Essays in Love by Alain de Botton

This is a fictional story about two people who meet on a plane and fall in love. Their relationship is dissected throughout - how they fell in love, why they fell in love, their every move and thought process philosophized upon and analyzed. While we all like to think that our own love stories are unique, while how we initially met our partners varies from person to person, the stages of love are all familiar. So the question is, just how unique are we when we all recognize the same physiological and mental processes that take place when we fall in - and out of - love?

The structure of the novel made more sense when I read the afterword from the author. He was only twenty-one when he wrote this book. He said he'd always wanted to write a novel but was also a philosopher and he ended up combining his styles so that he could analyze a fictional couple. While I find he had a lot of insight at such a young age, I found the style both intriguing and annoying. But mostly annoying.

For the most part, I didn't connect very much with the characters and for the main character to have such dramatic reactions at times I found to be a little over-the-top, though I suspect this was done purposely to demonstrate how people are literally overtaken with love.

But what really killed it for me was that while, at the beginning, it was interesting to recognize some of my own reactions reflected in the early heady days of first love, it quickly got old and all of the philosophy and analysis took the fun away. What makes the very beginning of relationships so awesome is that you're not really thinking. You're not always making smart decisions or being rational because you're just so wrapped up in the other person and you're thinking with your heart instead of your head. The more I read, the less engaged I got and just felt like "who cares"...not a feeling you want to have about the main characters of a book.

So, although it was a unique format, it ultimately fell flat for me. I wasn't sad to reach the last page of this book.

Calypso by David Sedaris

What's the worst thing about every book that David Sedaris has ever written? That they all come to an end.

"Nooooooo…." I wailed to myself as I came to the last page. "Why???? Why do they all have to finish?" I just want to read his books forever and ever. They're just so relatable. And when they're not relatable, they're hilarious. And when they're not hilarious, they're thought-provoking. They make you think and ponder and want to be his friend. They make you double over with laughter one on page and make your heart beat harder with emotion on the next. Calypso? No exception.

Here were some of my thoughts while reading Calypso:

- Page 1: "Here we go! Remember: Read sloooowly. Savour this book."
- He fed what to a turtle?!!!
- I have my very own Calypso. He lives next door and his name is Mr. Stinkers and there is absolutely no way he likes you more than me.
- David sure knows how to put the fun in tragedy.
- Carol was completely endearing. When it comes to wild animals and our reactions to them, I am David; my husband is Hugh.
- I'm so glad I've heard David Sedaris' voice before because now whenever I read his books, it's his voice I hear reading them to me in my head.
- Fuck, I hope that never happens to me on a plane. Or anywhere else for that matter.
- Wow. He sure picks up a lot of garbage.
- I really want to be friends with David Sedaris. And not just so I could score an invite to the Sea Section.
- This book is one that lives up to its blurb: "This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk and love a good tumor joke." I mean, who doesn't love a good tumor joke? You've already been told it's good...
- The last page: "You should have read that slower. Now it's over, you idiot." Immediately Googles: "David Sedaris next book", "When is David Sedaris' birthday", then just "David Sedaris" to see what Google would auto-fill for me after those two words. Then I Googled Hugh to see what he looked like.

What a perfect kick-off-to-summer book. 

What To Do About the Solomons by Bethany Ball

Normally when confronted with a family tree gracing one of the first pages of a book, it freaks me the hell out, and makes me want to throw it into a far corner and hide. There's just such an implied expectation of concentration. Personally, I find having to keep track of characters to that extent isn't relaxing, which is my primary reason for reading in the first place. Nevertheless, this book had been on my radar for a few months, so I decided to give it a shot and pretended to have never seen that daunting little diagram in the first place... The Solomon family in this book spans three generations, all who live in different parts of the world: California, New York and a kibbutz in Israel. Thankfully, although related, this is a very diverse group of family members, and most have some variation of eccentricities that keep things interesting and the story moving along. They each have a great personal struggle that they're trying to overcome. Although I generally read a book or two per week, this one unexpectedly took me longer than usual. I enjoyed the beginning (the California family intrigued me the most), then I sort of slowed down around the middle due to a busy couple of weeks and questioned if I was actually that invested in the storylines enough to continue on. After a mental coin toss, I decided to forge on and the last half went quicker. It turns out, I just need to read at my usual pace to keep on top of what's happening and not lose the plot. The characters, although they have ended up spread out across the world, ended up reuniting at the kibbutz and their stories intertwined and wrapped up nice and neatly. I was glad I kept at it. It turns out that little family tree diagram was pretty helpful after all and, hopefully like any good family, was not as daunting at it initially appeared. It helped to serve as a reminder when I came back to the book after putting it down for a day or two. In the end, I'm glad this one got rescued from a potential random dark corner.

