I needed a book with alliteration in the title, and my TBR offered up the perfect book: Soulful Simplicity: How Living with Less Can Lead to So Much More by Courtney Carver (TarcherPerigee, 2017). Not only does it have alliteration in both the title AND the author’s name (seriously, do I get extra points for that???), it was on my TBR AND I own a copy. Super perfect!
I’m always looking for inspiration to help me simplify and pare down, and Soulful Simplicity kept popping up online, so I added it to my TBR, but I was delighted when I came across a copy in a thrift store. Simplicity began to make inroads in Courtney Carver’s life when she received a shocking diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Realizing that she needed to make major changes in order to better care for herself, Ms. Carver began to take a hard look at her life and what she really wanted out of it. The debt had to go. The overworking needed to stop. The stuff, all the stuff cluttering up her house and her life, had to be dealt with.
It takes time to implement these changes; Ms. Carver reminds the reader throughout the book that embarking on a more simple life isn’t something that happens overnight. These changes take time, and even if your spouse, your children, or your roommates aren’t on board, you can begin a path for yourself that will bring more peace, more calm, more appreciation of what truly matters. This is a gentle read; she’s not trying to convince readers of anything they likely haven’t suspected themselves, but she uses her own life as an example of not only when changes must be made, but of the benefit of making them at all.
Soulful Simplicity is more inspiration than it is step-by-step, but it’ll at least get you thinking. Do I really need forty t-shirts? Are fifteen pairs of pants necessary? How much clothing do I really need, anyway? What about the rest of my possessions, and the rest of the activities that are cluttering up my life? Can I start clearing those out, too? What kind of life do I really want to be living?
This isn’t a full-on kick-in-the-pants, more like a gentle nudge with a voice that will be ringing in your ears long after you turn the last page. Ms. Carver urges you to ask yourself the tough questions, to do the difficult things that will help you live the life you’re picturing in your head (I’m going to be cleaning out my refrigerator soon instead of continuing to procrastinate, thanks to this book!). Her friendly but persistent reminders that you can do these things and that they’ll likely serve you so much better than not doing them really helped me, as did her ideas for things such as clearing out stuff you suspect you don’t want anymore but are too scared to fully give away. Put them away for a few months, and if, at the end of that time, you don’t even remember what’s in that box or bag, it’s time to give them away. I cleared out a HUGE stack of t-shirts and sweaters from my closet, and I have a wait-and-see pile stashed away. Things are looking better already. : )
If you’re thinking life is getting a little too hectic, your closet is bursting at the seams and there’s still nothing to wear, and you’re feeling increasingly hemmed in, Soulful Simplicity may be the encouragement you need to start on your own journey of getting your life in order. I enjoyed this and have definitely benefited from it.
Sometimes I scroll through Twitter and it feels like I’m losing my mind. So many people are struggling out there, and it seems like no one in charge gives a damn. It’s why I so consistently read books like Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America by Alissa Quart (Ecco, 2018). I’m just trying to make any kind of sense of what’s going on out there. Though this book was written before the pandemic, it doesn’t back down in showing exactly how bad it was and still is out there. Sadly, not much has changed since its publication.
Life is tough these days, for so many reasons. The rent is too damn high, and it just keeps getting higher. Home ownership is completely out for far too many people, the price of food is ridiculous, and have you HEARD what people are paying for daycare? It’s all too much, and Alissa Quart, who has experienced all of these problems herself, decided to write about it.
Jobs that expect you to work like you don’t have a family. Daycare that costs more than your mortgage and expects you to pick up your kids like your boss lets you out on time and traffic doesn’t exist. Rent that goes up and up and up, even when you haven’t gotten a raise in six years (but your boss has, and the CEO’s pay has doubled in that time!). Families today are squeezed to the max (and yet people are out there screaming, “WHY IS EVERYONE DEPRESSED? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE CAUSING THIS???”) in almost every area, and it’s affecting every part of our society. Property ownership is down, people are having fewer children, and everyone is struggling.
Alissa Quart does an excellent job of illustrating so many of the areas in which American families are hurting. She highlights a few solutions, but not many, because there just aren’t many good ones. These problems are caused by the top, and the solutions will need to be implemented from the top down, something that still hasn’t happened yet despite even more people struggling than when this book was first written. This does give the book an overall depressing feel – I kept having to put it down to scroll through my phone, because somehow that wasn’t as much of a downer – but it does help to know that it’s not just me who’s seeing this, that the problem is widespread and societal, and it’s not getting the attention it needs.
