For those who also find themselves with toddlers insatiable for the next read-aloud, I present to you: 8 Read-Alouds for Young Kids That the Grownups Will Like Too.

There’s a lot of drivel out there–books with weird pictures, about farts or weird escapades that don’t make a lot of cohesive sense. My philosophy is: if a grownup can enjoy the story, it’s probably a story worth reading aloud to your children. We want stories and pictures we can sink our teeth into; stories that show us the beauty of the world around us, that reflect the lessons we’re actively trying to teach our children every day.

These books do that, and are genuinely enjoyable to read aloud. Over. And over. And over.

The Snatchabook by Helen & Thomas Docherty

Coming in strong at #1 is the most beloved read-aloud in our house: The Snatchabook. A delightful, cozy, funny read with gorgeous illustrations and a very Hobbity vibe. The mysterious Snatchabook learns a lesson about not taking what belongs to someone else. We all have this book memorized.

“One dark, dark night in Burrow Down,
a rabbit named Eliza Brown
found a book and settled down…

when a Snatchbook
flew into town.”

Let’s Go Home by Cynthia Rylant

Let’s Go Home is a wonderful celebration of all the rooms you find in a home, what happens there, and why going home is always a good idea.

Over in the Meadow by Ezra Jack Keats

This is my favorite of Ezra Jack Keats’ kids books. It’s a rhyming structure, counting up to ten focusing on a new animal with each number. Wonderful to read in the spring. Kids always love when you can count in a book.

“Over in the meadow, in a hole in a tree,
Lived a mother bluebird and her little birdies three.

’Sing!’ said the mother.
’We sing,’ said the three.
So they sang and were glad,
In the hole in the tree.

Farmhouse by Sophie Blackall

About the generations of life lived in a Farmhouse, with all its messiness and beauty. We also like Hello Lighthouse by the same author.

Moon by Britta Teckentrup

Rhyming book about the moon with peek-through pages and beautiful illustrations.

The Storybook Knight by Helen & Thomas Docherty

Another great one from the same authors of The Snatchabook. Leo’s parents send him off to fight the dragon (and maybe find a little mettle), but instead of fighting, he teaches the dragon to be good.

“Leo was a gentle knight
in thought and word and deed.
While other knights liked fighting,
Leo liked to sit and read…”

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Absolutely gorgeous illustrations in this adapted picture book of Robert Frost’s famed poem. Perfect for cozy winter evenings.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”

Love Is by Diane Adams

A wonderful rhyming story about what it means to mother, care for others, and watch the fruits of your labor in how those you cared for do the same. Made me a little weepy when I first read it.

Alternating between the 1950s and 70s, two siblings disappear 15 years apart in the woods of the same summer camp, and we know immediately the vibes are OFF with their cases. Something isn’t right with their family, there are eerie parallels in the circumstances, and red herrings abound.

The primary narrative characters in this novel felt lived in and real, although at times the background cast members were a bit formulaic (the biased male detective who isn’t so sure about this new female cop, etc etc.) The A Plot of “who did it?” across both mysteries is the driving force of the story, but there’s a whole background B Plot going on that explores class and gender issues that were especially heightened during that time period. The missing children come from a wealthy family that employs most of the town, and the conflicts of interest and inappropriate influence are everywhere. There were some moments I felt preached at, even as a woman that can resonate with the female investigator’s experiences; but mostly the stereotypes exist for a reason and Liz Moore’s just pointing to them.

With both crimes, the undercurrent seems to be: do you really walk away unscathed when you commit a crime that no one sees and that you aren’t punished for? Or does Someone see, and does your conscience bear witness? Neither the suspects, the victims, or the witnesses walk away from their actions unscathed.

As a double crime mystery, set in the woods, The God of the Woods has a ton of literary merit and is worth your time.

However:

I didn’t love what seemed to be unnecessary sexual undertones in almost every character’s narrative. At first glance, you’d think maybe this was to add a layer of “could this be a sexual offense?” to both crimes being investigated. But really, I think it was just unnecessarily lewd. I am finding this sheen on more and more mainstream literary fiction and I don’t fully understand it.

And as someone who gets very affected by the tone of what they’re reading, I did have to stop and put this down for a couple stretches because crimes against children are hard to stomach. This is a heavy story, with only infrequent moments of levity. And the mother of these children narrates large portions of the story, which multiples the sad tone. Nothing here would prevent me from recommending it to the discerning reader, but maybe bear those notes in mind.

If you enjoy Tana French’s novels or watching SVU, this might be for you.

We rise and greet each day not as creatures wondering what the next 12 hours might bring, but with a hurried compulsion to wring as much out of the time as we can. Your work is all too often about how much you can produce, and not whether what you made was meaningful. Your parenthood is measured more and more by your child’s intelligence or athletic performance, and less by what kind of person they’re becoming. The worth of your very life itself is measured by ever-changing (and therefore arbitrary) metrics like how much money you have, how much money you create for others, or whether you’re “with it” culturally.

And it’s not all “society’s” fault. There’s an innate impulse we feel to resist the constraints of our humanness and become…something more. We don’t like the limitations of our body and mind. We don’t like that all the best parts of life require of us significant effort, physical pain, abundant self-sacrifice, and lots and lots of time–and that even after that, the outcomes aren’t guaranteed.

So what are we to do? We could claw stubbornly against our limitations. But perhaps we should submit to the reality we can’t change anyway: maybe we should just be human.

At least that’s what Oliver Burkeman argues in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, which I absolutely think you should read.

Four Thousand Weeks is one of those books that succeeds on a profound level simply because it says obvious truths, that we regularly forget, very clearly. The best writing elicits a kind of unclenching; it doesn’t always reassure, but it brings to light what we may have been forgetting, overlooking, or intentionally hiding. And there’s a relief in seeing things in the light.

Four Thousand Weeks and its follow-up companion Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts do just that; they acknowledge, out loud, that you can’t outrun your own mortality with greater degrees of productivity, efficiency, or optimization. So instead of spinning your wheels on a futile cause, Burkeman encourages us to submit to reality, see our human limitations as a kind of freedom, and “manage our time” in light of those boundaries.

His tone is wry and jovial, a recovered productivity addict speaking to us of important lessons learned. The audiobooks, narrated by the author, are also excellent.

Here’s how I would summarize the broad strokes of Burkeman’s message:

You can’t do it all.

“Confronting your non-negotiable limitations means accepting that life entails tough choices and sacrifices, that regret is always a possibility, as is disappointing others, and that nothing you create in the world will ever measure up to the perfect standards in your head. But these truths are also the very things that liberate you to act, and to experience resonance. When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that’s when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly count. When you no longer demand perfection from your creative work, your relationships, or anything else, that’s when you’re free to plunge energetically into them. And when you stop making your sanity or self-worth dependent on first reaching a state of control that humans don’t get to experience, you’re able to start feeling sane and enjoying life now, which is the only time it ever is.” –p. xxiv, Meditations for Mortals

And if you cannot do it all, then it must be an unreasonable expectation that you try. Therefore, pick the things that are most important, and do those.

You can’t do it perfectly.

“Quantity overpower perfectionism, as Altucher explains: ‘Perfectionism is your brain trying to protect you from harm. From coming up with an idea that is embarrassing and stupid and could cause you to suffer pain. We like the brain. But you have to shut the brain off to come up with ideas.’ A quantity goal puts you back in the driver’s seat: instead of hoping you produce something good, you get to know you’ll produce something.” –p. 111, Meditations for Mortals

There’s a resonant passage where Burkeman says that so long as we don’t actually start work on a thing, we can imagine how perfect it’ll be once we finish it, and how smoothly it’ll go, and how much satisfaction it’ll bring us. It’s not until we get into the weeds that we realize the “potential” for perfect goes away as soon we put our hand to the task. And so we avoid it, because it feels nicer to imagine it done perfectly than wrestle it into existence covered in mud.