The Two-Family House by Lynda Cohen Loigman

For someone whose stomach bunches into knots when someone asks me to keep a secret and who can't tell a lie, books that have secrets and lies as their primary plot focus always draw me in. It must be the opposites attract theory. 

The two families in the house are the curmudgeonly Mort, his increasingly distant wife, Rose, and their three daughters who live on the ground floor. Mort's older brother, easygoing Abe, and his loving wife, Helen, and their four boys all live on the top floor of the house. Mort and Abe, though opposite in personality, work together at a cardboard box-manufacturing company that they inherited from their father. Rose and Helen are housewives and best friends, so supportive of each other and their lives are so entwined, their living arrangement at first seems ideal. They're constantly in and out of each other's apartments and they share a very special bond. They even find themselves pregnant at the same time and while we, the readers, are privy to all of the secrets that hang in the air, there's enough drama as the story unfolds to keep it fresh and interesting. Rather than waiting to discover the secrets ourselves, we're waiting for the characters to find them out. 

The book is easily readable and well-paced, as each chapter is only two or three pages long. The chapters are mainly told from the alternating perspectives of Mort, Rose, Abe and Helen, but there are also some sprinkled in from Judith (Mort and Rose's eldest daughter) and Natalie (the youngest girl) that provide different contexts and engaging insights that add further dimension to both the characters and storyline. 

The characters are richly developed and watching them grow and evolve over the course of the twenty-three years this novel covers was intriguing. The author has a superb grip on character development and both the bigger and more subtle ways they transform are paced perfectly, making near-unbelievable circumstances seem entirely believable. The thought processes, reactions, responses and unique personality traits of each family member remained true to character at all times which only increased my empathy for them.

This novel covers the enormous range of drama all families have to deal with: everyday chaos and quiet moments, love and loss, complex family dynamics, secrets and lies and, perhaps most importantly of all, forgiveness. While I still can't fathom keeping such major life-altering secrets myself, it definitely made for a really compelling read. Highly recommend.

Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

For those of us who have never lived in them, we all have our own idea of what inner-city projects are like. We also hold personal theories as to why their residents landed there in the first place and why they can't - or don't - choose to leave. There are so many factors piled on top of one another that create such a result: economic class, race, luck, mental health, personal circumstances, physical health, gang relations, and family ties are just a few of them.

Gang Leader for a Day focuses on the Robert Taylor Projects at the very tail end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Located on the South Side of Chicago, Robert Taylor was an absolutely massive housing complex. It was initially built for about 11,000 residents; however, with multiple members living in each apartment, as well as squatters, stairwell-dwellers, and all manner of illegal and unofficial tenants, the number of people who actually resided there was enormous and pushed these high-rises beyond their capacity for reliable, safe accommodation. The tenants and visitors within these buildings were as diverse as their circumstances. They were rival gang members, drug addicts, prostitutes, young children, volunteers, tenant patrols, cops (both good and crooked), and sweet grandmas.

One person who stood out among all of the rest was Sudhir Venkatesh. Although he didn't live at Robert Taylor, he spent time there on a near-daily basis for almost a decade. A sociology student at the University of Chicago, he noted that as a new student, at every orientation he attended the students were told not to go alone beyond certain perimeters of the university that weren't patrolled by the university police as they were deemed unsafe. Sudhir's curiosity only increased as he familiarized himself with the city, and he soon felt compelled to explore these "unsafe" areas to see what he could find out firsthand. He was particularly interested in studying the poor black areas around the university, so he took this on as the basis of his academic research. Rather than asking survey questions and then breaking down the data using quantitative and statistical techniques safely behind a desk, he immersed himself in this alternate life instead using another method called "ethnography", or the studying of life by direct observation.

