It’s time for my installment of what’s been on my nightstand. Here are a few things that I’ve been reading (and not reading but meaning to read) this month.
Stitches A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, Anne Lamott: There’s just something about Anne Lamott that I can not get enough of right now. This short, powerful book hit me hard this week. Maybe because we had our own stitches experience when my youngest split his eyebrow open? I had to stop myself from going on Amazon and shipping to all my favorite people.
A Writer’s Diary, Virginia Woolf: Picked up at the library on a whim. Wanted to but just couldn’t get into it. Back to the library it goes.
Amulet – The Cloud Searchers, Kazu Kibuishi: The third installation for our Mother & Son book club. I’ve promised to read it on our Memorial Day camping trip. They’ve been waiting too long for me to catch up.
Glitter and Glue, Kelly Corrigan: This is a memoir of Kelly Corrigan’s experience being a nanny for a widower in Australia in her early twenties. As she navigates a family without a mother, she starts to see her own mother in a different way and eventually becomes a mother herself. The title refers to something her mom says, that her father is the glitter and she, the mother, is the glue (I could write a whole post on this alone). A short, easy read about motherhood and how we form ourselves in sync and in opposition to our own experiences.
Untie the Strong Woman – Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Love for the Wild Soul, Clarissa Pinkola Estes: My mom loaned me this book. I try every night to read a few pages. It’s half anthropological study, half spiritual guidepost about the sacred feminine and female iconography specifically the divine mother that we have across many cultures. It’s not light, but when you get to a good nugget, it’s totally worth it. And so I persist.
Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger: I picked this up at the library because I had never read it. I wanted to be blown away. Maybe this is the kind of book that you need to be taught to tease out all of the nuances. But I have to admit, I just didn’t really get it.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan: I whizzed through this fun novel about an unemployed 20-something that finds himself working in a bookstore with some hidden secrets waiting to be unlocked. The story takes you where the old world of books and the new world of technology meet and duke it out. There are wizard-like robes, secret societies and codes waiting to be broken. Then you’re on the Google campus meeting hackers and the brightest developers in Silicon Valley. It’s kind of like nerd heaven.
Not featured in the picture above is The Best In Tent Camping – Pennsylvania. We have the New England version of this book too (many areas of the country are covered in the series) and found it to be our go-to resource for finding campgrounds that work for our family.
That’s what we’re up to this weekend – packing up the car and headed into the wilderness. More like a state park, but we’ll be unplugging and s’moring it up and even taking in a baseball game. Whatever you’re up to this weekend, remember our veterans and have some fun.
Have a real weekend.
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