I enjoyed reading Elizabeth Acevedo’s With the Fire on High so much earlier this year, I immediately put her other book, Clap When You Land(Harper Teen, 2020), on my TBR. And on the last trip I made to my library in its old building, even though I already had a huge stack of books to read, I grabbed this one as well – and I actually did get to finish it before the new library opened up! (It opens Saturday! We’ll wait and go Monday, when there are fewer people. We’re so excited!)
Camino lives in New York City with her parents. Her father goes back home to the Dominican Republic every summer for business; Camino’s relationship with him hasn’t been good for the past year, ever since she discovered his secret. And it’s just after he’s left for one of these summer trips that Camino receives the terrible news: her father’s plane has crashed, and everyone is presumed dead.
In the Dominican Republic, Yahaira, another teen girl, is also receiving the devastating news of her father’s death in the same plane crash. Her life has always been on the edge; she lives with her aunt, and her American father supports them and makes what few comforts they have possible. And now, with his loss, Yahaira’s entire future has become uncertain.
In time, the two girls discover the truth: the existence of one another, the fact that they shared a father, and the complicated meaning behind all of it.
Told as a dual narrative in verse, Clap When You Land is deeply emotional. Camino is far from privileged – her parents work incredibly hard for everything they have, and they’re nowhere close to rich – but compared to the poverty that Yahaira and her aunt are surrounded by, she’s practically a princess. Yahaira is tough; she’s had to be, growing up in a place where tourists visit and take from and never think about what lies outside the walls of their resorts. She’s been on the radar of the local trafficker for years, and now that the protection of her father is gone, he’s following her like a dog. Camino’s life isn’t so precarious, but she’s experienced a lot of pain and fear in her life, and she understands Yahaira better than Yahaira suspects.
This story has a lot of similarities with With the Fire on High; both books tell stories of teenage girls in difficult circumstances, fighting to improve their lives and, occasionally, just fighting to survive. The settings here were so different, though, and the style in which it was written – verse – made it so different from Fire. The two sisters’ lives are so different from each other…but then again, they’re not so different at all. The story ends in a way that wraps everything up, but it’ll still leave you wondering how everything works out once the screen goes dark.
I really enjoyed this one. It’s been a minute since I’ve read a novel written in verse, and I always enjoy that.
I love a good leaving-religion-behind memoir, so that’s how Original Sins: An Extraordinary Memoir of Faith, Family, Shame, and Addiction by Matt Rowland Hill (Vintage Digital, 2022) ended up on my TBR, and I grabbed it on my last run to the library before it closed to move to its new home. And whew, friends. This isn’t your typical “This religion wasn’t for me so I left and it was difficult” memoir. Original Sins is a raw, searing collection of pain that will devastate you, then leave you full of hope.
Welsh-born Matt Rowland Hill grew up the son of an evangelical pastor, in a family with three other siblings and parents who fought constantly. Their family dynamic was fraught with conflict, and Matt delved deeply into his religion, desperate to have all the answers. But this wasn’t to be, and later on in life, he turned to drinking, then to drugs to fill in the gaps left behind by a religion he could no longer feel at home in. Falling deeper and deeper into a hole dug by crack and heroin, Matt gets clean and relapses several times while trying to come to terms with the way the world was always explained to him versus the reality of how things are.
This is an astonishingly honest memoir. There were things Mr. Hill wrote about that, as I read, I thought, “You could not torture this out of me!” but that ended up being important to the story later (which really made me admire his courage). His struggles are immense; his descriptions of drug use, cravings, withdrawal, and the many unethical things he did to score his next hit made me ache for him, so great was his pain and the mental anguish he was running from. Addiction is an utter monster, and Mr. Hill never holds back in letting the reader know the realities of living with such a condition. My heart broke over and over as I turned the pages.
This is such a fascinating look at the consequences of…life, really. Mr. Hill’s parents were extremely flawed; they were raising their children in the way they considered right, but obviously, religion of all sorts is never, ever a one-size-fits-all thing. The damage it can do can be massive, as can not dealing with that damage – and if we’re not given the tools to deal, or we’re told it’s wrong to confront our feelings or even to HAVE those feelings…we end up with stories like Mr. Hill’s, full of pain, suffering, and a long, long road back, one that not everyone is able to travel.
Original Sins is vibrating with pain, but it’s raw and brutally honest, and it’s an incredible piece of writing. I wish Mr. Hill all the best in the world for his continued recovery and journey towards finding peace with and in himself, and with the world.
Next up on the 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge: a book about a family. Not a difficult prompt to fill whatsoever! Tucked away in my TBR was a book I’d been wanting to get to for a while, You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone by Rachel Lynn Solomon (Simon Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2018). I’ve read several of Rachel Lynn Solomon’s YA books and have always enjoyed them, but this book is on a whole other level of serious. Don’t open this book looking for an easy, relaxing read. You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone is an emotional punch to the gut.
