*Friendly reminder that I’m still cross-posting to Substack, but the great bulk of my work is over at third-thing.com which is also where you can access my very cool Patreon for extra (paid) content
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
Y’all, this is going to be a long one. Chances are very high this email is going to get cut off and you’re going to need to scroll to the bottom and click “view entire message” or something like that depending what email platform you use. This email is broken up into nonfiction, fiction, and do not recommend. Hope you enjoy!
NONFICTION
Wild and Precious: A Celebration of Mary Oliver
Let’s kick off the new year with a technicality: this isn’t actually a book. Instead, it’s available only in audio formats and listens a little more like a 4-hour podcast than an audio book. But I think listening to this was actually a better experience than reading it would have been.
As someone who fell in love with poetry via Mary Oliver, this “book” meant everything to me. I listened to it twice over the summer, discovering new things in it each time. I felt like I really got to know the woman who shaped my early twenties and taught me more about presence and attention than any yoga or meditation class ever has.
Highlight of the book: When Rainn Wilson reads Humpbacks and tears up. I inevitably sobbed.
Pairs best with: An early morning walk around your neighborhood with a thermos of black coffee — just the way Mary Oliver would have wanted it.
The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance
You might recall a former review of this one in my very first newsletter, but here’s the gist: Journalist Rebecca Clarren explores the complexity of her Jewish family’s settlement in the midwest after fleeing oppression and genocide of the Russian pogroms while Americans were simultaneously committing oppression and genocide against Indigenous peoples — specifically the Lakota.
This book was incredibly powerful not just because Clarren is a phenomenal storyteller and researcher, but because it laid bare the nuance and complexity of issues we’ve come to consider very black and white in our very polarized country. In a culture so ready to point fingers and place blame, this book demonstrated to me at least that no issue can be boiled down to a simple “this person is right and this person is wrong” type argument. An Instagram tile of armchair activism simply will not suffice.
Highlight of the book: Simply coming to know history that I was never taught in school (how did it take until 30 before I learned that Hitler based his treatment of Jews off the way Americans treated Indigenous people????)
Pairs best with: A strong pour of gin smuggled through prohibition.
Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain
Again, you might recall mention of this book in the Third Thing a couple months ago. I’ve been writing about water for years, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. I love water, I love stories about water, I love the variation from oceans to streams to lakes. Deakin covers all of these landscapes and more in this amazing essay collection.
Originally published in 1999, this book evidently set off a wild swimming movement in Britain and wasn’t even available in the U.S. until 2021. Sometimes the text is SO British you have to pull out Google to understand exactly what he’s referencing, but it only adds to the charm. The book easily made me crave a dunk in the nearest body of water, but more than that, made me crave knowing my own landscape better.
Highlight of the book: Realizing just how adventure-filled your own backyard is if you make a point of exploring it.
Pairs best with: A steaming bath and a hot mug of bittersweet cocoa.
The Flow: Rivers, Water and Wildness
Amy-Jane Beer wrote this book as a sort of modern compendium to Waterlog, so even though the books can absolutely be read separately, I found The Flow much more impactful having read Waterlog first.
Beer doesn’t follow Deakin’s traverse exactly, but there are a few essay overlaps that show how time has passed, how regulations have changed, and how new threats have continued to mount on British waterways. Once again, it will make you want to seek out your nearest waterway and plunge in.
Highlight of the book: Beer’s descent into Hell Gill
Pairs best with: Having read Waterlog and already taken your hot bath and sipped your cocoa.
Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail
I am constantly frustrated with the outdoor industry — that the outdoors could be an industry at all — and have been somewhat put off by the need to have every book, story, film, feature, etc. star a hero (often male) who achieves some insane, if impressive, physical feat. I guess I’m just not all that impressed with people who were born with athletic bodies and also had the time and resources to train those athletic bodies to accomplish these things. Where’s the story in that?
“My lung capacity is naturally better than most and with a lot of athletic training while other people worked jobs, I was able to accomplish [INSERT BIG THING]! Be impressed by me!” BLEH.
In a description not at all meant to be insulting, Almost Somewhere is about a couple of very average people backpacking what could be considered a very average trail. But what makes the story interesting is not the physicality, it’s the dynamics, disappointments, thrills, and let-downs of finding your place in the world as a young person freshly out of college. The story felt so earnest and so honest, no sugar-coating involved. Roberts could have easily written a story about how “the mountains forever changed her,” or how “she was the best version of herself, constantly in awe and amazement on the trail,” which is what a lot of older nature writing leans toward.
