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What to read this Halloween, based on your ideal spooky activity

Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
NonfictionLifestylesCookbooks

Bodega Bakes

In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
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Biography

Book Clubs: Living between the lines

Feature by Julie Hale

Four standout biographies of American female writers will foster excellent discussion for reading groups.

Tracy Daugherty’s The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion chronicles the life of essayist, journalist and fiction writer Didion, who made her name in the 1960s with era-defining works like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. The first biography on Didion, Daugherty’s brisk and fluid book contains a plethora of interesting topics for conversation, from the gender dynamics of Didion’s carefully constructed literary persona to the impact of her home state of California on her outlook and writing as they both evolved over the course of the 1960s and ’70s.

In Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, Ruth Franklin sheds new light on the background of visionary fiction author Jackson, who wrote the famously creepy novel The Haunting of Hill House (the basis for the 2018 Netflix series). Along the way, Franklin traces the roots of Jackson’s dark aesthetic, which mined the quiet tensions of wifehood in postwar America and specifically her own tumultuous marriage to create chilling psychological horror. How much have things improved for women, and specifically female artists? Ask your group, if you dare.

Read our review of Shirley Jackson by Ruth Franklin.

Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder proves that Wilder’s life was a lot tougher and more complicated than she depicted in her Little House books. Using rare source materials, Fraser documents the financial hardships, risky farm enterprises and vagaries of nature that dogged the Wilder and Ingalls families. Fraser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography raises tricky questions of how American history has often been romanticized rather than truthfully portrayed. If you have any diehard Little House fans in your group, make sure they’re ready for a no-holds-barred reevaluation of the classic series and the family that inspired it.

Read our interview with Caroline Fraser.

Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry is an impassioned investigation of Hansberry, who deserves to be remembered for much more than her iconic play, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry used her platform to promote civil rights and support African leaders fighting against colonialism, and she joined one of the first lesbian organizations in America. (Hansberry was married to activist Robert B. Nemiroff but identified as a lesbian.) Like Didion’s, Hansberry’s life can spur conversation about many fascinating, thorny aspects of midcentury America.

Four standout biographies of American female writers will foster excellent discussion for reading groups. Tracy Daugherty’s The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion chronicles the life of essayist, journalist and fiction writer Didion, who made her name in the 1960s with era-defining works like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. The first biography on […]
NonfictionFictionAudioYA FictionYASocial Science

Audio: March 2020

Feature by Anna Zeitlin

Whether fact or fiction, this month’s best audio selections challenge the heart and the mind with thought-provoking stories. 

★ Such a Fun Age 

In Kiley Reid’s debut novel, Such a Fun Age, Emira is a black woman babysitting for a white family while figuring out what to do with her life. Late one night, while perusing a supermarket’s aisles with the family’s toddler, she is accused of kidnapping. In this intense scene, the listener is put in the shoes of a young black woman who may be sent to jail—or worse—for something so obviously unjust. Emira’s name is cleared, but the event shifts her relationship with her employer. The mom, Alix, wants Emira to view her as a trusted friend while continuing to treat her like a servant. When someone from Alix’s past gets tangled up in Emira’s life, things get even crazier. Narrator Nicole Lewis so effortlessly switches between Emira and Alix that I thought there were two narrators. This is a thoroughly fun listen with the feel of a good gossip sesh, but it’s also an utterly current take on race and class in America with the power to transform how many listeners view and react to the subtle cues of racism.

Tightrope

With Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn address the devastating challenges faced by working-class Americans as they attempt to gain an even footing, let alone try to achieve the American dream. The book narrows in on real stories, tells us where we went wrong as a country and offers hopeful solutions—if we’ll only listen and make a change. Listening to the audiobook feels like bingeing a few great episodes of “This American Life.” Personal stories from blue-collar America show the lives behind the statistics and make their struggles hard to ignore. Actor Jennifer Garner, narrating an audiobook for the first time, lends an emotional weight to these harrowing stories.

