Lifestyle: Annie Fay Blog

March 2020 Books

4/5/2020

All (abridged) summaries taken from Good Reads. Notes are my own.

#1: Marcel the Shell: The Most Surprised I’ve Ever Been by Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate, Paintings by Amy Lind

Summary:
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is walking on the blanket when he is unexpectedly launched high into the air. Tumbling through space, the bird's-eye view offers our small friend not only a glimpse of the important things in life--his beloved Nana who sleeps in a fancy French bread, a stinky shoe, and a monstrous baby--but also a much bigger picture. Sometimes the most wonderful discoveries are the ones we least expect.

Personal Rating:
10/10

#2: Marcel the Shell with Shoes on: Things About Me by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp, Paintings by Amy Lind

Summary:
From wearing a lentil as a hat to hang-gliding on a Dorito, Marcel is able to find magic in the everyday. He may be small, but he knows he has a lot of good qualities. He may not be able to lift anything by himself, but when he needs help, he calls upon his family. He may never be able own a real dog . . . but he has a pretty awesome imagination.

Personal Rating:
10/10

#3: i’ll be your blue sky by Marisa de los Santos

Summary:
The New York Times bestselling author revisits the characters from her beloved novels Love Walked In and Belong to Me in this captivating, beautifully written drama involving family, friendship, secrets, sacrifice, courage, and true love for fans of Jojo Moyes, Elin Hilderbrand, and Nancy Thayer. On the weekend of her wedding, Clare Hobbes meets an elderly woman named Edith Herron. During the course of a single conversation, Edith gives Clare the courage to do what she should have done months earlier: break off her engagement to her charming, yet overly possessive, fiancé...Shifting between the 1950s and the present and told in the alternating voices of Edith and Clare, I’ll Be Your Blue Sky is vintage Marisa de los Santos—an emotionally evocative novel that probes the deepest recesses of the human heart and illuminates the tender connections that bind our lives.

Personal Rating:
8.5/10

#4: The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson

Summary:
A woman inherits a beloved bookstore and sets forth on a journey of self-discovery in this poignant debut about family, forgiveness and a love of reading. Miranda Brooks grew up in the stacks of her eccentric Uncle Billy’s bookstore, solving the inventive scavenger hunts he created just for her. But on Miranda’s twelfth birthday, Billy has a mysterious falling-out with her mother and suddenly disappears from Miranda’s life. She doesn’t hear from him again until sixteen years later when she receives unexpected news: Billy has died and left her Prospero Books, which is teetering on bankruptcy—and one final scavenger hunt.

Personal Rating:
8.5/10

#5: No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg

Summary:
No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across the globe, from the United Nations to Capitol Hill and mass street protests, her book is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it.

Notes:
- “This is the time to wake up. This is the moment in history when we need to be wide awake,” (118).

Personal Rating:
10/10

#6: Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Summary:
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

Notes:
- “The space next to the man is the pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill...your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you,” (131).

Personal Rating:
6.5/10

#7: The Power Notebooks by Katie Roiphe

Summary:
Katie Roiphe, culture writer and author of The Morning After, shares a timely blend of memoir, feminist investigation, and exploration of famous female writers’ lives, in a bold, essential discussion of how strong women experience their power.

Notes:
- “Strong interpretations or opinions or worldviews are somehow better received if they are couched in approachability...Especially if the writer is a woman,” (59-60).- “Fantasies of quasimaternal power involve a tricky kind of subjugation to someone else’s difficulties; it is an antique female idea of taking care of things, assuming control, but at the same time erasing one’s own desires,” (88).

Personal Rating:
8.5/10

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Comments

February 2020 Books

3/1/2020

Comments

All (abridged) summaries taken from Good Reads. Notes are my own.

#1: Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

Notes:
- I have read "Little Weirds" twice now and absolutely love it. In terms of form, Slate redefines what it means to write short stories, and creative nonfiction short stories at that. "Little Weirds" is made up of dozens of vignettes about vulnerability, heartbreak, love, wildness, and beauty. Her nuanced way of viewing herself and the world around her is inspiring and I'd recommend this book to anyone.

Personal Rating: 10/10

#2: You'll Grow Out Of It by Jessi Klein

Summary:
In YOU'LL GROW OUT OF IT, Klein offers - through an incisive collection of real-life stories - a relentlessly funny yet poignant take on a variety of topics she has experienced along her strange journey to womanhood and beyond.

Notes:
- “When you encounter a man wearing loafers with no socks, run,” (68).
- “We were falling into the exciting tingle of fake intimacy through email, where a few personal overshares, blended with a sprinkling of coy, overly specific compliments, mimic the sensation of falling in love (when in fact usually you are only falling in love with yourself and your ability to write a really top-notch flirty email),” (70).
- “... I had been cuckolded. (I know this is not technically the definition of the word cuckolded but it’s a fun word and it somehow feels right in this context),” (75).

