Bomb Shelter: Time, Love, and Other Explosives by Mary Laura Philpott

I really loved this memoir in essays. She writes about parenting and worrying and time passing and loving your children, and it felt really poignant in spots. It was meaningful.

The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and Women's Work

I have a lot of interest in deep thinking and writing about subjects that seem to be, by definition, shallow and meaningless and, yes, quotidian. That was the whole point of this book--finding the meaning in the quotidian, daily tasks that fill our lives (especially as women). I liked a lot of points of this book.

Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas

This was hilarious and so well done as a group of stories about her childhood growing up as an immigrant in America. I love these types of cultural stories. 

That Sounds Fun: The Joys of Being an Amateur, the Power of Falling in Love, and Why You Need a Hobby by Annie F. Downs

This is another one of these unexpectedly Christian authors that I accidentally stumbled across and ended up reading her book. I liked the idea of the title, because I feel like books that are about hobbies and being an amateur sound up my alley, and will be motivating to help me try new things and get out of my ruts. And I thought this was a fine book, with cute essays and stories, but honestly nothing super shocking or brand new. It was only about 6 hours and I got through it super quickly and don't remember anything super concrete about it, even though it was just a few weeks ago. So it was so-so. 

I Guess I Haven't Learned That Yet by Shauna Niequist

I'm discovering that there is a whole genre of Christian self-help authors that I don't know anything about. I think of Jen Hatmaker as the prime example, and there are a whole bunch of women who orbit around her and do very similar things (although maybe they're all orbiting together and I just know of Jen Hatmaker the best, I don't know). Over the years, I keep accidentally reading books that I think are just books of essays or memoirs and then realizing that they belong to this elite club of Christian female speakers who all know each other and do the same thing. This was one of those times. I actually really like it and enjoy their books, but it's always surprising how many of them are basically doing the same thing. I had never heard of Shauna Niequist, but she apparently had some big drama in her family and the church her father ran, which she kept alluding to cryptically in her book, and which I of course had to google. But I'd never heard about it so that wasn't part of the draw for this book. I liked her essays about what she learned from moving to NYC from her hometown after living there all her life, and about parenting boys and learning from mistakes and stuff. The main title of the book is a great reminder. 

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

I have only read one or two of John Green's books, but they have always stuck out to me as books that I felt were really well done and really emotionally in tune and honest. So when I heard that John Green had written this book of reviews of human experiences (sounds weird but turned out great), I wanted to read it. I loved how he wrote about things like Canada geese and staph infections and described them in ways that made me able to appreciate them and understand what it's like to experience them, and he wrote really honestly about his experiences with anxiety and depression and Covid-19 and raising children, and it was really refreshing to hear about someone's real life experiences. He really made me think about how human-centric our worldview is and how we don't ever think about how tiny our little blip of world history really is. He also made me laugh out loud several times, like when he was talking about how if aliens came to our planet, they would think that we worshipped the green spots around our houses, because of how much we do to take care of these lawns--and how silly that is. 

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

I've read several of David Sedaris's books and always thought they were funny. Austin gave me this book for Christmas and even got it signed by David Sedaris himself (which he did very inappropriately, haha). None of his essays stand out too well in my memory even just a little while later after I read it, but I feel like he is always fun to read. I always wonder if he will ever get tired of writing about himself or about his family, or if they will get tired and tell him to stop. But I'm glad he's written what he has. 

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away by Bill Bryson

I loved this book so much when I first encountered it years ago. I remember reading it out loud to some of Tommy's family in the car in China in 2009! So it has been a while since I first read this. Bill Bryson is such a hilarious writer and I love that he is so matter-of-fact and basic while also making funny observations. Tommy and I re-listened to this while on our get-away road trip to Fredericksburg in March and it was a great audiobook for our drive. I feel like my appreciation for it this time around was less than I remembered, though--although some of his points still resonate, like him talking about how Americans don't walk anywhere ever. I still think about that all the time. 