Loveboat, Taipei

Abigail Hing Wen’s fun and exciting Loveboat, Taipei follows 18-year-old dancer Ever Wong, an Ohio-raised teen who has little in common with her Chinese parents. She feels pressured by them to go to medical school instead of pursuing her love for dance and choreography. When they send her to Taipei to study Chinese during the summer before college, she thinks she’s being punished. Instead, she discovers a thrilling world run by smart, creative teenagers where love connections abound. Narrator Emily Woo Zeller navigates a large cast of characters from multiple countries and regions and captures Ever’s earnest passion and inner turmoil.

Whether fact or fiction, this month’s best audio selections challenge the heart and the mind with thought-provoking stories. 
NonfictionSocial ScienceReligion & SpiritualityPoliticsMemoir

Searching for meaning

Feature by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When our relationships falter under the pressure of political or religious demands, when ambiguity more than certainty guides our lives, we may be tempted to succumb to our malaise. However, there is another option: We can stumble through the shadows, searching for some thread of meaning that will guide us out of the darkness. The authors of these books have chosen the latter path, peeling away the detritus of life to discover meaning—personal and political—and plumbing the spiritual depths that accompany their searches.

★ Thin Places

With humor and razor-sharp insight, Jordan Kisner’s Thin Places: Essays From in Between captures the visceral, palpable feeling of loss. The ways we inhabit space occupy many of these evocative essays, such as in a piece on an art installation at New York City’s spacious Park Avenue Armory, in which Kisner encourages readers to find someplace “big and empty” when they are “stuck somewhere small . . . somewhere unhappy or afraid or paralyzed or heartbroken.” In her celebrated essay “Thin Places,” she discovers the age-old concept of the space between the spiritual and physical world. This “thin place” is porous, a space where distinctions between “you and not-you, real and unreal, worldly and otherworldly, fall away.” It’s in these thin places that we can find ourselves, absorb glimpses of new meaning from another world and live in the moment. Kisner weaves together reflections on Kierkegaard, her early Christian conversion (and later “unconversion”) and waiting for the subway to gracefully guide us through our own emptiness in search of fullness.

The Great Blue Hills of God

Kreis Beall’s The Great Blue Hills of God explores in lyrical prose what happens when her life falls apart. Beall, who helped create Blackberry Farm, one of the South’s most heavenly resorts, appears to have it all: a loving marriage, great wealth, a beautiful family and a satisfying career. But the demands of building up several properties slowly erode her marriage, and she finds that her and her husband’s financial bank is full but their “emotional bank” is being emptied. As her marriage fades away, Beall falls, and suddenly her health is compromised, and she temporarily loses her hearing. She experiences further devastation when her son, Sam, dies in a skiing accident. Despite the loss of her family, health and wealth, she discovers glimpses of grace in her reading of the Bible, discussions with her pastor and friends and meditations on the nature of home. Throughout the book, Beall sprinkles in fruitful bits of wisdom, embracing the conclusion that, “to me, home is God, family, friends, and legacy. . . . A home is a heart. It is love, people, relationships, and the life you live in it.”

Scandalous Witness

Lee C. Camp’s Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians offers a brilliant summary and exposition of the ways that Christianity is a politic, not a religion. Camp (Mere Discipleship) asks a series of questions that frames Christianity as not just a private spiritual practice but a guide for our life together: “How do we live together? Where is human history headed? What does it mean to be human? And what does it look like to live in a rightly ordered human community that engenders flourishing, justice, and the peace of God?” In the end, the Christian community embraces its mission when it “sets captives free, demolishes strongholds, and . . . [sows] the seeds of the peaceable reign of God.” Camp’s manifesto is a must-read in a world in which Christianity has become either a bedfellow of political parties or an isolated, private practice.

I Am Not Your Enemy

Michael T. McRay’s I Am Not Your Enemy takes Camp’s idea to the personal level. We create meaning in the stories we tell each other, and if we tell a good enough story, we can convince others that certain individuals are our enemies. But just as stories have the power to cultivate hate, they also have the power to reconcile and redeem. Throughout his travels across Israel and Palestine, Northern Ireland and South Africa, and through his work as a conflict and resolution counselor, McRay hears violence-filled narratives with shattered endings. Yet, as he illustrates, not every story needs to end this way. McRay shares stories of a mother who refuses to seek vengeance for her son’s death, a community theater director who helps people who are marginalized find their voices and discover beauty in their lives and a woman who forgives the man who murdered her father. With the verve of a great storyteller, McRay regales us with spellbinding narratives that illustrate the power of words to change our lives and bring meaning to the world.

