pull apart what bullshit is, from its etymology, to its relationship to truth and its difference from lying, to the purpose it serves us. It's philosophical, but not dense, and interesting in that I hadn't though much about what bullshit is prior to this reading (which, I guess, bullshitters rarely do), despite the fact that I readily dole it out (...) and often feel like I'm on the receiving end of it. Generally speaking, we throw around words a lot without considering the nuance of their function and meaning, so this was a fun exercise in diving into a word. Plus, isn't it a bit meta to write a whole damn essay on the meaning of bullshit?

This book was recommended to me by a friend after we saw “The Post” together. I listened to this as an audiobook (as I love to do with memoirs - it's such a unique experience to hear someone's story in their own voice... or in this case, through a voice-actor that sounded a hell of a lot like Ms. Graham). It was over 30 hours long, so quite the commitment - but a worthy one, as I felt I got to more intimately know an incredible woman. And not only because she took on the role of Publisher of a major newspaper - the first woman to do so in a time where almost no women were in executive roles - following her husband's suicide (a courageous act), but because of her intelligence; expansive knowledge of politics, current events, and the arts; and the genuine modesty in which she recounts the events of her life (which include close relationships with Warren Buffett, several presidents, Truman Capote, and many other major figures of the time).

Admittedly, parts of this were a bit of a bore (e.g. the pressman strike, which seemed to go on for ages). But it was 30 hours, after all - bound to lose my attention at some point. I also missed a lot of the Nixon scandal; a few times I put this on when struggling to sleep, and could never quite figure out where I was in the chapter when I plunged into unconsciousness, leading to a fragmented picture (and some disturbing dreams about Nixon). I was surprised the part about the Pentagon Papers was so relatively short - not because I felt they deserved more attention, but because they only comprised such a small chapter in Katharine Graham's truly incredible vault of experiences. So I guess the real surprise is actually how many other movies could be made from her life.

While it's a bear to take on, I would recommend it to those interested in reading about the life of a true trailblazer for women (whether she knew that at the time or not) who led an amazing life and met some incredible people, all while remaining true to her wonderful self.

I bought this book in Zion last year at a quirky antiques & books shop, and it's been sitting on my nightstand at my parents' house since. I decided to bring it with me this weekend to a family lake house trip, and I'm glad I did – this is a great book in which to get swept up. The cast of characters has an Agathie Christie feel, a diverse crew of different ethnicities, ages, personalities, and backgrounds that both fulfill and evade common archetypes so as to create interesting group dynamics. The setting is stunning; the book is clearly well-researched and replete with full descriptions of East Asian traditions, religious beliefs, history, and political turmoil – all of which catch the somewhat ignorant American tourists in a terrible situation. I'm not sure I'd qualify this as a thriller, but Tan did an excellent job of building suspense; it was hard to put down, and easy to just keep reading and reading.

The overall message is clear: tourism is not a solution to developing nations' problems, and throwing money at causes is not enough to make demonstrable change. It's hard to tell if the things tourists/distant activists do to help are actually helpful, or more harmful in the long run. It's different when you don't have a real stake in the situation, and especially when you don't understand an incredibly nuanced and brutal history. So long story short: try not to visit anywhere in political turmoil, but if you do, have a VERY good understanding of that turmoil, and the people whose lives you're stepping through.

I wasn't sure I understood the decision to have the book narrated by a ghost, except maybe to play better with the Burmese beliefs in the supernatural, and to lend a more sympathetic light to the rather unsympathetic tourists, who she refers to as her friends. There were a few detours into pieces of history that weren't especially relevant to the main plot, and the main plot wrapped up in a rather strange, too-neat, and unbelievable way. Otherwise, this was a perfectly pleasant book.

Not sure whether or not this was ghostwritten, but I hope not because it is so raw and vulnerable (and, hate to say it, not terribly well-written). Following the journey of the author's eating disorder shows you really don't know what's going on behind the scenes of your favorite tv shows. Side note: while it comes to a happy conclusion in recovery, I can see how the early parts of this book would be very triggering to those who have dealt with EDs.

