You guys, it’s serious… My right thumb swelled up. It hurts to bend it. I don’t remember bumping it on anything; could it be from practicing yoga? It has no visible bruising, but it shook so that I have to put it under my Kindle while I’m reading and use my left hand to swipe…to swipe?…I usually use my right thumb to swipe… Oh. My. Goodness! I DEVELOPED A REPETITIVE STRESS INJURY FROM SWIPING ON MY KINDLE.
Sometimes you just have to laugh! And, of course, there are much worse ways to handle life’s stresses than reading too much. What are you reading and enjoying? And how are you keeping up a sense of humor and laughing at yourself?
One more thought: two of these books’ titles begin with “Dear…” and those two plus one more all include writing letters to someone as a literary device. During this time when we’re not seeing as regularly, if at all, the people who once populated our days, why not send someone a letter through the mail? Sure, you could text or email, but who doesn’t love receiving something personal in the mail? Let someone know you’re thinking of them.
Book titles link to Amazon for more info + easy purchasing. Please note: As an Amazon Associate, I may earn from qualifying purchases.
Deacon King Kong by James McBride
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Some of the most uniquely vivid characters I’ve encountered in recent reads, and another mind-bending illustration of how our lives can be so incredibly intertwined even without our recognition of it.
“…and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.”
“In those twenty minutes the war between the races, the Italians versus the Irish, was waged, the two representatives of the black souls of Europe, left in the dusty by the English, the French, the Germans, and later in America by the big boys in Manhattan, the Jews who forgot they were Jews, the Irish who forgot they were Irish, the Anglos who forgot they were human, who got together to make money in their big power meetings about the future, paving over the nobodies in the Bronx and Brooklyn by building highways that gutted their neighborhoods, leaving them to suffer at the hands of whoever came along, the big boys who forgot the war and the pogroms and the lives of the people who survived World War I and World War II sacrificing blood and guts for their America, so they could work with the banks and the city and state to slap expressways in the middle of thriving neighborhoods and send the powerless suckers who believed in the American dream scrambling to the suburbs because they, the big boys, wanted a bigger percentage.”
“They stared at her with that look, that projects look: the sadness, the suspicion, the weariness, the knowledge that came from living a special misery in a world of misery.”
“…all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country.”
“But then, she thought, every once in a while there’s a glimmer of hope. Just a blip on the horizon, a whack on the nose of the giant that set him back on his heels or to the canvas, something that said, ‘Guess what, you so-and-so, I am God’s child. And I. Am. Still. Here.”
Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Love! This precious book was so perfectly written that it was like watching a movie, or a really well-done TV series, play out on the page. I binge-read it over a few days and then cried when it ended. The only time I needed to put it down was when I realized I was so fully identifying with Edward that I might actually be feeling his depression (after all, I was reading in bed with coffee on a Saturday morning, that became a Saturday afternoon… I needed to get up and move).
“He wants to know what to do.”
“She taps the center of his hand. ‘That’s easy. The same thing we all must do. Take stock of who we are, and what we have, and then use it for good.'”
“‘What happened is baked into your bones, Edward. It lives under your skin. It’s not going away. It’s part of you and will be part of you every moment until you die. What you’ve been working on, since the first time I met you, is learning to live with that.'”
Dear Martin by Nic Stone
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Reading this book during a week of protests regarding another cop-involved shooting of a Black man and then a white teenager shooting 3 protestors in Kenosha, WI… Let’s say it was timely and I felt angry, sad, confused, heartbroken, challenged. I appreciate that, as the author tried to work out her own questions and feelings about the devastating state of race relations in America, she provided a well-rounded picture of its complexities.
“It’s like I’m trying to climb a mountain, but I’ve got one fool trying to shove me down so I won’t be on his level, and another fool tugging at my leg, trying to pull me to the ground he refuses to leave.”
“What do I do when my very identity is being mocked by people who refuse to admit there’s a problem?”
“That idiot ‘pundit’ would rather believe you and Manny were thugs than believe a twenty-year veteran cop made a snap judgment based on skin color. He identifies with the cop. If the cop is capable of murder, it means he’s capable of the same. He can’t accept that…. They need to believe you’re a bad guy who got what he deserved in order for their world to keep spinning the way it always has.”
“You can’t change how other people think and act, but you’re in full control of you. When it comes down to it, the only question that matters is this: If nothing in the world ever changes, what type of man are you gonna be?”
It Is Wood, It Is Stone by Gabriella Burnham
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
“It is wood, it is stone. It is the end of the road.
“It is life, it is sun. It is night, it is death.”
Beautifully written, this book is like a fever dream: out of place, foreign, characters floating in and out and doing god knows what for god knows what reason. Thing is, I didn’t like a single character in this book. Every one of them bugged the crud out of me.
“He imagined that in the U.S. democracy prevailed, not like the corrupt politicians in Brazil who embezzled government money, or the police officers who shot innocent people on the street.”
“I had caught a glimmer of myself as someone who dug into her life with teeth and let the juice run down her chin. It was worth it to feel sticky afterward, but it wasn’t worth it to lose you.”
I Was Told It Would Get Easier by Abbi Waxman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Having thoroughly enjoyed other books by Waxman, I was thrilled to pick up another one. This one, however, is so emotionally on-point as it describes a relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter during a spring break college tour, so immediately relatable (my sons are in college/high school) that it became hard to read. It would make for a great mother-daughter book club for daughters in the beginning of high school, or for moms well beyond the drama of having launched their kids.
“Why do adults talk such shit about mindfulness and living in the moment, and at the same time point us all in the same direction and tell us to run as fast as we can to get ahead? Do this, you’ll be able to level up to a good high school, do this, you’ll be able to get into a good college where, if you work hard, you’ll be able to get a good job, where you can work harder and get a better job. When are we supposed to start actually living?”
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Cover image by Lubos Houska from Pixabay