Personal Rating: 7/10

#3: Normal People by Sally Rooney

Summary:
Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.

Notes:
- “If he silently decides not to say something when they’re talking, Marianne will ask “what?” within one or two seconds. This “what?” question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them,” (26).
- “...the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them,” (72).
- “Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct,” (112).

Personal Rating: 9/10

#4: Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose

Summary:
Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today.

Notes:
- “Those guys who, of course, don’t exist...These tiny people turned me onto ingenuity...They were, for example, the characters in Mary Norton’s The Borrowers; a series of books I don’t remember reading but on whose illustrated covers I imparted my own stories...The Borrowers were, I made myself believe, living among us: snatching up my spare buttons and refashioning them as tabletops or winter sleds...They repurposed our excess was the point,” (14-15). Reading this, I was astonished at how an experience I thought was unique to me (as I've imagined this exact same thing) might be more universal/shared. I had this same realization later when I read the line, “...imagine furniture mounted on ceilings...” (176).
- Semaphore, anthropomorphic, acquisitive, alcove, moonbeams (I always record words I like)
- Thinking of things the way they were is another way of writing: “Thinking about someone I was in love with—how he’d peel an orange and hand me a slice...” (19).
- “...questions that can only occur in cars,” (25).
- “A vacant stare does not mean vacancy. It’s the inverse of invitation, and yet,” (26).
- “...make stuff instead of make sense...” (61).
- “She always feels like...she’s meant to be going to a museum, so sometimes she does. Like she’s meant to be ordering a pastry. So, often, she does,” (148).

Personal Rating: 8/10

#5: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Summary:
A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.

Notes:
- verisimilitude
- “It is certain that species are vanishing without ever having been known to science. To think about this is to imagine the space inside our heads expanding but the places outside shrinking, as though we were literally devouring them,” (187).

Personal Rating: 7/10

#6: Create Dangerously: The Power and Responsibility of the Artist by Albert Camus

Summary:
In 1957, Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Albert Camus gave a speech entitled "Create Dangerously," effectively a call to arms for artists, in particular those who came from an immigrant background, like he did. Camus understood the necessity of those making art as a part of civil society. A bold cry for artistic freedom and responsibility, his words today remain as timely as ever. In this new translation, Camus's message, available as a stand-alone little book for the first time, will resonate with a new generation of writers and artists.

Notes:
- “This ideal of global communication is, in fact, the ideal of every great artist,” (20).
- “...the suppression of creative freedom is not, perhaps, the right way to overcome servitude, and until we can speak for all, it is stupid to take away the power to at least speak for some,” (27).

Personal Rating: 8/10

#7: The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe

Summary:
Set in a Roman Catholic Europe of violent passions and extreme oppression, the novel follows the fate of its heroine Adeline, who is mysteriously placed under the protection of a family fleeing Paris for debt. They take refuge in a ruined abbey in south-eastern France, where sinister relics of the past - a skeleton, a manuscript, and a rusty dagger - are discovered in concealed rooms. Adeline finds herself at the mercy of the abbey's proprietor, a libidinous Marquis whose attentions finally force her to contemplate escape to distant regions. Rich in allusions to aesthetic theory and to travel literature, The Romance of the Forest is also concerned with current philosophical debate and examines systems of thought central to the intellectual life of late eighteenth-century Europe.

Personal Rating: 5.5/10

#8: Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

Summary:
A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

Notes:
- sanguine, verdant

Personal Rating: 8.5/10

#9: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

This is a book I've continued to revisit since I first read it in fourth grade. I doubt a summary is necessary but I'll leave my notes and personal rating below (:

Notes:
- “You won’t make yourself a bit realer by crying,” Tweedledee remarked: “there’s nothing to cry about,” (176).- “”Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you’ve come today. Consider what o’clock it is. Consider anything, only don’t cry!”” (185).

Personal Rating: 10/10 (obviously!!)

Comments

January 2020 Books

2/2/2020

Comments

All (abridged) summaries taken from Good Reads. Notes are my own.

#1: Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith

Summary:
From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year.

Following a run of New Year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland with no design, yet heeding signs–including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger’s words, “Anything is possible: after all, it’s the Year of the Monkey.” For Smith–inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing–the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.

Notes:
- "My logic may have been full of holes but so was Wonderland," (82).
- "The Virgin kneels within a kaleidoscope void ornamented with her words inverted in burnished gold," (144).

Personal Rating: 8.5/10

#2: The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

Summary:
Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck map, with Adichie's signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them.

Notes:
- "How can you love somebody and yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?" (153).

