Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton & 639 Others

I absolutely love this book! It's the equivalent of peeking into someone's fridge or their diary to discover the layers that make each person's style unique. At first glance, it seemed a little odd to have a book entirely dedicated to fashion without many pictures, but I quickly discovered the fun of imagining these women through their vivid descriptions of their clothing choices, the various factors that impact how they choose to adorn themselves and how these change from person to person. These range from cultural reasons, to religious conventions, to job requirements, to personal preferences, to sexuality and gender expectations or rejections, to the way we were raised. There are thousands of factors that influence our individual clothing choices.

This book isn't just a frivolous look at clothes. It looks at fashion from a huge range of angles. The interviews with sweatshop workers and the chasm that exists between the fashion they make and the choices available to them at their pay grade was particularly fascinating. It was a like a light bulb went off when one of the workers stated that it's not as though the fast fashion factories are shitty and the factories where designer clothes are sewn are glamorous with better working conditions.

Some of my favourite parts of the book were the collections. We all have things we collect multiples of, so these visual mini museums ranging from homemade dresses to safety pins to lipstick blots were so much fun to see. I also loved the "Mothers as Others" parts, where respondents provided pictures of their mothers before they became parents and revealed what they saw.

This huge survey seems like so much fun, so I decided to reveal some of my own responses:

• I didn't grow up in a glamorous family. I often fantasized about having the kind of mother who had a little vanity table strewn with makeup and hair accessories who would swipe some of her colour over my own lips as she got ready for a night out. Or, even better, a glamorously fashionable grandmother who would allow me to twirl around her huge closet and gift me beautiful vintage clothing and jewelry pieces from her own collection. In fact, strangely enough, almost none of the women in my immediate or extended family, young or old, wear any visible makeup, colour their hair or dress up on a regular basis, but those little rituals have always been super important to me, so I can't imagine not having those things in my life. I did, however, have a great aunt who I met in England when I was very young who wore three-inch heels into her final days. I thought this was so excellent and it left a huge impression on me. I aspire to be more avant garde, eccentric and fearless as I get older, especially as the older women get, the more we seem to fade into the scenery. Iris Apfel is my imaginary fairy godmother and ultimate style icon.
• Ever since I can remember up until the present day, I have been (in)famous with anyone who's lived with me for changing my clothes multiple times before I leave the house. We're all ready to go, then all of a sudden it's like "hang on just a minute" and everyone rolls their eyes as I run into the bedroom and emerge wearing a completely different outfit. Sometimes in grade school I used to walk home for lunch, which provided me with the best opportunity: I would wear one outfit in the morning, go home and change and return for the afternoon in an altogether different outfit.
• I dress only for myself and no one else. I don't tend to ask opinions from others when I'm buying things, as I literally don't care if anyone other than me likes my choices. I almost exclusively thrift shop for my outfits and accessories - it's like treasure hunting! The fun is in finding unique items that no one else has and looking for clothes with unusual twists that separate basics from truly unique pieces. I definitely much prefer my jewelry to have some history. I also can't imagine life without makeup. I go so far as wearing makeup when I'm home alone, as I can't handle seeing my bare face in the mirror.
• I use clothes as camouflage for my bodily insecurities. I literally don't like any part of my body, so I love cooler months because I can cover myself while and distract with clothes. Summer makes me want to hide. I can't deal with the absence of clothes. It makes me feel exposed and naked. The fun part of dressing is finding clothes whose shapes/volume/details can accentuate or disguise different body parts. I love the challenge of finding unique items that express myself. That's when I feel the best.
• I have a terrible memory, but clothes are so visceral to me that fashion moments (my own and others') are ones that sift the most easily through the cobwebs of my own personal history.
• I get terrible anxiety whenever people gift me clothes or jewelry. (Hand-me-downs and clothes swaps are different, as I can choose what I like and discard the rest.) I have such a distinct line of what I do and don't like and feel uncomfortable with the obligation to wear them that being gifted items of clothes or accessories creates. Gifts like these are also often accompanied by proclamations of "This is so you!" or "I thought about you the second I saw this..." but this usually just makes me feel weirded out and misunderstood, even if I can usually understand their intention. I've always liked to pick out my own clothes, as it's an extremely personal form of expression for me. Whether or not I get it right is another story, but I like to be fully in control of my own choices.
• If I'm stuck in an outfit that I'm not happy in, it can literally ruin my already fragile self-esteem for the day. Just the other day, I left the house feeling fairly confident, but as soon as I caught a glimpse of myself later on in a shop window, I felt awful and was immediately dying to go and change into something else. I couldn't get it out of my head and it put a damper on my entire day. Sometimes I'll stash backup outfits in my purse just in case this happens to me. I like having options.
• Uniforms are one of my worst nightmares. My first job was at a grocery store where I was required to wear an ugly, unflattering polyester dress with nude pantyhose, flat shoes, and jewelry was limited to one pair of earrings which could be no bigger than a 10-pence coin. I felt self-conscious, uncomfortable and absolutely stripped of personality. In contrast, this was the same year that I was fifteen, living in England away from my immediate family, so I chose my clothes all on my own without having to deal with any form of parental input/comments for the first time. I adopted a wacky hippie/alternative look and bought my first pair of much-coveted Doc Martens. When I wasn't working at the grocery store, I was in sartorial heaven, pushing boundaries that had been created for me, discovering my very own style for the first time. When I returned home to Canada, I kept my out-there style throughout my teenage years. One evening I was handing out candy to trick-or-treaters. I opened the door and a teenage guy was standing there. He looked at me with a confused look on his face and asked me what I was dressed up as. I told him it wasn't a costume, just one of my everyday outfits. This made me extraordinarily happy.
• As a kid, I was forbidden from wearing black, as it wasn't deemed an appropriate colour for little girls by my parents, which resulted in years of adulthood married to the (non) colour. Maybe it's a habit I should have never delved into, as now I'm trying to climb out of the black hole by choosing more colourful options. It's a hard habit to break, but I'm finally realizing the innate happiness a little colour can provide.
• I've always had very tangly hair so, as a little girl, it was generally cut super short and looked boyish. As an adult, I've never had super short hair again. The shortest I've had it is a long lob, which I liked at first but then it soon felt too short. While my hair is way too long at the moment, I find going to the hairdresser a supremely uncomfortable experience and will leave haircuts until I'm absolutely beyond desperate for one to go. I still have yet to find my perfect hairstyle. The struggle is real.
• I find occasions that specifically call for casual dress super stressful. It's so much harder to me than dressing up. I will happily wear a party dress on a random Tuesday to run errands, but if I have to go to my kid's soccer game or to a cottage, it starts to feel like hard work. I feel masculine, stumpy and short if I'm not wearing heels. Runners and pants are generally a bad combination for my self-esteem.

I could go on and on, as this is right up my alley. Thank you, Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton and the 639 others who contributed to such a fascinating book! I read voraciously and, despite owning my own bookstore, I don't keep many books. That said, this one is going straight into my personal collection of must-keep favourites.

Judge the cover: 4/5

The Year of Less by Cait Flanders

I love a good personal challenge, so books about personal challenges always pique my interest. Back in 2010, inspired by The Uniform Project, I did my own strict shopping ban for six months, so I was interested to read about Cait Flanders' yearlong shopping ban to compare the similarities and differences.

The Year of Less follows Cait's journey to consume less and purge as many belongings as she could that she no longer used. She had a different focus each month, each of which recommitted her energy to her challenge while showing tangible evidence of how her challenge bettered her life. She kept herself accountable by blogging about her experience.

It's admirable how much money Cait was able to save over the year and, through her book, I learned about "stretch goals" - basically an extreme acceleration of a goal tightened into a short time period as an extra form of personal challenge. It's basically all about achieving the supposedly impossible, yet proving you can do whatever you put your mind to with enough discipline.