Tovah and Adina are twins, on the cusp of adulthood and figuring out their senior year of high school. Tovah is dead-set on becoming a surgeon after college and med school at Johns Hopkins; Adina, a viola prodigy, is destined to become a soloist. The two have never gotten along, and to complicate matters even more, their mother is stricken with Huntington’s disease, a genetic neurodegenerative disorder. The twins have a 50/50 chance of inheriting this condition, and after they turn 18, they get tested, something Tovah has pushed for, but Adina has resisted.
The horror of it:
Tovah tests negative, and…
Adina tests positive. She’ll eventually develop symptoms and die in the exact way they’re watching their mother slowly die in front of them.
This new information widens the gap between the sisters and sends Adina absolutely reeling. Who will she be when her body no longer works, when everything she’s worked for will be gone? She lashes out at her sister even more and begins an affair with her older viola instructor, all the time panicking that she’s already developing symptoms. Tovah, laden with an early form of survivor’s guilt, draws a little closer to the mother she’s never felt close to, begins her first relationship with a boy, and struggles with what the future will be. The two sisters will have to learn to live with knowing exactly what their futures will be, when half the family will eventually be dead from the same disease.
This was such a heavy book. I knew it would be, but phew. The sisters start out disliking each other, which I think actually made it a little easier. It would’ve been even more emotionally devastating if they’d been best friends and each others’ everything, but it was hard enough to read about the pain both of them were carrying due to the effects of Huntington’s (interestingly, this is the third book I’ve read in 2023 that has included Huntington’s disease. In two, it’s been featured; in one, just mentioned, but still. Wild coincidence).
Adina isn’t a likable character, so be warned. She’s actually kind of awful: standoffish, hateful, manipulative, snobby. She’s gorgeous, she knows it, and she uses it to get what she wants. Her relationship with her viola teacher is just over the line of being legal yet still extremely icky and uncomfortable to read, but it highlights both her manipulativeness and her immaturity, and it made me feel deeply sad for her. Reading this book as an adult is, I think, a lot different of an experience for me if I had read it as a teenager; Adina’s diagnosis is frightening, and as an adult who can see just how quickly those post-high school years go, all the adults telling her, “You have plenty of time!” didn’t much make me feel better. It only made me feel panicky and depressed for her.
Tovah is also a little selfish and immature. She’s so focused on her goals of getting into Johns Hopkins and becoming a surgeon that she kind of forgets to do things just for fun, and to reach outside of herself. She’s never intentionally nasty like Adina is, so that automatically makes her the more sympathetic character. There’s also the guilt of having pushed Adina to get tested, and knowing what Adina’s positive result means for their lives.
The Jewish representation in this book is, of course, amazing. Tovah is more observant; Adina has abandoned it all. Tovah’s love interest is Jewish but not very observant, and the twins’ dad became more observant as an adult. These two characters serve as points of explanation for readers who may not be as familiar with Jewish culture and tradition, which I love. Mom is also Israeli and has some complicated family relationships in her past, so that provides even more tension – with Mom, between the twins, and with their family history. This is all woven into the story like threads of gold in an intricate tapestry; it’s all so well-integrated.
You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone is a tense story of an already complicated sibling relationship strained by the results of a genetic test. It’s not an easy read, and one of the sisters is immediately unlikable, but it’s incredibly well-written and so multifaceted that despite its extremely heavy subject matter, I’m glad I read it. This will stick with me.
Trigger warnings exist for mental illness, self-harm, inappropriate relationships, Huntington’s disease, a lot of talk about long-term illness, decline, and death.
It’s April! The month that really *should* be spring, but is instead usually just a gloppy mixture of rain, chilly temperatures, random bizarre snow, and sometimes unseasonably warm days around here. It’s a completely unpredictable month here, and sometimes even May can still be downright cold, so there’s no celebrating the warmth yet. More indoor reading, which is just fine by me!
It’s been a quiet-ish month around here. Dental woes, which are never fun, but we’re on spring break from homeschool as I write this, so that’s at least a bit of relief. More reading this week, and getting caught up on All The Things that I don’t have time for throughout the school week.
I’m still making my way through the stack of books I checked out from my library before it closed for the big move to its new home, along with books from another local library, so it’s all good!
13. The Penderwicks at Point Mouette by Jeanne Birdsalle
14. Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation by Linda Villarosa (no review: I’m not smart enough to review this!)