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And you probably can’t do it fast.

“You surrender to the reality that things just take the time they take, and that you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster, because it isn’t within your power to force reality’s pace as much as you feel you need to, and because the faster you go, the faster you’ll feel you need to go.” —p. 170, Four Thousand Weeks

Doing things fast often means we do them poorly or don’t do them at all, sacrificing actual meaning on the alter of efficiency. Letting things “take the time they take” is one way to embrace the reality of our limitations, lean in to the true nature of the task at hand, and relish it in whatever way we can.

My only quibble with Burkeman is his reliance on the idea of our “cosmic insignificance”–the idea that you and your actions matter very little in the grand scheme of the universe. And that therefore, it’s egotistical to assume that everything you do must be profound and extra-ordinary, since you’re just a speck anyway.

He’s right in one sense, but I would argue he only has half the story. It’s true that we are each of us, on our own, pretty insignificant; what is one drop to a whole river? But what if there is actually someone extra-ordinary on a cosmic level, from whom we came and through whom we get our very life, that does lend our actions cosmic significance, purely because we come from him? What if our ordinary, everyday lives mean quite a lot, because of where we came from?

Perhaps we were made for something—or someone—more?

I had a pretty weird reading year, mostly because I had a baby. Listening to Austen’s Emma on audio was so great. (“Better be without sense than misapply it as you do.”) Even though I wasn’t blown away when I closed the cover, I’m still thinking about The Other Valley (review here) by Scott Alexander Howard and that’s a good sign that a book was a good choice for me. I LOVED ’s This Homeward Ache (review here). Myquillyn Smith’s House Rules was wonderful and practical and full of real-person-who-owns-a-normal-house advice. I finally read another entry in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series–Faithful Place–and gosh, she’s just so good at character-driven literary mysteries. Honorable mentions: really enjoyed Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse (highlights here), and (even though it was a bit of a slog) I think Mark Lawrence’s The Book That Wouldn’t Burn was so original and worth my time. The Eye of the World was my long fantasy tome of the year and it was 5 stars.

Other Good Writing

1. On AI & Creative Work: I’m pretty freaked out by generative A.I., but have struggled to interpret exactly why. This great essay by Ted Chiang (“Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art”) gave me some good categories to consider:

   1. “Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.”

2. I really enjoyed this piece from 2022 in The NYT Magazine about commonplace books: “Commonplace Books Are Like a Diary Without the Risk of Annoying Yourself”.

   1. “With others’ words as intermediaries, the harsh light of hindsight softens.”

Music & Podcasts

I didn’t listen to a ton of new music, but like the rest of America, I loved Gracie Abrams’ album. I discovered Noah Kahan’s Live from Fenway Park and had a ton of fun in the car with that one. Lizzy McAlpine keeps making really interesting, often heartbreaking music; her 2024 album Older (and Wiser) was wonderful, specifically the tracks Older and Spring Into Summer. Even though I know Spotify is doing some dastardly manipulation of plays and profits, the Cozy Christmas Jazz playlist has enjoyed a fifth (sixth?) December rotation in the background.

The Free Press keeps having interesting conversations on Honestly: their episode with Jonathan Haidt on smartphones and kids was great. Listening to The Big Boo Cast still feels like hearing some old friends catch up. If you’ve been missing Reply All too, check out Search Engine.

Food & Drink

• I love Cheese Gal for fun and easy apps and quick recipes, and her “Bill’s Breakfast Casserole” is now my go-to for an indulgent and quick breakfast when we have guests.

• Half Baked Harvest’s Creamy White Chicken Chili in the Instant Pot is still a go-to, and sometimes I add a bunch of colorful bell peppers and chili beans to make it more chili-y. LOTS of lime and LOTS of cilantro is key.

• During postpartum I made a ton of chopped salads with steak, and I liked this one from No Crumbs Left as inspiration.

• Somewhere along the way I left my LaCroix fixation behind, and this year the Spindrift Nojito flavor reigned supreme in our fridge.

• During a serendipitous moment in a Bucee’s I discovered this watermelon licorice from Wiley Wallaby–I don’t even like licorice but this stuff is so good.

• It’s really important to me that y’all know about the Reese’s Caramel Cup, which I threw in my basket during a whirlwind Halloween grocery run. Rarely does a spinoff improve upon the original, but dare I say…this might.

Habits

• My daily evening walk has become such a fixture that it throws me off-kilter when I miss it. I was so committed that this year I took it regardless of weather, and accidentally got caught in a sudden summer downpour with both kids, the stroller, and the dog and had to shelter under a neighbor’s front porch, waving an apology to their ring camera. Worth it.

• Post-nap snacks outside: one summer day I suggested to Rosemary that we take her snack to the back deck after naptime, and now she insists on it every day. It’s been an easy way to increase our hours spent outside and get some much-needed fresh air.

• Afternoon pour-overs: I rediscovered my v60, and the 5 minutes it took to make a better-than-normal cup of coffee after lunch was the highlight of a lot of my days!

See you in 2025!

“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you…the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and effect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.”
–C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

And:

“At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.”
–C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I hung on every word of that famous sermon, but not until Amy Baik Lee’s This Homeward Ache did I realize how many others have attempted to wrap that idea in definitive language.

Every word of this part-memoir, part-thematic-reflections was a joy. First tracing the idea of “Sehnsucht” through the writings of Lewis, Buechner, Tolkien, and others; then reflecting on it through vivid snapshots of her own story, Amy Baik Lee helps us put two hands around living Heavenward while still here on Earth.

Your eternal desire was given to you on purpose.

“This is an ache well worth carrying, friends. The Cause of this longing himself has directed us to "seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God" (Col. 3:1). He knows the depth of this pull toward "a better country," lodged in the hearts of his people throughout history, and he "is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city" (Heb. 11:16).

One day soon our longing will heal in the most curious way, and we will find that it was not a wound that marred our earthly existence, but a cleft through which the fullness of our coming joy shone. And on the day that it breaks open completely, we will finally receive that which we have thirsted to behold and belong to all our lives; like autumn travelers loosed upon a resplendent landscape of beauty with no nightfall ahead, we will find both our peace and our flourishing in the triune Healing of this ache.” –p. 3

She quotes Tolkien, saying:

"We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of 'exile,'' J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote to his son Christopher.

“What kind of grace is this, that Christ has not only redeemed me but embedded a shard of unsettledness within me so that I would look for its source?” –p. 35

On how our temporary homes point to our eternal home:

“The act of stewarding an earthly house in the service of Christ is, I now believe, that single steady beacon. In times of exigency—family illness, local disaster, widespread war, persecution—every resource his people have must of course be mobilized for extraordinary use; each station always stands ready for the King's command. But in between these times (and one could well argue, especially during them) our temporary homes are concrete ways to affirm that "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well"—that life is worth living as fully as we can and that we are not forsaken. When we tend our spaces with work and worship, however small or transitory those spaces may be, we join a pattern of bright stations that signal the way Home.” –p. 95

Living Homeward while fighting the good fight:

“We live in a story of epic proportions, no matter how easily we forget it. And the same Bible that opens our eyes to this immense reality also gives us plain direction about how its war is to be waged. Our "myth" involves an arsenal of the ordinary: promised prayers earnestly prayed, hidden fasting, secret giving, the continual laying down of our own interests, an open-armed welcome to children, provision for the poor, endurance in trial, and a faithfulness in all these and similar acts, so that when Christ returns, he will find us going about his work.” –p. 135

Christ establishes us in joy while we’re Living Homeward:

“For I know now that it is possible to weep with him and then get up and keep going….With the greatest kindness, he keeps walking me off the ledge of my capabilities so that, it seems, I will stop attempting to live within them….Even when I falter, he fills up the minutes with his patience, the unfolding of everyday eucatastrophes, and the slow work of establishing my roots in joy. Every step taken with him, whether down or up, is a step Homeward.