After a bit of an uncertain and shaky start, one of the first people he met and quickly ended up befriending was J.T., the leader of one of the most prominent gangs in Chicago at the time. This unlikely friendship and the book that resulted from it provides us with a real insider's viewpoint of life in the projects that's utterly fascinating. Okay, let's back it up for a second, though, and preface the need for any personal stances to be taken with a grain of salt. To clarify, I would say that the wide angle view (the general observation) of life in the projects was a reality check for me, as life within these dark, imposing building comprised much more depth than the stereotypes that initially came to mind, though the close-ups (the viewpoints and stories told by the residents and visitors) were often self-serving and not necessarily 100% believable, depending on the context and the storyteller. Remember here that Sudhir was the one on the receiving end of these stories, and oftentimes the narrators were involved in illegal activities or sometimes his interest was simply pumping up their egos, so the truth would often lie somewhere a few notches below the bravado. The juxtaposition between Sudhir, a middle-class privileged university student of Southeast Asian descent, and J.T., a lifer of the projects who was working his way higher through the ranks within his already powerful gang was captivating. J.T. was street-smart, caring, tough, egotistical, helpful, and community-minded. Sudhir was naive (stupendously so at times), mild-mannered, personable, and adaptable.

For me personally, one of the most surprising and revealing aspects was the comportment of the gang members, the tenant patrols and the police and the independent hierarchical structure that formed out of sheer need. The gang members weren't just focused on drug sales and weapons and drive-bys. While the source of their cash wasn't generally above board, there were some extremely altruistic members that really did give a lot back to their community - especially to the children - perhaps not via the usual routes; however, when you realize just how marginalized they've been by the government, the wider community and the housing authorities, no one is looking out for them but themselves. They become bargainers, mediators, and leaders within their home base. What else can you do when services such as ambulances simply don't show up when you call them from a certain part of town? What other choices do you have when housing authorities don't have the means to help everyone who needs it? These dire circumstances force all sorts strategies that the gang members, tenant patrols and cops utilized to cobble together their own solutions to the unique challenges of life in the projects. On the flip side was one of the tenant patrols, Ms. Bailey, whose job was generally focused on making sure the elderly tenants were doing okay. She also liaised with the Chicago Housing Authority, but she ended up taking bribes and giving preference to certain tenants over others to both feed her ego and play off both sides of her go-between position. The police were another story altogether. Sudhir couldn't figure out why the residents wouldn't just call the cops when crimes such as brutal assaults took place. There was one reliable, kind cop who was a former resident of the Robert Taylor projects who was often called to mediate, as he had a unique understanding of life there and therefore held respect, but others who viewed the residents with disdain and hatred and were so obviously racist and corrupt, it was soon obvious why they were never called to come in and sort out emergency situations.

The longer Sudhir spent integrating himself into everyday life at Robert Taylor, his focus and loyalties began to morph and spread and his naiveté started to get him tangled up. This came in a few forms: from the beginning, J.T. was under the somewhat misleading impression that Sudhir was there to write a biography about him. Furthermore, although his professors were aware of his research undertaking, Sudhir didn't disclose to them just how far he'd incorporated himself into the gang members' everyday life. Through sheer innocent ignorance, at one point he was seen as being both on the gang's side from the cops' perspective and the cops' side from the gang's perspective. This prompted some of the tenants that had always been open with him to begin to feel distrustful. He learned it was impossible to play both sides and keep everyone on an even keel. But because he'd immersed himself so deeply within the complex and its residents, he found it hard to step away and keep everyone happy and ensure his safety.

