Smoke in Your Eyes by Caitlyn Doughty

Oh my gosh, Caitlyn Doughty makes death completely and utterly acceptable and not scary, kinda like Mary Roach did in Stiff, Doughty grew up in Hawaii and was obsessed with death as a teenager in high school, although I don't really see her as being Goth or anything like that. She volunteered in the mortuary in her local high school and got a bachelor's in medieval history (can you get more death obsessed people then those that lived in that time period?!) - her thesis was on dead babies and the role that they played in witchcraft. While in college and after graduation, she decided to work in a crematorium so that she could see real life death. This book is a memoir of her time at Westwind, a funeral home and crematorium in San Francisco.

I admit that I'm not "functionally morbid" (which is how Doughty describes herself) or even morbid at all actually but I loved this book.  First and foremost, her voice is totally amazing and she's very witty.  I really enjoyed reading it - because I could HEAR her telling me the stories.  It was like her voice was in my ear. I loved learning about how modernity deals with death and her comparisons to the history of death were fascinating - for such a short book, I learned a TON about death (it's history and how it is currently viewed). I also appreciated the journey that working at Westwind provided to Caitlyn.  She obviously learned a lot about herself and her emotions deepened tremendously. In fact, she appeared to achieve a level of peace and acceptance of mortality that most people don't have with regards to their own imminent deaths.

That being said, this book is NOT an academic rendering of death.  There aren't statistics in it and it isn't something that Caitlyn spent months and months in a library researching.  There is some historical anecdote in there (and she cites sources) but ultimately, this book is about her experience with death and the history just provides the context within which she's working.  I loved it nonetheless and look forward to reading other books by her. 

Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

I heard about this book when I was at a conference recently - it is written by Janet Mock, an openly trans woman.  It is one of the first books of its kind in that it is the first memoir written by a trans woman. This offers a public glimpse of Janet's private life and how she seemed to surpass all odds to become the person that she is today and how she is a happy and fullfilled and successful woman.

What makes Ms. Mock's memoir that much better is that I felt compelled to question what constituted freedom.  I had always respected a person's path to self realization. We get to where we need to get through a variety of different ways and the journey to self realization has always utterly fascinated me. In applying this to her own life as a trans woman of color in America, however, Ms. Mock challenges us to see how marginalized a person that walks in her shoes is. Becoming a woman ensured that Ms. Mock had the freedom to be who she was in spite of whee and how she was born. She showed grit and determination and honesty in moving her life forward. This is not an easy story but I still enjoyed reading it.  Ms. Mock intersperses her personal stories with statistics and mini essays in an attempt to show the broader picture of what it is to mean to be trans in America today.

There were things that might not resonate with everyone.  She occasionally uses phrases like "born as a boy" and "born in a boys' body" and part of her journey is finding heterosexual love.  This is not, by far the majority of the book though and it is a very important telling of a journey that is not readily available currently.

My Education by Susan Choi

I admit it: I have a thing about academic novels.  And by that, I  mean novels that occur on campuses and are about characters that are entrenched in academia (think Donna Tartt's The Secret History or I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe). Combine this proclivity with my penchant for getting book recommendations from NPR and I'm in.  That's how I got to this book.

This isn't Susan Choi's first book - it's the most recent release by her but the first that I've read - and it's kind of typical in some ways. At the beginning of the novel, we are introduced to the young protagonist, a first year graduate student, who is taking literature classes at an East Coast University- I assumed it was the Northeast but that could totally have been my own experiences and biases coming into play. She's taking classes with Nicholas Brodeur, a celebrated academic, and Choi seems to set up a relationship between Brodeur and our main character, until a scene at a dinner party where Brodeur's wife, Martha, eclipses him by swooping in and hooking up with our main character!

This book details, in a painfully intimate fashion, the unfolding of this relationship between our main character (Regina) and Martha - Regina's almost teenage exuberance and expectations of it (she is only 21 or 22) and Martha's guilty ambivalence (married, thirties maybe and with a new child). This book is, thematically, most of all, about how different people navigate different relationships at different points in their lives.  This is driven home most poignantly by the book ending with Regina, fifteen years later, trying to navigate a wide variety of things from her marriage, to her career and other obligations that have given her a new perspective on what occurred when Regina was a mere 21.

What was also particularly interesting is how Choi takes on the sexual interests and love of two women who identified as straight.  In some ways, it's really interesting - she takes it seriously and tries to provide some literature about people who are bisexual (is it REALLY so that literature has been about straight or lesbian/gay couples but not about bisexual attractions? Maybe that's a loaded question for another time). Regina says, interestingly, that the sex of her lover wasn't an issue and was very nonchalant about it.  I got the opposite feeling from Martha. So in that sense, I respect this - this is LOVE BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE, not two women or two men or a man and a woman.  Their life stages - one married with the children and the other a 21 year old grad student - is what is problematic for them, not that they are in a same sex relationship.

That being said, I simply loved reading this novel.  Choi writes beautifully, elegantly and breathtakingly about this and I want to read her previous novels simply because of the grace and beauty of her writing. 

Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti

Many know Jessica Valenti as the founder of Feministing, a feminist blog and website.  However, she's also a successful author. This book is more of a primer on feminism than an in depth analysis of the subject and is aimed at those who don't consider themselves feminists (think: "I'm not a feminist but..." and then insert something that is totally feminist, like equal pay for equal work.).