When these years are finished, I will never again know the experience of having to lean on him in such fallen weakness. But I will remember it, when the union between Christ and his church comes into unmarred sweetness. When I see his face for the thousandth time.

And so the ache grows. Always gliding a few steps ahead, it has led me from a rote understanding of my Lord into the careful tread of toeing the line, and from there into the freer movement of a deepening love. I find now that I want not merely to obey but to delight him, more than anything else. Receiving all that he given and rendering my all back to him in love, as he does the greater work in me: I believe this is, of all things, what it means to live Homeward.” –p. 209

The Eye of the World

By Robert Jordan • ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Before there was Brandon Sanderson, there was Robert Jordan. Now considered a staple of the genre, The Eye of the World is the first in a 14-book series that initially heavily borrowed from Lord of the Rings….and you can definitely tell.

The Eye of the World has everything: a young farm boy (Hobbit) from an out-of-the-way part of the world (the Shire), who gets thrust into good vs. evil action much bigger than him, guided by a powerful magic-user (Gandalf).

Every book in this series is 600+ pages (save one), and it’s intimidated me for years. BUT! It was such a good time. Yeah, for the first half it’s almost a one-for-one facsimile of Tolkien, but about half in I started to see glimmers of a bigger, unique path Jordan is paving. This is really well-done fantasy, and I can see myself picking this series up every couple of months when I want to feel cozy.

Read if you like: quests, LOTR, big books

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 1/5 • Language: 1?/5 • Violence: 2.5/5

First Lie Wins

By Ashley Elston • ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Set in the thick humidity of towns across the Southeast U.S., this was a great summery thriller. Evie Porter is a con artist, with a long history of successful jobs across the south. But things start to slip when she takes her latest job and develops a connection to her mark–because always watching is her mysterious boss, Mr. Smith.

Expect: twists, southern lady gossips, spy vibes
Read if you like: con artist movies

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 2/5 • Language: 2/5 • Violence: 1/5

The Other Valley

By Scott Alexander Howard • ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I wrote in-depth about this one here. Really intriguing premise: sixteen-year-old Odile’s home valley lies between ones just like it to the east and the west, but those valleys exist twenty years in the future and twenty years in the past, respectively. The valleys repeat into infinity on either side, the town’s ancestors and offspring existing simultaneously into the past and future.

This idea was enough to keep me reading, and while I did have some qualms with the pacing (80% groundwork, 20% payoff), it will stay with me.

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 2.5/5 • Language: 2.5?/5 • Violence: 1.5/5

I Cheerfully Refuse

By Leif Enger • ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I shared my favorite excerpts from this one here.. This is the story of Rainy’s flight across Lake Superior as he’s forced on the run by some heartbreaking events at home. It’s a wonderful little window into a happy marriage, an ode to sailing and the bass guitar, and full of literary allusions. The book dips its toe into lots of different streams, but at its core, it’s a sort of treatise against despair—persuading the reader to choose hope and life over resignation, not so much through argumentation but through the portrait of a grief-stricken character contending with his new future.

Read if you like: Greek myths, sailboats

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 1/5 • Language: 2?/5 • Violence: 2/5

Pray Big

By Alistair Begg • ⭐⭐⭐

I read this with my church small group and I think it’s a great little primer on prayer!

Faith in Christ is first of all a decisive act, and then it is a sustained attitude. It is to have your heart-eyes opened to who Jesus is and what he has done; and then it is to have your heart-eyes more and more focused on the glory of Jesus, so you live more and more in light of that. –p. 45-46

The House Across the Lake

By Riley Sager • ⭐⭐⭐

A solid thriller: set at a remote lake house with an unreliable(ish) protagonist who sees something in the house across the lake and can’t let it go. I didn’t love the twist explanation, but go in blind, and to each their own.

Read if you like: The Woman in the Window

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 2/5 • Language: 2/5 • Violence: 2/5

Emma

By Jane Austen • ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Brilliantly plotted with razor-sharp characters and hilarious dialogue. Austen is the queen of creating people you swear you’ve met in real life.

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: it’s a classic • Language: it’s a classic • Violence: it’s a classic

Death By Living: Life Is Meant to be Spent

By N.D. Wilson • ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The best antidote to being sad that your life is filled with sacrifice is to be reminded that that’s the whole point. I revisited this one this summer, ten years later, and it was a great refresher. For those who read Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl back in the day, this is the other side of that same coin: you are here for a limited time, what are you going to do with it? Try to hoard your moments for comfort’s sake?

Great for moms, great for kids, great for people completely closed off to the idea of a God telling them what they’re here for in the first place. (Occasionally I feel he pulls a grenade pin just for the sake of raising eyebrows, but I think that’s his point.)

This is my body. May it be broken for you.

Read if you: want a big view of your life; feed babies in the middle of the night; want to shake up your reading

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 2/5 • Language: 1/5 • Violence: 0/5

It’s the story of Rainy’s flight across Lake Superior as he’s forced on the run by some heartbreaking events at home. It’s a wonderful little window into a happy marriage, an ode to sailing and the bass guitar, and full of literary allusions. The book dips its toe into lots of different streams, but at its core, it’s a sort of treatise against despair—persuading the reader to choose hope and life over resignation, not so much through argumentation but through the portrait of a grief-stricken character contending with his new future.

Here are my favorite excerpts:

On hopelessness:

“As enemies go, despair has every ounce of my respect.”

Rainy’s first encounters with his future wife at her library job, and with books:

“I went back hoping to hear again that easy low music, and sure enough there it was, addressing the agitation and pain of the fearful. This time I sensed a trace of humor or affection down inside her voice. Again I was stirred by a nameless melancholy, by envy for those who lived within that frequency. I didn't think of it in those words. Picture a voice like a river's edge where the water turns back on itself, orbits quietly, proceeds downstream in laughter. This time when I left she had gone on break. Again I was denied the sight of she who had beguiled me. In later visits, I paid attention not just to tone but to content. Pulling books as camouflage I took a carrel nearer her desk though still out of view. She did far more than direct people to charts and information. She had a way of answering unasked questions, finessing and adjusting her recommendations. History for the ambitious, novels for the lonely, poetry for the heartbroken. All of it a lettered world alien to me. I began to take notes— "Dickens," she replied in a near whisper to one request, and ‘dikens’ I wrote in stub pencil. Why, you ask. How would I know? When a flame is lit move toward it. Titles, authors, barely floated notions—whatever she said that's what I scribbled. I didn't yet know the word oracle but she had that smoky appeal. There seemed no person she couldn't understand, no question too dead to resurrect. She told a bored girl about a sixteenth-century poet whose goal was to read everything ever written. Think about that. The girl did not believe her but I did. Apparently this poet went blind in the attempt. Luminous is another word I didn't know….I banged and barged through dozens and hundreds of books discovered in my eavesdropping sessions, not just adventures but also poetry, sweet Jesus, by Greeks and Brits and Japanese whose silky names I never can remember. Did I understand it? Not by half, but when it thunders you know your chest is shaking. These thieves and lovers and wandering poets—what big lives they had! I began watching everyone I met for secret greatness.” —p. 27-29

Sick of sailing already:

“Guess what, I didn't want to be on a boat anymore. I wanted to be on land. In fact I wanted nothing except to be on land. The land was close, too. A hundred yards off! A good grassy smell came from it that made me weepy and profane. Some voyager me. Much as I'd worked on Flower I was ready right then to leave her forever, to swim ashore and walk to whatever town and buy a cup of coffee and sit in the sun. Lark and I once took life a year at a time. As the world shifted we went to a month at a time, later a week. At this point an hour would do. I'd take twenty minutes in the sun. I was cold and hungry and getting the headache that comes of no coffee. In that instant I made what Lark used to call an Executive D. I'd swim ashore and see what offered.” — 104

On the democratic value of a dubious newspaper:

“I was about to leave when there was a muted bump at the alley door. I got there in time to see a manky old hybrid coasting away with the aspect of a hat pulled low. At my feet lay a small bale of newspapers crisscrossed in twine. The Mosquito. I looked both ways and bent over and snagged the bale. I wasn't happy to see the fungoid tabloid that showed up erratically without explanation. If you don't know who delivers, how can you tell them not to?

