For a fun year-end summary, I tallied the books I’ve read in 2020 and realized that I have read far more nonfiction than fiction books! That is unusual for me, so I made a conscious effort to enjoy some lighter reads this month. The summary and favorites are at the end of this post.
In December, I gave my family haircuts, something I’ve gotten quite good at, surprisingly even at giving myself one. I got addicted to the Xbox game of Ticket to Ride. We had an awesome Chanukah and New Years, did come baking, celebrated two birthdays in grand though solitary style, and went camping. We found a place nearby called Getaway (they are in 11 US cities) that has about 50 cozy little cabins spaced apart in the woods. We had SG’s first campfire, enjoyed the walking trails, and have plans to return for another weekend soon.
The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel
Our camping trip inspired me to read this. The little cabin had a luxurious queen bed, a little table, a cooktop and fridge, and a tiny bathroom. I was wishing I could go alone and stay a week! The two guys who started Getaway were hoping to give people a much-needed sense of disconnecting from technology and modern life for a few days. While there, I started reading a book they wrote about their journey and about society and technology today, but I didn’t finish it. (But… we are going back soon!)
This book is the story of how Knight lived in the woods for 27 years (breaking into nearby cottages and a camp over 1000 times) and how he was finally found, as well as what compels someone to become a hermit. I felt such admiration for him for his honorable way of surviving, his need for solitude, his love of reading, his cleverness and survival skills, and for how he came out of it all. The author visited Knight in jail nine times and felt extremely connected to him.
“For Knight, his camp was the one spot on the planet where he knew he belonged. His existence had been extraordinarily challenging at times, but he’d made it work. So he had remained there as long as he could… He has known something far more profound, and that sense of loss feels unbearable… He will return to the trees, his real home, even if it is just to die.”
“‘I was never lonely,’ said Knight. He was attuned to the completeness of his own presence rather than to the absence of others. Conscious thought was sometimes replaced with a soothing internal humming. ‘Once you taste solitude, you don’t grasp the idea of being alone,’ he said. ‘If you like solitude, you’re never alone.’“
No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality by Michael J. Fox
An enjoyable read. Fox recounts stories from acting from his current perspective of having finally retired. He’s had a rough year (2018) with spinal surgery to remove a tumor, a long rehab, and then a broken arm that sets him back to rehab yet again. He tells about a trip to Bhutan, a family safari to Africa, and other stories and uses them as a means to explain his fears, vulnerability, and sense of belonging.
“I do think that the more unexpected something is, the more there is to learn from it.”
“I don’t want to live like this, but I’ve found a way to accept the fact that I do. For every perilous trip across the room, when my meds are off and my steps are halting and erratic, there are also times when it all slips away. In those moments, like this night out with my family, I feel joy and contentment. In those moments, I have everything I need.”
The Bermondsey Bookshop by Mary Gibson
I loved this book!!! I got it on Chirp for $3.99 and listened to it while diamond painting. 1920s London, orphan girl works at surviving, solving various scandals, and making her way in the world. It’s based on a real bookstore that was meant to be a place for working class people to learn to read and speak properly. I couldn’t stop listening. The characters are quite realistic and likable.
“As the door of the Bermondsey Bookshop closed behind her, Kate stopped to study the sign that swung above it. The painted torch of learning had faded since she’d first seen it, but the legend, “He who runs may read” meant so much more to her now, almost as if the place had given her permission to become someone else, the orange door a portal to another world.”
At Home in Mitford by Jan Karon
I borrowed this from my library on an app called Axis 360. I enjoyed this short read for its simplicity of language and comforting subject matter. We have a narrator, Father Tim, living in a very small town. He has a satisfying relationship with his quirky neighbors but is looking for a deeper life… which of course he gets with the help of a boy, a dog, and a neighbor. Toss in a little mystery, a health challenge, and some connections that Father Tim helps make, and it’s quite a sweet and refreshing read.
“It was nice to have a change of scenery, to get up and sit in someone else’s kitchen and look out someone else’s back door. For another change, he’d rested well and, since it was Saturday, hadn’t set the alarm. Then he had run along Church Hill by the orchards and looked down upon the village in its spring finery. He had felt such a tenderness of heart for the little town tucked so neatly at the foot of the hill that he had stopped to sit on the stone wall.”
To Be A Man: Stories by Nicole Krauss
10 stories set all over the world about how we become who we are and what it means to live a meaningful life. I had some excerpts, but I read this on a library app and they disappeared when the book was returned. Krauss has an original voice, though I remember thinking that her stories here were a little too modern for me.
Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
“We Americans are a patriotic tribe and we tend to wax lyrical about our land of plenty and opportunity… We proudly assert “We’re #1!” and in terms of overall economic and military strength, we are.
“But in other respects, our self-confidence is delusional. Here’s the blunt, harsh truth. America ranks #40 in childhood mortality, according to The Social Progress Index, which is based on research by 3 Nobel Prize-winning economists and covers 146 countries. We rank #32 in internet access, #39 in access to clean drinking water, #50 in personal safety, and #61 in high school enrollment. Somehow, “We’re #61” doesn’t seem so proud a boast.