Know Brother Joseph: New Perspectives on Joseph Smith's Life and Character by Various Authors

I heard about this book on the Follow Him podcast and since we are reading the Doctrine and Covenants this year for Come, Follow Me, I wanted to check this out. It was a super interesting book, made up of maybe 50 short essays about Joseph Smith by a number of different Church history scholars. I thought the amount of research and information all of these people have done and have read about Joseph Smith was amazing; they've read all of his papers (from the Joseph Smith Papers project) and they shared many insights they'd gained by studying his writing and history in a scholarly way. I felt like they shared a lot of many interesting and wonderful insights into who Joseph Smith was as a person--and they didn't sugarcoat his personality. They shared many of his flaws and problems, but also all of his very human and positive traits as well. I felt like I learned a lot about him and like I got to know Joseph a little bit more by reading this book. 

Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions and We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I wanted to read more of Adichie's works after reading Americanah, so I requested these from the library. I thought they were full-length books, but turned out they were super short little booklets, which I'm not going to complain about because I was able to read both of them in about an hour this evening. Still, they packed a punch and were filled with a lot of wisdom about feminism. I especially liked Dear Ijeawele, because it was specifically about teaching your daughter to be feminist, and I really appreciated the reminders about how to raise a girl to value her own worth. I feel like this one especially would be worth reading again and again. 

Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace and Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy by Anne Lamott

I've known of Anne Lamott for years because I've used one of her essays, called "Shitty First Drafts," for my writing class as one of my first reading assignments, to help students feel good about their writing process and how to write. But I haven't read a ton more from her. I decided to listen to these two books of hers, mainly because they were short and available from the library... but I did really enjoy them. I feel like if I had read them, I would have probably gotten more out of them and possibly even marked a few things here or there, but instead I just enjoyed listening to Lamott's funny stories about her childhood and her family and her history. She does a great job at being self-deprecating and making you feel like we're all on the same page, probably all struggling together, and she is really open about what she has struggled with, in her family and in her past. I really liked how open she was and hearing her perspective on Christianity and faith. They were both fun books to listen to, and kind of soothing, but nothing super earth-shattering came out of them for me.

I Miss You When I Blink: Essays by Mary Laura Philpott

I didn't know before I started reading this that this was Philpott's description of basically how she got out of a depressive cycle in her life, where she wanted to escape from her (perfect) life and couldn't figure out why she was depressed. Some of the essays have nothing to do with that--they are just funny stories about her life. But as a whole, the overarching narrative of this collection of essays is about how she came through this realization that she didn't love her life, and how she could fix that.

These essays were beautifully written, and I felt like I could relate to Philpott on a lot of levels. I related to her perfectionism and overachiever status, and she seemed like such a normal person that I wanted to get to know her.

I feel like I could have read this book 10 times slower and gotten a lot more out of it. As it was, I read it pretty fast, and enjoyed it and giggled at times and felt feelings at other times, but I think I missed some of the deep stuff that Philpott was writing about. I wish I'd kept better mental notes about which essays I liked and which ones stood out to me, but I don't ever do that very well when I can't fold a page over (this was an e-book). So there were definitely really good moments in this book that I wish I could reference, but overall, it was a good read.

Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult by Bruce Handy

I have definitely felt a lot of joy about reading and re-reading all my favorite children's and middle-grade novels lately, especially reading them aloud with my kids. I have spent countless hours so far in my parenting life reading picture books to our kids, and I've read 44 chapter books aloud with Dane so far (and maybe about half of them with Graham too). I really, really love reading books that I loved with them. I get a LOT of joy out of doing this.

Unfortunately, I didn't feel a ton of joy reading Handy's literary criticism of his chosen selection of children's literature. I did really like learning about each of the authors he selected--Margaret Wise Brown was fascinating!--and I liked learning about his analysis of each book. It was definitely worth a read for anyone who reads a lot of kids' books, because he chose a famous genre or author to write about in each chapter and clearly did a lot of research on it.