Instead she’s honest about being hungry, cold, and tired, not getting along with her companions, thinking a lot about boys and whether or not she’s pretty, and if she really wants to finish the trail at all. That honesty makes for an interesting story. Not the physical feat.
Highlight of the book: When the boys finally give up because they’re a bunch of babies and are honestly dragging the women down
Pairs best with: The high point of a local hiking trail and a packet of instant coffee made in a JetBoil
On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good
Y’all, I was pretty certain this book was going to be another garbage marketing gimmick with no actual substance (so why did you buy the book, Anja? Because I too am a sucker for good marketing!) BUT I WAS ENTIRELY WRONG.
This book was scrupulously researched, well written, and opened my mind to the history of the seven deadly sins and how they very much were intentionally targeted at women and how we still shame women disproportionately for these “sins” today.
Highlight of the book: Learning that the seven deadly sins never even appeared in the bible (why did we all think that?) and were just made up by some monk who kinda hated women.
Pairs best with: A large goblet of red wine (or is it the blood of your enemies?) shared amongst your coven of women.
Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying
I picked up this audio book after Mari Andrew recommended it in one of her weekly newsletters. She spent some time studying to be a hospital chaplain which isn’t so different from being a death doula — a service I received a certificate in this year.
Walking Each Other Home is a co-authorship between Ram Dass and his lifelong friend Mirabai Bush. Dass had wanted to write a book on the spirituality of dying but his prior stroke made it hard to write, think, and speak at a speed and coherence that could pull together a book. Bush stepped in to help make it happen and this is what arose.
This book is yet another example of how death does not need to be scary and is worth talking about and mulling over while we’re still alive.
Walking Each Other Home is available in print, but the audiobook is narrated by Bush herself (with an opening by Dass before his death) and is so much more eloquent coming from her. I’d recommend listening to it rather than reading it.
Highlight of the book: Dass says the most spiritual moment of our lives occurs at the end of life and it’s given me so much to think about with my hospice clients.
Pairs best with: A sunshine puddle and a turmeric latte.
The world is mean, the news is awful, it seems like everything is falling apart and Samantha Irby allows us to come back to humor, mundanity, and small joys without shame. If you want to laugh and laugh and laugh while reading witty essays that don’t make your eyes glaze over with academic rhetoric, you are going to love this book.
Highlight of the book: I can’t quite remember, but something about nun porn?? Hit me up if you read it and remind me. I just recall that essay being absolutely side splitting.
Pairs best with: A diet coke sipped from your living room couch.
Confession time: Up until this book, I had never read anything by Joan Didion. In fact, I regularly confused her with Joan Rivers and when people would tell me to read Didion’s work I’d be like, “Really? Her writing is good? Wasn’t she kind of an asshole?”
Anyway, Joan Didion is not Joan Rivers and The Year of Magical Thinking is yet another thought provoking book about death and grief and how to keep on living when it all feels too heavy to go on.
If you’re worried the book will make you cry, it will. But what I discovered this year is that the more and more I took in stories of death and grief, the less scary those things became — even if they still made me bawl like a baby. No, I did not become desensitized to them. If anything I became fully sensitized which made the whole ordeal feel less like a mystery and more like an inevitability I didn’t have to be blind-sided by.
Highlight of the book: A highlight in a book about sudden death probably sounds incredibly morbid, but getting to witness someone else’s grief process is immensely comforting. If I’ve learned one thing in my death work, it’s this: There is never a wrong way to grieve.
Pairs best with: A vodka martini and a box of tissues.
Ross Gay is such a joy (ha ha see what I did there?) and this book will make you feel like there is so much more beauty and wonder in the world than social media and the news would have you believe.
Gay quickly points out in the first essay that joy is not separate from pain and I think that really sums the book up — you’ve got to have both if you want to have joy and we are a society so set on not experiencing pain that we’re also regularly denying ourselves joy as well.
I also found myself tearing up on the very first page of the book when he recounts a story at a book signing where a fan came up to him and basically said, “I didn’t know you could write about joy.” Which is to say, I think a lot of writers and artists think we are only allowed to cover really awful, horrible, and sad things to actually make art and that’s just plain not true.
Highlight of the book: Ross Gay is a master of parenthesis and footnotes. Sometimes a single footnote will stretch for two pages and I just love that he said “fuck it” to convention and did whatever the hell he wanted. As a fellow parentheses lover and footnote maker, I now feel I’ve been gifted the permission to capitulate wildly with my side bars.