"Who was that?" said Lark.

I held up the bale. Lark and I had argued before over accommodating the papers. I voted for immediate composting. She put no credence in the Mosquito but "aligned with the principle."

"What principle?"

"More words are better," she said.

"They can't spell 'disturb.’" In matters of language I was a zealous convert.” —72

On being blind to the beauty:

“I am always last to see the beauty I inhabit.” –329

The premise itself is just as compelling as the cover: sixteen-year-old Odile’s home valley lies between ones just like it to the east and the west, but those valleys exist twenty years in the future and twenty years in the past, respectively. The valleys repeat into infinity on either side, the town’s ancestors and offspring existing simultaneously into the past and future.

Odile is in the running for a coveted seat on the Conseil, the protectors of the town boundary and the arbiters of travel between valleys. Visitors are, rarely, permitted to visit the neighboring valleys on the basis of profound grief or loss–accompanied by an armored guard and explicitly forbidden to interfere lest the butterfly effect of any meddling roll through time to their home valley.

But one day Odile sees something she shouldn’t: two visitors on a mourning tour from another valley who she immediately recognizes as the parents of her new friend, Edme. Edme, who Odile’s heart has been quietly opening to, is going to die.

The Other Valley is the subdued, measured story of how grief alters the trajectory of Odile’s life, how her loneliness blooms and hardens, and how her past and future selves dance around one crucial event. We follow Odile twenty years into the future, and walk with her through the life she chose–the good, but mostly bad, of it. We watch as her life coalesces into a decision to change it, for better or worse, and with full knowledge of the consequences.

This is worth your time for the ways Howard looks honestly at how loneliness can be both a fate that befalls you and a result of your own decisions. Our peek into Odile’s inner life feels raw and realistic, neither the poor nor praiseworthy aspects of her character hidden. Many of us can find ourselves in her over-reservedness, in her defiant bent toward justice, or in her withdrawal in the face of pain.

This definitely felt like a debut, though. There were clearly undeveloped parts of the story, and the pacing could’ve used more fine-tuning. But a worthwhile read, and it will stick with me for its bittersweetness. I will read whatever Howard writes next.

Some things to note:

• This story is 80% groundwork, 20% payoff, and I wasn’t quite ready for that. I kept waiting to get to the “ok but how does this work out??” and it took far longer than I expected. This is absolutely not for you if you must have rapid plot progression in your books.

• I think the jacket copy pitches a little too heavily toward the “playing with time” aspect of this novel, when really, this is a story about grief and loneliness. We spend most of our time sitting with what has become of Odile and what happened to her potential. That’s not a criticism, but don’t go in expecting Blake Crouch.

• I cannot emphasize this enough: there are no quotation marks around dialogue. I know. I will never understand this, and I have the same feedback I always do when authors make this choice: there were multiple situations where I didn’t know if I was reading the character’s thought, or something they actually said out loud. Authors, I promise we will still take you Seriously™️ even if you use quotation marks.

I was driving past the school when the recess bell sounded, and at the familiar chime, children flowed from the cloakroom doors toward the field and playground, shouting in high voices, their bodies impossibly small. I pulled over for a minute and ate a snack as I watched them. All I saw were future griefs. —p. 234

Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir | Ina Garten

October 1, 2024 – Preorder

The Barefoot Contessa herself tells her story. That title! That neck scarf! I’m not typically a huge fan of memoirs unless they’re about someone I really like, and who doesn’t like Ina? I’m hoping for more vibes like this IG post of when she bought her first store.

Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us About the Wonder and Struggle of Being Alive | Russ Ramsey

October 22, 2024 – Preorder

I’ve been working through Ramsey’s Rembrandt Is in the Wind for…longer than I care to admit, 1) because I had a couple kids and 2) because it’s not one you fly through. But it has me excited for this follow-up digging into the stories of ten artists and their work. Here’s a snippet from Rembrandt:

We are drawn to beauty, and we instinctively know that somewhere, somehow, such a thing as perfection exists. We seek both beauty and perfection, at great expense of money and time. Beauty we can find. It's all around us, in a million different forms. Perfection, on the other hand, eludes us. It is as though, to borrow an expression attributed to Meister Eckhart, perfection inhabits our true home, but we are walking in a distant country.

We are like revenants. On the other side of the veil is the tangible glory of unfailing perfection, but it is just out of our reach. So we have given ourselves to the pursuit of making copies from the dust of the earth, compressed by time, crafted by pressure, but conceived by something more than mere imagination. Our best attempts at achieving perfection this side of glory come from an innate awareness that it not only exists, but that we were made for it. –p. 38

The PLAN: Manage Your Time Like a Lazy Genius | Kendra Adachi

October 8, 2024 – Preorder

A genius about the things that matter, and lazy about the things that don’t? She got me with that. Kendra’s in my top 10 fave content creators, mostly because she makes productivity, organization, and life management work for you in any season or situation. I loved her first two books, and I’m excited about this new one on time management that’s described as “refreshingly compassionate and immediately practical.”

What I Ate In One Year (and other thoughts) | Stanley Tucci

October 15, 2024 – Preorder

“Are you rolling?” IYKYK. This is a tour through twelve months of eating with Stanley “in restaurants, kitchens, film sets, press junkets, at home and abroad, with friends, with family, with strangers, and occasionally just by himself.”

The Three-Body Problem

By Cixin Liu (Translated by Ken Liu) • ⭐⭐⭐

This might be one of those “it’s not you, it’s me” reading experiences….or it might just be the book.

In 1960s China, amidst the violence of the Cultural Revolution, a handful of scientists begin sending messages into the galaxy to establish communication with any other intelligent life. Unbeknownst to the rest of humanity, a single scientist gets a response…and proceeds to welcome an alien invasion. We jump to the present day, where scientists are dying under suspicious circumstances, and intellectuals are being drawn to a mysterious advanced virtual reality video game. We uncover how these events are connected to the events of the 60s, and the book ultimately explores whether there’s anything worth saving in humanity (given our penchant for depravity and lack of moral center) against the backdrop of an alien invasion story.

The ideas at the core of this story are really cool: a very unique alien race, a serious reckoning with humanity’s problems, mind-blowing physics. But ultimately it felt like just those ideas strung together in a row, and not a cohesive story with setup and resolution. I’m glad to report that the Netflix show (content warnings apply) is great so far, and made sense of the story and ideas through some heavy reworking. (Caveat: I haven’t read the second and third book.)

If you want a foray into big philosophical questions and the ethics of futuristic science, without a lot of readerly cushion, this may be for you.

“It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.”

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 1.5/5 • Language: 2?/5 • Violence: 2.5/5

Carrie Soto is Back

By Taylor Jenkins Reid • ⭐⭐⭐⭐💫

All of a sudden I’m really invested in tennis?

