Living without a TV* = more reading happening in my house these days, despite an incredibly hectic holiday season.

• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. I had a really hard time getting into this, only to love the second half, and hate the ending. The translation is excellent – the book feels very French. I’m on the fence.
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding. If you, like me, haven’t read this book since it was assigned in middle school you need to pick it up again. It holds up and more – there’s a reason it’s a modern classic. Beautiful, and terrifying.
  
• The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. Overall really lovely. She gets a few very key, very basic things wrong about both the San Francisco wedding industry and the SF Flower Mart (these drove me slightly crazy, obviously) but the characters are great, and the history and meaning of flowers woven throughout is fascinating. Fun, quick read.
• Five Men Who Broke My Heart by Susan Shapiro. Lovely & funny, and occasionally, well, heartbreaking, Shapiro has a great, if slightly neurotic, voice.
  

*I am not one of those self-righteous non-TV owners. In fact, when I moved in November I decided against getting a TV this round because I love watching TV so much. And the truth is that I was watching it way more than I liked, and since I am someone historically not awesome at moderation, I decided the best solution was simply to not own one. We’ll see how long it lasts.

oh hey, six month round up. Summer & fall is busy season, folks, which leaves not nearly enough time to read (which is, unfortunately, kind of the opposite of what summer should be,) so this list is not very long:

• Lit by Mary Karr. I love a good addiction memoir, so I have no idea why I hadn’t read this until now – the genre at it’s very, very finest – Karr is a beautiful writer.
• Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed.* My book club picked this before Oprah’s did, and as I said in discussion – any woman who can make me adore a book about backpacking, which is an activity I could not possibly find less appealing, is an incredible writer. (hint: it’s not really about backpacking. Read it.)
• You Take It From Here by Pamela Ribon. Super fun & engaging summer read. Except for the last two chapters which I actively cried through in their entirety, so consider finishing it in private.
• The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides. Loved this, although some parts were a little on the slow side, one of the rare books whose last quarter is the strongest.
• I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie by Pamela Des Barres. Meh. I got about 1/3 through it before I was bored with the name dropping and (sorry to say) really poor writing and put it down. If you’re big on retro-celebrity gossip you’ll be into it.
• I Love You and I’m Leaving You Anyway by Tracy McMillan. Smart, painful, surprisingly funny memoir. McMillan’s journey through her relationship issues is something I bet most people will be able to relate to.
• Things I Learned About My Dad in Therapy edited by Heather B Armstrong. Some of these essays were very strong, others less so. Overall a pretty engaging & quick read.
• Getting a Life: Stories by Helen Simpson. Lovely in a sort of melancholy way, Simpson writes women then way that only a woman can (sorry male authors, but it’s true.)
• This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz. Brilliant and gorgeous. Diaz proves again that he’s one of our best contemporary writers.

*not pictured, which means I must have lent it to somebody. Also, the photo was taken on my iPhone as I seem to have misplaced my camera in the move. sigh!

Kind of a mixed bag recently… well, actually one kind of terrible book and a bunch of good ones!:

• Palo Alto by James Franco. OK, I kind of finally understand why people bag on Franco. The truth is – this book is just not very good. The writing is essentially very-good-undergrad, or very-mediocre-MFA level. There are moments where he captures the California suburban teenage experience well (I was a teenager in a town very similar to Palo Alto) but in the end too many of the stories are too similar, and gratuitously violent beyond the gratuitous violence of teenage-hood. He shows promise here and there, and it’s honestly too bad that this was published, as it will (or, should) turn people off from his writing in the future.
• Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. gah, this was good. No big surprise, as I adored Russell’s first book. It took me a while to get into this one (the first third didn’t grab me that much) but Russel is definitely a young writer to watch.
• Accidentally on Purpose by Mary F. Pols. A really lovely, engaging memoir, that is much more than the cover gives it credit for. About single-motherhood, yes, but more than that about family as a bigger picture. (apparently this was briefly made in to a TV show… I never saw it but the online description makes the story sound rather different.)
• Waiting for Daisy by Peggy Orenstein. Orenstein is a generally brilliant writer, and this book is no exception. A kind of terrifying look at the craziness that is infertility medicine in the United States – worth reading if you are or know a woman of childbearing age (so, everyone.)
• The Ride Down Mount Morgan by Arthur Miller. This is the first play I’ve ever read outside of school (and I haven’t been in school for years.) My favorite quote in the world comes from it, so I figured I needed to actually read the source. Plays are an adjustment to read, but I really enjoyed it a lot.
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I was stoked when one of my bookclubs decided to read this, as I’d been wanting to re-read it for a while (I hadn’t read it since it was assigned in school… 8th or 9th grade?) There’s a reason it’s a classic – I literally could not put it down, to the point of distraction, and finished in in two days. Scout Finch is definitely one of the most enduring narrators in the American literary canon. (also worth noting – the 50th anniversary special edition hardback is beautiful.) Reading it made me think a lot about my late grandmother, who, like Scout, grew up in small-town Alabama during the depression, and appreciate even more how incredible it was that anyone who was a product of that place and times could grow up to be such an outspoken advocate of civil and women’s rights.

