Wanderlust at home: November books

November was so full I don’t know how I read anything! Now the school book fair is over (smashing success), the kitty is healthy, the new car is purchased, the house guests are gone, and the neighborhood party complete (another success).  We have a somewhat busy December but I am relaxing big time.  Nothing seems to be as harried as last month.  I plan to wholly enjoy my daughter’s birthday, watching her open Chanukah gifts, and our travel experiences together.

I didn’t plan it at all, but in compiling these reviews I notice that many of these books are set elsewhere.  My Wish List takes place in a small French town.  Nick Kristoff’s research took him all over the globe.  Driving Hungry is set first in Buenos Aires, then New York City, and finally Berlin. Paris, He Said is rather obvious.  And Station Eleven is it’s own geography entirely.

I do love traveling more than just about anything, besides reading about it.  Mr. B and I have a long list of adventures to undertake.  Hmm.

My Wish List: A Novel by Gregoire Delacourt

What if you won enough money to change your life? Would you do what this storyteller does and not tell anyone and not change anything? What an interesting concept! Out of fear that her life would change drastically in a downward direction, she keeps mum but her husband finds out anyway…

“I reread the list of what I need, and it strikes me that wealth means being able to buy everything on it all at once, from the potato peeler to the flat-screen TV, by way of the coat from Caroll’s and the nonslip mat for the bath. Go home with everything on the list, destroy the list and tell myself: Right, there we are, there’s nothing else I need. All I have left from now on are wishes. Only wishes. But that never happens. Because our needs are our little daily dreams. The little things to be done that project us into tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the future; trivial things that we plan to buy next week, allowing us to think that next week we’ll still be alive. It’s the need for a nonslip bath mat that keeps us going. Or for a couscous steamer. A potato peeler. So we stagger our purchases. We program the places where we’ll go for them. Sometimes we draw comparisons. An expensive iron versus a cheaper iron. We fill our cupboards slowly, our drawers one by one. You can spend your life filling a house, and when it’s full you break things so that you can replace them and have something to do the next day. You can even go so far as to break up a relationship in order to project yourself into another story, another future, another house.”

A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

“We crave meaning and purpose in life, and one way to find it is to connect to a cause larger than ourselves. This book is about innovators who are using research, evidence-based strategies, and brilliant ideas of their own to prevent violence, improve health, boost education, and spread opportunity at home and around the world—and to suggest to the rest of us specific ways in which we too can make a difference in the world.”

How can we do a better job of making a difference with our efforts and philanthropy? I read this book in preparation for attending an event where Kristof and his wife were speaking about their work around the world and some of the researchers and programs they have been part of.  In their first book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, they addressed how the repression of women and girls around the world hinders families and whole economies.  Now they take it further to look at other roadblocks to success and how we can help people overcome them.

It’s a fascinating look at some simple ideas and how extraordinary change comes about. The importance of early intervention and education cannot be overstated.  Highly recommend.

Driving Hungry: A Memoir by Layne Mosler

Thank you to Janet for this recommendation!

“We’re so focused on where we’re coming from and where we’re going,” I told him, “on getting from A to B. Most of the time we’re not paying any attention to what happens between A and B. On a taxi adventure, you have to pay attention. It’s all about the in-between.”

A three-city travel memoir about love, adventure, and discovering what’s most important. Mosler’s descriptive words bring the flavors she experiences front and center and invoked a wanderlust in me! I’ve never been to Buenos Aires or Berlin and they are now on my list.

“It had taken me a while, but I was finally realizing that affinity with a city was not about aesthetics (or pace, or cosmopolitanism, or lack thereof). It was about the way a place made you feel, or, more precisely, what it elicited from you. Just like a person, I thought. Every person brings out something different in us. But how often did a person, or a place, encourage you—better yet, implore you—to come as you were?”

Sexy Mamas: Keeping Your Sex Life Alive While Raising Kids by Anne Semans, Cathy Winks

Body image.  Double standards.  Identity shift. Media images.  Time.  Hormones.  Confidence.  There is so much that goes into our self-image when we become mothers.  Since becoming a mom, I am so much more in awe of and comfortable in my body.  I don’t have nearly as many hangups as I used to.  I turned to this book for it’s tips, stories, and practical information on juggling schedules and kids and still having an intimate relationship.  This is an excellent and encouraging book.

The authors write, “Motherhood is also an amazing opportunity to create a richer and more fully integrated self-image. Many women discover that they now feel more whole, and have a greater appreciation for the spirituality inherent in sexuality.”

“Every woman’s self-image gets an overhauling in the transition to motherhood, and sexuality is just one of the aspects of your identity that is temporarily dismantled. It takes a while to complete a transformation that allows you to feel true to yourself; in fact, it’s an ongoing process.”

Paris, He Said by Christine Sneed

A young artist in Manhattan is invited by her art gallery owner/lover to move to Paris and live with him… an offer too romantic to refuse.  But as the story unfolds, we learn that it isn’t as perfect as it sounds at first.  When you actually get what you’ve always wanted…

“I think it’s true that the people we open ourselves up to, whether as friends or as lovers—we choose these people with some calculation, conscious or not. Maybe they dress well and seem delighted by life all the time, things we wish we did too; maybe they are wealthy and will be generous materially with us because we are poorer; maybe they are beautiful and make us look closer to beautiful when we are with them, smiling and laughing too. Though sometimes these hopes do not work out so well; their wealth and beauty might underscore our relative poverty and plainness. We end up resenting them for not making us happier, for not making us look better, but this seems such a cynical way to view the world and how we interact with each other.”

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

I have no idea how I came to this one.  It’s different for me to read sci fi.  This is a apocalypse collection of interlocking stories that surprised me in it’s beauty.  It’s remarkably humbling how quickly things in society could fall apart.  How would we adjust? Fascinating!

“On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is.  We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all.  There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.  No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports.  Cars are stranded.  Airplanes cannot fly.  Trucks remain at their points of origin.  Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close.  Businesses are locked and then looted.  No  one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines.  Given was standing by the window when the lights went out.”

On Clark’s Museum of Civilization:

“There seemed to be a limitless number of objects in the world that had no practical use but that people wanted to preserve: cell phones with their delicate buttons, iPads, Tyler’s Nintendo console, a selection of laptops.  There were a number of impractical shoes, stilettos mostly, beautiful and strange.  There were three car engines in a row, cleaned and polished, a motorcycle composed mostly of gleaming chrome.  Traders brought things for Clark sometimes, objects of no real value that they knew he would like: magazines and newspapers, a stamp collection, coins.  There were the passports or the driver’s licenses or sometimes the credit cards of people who had lived at the airport and then died.”