When our relationships falter under the pressure of political or religious demands, when ambiguity more than certainty guides our lives, we may be tempted to succumb to our malaise. However, there is another option: We can stumble through the shadows, searching for some thread of meaning that will guide us out of the darkness. The […]
NonfictionFictionAudio

Audio: April 2020

Feature by Anna Zeitlin

Listen to an all-star cast take on landmark ACLU cases, an eerie take on a social media dystopia or an author’s self-narrated memoir in essays.

★ Fight of the Century

Fight of the Century, edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, includes essays by 40 writers on different ACLU court cases that helped define and protect our civil liberties over the past century. Anyone with even a passing interest in constitutional law and the Bill of Rights will be enthralled by this audiobook. The writers make history personal and breathe life into what could be a dry subject. For example, Homegoing author Yaa Gyasi takes on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Reflecting on growing up in the Huntsville, Alabama, public school system, she provides new insight and reminds us that our work is not finished. The narration is performed by an all-star voice cast including Samuel L. Jackson, Lucy Liu, Zachary Quinto, Patrick Stewart and many others. The changing voices keep things lively, and many actors bring a personal element to the narration, their own backgrounds reflective of those in the cases being discussed.

Followers

Megan Angelo’s Followers tells two parallel stories in the 2010s and 2050s about how far people will go to achieve fame—and to escape it. This pop culture sci-fi book’s grim (or maybe just too-real) vision of the not-so-distant future pushes the concepts of social media influencers and reality stars to their extremes. In the future, stars have product sponsorships and live their whole lives on camera. But instead of staring at devices all day, the technology is implanted directly in your body, and it’s very hard to disconnect. Narrator Jayme Mattler has a cold, dissociated style that adds to the story’s eeriness. It’s like The Truman Show for the 21st century.

Here for It

Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America is a collection of funny, touching essays about R. Eric Thomas’ life. As a black kid growing up in urban Baltimore, Thomas imagines the horrors that lurk in the suburbs of his mostly white classmates’ neighborhoods. As a gay Christian, he navigates dating a horror-loving agnostic and dealing with his certainly bedeviled Krampus Christmas decoration. When Thomas falls in love with a preacher, he realizes that his life doesn’t fit into the expectations for a preacher’s spouse. Thomas doesn’t shy away from strong opinions, and his narration provides the perfect tone for sassy asides, making these deeply personal stories even more so.

Listen to an all-star cast take on landmark ACLU cases, an eerie take on a social media dystopia or an author's self-narrated memoir in essays.
Nonfiction

Book Clubs: Heavy topics, light touch

Feature by Julie Hale

Four essay collections balance wisdom and high-spirited humor, tackling weighty topics with exhilarating playfulness that will encourage freewheeling discussion. 

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life

In her funny, fearless We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Samantha Irby—a popular blogger who writes for the Hulu comedy series “Shrill”—opens up about what it’s like to be a bisexual black woman in today’s world. Irby is frank and unfiltered in essays on her troubled childhood and alcoholic father, her adventures in dating and sex, and the strange nature of personal connection in the digital age. Themes of gender, race and self-love run through these bold autobiographical set pieces. Irby’s progressive sensibility and cutting-edge comedic attitude will set the tone for spirited and unrestrained conversation.

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

Scaachi Koul ponders her background as the daughter of immigrants in her slyly humorous debut, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter. In this wide-ranging collection, the Buzzfeed staffer writes about interracial romance, internet harassment and the unique blend of cultures that has informed her identity. Book clubs will find much to dig in to here, as Koul shares her thoughts on minority issues and sexism. Her shrewd observations and well-honed sense of humor will inspire rousing conversation—and lots of laughter. 

I Miss You When I Blink

In her delightful book of essays, I Miss You When I Blink—new in paperback this month—Emmy Award-winning co-host of “A Word on Words” and bestselling author Mary Laura Philpott offers insights into the vicissitudes of modern womanhood. Whether she’s reflecting on the challenges of being a mom, her struggles with depression or the nagging need so many of us feel to have an Instagram-worthy life, Philpott is a companionable presence on the page, and her compassion for like-minded readers is palpable. Book clubs will find weighty topics in this collection, but the author’s sparkling wit and lively narrative style make for an all-around upbeat reading experience.

