Farewell to Great New Books

The students are trickling back into Boston and Cambridge. The light is shifting – gently but inexorably – toward fall. And (sniff) I’ve hugged two of my favorite baristas good-bye in the last two weeks.

Change is in the air, as it always is at this time of year. I’m writing this post, belatedly, to tell you about another change: we’ve decided to let the sun set on Great New Books.

My friend Jennifer, the site’s founder and our fearless leader, invited me to be part of the GNB team three summers ago, and I said yes right away. I knew several of the women who wrote reviews for GNB, and I loved its mission: sharing the best new books we could find with the world.

I enjoyed writing my quarterly-ish reviews and reading my colleagues’ writing. I quickly fell in love with the smart, honest, well-read, funny group emails we’d all exchange every week, trading book recommendations and keeping each other updated on our lives. And I eventually took over the site’s Instagram account, which was a fun outlet for the #bookstagram photos I love to snap.

This spring and summer, several of my fellow reviewers decided to step down: new jobs, urgent writing projects and shifting family priorities meant they needed to rearrange, reevaluate. I was thinking of stepping down, myself: I’m also spinning a lot of plates these days. We were approaching the five-year anniversary of GNB, and it felt like the right time to decide: revamp and rev up for the next five years, or let it go?

We decided, as you know by now, to let it go. It was a bittersweet decision: I love books and I love community, and GNB has provided a lot of both for me. Those friendships won’t disappear because the site is going quiet, but this is still the end of something that’s meant a lot to me. I’m writing this post to name that: to mark an ending, and to give thanks for what has been.

Check out the final GNB post for the links to our various homes on the Internet, and you can still browse the site for our past book recs of all kinds. And as always, if you have great books to recommend, I’d love to hear.

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Birds Art Life at Great New Books

“I found myself with a broken part,” Kyo Maclear writes in the introduction to her luminous memoir, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation. During a year of dealing with her father’s illness and other challenges, Maclear found herself unmoored. “I had lost the beat,” she writes. Struggling with her responsibilities to her father, husband and sons, she found herself with no words: a troubling state of affairs for a writer.

Searching for a way to relocate herself in the everyday, Maclear met a musician whose passion was urban birdwatching. Birds Art Life chronicles the year they spent watching birds in and around her home city of Toronto.

I’m back at Great New Books today talking about how much I loved Maclear’s quiet, gorgeous memoir, which I picked up at Idlewild Books in NYC this winter. Please join me over there to read the rest of my review.

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A Piece of the World at Great New Books

Immortalized in Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World, in which she crawls across a field toward her family’s Maine farmhouse, Christina Olson lived a quiet, private life. She was hampered and eventually crippled by a degenerative muscular disease, but insisted on living independently (with the help of her brother, Alvaro) for as long as she could. Christina Baker Kline delves into Christina’s story – her razor-sharp mind, her stubborn family, her fierce pride, the degenerative disease that eventually stole her mobility – in her sixth novel, A Piece of the World.

Christina, with keen powers of observation and completely without self-pity, shares the details of her life with readers: geraniums “splayed red like a magician’s handkerchief,” the sweep of the sea beyond the fields of her family’s farm. She relays her family’s seafaring history, her own love for Emily Dickinson’s poetry, the ill-fated love affair with a summer visitor who eventually stopped writing back. And she delights–cautiously at first–in her friendship with Andy, the young artist who finds himself drawn back again and again to the humble Olson farmhouse.

I’m over at Great New Books today, sharing my thoughts on A Piece of the World. Please join me over there to read the rest of my review.

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Best Books of the Year at Great New Books

As many of you know, I’m a regular contributor at Great New Books, where we take turns recommending (what else?) new books we love. Every December, we do a few group posts, in which we round up our favorite books of the year. (Because what’s better than one book rec? Ten book recs!)

Join us over at GNB to read about our favorite new books of 2016 (including mine, above); our favorite lines from books we read this year; and, today, the best books we finally got around to reading in 2016. (Keep an eye out for next week’s post – we’ll share the books we’re looking forward to reading in 2017.)

Happy reading and browsing – and feel free to share your favorites, either here or over at GNB.

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Hidden Figures at Great New Books

Before “computer” came to mean a sophisticated calculating machine, it meant a person: someone with a firm grasp of numbers and their myriad practical applications in the real world. In the 1940s, as the U.S. rapidly expanded its flight program to fight the Axis Powers, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia tapped into a new source of computing power: a group of whip-smart, highly educated African American women.

For the next two decades, the “colored computers” applied their mathematical knowledge to solve problems of flight at Langley, first in aviation and eventually in the space race. Margot Lee Shetterly tells the previously unknown story of these women in her first nonfiction book, Hidden Figures.

Sixty years after the narrative of Hidden Figures begins, we are living in fraught times here in the U.S. Many voices are calling for respect, equality and civil discourse while other voices–which often seem louder–are trumpeting hatred, bigotry and violence. I don’t always know how best to add my own (white, privileged) voice to the chorus of the former. But I believe that listening to, and helping tell, the stories of people whose experiences are different from my own is a vital first step.

