Part 2: A Year of Reading as Retreat & Renewal

From poetry to memoir to self-growth to fiction, in 2023 I read 50 books that nurtured clarity, connection, community and creativity in my life. Stay tuned for the third and last part next Friday.

This is the second in a three-part series for paid subscribers (with a generous preview for all readers) in which I take you into my library to peruse all 50 books I read in 2023, a year in which I read voraciously for retreat, renewal, restoration: to save my life, essentially, because that is what words have always done for me. I hope that in my review of these 16 titles you will discover new worlds and new friends just as I have. Please share your favorite books of 2023 in the comments. I am building my TBR list for 2024!

CLARITY

To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings by John O’Donohue: This book sits on my nightstand because I am always reaching for it. In seven sections divided among Beginnings, Desires, Thresholds, Homecomings, States of Heart, Callings, and Beyond Endings, O’Donohue makes offerings for every occasion of the human heart. For the Artist at the Start of the Day; For Belonging; To Come Home to Yourself; For Solitude; For the Time of Necessary Decision, and for the Breakup of a Relationship are among the Blessings I have turned to in the past year for the late poet’s ineffable wisdom.

Devotions by Mary Oliver: Another volume on my nightstand is this collection by Mary Oliver which includes some of her earliest poems from the 1960s right through to 2015. So many favorites are here like “Wild Geese,” “Praying” and “Journey.” Even as I reread these poems there are so many heart-stopping moments as their wise tentacles reach me anew, like the first few lines of “The Journey”: “One day you finally knew/what you had to do, and began,/though the voices around you/kept shouting/their bad advice—….”

The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schaffler

This book was a revelation for me as a lifelong perfectionist, and my more than 30 colorful little sticky tabs prove it. On nearly every page I felt both recognition and deep comfort in how Morgan Schaffler was interpreting and validating my experience. This book has depth. What a relief to know that my perfectionism could be a superpower, if I channeled it away from maladaptive perfectionism to adaptive perfectionism. Morgan Schaffler is a beautiful writer, intuitive and compassionate, and she shares stories of women she has worked with in her clinical psychology practice who learned how to use their perfectionism to their benefit. There’s also a quiz to find out what kind of perfectionist you are among the 5 types (who doesn’t love a quiz?) and no surprise that I am a “Parisian perfectionist.” This makes the perfect (ahem!) holiday gift for yourself or the beloved perfectionist in your life.

CONNECTION

Certain themes that preoccupied my life in 2023 were reflected in my choice of novels. The beautiful, haunting way in which Julie Otsuka and Lisa Genova describe their character’s experience of dementia from the inside-out were difficult but necessary reads as my mother’s dementia advanced. The difficulty of navigating marriage and parental and sibling relationships drew me to Flight, A Separation and Hello Beautiful. In The Wife and Unless, I was drawn in by one woman who sacrificed her art for her husband and another who used her art to buoy her in the depths of her grief. I was entranced by every one of these worlds.

Flight by Lynn Steger Strong: As the novel begins, a trio of siblings meet at an upstate New York farmhouse for their first Christmas without their mother. The financial, emotional and sexual complexities of three marriages are laid bare as the siblings’ competing interests make for beautifully tense scenes in her arresting prose. The final powerful scene after the family is thrown into a crisis by a young woman outside of their orbit is one I will never forget. So glad to be introduced to this novelist this year.

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano: Can love make a broken person whole? This compelling question illuminates Napolitano’s beautiful and painful family saga. It centers on William Waters, growing up in a house silenced by tragedy. In freshman year of college he meets Julia Padavano and her sisters, transforming his lonely world into one of loving chaos. When his dark past collides with the present, it causes a huge rift between the once-close sisters that lasts for generations. An homage to Little Women, the novel asks: can we love someone not in spite of who they are but because of it?

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka: This powerful story of a mother’s dementia and her daughter’s love had me spellbound, both the characters and Otsuka’s incantatory prose, almost like spoken word poetry. Alice, who is slowly losing her memory, has to abandon her beloved daily laps in the pool when her symptoms worsen and her estranged daughter reenters her mother’s life too late. Otsuka is a master of the small, telling detail that conveys all we need to know about life and loss, including time spent in the Japanese American incarceration camps. She takes us into Alice’s evocative and fleeting memories:

“She remembers the rows of dried persimmons that once hung from the eaves of her mother’s house in Berkley. They were the most beautiful shade of orange. She remembers that her father loves peaches. She remembers that every Sunday morning, at ten, he takes for a drive down to the sea in the brown car.”

Still Alice by Lisa Genova: I had seen this movie twice with Julianne Moore’s beautiful performance, but never read the book. With my mother’s dementia diagnosis, I wanted to return to the story of yet another Alice with dementia, but with an even crueler twist as Alice Howland is a fifty-year-old Harvard professor in the prime of her life when she descends into the swift, early-onset form of the disease. Genova, a neuroscientist, lets us into Alice’s experience with deep sensitivity and her book, translated into 37 languages and sold over a million copies, has done a wonderful job of raising awareness around dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

A Separation by Katie Kitamura: Described as a “slow burn of a novel,” Kitamura creates a nightmare scenario for a young woman who has agreed with her cheating husband that they will separate but keep it private for the time being. When he goes missing in a remote part of Greece on a research trip, she’s compelled to go find him, not even sure she wants to. Suspense builds, revealing layers of intimacy, fidelity and loss, until a shocking breaking point brings a moment of reckoning.

The Wife by Meg Wolitzer: First published in 2003, I had seen the film adaptation starring Glenn Close but not read it. Wolitzer is a master of being very funny while twisting our emotions and steadily raising the stakes of a long marriage that, from the perspective of the wife, has finally reached its expiration date. It is a revealing story of the dramatic concessions a wife makes to prop up the ego and career of her famous husband, abandoning herself and her own talent and dreams in the process.

Unless By Carol Shields: This is among my top five books of all time. I have read it three times now and I seldom reread books. The late Carol Shields, a Pulitzer-prize winner, tells the story of Reta Winters, 44, a writer of light fiction, whose daughter Nora has inexplicably dropped out of life to sit on a gritty street corner in Toronto, silent but for a sign around her neck that reads, “GOODNESS.” Reta encounters loss for the first time, unable to help her daughter, and Shields tells an ultimately consoling story of one family’s anguish and healing. Because it touches on my own work in progress, I am fascinated with how Shields narrates Reta’s sensibilities and challenges in writing her novel, including scenes of the novel-within-the-novel.

In the next two sections, COMMUNITY, and CREATIVITY, I review books by

Elizabeth Gilbert

,

Cheryl Strayed

Suleika Jaouad

Maggie Smith

and Robert Olen Butler. If you’d like to read on for more recommendations, consider becoming a paid subscriber (which includes my voiceover of both weekly newsletters—scroll to the end of this newsletter for that). I’d love to have you along.