Carrie Soto, one of the world’s greatest tennis players, comes out of retirement to defend her winning record against a new wave of younger, fresher players.  Coached by her father, we follow as she battles not only her older body and skillset but her own pride and ego. While pursuing #1 at all costs, like she always has, Carrie starts to wonder if winning is really all there is.

The match scenes were riveting, and I loved the story of Carrie’s growth from vicious, impersonal competitor to something more human. If you like books about people who are the best at their particular thing, you’ll like this. This is my first Taylor Jenkins Reid novel.

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 2/5 • Language: 2/5 • Violence: 0/5

Drowning

By T.J. Newman • ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

You’ll want to plan to read this in one sitting. A classic unputdownable thriller that went down super easy, outlandish premise aside.

Flight 1421 crashes into the ocean and then sinks with a dozen passengers still inside, Will—an engineer—and his daughter among them. Can you believe that Will’s soon-to-be-ex wife is a professional diver and the only person who can save them? With oxygen running out and tensions running high, the folks in the plane and the crew above work together to find a solution and get the survivors rescued. No I’m serious.

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 1?/5 • Language: 1/5 • Violence: 2.5/5

Going Zero

By Anthony McCarten • ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Jason Bourne meets that supercomputer from the Dark Knight.

The U.S. government has partnered with Silicon Valley (never a good idea?) to create the grandaddy of surveillance software: FUSION. To test the technology, they invite 10 contestants to “Go Zero:” evade the surveillance program for 30 days by going off grid. Ordinary librarian, Kaitlyn, is chosen to participate, but may have some ulterior motives as she pulls James Bond-level evasion tactics and remains in the game far longer than expected. We love an uber-competent librarian.

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 2.5/5 • Language: 2.5?/5 • Violence: 2/5

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone

By Benjamin Stevenson • ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Everyone in Ernest’s family has killed someone—one way or another—and when the family reunites at a snowy ski lodge and a dead body shows up on the slopes, Ern plays amateur detective to find the killer.

This was so fun. Some people found the narrative voice to be annoying (Ernest himself writes books about how to write books…including detective novels) but I thought it was funny. A fun, fresh take on Christie style mysteries.

Read if you like: Knives Out or Agatha Christie

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 1/5 • Language: 2/5 • Violence: 2.5/5

Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse #1)

By James S.A. Corey • ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Some solid space opera sci-fi here from Corey.

In the near-ish future, humanity has expanded into our solar system but hasn’t expanded beyond our age-old problems and divisions. Jim Holden and his crew haul ice in the asteroid belt and stumble upon a mystery way beyond their pay grade in the form of an abandoned ship hiding a secret. Meanwhile: a Detective is tasked with finding a missing girl, and finds himself pulled into the same web as Holden’s crew. Hint: there’s definitely a malicious alien intelligence involved.

The worldbuilding was great, and the political backdrop of this interplanetary story felt so realistic. I can picture humanity having these exact problems given this technological progress. Good pacing and plotting, maybe felt a little bloated at certain points.

But: Sc-ifi has a women problem. The frequent references to prostitution and the objectification of women's bodies got old fast, and I really feel like we can tell speculative stories without them?

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 3.75/5 • Language: 3/5 • Violence: 3.5/5

The Maid

By Nita Prose • ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Molly loves her job as a maid at the lavish Regency Grand Hotel, throwing herself into maintaining order and cleanliness with gusto. She knows she struggles to understand other people and can be perplexed by social situations, but she does her best to be courteous at all times. But one day she finds the body of a wealthy guest in the suite she’s cleaning—and finds herself targeted as the main suspect.

Fun setting, interesting main character, good writing. If you like NYC hotels, you’ll like this. If you like cleaning, you’ll like this. If you like hot tea, you’ll like this.

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 1/5 • Language: 1.5/5 • Violence: 2/5

Listen for the Lie

By Amy Tintera • ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Remember the collective experience we all had during the first season of Serial? This Texas-set mystery is in that lane.

Lucy has no memory of the night her best friend was murdered, and while the evidence wasn’t sufficient to put her away, she remains the presumed murderer by everyone in her small town. She returns home and finds herself collaborating with a true crime podcast host to uncover the truth about who killed her best friend, even if it was herself. We have amnesia, we have a small town dinner, we have old flames and new enemies.

I enjoyed this, I think it nailed the unreliable narrator without being overdone and the small Texas town setting felt authentic.

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 3.75/5 • Language: 2?/5 • Violence: 3/5

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

By Gabrielle Zevin • ⭐⭐⭐

Written by the same author of one of my 2022 favorites–Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow–there’s a definite shift in tone from that novel to this one.

A recently-widowed, persnickety bookstore owner finds a baby left in his shop, and his most prized book stolen. The trajectory of his life changes forever. This was a sweet story, recommended for those who love character-driven, bookish novels.

Read if you like: Fredrik Backman or the novel How to Find Love in a Bookshop

• Content Ratings • Sexual References: 1.5/5 • Language: 1/5 • Violence: 2/5

The Hound of the Baskervilles

By Arthur Conan Doyle • ⭐⭐⭐

Somehow I’d never actually read a Sherlock Holmes novel. Basically: a rich guy ends up dead on a moor where a fabled “hound” roams. Holmes and Watson are on the case. Doyle really nailed the eerie vibes of the moor, but I felt the core pieces of the mystery itself lacking a tad. (A key “clue” feels dropped in randomly and wasn’t provided to us in a way where the reader could actually solve the puzzle.) Am I allowed to say that?

• Content Ratings • Sexual References 0/5 • Language: 1/5 • Violence: 2.5/5

That’s all folks! See you next time, where I will share my ice cold takes on the tome that is The Wheel of Time book 1: The Eye of the World.

Sonnet 73 • William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

After Apple-Picking • Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Besides the Autumn poets sing (131) • Emily Dickinson

Besides the Autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the Haze -

A few incisive mornings -
A few Ascetic eves -
Gone - Mr Bryant's "Golden Rod" -
And Mr Thomson's "sheaves."

Still, is the bustle in the brook -
Sealed are the spicy valves -
Mesmeric fingers softly touch
The eyes of many Elves -

Perhaps a squirrel may remain -
My sentiments to share -
Grant me, Oh Lord, a sunny mind -
Thy windy will to bear!

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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

By Gabrielle Zevin • ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

One blurb called this the “Great American Gamer Novel,” and I think that’s apt. Spanning three decades, this 2022 novel follows the creative partnership of two video game designers who met as children, fell out, and reunited in college. Sam and Sadie–along with their producer, Marx–build an unexpected bestseller and are catapulted into increasingly great professional success and personal strife. Sam and Sadie’s story is expertly layered and genuine here; their journey felt real in a way some coming-of-age stories don’t.

This is a novel about so many things: creative partnership, physical suffering, grief, being mixed race, human connection and conflict, love and friendship, and play. (It started a little slow, but by page 100 I was completely hooked.) Read this for the questions it asks about the place of friendship in romantic love, the creative process, and living with grief.

“Sam's doctor said to him, ‘The good news is that the pain is in your head.’ But I am in my head, Sam thought.”

Content Ratings • Sexual References: 3.75/5 • Language: 3/5 • Violence: 2/5

Klara and the Sun

By Kazuo Ishiguro • ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I wrote a full review of this beautiful novel last month here on Substack. Here’s an excerpt, and read the full thing here.

“But really, this novel is about what it means to love. What does it mean to love a person, when you could build an AI to act just like them? What does it mean to love the source of your life–for Klara, the Sun, but for us: what does it mean to truly love God? What do we owe him in return for his sustenance and nourishment? In a world that has rejected love and faith, can we really survive without them?” Review.

Content Ratings • Sexual References: 1/5 • Language: 1/5 • Violence: 1/5

Who Is Maud Dixon?

