I spent an evening chasing the titles of the books I read this year. I thought there were a myriad of apps tracking this for me, in addition to my library accounts, and perhaps Amazon kindle had my digital rentals as well? But: no. None of them kept up! What are internet cookies* for anyway?

Anyway, I went about looking for signs to recall what I was reading—email mentions, texts, photos, Instagram stories. I wondered if I had read 30 books this year (nearly, somewhere around 28). Then I wrote them all down on a piece of paper in a journal. Foolproof!

Here are some of the books that passed the attention gauntlet, and won their place in my hands and flighty mind for the duration of their pages. They were all great, or I wouldn’t have finished them.

Going to take my Marie Kondo moment and say: Thank you books, for being part of my year.

More than a few peculiar memoirs this year, mostly because I fell completely for Anne Truitt’s four books that are edited journals about her life as a sculptor and doting mother. I loved the way she cataloged work as a sculptor alongside housekeeping, being a single mother, and life. I loved learning from how incredibly hard she worked at the work, even when her art was not selling or getting critical reception. I loved entering her mind at different ages and stages in her life, from her 40s. These books inspired me in my own writing, because the way she wove daily life together with meta-aspirations is exactly the type of writing I love to do.

For those of us who grew up hearing Elisabeth Elliot on the radio, hearing about she and Jim from church mission culture, or simply reading her books, the book Becoming Elisabeth Elliot was an incredible read. Through extensive journal excerpts and letters (so many letters!) the author documents how Elisabeth became one of history’s extraordinary persons, through her devotion to God and the moral framework she believed in.

Amazing fiction of the year were Hamnet, Olive Kitteridge, Small Things Like These (the slimmest, most elegant novella set in Ireland) and The Candy House.

The Candy House is on a lot of the best books of this year lists. It’s a surprisingly easy read about a future where people upload their memories to connect with one another, written from nine (maybe? I lost count) different intertwining perspectives. Like another of her books, A Visit from the Good Squad, it’s written with this light spirit and is somehow pleasant and funny while tussling with this dark sci-fi premise. Note you do not need to read Visit from the Goon Squad first.

Similarly light yet deeply thoughtful, the sci-fi books Station 11 and Sea of Tranquility were two of my favorite books of the year. If you read Station 11, you then get to watch the hbo series which has amazing costumes and fascinating twists on the original plot.

In April Joe and I went to the warm white sands of Canouan island for my older brother’s epic 40th birthday party. The hotel, Soho House, felt like a gorgeous open air home run by an invisible benevolent being, and the lobby had small piles of chic worn beach reads for the taking. There I found The Wreckage of My Presence a hilarious memoir about mothers, being a mother, and love in general. So happy and SO sad at times. Don’t want to give too much away, but it’s an amazing read, terry clothed beach lounger not required.

I picked up Lessons by Gisele Buchen at a summer used book tent sale, the type with cardboard boxes lining tables setup over lawns and under tents. Somehow I finished it just as she and Tom Brady divorced. Sad timing! I enjoyed reading about her modeling career and all her hard work inspired by her parents’ faith in her. If you read the book you learn she values family more than anything, so I can only imagine how heartbreaking that divorce was.

At one point this year I did a send-a-book chain on Instagram. I have no idea how it worked out for the 40ish people who signed up but I did my best to maximize the system by mixing up the names instead of putting them into one-chain pyramid with me at the top (as most chain letters are structured). Through that I received 8 books from strangers and really enjoyed 3 of them: Panchinko, Untamed, and The Color of Water. I loved The Color of Water, it was astounding how his mother had shaped their family, and how much he admired her, while he was also honest about how difficult his childhood was.

In January we knew we were going to Paris and Croatia in the early summer, and some reading was influenced by that. Joe and I both loved An Editor’s Burial which is a collection of stories that inspired Wes Anderson while he was writing The French Dispatch screenplay. Arguably his inspiration is better than the actual film; An Editor’s Burial is filled with gems. For Croatia I read Balkan Ghosts, a fascinating collection of essays about the different Balkan countries. And Lea Ypi’s Freedom, about growing up in Albania (which bizarrely is directly across a slim sea from Italy, but seems a world apart).

First book of last year was a re-read that I could read every year for the rest of my life: Circe by Madeline Miller. Last book of 2022 was Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change an absolutely beautiful and thoughtful book about the kinds of care we have around us, and what we offer one another. I would recommend it to anyone, mother or not.

*Speaking of cookies, I couldn’t decide how to best hyperlink these books. Most of them are linked to Bookshop, which has a nice interface and is a place you could buy the book. But realistically what you need, as a reader, is a hyperlink where you could add these to a to-read list and get them from your library. I’m not sure where you should do that. I think goodreads is stuck in the mud–despite knowing everything I’ve read for years now, they do not give me any good recommendations. So I’m on the hunt for a new book tracking app–I think the space is realllly ready for a cute enthusiastic app that makes you want to read and helps you keep nice lists! Right now I am trying out the app Storygraph. 

Do the categories word person and numbers person truly exist? Are they separate kingdoms as in the genially absurd classic novel Phantom Tollbooth?

I always liked math in school and never questioned my competence in it. In particular I remember delighting in the requirement to circle your answer, lest it got lost amid the scribbled equations. There was this sense of the question–what if you had the right answer, but then you wandered away, and ended up circling the wrong one? The mysterious revolution–you were right, then you were wrong, but then you were right after all. It felt intimate, and I loved that part.

