A Few Good Books: March

It’s the 15th!  Which means I’m linking up with Modern Mrs. Darcy to share a few of the best books I read during the month of March.  I covered some good ones and a few worth raving about. 

Here’s what I read in March

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

The Road Back to You by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile

The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

Good as Gone by Amy Gentry

The Road Back to You is a look at the Enneagram personality typing.  I’ve been dipping my toes in this somewhat ancient way of looking at our selves, how we respond in stress and at our best.  I had heard good things about this book and had spent some time listening to the podcast these authors host.  This book was a really great introduction to the Enneagram.  It covers the theory behind it and goes through each of the nine types in pretty good detail.  It certainly isn’t an all-encompassing, comprehensive look at the Enneagram but it’s a great starter and it made me want to look into other resources on the topic.  The authors’ writing style is very warm and accessible as well.  Overall I definitely recommend it!

Born a Crime is Daily Show Trevor Noah’s memoir about his childhood and young adult life in South Africa during Apartheid.  Noah was born to a white father and black mother, which during this era in South Africa’s history was literally a crime.  I’d listened to some interviews by Noah in recent months and have been struck by his wisdom and insight when it came to some of the things that were happening in our country.  I was super excited to get my hands on this memoir.  Noah writes like he talks and I could almost audibly hear him through the words on the page.  His stories and antecdotes were entertaining, eye opening and thought provoking.  The thing I most appreciated about this book was the education on South African Apartheid that Noah provides.  Each chapter is framed with a short “lesson” on different aspects of what happened during the Apartheid era.  There was so much that I didn’t know and Noah gave the reader a master class in an entertaining, approachable and interesting manner.

Americanah was my read of the month.  It’s the story of two Nigerians and their respective experiences immigrating to America and London, and then their return back to their homeland.  This book made me think about so many topics: the experience of immigrants, race in America and England, the way hard life experiences change and shape us.  It was SO well written, and the characters so well developed.  This is a book that will stay with me for a while.  One of the characters writes an anonymous blog about race in America and the author incorporated these fictional blog posts into the book beautifully.  It made me wish that this blog actually existed.  I love good fiction that highlights the experiences of others in a way that helps foster empathy and understanding and this book is heading to the top of my list of books in this category.

I’m slowly making my way through the Inspector Gamache series and The Cruelest Month was the third in the series.  Penny’s created a great cast of characters in these books and they keep me coming back.  The Bible Tells Me So was a super fascinating look at how our culture’s way of reading the bible in order to defend it’s divine accuracy is ruining our ability to  actually read and experience the bible as God intended.  It’s changing the way I read the bible.  And Good as Gone was the palate cleansing page turner I needed after the much heavier Americanah.  It was a fast paced, well told story of a girl who returns 8 years after being kidnapped.  Questions abound over who the girl really is and what really happened.  

That’s my March reading!  What did you read?  Anything I should be adding to my ever growing to read list?

My Best Books of 2016

I read forty-five books this year, which is probably the most I’ve read in a given year since I was ten and tearing through a Baby-Sitters Club book every other day.  I thought I’d share my favorites from the list.

The Best Books I read in 2016:

The Colors of Goodbye by September Vaudrey

I read this book on my i-phone in about 36 hours.  I am not exaggerating when I said I couldn’t put it down.  Vaudrey shares her family’s story of the unexpected death of her nineteen year old daughter Katie and the traumatic aftermath.  It is beautiful, hopeful, honest, raw, vulnerable and everything else you would hope a book about grief would be.  It is the book I now give to people in the midst of painful grief and it is one I will probably return to again.  

Columbine by Dave Cullen

There was so much I didn’t realize that I didn’t know about the Columbine shootings and Cullen’s detailed and researched account sheds so much light on what happened and how it was reported at the time.  It is incredible well written and eye-opening and I learned so much, particularly about the media and the ways stories can take on a life of their own, regardless of the truth.  It also gave me a tremendous amount of compassion for the families of the shooters.

Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes

I wasn’t prepared to be so struck by this book, but man did it land with me.  This is one that may become an annual read for me; the encouragement and motivation it gave me was so great.  It’s about the year Rhimes decides to say yes to everything that scares her.  The writing is delightful and entertaining, but the story is riveting.  I was a big fan.

A Little Life by Tanya Yanagihara

Content wise this was the most difficult book I’ve ever read.  This book reveals the very ugliest of humanity.  But I haven’t been that invested in a group of characters in a long time.  I found myself thinking about them when I wasn’t reading, wondering if they were ok.  It is a book that is made for discussion, so I was thankful to find a book group meeting about it at my local book store.  It is a book I recommend with hesitation, not because it’s a bad book, but because its content is not for everyone.   But man, is it a beautifully written story.

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

This should be required reading for the 21st century.  Stevenson writes about his work for the Equal Justice Initiative which is concerned about inequality and injustice in the criminal justice system particularly against the poor and minorities.  The book goes back and forth between a particularly moving case Stevenson worked on in his career and other cases/issues he continues to work on today.  It is an eye-opening and powerful read and I just found out it’s going to be a movie (starring my favorite, Michael B Jordan!).  More of us need to be talking about what’s really going on in our prison systems and how we can change it.

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

This is not my typical read, science fiction/thriller, but it had been recommended by more than one person as just that, a science fiction/thriller for people who don’t usually read them.  It was kind of mind trippy and I couldn’t think to much about the science behind some of it or I’d get way too confused, but it was an incredibly interesting story that left me thinking about the choices we make and the lives that those choices lead to.  It was really good.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by Jack Thorne and JK Rowling

This is a play that went up in West London sometime in the last year, I think.  It’s set where the very end of the last Harry Potter book leaves off, with Harry and his crew grown adults who have children attending Hogwarts.  It was a little weird reading a play and I couldn’t wrap my brain around how they did this live with the magic and what not, but all in all it felt like a few hours with some old friends and that was lovely.

Honorable Mentions:  Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton, Very Married by Katherine Willis Pershey, The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander, The Girls by Emma Cline and Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

Three authors I got into this year.

I discovered a few new authors this year and went deep into the rabbit hole of their books and/or series, all of which were so good, it felt redundant to add them to my best of list.  I found Rainbow Rowell and read five of her books this year (Fan Girl, Carry On, Eleanor and Park, Attachments and Landline).  I started and finished the Robert Galbraith (which is actually just J.K. Rowling writing under a pen name) Cormoran Strike series which was excellent.  (Those three books are A Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm and Career of Evil)  And while I discovered Liane Moriarty last year, my deep dive of her stuff continued into 2016.  I’ve read everything she’s written and thoroughly enjoyed all of it, but my favorites would probably include The Hypnotist’s Love Story, Big Little Lies and What Alice Forgot.

I read a lot of really great stuff this year and so while this list may just be my very favorite, there were a bunch of others that I would enthusiastically recommend as well.  In fact, of my list of 45 books there were maybe only two or three that I didn’t like.  I just finished my first book of 2017, Hatching Twitter by Nick Bolton, a super fascinating look at the birth and growth of Twitter.

What are you reading??