Pairs best with: A Yuengling and a movie about skateboarding
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
I read Jenny Odell’s first book, How To Do Nothing in late 2019 just before the pandemic. While a seemingly “self-help” sounding title, the book was actually a blend of art history, labor union history, and nonviolent anti-capitalism. That book really set the stage for how I wanted to handle work and was in no small part what drove me to quit my job in the summer of 2020 as the pandemic wore on.
Saving Time is something of a compendium to How To Do Nothing, but again, you don’t have to have read one to fully enjoy the other. Odell eloquently explains the different ways people have historically viewed time and how we ended up in this system where time has been commodified.
As someone who thinks the 40-hour work week is an absolute scam, this book really hit home and made me certain that should I ever be in a position of power in the workplace, my employees will not be bound by hours clocked, but rather the quality of their work.
Highlight of the book: The incredible detail to research and history that shows us how we got from one place to another (and the implied hope that we could change)
Pairs best with: A walk through a rose garden with a sparkling lemonade
Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age
I’ve heard it said that one of the great antidotes to anxiety and depression is a cocktail of curiosity and wonder.
Enchantment (from Katherine May, the same author of the highly acclaimed Wintering) lays out in real time how that is definitely the case. This book meanders in the most lovely way and slows us down post pandemic to see just how anxious and wound up we’ve become and how to get back to a place of wonder and delight.
Highlight of the book: Any of the scenes involving walking and water
Pairs best with: A cold plunge in the Atlantic ocean and a hot toddy
How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures
How Far the Light Reaches is an incredibly endearing collection of essays that asks the reader over and over again: “Hello! Have you ever thought about this insane little sea creature? And also queerness? Well, here! Let me put them together for you in a way that seemingly shouldn’t work but absolutely does.”
Highlight of the book: The freaky creatures
Pairs best with: Lapping waves and a mocktail
Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life
Have you ever needed a tooth filling, a titanium rod in your leg, or a very serious piece of medical equipment permanently placed in your body and wondered, “How the heck did this piece of technology even get to me, and how many people had to lose their lives for it to happen?” No? Well, Katherine Standefer makes it hard not to.
After being diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition in her 20s and receiving a very invasive piece of technology embedded in her chest to prevent her from dying, Standefer goes on a journey to find out where the precious metals came from to make the device, learning along the way about the humanitarian issues involved with mining for these metals and the great swaths of environmental degradation that entails.
The book also highlights America’s fucked up medical system, the struggle of being a writer, the unbearable weight of a chronic health condition, and just how much work it takes to stay alive.
Highlight of the book: Learning so much more about the heart, an organ I knew practically nothing about
Pairs best with: A dive bar in Wyoming and a double shot of whiskey
Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
I’m a sucker for a “how to write” book and let me tell you, this is maybe the best one out there. This book makes the case for why/how memoir became “women’s work” (even though tons of men wrote memoirs what just were never called memoirs) and why considering memoirs a lesser form of writing is a load of bullshit.
Highlight of the book: “My resistance to and bias against memoir was not based in any lived experience as a writer or a reader. It was my own internalized sexism, calling from inside the house to warn me away from telling my own story, because doing so might free me from shame and replace the onus of change onto the society in which we live.”
Pairs best with: A very large rock to smash that glass ceiling. And probably also a strong cocktail.
FICTION
I used to be a voracious novel reader and now I’m lucky if I can finish a few novels a year (hence the relative lack on this list). HOWEVER. I got really burned out by nonfiction in the last few years and generally feel like publishers are putting out a lot of garbage simply for the publicity or the catchy title with no real substance behind the work (see my “Do Not Recommend” list below).
Cloud Cuckoo Land made me want to read fiction again and reminded me how lovely it can be to disappear into someone else’s world. But maybe not even disappear. Fiction is a reminder that there are many many many worlds that we each craft every day and the news media is just one teeny tiny world in that whole bigger world soup.
Highlight of the book: There is a mind-blowing twist near the end of this book (no spoilers here, I promise) but if you’ve read the book, please reach out so we can discuss because I am dying to gush over it.
Pairs best with: An herbal tea sipped in a cozy corner of your local library
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Growing up, my first introduction to video games was on the computer via The Sims, Age of Mythology, and Zoo Tycoon. I loved these games but also felt an undertone of shame playing them. The phrase, “video games will rot your brain,” was in high use during the early 2000s and there seemed to be a much higher stigma for girls who played video games than. boys.
After high school, I stopped playing video games, feeling that they were largely a waste of time and a somewhat ugly trait in a person. What a critical time to be alive.
Later, I played games here and there with my partner on his consoles as a “guilty pleasure,” but firmly kept my distance by never purchasing a console of my own.
