Strap on your parachutes, friends, we’re almost at the end of the year. I think I like measuring my year in books, which presents a much more pleasing picture of my 2023 than if I measured it by the number of vats of butter cookies I consumed. Here are the books I read in November that were worth finishing.
The few I’m jazzed enough to discuss? They are all about the heart, emotional landscapes, and their exploration and enrichment.
Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion
This is a punchy collection of essays with Didion’s signature crisp prose and sharp intellect. As with most of her nonfiction collections, here she explores a range of political, cultural, and personal topics from Nancy Reagan’s hostessing charms to being rejected by the college of her dreams. This panoply of insights is a portrait of one of America’s best writers.
These pieces are often but not entirely timeless. The collection itself is uneven, possibly because the essays span much of her career from the 1960s to the 2000s. But oh, that starting point. Even the lesser essays tower. Didion is a writer who competes only with herself, her early work ‘merely brilliant’ when compared to the entirety of her oeuvre. She brilliantly traces her thoughts, capping each one with an arrow, landing us exactly where we need to be.
She is also sneakily funny and deeply empathetic.
Let Me Tell You What I Mean is an ode to her ability to be self-aware, to be in and out of a moment, watching, living, playing with the “I” and the “Why” and yes, the “Writing” while never exhausting us by centering herself inappropriately. She crafts a guiding narrative voice that is beautiful, utterly relatable, quite wry. How Didion strings words and thoughts together can make a certain writer (Hi! It’s me!) weep with the admiration and slight despair that they (Hi! Still me!) are reading the works of a master.
“Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
So grateful to have access to some of that in this and other books of hers.
Piglet: A Novel by Lottie Hazell
I won this in a Goodreads Giveaway and wrote a review here. It comes awfully close to being an anti-romance novel, and awfully closer to being a Lifetime movie, but it’s not awful or awfully at all. The excellent writing and competent handling of eating issues and self-worth explorations level Piglet up.
I would not be surprised to see this on a lot of Best-of and Must-Read lists when Piglet is released in early 2024.
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
Oh, yes, I’ve written a little about this book that I love.
There, specifically. Good lord, that’s a disruptive embed…but now we all understand the precarious nature of inserting flashbacks into our writing, don’t we? Do it wrong and it looks like your writing is having some sort of medical event.
“The more stuff you love the happier you will be,” says Ross Gay in this series of essays about seeking and immersing oneself, if only briefly, in daily delights. He focuses on both the profound and the ridiculous and creates a meditation on the delight of being with others and for others. “The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking,” and those words are too strong to buckle even under their own beauty.
He is generous with his joy. His delight is not preachy or gooey. It is just right, balanced, even, the sweetness with the saltiness, the wonder with the wry.
Gay writes with unabashed optimism, mature and still childlike, but hardly childish. Layered. Multivoiced. Fully aware of the pain and horrors of life, but choosing to treat that pain as a place in the wilderness that allows us, if we are willing, to connect. To be even more human.
His delight is loud at times, soft at others, and always crystalline.
His essays/delights wander just enough to keep the pieces moving, then return to Center. To Heart, for this is as much an atlas of the heart as Brene Brown’s book.
Speaking of which...
Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown
I’m a fan of Brené Brown and her approachable yet academic writing that is anything but doctrinaire. “The entire premise of this book is that language has the power to define our experiences,” she writes. You can’t argue with that. Or I can’t, at least, because she lays out a pretty compelling case as for why.
Dissecting the varieties of emotional experiences, and putting precision to our ability to describe our own feelings, she encourages a fuller engagement with life.
What makes Atlas of the Heart work is its compassionate yet straightforward narrative. Brown doesn’t write to be liked; she writes to illuminate the complexities of our humanity.
Like Ross Gay, she urges thoughtful connection with others and ourselves. This is how to live and take notice of how we are living.
There is an entire universe of emotions inside us. This is a star map.
What were your superstar reads in November?