A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I didn't love this one, but it did go pretty quickly. I liked a lot of the stories, even though they were all about a world I have no knowledge of or interest in. I liked the short story format, because I felt like I was able to get invested in each character really deeply for that time. 

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyah

I wasn't sure what I was expecting but this wasn't it. I thought the stories were really good, although some of them were a little raunchy for my interest. I loved some of the themes though. Really well done.

You Think It, I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld

I burned through these short stories really quickly and thought they were so good. I really liked each one of them and how they represented such different people. I feel like a short story is such an interesting genre that I don't read enough of, but every time I do, I am so engaged and interested and wish I read more of them. I don't have anything specific to say about any of the specific stories, but it was definitely worth the read. 

A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders

This book sounds so weird and not interesting at all, but I'd heard several good reviews from readers I trust. And when Austin said he loved it, I moved it to the top of my list and checked it out from the library immediately to read it. Saunders takes seven different Russian short stories and includes them in the book, then basically dissects them and discusses how they wrote what they did and why they wrote them in the way they did and how we can learn how to write and read better from their writing. It was basically like taking a writing class from him (and he said in the introduction that this book does stem from a class he teachers on the Russian writers). And I loved it. I feel like if I ever do want to write something, I will have to go back and re-read this, because it was so insightful and well-done on all of the things that these four Russian writers managed to do in their short stories. While I didn't feel as moved or as delighted by all of the short stories themselves as Saunders is, I did really enjoy the whole experience of reading the stories with his commentary and discussion. (This is why I loved literature classes in college--I get so much more out of reading stories and books with outside help and intentional reading! I need more of this!)

Drown by Junot Diaz

I enjoyed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and the audiobook was combined with Diaz's short story collection--like, it literally began as soon as the novel was finished. So I figured I would just keep listening and read his short story collection. It had a really similar feel to the novel, but felt a little more depressing and hopeless. Every story was sad and heart-wrenching in some way. I thought it was kind of more of the same as Oscar Wao, but I didn't enjoy it as much. I hate the way all of the women are viewed and treated throughout both books. 

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

I absolutely loved these stories written by Jhumpa Lahiri. I've wanted to read more of her works for years and years, and I'm happy that I've now read all three of her books that I'd heard of. I felt so invested in all of her characters and stories, particularly the trio of stories at the end of this collection that were all linked about how a boy and a girl met each other when they were young and how they grew up and met each other again. I feel so much more knowledgeable about Indian culture and I feel as though I've lived the life of an immigrant to the United States. I would say more but I listened to this a few weeks ago now, and I'm glad to just be writing about it. 

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

I read this in college--I'm not sure if it was for a class or just because I was wanting to read Pulitzers more then too--and remember loving it. But then I am pretty sure I lost my copy or someone took it and never gave it back, and I re-bought it several times until I had three copies this weekend, haha! I gave two of them away at my two book club Christmas parties this week, and finished my own copy tonight. It was just as good as I remember. It's a collection of short stories by an Indian-American author and each one is about both of those countries and people navigating between them. Several are set fully in India and not involving any Americans (but I felt like those were my least favorite), but I loved the ones where Indians have moved to America and are adjusting to their new lives in America and the new culture here. I love how Lahiri really helped me feel like I was one of them and like I understood what it was like to move to America from India and to lose all my family and to have everything change so drastically. It says on the back of the book that "Lahiri speaks with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner," and that's exactly how I felt. My favorite story might have been "The Third and Final Continent" about a man who moves to America for the first time, and how he comes to know his wife after their brief arranged marriage, and also "Interpreter of Maladies," which I remembered from reading the last time. I really loved this book--it rekindled my love of short stories.

Uncommon Type: Some Stories by Tom Hanks

I'm pretty impressed by Tom Hanks' writing chops in this book. These stories were all really well-done. They all seemed to incorporate a typewriter somewhere in the story, which is where the title comes from, I guess. The ones I really loved were about the extremely type-A personality Anna dating a much less interesting guy and keeping him on his toes, a guy who goes viral by bowling six perfect games in a row, a time travel story about a guy who goes back in time and falls in love with a woman in the 1930s.

Many of them stood out and were hilarious or touching. I really enjoyed listening to them, especially since Tom Hanks himself read them. But I don't have the brainpower or time right now to write too much more about it, even though I did have other thoughts about them at the time.

Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

I listened to My Name is Lucy Barton a few months ago, and it was an interesting book. Interesting in that I didn't love it, but I got invested in it, and I couldn't seem to stop thinking about it afterwards. It was very well-written and beautiful, and very hard to listen to at the same time because of how honest and real it was. Anyway, I decided to listen to the sequel, which is not really a sequel because it doesn't continue what you read about in the first one, but it is about many of the same people you hear about in the first one. Lucy Barton grew up in a tiny rural town in Illinois, and that is where we find our characters in Anything is Possible, which is a set of short stories all kind of related to each other because they all revolve around Lucy Barton. Each one is about a different person, and each of these people knows her or knew her and each of their stories touch on her in some way, and each of the stories are so much more revealing and eye-opening than you expect it to be. It seemed like each person had a lot of shame and big secrets, bigger than you'd expect from people who are just like the ones you know. Some of the stories were so shocking or sad in how they revealed themselves, and they all made me feel for the person, fictional though they may be. It made me think of the quote about how you should be kind because you never know what loads other people are carrying. I am glad to have listened to it and I think I will be thinking about it later afterwards, like I did with Lucy Barton.

I have meant to read more of Strout's work for years (specifically Olive Kitteridge, since it's the Pulitzer Prize winner) and I hope I can get around to it soon. It sounds like it's a lot like this one (at least in format, short stories) and I would be very interested in it.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modern Bestiary by David Sedaris

I've never read (or listened to) anything by David Sedaris, but I've always heard of him being very funny and I decided to finally start checking out some of his stuff on audio. This one was only 3 hours long so I gave it the first priority (I love books I can get through in only a weekend of listening while doing chores!), and it was a moderately fun listen. It's a collection of short stories, each one about different animals who are completely anthropomorphized, so much so that they sound like gangsters from the Bronx or breathless young wives with completely distinctive personalities. Sedaris tells stories that could definitely be about actual people, but making them about animals instead gives him an advantage in that we already have associations with certain animals and characteristics in our minds, like skunks are smelly and rabbits are fast and purebred dogs are snobby, and he is able to use those characteristics for comedic effect by either making his animal characters have or not have those expected characteristics. The stories were sometimes funny, sometimes depressing (in a comedic way) but they all got me thinking and seemed like they could be true to life in a way--like I could imagine people acting like those animals were. I think my favorite story was about the owl who would try to interrogate his prey into getting them to tell him something new that he could learn, and who ends up making friends with a hippo and a gerbil through his adventures (although there was a somewhat gross image about some parasites living in the hippo's rear end, but it wasn't written about crudely in that story). I like Sedaris's writing style (although sometimes it was a little more crude than I prefer, but not usually) and am interested to read or listen to more of his stuff.

Book #130: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I don't know that I've read this book (novella? it's really short, so not even sure what it qualifies as) more than once in my life. I really enjoyed reading through this this December. I of course remembered the story, but I liked finding the surprisingly funny parts in the written version. I loved the overall message, which does feel very poignant while reading it. The thing that really stuck out to me while reading this, which I don't think much about when watching any of the many versions I've seen, is how humble and humbled Scrooge must have been to actually make such a drastic change in his life. Even after seeing such a blatant and didactic vision as he did, it would have still been difficult to upend your life so completely, and potentially embarrassing to show yourself to everyone who has known you for decades. Even though it was a positive change he was making, it still said in the book that "people laughed at him." I like how he didn't care and still did what he knew now was right. It's such an encouraging story with the potential for change. Maybe next year I'll read some of the other Christmas-y Dickens stories that go along with it--I was planning to but with our trips it just didn't happen.

Book #110: One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B. J. Novak

I was in need of an audiobook to fill some time in between Armand Gamache books (the library doesn't have an audiobook copy of the fifth book, so I just have to get around to reading the e-book copy I currently have checked out), and this one was available, and it was pretty short. I kind of thought this was going to be a memoir-ish type book, because that's basically what you always get from actors, but this was actually a collection of short (some, very very short) stories that Novak wrote. It was actually a very fun book to listen to on audio, because he is a great reader and he had plenty of other famous friends sub in and help do the other voices in his stories, including lots of favorites from The Office, like Jenna Fischer, Mindy Kaling, and Rainn Wilson. I thought some of the stories were very funny and well done, like the blind date between the woman and the African warlord, the rematch between the tortoise and the hare (the opening story, which was funny and thoughtful), and the one about the sex robot who became sentient and fell in love with the person who bought her. But some were really dumb and too short. There were over sixty stories, and many of them were one page or less, which makes you wonder why the editors didn't make him cut at least a few of those and expand some of the other stories. I feel like the less-than-one-page stories are more just funny than actually bringing anything to the table, and having like 30 of them in the book just took down the quality of the whole book, I thought. But overall, it was a funny read/listen, and a few of them even made me think too.