“Overall The Social Progress Index ranks the US #25 in well-being of citizens, behind all the other members of the G7 as well as significantly poorer countries like Portugal and Slovenia. And America is one of just a handful of countries that have fallen backward. Despite spending more on healthcare than any other country in the world, the US has health outcomes comparable to Ecuador while the US school system is producing results on par with Uzbekistan.”
Stories of personal friends who had rough upbringings and succumbed to drugs or homelessness, and stories of those who did make it out to a productive life. Kristof and WuDunn provide personal and heartbreaking profiles of people who have lives of crime, drugs, obesity, broken families, unemployment, and sometimes early death.
More children die each year from abuse and neglect than from cancer. For every one who dies, thousands are abused or injured… and then we blame the kids when things go wrong. Kristof and WuDunn outline policies and programs that mitigate suffering and provide help for struggling families, like early childhood programs and family planning, all that save public money many times over.
“We have told stories in this book more than explored policy alternatives because we agree that the first step toward better policy is to amend our understanding of people’s struggles so that it is less about indivi irresponsibility and more about our collective irresponsibility in tolerating levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in the rest of the developed world.
“People in other wealthy countries today pay about an extra 10 cents on the dollar in taxes, but in exchange get health insurance, better infrastructure, less poverty, reduced homelessness and (we’d argue) a healthy society.”
Code Name Helene: A Novel by Ariel Lawhon
Based on the true persona of Nancy Wake, WWII spy and resistance fighter. Lawhon notes that there were many female spies in the war, but there were a very few female military leaders. This is a true story, albeit fictionalized when necessary, of one of the most decorated women in the war. It was primarily meant to be a story of her marriage, though there is far more description of her bravery and war friendships. It was suspenseful, excellent and quite hard to put down. Highly recommend. I could not put it down.
“The thing about lipstick, the reason it’s so powerful, is that it is distracting. Men don’t see the flashes of anger in your eyes or your clenched fists when you wear it. They see a woman, not a warrior, and that gives me the advantage. I cannot throw a decent punch or carry a grown man across a battlefield, but I can wear red lipstick as though my life depends on it. And the truth is, these days, it often does.”
A Promised Land by Barack Obama
Well, in general I’d say this was excellent, but far too long and full of clarifications and generous staff resumes and probably written to clear the record. I am a 100% Obama supporter and don’t have anything negative to say about him or the content itself, except that I wasn’t interested in learning so many details. I think he had to write it all though. He did rise above much of the political machinations at play in Washington. I’m glad to have read this, though it’s over 700 pages and only the first half of his memoir of his time in office. (Added bonus: the paper is so soft… I often just enjoyed moving my hand across the page as I read.)
“How useful is it to describe the world as it should be when efforts to achieve that world are bound to fall short? … Was it possible that abstract principles and high-minded ideals were and always would be nothing more than a pretense, a palliative, a way to beat back despair, but no match for the more primal urges that really moved us, so that no matter what we said or did, history was sure to run along its predetermined course, an endless cycle of fear, hunger and conflict, dominance and weakness?“
A couple of my favorite parts were learning about the election from Obama’s perspective, hearing about all the negotiations that happened to pass the Recovery Act during the financial crisis, and his meeting with the Chinese premier to get a UN environmental agreement passed.
Despite the US being the only major country that had not signed the Kyoto treaty, he and a few others were working on a UN agreement on greenhouse gas reduction. Wen refused to agree that China should have to review their emissions. Obama and team crashed a secret meeting (taking place when Wen was scheduled to meet with Obama) in a hotel conference room, and threatened bad PR until he got agreement.
“…there would always be a chasm between what I knew should be done to achieve a better word and what in a day, week, or year I found myself actually able to accomplish.”
The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate
Here I am trying to read something that’s fiction and I find this. It’s been recommended in many different places, yet I found it disappointing. It’s about a girl in the post-Civil War South on a journey to find her lost family, alternating eras in each chapter with a more modern day woman teaching a Mr. Holland’s Opus-type class, struggling to connect with them. She finally engages them in researching stories just like the girl’s. Predictable, includes unnecessary details, white rescues black storyline, and just not very interesting. I forced myself to finish it.
“Everything about that place is meant to provide some sort of immortality here on earth. And yet the Gossetts of old have not altered the terminal nature of human life. Like the enslaved people, the sharecroppers, the bayou dwellers, and the ordinary workingmen and women in the potter’s field, they’ve all come to the same end. They are dust beneath the soil. All that is left behind lies in the people who remain. And the stories.”
2020 SUMMARY: Fiction: 31 Nonfiction: 49 Total read: 80 books
Fiction favorites: The Stationary Shop by Marjan Kamali; Writers and Lovers by Lily King; American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins; The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett; Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano, Where the Light Enters by Sara Donati; Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin; and The Bermondsey Bookshop by Mary Gibson (above)
Nonfiction favorites: The Great Influenza by John Barry; Caste by Isabel Wilkerson; Everything is Spiritual by Rob Bell; The Everything Store by Brad Stone; and Bible Babel by Kristen Swenson