During her yearlong retail challenge, Cait had to also deal with unforeseen personal challenges in her relationships, her job and her family, any of which could have easily derailed a less committed participant. But Cait learned to sit with her pain rather than reaching out for any of her usual stress coping tactics - all of which involve money (booze, food, shopping). She learned to retrain her brain to soothe herself in other ways, ultimately proving that buying things doesn't fill the holes in our lives. While it's a temporary fix that feels good in the moment, it's not actually getting to the root of the problem.

While our personal challenges varied a bit in terms of our rules, I found a lot of similarities with our experiences. It's takes an incredible amount of willpower to not fall off the wagon and furthermore to not give up completely when you slip up. While I didn't do this at all during my six-month shopping ban, I tried to do another six-month challenge this year (January through June) and failed by buying something in March. Unfortunately, that's all it took for me to give up the challenge. I figured, if I already messed up, I might as well give up. I berated myself for giving up so easily and not just taking a moment and restarting, but I found that by reading about this topic, it's definitely got me inspired to give it another try. The trick is to know that there will be moments of extreme discomfort, of desperately wanting certain things and believing that it's now or never - if you don't get whatever it is at that very moment, you will miss out. And the truth is that you might - you might actually miss out on a deal or a last chance at an item or not get something that you feel will make your life easier/yourself more attractive/your life better/whatever it is that triggers your spending - but the truth is that you also will most likely forget all about whatever it was very quickly. And even if that worst case scenario plays out, you will be okay. After all, it's just things. It's just stuff. 

While there was some good advice and a lot of reflection in this book, it ultimately was more of a personal memoir than a how-to book. This is fine - after all, our relationship to money and the things we acquire is a personal thing with our own triggers and motivations - but if you're looking for a book with a solid focus on money management, this might not be the book for you. That said, there is some great advice at the back of the book if you're inspired to try your own shopping ban. And while a ban on spending might sound intimidating, it's actually all boils down to just one simple question: Do you want it or need it? Two tiny words that, if you answer with complete honesty, make a world of difference and, as extreme as it sounds, can actually help change your life.

Judge the cover: 3/5

Living and Dying in Brick City: Stories from the Front Lines of an Inner-City E.R. by Sampson Davis, M.D.

The challenge: to read a book about a current social or political issue. Living and Dying doesn't just cover one issue, it covers a multitude of issues that primarily affect the patients in Beth Israel Hospital in inner-city Newark, New Jersey.

What makes this book unique is that it's not just a book of facts. The author, Sampson Davis, was born and raised in the neighbourhood then specifically chose to work at this particular hospital, so he's able to provide an insider knowledge that not just anyone could. He provides real-life examples of patients' circumstances from an emergency doctor's perspective, but he also ties these issues and illnesses back to how they have personally affected him via his and his family's, friends' and acquaintances' experiences and he provides solutions and reference information for help at the end of each chapter. 

Social issues that he discusses are subjects like gangs, abuse, pregnancy, diseases, suicide and depression. While these affect people all over the world, he really drills down and focuses on how they specifically affect inner city residents and, often, the African American community. He comes across as empathetic, never preachy, and he reflects back on his earlier career days when he was learning the ropes and how he might change certain things he said or did as a result of the outcomes. 

This book provides a fascinating glimpse into the everyday hectic life of an emergency room doctor and the constant split-second decisions that can help, harm or save a life. What sets Dr. Davis apart is how he was determined to not just remain in his community, but how important it is to him to  provide outreach and educate, uplift and inspire younger kids who don't always have the same options and opportunities as those from more economically advantaged communities. He's very honest about how, when he was growing up, he nearly slid into a life of crime and jail time and it was only by a very lucky break that he was able to turn his life around. He witnessed drugs, guns, health issues and abuse within his own family and he's very cognizant of how he was only a few steps away from having had a completely different life. He worked very hard all of his adult life to not fall into the traps that others do when they don't have the resources, knowledge or money to turn away from crime just to fit in or survive. As a result of his experience and decisions, both he and his community benefit from each other. His life story is a perfect example of how just one person can make a really big difference.