By Alexandra Andrews • ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

File this one under "bad people behaving badly."

Florence is a struggling, wannabe writer living in New York and generally wandering aimlessly. After being fired from her job, she stumbles into a role as assistant to the mysterious writer Maud Dixon (a pseudonym for no-one-knows-who). So begins Florence’s slow devolution.

On the surface this is just a summer thriller. But at the heart of this story is a woman who doesn't know who she is, and takes all of her cues from the people she aspires to be like. She doesn't actually know what she likes, what she wants, or why. She has no real identity, and so she becomes a copy of others. This is a story about not having the courage–and the humility–to learn and own all the good and bad parts of yourself, work through them, and come out with a vision on the other side. This is a story about identity theft at the deepest level.

Content Ratings • Sexual References: 2.5/5 • Language: 1.5/5 • Violence: 3/5

The Road to Roswell

By Connie Willis • ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The publisher's copy calls this a romantic comedy, but I don't think I'd classify if that way. Francie lands in Roswell, the home of the UFO festival, to be maid of honor in her best friend's wedding to a UFO nut. With many an eye roll, Francie steels herself to talk her friend out of this wedding, but before she can make any progress she's–you guessed it–abducted by an alien. A rollicking adventure ensues.

This novel is fun without being frothy, and takes an unexpected approach to the typical close encounter story. I loved the ending.

Content Ratings • Sexual References: 1.5/5 • Language: 1/5 • Violence: 1.5/5

A River Enchanted

By Rebecca Ross • ⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Scottish-inspired fantasy set on the fictional island of Cadence, where the four elements (wind, water, earth, fire) hold powerful sway over the people’s way of life. Young girls are disappearing off the island; Adaira, heiress of the island, summons her childhood friend/rival, Jack, home to help find the girls and restore peace.

Lyrical, gorgeous writing. Cozy, wind-swept setting. Great character development.

Content Ratings • Sexual References: 2.5/5 • Language: 0/5 • Violence: 2/5

Tom Lake

By Ann Patchett • ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Lara's three daughters have returned home to the family's cherry orchard as the pandemic is at its height. Between rows of trees, they beg their mother to recount the story of her summer spent acting at the Tom Lake theater and in a romance with the now-world-famous Peter Duke.

The portions of this novel set in the present, where mother and daughters share a story while sharing the farmwork, just glow. Patchett's prose is reminiscent to me of Wallace Stegner or Leif Enger in Virgil Wander. There's something very mid-20th century about the way she writes in Tom Lake. As always, her insights and turns of phrase are beautiful, and she says such true things about the world and human nature with concision and wit. In Tom Lake, she again revisits themes of womanhood, the physical and emotional dynamics of bearing children, and marriage. In the ways this story is a meditation on motherhood, the warmth and glow of the love of a family, the contentment in a simple life–I loved it.

In the ways this is a searing portrait of the decisions you make in your youth that you can't take back–I felt unmoored and saddened. I wanted Lara to be cut-and-dry and she wasn't. Like many of Patchett's main characters, she makes a moral decision at the very end of this book that really disappointed me. Lara didn't have to make the choice she did at the end of this story, and it even felt directly contrary to the portrait we see of her throughout the prior hundreds of pages.

I think this is Patchett's best, but best doesn't always mean morally exemplary.

Content Ratings • Sexual References: 2.5/5 • Language: 1/5 • Violence: 1/5

The Last Ranger

By Peter Heller • ⭐⭐⭐

Ren, a park ranger for Yellowstone, discovers an alarming pattern of violence against the park’s wildlife and, eventually, others working on the grounds. As he investigates he’s brought face to face with a group at enmity with the preservation of wildlife and peace in the park system.

Heller’s nature writing is always good, and Ren as a main character felt very human, but I just needed more to happen. This moved slow, and really the plot was more of a platform for Ren to explore his own grief and desires for the future. That’s not bad, I just prefer a little more get-up-and-go.

Content Ratings • Sexual References: 2.5/5 • Language: 1/5 • Violence: 3/5

Yellowface

By R.F. Kuang • ⭐⭐⭐✨

June Hayward steals the manuscript of her friend/rival, Athena Liu, after Athena’s death and passes it off as her own. What follows is a tale of corruption, the publishing industry’s hypocrisy, and the devolution that follows when a person does a bad thing and tries to live with their guilt.

This was really a wild ride. There were moments when I was enjoying myself, and then moments where I was really dreading picking this back up due to the morally grey main character. But I think that was at least partially intentional by Kuang. It felt preachy a couple too many times, but the rawness kept you believing.

Content Ratings • Sexual References: 3.5/5 • Language: 3/5 • Violence: 2.5/5

Piranesi

By Susanna Clarke • ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Y’all already know! Just read it.

Content Ratings • Sexual References: 1.5/5 • Language: 1.5/5 • Violence: 2.5/5

Magpie Murders

By Anthony Horowitz • ⭐⭐⭐

Horowitz weaves together two stories in Magpie Murders. In one, book editor Susan Ryeland is reviewing the manuscript for the last “Atticus Pünd” book by renowned author Alan Conway. Soon we’re transported to the novel-within-the-novel, where Atticus Pünd is on the case in a sleepy English village, attempting to solve a double murder.

Very much an homage to Agatha Christie, this was a quality mystery that just felt too long. Christie’s magic is her pacing and skill with plotting.

Content Ratings • Sexual References: 1.5/5 • Language: 1/5 • Violence: 2/5

S Tier: Library of Congress

• Red leather bookmark from the Strand, purchased for me by my husband in New York City, still in pristine condition.

• A Kindle. Obnoxious? Yes. Perfect? Yes.

Pretty good

• Walgreens receipt. Why are they so long? Why do I get 17 coupons when I purchase a bag of Cheddar Jalapeño Cheetos?

• A Post-It note. Works great. Can lose its stickiness.

• Pop-A-Lock business card. I locked my keys in my car 4 times my Freshman year of college, and never again since then. All hail the Pop.

A win is a win

• A pen, spine be forsaken.

• The dust jacket of your book. This is, in my opinion, the only redeeming quality of a hardback. Fight me.

• Apple TV remote. We will not be able to watch Netflix until I finish this book.

• Bobby pins.

I’m embarrassed

• McDonald’s straw wrapper. Guarantee you have 2 in your glove box.

• Dog ear-ing. I’m only human.

• A blade of grass. Hear me out: you go for a bookish reading picnic and leave your purse in the car (because this is the park), and the only thing handy is nature.

Straight to jail

• Remembering the page number. Psychopath tendencies.

• Square of toilet paper. Can you look me in the eyes and tell me you’ve never done this?

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Our narrator, Klara, is an AF–an Artificial Friend designed to be a companion to a “lifted” child, and intended to counterbalance the loneliness and isolation that seems endemic to the setting of this novel. Klara is chosen by Josie, a gregarious teenager who visits Klara’s store accompanied by her wary and grieving mother. Josie is battling an illness that’s come as a result of her genetic editing, and her condition deteriorates soon after they bring Klara home.

Without question, Klara dedicates herself to Josie’s care, and the boundary between a human’s love for another and the programming of an AI to mimic it becomes blurred. Can an AF really love a person? Is this a distinction without a difference, when the AI companion in front of you acts just the way a human companion would act? Josie’s mother is surely asking these questions as she watches her daughter’s condition worsen.

While a slow burn, the thrust of this novel hinges on Klara’s faith and hope in the Sun to provide a “special nourishment” to Josie that will heal her. AF’s are solar powered, and Klara’s trust in the Sun is undeniably religious: unwavering, humble, hopeful. Her belief in the Sun reminded me of the faith of Noah: yes, there really will be a flood and I really am building this ark. Yes the Sun really can save Josie.