The book is written in a very colloquial style, which initially I really liked but then which really got on my nerves.  I understand and appreciate a more simple style of writing, but the overuse of curse words really took away from the valuable points that Ms. Valenti was trying to make. I feel like she lost credibility along the way. That being said, the point of the book was to ensure that the younger generation, who tends to believe that feminism is dead or not needed or not for them, understands why feminism is so important.  And since this was the goal, I found that Ms. Valenti adequately accomplished that goal. She provided numerous examples of why, even in this day and age, feminism is extremely important and necessary even where it might look different than what it did in our mothers' or grandmother's time.

Generally, a decent first shot, but I hope to find something better out there.

The Last Policeman by Ben Winters

I have a confession:  I got this book out because I worked with Ben's brother, Andy and because it takes place mostly in Concord, NH, a city that I now work in and know somewhat well. That being said, I don't regret getting this book out at all and I actually really loved it.

It's not unusual to have a murder in a mystery.  A cast of unique and quirky characters with interesting backstories and even insurmountable odds. However, the insurmountable odd in this series is an asteroid that is inevitably going to hit the earth but no one knows where on the earth is going to hit exactly. In spite of this, Detective Palace of the Concord Police Department is investigating what he believes to be the homicide of a local insurance agent that was found hanging in the bathroom of a local fast food restaurant.  The fast food restaurant is obviously a Mickey D's although the company itself has gone out of business, as has Dunkin' Donuts (a sacrilege in New England). Cell phone service is getting more and more spotty. Many employees are going "bucket list" - they are quitting their jobs and their lives and trying to do everything that they wouldn't have done during their normal lives under normal circumstances.  This includes many police officers. Who wants to solve a murder when the world is going to end by the close of the year?

The insurance agent's body is found hanging in a seeming suicide but our protagonist thinks that it was a homicide and not a suicide and is dead set on proving that he's right. I found myself starting off thinking that Palace was just going to be a regular, dogged grunt.  But then I found myself giving him more and more respect as the very well written novel progressed. He followed his instincts and was persistent, dogged even, in attempting to find justice for his victim in the light of much heel digging and joking. The novel itself moves quickly and with confidence. I loved Detective Palace and I loved the premise of the book: in a time when everyone has an "I Don't Give a F***" attitude, I  was very happy to see someone who just went about his business.

Go get this - I'm about to go get the second novel in the trilogy!  :)

American Fire by Monica Hesse

As with most of the books I read, I heard about this one on NPR.  I am also on a true crime kick right now - think Making a Murderer, the Keepers, the disappearance of Maura Murray and Adnan Syed. So when I heard about this book, I was intrigued.

This book is non-fiction written by journalist Monica Hesse, in which she tries to determine the question of what really happened in a rural Southern county. In November, 2012 in Accomack County, Virginia, the first abandoned house went up in flames. It was a long night, even though no one died.  There were two further fires that night in the area, so firefighters were extremely busy. Over the course of a few months, firefighters were seemingly called out every night as further homes blazed - it was quickly determined that these were the works of an arsonist or arsonists.

What I particularly enjoyed about this book was Hesse's attempt to delve into the reasons that an arsonist would commit arson.  It's not just a property crime. In many ways, it's an emotional and psychological crime too - think pyromania or control issues or a desire to please or all three! It also impacted, in this case, the other residents of the community - while the structures that were set on fire were abandoned, the residents lived in fear that the fires could easily spread to their own homes and there was a tremendous amount of anxiety over not knowing who was committing the crimes.

Even though we learn very early on who did it, it is still unclear as to what the motivations were.  The buildings burned were abandoned and the arsonists didn't have insurance policies on them, so money wasn't the motivation. Hesse speculates it was about the intersection of things like poverty, codependence, hope, pride, sexual performance and risk.  The defendants - Charlie and his girlfriend Tonya - led extremely difficult lives. They lived hand to mouth.  Tonya's three children demanded a lot of attention for various reasons (even though all children demand attention).  At the end of the day, while both were ultimately convicted of their crimes, we still don't have a clear answer from them as to their motivations.

I found this book fascinating and very readable.  I couldn't put it down.  Highly recommended.

Ernest Hemingway by Mary Dearborn

I think like every American school attendee, I had to read Hemingway.  I clearly remember reading The Old Man and the Sea in 8th grade, but I didn't read any other Hemingway until recently. I admit, I hated The Old Man and the Sea, in part because I didn't get it.  After reading A Farewell to Arms, and knowing that Hemingway was troubled (at best on a good day) and downright psychotic at his worst, I wanted to learn more about him as a person.

Dearborn's book was very well researched - thorough and exacting - and yet, her story was compelling and her writing style accessible.  I learned a lot, in particular, about Hemingway's relationship with his mother Grace (who he really seemed to dislike and whom he blamed for his father's eventual suicide-that's another thing I learned.  It seems that for four consecutive generations, people in each generation of the Hemingway family committed suicide!). Hemingway was not able to write very much after World War II and his physical and mental health precipitously tanked during that time period. He had everything from high blood pressure to manic episodes and, it sounds like, a psychotic break, that Dearborn attempted to link to a traumatic brain injury that Hemingway received during the Second World War.

Ultimately, Dearborn was successful in describing a man that was tremendously flawed but also tremendously compelling. It was such a great read.  Definitely worth each and every page.