Hello, friends,
Who doesn’t love a new book to unwrap and read during the break before the new year? Some of you, I happen to know, are madly rushing around right now, checking people and to-dos off your list. You might want some book recommendations.
Of course, you could also consider sending someone to my January Retreat (Wednesday Jan 3 -Sunday Jan 7), or give them a spot in one of my weekly writing groups, or give them a subscription to Morning Seeding & Tending•, but people do need to know about these terrific books out there that should be read! So without further ado, here are my (mostly) Tweet-length reviews of the books I loved, in the order I read them this past year.
Fiction
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin. Interesting Kunstlerroman about a working/work relationship and how artistic partners can be just as passionate as romantic ones.
Surrender, Bono. U2 singer’s memoir about faith, true love and how very like a family a rock band is. Made me pull out all my old CDs.
Liberation Day, George Saunders. Another stellar collection of short stories by one of my favorite writers ever. Check out his Substack newsletter Story Club.
Mink River, Brian Doyle. By one of my all-time favorite writers, this is a warm, rambling story about a small town on the Oregon coast with a sentient and talking crow.
Hello Beautiful, Ann Napolitano. Modern-day interpretation of Little Women.
Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell. An imagining of Shakespeare’s family during the time of the bubonic plague.
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid. The most hopeful dystopia novel I’ve ever read.
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver. WOW. The voice! The characters! I am stunned by how fully imagined Kingsolver’s re-telling of Dickens David Copperfield was, and how perfect it was to set it in southwestern VA during the late 90s. I paired reading this novel with watching the mini-series Dopesick.
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck. For the three readers who haven’t ever read this novel: what I loved most was being immersed in the landscape of Dust Bowl America, the tactile details of trying to survive as transients during the Depression, the totality of our stupid destruction of the Great Plains. I paired this with both the 1940 film and with Ken Burn’s Dust Bowl series. And also Steinbeck’s journal of the writing of this novel, Working Days.
We All Want Impossible Things, Catherine Newman. Laugh out loud, cry out loud, there’s NO ONE who writes like Catherine Newman. She’s like your best friend, and you feel you know her when you spend any time with her prose. If you don’t believe me, read her Substack newsletter Crone Sandwich.
Once We Were Home, Jennifer Rosner. As many of you know, I adored Jennfier’s first novel The Yellow Bird Sings so much that I wrote this review of it. I think I loved Once We Were Home even more. It’s a book for these times—taking place before, during, and after WWII and showing how complicated homeland and family has always been.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy. I almost failed this book, and by that I mean I had to put it down several times to stare at the wall in despair. It was just too brutal. I couldn't imagine a future for this father/son duo, and because the love between them was so palpable, so natural, so beautifully and perfectly rendered, I couldn't handle seeing them suffer. I thought I'd rather walk away. But something kept me reading--perhaps sheer determination to be brave, perhaps simply because I loved these characters so much I couldn't bear to leave them. I'm glad I stuck with it because the ending of this book shocked me in its hopefulness, and I cried out loud as I read the final page. I wrote an essay about this novel and The Vaster Wilds which you can read here.
The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff. It is 1610, and Troy is the fort at Jamestown, surrounded by indigenous Americans who are fed up with these stupid intruders, most of whom are dead or dying from small pox or starvation. It's been a terrible year for the English, and their settlement is about to fail. For reasons we don't discover until the end of the novel, it's vital that our wily unnamed protagonist (she refers to herself only as "Girl") succeed in escaping. She has armed herself with layers of clothes, the boots taken from the corpse of a dead boy, and several useful items, all of which she does name: a hatchet, a cup, a knife, a flint, all tied in a sack around her waist. Because of her many feats of physical and intellectual brilliance, I had no doubt that this girl would survive. She has knowledge; she has seen a map: Spanish settlements in the south, French to the north. She knows a bit of French, so it's north she runs. As she makes her way up the James River she manages to capture and eat everything from fish, duck, baby squirrels, even wood grubs at one point. She's a major survivor. But she, like the father and son in The Road, must keep moving or risk capture and certain death. I wrote an essay about both this novel and The Road, which you can read here.