It’s my turn again at Great New Books today, and I’m raving about the brilliant, bold women of Hidden Figures. Please join me over there to read the rest of my review.

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Lab Girl at Great New Books

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.”

This is one of many wonderful lines from Hope Jahren’s memoir, Lab Girl, which I read this spring. As I walked under budding trees and past flowering bushes, Jahren’s narrative of becoming a botanist, building three successful labs and constructing a life from scratch resonated with me deeply.

Jahren draws wonderful parallels between plants and people, exploring roots, leaves, seeds, flowers and fruit in both the botanical and human realms. She writes about the cyclical nature of growth, the right conditions for flourishing, the ways both plants and humans react to unexpected strain. She never loses sight of the fundamental differences between plants and people, but her elucidation of those differences is also insightful.

I’m over at Great New Books today talking about how much I loved Lab Girl. Please join me over there to read the rest of my review.

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Becoming Wise at Great New Books

“I’m a person who listens for a living. I listen for wisdom, and beauty, and for voices not shouting to be heard.”

These are the opening sentences of Krista Tippett’s luminous memoir, Becoming Wise, which distills the best of what she has heard, and learned, in nearly 15 years of hosting the radio show On Being.

Each week, Tippett interviews a guest about his or her work in a stunning range of fields: from poetry to physics, counseling to yoga to social activism. She has listened to doctors and actors, priests and lawyers, people who are household names and those who work in quiet, unheralded spaces. Becoming Wise introduces us to some of those voices, and lets us listen in as they talk with Tippett about the big questions of what it means to be human.

If you’re a regular reader, chances are you’ve heard me rave about Becoming Wise in recent months. I’m over at Great New Books today, talking about it more fully. Please join me over there to read the rest of my (glowing) review.

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Roots and Sky at Great New Books

What does it mean to come home?

How does a person, or a family, decide to build a home in our frantic, increasingly mobile society? Is it possible to set down genuine roots in a place far from where you grew up? And how is the concept of “home” intertwined with making, and living, a meaningful life?

Christie Purifoy doesn’t answer all these questions in her memoir, Roots and Sky. But she wrestles with them, in honest, lyrical prose.

Roots and Sky is the story of how Christie, her husband, and their four children have made a home at Maplehurst, an old farmhouse in eastern Pennsylvania. That journey, like so many worthwhile ones, has been both more difficult and more beautiful than they imagined.

Like me, Christie is a Texas girl who has traveled far from her childhood home: first to Chicago, then to Florida, then eventually to Maplehurst. I nodded my head as I read her words about travel and movement, about the longing to arrive. She wanted a place where she and her family could set down roots, where they could live into the rhythm of the seasons. At Maplehurst, she found a solid foundation – but quickly realized she had underestimated the work of building it up.

I’m back at Great New Books today talking about how much I loved Roots and Sky. Please join me over there to read the rest of my review.

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Stir at Great New Books

After suffering a brain aneurysm at age 28, Jessica Fechtor found herself mostly physically healed, yet utterly disoriented. Multiple surgeries had left her brain clear of “problem areas,” but also caused the loss of her sense of smell and the sight in her left eye. And while she was “aggressively grateful” to have survived the medical ordeal, Fechtor still yearned to resume the life she loved: her graduate studies at Harvard, her still-new marriage, and the hours she spent in her Cambridge kitchen, cooking and baking for her husband and her friends.

“Getting well means finding your everyday,” Fechtor explains in her gorgeously written memoir, Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home. “I found mine in the kitchen.”

First came clear chicken soup and fresh raspberries, the latter eaten with her fingers in a Vermont hospital bed. Later, she propped herself up in a kitchen chair, watching as her loved ones prepared her favorite meals. Gradually, Fechtor ventured back into the kitchen, rediscovering “the protective powers of kneading, salting, sifting, and stirring, because you can’t be dead and do these things.”

It’s my turn again at Great New Books today, and I’m raving about how much I loved Stir. Please join me over there to read the rest of my review.

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Walk on Earth a Stranger at Great New Books

Leah “Lee” Westfall has a secret: she can sense the presence of gold. Whether it’s a few flakes of gold dust in a riverbed or a nugget hidden under a floorboard, the metal calls to Lee, tugging at her fingers and tingling in her throat.

Since her father fell ill, Lee’s gold sense (as well as her skill with a gun) has allowed her to help provide for her family. But when her beloved parents are both murdered, Lee runs away from her greedy uncle – the only other person who knows her secret. Disguising herself as a boy, Lee joins a wagon train headed for California, where the promise of gold beckons to settlers and opportunists longing to build a new life.

I’ve read and loved my fair share of fantasy novels peopled by witches, wizards, demigods and other magical creatures: books by J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Rick Riordan. But I also love this kind of fantasy: the kind that weaves a glittering thread of magic into a story set in our own world.

In Walk on Earth a Stranger, Rae Carson brings the historical detail of the California Gold Rush to vivid life, tracing Lee’s journey from rural Georgia to Independence, Missouri, and then across the largely uncharted territory of the American West.

It’s my turn to share a recommendation at Great New Books today, and I’m talking about how much I loved Walk on Earth a Stranger. Please join me over there to read the rest of my review.

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