Judge the cover: 3/5

Still Life by Louise Penny

When you feel like the only one who hasn't read a particular book, you have one of two choices: you can choose to ignore it altogether in your happy little cave of one or you can pick up the book and see for yourself what all of the hype is about. Because I'm participating in a reading challenge for which one of the requirements was to read a cozy mystery and because I was one of the few stragglers who hadn't yet read anything by Louise Penny, I picked up her first book, Still Life.

From what I'd heard, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache would be a hard character to dislike. I found this to be absolutely true. There's something really endearing about him. He's not your usual hard-nosed macho cop. Far from it. He's actually a bit of a softy with a penchant for licorice pipes whose job just happens to be a professional crime solver.

Inspector Gamache finds himself called to the cozy village of Three Pines when well-liked, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary senior citizen Jane Neal turns up dead in the woods on Thanksgiving Sunday, apparently shot by an arrow. It's hunting season, so the possibility of her death being a genuine accident is great, but when someone turns up dead for no apparent reason, everyone connected to them suddenly becomes a suspect. What are the red herrings that incorporate themselves into everyday life and who is the actual murderer? All of sudden it looks as though everyone has something to gain and closets full of skeletons.

Still Life is the perfect title for this story, as Jane's life is literally still now, since she's deceased, but there was also an art competition taking place in the village just days before she turned up dead, so it also fits the the art reference. This is unfortunately one part of the story that brought things down a notch for me. I generally find - and this is only my personal opinion - that nine times out of ten when art is a component in novels, I just don't get it. I like art in real life, but because it's such a personal taste thing, what we like and don't like, I often just don't get the artworks in books and why the pieces garner the praise they do within them. That said, the art Jane did in the novel actually becomes much bigger than just the competition piece and that integral part of the plot made things really interesting. It was less about the style than the...well, hey, this is a mystery after all, so I can't give it away. I'll just say that the bigger artwork component managed to pull me back around.

I don't often read mystery books. Something about the genre is less appealing to me than regular fiction. I think it's that I find myself unable to settle comfortably into the stories, as I get wholly fixated on trying to figure who did the crime. But something that made this particular book stand out to me is that I have visited some of the real-life townships that Three Pines is inspired by. Having seen the area in person allowed me to have true-to-life visuals of some of the fictional places and the atmosphere in this book, which made it extra engaging. Let me just say that Louise Penny is stamped all over these townships: her readings sell out and there are references to the author and her books all over the place. Now I know what all of the fuss is about. And now that I finally picked up a book by Louise Penny, I'm grateful to no longer be on the outside looking in.

Judge the cover: 3/5

The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992 by Tina Brown

Tina Brown was only in her twenties when she left her job at Tatler magazine in London and flew across to New York City to become the editor of Vanity Fair magazine. 

Her diaries dated between 1983 and 1992 follow her journey as she works her way into upper class New York social circles, attends over-the-top glamorous parties, and transforms the flailing magazine into sales record numbers all while juggling touchy egos, a ridiculous schedule and a growing family.

Partway through reading this book, I noticed some common themes. Most of the content can be broken into the following categories: London vs. NYC; Girl Power; Balancing Family & Work Life/Mom Guilt; Opulence; and The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same. There are so many quotable quotes and tons of firsthand celebrity scoops. Because I was only a schoolgirl during this era, I don't recognize many of the names, though there are definitely many that I do know - enough to make it interesting. I'm sure if you know more of the references, this would be an even juicier read. Most of the diaries are concentrated into the opulent 1980s, while the 90s entries are less detailed.

Tina Brown has the most quotable quotes, so here are some of the most prominent observations from her crazier-than-fiction diaries from the woman herself:

London vs. NYC: 

- "Here [in the States], time is to be spent, like money; time is to be killed, time is to be forgotten. Everything is a race against time. Trying to beat it is the pressure at your throat. I dream of London's manageable scale, its compactness, its conversation. America is too big, too rich, too driven. America needs editing."
- "I had forgotten how terrifyingly tough NYC is, what an hourly battering it is to stay on top. I was in such a sensitive mood that I felt I had gone out stark naked."
- "America, as with everything else, makes you more professional about entertaining. In London we just threw fun parties. Here one sees what works and formats it, so that each dinner is the dress rehearsal for the next one."

