Author: vicky

I’m doing a shitty job of hitting my goal of writing weekly blog posts. We’re 12 weeks into the new year and I’ve only written eight posts (including this one) so I’m at 67%, which is like a D+. Gotta step up my game.

Anyway, I may not have been writing but I have been reading. I’ve finished 21 books so far this year! And even better than reading a lot, the ones I’ve been finding have all almost magically been great books. Here are some of the highlights:

• The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantu: My book club decided to read this one, or I never would have picked it up. And I’m so glad we did because it’s fantastic. It’s a memoir written by a very bright young man who is obsessed with the US-Mexico border and becomes a border agent. It’s very good. There’s some controversy around but because apparently it doesn’t reflect everyone’s experience with immigration, but how could it? The criticism is wasted, I think, because this is a thoughtful look into a problem I think lots of us have opinions about with very little actual experience.
• An American Marriage by Tayari Jones: This is Oprah’s latest pick for her newly revived book club and a very solid novel, telling the story of a wrongfully imprisoned man and the struggles he and his wife go through as a result. This is much more about the human reactions of two well-intentioned people than it is about big issues like race and politics, but of course those come into play as well. It reminded me a lot of Toni Morrison’s Jazz, one of my favorites.
• The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah: This is one of those books that I read and thought, “Hmm, that was a very nice novel,” but didn’t really rate it very highly at the moment I finished. It has however, really stuck in my head, and I find myself thinking about it and referring to it often in the weeks since I read it. It’s an intriguing story of a girl growing up in the shadow of her father’s uncontrollable anger, and is incredibly evocative of place — very rural Alaska.
• The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne: Is there a name for a novel that follows a person’s story from birth to death, showing the full arc of their life? That’s one of my favorite types of books, and that’s what this book does for Cyril Avery, born to a 16 year-old unwed woman in post-war Ireland and eventually is a gay man living through the AIDS crisis in NYC. It’s beautiful, and heart-wrenching, and very reminiscent of the best John Irving novels.
• The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas: This was the first book I read in 2018 and it was PHENOMENAL. Beautifully written story on a difficult but important topic — the 16 year old African-American narrator’s friend is shot and killed by a white police officer. Thomas does a great job getting a wide range of perspectives and does an amazing job tackling a difficult subject in a voice targeted to young adults.

PS: Speaking of young adults, don’t those kids from the Parkland Florida shooting just inspire the shit out of you? Everytime I see Emma Gonzalez speak I get a lump in my throat. It makes me think of this great Tweet I saw a few weeks ago: I’m not sure why people are so surprised that the students are rising up — we’ve been feeding them a steady diet of dystopian literature showing teens leading the charge for years. We have told teen girls they are empowered. What, you thought it was fiction? It was preparation. @JenAnsbach (A Douglass College alum, what-what!) That last line just gives me the fucking goosebumps.

My coworkers and I were chatting about books earlier this week and I found myself trying to explain my love of fiction, maybe for the first time ever. I’ve never had to explain this to anyone before. I assumed most people read fiction for fun. Maybe they do. I probably read more fiction than any other category.

I’ve always worked with smart people, and of course smart people come in all shapes and sizes with varied interests and concerns. Some smart people like business books, some like romance novels. But the people I work with now are, without exception, much more intellectual than I’m used to. There is no one on my team who will admit to reading mysteries on a cozy weeknight; they’re all reading about cognitive science or global economics.

So over beers my coworker is telling me about the book he’s reading now, Violence & Social Order: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. I could tell he was really enjoying learning from it and hadn’t just name-dropped it to sound impressive or superior. He was meeting a woman for a date the next evening and I had suggested he bring her a book as a way of starting a good conversation. When he told me what it was he was reading though I changed my mind. (I’m no expert in dating but starting off with a book about violence is probably not a great way to get laid. But I suppose I could be wrong. Who knows what those crazy millennials are into?)