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens. Just a li’l ole’ coming-of-age story about a scrappy orphan. Mr. Macawber is one of the funniest characters ever, and Uriah Heap is like Lurch from the Addams family, only sinister.
The Fraud, Zadie Smith. I pretty much love everything ZS writes, but this was my favorite. Fun to read shortly after David Copperfield, since Dickens shows up as a character in this novel.
Nonfiction
Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, Greil Marcus. Brilliant essays about seven of Bob Dylan’s songs. Re-newed to me: “Jim Jones,” Dylan’s cover of an old 18th C Australian ballad.
Body Work, Melissa Febos. Critical feminist essays about writing.
No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model, Richard Schwartz. Finally, a well-written and totally helpful description of Dick Schwartz’s life-changing Internal Family Systems (IFS) work. I got this book on audio so I could do the exercises as meditations and get to listen to Dick’s kind, friendly voice while I’m at it.
The Way of Integrity, Martha Beck. My old life-coach mentor! Martha has gotten wiser, funnier, more comfortable with herself and her brilliance over the years. This was my favorite of all her books, and I got this one because Anna Smith recommended it. I now listen to Martha’s podcast The Gathering Room which I also love.
And now, thanks to Martha, I’m finally reading The Open-Focus Brain, which is an unappealing title for a book with an unappealing cover (Les Fehmi, like the Nields, shared a publisher who made very bad book covers), which is why even though I got this book in about 2008, I haven’t read it till now.
Your Work Out in the World!
I have extremely talented students and visitors to my workshop. Behold:
Anna Baker Smith’s essay “The Creeks of Greensboro” was published as a chapbook by Bellepoint Press.
Kristen Holt-Browning’s prose poem "A Theory of Doors" is included in the 2023 edition of the Best Small Fictions anthology.
Allie Eaton’s piece called "Sally's Face" was in the print journal The Memoirist Quarterly.
Sarah Sullivan’s poem “Fine Work” appears in the Alaska Quarterly Review.
And more coming for 2024! I have a couple pieces coming out then, but for now, what I want most to share with you is this video I made of an obscure track I procured by secret means. Do not watch this while operating a Cuisinart.
Why I Lowered Subscription Rates
Short answer: I’ve lowered the paid subscription price for this newsletter from $240/year ($20/month) to $80 year/$8/month, and as such, the premiums have changed too. Skip to bottom line.
Longer answer: As always, and forever, this is a free publication, but per Substack’s desire to get you to pay me, there are a couple of tiers for those who feel like becoming paid subscribers out of the desire to support us artists and writers.
Previously, I felt extremely guilty about even asking you to contribute to my work without offering something compensatory in return. So I had the idea to make the monthly subscription cost equivalent to the cost of being a Morning Seeding & Tending subscriber.
But because I already have a platform for Morning Seeding & Tending subscriptions (Ko-Fi), my poor ADD brain got addled with all the calculations I was having to do to try to figure out who had paid through which platform. Moreover, I happily contribute to lots of artists and writers via Substack without asking for anything more than that these people keep on writing and doing their work in the world. But they’re asking a reasonable fee—usually around $80 year/$8/month.
BOTTOM LINE
Whereas before, the monthly subscription was admission into Morning Seeding & Tending, now, a regular paid monthly subscription ($80 year/$8/month) allows you try Morning Seeding & Tending for one month for free! Plus, I will send out occasional emails with my best recipes and secrets. And you will receive my admiration, undying gratitude and novenas. Which I think are Catholic prayer thingies.
If you aren’t a writer, you can gift your month to a friend who is!
For a “Founding Member” rate of $240 a year/$20/month, you can be in Morning Seeding & Tending for as long as you remain a Symbols & Cymbals subscriber—this includes you, if you are one of my three subscribers at the old rate. For you, NOTHING WILL CHANGE. You’re good. You get to stay in Morning Seeding & Tending without paying anything other than the $20/month fee you already pay.
If you followed all that, you are impressive and deserve a gold medal and whatever you want in your stocking, if you are the kind of person who hangs stockings on Christmas Eve.