15. You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone by Rachel Lynn Solomon (review to come)
16. White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones (no review; I’m not smart enough to review this)
17. The Little Gymnast by Sheila Haigh (no review; read out loud to my daughter)
18. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor (no review; read as part of my personal Read Harder challenge)
Not a ton of books this month, but Rose Madder was long, over 600 pages, and some of the nonfiction I read was super information-dense and heavy, and I’m definitely a little slower on those. I chose not to review a few of these, because to be honest, I don’t feel like I can do these books justice, and I don’t necessarily think the world needs another random white lady talking about race (the books and their authors speak for themselves more than enough). I read books like Once I Was You and Under the Skin because the world definitely needs to listen to more Black and brown women’s voices, and White Too Long, while written by a white man, is honest about the racist history of Christianity in America. All of these are worthy reads.
I think this will be the stopping point for my daughter and me in the Penderwicks series for now; we tried to start the next one, but it skips forward five years in time, and the beloved family dog has since died (six months before this book begins), and my daughter, who freaks out at anything about anything that mentions death, didn’t want to continue. So we’ve switched to reading a few books that I loved when I was younger. The Little Gymnast was a favorite for me when I was her age; I can’t say it’s held up well – SO much telling, so little showing, and there are way fewer gymnastics than I remember – but next we start The Girl with the Silver Eyes, which I adored as a kid, and I think my daughter will love as well.
Ten fiction; eight nonfiction; one graphic-nonfiction. Seven of these books came from my TBR. Ten were read for the 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge.
Reading Challenge Updates
Coming along swimmingly here! Here’s what this looks like now:
Out of fifty books, I’ve read 32, so I’ve got 18 left to go! I feel like I’m doing okay here, and I’m pretty proud of the progress I’ve made!
State of the Goodreads TBR
Last month, we left off at 123 books. After reading a whole bunch from my TBR, I’m now at…
Drumroll, please…
120!!!
I really want to read this down to as low as I can. The lowest it’s been in the past ten years has been in the 70’s (that was right before the pandemic started, and then we all had nothing to do but sit at home and add books to our TBRs, so it blew up again at that point). When I’m not participating in reading challenges, I tend to read almost exclusively from my TBR, and I’d like to get it low enough that I also feel more able to just browse in the library from time to time without my TBR exploding. We’ll see!
Books I Acquired in March 2023
None!
Bookish Things I Did in March 2023
…not really anything I can think of, to be honest!
Progress! This month, I delved into The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor. I was familiar with one or two of her short stories before reading this, but that was it, and after reading one story a day every day in March, I can confidently say I’m not the biggest FOC fan in the world. I was about halfway through the book when I realized I really wasn’t enjoying this, and after a few days of pondering, I realized why: everyone in her stories is just absolutely terrible. They’re horrible, awful people, and thus, I just don’t care all that much about them as characters. Read and learn, I guess!
I’ve got a massive book of O. Henry’s short stories; we’re talking like over 1000 pages long. Some of the stories are quite short, so I think I’m going to split my Read Harder time in between that and a few other shorter books. I’ll read a short story, then dedicate whatever time I have left (I set the timer at 30 minutes for longer books) to reading some from one of these books.
Real Life Stuff
Oof. For the last month, I’ve been dealing with some dental crap. Dentist is kind of a try-something-and-wait-and-see personn, which I don’t hate, but it also means I’ve been in the kind of mouth pain that wakes me up in the middle of the night since the end of February, and that I’m beholden to Advil and Aleve 24 hours a day. I’m now in another wait-and-see period, so I’m basically just not eating much, and only drinking (cold and warm bother me, too) when necessary. BLAH.
It’s been spring break this past week, which is wonderful; I really needed this time off. We’re actually pretty close to being done with everything I had planned for the year and have delved pretty deeply into our supplemental Women’s History unit that my daughter had requested, which has been great. After we finish with absolutely everything on our list, we’ll just learn whatever looks awesome when we’re at the library and go from there!
Our library move is going well, from what I can tell. All the books have been packed up and moved over to the new building; we can see books on shelves in the children’s department when we drive by, which is, of course, SUPER exciting. They’ve still got some minor construction work to do; we can see that the main staircase by the entrance still needs a railing, stuff like that. Should everything stay on schedule, the library is set to open at the end of this month, and they’ve sent out community invitations for the grand opening. It’s likely going to be too people-y there for us the first two days (which are on a weekend); our plan is to go that Monday to return our books and explore. We’re excited!
What’s up next in April? Passover starts this week; I’ll just kind of be sucking on matzah (chewing hurts, so…). I have to schedule an eye appointment at the end of the month; I went in six months ago and my eye doctor didn’t like some of the changes she was seeing, so she wanted me back in six months – and that’s fine because I think my prescription in my right eye got worse, AGAIN. The new library will open, my daughter will turn NINE, and hopefully I’ll get plenty of reading in there with all of this going on.
Wishing you a lovely month filled with excellent books that speak to your soul. Be well, friends. : )
She's probably at the library... 