Immortal Diamond by Richard Rohr

 genre: non-fiction, religion, spirituality

I picked this up because it was highly recommended by a therapist I have worked with and truly admire.  I've experienced a religious deconstruction over the past several years and I got the impression that there were ideas here that could help me. I was both correct and not correct.  There ARE good and important ideas here, especially about the True Self and the False Self.  Thinking about this dichotomy has been a good exercise and one I'd like to continue.  There are thoughts here about the concept of "sin" and "moralism" that rang very true to where my own spirituality resides right now.  But in other ways, the very heavy emphasis on Jesus Christ as being completely necessary to a spiritual life - almost the entire core of its purpose - did not fill the holes inside me.  My faith in nearly everything has collapsed and so I personally need a different starting point to rebuild that doesn't even require the idea of a Heavenly Parent God.  I need more feminism and more inner work than what is offered here - although I will grant that there is a lot more expansive thinking in the author's words than in the Mormonism that I was raised with.  The trinity, God-inside-you and that Love is the biggest and first source of Truth - all of this was really good to let my brain simmer on.

For the first non-fiction, non-memoir book I've read specifically on spirituality by an author not associated with Mormonism, it was an interesting - if imperfect - start for me on my journey.

Done and Dusted by Lyla Sage

genre: contemporary romance

Emmy has come back to her hometown in Meadowlark, Wyoming because it's the only place that feels like a choice after an upsetting accident has made being on a horse impossible. Of course, going home means seeing Luke Brooks, her brother Gus's best friend.  Luke has always been a complete idiot except now, he seems like more than that.  And because he works at her dad's ranch, Emmy cannot get away from him.  But maybe she doesn't want him to.

OK OK.  It's instalove.  It's super cheesy and cliche open door steamy scenes and predictable as heck.  But also, I read it all fast and enjoyed myself enough.  And it's cowboys and dive bars and there is sort of a ranch-family-vibe that I appreciated.  While there is really nothing deep here, there IS Emmy having to get over her mental block to get back on a horse and I liked that thread.  I actually think I liked all the ancillary characters enough that if there are books about them, I'd read them if I had a hankering for this sort of brain candy.  But dang, some legit typos really were annoying and made me wonder what happened to the editor.  2.5 stars.

Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya

 genre: memoir

In this memoir of reading and writing, Sarah Chihaya examines her own experience of depression and how books have both been the cure and the trigger for the pain in her mind.  The way she interacts with us as readers, her introspective way of viewing her own choices or non-choices, and especially the way she tries to understand the meta cognition that led to where she ended up - all of this creates a bubble around us in which we are trying along with her to make sense of it all.  

Sometimes the writing felt like I was swimming through a word soup, with only vague swerves avoiding actual repetition.   But then a sentence would absolutely floor me with its beauty and with the poignancy of the writing.  Sometimes her words spoke to the insecure little kid inside me and made her feel seen.  This quote in particular:  

     “Though I was genuinely dedicated to certain things – cross country and track, choral music, calorie counting, real or metaphorical beret-wearing – over the course of high school I became sickeningly aware that I would never be exceptional. I would not be the fastest or the thinnest or the coolest. I was either the worst at being the best or the best at being OK – a solidly middling member of the varsity squad playing the vicious sport of adolescent life.”

I also appreciated the way that throughout this book she used the novels that had a profound impact on her at different points in her life to help make sense of her life at that time.  It made me, in my mind, think about the books that exist for me in specific places and times and I loved that exercise.

It is a sad and hard book. The author talks very bluntly about a desire to unalive herself and yet you do finish feeling like all is not lost.  Read with caution but this could really speak to fellow readers who have dealt with similar pain.

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (audiobook)

genre: contemporary romance

When Alice arrives at the tiny, picturesque island off the coast of Georgia, her focus is so clear: convince heiress and recluse Margaret Ives that she wants to have Alice write her biography, finally telling the world her true story.  But when she finally meets Margaret, a giant wrench is thrown into her beloved plan - she is forced to deal with Hayden Anderson, a Pulitzer Prize Winner who apparently has also been given a chance to prove he can write Margaret's book. The story of Hayden and Alice, two very different but very capable writers, is told in the present tense while we also have the secondary storyline of Margaret's life both from her own point of view and from common memory.  Whoever ends up being Margaret's biographer will be given a true shot at a literary blockbuster, if only they can convince her they'll do the best job.