This was a cool book with a unique structure, piecing the exactly how the infection started, spread, proliferated to full-on war, and the response and fall-out and recovery thereafter through transcriptions of oral interviews from all kinds of people from all walks of life and all corners of the world. It does give a great picture of the entire world, and how all people had these unique (but all quite scary) experiences after the outbreak. Knowing enough about public health as an editor of textbooks in that topic area, I felt like this was a terrifyingly realistic story. The non-linear narrative is refreshing and the perfect form for this story. I'd recommend reading it, but build up your bunker first. And don't read alone in the dark... or on your first trip to rural China.

A lovely, very quick read (maybe a couple hours?). Simplistic language tending towards aphoristic works well as the reader follows the journey of the Shepard boy from Spain who crosses the dessert to achieve his Personal Legend. A deeply spiritual book, it inspires us to tune into the universe in the pursuit of our own legends, to claim our space in the world that's been carved out for us.

Jacobs spends a year or so trying out a bunch of different health fads as a means of becoming the “healthiest man alive.” He's a funny/talented writer, so I enjoyed his somewhat sardonic (but never mean) retelling of meeting with the experts and gurus of each fad and actually diving into their merit scientifically. That being said, the whole book is ridden with diet culture, and made me think, what's the point here? Jacobs more or less comes to a similar conclusion – that all of this stuff is time-sucking and can be contradictory and like his aunt, death is coming for us all anyways, and not always in ripe old age, often regardless of how we live. There are some “healthy” things we can do to improve our lives slightly, but the key is the word “slightly,” and a quest for bodily perfection is a doomed one.

Really practical training advice, whether you're a novice or advanced runner. I've been running competitively for over a decade and still found so many really helpful pointers for tuning into your body to hone in on your training and get faster. I'm a solid proponent that every body and mind is different, so we should approach training differently and through listening to our bodies. This book helps guide a runner through that calibration process while emphasizing maximum enjoyment all the while.

Wow. It will be difficult for me to summarize here 550+ dense pages, but I will try. This is a powerhouse of a novel, an engrossing and highly-nuanced narrative of the intricacies of marriage and parenthood, traditional American values held in the light of increasingly polarized politics, and the paradoxically complicated nature of what it actually means to be free.

The story follows a perfectly midwestern couple, Walter and Patty Berglund, and their perfectly nuclear family, who at the start seem cliche in their normalcy and unflappable kindness. But slowly, as their children become teenagers, Patty begins to crack, and then the family cracks, which then sets off a permanent and increasingly damaging rift that grows into all kinds of scandal.

Franzen does a remarkably thorough job of harping on freedom, and what characters will do to try to find it; Walter seeks freedom from his childhood, and from the ills of an environmentally-imploding society; Patty seeks freedom from her marriage with Walter, and from the pervasive regrets of having not hitched the rockstar; Joey wants to be free of his too-committed high school girlfriend; etc, etc, while in the background is 9/11 and then the ensuing war for freedom in Iraq. And so it seems that all journeys for freedom end up messy, painful, and even if freedom is found, it is vacuous and unfulfilling. Walter's older brother Mitch is the prime example of this, and perhaps even Richard Katz.

I may need to think more on the takeaways, thematically, but I will say that Franzen's clever structure and knack for detailed, long-haul character development is captivating from the start. The dialog is delightful and the overall story a little absurd but still firmly enough in contact with reality to be uniquely charming. This book is a commitment, but if you've liked other Franzen novels, or David Foster-Wallace, or the like – then I definitely recommend picking this one up.

As a lover of all David Sedaris's memoirs, and as a lover of cute illustrations of animals, I picked this up on a whim with high hopes a few years ago. Recently I spotted it on my bookshelf and after having read a morbid thriller, thought it would be nice for a light change. Unfortunately (or fortunately, I suppose, depending on what you're looking for) this book is also morbid: a modernized, satirized twist on children's fables, complete with a zinger moral at the end of each story. While I appreciate the clever satire, it wasn't the reading experience for which I had hoped. Quick read, though, and lovely (though, again - kind of morbid) illustrations.

The manager that hired me at my current company gave this book to me as a holiday gift. He said that he had read many business books, and few resonate, but this one did. And I'll admit, it is interesting in that the author had an entire team dive into data to figure out how companies went from good – as in, profitable but nothing special – to way out-performing their competitors based on share value. The author then took the findings and reduced them to some graspable concepts, linked together with vignettes from each of the “Good to Great” companies to drive the concepts home.

But in the end, it's still a business book, and therefore, not necessarily fun for me to read, personally.