This novel asks plenty of questions that will become ultra relevant for us in the next 10 and 20 years–is a person just a brain? Is there such a thing as a person’s soul that can’t be replicated by AI? (At one point Klara is asked, “Do you believe in the human heart? I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense.…Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?”) What do we owe to AI if we also treat them like people when they’re operating? What are the ethics of genetic editing?

But really, this novel is about what it means to love. What does it mean to love a person, when you could build an AI to act just like them? What does it mean to love the source of your life–for Klara, the Sun, but for us: what does it mean to truly love God? What do we owe him in return for his sustenance and nourishment? In a world that has rejected love and faith, can we really survive without them?

The pacing is measured but on a razor’s edge. There are no wasted words here, and every character packs just the right punch. This is not a propulsive summertime novel, but it feels like a key contribution to the age we find ourselves in.

Key Quotes

“Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.”

“As I say, these were helpful lessons for me. Not only had I learnt that changes were a part of Josie, and that I should be ready to accommodate them, I'd begun to understand also, that this wasn't a trait peculiar just to Josie, that people often felt the need to prepare a side of themselves to display to passersby - as they might in a store window, and that such display needn't be taken so seriously once the moment had passed.”

“At the same time, what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom…”

I switch to Twitter and it definitely isn’t better: somebody’s mired in controversy again. Devastating news from a town just down the road. Someone we thought we knew betrayed our trust. Scroll, scroll, scroll: backbiting, vicious remarks, and black and white thinking in areas that call for nuance. Before I can do justice to one thing I’m whiplashed into the next.

Scrolling for just 5 minutes leaves me gutted these days. I could be having a wonderful afternoon, and once I check my phone, my heart is racing and my mind is filled with a dozen things I need to improve, several things I need to buy, and a couple things to be sad about.

My relationship with social media has been shifting for a while, but especially this year I’m realizing that I simply can’t handle The Feed™️ in its natural state. It leaves me wondering “Is there anything good and beautiful left?” And there is.

I have a beautiful, weighty, complex life. I have more than enough problems I’m trying to solve, battles I’m trying to fight, and people I want to care for. Sufficient for today is my trouble–and I don’t have the bandwidth to borrow more of it from a screen (Matthew 6:34). I’m trying to be faithful with the day I’ve been given. How could I also carry an endless stream of unrealistic expectations, unproven methods, the weight of the Internet’s opinions, and every other person’s griefs too?

You might respond that we all have a responsibility to live with open eyes, and not shut ourselves off from the truth of what’s happening in our world. I promise I agree. But I couldn’t do that even if I tried.

Instead of letting everything everywhere hit me all at once, I want to absorb important and beautiful things in a controlled, measured way. I want to know the things I need to know about. I’m commanded to actively guide my own thoughts toward the true, good, and beautiful: “…whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4:8) How could I direct my own thinking with a fire hydrant of content in my face?

I am actively trying to shape my social media so that I see more of the good, lovely, and commendable. I need some good news–and I bet you do too.

These are some questions I ask myself after a scroll session leaves me shaken:

1. Does this make me feel like I need to 1) do, 2) be, or 3) buy something in order to be good?

2. Did this cause me to unnecessarily battle feelings of despair, bitterness, anxiety, or anger?

3. Is there something within my actual, physical community I can do about this? Does this prompt me to love and serve someone?

4. Did I consume content from people I know, or mostly from people I don’t?

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We need a heavy diet of truth, goodness, and beauty in order to be steadfast. Regularly auditing what you’re seeing on social media is a great way to direct your own thoughts and beliefs. Maybe those questions will help you too!

📚 Reads and Things

• Since I’ve last written, Alan Noble's (You Are Not Your Own Substack’s) On Getting Out of Bed released, and I highly recommend it. Here’s one of my favorite parts:

“Life will inevitably crush you, at one point or another, and your response to that suffering will testify to something. There will be times when subjectively you will be convinced that life is not worth living, and that existence is not beautiful or good but onerous and meaningless. When those times come, your obligation is to look toward others as witnesses of God's goodness, to remember your responsibilities to care for others, and to remember that you are always a witness, whether you want to be or not. But most of all, remember that you are God's beloved….Your existence is a testament, a living argument, an affirmation of creation itself. When you rise each day, that act is a faint but real echo of God's ‘It is good.’ By living this life, you participate in God's act of creation, asserting with your very existence that it is a good creation.”

• I’m in the middle of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and you better believe I’m going to have some thoughts. More to come, but just listen to this:

“Klara, do you think once we're in the window, we'll receive so much goodness we'll never get short again?”

Happy Friday!

Late last year, this post from on Barnes & Noble’s unprecedented turnaround made the rounds online and I found it fascinating. The Decoder podcast recently had B&N’s CEO on and I found that conversation doubly fascinating. It turns out that, in order to make a living selling books, you must love and value…books. And the marketplace of ideas.

🖊️ A Poem to Refresh

A not admitting of the wound (1188) – Emily Dickinson

A not admitting of the wound
Until it grew so wide
That all my Life had entered it
And there were troughs beside -

A closing of the simple lid that opened to the sun
Until the tender Carpenter
Perpetual nail it down -

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💬 Four Verses for Suffering

1. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore… –Matthew 10:29-31

2. Before I was afflicted I went astray,
       but now I keep your word.
   You are good and do good… –Psalm 119:67-71

3. When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.

   Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy;

   then they said among the nations, “The LORD has done great things for them.”

   The LORD has done great things for us; we are glad.
   Restore our fortunes, O LORD, like streams in the Negeb!

   Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy!

   He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing,

   shall come home with shouts of joy,

   bringing his sheaves with him. –Psalm 126

4. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. –1 Peter 5:10

I feel like I’ve lived a thousand lives in the last half-year, but I’m somehow still not adjusted to the feeling of the words “my daughter” when they come out of my mouth. One day, she wasn’t here; the next day, she was. All of a sudden, everything about me changed: my days weren’t ever just for me but now they’re really not. A person only has so many minutes in one day, a certain number of thoughts you’re able to think, and now the majority go to her. She is physically, emotionally, and mentally the biggest rock of my days right now, and all the little pebbles have to find a spot around her. I can hear a choir of tenured parents telling me that it won’t always be like that, that babies don’t keep and she’ll be in school one day. I know you’re right. But even then–the weight of her little soul will still be sleeping under my roof and that will never not be terrifying and wonderful. She’s a little miracle and I can’t believe it.

Back to the learning: sometimes good enough is good enough. The first few months postpartum after your first baby? That’s one of those times.

This is day 2 of the 74th season of Survivor, you just got dropped in the desert, and your tribe hasn’t found water yet. You can’t get preoccupied with building a fire when you’ve haven’t had a drink of fresh water in 24 hours. Jeff Probst and the remnant of loyal Survivor watchers are waiting to see if you’ll make it past this first, difficult challenge.

The analogy is breaking down but you get it: I’ve just been in survival mode. I survived the first week, the first couple weeks, then the first month. I fed her, fed myself, and fed the dog. We kept going. I added activities that 25-year-old me took WAY for granted back into my life like a giraffe learning to walk. And what I’ve learned is that good enough has been good enough. Saltines with peanut butter for lunch? Great. She got shots and missed a nap, so she’s been crying for 3 straight hours? She will not remember this tomorrow. You’ve been wearing the same joggers for 3 days? Who even cares.

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We’re blessedly past most of those examples, but I really got down on myself for not doing better. As if this was a competition between myself and the rest of the world, and I was losing. But what is “better”? It wasn’t the time for heroic perfectionism, it was the time for second-by-second faithfulness. My daughter is scooting around, so loved, and fed and watered. So was I, and that was good enough. Now, we can think about building a fire and beating the other team in some bizarre puzzle game on the beach.