Some of it dragged, though, and I was very annoyed by his reflex reactions to Little Women and Anne of Green Gables: he didn't like the former and didn't even get through 30 pages of the latter. Of course, he's a grown adult man, which means he's not at all in the target audience for those books, but deciding to read (for the first time ever) these towering classics of children's literature as research for writing a book about children's literature completely misses the point of those books. Of course you won't like them in the way that a young girl would, or an adult re-reading them after loving them as a child. I think the nostalgia factor is huge in my pure joy that I get out of reading children's literature. It's not the only reason I love them--because I have had books that I don't love very much when I revisit them as adults--but I don't think I would love them as much now if I hadn't encountered them a long time ago. I feel like Handy misses the point by discussing their authors' backgrounds and breaking them down (although I did really like learning about them)--those aren't the reasons these books bring us joy. So that made the subtitle of his book a little misleading to me.

But maybe I'm just still offended by how much he hated Anne of Green Gables. How dare he.

I Remember Nothing and I Feel Bad about My Neck by Nora Ephron

These two books were super short quick audiobooks that I listened to with one headphone in while driving to Utah. Nora Ephron is someone I've always been slightly interested in, and I read her novel Heartburn about her husband having cheated on her, so I thought these two memoirs she wrote in the last ten years would be fun to listen to. They definitely were fun, in the style of a celebrity memoir--pretty fluffy, nothing very memorable, but perfect to listen to and distract me on an unbearably long drive. There were some pretty hilarious parts about her observations about ageing and being a woman, and some stories about her childhood, and they were definitely fun and quick and great to listen to.

Seriously... I'm Kidding by Ellen DeGeneres

I listened to this audiobook in one day... because it was only three hours long. It was a bunch of super short chapters of Ellen's favorite types of humor--over the top, silly, and kind of expected once you get used to hearing her. I laughed a bunch of times while listening to this, but a lot of the chapters were just gimmicks, like just a few words or sentences, and there wasn't a ton of actual writing in this. It was a fun audiobook, but I don't feel a huge need to listen to her other books she's written.

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

I've read many of Bill Bryson's books--most of them before I started writing on this blog, some of them even when I was in college and barely had any time to read for fun. His I'm a Stranger Here Myself is one of my favorites, and I often think about his A Walk in the Woods where he travels along the Appalachian Trail, which I listened to while running along the trails in North Carolina. But I'd never read this book about England, and since Tommy and I are going to England in August for our tenth anniversary, this was one of my England books that I wanted to read before going there. (I only have about 20 books on that list, haha!) Bryson is an American who has spent almost his entire adult life living in Great Britain, and this book is about a period of two months that he spent traveling around Great Britain and visiting many different towns and areas. I really enjoyed the parts where he was talking about British culture and personalities and interests, and sometimes lost interest in the very nitty-gritty travelogue details that he went into in all of the tiny towns that he visited. I loved his love for this country, and his admiration of its many virtues, and it made me really excited to go there (and wishing I could spend longer). I wouldn't say this was a super fascinating read for the most part--it was too long-winded and too much focused on all of the little facts about all of the towns he visited, and it all started to blend together after a while--but I liked the overall effect of it and I'm planning to read his second book about England next.