Then I read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and realized that perspective was really stupid and that video games could be (and often are) art, leading to thoughtfulness, amazing stories, and critical thinking.
Halfway through the book I picked up a Nintendo Switch and started playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild and then after that, Tears of the Kingdom. Both games combined took me nearly a year to finish (I just wrapped up TOTK last week) and I still don’t think I saw everything I could in those games. Video games are great. Let’s stop the hate.
Highlight of the book: The description of trying to code the sea to move the way they wanted it to in their video game
Pairs best with: Noise canceling headphones, a cold and stormy day, and a fridge well stocked with grapefruit Spindrifts
Let me start by saying this book was such an amazing portrayal of life in Alaska in the 70s — especially out in the bush where there were few resources and fewer comforts. The characters were so real and the story had me on the edge of my seat. Having not spent much time in Alaska at all, I felt like I had a better understanding of the kinds of people I’d need to work with at my job.
That being said, I would not recommend this as a bedtime read as the content is tough and dark and violent. That’s not to say you shouldn’t read it, but maybe read it with a little space between when you need to be relaxed and calm enough to fall asleep.
Highlight of the book: The love story
Pairs best with: Smoked salmon and cheap beer
In what will come to be no surprise the more and more you read from me, I did not realize this book was the 4th in a series until many months after finishing the book.
That being said, the book stands on its own just fine and is an excellent portrayal of what it was like in those early days of the pandemic and also what it is to fall in and out of love. I hesitate to call it an “easy read” because that might imply it lacks substance, which it does not. But it is a gentle read that can be sipped over and over again without becoming overwhelming.
Highlight of the book: A reminder that we all lived through the same pandemic and had VERY similar experiences to one another
Pairs best with: An ice cold glass of chardonnay on the Maine coast
I love sci-fi that you don’t quite know from the get go is sci-fi and that’s exactly how this book unfolds.
This is a classic book where we jump from story to story to story and only at the very end do we come to understand how they are all connected. It’s also another story of the pandemic and pandemics in general and if you’re thinking to yourself, “I really don’t want to read about pandemics after what we lived through,” I promise you this book will not make you relive that nightmare.
Highlight of the book: The big reveal
Pairs best with: A freshly Lysol-ed kitchen table and a shot of immune-boosting B12
DO NOT RECOMMEND
This is the section where I really don’t want to be an asshole, because someday I’m going to publish a book (god willing) and some people are going to hate it and I’d be crushed to see it end up on a “do not recommend” list — but I also think it’s worth talking about what made these books so bad so that we as readers and writers can do better.
How To Be Alone: an 800-mile hike on the Arizona Trail
This is the least worst of the “do not recommend” books in that I DID finish the book and found it at best mediocre and at worst repetitive.
The title pretty much says it all, the book is about hiking the AT. Now I’m a big believer that just because Cheryl Strayed’s Wild exploded in popularity doesn’t mean that no one can ever write a good book about thru-hiking again. The problem is that this just wasn’t a good book.
It read like a very long trip report or a very long Instagram caption and was altogether unmoving and uninteresting.
That being said, I think her editors were the ones who really failed her, not the writer herself (the writing wasn’t bad). They should have helped push this to be a deeper, more interesting story and instead let it go to print flat and dull.
This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World
*Absolutely NOT to be confused with my first rec, Wild and Precious.
This book was straight up garbage. Preachy, focused on individual action to solve the climate crisis (Don’t use paper cups at coffee shops! Live with only a suitcase worth of belongings! Just be like me, it’s so easy you sack of hot garbage who clearly doesn’t care about the earth!) and was basically just one long un-researched hot take.
As someone who works intimately in the climate movement, I just kept thinking, “Um, have you ever actually had to work to change policy and consumer habits in any kind of a real way? Or do you just post to Instagram and get mad when the world doesn’t change?”
I finished this book — barely — hoping there’d at least be something to take away from it. But all in all I just found myself really angry and annoyed with the author the whole time.
Feels like another case of someone who got Instagram famous and publishers knew they wouldn’t have to do any work to market the book so they signed the book deal.
Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life
I really REALLY wanted to love this book. Doesn’t it sound great??? And yet, it was just a bunch of thinly researched anecdotes that basically all said the same thing, “Yo, this dude seemingly should not have wonder in his life, and yet he does! How neat is that? You should have wonder too!”
I couldn’t finish it and I got really angry with the publishing world that the book was published at all. I heard from other writer friends that they also were unable to finish it and felt like we’ll just publish anything these days if the title is catchy enough — so I felt validated.