This one is a bit different than the usual Emily Henry fare - not that it's a bad thing!  It had a distinct The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo vibe, which also, isn't a bad thing.  I like stories with two time periods, although it did take a while for me to keep all the people in Margaret's early life straight.  I had to work pretty hard at first to keep names with generations but it wasn't annoying. I believed in the romantic chemistry and the twist at the end actually caught me by surprise AND I believed it, which was awesome.  I like that Emily Henry's characters are complex and that throughout the story we get to understand why they behave the way they do and make the choices they make.  Fair warning, this may be the steamiest of hers that I've read so far, and  Julia Whelan always does a fantastic job narrating.  Emily kept me engaged and entertained again.  I'm already ready for whatever she has next.

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight

 genre: contemporary fiction

Pen's choice to leave Canada and attend the University of Edinburgh was not made lightly.  Not only is it where her father attended college, but it is where he befriended the famous novelist Lord Lennox, who still lives nearby.  Pen knows that something happened with Lord Lennox, something her dad won't talk about, and she is determined to figure out if it has anything to do with the way that her family fell apart.  This family mystery is at the heart of this coming-of-age novel.  Pen's relationship with her friends (both new and old), the boys she meets, the chances she takes - all of these are wrapped up in this mystery that has ahold of her.  She is a complex character, both cerebral and gutsy when it counts, and she is set on figuring out if Scotland has the answers that she needs.

This was a quick read for me - partly because I had the time but partly because I found myself sincerely interested in Pen her questions.  The family of Lord Lennox is intriguing and, as an American, the discussion of class and Canada vs. Great Britian is just interesting, like looking through a window into a different way of seeing the world, where accents and titles and castle ownership and inheritance laws are just a part of life that has to be dealt with in society.  The story of Pen's best friend and her choices was a little harder to relate to and even though I hated it, I appreciated how it fit into things.  There were also some really profound ideas here about motherhood and friendship and keeping ahold of our most important parts of ourselves while still learning and growing into new parts.  Every once and a while the third person narrative would take us into the mind of one of the other characters and although it threw me at first, I ended up loving this narrative device, letting me sneak into other tangential but important stories for some pages, because it allowed me to understand those characters better.  I think I really did like this book a lot, the more I think about it.   I am going to wrap this up with one of my favorite quotes: 

She and Pen had been friends since well before they had discovered the need to construct an outer shell, like that of an invertebrate animal, to protect the soft inner substance of the self.  Childhood friendships often lose their hold at that point, when one sees that the person one loved has learned to disguise herself and will no longer be reachable, or at least not often.  What made Alice feel certain...that this friendship could take them through every stage of their lives, cushioning them against the bone-crushing loneliness of being human, was that they did not have to pretend with each other.

The Geographer's Map to Romance by India Holton (audiobook)

 genre: romantic/historical fantasy

Professor Elodie Tarrant is not unhappy with her life.  She enjoys the students she teaches at Oxford and she absolutely lives for solving magical disasters throughout the British countyside.  What is not working?  Her marriage.  The one she maybe made on a whim but also the one that's with the dashing yet curmudgeonly Gabriel.  Their estrangement is nearly complete except that they both are professors at Oxford in the field of magical geography and so of course they can never really be free from each other.  If they even wanted to be.  Which of course they DO.

This is another lighthearted and fun romance with witty dialogue and fun world building.  I love that Elodie is a super intelligent and educated woman making her way for herself in a man's world - but without sacrificing a unique way of looking at the world.  The plot isn't particularly fast-paced, as fantasy plots go, although there does seem to be danger around every turn.  I was in this book for the relationship thread and for the use of  the word "miffed."  I enjoyed it and will continue to read anything else that India Holton writes.

By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult

genre: historical fiction

For so many, Shakespeare is on a pedestal than should not be even approached let alone touched.  His memory is sacrosanct.  To even posit the IDEA that maybe he was not one singular man who wrote all the plays we attribute to him is like actual heresy.  But, what if?  What if when we look at all the actual historical evidence, what we have all believed as truth for so long is wrong?  What if maybe Shakespeare is something - or someone - else?  In this novel of two time periods, Melina Green is a contemporary young playwright with talent but not a lot of encouragement from the theater community.  In Elizabethan England, Emilia Bassano is likewise talented but living in an even more restricted world.  In this story of finding your voice and being brave enough to speak, identities will be hidden and revealed while the pain of life goes on beyond the pages that these women write in their own spheres and their own purposes.