Book #46: Tales of Beedle the Bard by J. K. Rowling

Since I just got off this Harry Potter kick (and Tommy and I are watching the movies again, on the rare nights we're both home and available), I thought it would be fun to check this book out. It's super short--seriously took about an hour to read. It's a collection of children's fairy tales for the magical world, the most important of which is The Tale of the Three Brothers, as any Harry Potter reader knows. There are only about six stories in the book, but each story has some commentary about it, written theoretically by Albus Dumbledore. The commentary was the most entertaining part, with lots of interesting information about the wizarding world. It was a cute book.

Book #21: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

I picked this book up off our shelves simply because it was a) super short and b) by Tolstoy, and decided I'd take a whack at it. It's a novella, less than 100 pages, which makes it decidedly easier to swallow than War and Peace, for example. I liked that this felt like serious reading but that it only took maybe an hour and a half to finish it, instead of three months' worth of work.

This book is Tolstoy's look at death--Ivan Ilyich Golovin falls ill with an obviously terminal disease and we get to look inside his mind and see what he thinks about as he comes to dealing with his impending doom and slowly coming to terms with it. (Although I wouldn't say he ever really "comes to terms" with death itself.) Ivan Ilyich expresses some probably universal feelings about the impossibility of death for him and wondering why he has to go through this, etc., and it caused some introspection as to how I would feel if I were in his same position.

Here's the part I liked the most, that seemed especially applicable to me (and probably everyone): "The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: 'Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,' had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius – man in the abstract – was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and will all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of?... 'Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it's altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.' Such was his feeling" (78). Yes--don't we all think that way, until we've had enough experience with loved ones or health scares ourselves to believe otherwise?

For the record, I did think a bit about being in his same position--terminally ill, heading towards death. How would I feel? And I think probably a lot the same, at first, but the difference between Ivan Ilyich and me is that I am not isolated or alienated from my family or loved ones, and I believe in God and in a very happy afterlife. This is a very obvious statement, but that framing makes all the difference. That wouldn't take the bitterness of that experience away, but I think understanding the gospel would lessen it and help you to get past it quicker, and would put you in a place where you would be surrounded by people who really did care and want to help you (unlike Ivan Ilyich). Ivan Ilyich realizes right at the very end of his life that he had been living his life all wrong--there was no life for him to even stay alive for because he had been selfish and self-serving for most of his life. That's something I like about Tolstoy--he seems to come to conclusions through his characters' thoughts and self-seeking (like with Levin in Anna Karenina) that I believe in and agree with wholeheartedly, and he does it in the most sincere way.

Book #79: The New Kings of Nonfiction edited by Ira Glass

This book is a collection of nonfiction essays that editor Ira Glass read and enjoyed over the years and eventually brought together to be published in one book. Glass is the producer of the NPR show "This American Life" (which is also a podcast that Tommy listens to) and from what I gather, these essays are somewhat similar in style to that radio show. Glass's introduction laments that there isn't a  snappy name for this type of writing; some people apparently call it "literary non-fiction," but he says that that's too stuffy and boring for what it really is. What it really is is really great storytelling--using real facts and real live people and real things that happened in real life, as much as real things can happen and be described and told in a story. Each of the essays is really fascinating: one about a fourteen-year-old kid who got called up by the SEC for "manipulating the stock market" (because he was doing what actual stockbrokers do every day), one about Saddam Hussein and what he was really like (written back when he was alive), one where the author goes and befriends and becomes a part of a gang of marauding and vandalizing soccer fans in Britain, one about the man behind a violently right-wing talk radio show and how he and the show worked, and about ten more. This book went right up my nonfiction alley.

Book #22: Thirteen Clues for Miss Marple by Agatha Christie

Quick, easy, FUN. There's not much else to say about Agatha Christie books, except that I can't help loving them. Even when Miss Marple solves everything without any clues and seemingly always knows everything for no reason. I thought the Miss Marple novel that I read was more believable than all of these short stories. But still a perfect read for an evening when your husband is gone all night, and not creepy at all.

Fun fact: It might be good for you to know that Miss Marple lives in St. Mary Mead. I was asked this in a trivia game we were playing ("What is the name of the small town that Agatha Christie's heroine Miss Marple lives in?") and I actually GOT IT RIGHT because I'd just read the other Miss Marple book (last year). Tommy was amazed and disappointed that I beat him BOOYAH.