After many years, eventually his research came to a close, as did this book. If there's one thing you probably wouldn't expect from a book about life in one of the poorest, most ignored projects in Chicago, it's a fairy tale ending, though you never know...I won't ruin anything here by letting you find that out for yourself. Regardless, the level of commitment Sudhir took on with his research and the openness of these particular projects residents leaves us with an absolutely unique, intimate view of a way of life many of us, thankfully, don't have to contend with. We can be nothing but richer in understanding and more compassionate of one another as human beings if we take our blinders off, throw our preconceptions aside and truly find out how others live.

Nasty Galaxy by Sophia Amoruso

This is a gorgeous coffee table book for lovers of vintage, the Nasty Gal brand, and the woman who founded it, girlboss Sophia Amoruso, or as she calls it "a deep dive into my brain and my home." And holygoodnessofgreathomes, what an amazing home it is. The fact that her bedroom was inspired by a pair of vintage suede shorts...ah! What I would give to see her closet that was once an entire bedroom in person...

Nasty Galaxy has got a tongue-in-cheek, flirty fun edginess. Each section is inspired by a particular album and contains profiles of women with unique personal style in the fields of art, music, fashion and movies. These are the kind of cool girls who other girls want to be. That is, until I came upon an awesome quote by Exene Cervenka proclaiming: "I would not want anyone to try to look like me. My whole point is that I look like myself and you should look like yourself. That's my whole goal in life: to be a freethinker and to help people learn that skill, which we all have innately inside of us. You can only be you. You can't really be someone else." Yes! As someone who's constantly trying to feel comfortable in my own skin, this is perfection. 

Profiles of various girlbosses offer insight and advice to entrepreneurs from innovative females in their fields, wacky how-to's (often involving TMI and quirky diagrams) and an author who's equally skilled at showcasing her brand, championing fellow feminists, and showcasing her insecurities and inner thoughts all combine to make this a fun book to stare at for a few hours. 

It's a little disheartening to have to point out that the same year this book was brought to life by such a famous trailblazer, Sophia Amoruso's company, Nasty Gal, filed for bankruptcy. This can't help but bring into question some of the narrative and the happy-go-lucky veneer, but if you take the book itself at face value, it's still filled to the brim with great advice, lush editorial pictures and drool-worthy vintage style inspiration.

You'll just need to find a coffee table with as much aesthetic appeal as the book on which to display it and you'll be right up there killing it.

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

This book has all of the elements that make up an engaging read for me: prison life, innocence versus guilt, people living on the edge of darkness all while trying to make sense of a life and circumstances that seem bigger than they are.

The Mars Room focuses primarily on Romy, a former stripper, now a prisoner serving back-to-back life sentences. A single mother-turned-inmate, her main concern is for her young son, Jackson, and his fate now that hers is sealed. It's tearing her up that she can't ensure his safety now that her rights to him have been involuntarily surrendered.

There is a great cast of characters within these pages, but somehow it all feels a bit too familiar - I just couldn't help mentally substituting the cast of Orange is the New Black the entire time for the characters of The Mars Room. They're all there - the corrupt and skeezy guards, the inmates - some just quietly biding their time, others hardened and staking their claim to anything and anyone they can, the transgender inmate who needs to be kept safe, the older eccentric, the hateful skinheads, the tough butch lesbians, the mentally ill delusional, the newbie prison teacher who's trying not to be swayed by the cunning females who have nothing to lose. The unique self-declared hierarchy of incarceration, the prison hooch, smuggling and commissary product innovation, the cliques, the racism - it all runs throughout the novel. Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility could easily be replaced with Litchfield Penitentiary and if you've watched the series, you might, like me, evoke the images of many of the televised inmates for the ones in this book.

Much of the novel is centered around the day-to-day disruption and frustration of life behind bars and those who make up the system. Life on the outside is generally portrayed via memories and flashbacks. It's a very character-based story and while I found the first half a little slow going, almost to the point of lagging, as the characters' back stories are gradually revealed, they gain added dimension and sympathy (or apathy), depending on their circumstances. The very end is where it all starts to gain speed, so I would recommend sticking with it, as the pace doubles up and soars you into the final remaining pages.