Best Reads of 2023
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I read over 50 books a year so many ask “what were your favorites?” I decided to make a list to share.
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Review: Notes on the Poet: A Little Book of Criticism by John Poch
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This book is a companion, not merely something to read.
Read MoreReview: Katy Carl's Fragile Objects
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It has been a while since I read a collection of short stories as captivating as Fragile Objects by Katy Carl.
Read MoreReview: Jody L. Collins Mining the Bright Birds: Poems of Longing for Home.
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In Mining the Bright Birds: Poems of Longing for Home, Jody L. Collins invites the reader into a moment, a minute of quotidian life, to witness. These poems reflect both in outward revelation of God’s glory in creation but also inward, the secret space within a heart attuned to His love.
Read MoreJanuary Book List
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The books I read in January. These are all very short books. Less than 200 pages.
Find your next read.
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October Book List
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If you don’t know by now, I read A LOT.
People keep asking me what I’ve been reading lately so I thought I’d put them down in one post to share.
Read MoreChoosing Joy
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"Once we know we are loved, it is easy to choose joy."
My new reflection for Loyola Press on Father Gregory Boyle new book!
Read MoreUwen Akpan's "Say You're One of Them"
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Each opening sentence of Uwem Akpan's short stories in his debut collection "Say You're One of Them" pull the reader into the story:
"Selling your child or nephew could be more difficult than selling other kids."
Or "Now that my eldest sister, Maisha, was 12, none of us knew how to relate to her anymore."
Each of these five short stories is told from the perspective of a child, and with the first sentence, Akpan demands your attention.
Book Review: The Defiant Middle
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Jane Goodall once said, “It actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.” Author and writing professor at the University of California, Berkeley Kaya Oakes would agree and has written a new book, The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In-Betweens to Remake the World, to tackle this very issue.
Read MoreListen to Your Inner Voice
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Do you ever wonder if you even know the sound of your own voice — what stream of thoughts running through your mind are authentically yours? Or are you just hearing an echo of voices from throughout the day or your life?
Read MoreFrank Mc Court: Angela’s Ashes
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Frank Mc Court’s childhood in Limerick, Ireland was so dire, reading his memoir, Angela’s Ashes, you’ll be grateful you ever had a full egg all to yourself.
The bleak stories seem to spill over one another with Mc Court’s run on sentences and dialogue meant to evoke the Irish cadence of speaking over one another (and not necessarily listening). This style of writing works well to convey desperate nature of the lives of the Mc Court’s but leaves very little in the way of respite.
Read MoreOctober Book List
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I read about a book a week. Sometimes for reviews. Sometimes for fun.
I get asked often what I am reading, so I thought I’d make this a regular feature on my website. Maybe you’ll discover a new read or reminded of one you’ve been wanting to pick up.
Read MoreJosephine Humphrey: Rich in Love
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“Perhaps someday we’ll recall with joy even these things”
These are Aeneas’s words in Virgil’s The Aeneid; spoken to encourage his men in the face of hardship. They are also the words of Lucille, the seventeen-year-old narrator of Josephine Humphreys’ novel Rich in Love, spoken to encourage herself. This is the story of the unravelling of the Odom family and the seventeen-year-old who tries to keep them together.
Read MoreJulian Of Norwich-A Revelation of Love
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There is a tenderness of language in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love. These sixteen mystical revelations manifested at what Julian had thought was her deathbed one night over several hours.
Read MoreAnne of Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery
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“No commonplace soul inhabited the body of this stray woman-child of whom shy Matthew Cuthbert was so ludicrously afraid.”
Read MoreThe Boyfriend List: E Lockhart
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Have you ever wanted to get inside the mind of a teenage girl? Me either, but this is exactly where we live for 229 pages in E. Lockhart’s The Boyfriend List.
Read MoreMolly McCully Brown: Places I've Taken My Body
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Molly McCully Brown cannot forget she has a body. Many of us can. We float through life without recognizing the way we move from one place to another. Brown lives with severe cerebral palsy. She is “visibly disabled” so she must “talk about [her] body everywhere [she] goes.” In this captivating collection of essays Brown explores living with this body; hating it, learning to love it, what she says to her body, what it says to her, where she has taken her body and where she has pushed it to its limits.
Read MoreKatharine Smyth- All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf
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“Perhaps there is one book for every life,” Katharine Smyth writes in her biblio-memoir All the Lives We Ever Lived. For Smyth, that book is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and it is the lens with which she views her father’s life and death.
Read MoreRachel Cohen: Austen Years: A Memoir in 5 Novels
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Jane Austen’s novels conjure up images of country ball rooms, empire waist dresses and teatime in the parlor---not grief. Yet Rachel Cohen’s biblio-memoir, Austen Years: A Memoir in 5 Novels, does just that. Cohen looks at the well-loved British novels through the lens of grief, mirroring Cohen’s own in her in the death of her father. Walking through Austen’s work with Cohen, one will wonder why they never looked at this literature in this way before.
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