Girl Power: 

- "Big blowup with John Halpern because I don't like his Jessica Lange piece after all the agony it was to secure it. The piece has too much of him, not enough her, and he doesn't want to revise it at all or report additional material, which pissed me off. It was so difficult telling him and he seemed to deliberately make it harder and more personal...I felt the resentment of a man being criticized by a woman."
- "At the apartment closing, aside from our lawyer...all the other legal eagles were women in their thirties...Looking at all these tense New York women, a little frayed, a little underpaid, enough to keep them hooked on their career path but not enough to finance escape, I felt they are the new prisoners of the American dream, always working harder than the guys and dealing and redealing the paperwork.
- "Because of the Gulf War, the plane was entirely empty except for Barbara Walters. That was a girl-power statement. Everyone else chickened out of flying, but we didn't. She was going over to get some scoop interview. There is a reason she is on top."
- "But as soon as I saw that warm, golden image of the utterly naked, enormously pregnant, totally glorious Demi [Moore], I knew this was the shot we had to have. I felt retrospectively liberated from a long 1990 trying to hide the expanding Izzy, the vicarious shout of joy showing Demi's bump to the world. Women need this, dammit!"

Balancing Family & Work Life/Mom Guilt: 

- "I AM SO HAPPY. My first panicked worry was that I could never handle motherhood and the mag in current mode. But now that I know it's going to happen, I suddenly see it as THE PERFECT TIME."
- Working through the premature birth of her son: "With my neurotic moralizing streak I see what's happened as a punishment for surfeit of thoughtless success. So you think you're going to romp through motherhood, too, huh? Try this on for size! Remember pain and grief and failure? Here's a refresher course."
- "My eyes burn with the stress of a day that begins at six, doing crunches with the thunder-thighed trainer, followed by an hour gurgling with G, an hour blowing out hair and getting dressed for the office, and then it's race race race to get through the day and home by five to walk G in his stroller and play with him (it's so damn tough to make the power woman-to-mommy switch), then on to his bathtime and dosh up for one of the innumerable place-card dinners raining down."
- "I retreat to Quogue [their summer house] to think about it all. The power life roars along with all real thoughts, fears buried or put indefinitely on hold. I want more time to contemplate, but I can't seem to live any other way. I feel panic when I stop. I am an action junkie. My best hope for peace is when I'm with G."
- While on maternity with her second child, Izzy: "It's heavenly to be around my home, however chaotic, instead of racing out with a pile of manuscripts spilling out of my bag. Heavenly to take my own children to the pediatrician instead of calling the doctor from the office for an update."
- While determining her son has special needs: "If only he had come to full term. Was it my fault for working too hard and too long? I worry so much about what cruel world has in store when he has so many challenges."
- "The Bermuda phone was red-hot with press calls from London. I tried to get Harry [her husband] out of the ocean to advise me, but he had just been stung by a jellyfish. To my consternation I could view him from the porch, peeing on his own leg, while Izzy screamed from her stroller on the deck, Georgie was drubbing me about going to the beach, and the credibility of the magazine's reporting was imploding on the other side of the Atlantic."

Opulence: 

- "Jayne Wrightsman, apparently, gave the Kissingers a tractor for Christmas for their house in Connecticut. She also buys four sets of Bulgari earrings at twenty-five thousand dollars a throw for each of her girlfriends."
- "Went to Malcolm Forbes' birthday on board his party yacht The Highlander. First regroup of power people after the summer and it was interesting to see them all refreshed from their Hamptons and Mediterranean renewal sojourns, women thinned down and younger, achieved in secret weeks at spas and clinics, men shiny and complacent from planning takeovers by the pool...There were delicious moments such as when Malcolm's son, Steve, landed on the boat in a helicopter. We all went onto the upper deck to watch it come in, our hair whipped by its landing."
- "We shared a car to Trump Tower with Barbara Walters, after another holiday bash. Barbara told me she was planning to go home in between and change out of her five-thousand-dollar Galanos cocktail dress into something "more formal with serious jewels because Ivana is sure to be dressed up."
- Pat Buckley to Bill Blass: "I am trying out this new Sauternes but it's not nearly as nice as the one you serve." "I'll send you over a case," said Blass, and to me: "One of the nicest things about being as rich as I am is the ability to make these kinds of grand gestures."
- "Si warned me that once I sampled it, I'd never want to travel any other way than on a private plane, and how right he was."

