Books this week:
1) Kate Bolick, Spinster, 2015
2) Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren, 2023
3) Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry of the Future, 2020 (Didn't finish)
"To do what you are afraid to do is to guide your life by fear. How much better not to be afraid to do what you believe in doing! Keep one main idea, and you will never be lost." (Bolick, quoting Jane Addams' response to Emerson's "Always do what you are afraid to do," p 222)
Books this week:
1) Judith Herman, *Truth and Repair* (2023)
2) Kay Redfield Jamison, *Fires in the Dark" (2023)
"Tyrannical regimes...cultivate attitudes of cynicism, indifference, and narrow egotism...When seeking the truth becomes too dangerous or just too exhausting, it is tempting simply to retreat from any form of public engagement." (Herman, pp 34-5)
Books this week:
1) Larissa MacFarquhar, *Strangers Drowning*
2) Ursula Le Guin, *The Left Hand of Darkness* (Re-read)
3) Pekka Hämäläinen, *Indigenous Continent*
"The essence of being human...is [to be] prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals." (MacFarquhar 2015: 9, quoting Orwell).
Books this week:
1) Maggie O'Farrell, *The Marriage Portrait*
2) Sarah Thankam Mathews *All This Could Be Different*
3) Barbara Ehrenreich, *Bright-Sided*
4) Phillippe Petit, *Why Knot?*
"I am of the opinion that all ropes--fiber ropes, wire ropes--are alive. They have been smiling at me for more than fifty years, drawing for me magnificent catenary curves upon which I promenade" (Petit 2013: 23).
Books these last two weeks:
1) Jo Harkin, *Tell Me an Ending*
2) Carmen Maria Machado, *In the Dream House*
3) Samantha Hunt, *Mr. Splitfoot*
4) Melanie Brooks, *Writing Hard Stories*
5) Katherine May, *The Electricity of Every Living Thing*
6) Pat Ogden et al., *Trauma and the Body* (Skimming)
"When you really go there with your own truths, you end up in a universal place... and it's fucking magic" (MacDonald in Brooks 2017: 43).
Books this week:
1) Lisa Wells, *Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World* (finishing)
2) Annie Dillard, *The Abundance*
3) Ross Gay, *The Book of Delights*
4) Orhan Pamuk, "Nights of Plague*
"Showing up, again and again, is what it takes to know and be known by someone, to belong to someone or somewhere" (Wells 2021: p 239).
Books this week:
*Termination Shock by Neil Stephenson
*Pregnancy Childbirth and the Newborn The Complete Guide by Penny Simkin
*Mother Brain by Chelsea Conaboy
Books this Week:
*The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland
*Shepherd's Warning by Cailyn Lloyd
*Buddhism Plain and Simple by Steve Hagen
Books this week:
1) Tessa Fontaine, The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts
2) Alex Jennings, The Ballad of Perilous Graves
3) Linda Villarosa, Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and the Health of our Nation
“What is adventure but inconvenience, properly regarded?” The Electric Woman (Fontaine, quoting G.K. Chesterton)
Books this week:
Shadows Fall by Simon R. Green
Screaming on the Inside by Jessica Grose
Bare Minimum Parenting by James Breakwell
Virginia Eubanks
Erin Terlson