Reviewed: Everything I Read in September
The big September development in my house arrived in the form of several very large IKEA boxes. Inside were four matching bookcases: beautiful, surprisingly sturdy, and quickly filled with the books that make up my home library.
I’ve been told that you can’t claim to own a library until you’ve reached 1,000 books, but I suspect that’s just an arbitrary number someone assigned once, everyone shrugged and said, “Sure, why not?” and then began spreading the word.
Recently, I culled quite a few books, so my number shrank. According to my Book Buddy app, I’m sitting at 770, though that includes physical books as well as Kindle editions and audiobooks.
The satisfying thing about my home library as it stands now is that nearly every single book is there for a good reason. When I peruse my shelves, I’m delighted by what I see: classics, my favorite books of all time, gifts from people I love, books I shared with my precious book club friends, books that once belonged to my great-grandma, and stories my husband loves. I'm not interested in packing my shelves with any old books--I want them to contain great books, and I think mine is a good collection.
We have plans to build out the bookcases and give them the “built-in” look so many people have created with this particular IKEA setup—our fall project. Jeff is designing ours to fit the way we actually use the space, with a heavy-duty pull-out shelf for his 3D printer and a drawer near my reading nook for highlighters, journals, and bookmarks. Places for these very important things to call home.
I’ll post photos once the project is finished.
For now, here’s the list of books I read in September. I had a good reading month! Even the books that I didn't love were worthwhile and taught me things.
Published in 1936, this poetry collection once belonged to my Great-Grandma and was given to me as a teenager. My Grandma loved everyday poetry—the kind that spoke in plain language about ordinary things.
I decided to read this collection over the summer in honor of America's 250th birthday and to remind myself of the country we once were. I think that most of us are fundamentally similar to those who lived in the America of old. But the loudest voices tend to reach the most ears, and sometimes that can skew our perception of who we are collectively.
Reading this collection made me so proud to be an American. There was something wonderful about spending time with poems that captured ordinary American life: relationships, patriotism, joys, sorrows, and the things people hold dear.
This kind of poetry always makes me feel less alone in the world. It reminds me that the cries of my heart are the same ones that have echoed through countless other hearts for generations. Most of these poems were written more than a hundred years ago, and yet their words echo my own lived experience.
I think that's what warmed my heart most about this collection. Though the poems span the whole of human experience—including its heartbreaks and tragedies—they remind me that, for all the ways the world has changed, people really haven't changed all that much.
Finally! I read it! And I liked it! This is a short book, and it's been sitting on my shelf for quite a while, so I'm not sure why it took me so long.
At any rate, True Grit is about Mattie Ross, a remarkable 14-year-old girl who grew up on her family's farm in Arkansas. When her father is murdered by one of his own hired hands while away selling livestock, Mattie is sent to retrieve his body. Furious, she makes arrangements to send her father home but decides she won't be returning with him. Instead, Mattie sets out on a mission to find the man who betrayed her father and bring him to justice. She seeks out and hires a U.S. Marshal named Rooster Cogburn to track down the scoundrel and devises a plan to tag along.
Owen Meany and John Wheelwright are unlikely childhood friends. Owen is an unusual boy—physically, mentally, and spiritually. Physically, he is remarkably small and has a raspy, high-pitched voice that attracts attention everywhere he goes. Mentally, he seems more mature than most adults, possessing an uncommon understanding of human nature. And spiritually? Well, Owen is a no-nonsense, sometimes-irreverent believer in God.
I say sometimes irreverent because Owen calls life in balls and strikes, and that means pointing out the hypocrisy and false motives that are so often tolerated in our faith communities. He doesn't care that he's just a kid. He's gonna call it like he sees it.
One day, while Owen and John are playing baseball, Owen makes a bat-to-ball connection that changes both of their lives forever. The ball flies straight toward the bleachers and strikes John's mother in the temple, killing her. From that day forward, Owen considers it one of his life's unspoken missions to love and protect John, almost as a parent would. And as the story unfolds, we begin to see just how deep Owen's influence and devotion really go.
The story spans 1942 to 1987 and unfolds in a Forrest Gump-like fashion, full of seemingly insignificant moments that turn out to be anything but. We watch the boys grow up, navigate friendships, faith, family, and all the awkwardness and mischief of adolescence (Warning: these are portrayed as real, worldly boys with not much parental supervision, plus there are some of the more unsavory things you might expect from boys attending private religious schools). All the while, these little moments are quietly weaving themselves into something much bigger.
I highlighted whole pages of this book and read passages aloud to my family. Here's a snippet of Owen's take on our inability to earn God's love:
"It's true that the disciples are stupid--they never understand what Jesus means, they're a bunch of bunglers, they don't believe in God as much as they want to believe, and they even betray Jesus. The point is, God doesn't love us because we're smart or because we're good. We're stupid and we're bad and God loves us anyway."
I couldn't help myself with the highlighter while reading. In another passage, Owen got me considering Marilyn Monroe's death in a new light:
"She was just like our whole country--not quite young anymore, but not old either; a little breathless, very beautiful, maybe a little stupid, maybe a lot smarter than she seemed. And she was looking for something--I think she wanted to be good."
He goes on to give a compelling argument to back up that statement. So this book gave me a lot of cud to chew.
This is a story that is so much more than the sum of its parts. I loved it. For me, it gets five stars, without hesitation. But I wouldn't recommend it to everyone.