The AIDS Crisis: 

- "I assigned a piece for the March issue on the toll of AIDS on the arts and fashion. No one has yet gathered up a gallery of faces of all those who have died and denuded us of their talent, and we have done it in a haunting double-page spread. I asked our new hire Michael Schnayerson...to report it out. He's a young straight guy who lives in the West Village and who until this assignment was oblivious to AIDS. Now, reporting the piece, he says it's been like stepping into a war zone...Collecting the pictures of the people who have died has been a real challenge. So many were in the closet or didn't want anyone to know they died from AIDS, or had hidden it from their families. Is it appropriate to run these pictures?"
- "Stricken to learn that the fashion designer Patrick Kelly has died of AIDS. He was only thirty-five!...I grieve that so many bright lights like Patrick, one by one, continue to be stolen from us by AIDS."
- "Today I had a tragic meeting with the young editor Duncan Stalker...I rehired him as senior editor in November...knowing he was HIV positive but hoping for the best. Now he came to tell me he has been going through hell with his dying boyfriend and feels he can't cope anymore and has to quit. I felt stricken as I looked at him. He's suddenly pale and insubstantial. His head has become a strange bulbous shape and his shoulders look as if they could crumple like paper. I told him he could be paid for as long as...And both our eyes filled with tears. Duncan, this promising young editor of thirty-two, began to speak of himself in the past tense."
- "A memorial service at St. Bart's Church for Malcolm Forbes. Another nineties cataclysm - all the great movers and shakers are going down. It was very sudden, and there are whispers of suicide because of illness. And there is only one illness that people whisper about, and that is AIDS. Could Malcolm have decided he couldn't face being outed at last? He was of a generation that couldn't bear it, and always feigned masculinity so strenuously, with the gruff voice and motorbikes. It would have been so great if he could have declared the truth and turned away the shame so many others feel, too, but he chose this way instead. Or that's how I read it."

The More Things Change...: 
Social isolation:

- Just swap out the eighties technology for cell phones and nothing much has changed: "Schiff has done a great essay in the mag on the Particle People, which we're all becoming - splintered apart by the inequity of wealth...the youth boom, the changing demographics, isolated by our camcorders and fax machines and home computer modems on the desk."

Donald Trump:

- About his book, The Art of the Deal: "...there is something authentic about Trump's bullshit. Anyway, it feels, when you have finished it, as if you've been nose to nose for four hours with an entertaining con man and I suspect the American public will like nothing better."
- "My Italian dinner partner and Tina Chow on the other side of him listened with mounting disgust as I bounced it back and forth with Trump over the artichoke and shrimp. "You see this man, Trump," hissed the Italian on the other side of me. "He is trying to force you to think like him, and I think it's working."
- About a magazine article Vanity Fair was featuring about Donald and Ivana Trump: "We wanted to capture their fascinating repositioning now that they are divorcing and Ivana has been upgraded to superstar victim of a brutish, philandering husband, which she is playing to the hilt...Marie [the article writer] has been able to establish such a pattern of lying and loudmouthing in Trump that it's incredible he still prospers and gets banks to loan him money. Great quote where his brother said Donald was the kid who threw cake at the birthday party. He's like some monstrous id creation of his father, a cartoon assemblage of all his worst characteristics mixed with the particular excesses of the new media age...The revelation that he has a collection of Hitler's speeches at the office is going to make a lot of news."