some good stuff lately

• Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. An incredibly compelling narrator. Super thin female characters. Enjoyable and fun overall – would be a great vacation read.
• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. Epic is right – this is hugely long (and, admission: I did not finish it. although probably will at some point?.) A book club pick – fascinating look at a formerly under-reported part of America’s history.
• An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin. This was a bookclub pick (other book club!). Overall fairly fun, a female lead that could only have been written by a man, and art references that could have been made by a foundation art student. Another good vacation read.
• Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman. Waldman’s best book yet. Lovely look at human nature in the aftermath of tragedy.
• The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits. Engaging, although rather disconcerting. I loved Julavits’ The Effect of Living Backwards, and while I didn’t love this one as much, I definitely enjoyed it.
• It Sucked and Then I Cried by Heather Armstrong. The best blog-to-book… book that I’ve read. Armstrong has one of the strongest voices on the internet, and it carries through superbly.
• Dream Work by Mary Oliver. I love Oliver, and this book contains some of my favorite of her work.
• The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. I adored this book. A-dored. Seriously, go read it right now. Harbach is nothing short of brilliant – almost perfect example of everything the American Novel should be, and in my opinion well worth the 10 years he apparently spent writing & trying to publish it. (note: I love baseball, but I suspect that you would love this book even if you’d never seen a game/had no interest in the sport.)

The main ways I find books are:

• recommendations from friends & family whose taste I like
• recommendations from authors whose work I like (many authors keep book logs, write reviews, or mention books they like in interviews. Pay attention.)
• recommendations from bookstore employees (people who work in bookstores are almost always big readers. If you tell them what you like, they can almost always give you spot on recommendations. I’ve discovered some of my favorite books & authors this way.)
• Reviews, specifically from The New York Times.
• mindlessly browsing in local used book stores. In Oakland, Walden Pond Books is my favorite (as well as having been my closest neighborhood bookstore for most of my adult life.) I’ve discovered amazing things completely randomly by reading the backs of book covers while killing time.

So, how do I keep track of all of these books when I hear about them so that I actually read them later? Amazon. Let me say this: I am big, big, big supporter of local book stores. I’m also a big fan of buying books used, because I buy so very many books, and try as I might the library just doesn’t do it for me (I’m a giant believer of the importance of libraries to local communities. But I like to highlight books, fold down pages, re-read, and lend them out. Borrowing just doesn’t really work for me.)

Enter: the Amazon wishlist and my iPhone. Whenever I hear about a book that I want to read, I go into the Amazon app on my iPhone, and add it to my wishlist. Then, whenever I happen to be near a bookstore, and have some time to browse, I can pull up my wishlist, remind myself of what I’ve recently heard about that I want to read, and look for it in the shelves. Win. I do also order books from Amazon – mainly new releases that I’m dying to read so much I can’t wait for them to come out in paperback (if money were no object I would buy everything locally, and in hardcover.)

It’s probably worth noting some of my all-time favorite books while we’re here: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, A Kind of Flying by Ron Carlson, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Any other tips for good ways to find books to read? Any books you want to recommend that I read?