I, meanwhile, was loving The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne. A great thick multi-decade novel about the life of a man called Cyril Avery, set mostly in Ireland. The story opens with his 16 year-old pregnant mother being exiled from the church and her family and follows Cyril as he grows and experiences many different types of love and loss. “Maybe there are no villains in my mother’s story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing.” SO. GOOD. It’s definitely the best book I’ve read so far this year and I’ve been reading some great ones (I also loved The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui).

Anyway, my coworker was explaining that the thing he liked about his book on violence and social order was that the author created a clear framework and helped him understand the impact of one on the other. I started a friendly little argument with him about it — how could you trust this author? Don’t you feel like you need to read another book with a different perspective in order to know whether the first guy knows what he’s talking about? Arguing with him made me realize that one of the reasons I love fiction is that you very rarely get the perspective of just one person — it was written by a single person, of course, but in order to make the story work, it’s imperative that other characters have different perspectives. And when it’s done well — like in The Heart’s Invisible Furies — you end up with a fuller and more nuanced view of the world. I’m not gay, I don’t live in Ireland, and my mother was much older than 16 when she had me. I have literally nothing in common with Cyril Avery. But after reading his fictional story I feel like I know something about what a person like him might have experienced. I know just a little bit about what it’s like to be cast out of your family and church, about what it might be like to love parents who don’t understand children, what it might have been like to be in love with someone you could never tell.

To be clear, I try to never judge what anyone’s reading. What you read is your business, and you don’t need to justify it to anyone. It doesn’t make you a better or smarter person to read one thing over another. It’s just a matter of personal taste. And I’m glad my friend is reading about violence because lord knows we could use some people to figure out how to solve it. My point is just that sometimes getting into a friendly argument with someone who sees things differently than you helps you better understand why you love the things you love. And I unabashedly love fiction.

I love to talk about books. When it was my job I used to talk about books all day every day. Now that I don’t have that luxury I try to find other ways to scratch that itch.

Of course there’s this blog, where I can talk to Elise and to the rest of you about what I’m reading. It’s awesome and I love it but it’s not enough.

I’m in a book club (shout out to Quitters Club Book Club!) and I love it but we only meet once a month and talk about one book at a time. That’s not enough.

There’s also Goodreads, where I can see a steady trickle of what my friends are reading and rate and review my own stuff. I am a superfan of the Goodreads Reading Challenge and obsessively track what I’ve been reading. I also try to write a review of each book I read. A friend inspired me to try to write 25 word book reviews — long enough to be interesting, short enough to keep a reader’s interest. It’s fun but also not enough.

There’s also Round Robin Reading, a book sharing thing I do with one or two friends. Each of us buys a hardcover book that the others either want to read or are curious about. You open the book to the first page and write your name and the start date. Then you read it and you mark the hell out of it. You talk to your friends as though they’re right there with you. You underline passages, make notes about what the text says, make notes that have nothing to do with the text, draw smiley faces, exclamation points, hearts. You dog-ear and add post-it notes. Then you pass the book to the next person for them to do the same. And so on. Eventually the book makes its way back to the original owner and that person has a beautiful, well-read and marked-up object that is kind of a self-contained book club, sitting right there on your shelf whenever you might want to dip into it. It works best if each person sticks to one writing implement so you can tell who wrote what — maybe I’ll use a blue pen and the second reader will use a pencil and the third, a green marker. [Obviously this doesn’t work if you are one of those people who think books are sacred objects and need to be preserved in plastic — that’s not my thing, but you know, you be you. I like my books marked up and well-loved.]

Another option is to pick a book to work through with a bunch of people, sort of a one-time-only book club. My team at work is awesome, and all four of us are in places where we’re thinking about what comes next, whether it’s a new project or a new job entirely. We all read Do More Great Work and for a month we met every week over breakfast to discuss and do the exercises together. It was great, and I definitely got more out of it than I would have alone.

But it’s still not enough.

(There might be something wrong with me.)