Thanks for reading with me in 2022. The best to you and yours in 2023!
What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings by John Lorinc. I stumbled upon this book, and I’m so glad that I did. It’s a collection of personal essays by different writers with one overarching theme in common: dumplings – or potstickers, or ravioli, or matzo, or pierogy… And the list goes on. Whatever you call them and whatever the specifics, they truly are a universally recurring comfort food across cultures. For the bargain price of $1 each (or a dozen for $11!), the savoury potato-and-veg filled samosas from one of our local halal grocery stores are a go-to lunch staple for me to the extent that I’ve been known to refer to myself as a “samosatarian.” Now that I realize how closely related these pockets of delight are to my other long-time favourite har gow (steamed shrimp dumplings), I now know the correct term for my food religion is “dumplingism.” I’m a true believer.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gotlieb. I was really captivated by this book. The author is a therapist based in Los Angelos, and this is a fictionalized memoir of her work as a clinician and her own experience as a patient in therapy. I cried more than once – not just welled up, but full-on cried – but also smiled a lot. I felt emotionally involved in everyone’s outcomes, let’s just say. (I mean, maybe I should talk to someone?)
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. I don’t really know how to describe this lovely, unusual, brief novel. It’s about the relationship between a woman and her mother, the woman and her husband and children, and the woman and herself. You should read it.
Payback’s a Witch by Lana Harper. Take a chick lit romance (except both people in the prospective couple are women), add in a life-long best friend and a douchey ex-boyfriend, and blend with the Triwizard Tournament from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and you get this novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it and will look for sequels as this is the first of a series.
Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. Wild. Just freakin’ wild. Subtitled “A Story of Violent Faith,” this deep dive into the Mormon faith and the murder of a woman and her baby by LDS fundamentalists is absolutely horrifying and riveting. I can’t help but think that when this book was published in 2003, it was at least partially intended as a counterpoint to some of the anti-Islam sentiment flowing at the time: like, “hey, if we’re going to worry about fundamentalist whackjobs, let’s look at the culture right here in the heart of the USA!” I mean, holy shit. (Ha, is that a truly terrible pun? Imma let it sit there.)
City of Likes by Jenny Mollen. Whew, I needed a palette cleanser after the last book, so I went for something rather frothier. This did the trick nicely. Quick and light.
The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian. A flight attendant wakes up in a lavish Dubai hotel room after yet another night of heavy drinking. Except this time, there’s a dead man in bed beside her and blood everywhere – and she hadn’t simply passed out, she’d blacked out. Meaning she has very little memory of what had happened the night before and a plausible fear that she’d killed him. There is also a Netflix series based on the novel, and I watched and enjoyed season 1 when it came out a couple of years ago. There are some differences in plot points, but enough distance in time for me that I couldn’t tell you exactly how they differ.
Hook, Line, and Sinker by Tessa Bailey. The blurb calls this novel a rom-com, but the “com” part is a bit scarce on the ground. Rather, it is a fine-but-not-great, fairly standard romance. Would likely be a good beach read, but was a little eye-rolly for a work week in December.
The Gown by Jennifer Robson. Its subtitle is “A Novel of the Royal Wedding,” no doubt suggested by an editor with an eye to grabbing on to the publicity coattails of Harry’s wedding the same year this book was published. Don’t let that mislead you. I enjoyed this novel very much on its own merits, which is good because it’s not about the royal wedding much at all – the royal wedding in this case being between then-Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten in 1947. It tells the stories of two alone-in-the-world young women, Ann and Miriam, who meet and become friends when they work in the embroidery studio of dressmaker Norman Hartnell, who is selected to design and make The Gown for Elizabeth and the gowns for the rest of the bridal party. The (I think?) accurate historical details about the studio, the gown, and the wedding are very interesting, but what really makes the novel is the heart, courage, loss, love, and small joys of the main characters.
Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver. Given the author, you already know it’s going to be beautifully written and a cut above most of your other reading options. That said, I wasn’t as absorbed by this novel as I expected. The main character, Codi, feels disconnected from her life and her own choices. Her journey to a state of attachment and sense of self and place provides the backbone of the novel, but that feeling of temporariness and floating along also made it challenging for me to engage or care all that much.