But I feel like a natural words person. Was this feeling assisted by simplistic duality of a printed piece of paper carrying my ACT score in which I scored higher on English than Math? Perhaps.

But there is too the fact that I do not think in numbers, nor do I puzzle over them, nor do they seem to call to me. Not in the morning, or the night, or the middle of the night. I do not so much miss them, but I do think it would be incredible to encounter numbers so familiarly that they had essence and color, as autistic savant Daniel Tammet recounted in his book years ago, Born on a Blue Day. When I make a list of human experiences I hope to have in heaven, that is top five on mine, absolutely.

Anyway, as a result of some of these things, I often puzzle over how to invite numbers generously into my children’s world. My approach to this is to read about it (ha). Basically I’m hoping to get inside the head of a numbers person so I can properly convey that magic to the girls. Lately I’ve read several books by the mathematically inclined, like A Mind for Numbers, and Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. 

So when my friend Katharine recommended the new The Weil Conjectures about math and the genius siblings Simone and André Weil (pronounced “vey”), I immediately asked my library to order it.

The book is one part reminisce of the author Karen Olsson’s own brief love affair with math, a sprinkling of the writings of various mathematicians (all delightful!), and one part biography of the Weil siblings—Simone, known among Christians and philosophers for her spiritual writing, and André, unknown to me, but a brilliant mathematician.

About one of the historical mathematicians, she writes:

Poincaré characterizes math as practically a form of spontaneous combustion, “the activity in which the human mind seems to take the least from the outside world.” As such, he says, it ought to tell us something about the essence of thinking.

It is very much a genre-bending book, with historical notes blended with personal ones, and fictitious scenes recreated based on fact. I particularly enjoyed Olsson’s reflections on her emotional experience with math…

But after more than two decades, if anything my dalliance with math seems just that, a past love, one I remember with nostalgia and the kind of echo feeling that adheres to the memory of an old romance.

 

Also, at nineteen, so much is up in the air, open to question, unreliable. I think part of what I like about math was simply that it seemed like a sure thing, as sure as a thing could be, a solid mass of true and rigorous and irreproachable knowledge that I could grab like a pole on the bus.

Because I previously only knew of Simone Weil as a Christian spiritualist, I was initially surprised by how lightly Olsson dealt with her spiritualism in the book. But as she reveals the intensely complex and troubled character of Simone, I began to understand why encountering her spiritual writing revealed only a fraction of this woman.

One thing I’ve taken away from my reading is the sheer delight that mathematicians take in the question. Never mind the answer. It’s the question, and the possible solution, and routes to the possible solution, that are most delightful. The Weil Conjectures is most engaging when recounting Simone and André’s letters wherein Simone asks again and again for him to explain the work he does, the math he puzzles over, and he finally does. She does not understand the explanation, and she knew she wouldn’t, but his answer has been recorded for history, for us, nonetheless.

I just finished a forest school book that was so nice I’d like to read it twice. Maybe I will. It was one of those wonderful reads where you get to live in someone else’s life and soak up their lessons and foibles, their mistakes and ambitions, all from the sequestered comfort of your home that looks nothing like theirs. Here’s how I came upon the book…

A few years a guy by the name of Ben Hewitt wrote an article for Outside Magazine about unschooling. I read it through a couple times and deemed it a steaming cup of bone broth from the unschooling movement. Here’s just a paragraph or two…

By 6:30, with the first rays of sun burning through the ground-level fog, the boys are outside. At some point in the next hour, a yellow school bus will rumble past the end of the driveway that connects the farm to the town road. The bus will be full of children the boys’ age, their foreheads pressed against the glass, gazing at the unfurling landscape, the fields and hills and forests of the small working-class community they call home.

The boys will pay the bus no heed. This could be because they will be seated at the kitchen table, eating breakfast with their parents. Or it might be because they are already deep in the woods below the house, where a prolific brook trout stream sluices through a stand of balsam fir; there is an old stone bridge abutment at the stream’s edge, and the boys enjoy standing atop it, dangling fresh-dug worms into the water. Perhaps they won’t notice the bus because they are already immersed in some other project: tillering a longbow of black locust, or starting a fire over which to cook the quartet of brookies they’ve caught. They heat a flat rock at the fire’s edge, and the hot stone turns the fishes’ flesh milky white and flaky.

I immediately googled what else this guy had written, and requested his book Home Grown. It is a quieter read than the article. While the article is edited to entice, and also, yes, to provoke, the book is a thoughtful read on the endearing attempts of unschooling parents to guide and provide for their children, to be patient, to believe in themselves and their child, and their children’s recent habit of skinning skunks in the front yard. It reminded me of Wendell Berry–written in a softly humble tone by a man who is grateful and astonished to find himself supporting his family above the poverty line as a writer and farmer.

Though we may now live surrounded by trees, rest assured my children are not (yet) hunting squirrels with handmade bows or building their own maple sugaring fires. They do not wake at dawn, dress appropriately for the weather and leave the house for hours at a time. And we aren’t unschooling. We are decidedly full of workbooks and curriculum and goals. But in reading something like Home Grown I can learn a lot from his attitude, the reminder to take the extra time to let them learn alongside you, the power of wait-and-see.

It has also been on my mind to seek out a tutor of sorts who could wander the woods with the girls, so I was delighted to find this same idea working well for Ben’s family. There are loads of wonderful camps around us, but I don’t need a week of intense activity framed by long drives and packed lunches. I would love something regular in our backyard with someone who can evolve into a mentor and friend.

What about you? Any good education reads lately?