Personal Rating: 7.5/10

#3: Honeybee: Poems by Trista Mateer

Summary:
You will meet people in your lifetime who demand to have poems written about them. It’s not something they say. It’s something about their hands, the shape of their mouths, the way they look walking away from you. Honeybee is an honest take on walking away and still feeling like you were walked away from. It’s about cutting love loose like a kite string and praying the wind has the decency to carry it away from you. It’s an ode to the back and forth, the process of letting something go but not knowing where to put it down. Honeybee is putting it down. It’s small town girls and plane tickets, a taste of tenderness and honey, the bandage on the bee sting. It’s a reminder that you are not defined by the people you walk away from or the people who walk away from you. Consider Honeybee a memoir in verse, or at the very least, a story written by one of today's most confessional poets.

Personal Rating: 6/10

#4: Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin

Summary:
Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse traces the relationship between the city and creativity through a journey that begins in New York and moves us to Paris, via Venice, Tokyo and London, exploring along the way the paths taken by the flâneuses who have lived and walked in those cities.

From nineteenth-century novelist George Sand to artist Sophie Calle, from war correspondent Martha Gellhorn to film-maker Agnes Varda, Flâneuse considers what is at stake when a certain kind of light-footed woman encounters the city and changes her life, one step at a time.

Notes:
- Infraordinary: what happens when nothing is happening (idea from Georges Perec) (5).
- "I had an astonishing immunity to responsibility, because I had no ambitions at all beyond doing only that which I found interesting," (6).
- "She is going somewhere or coming from somewhere; she is saturated with in-betweeness," (22).
- "saucer eyes..." (219).
- "wallow," (220).

Personal Rating: 10/10, genuinely one of the most thought-provoking books I have read in years!!

#5: My Oxford Year by Julia Whelan

Summary:
Set amidst the breathtaking beauty of Oxford, this sparkling debut novel tells the unforgettable story about a determined young woman eager to make her mark in the world and the handsome man who introduces her to an incredible love that will irrevocably alter her future—perfect for fans of JoJo Moyes and Nicholas Sparks.

Notes:
- ""If I or she should chance to be/involved in this affair,/He trusts you to set them free,/Exactly as we were,"" (Lewis Carroll, 135).

Personal Rating: 9/10

#6: For The Time Being by Annie Dillard

Summary:
From Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and one of the most compelling writers of our time, comes For the Time Being, her most profound narrative to date. With her keen eye, penchant for paradox, and yearning for truth, Dillard renews our ability to discover wonder in life's smallest--and often darkest--corners.

Why do we exist? Where did we come from? How can one person matter? Dillard searches for answers in a powerful array of images: pictures of bird-headed dwarfs in the standard reference of human birth defects; ten thousand terra-cotta figures fashioned for a Chinese emperor in place of the human court that might have followed him into death; the paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin crossing the Gobi Desert; the dizzying variety of clouds. Vivid, eloquent, haunting, For the Time Being evokes no less than the terrifying grandeur of all that remains tantalizingly and troublingly beyond our understanding.

Personal Rating: 4/10

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March 2020 Books

#1: Marcel the Shell: The Most Surprised I’ve Ever Been by Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate, Paintings by Amy Lind

#2: Marcel the Shell with Shoes on: Things About Me by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp, Paintings by Amy Lind

#3: i’ll be your blue sky by Marisa de los Santos

#4: The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson

#5: No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg

#6: Citizen by Claudia Rankine

#7: The Power Notebooks by Katie Roiphe

February 2020 Books

#1: Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

#2: You'll Grow Out Of It by Jessi Klein

#3: Normal People by Sally Rooney

#4: Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose

#5: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

#6: Create Dangerously: The Power and Responsibility of the Artist by Albert Camus

#7: The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe

#8: Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

#9: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

January 2020 Books

#1: Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith

#2: The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

#3: Honeybee: Poems by Trista Mateer

#4: Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin

#5: My Oxford Year by Julia Whelan

#6: For The Time Being by Annie Dillard

Categories

Archives

March 2020 Books

#1: Marcel the Shell: The Most Surprised I’ve Ever Been by Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate, Paintings by Amy Lind

#2: Marcel the Shell with Shoes on: Things About Me by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp, Paintings by Amy Lind

#3: i’ll be your blue sky by Marisa de los Santos

#4: The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson

#5: No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg

#6: Citizen by Claudia Rankine

#7: The Power Notebooks by Katie Roiphe

February 2020 Books

​#1: Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

#2: You'll Grow Out Of It by Jessi Klein

​#3: Normal People by Sally Rooney

#4: Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose

#5: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

#6: Create Dangerously: The Power and Responsibility of the Artist by Albert Camus

#7: The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe

#8: Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

#9: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

January 2020 Books

​#1: Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith

#2: The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

​#3: Honeybee: Poems by Trista Mateer

​#4: Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin

​#5: My Oxford Year by Julia Whelan

​#6: For The Time Being by Annie Dillard

Categories

Archives

#1: Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

#3: Normal People by Sally Rooney

#1: Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith

#3: Honeybee: Poems by Trista Mateer

#4: Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin

#5: My Oxford Year by Julia Whelan

#6: For The Time Being by Annie Dillard