Book Round-Up

The History of the Book in 100 Books by Roderick Cave and Sara Ayad: This covers over 15,000 years of human expression and lots of fascinating works, but with only two pages devoted to each of the 100 books it left me wanting more.

Dig if You Will the Picture by Ben Greenman: not so much a biography as an impressionistic analysis of Prince's music, influences, and beliefs. The prose can get a little purple, but that's only to be expected when discussing the Purple One.

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis: A retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth that has profound insights on love, jealousy, and faith. I'm so glad I finally re-read it.

Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty: this was a fun book that skewered modern obsessions with wellness and social media, while being quite gentle with the all-too-human characters.

The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender: Bender's latest novel is a lovely, melancholy mediation on memory, mothers and daughters, and mental illness, with a dash of magical realism. That's a lot of Ms!

Gravity Is the Thing by Jaclyn Moriarty

The same year Abigail begins receiving chapters from a mysterious self-help book, her brother disappears, never to be seen again. Gravity Is the Thing is a novel about how these two events affect Abigail and her choices for decades. The narrative is disjointed and fragmented, uniquely illustrating Abigail's thought processes but also mirroring the messiness of life, where there aren't tidy little resolutions and clear-cut sequences of events. "Causation is complex," Abigail, a former attorney, likes to say. But even that simple statement is challenged by another: "life is full of memories, stories, and facts, and we push our way through them ... and now and then, we pluck one, pull on the seam and make that responsible for everything. ... Which ... is wrong." It's only when Abigail realizes that causation may not matter at all, at least not in the way she thinks, that she can finally live her life free of the blame and self-doubt that has weighed her down. (See what I did there?)

The story is by turns funny and gut-wrenching and profound.  It's also resolutely grounded in real life, despite the self-help book's assertion that Abigail and her companions can learn to fly -- there's not a hint of magic realism here, as characters remind us repeatedly that humans cannot fly, ever.  Instead the novel finds magic in the relationships between the characters, in the small, ordinary events that can brighten a day or cause a major shift in understanding, in the coincidences that change everything, and the moments that free us.