It's very raw in places, and the people in it behave like, well, people. They can be vulgar and are flawed, sometimes terribly so. If you need likable characters, tidy resolutions, or a happy ending with a bow tying up the loose ends, this probably isn't the book for you.
But if you can tolerate reading about some bad behavior, and you love classic Americana, coming-of-age stories, or the movie Forrest Gump, I think you might love this one as much as I did. I listened to the audio as I read and highly recommend it, especially because it keeps you from forgetting Owen's unique voice, which is a much-discussed topic in the story.
*This book has many content warnings. I recommend looking into these before reading.
The Bright Years is a heartbreaking story that explores the effects of addiction on an otherwise ordinary, loving American family. Ryan and Lily aren't unusual people. They're just two young adults trying to navigate adulthood and find their way in the world. Like most of us, they each carry some baggage from childhood, but it seems they've managed to overcome the disadvantages of their individual upbringings.
They fall in love, get married, and start a family. And then we watch, in painful slow motion, as they struggle to outrun their pasts, which have come to call.
It's a plot-heavy book that turned out to be a surprisingly easy read. I really liked The Bright Years, even though there were a few aspects of the story that I didn't love.
The Feast was our book club pick for September, so I got to read it a second time. I also listened to the Close Reads podcast episodes again, which I think are some of my favorites to date.
Let me tell you, I love this book.
I love it.
Love.
It.
In the summer of 1947, in the wake of WWII, we learn straight away that there has been an accident in a small town on the Cornish coast. A cliff has broken off and fallen into the ocean—the very cliff on which the Pendizack Manor Hotel stood, where a group of strangers had recently arrived for a holiday. We aren't told who lived and who died, but instead are taken back to the week before the accident occurred.
We meet each of the hotel's guests and learn that, while they have different reasons for taking a holiday, all have arrived hoping for a little rest and relaxation by the sea.
The thing about a house-turned-hotel is that it's a rather intimate setting, with shared meals and living spaces. To get along, people have to agree on things like music, temperature, conversation topics, and rules. The trouble is that strangers of vastly different ages, classes, religions, and walks of life aren't especially likely to do that.
So that's the setup. But what I really want to talk about is the real story.
You see, The Feast is an allegory in which seven of the characters each represent one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and they do their jobs well!
As the story progresses, a few things become clear:
First, sin destroys people. It hurts those around the sinner as well as the sinner themselves, skewing perspectives in ways you might not expect or even identify as a side-effect of that particular sin. That was very thought-provoking for me.
Second, sin doesn't simply appear one day, fully formed, and it certainly never remains stagnant.
And third, it is possible to be freed from the grip of sin.
One of the reasons I read is to understand, so books like this are golden to me. Having read The Feast twice now, I am in awe of Margaret Kennedy's genius. I don't say that lightly. She writes with wisdom, nuance, and such care to avoid stereotypes and caricatures. I can't help but wonder how much her own experience and understanding of human nature informed her writing. How else could she have given these characters such believable motivations and then portrayed them in ways that are so clever, perceptive, and even witty?
I will say, I don't think everyone in my book club loved this one. I got the impression that some found it depressing to spend so much time immersed in all the "yuck" that sin creates. I get that. On its face, it's a pretty dismal picture.
But for me, the underlying story is what makes this so compelling. I find these stories deeply relatable. Again and again, I caught myself thinking, "Yes! That's exactly right!" as Kennedy gave words to the things people think and feel but know better than to say aloud.
And I think that's what I love most about The Feast. It doesn't just tell a good story. It tells the truth--or at least some of the truth--about human nature, and the patterns of sin that permeate our fallen world.
Okay, so this one was an unusual reading experience for me.
I didn't like this book for about the first 40%, and I really wanted to DNF it. It's a quiet story and sometimes I like that, but in this case I just found it boring. Beautiful writing, but a boring story. I even opened my library app one time, fully intending to hit that "return book" button, but stopped myself. I'd waited so long to read it, and so many people were raving about it. Did I really want to spend the rest of my life wondering what everyone saw in this book?
Apparently not. So I kept reading.
And I'm glad I did.
Somewhere around the halfway mark, things picked up, and all that groundwork O'Farrell had been laying finally began to pay off. And this is where I think she deserves credit, because I didn't believe I could become interested in these characters. But somehow, almost without my noticing, she took everything that had come before and used it to make me completely invested in the lives of this family.
As for the story itself, Land takes place in Ireland in 1865, not long after the Great Famine. Tomás and his ten year-old son, Liam, are working to survey and map the Irish countryside, with Tomás determined to preserve a record of the destruction left behind by the famine.
But after a strange encounter in a copse, Tomás changes rapidly. He begins behaving strangely, seemingly unable to see that he is frightening his family. They assume he's contracted some kind of illness, and after a time life settles back into something resembling normal. But a series of events upends the family once again, and much of the remainder of the novel follows the children as they grow up, navigate adolescence, and eventually venture out into the world to make lives of their own.
This book reads like North Woods and The Overstory. There's the magical realism, the quiet, almost documentary-style of narration, the natural world presented almost as a character itself, and the way the story spans across a lot of time. I actually think this is a big part of why this story felt stagnant to me at first. Because I read the other two books, the devices she was using felt a little rusty to me.
Ultimately, I'm glad I didn't hit that return button but I probably won't be reading this one again.
This observation in Great Expectations about Miss Havisham, who withdrew from the world after suffering a devastating heartbreak. It's food for thought! Opening up to joy means opening up to pain. That's just the facts, folks.
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