*In fact, I often joke that my only non-work related hobbies are reading and my social life. Not really a joke. And I’m not sure how legitimate of a hobby “my social life” is.

I’m giving up regular TV watching again, so these lists should be longer again starting this month (I’m so not judgey about people who watch TV, it’s just that TV is definitely the enemy of pleasure reading in my life. And in the end reading makes me, personally, much happier than watching TV does.)

• A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for Planning a Beautiful, Affordable, and Meaningful Celebration by Meg Keene. I loved this, you can read my full review here.
• 20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker edited by Deborah Treisman. I’m a giant fan of contemporary short fiction, and the New Yorker always publishes some of the best, so it’s no surprise I loved this collection. Fun fact: Yiyun Li, one of the authors included, was my undergrad thesis adviser.
• Emily, Alone: A Novel by Stewart O’Nan. Captivating in a quiet way. A pretty lovely look at what it’s like to be old in America, through the eyes of one woman.

SO, my friend Meg, author and editor of the brilliant website A Practical Wedding, wrote a wedding planning book. And, you guys? It’s awesome.

When I first started planning weddings five years ago (for friends, I had no idea at the time that I’d one day be doing this professionally) I read pretty much every wedding planning book I could get my hands on that didn’t seem totally insane, because that’s what I do when I want to learn about something – I read. And while I picked up some helpful pieces here and there, there was not a single book that I loved overall.* I wish that this book had been around then.

Now, I didn’t learn anything from this book, but that’s because, well, I now do this professionally (as Meg said when I told her this, “Well, I would be really concerned if you had learned anything from it, and have to start re-thinking whether or not I could recommend you.”) However, if you’re not a professional wedding planner? You will learn things. Good things. Things like how to find an affordable venue, and that it’s OK to sometimes cry during the planning process, and why you should focus on your ceremony, and when and why you need to ask for help.

Also – this book made me cry. And if you know me, I never cry (I do tear up – at weddings, at sappy movies, and at commercials that involve tender parent/child moments and/or deployed loved ones.) I cried because I am just so proud of Meg for writing this book. It’s a wedding planning book that manages to deal with both logistics (important! weddings are full of logistics, and they are often overwhelming) and, probably even more importantly, also deals with the often intense emotional logistics around weddings and marriages. It reminds you that your wedding is not just a big party, it is the start of your marriage.

So go buy it, and buy a copy for your mother, and copies for all of your friends who are getting married. This book is definitely my new go-to engagement party gift. If you are a regular APW reader, rest assured that it’s different than the website. The book walks you through wedding planning from engagement to post-honeymoon, all in a concise, smart, practical way. It pulls from many of the wisest posts on the site, but is in fact an entirely new piece of work that is valuable in an entirely different way to anyone who’s planning a wedding. (Fun fact: while I didn’t actually meet Meg until this year, I was one of APWs earliest readers, and so have read every post ever published on the site. Which, if you’ve just started reading recently, would take you a whole hell of a lot of time to do. Buy the book
instead, and then continue to read the website on a regular basis.)

The wedding industry in America gets a bad rap for a reason – it’s generally full of people and organizations who are trying to get you to buy more, do more, stress more. Couples who are getting married need all the help they can get in getting away from this – it’s insidious, and can trap even the most sane, laid back people into thinking that they have to do things a certain way, because it’s a wedding and it has to be perfect. My favorite line in the book is tied between “There is a whole wedding marketing machine set up to sell you the perfect wedding, but the reality is, things are going to go wrong on your wedding day. That’s fine. It’s great, even.  It’s the imperfections that make the day yours.” and (a quote from a real-life former bride) “I honestly just gave it up to Jesus. I mean, WWJD anyway? He wouldn’t stress about anyone handing out some program fans, I’ll bet you that much.”

Truth.

*well, I did, and continue to, love One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, but it’s not a planning book.

note: Meg personally gave me an advance copy of this book to review. Please see here for my policy on accepting things for review.

