Am I the only person who puts things on her Kindle app and then completely forgets about them? I kept thinking, as I wrote last month’s edition of this column, “I really thought I bought some other books.” But I turned over all the piles of books and found no new books, so I just thought I must be wrong — until I opened the Kindle app on my iPad: and there were “Dietland,” “The Knockoff” and “Picnic in Provence.” I’ve even been known to start a book on Kindle and then forget about it (or roam the house saying things like: “I know I started a book. Where is it?”).
Every month I share not only the books I’ve been loving, but also what I’ve been reading, in total, including the books I thought I would read and the books I read part of and the books that just turned out to be aspirational. The first half of my summer reading was wide-ranging, and nearly all books I bought (as opposed to books sent to me by writers and publishers). I did not, I note, read one single one of the “books I kept with the intention of reading” next month. Instead, I wandered into bookstores (often in England, where I was traveling), bought things that interested me, and read them instead.
Before I left for England, I bought and read Nina MacLaughlin’s “Hammer Head.” It’s the story of her decision to leave journalism in favor of carpentry, a female version of “The Soul of Shopcraft” written without the somewhat over-inflated notion that what is good for one person must therefore be a recipe for success and happiness for all of us.
In England I continued the strong-women theme, starting with “How to Be a Heroine,” the playwright Samantha Ellis’s semi-memoir about the heroines who have influenced her at every stage of her life, from the girls of “Ballet Shoes” and Anne of “Anne of Green Gables” through the protagonists of the Brontës, Virginia Woolf and Jilly Cooper. That last name is that of a writer of Jackie Collins-style page-turners in the British mode, and her inclusion is one of the book’s strengths. When the writer asks herself what she learned from the women on the pages, and whether she really understood who they were, who their authors were and what they had to offer, she doesn’t skip over the books that may not rank on a syllabus of literary reading, or give less weight to Anne than to the heroine of “The Bell Jar.”
We walked our way through the moors of North Yorkshire, and in the process I picked up and read “The Yorkshire Shepherdess.” Its author, Amanda Owen, could be described as Britain’s answer to “The Pioneer Woman,” minus the reality television show and plus, I suspect, a big dose of reality. Over the course of her memoir, the farmer and mother of seven loses hundreds of sheep to foot and mouth disease, has her babies (more than one) by the side of the road when she can’t reach the hospital in time, and is often snowed in for weeks — which doesn’t mean she and her family aren’t out tending to the livestock on foot, horseback and quad bike. Reading it, you never once suspect that circumstances are being exaggerated for effect, comic or otherwise. I loved her unapologetic approach to childrearing, which can best be summed up as “we’re building character and I don’t really care how any one else does it.”
While on my Brit farm memoir kick (I do love a good farm memoir), I also spent a few hours in the company of Simon Dawson, reading “Pigs in Clover” and “The Sty’s the Limit,” the first about his move from city real estate agent to small-scale farmer and the second about coming to terms with middle age on the farm. Those books are good company; I missed Simon when I turned the last page.
Other impractical England bookstore purchases that I (we) bought and manually imported: “How Not to Be Wrong” by Jordan Ellenberg; “The Woman Who Stole My Life” by Marian Keyes; a book on disaster physics for one son; a book on the monsters of Doctor Who for another; and assorted books in a British series called “Pony Club Secrets” for one of my daughters. If you would like to picture our house as full of toppling stacks of books on all surfaces, you would be exactly right, and this kind of ridiculous behavior is why.
My favorite fiction read last month was Sarai Walker’s “Dietland,” a smart, funny book that starts off as the story of a fat woman’s journey to being and loving herself regardless of her weight. But she adds a hefty and gloriously funny feminist fantasy in the form of a terrorist group that targets men and male-dominated organizations that fail to respect women, from the British tabloids with their Page 3 girls to fictional versions of the gang-raping sports figures for whom our culture too often makes excuses. If you liked “The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty,” by Amanda Filipacchi (my pick of the month from March 2015) you’ll like “Dietland”; if you haven’t read that one but are looking for a summer read that turns the usual beach read gloriously upside down, this is still the book for you.
As for what I didn’t read, I abandoned “Far From the Madding Crowd” in a hotel in York, England, having realized too late that one Thomas Hardy book was apparently enough for me in this lifetime. I also released “Discontent” and “I Think You’re Totally Wrong.” I enjoyed the half or so of each book that I read, but they just didn’t call to me from the bed table at night, and my stack of “to read” is too big and too wobbly as it is.
On that “to read” front, in the world of advance copies I’ve been sent, I’m looking forward to Julie Halpern’s “Maternity Leave” and Caitlin Moran’s “How to Build a Girl.” I bought myself “The Truth According to Us” and and a friend just delivered her copy of “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves,” which looks highly promising. I’ll also be trying a little poetry; not only did someone kindly send me two books she thought I would like, but she also marked some of the pages of “Interval” and “Life of the Garment” for me.
What will I open first? Elisabeth Egan’s “A Window Opens.” I’ve cheated and skimmed, and I know I’m going to like the story of Alice Pearse, a book lover and mother of three who goes back to work full time in a digital start-up that sounds like a reader’s paradise (but surely won’t turn out to be quite what it seems). Next (if I remember it’s there) “The Knockoff” on my iPad. And, of course, I’m always trolling the shelves for another memoirist to metaphorically hang out with (especially if there is a farm involved).
I’m hoping the rest of July and August include at least a few hours in a hammock or by a pool or beach, book in one hand, icy drink in the other, and I have a big stack of books planned for any opportunity. What will you be reading in your (possibly imaginary) deck chair?
Books I Bought
AMANDA OWEN “The Yorkshire Shepherdess”
SIMON DAWSON “Pigs in Clover” and “Sty’s the Limit”
SAMANTHA ELLIS “How to Be a Heroine”
SARAI WALKER “Dietland”
MARIAN KEYES “The Woman Who Stole My Life”
ALEXANDRA PETRI “A Field Guide to Awkward Silences”
ANNIE BARROWS “The Truth According
to Us”
JORDAN ELLENBERG “How Not to Be Wrong”
NINA MACLAUGHLIN “Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter”
ELIZABETH BARD “Picnic in Provence: A Memoir With Recipes”
Books I Finished
AMANDA OWEN “The Yorkshire Shepherdess”
SIMON DAWSON “Pigs in Clover” and “Sty’s the Limit”
SAMANTHA ELLIS “How to Be a Heroine”
SARAI WALKER “Dietland”
NINA MACLAUGHLIN “Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter”
Books People Sent Me That I Kept With the Intention of Reading
ELISABETH EGAN “A Window Opens”
JULIE HALPERN “Maternity Leave”
BRENÉ BROWN “Rising Strong”
Books People Sent Me That I Still Plan to Read Probably But Have Been on This List for a While
AMY SEEK “God and Jetfire”
HARRISON SCOTT KEY “The World’s Largest Man”
AMY
MCCREADY “The Me, Me, Me Epidemic”