Calypso

With his 10th book, the essay collection Calypso, David Sedaris proves again that he’s a master of the amusing anecdote. From the vagaries of book tours to his experiences as a litter collector in England, Sedaris’ comic scenarios are sure to make readers smile. His one-of-a-kind views on the human condition, the passing of youth and the inescapable bonds of kin will fire up book club conversation without dampening spirits. Pieces focusing on family matters, such as the suicide of Sedaris’ sister Tiffany, can feel wistful, yet the author’s trademark hilarity prevails. 

Four essay collections balance wisdom and high-spirited humor, tackling weighty topics with exhilarating playfulness that will encourage freewheeling discussion.  We Are Never Meeting in Real Life In her funny, fearless We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Samantha Irby—a popular blogger who writes for the Hulu comedy series “Shrill”—opens up about what it’s like to […]
Animals

Advice on taking care of man’s best friends: Pets are people, too

Feature by Linda Stankard

As John Ruskin so insightfully wrote, “There is in every animal’s eye a dim image and a gleam of humanity.” Perhaps our fascination with animals lies in our awareness of a basic kinship and our realization of each animal’s unique ability to teach us something about ourselves.

For those who want to learn something more about their pets and possibly themselves this summer, we have sifted through the season's pet books and selected a few of the best. This collection offers a wide range of animal-related material; you'll find everything from practical pet care strategies to amusing cat autobiographies, but however light-hearted the approach, all these books share an underlying respect and love for the animals who look to us humans for their well-being.

An excellent reference book for serious feline fans or the newly initiated about to take on the responsibility of a kitten is The Humane Society of the United States Complete Guide to Cat Care by Wendy Christensen and the staff of the Humane Society. The comprehensive text covers all aspects of cat care, from the smallest details, like getting your cat's collar size correct, to larger issues such as proper nutrition, grooming and choosing the right veterinarian. Not surprisingly, this text advocates getting your pet from your local animal shelter not only will an animal's life be saved, but the authors hope that people who see first-hand the abundance of unwanted, innocent life sitting on death row will be more motivated to spay or neuter their animals helping to break the sad cycle of throw-away pets.

A chapter is devoted to stray (lost) and feral (never owned) cats, but for a more complete study, Living in Shadows: How to Help the Stray Cat in Your Life (Without Adding to the Problem) by Ann K. Fisher offers an analysis of this complicated problem and a step-by-step guide for tackling it. Fisher provides an invaluable service not only to the millions of homeless cats living in shadows, on the outside looking in, but also to the people willing to reach out to them.

If you're a puppy person or you want a gift for a new puppy parent, The Good Life: Your Dog's First Year by Mordecai Siegal and Matthew Uncle Matty Margolis is a wonderful month-by-month guide that follows a dog's development from birth to adulthood, ending with a chapter containing 10 lessons in training fundamentals. Siegal and Margolis are experts in the field with numerous other canine collaborations to their credit, and they write with an engaging, down-to-earth style. Like the books above, The Good Life contains photographs and will help the new puppy parent become a veritable Dr. Dolittle, with advice on everything from feeding to first aid.

For a true veterinarian's perspective on animal care, Real People Don't Own Monkeys: And Other Stories of Pets, Their People and the Vets Who See It All by J. Veronika Kiklevich D.V.M. with Steven N. Austad is an eye-opening collection of warmly humorous, though often poignant, stories of the animals (iguanas, turtles, pigs and pythons along with the traditional cats and dogs) Kiklevich has doctored. More than mere entertainment, these engaging tales also serve to illuminate the personalities of the human owners these pets are either blessed with or subjected to and the result is captivating, provocative and sometimes disturbing reading.

 

Linda Stankard was adopted years ago by a dog named Sweetie and lately by a cat who has just given her four grand-kitties. They all live with two fish who keep a tight rein on them.

As John Ruskin so insightfully wrote, “There is in every animal’s eye a dim image and a gleam of humanity.” Perhaps our fascination with animals lies in our awareness of a basic kinship and our realization of each animal’s unique ability to teach us something about ourselves.

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