Work life invading personal downtime:

- "I commissioned a piece for fall from Tony Schwartz...about the new, unmanageable pace of life. I am calling it "Acceleration Syndrome." Car phones and call waiting and home faxes are making everything so revved up. Tony's done great interviews with people like Bob Pittman, who intends to purchase a portable phone so he has no dead time walking between appointments, and a USA Today exec who takes a tape recorder for dictation to the pool. Great interview with Don Simpson about his exhaustive magazine reading list he's devouring while also watching TV."

Fighting for equal pay/feminism:

- At breakfast with literary agent Morton Janklow: "Sees Hearst as I do - a sleeping beauty...was shocked by what I am paid (now $225,000) comparative to other reps, especially when I told him that a month ago Dick Snyder had ruminated to Ed Victor about the S and S [Simon & Schuster] job that pays a lot more. Agrees with me completely that in an era when magazines are changing hands for as much as 15- mil, we need to explore all with Bennack, and then talk to Si [Tina's boss]."
- "Back came a nice note mentioning financial "participation" in future success, something Si would never, ever do because of the wholly owned family situation. I would so much rather have stock options, or phantom stock (I am learning a lot from Mort), than perks and lifestyle treats. With phantom stock, a future payday tied to the performance of the magazine could turn out to be extremely valuable, especially if he ever sells it."
- After Vanity Fair won a major magazine award: "Si was flushed with pride: "I can leave now, Tina. I am so thrilled." But how thrilled? I wish he would show real trust and give me some stake in the ongoing success. It would mean more to me than any raise."
- After finally getting the pay raise she worked hard for: "I felt the thrill of the big time...I left Mort's office in an altered state...So this is the day I will never forget as long as I live, the day I made my quantum leap. The day I joined the boys club...I already felt something new - a more independent woman. A confidence that wasn't here before. Thanks to Mort, five years in I am now paid six hundred thousand dollars a year on a three-year contract with a million-dollar bonus at the end, plus my parents taken care of and no debt on our apartment...It feels good that I got it through hard work, strong nerves, careful strategy, and an eye to the future. Those crazy dinner parties where the game of money and value is vociferously discussed by the men turned out to be my listening tour of the way deals get done."

Influencers/social media before its time:

- "The image makers are now as important as the stars themselves, and certainly more interesting. Maybe because their power is our need. The more fragmented we become as a culture, the more the media holds us together."
- After attending a birthday party for the diplomat Dick Holbrooke: "Pondering on why it was such a discomforting night: there's a new social trend that seems to be about marketing your private life. Every birthday, every anniversary, every baby shower, every wedding is just the excuse for a positioning statement."

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

I haven't yet watched the movie adaptation of this book; I decided to read the book first. While I'm usually inclined to prefer books over movies, because I've already seen the movie trailers for this particular book, I had some ingrained visual cues already running through my mind. I enjoyed the book, but I have a feeling in this case the movie will only enrich the story. I'll have to wait and see if that's true.

In the book, we meet Tish and Fonny, a young couple in love who have known each other since childhood. When the story opens, we find out that Fonny has been wrongly incarcerated for a crime he didn't commit, the nature of which is revealed about halfway through the book. That's bad enough in itself, but the timing couldn't be worse, as Tish has just learned she is pregnant. Tish's family is very loving and supportive of the young couple's romance and the pregnancy and they're doing everything they can to both support Tish and try to get Fonny out of prison. Fonny's family is more agitated and fragmented. His mother, in particular, is extremely religious and anguished about the whole situation.

This isn't just a book about a relationship and unplanned pregnancy: it's a portrait of black America in the sixties. That said, it's mind-boggling to realize that while things have improved a bit over the years, there is still rampant racism and mistrust of police and "the system" - often for good reason - because young, black men are still being wrongfully incarcerated in the present day. 

It's the reason that reading books about different cultures and races is so important. It opens our eyes to the world around us. It's what strengthens our empathy and understanding of other people's experience. It's just incredibly disheartening that intolerance of others is still so pervasive in the present day. Words can hurt and they can heal. Unfortunately our world still has a lot of healing to do.

Judge the cover: 4/5