Yeah, this is a cop-out combination of months – the last two months have been a little crazy, and so the reading lists were on the lighter side. Here we go:

• How to Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran. This was the APW book club book, and is well worth ordering from the UK (it won’t be available in the States until May.) While I don’t agree with Moran on everything (high heels and weddings being two notable exceptions) it’s high time that a contemporary woman came out in favor of “strident feminism.” Hilarious and deeply thought provoking at the same time.
• Little Bee by Chris Cleeve. Woah, this was engaging. A successful switch between two narrators telling the same story, which is not an easy thing to do. A beautiful novel that’s the cover for a fictionalized and personalized take on immigration policies that may just change the way you think about the issue.
• What Is This Thing Called Love by Kim Addonizio. Raw and powerful, the way that the best poems (or, at least, my favorite poems,) are. The first section was my favorite.
• Great House by Nicole Krauss. It took me a while to get into this one, but I ended up liking it a lot. Moments of brilliance – Krauss certainly has a way with words. If you don’t like slow books this one may not be for you.
• Miss Manners’ Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding by Judith Martin and Jacobina Martin. How is it possible that I just got around to reading this book? It’s *hilarious,* as in, one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. I think people who don’t read her don’t realize that Miss Manners is actually a total bitch (in a good way,) just a super, super correct and polite one. I have to say, I don’t agree with her on everything surrounding weddings, but I do agree with a whole lot of it. Worth reading if you’re planning a wedding, or even if you’re just going to a lot of weddings.
• Oak: One Tree, Three Years, Fifty Paintings by Stephen Taylor**. Stephen Taylor painted the same tree for three years, and this book is part art book, part painting process book, and part reflection on nature and the way that we interact with it. A quiet, lovely book.
• Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling. OK, I loved this. It’s light, and funny, but actually very well written. And, I’m not really sure why it’s getting compared to Tina Fey’s book so much, because frankly, it’s head and shoulders above. Great holiday gift for your girlfriends/sisters.

**this book was sent to me by the publisher. please see here for my policy on accepting things for review.

September was a super busy work month for me, so the list is a little shorter than normal.

1. Wife of the Gods by Kwei Quartey. A book club pick (I’m in two- wouldn’t you be if you read as much as I did? I like to joke that besides my social life, reading is my only hobby.) While I’m generally not a mystery fan, this was totally engaging, and would be a great vacation read.
2. Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell. A client who works in publishing gave this to me, and warned me that it was a tearjerker so I might not want to read it in public. She was right. A beautiful look at friendship, and at the very specific thing that is the grief of losing a friend, which is a topic there doesn’t seem to have been much written on.
3. Bossypants by Tina Fey. This was another bookclub pick (the other one) I have to say, I was not as enamored with this book as everyone else on the internet seemed to be. Yes, Fey is very funny. But I found the constant self-depreciating humor a little much to take through a whole book. I did, however, laugh out loud multiple times, so there’s that.
4. The Secret of Life by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Smart. Punchy. Cute. My guess is that most people either love or hate Wurtzel – she’s not really someone you can feel neutral about. I’m firmly in the love camp, but she’s definitely fairly ridiculous at times.
5. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. Weird. Captivating. Probably brilliant. I liked it a lot, but if you didn’t grow up reading sci-fi, you might have a hard time getting into it. (it should be noted that this book is likely not classified as sci-fi at all.)

1. Room by Emma Donoghue. A haunting but somehow lovely story, told by a completely captivating narrator, which is very hard to do when your narrator is a five year old.
2. Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson. This was a book club pick, and was a totally engaging little gem of a book. Would be a great vacation read.
3. Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby. Hornby’s books are like the movies that get made from them – fun, cute, at least relatively smart. This one’s no different.
4. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. My God this is a powerful book. A look at Hurricane Katrina and it’s terrible aftermath in New Orleans, through the lens of one family. Zeitoun should be added to mandatory high school reading lists across the country.
5. An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life by Ann Hood. I wanted to like this more than I actually did. Not bad by any stretch, but for the most part didn’t catch me the way that short stories often do.
6. The Lovers by Vendela Vida. a lovely book filled with beautiful writing. I wasn’t particularly satisfied by the ending, but the gorgeous moments in Vida’s prose make up for the occasional missteps of plot.
7. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Stunning. Really, just incredibly excellent. Both completely captivating from a structural standpoint and gorgeously written. Add it to your list immediately.