Tell Me More by Kelly Corrigan

I read one book by Kelly Corrigan years ago (and I remember absolutely nothing about it, haha), but I kept seeing review about this book and mentions of it as a good audiobook, so I requested the library purchase an e-audiobook copy of it and they actually DID! (Shocker of all shockers--our library NEVER purchases copies of books that I recommend to purchase.) And this was a good audiobook--a thoughtful, honest, vulnerable memoir-ish book made up of twelve essays about important phrases that build connection and love between people. I mostly loved how open and honest Corrigan was in these essays, and how she wrote about the people she loved in such a loving way while looking at her own faults and mistakes. She made herself so relatable, explaining the confusing mistakes she has made as a parent and the oxymoron of loving these people more than anything yet making the worst mistakes ever with them. She wrote so movingly about her father's recent death and the death of one of her closest friends as well. I think my favorite essay was the one at the end titled "This Is It," where she talked about how even with its horrible moments and the dullness and difficulty of parenting sometimes, this is exactly the life that she wanted. I think of that often too--how I'm living my dream life right now, even though it's hard sometimes to see that through the weeds. I also loved her essay "Tell Me More" where she talked about a conversation she had with her daughter where she said that instead of trying to "fix" her problem, mostly because it was a good reminder of how to talk to our kids to build connection with them instead of always trying to be right. This was definitely a worthwhile audiobook and one I'm glad to have listened to.

My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South by Rick Bragg

I don't think I would have loved this book if I had read it--but I did love it as an audiobook. It is 100% necessary that you listen to this book instead of read it, so that you can listen to Rick Bragg's crazy strong Southern drawl reading his essays about football, southern food, and the red dirt of the South. All of these essays were put together from being previously published in magazines, mostly Southern Living, and all of them are about Bragg's life, childhood, and experiences of the South. And all of them give you the strongest feeling of the South. It made me want to go eat a grouper sandwich, something I have never even heard of and doesn't even sound remotely appealing to me, and to move to New Orleans and feel the liquid dirt there. I loved all of his family members who he wrote about so lovingly, and loved the imagery of all of his huge family gatherings and his strong sense of a family tree and his Southern heritage. This book made me feel like I want to move to Alabama, which is a huge accomplishment considering how little I actually want to do that. The only other book I've read that makes me feel that way is To Kill a Mockingbird. I wish I could have written down what some of the best lines were, but I couldn't since I was listening to it. This wasn't a page-turner by any means (or whatever the equivalent would be for an audiobook), but everything in it was so good. I'm wanting to read much more Southern literature now.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

This is my third and maybe final David Sedaris book that I'm going to listen to for a while. Not that I didn't enjoy them, because I did. They are especially funny to listen to, since he reads them and his voice is really distinctive and he does excellent accents for his siblings and places the emphasis on things so well (hopefully so, since he wrote these essays). Some of his essays were so funny I laughed out loud, and some were funny but also a mix of depressing. I feel like I should be able to explain it better, but he is so honest and up front about his family and his upbringing and the flaws in his family and himself that it makes me a little sad. He tells a story about when his dad said they would buy a beach home on the coast of North Carolina and how excited and happy his whole family was, but then his dad changed his mind and didn't want to spend the money on it and how disappointed all of the kids were and his mom. He tells it so well and I could feel all of their emotions, which makes it such a great story, but it was kind of gut-wrenching to sense all of their deep disappointment (especially the mom's).

I also couldn't listen to most of these stories without wondering how his family feels about how he portrays them. He doesn't just write about when they were kids in the seventies in North Carolina, but he writes about them today and seems like he exposes quite a lot about their lives and their relationships. He addresses this specifically in a few of his stories, but doesn't quite resolve it and I know that I definitely would not be happy if I were his sister and he were doing that to me. Mostly his essays expose more of his flaws and his realizations about himself, which he learns through his interactions with his sisters, but it still feels like a violation of privacy.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

I liked this book better than I liked Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, probably because it's more memoir-ish and therefore more real. There were so many funny stories about Sedaris's childhood and his adulthood, many of them about him moving to France and attempting to learn French. I was disappointed after finishing this to find out that the audiobook is an abridged version of the written book, because I would have liked to listen to more. He does a great job of telling about his life and making it funny, but also having a lot of heart and emotion in it at the same time. Some of the stories about his drug use or about his parents' reactions to him coming out as gay are poignant at moments, although he never comes across as self-pitying. I really enjoyed his balance of emotions and I would like to find another one of his memoir books (instead of his fictional ones) to listen to.