📚 Reads and Things

• Relatedly, I appreciated and saved ‘s recent post on focusing on the doing, not the done.

• I recently taught a small lesson on Psalm 131 and the Lord has blessed my own soul through my prep for that teaching. May it be true: I don’t occupy myself with things too difficult for me; my soul is calm and quiet.

“O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, hope in the LORD
from this time forth and forevermore.” –Psalm 131

This is the day to leave the dark behind you
Take the adventure, step beyond the hearth,
Shake off at last the shackles that confined you,
And find the courage for the forward path.
You yearned for freedom through the long night watches,
The day has come and you are free to choose,
Now is your time and season.
Companioned still by your familiar crutches,
And leaning on the props you hope to lose,
You step outside and widen your horizon.

After the dimly burning wick of winter
That seemed to dull and darken everything
The April sun shines clear beyond your shelter
And clean as sight itself. The reed-birds sing,
As heaven reaches down to touch the earth
And circle her, revealing everywhere
A lovely, longed-for blue.
Breathe deep and be renewed by every breath,
Kinned to the keen east wind and cleansing air,
As though the blue itself were blowing through you.

You keep the coastal path where edge meets edge,
The sea and salt marsh touching in North Norfolk,
Reed cutters cuttings, patterned in the sedge,
Open and ease the way that you will walk,
Unbroken reeds still wave their feathered fronds
Through which you glimpse the long line of the sea
And hear its healing voice.
Tentative steps begin to break your bonds,
You push on through the pain that sets you free,
Towards the day when broken bones rejoice.

–First Steps, Brancaster –Malcolm Guite

📚 The Book Section

Currently Reading: I picked up Designing Your Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness at Work by Bill Burnett…three?…four? years ago, and it sat untouched until this month. Burnett applies design thinking to your professional life, and so far there are some good tidbits:

“How often do we find ourselves waiting to get there? That magical place that we wait and wait for—the place where we will finally be content and happy....Good enough for now is one of the big reframes this book. Cultivating this attitude doesn't mean life or work can't get better, or that things never change, or that you stop learning and growing. On the contrary changing our internal narrative to ‘good enough for now’ makes it possible for everything in our external situation to transform.” –p. 18

Just Finished: Andrew Peterson’s The Wingfeather Saga because my brain could only handle magical-hopeful-fun children’s fiction this week. It was great, especially the later books:

“He felt as if he were two people: one boy who saw the situation objectively, who knew the right answers—which were to be content with his lot, grateful to the Maker, humble to his calling—and another boy whom he hated, who felt things hotly and demanded attention like a child throwing a fit. Even the good feelings betrayed him, because once he felt them he was proud of having them, which opened the door for the next multitude of conflicting emotions.” –Book 4

That’s a heavy quote, but I promise, there are also dragons and swords.

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📎 Miscellany

“The road that I took then was full of ditches and mistakes
And deep in the shadow of my failures
I saw some things are worth the pain.” –Ruston Kelly

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📚 The Book Section

Almost as if someone was trying to teach me something, a theme has emerged from the stuff I’ve read lately: truth, goodness, and beauty. Historically we’ve referred to these as the transcendentals–attributes that come from God himself and that are self-justifying. We should pursue them for their own sake, not as a means to an end. (For further exploration: Roger Scruton gave an enlightening lecture on this here, and Lewis has written tons.)

Truth and Goodness are relatively easy to understand: 1) there is objective truth that we should believe and internalize, and 2) and we should both be good and do good. But Beauty is trickier: who’s to say what’s beautiful? Beauty should illustrate, amplify, and affirm the Truth and Goodness of the true and good, but how do you know what is beautiful?

1. I’m buddy reading Russ Ramsey’s Rembrandt Is In the Wind with a friend (hi friend!), and Chapter 1 speaks to this specifically. He says that Beauty: 1) attracts, 2) shows us where we’re wrong, 3) inspires creativity, and 4) arouses belief in God. More from Ramsey:

So many things in our world are beautiful but didn't need to be. God chose to make them that way so he might arrest his people by their senses to awaken us from the slumbering economy of pragmatism. That awakening is a vital function of beauty.

This is the gift of beauty from an artist to their community–to awaken our senses to the world as God made it and to awaken our senses to God himself. –p. 14

2. I’m rereading Narnia on audio (shoutout to Kenneth Branagh, the absolute best choice for this job) and these three aspects are all over the narrative in The Magician’s Nephew where Aslan creates Narnia. Diggory and Polly can feel in their bones the truth of Aslan’s song, they see his goodness in what he makes, and the beauty of it is undeniable to them. It’s also torture for Uncle Andrew, who just wants to use it for his own ends.

3. One day I’ll write an actual response to the wonder that is Piranesi, but here’s this:

“It is my belief that the World (or, if you will, the House, since the two are for all practical purposes identical) wishes an Inhabitant for Itself to be a witness to its Beauty and the recipient of its Mercies.

If I leave, then the House will have no Inhabitant and how will I bear the thought of it Empty?”

– Piranesi, Part 1

📎 Miscellany

in Steal Like an Artist:

This NYT article about the magic of libraries: “Best of all, you never need a reason or an invitation to go to the library. You aren’t required to make a reservation ahead of time or purchase a cup of coffee while you’re there.” Shoutout to our library, where you can check out wifi hotspots for free, which got me through 3 months of working from home without a home.

Lewis in The Weight of Glory:

“At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.”

💡 The Writing Part

This year, Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent had me thinking not just about repentance, but about the levels of truth in the refrain: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:19)

I take pride in the utility of my life, my body: I can get that done, and that and that and that. But you won’t be surprised to hear that after a couple months of this my actual, physical body says “Hey there. Let me reintroduce you to the slow demise of all living things.”

More than that though, I’ve been thinking about 2 Corinthians 4 where Paul reminds us we’re jars of clay, and says we are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.”

So we are “carrying death in our bodies” both materially (we’ll be gone soon), and also spiritually (we give of ourselves to see life and new life in others.) But Paul continues: “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen.” And now suddenly, Ash Wednesday is absolutely beautiful.

Now we can embrace the fact that we’re dust. We can almost make friends with death, because it brings an eternal weight of glory. Our “outer self is wasting away” but there’s a treasure hidden in this jar of clay. We remember that we are dust, but instead of putting our heads in the dirt, we look to the things that are unseen and raise a big ruckus that a light has shone in this darkness. “The light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

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My trajectory has been anything but straight: I’ve been an event planner, a writer, an editor, a chief of staff, an executive assistant, a brand messaging consultant, a problem solver, a counselor, a “hey can you figure this out?”-er. The common denominator is that I’m a Generalist who loves ideas, reads avidly, and has maybe learned something useful from these experiences.

My commonplace book has helped me retain what I learn and steward it well for the glory of God in future jobs, conversations, and relationships.

Those early versions of my commonplace book are in a landfill right now, but thanks to the magic of the internet I’ve been digitally saving and organizing notes, thoughts, and ideas for years. This has become a library of the interesting, the valuable, the true/good/beautiful. (For the curious, I use Notion, and maybe one day I’ll make it accessible. If that’s interesting to you, let me know.)

I write every day for my various jobs, and it’s a core skill I’m constantly trying to improve. Thus: this newsletter was born.

Most Fridays, I’ll send you the highlights from what I’ve saved to my commonplace book that week. That could include:

• 📚Book notes, reviews, and quotes

• 📝 Interesting article snippets, podcasts, songs, etc.

• 📌 Resources I think are valuable

• 💡Learnings from work and life, takeaways from MasterClass + other courses, etc.

• 📎 And the remaining jots and tittles

Subscribe if you want these snippets!

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