I was so intrigued by this novel!  The parallel experiences of these two women are images of each other while still being believable.  Emilia's life is richly imagined and sometimes so deeply painful that I almost want to cry for her.  It is HARD to let myself think about how little opportunity women have been given to make a place for themselves in history as any kind of creative force.  And it is NOT because we are not capable.  It is because we've been put in boxes and forced to confirm and literally forbidden from thriving in history's (men's) spaces.  It is infuriating.  And so reading this book sometimes made me feel a lot of that.  But I also loved this imagining of Emlila being the playwright of some of the familiar plays I know - the way the evidence is lined up makes you really wonder - what if?  Lots of little Easter Eggs in here, even if you aren't a huge Shakespeare person.  The contemporary storyline didn't thrill me as much - it felt a little more far fetched while still being written in a way that kept me wanting to read.

For as long as this book was, I read it quickly because it really interested me.

The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager

genre: I don't even know!  Ha!

This unique book has no chronological plot but it has a forward traveling progression between different storylines that correspond with the recurrence of Hailey’s comet. It’s such a cool concept, the way pieces of stories are complied to tell a very meta tale of the power of words, the power of connection, and how one singular fairy tale can cast a wide net that will morph and capture generations of tellers and listeners. With a breadcrumb trail to follow we see invention and epidemic and the fruits of human kindness. This is a gorgeous and glittering examination what could have been and would could be - but it’s not all shiny and lovely. There is deep pain and loss. Luckily, there is refuge. There is compassion and there is a hand to hold through the woods.

You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego

genre: contemporary mystery

You are only given an invitation to this particular writer’s retreat if you’re already a famous writer. For the authors who make their way to an island along coastal Maine, a chance to workshop and learn from the elusive and brilliant horror writer J. R. Alastor is like a dream come true. There are secrets everywhere, of course. It seems like everyone is connected but we don’t know how and the past is bubbling up and triggering both the staff of the retreat and the attendees. When the first gruesome murder occurs, the tropes begin, in a very meta sort of way, as the text of J.R.'s Guide to Writing is interspersed in the narration of the plot. Who will be next and how will it end and who IS J.R. anyway?

I keep being surprised by my own enjoyment of mysteries. Maybe it’s time to just admit I like them? There were a lot of characters here to keep straight, as we jump from POV to POV throughout the story. But I wanted to know who stole the one girl’s manuscript and what old confessional was for and who in the heck is the serial killer? It wasn’t a crazy page turner but I never wanted to give up on it. I was entertained. I can’t think of another word for it. It’s pretty bloody, as many people die, but it wasn’t anything I wasn’t expecting when I decided to try it. I liked the bookish theme of the whole thing and so 3.5 stars for that.

Tilt by Emma Pattee (audiobook)

 genre: contemporary fiction

On a hot summer day in Portland, the very pregnant Annie finally decides it's time to pick out a crib. While it might seem trivial, it can feel like a monumental decision when you are carrying a new human life inside you. While Annie is at the Ikea, she is feeling all the feelings when an actual disaster strikes. The kind of disaster that can take the city and life that you know and turn it into an apocalyptic nightmare. How Annie makes it to the end of this day when everything changes is the setting of this novel. But the heart of this novel is Annie becoming a mama, it is Annie figuring out what she wants her life to be on the other side.

I do LOVE a realistic apocalyptic novel. That was really all I knew about this one when I decided to try it and having our protagonist be so pregnant did just force you you see the world through her very specific lens. I listened to the words "my belly" about a hundred times but I understand why. The only thing I didn't love, and it's a big thing, is how often we go back and forth in time. I guess it is a way to give us context about who Annie is and why she's feeling how she does but I don't feel like it ended up doing much for the story. This is a sad book. The ending was not what I anticipated and while very lovely and powerful, it still left me wanting a bit more.  I'm not sorry I listened though, the audio was fine. 3.5 stars.