I read seven books in March (one was an audiobook), which brings my 2016 total to 27.

These are the books I started reading in March but decided not to finish:

• The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, Diane Ackerman
• Age Is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams at Any Stage in Your Life, Dara Torres

I rank my books with these categories: Highly Recommended, Recommended, Okay, and Not Recommended.

Recommended

1) Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, Randy Frost & Gail Steketee

Description: Frost and Steketee were the first to study hoarding; they expected to find a few sufferers but ended up treating hundreds of patients and fielding thousands of calls. Now they explore the compulsion through a series of compelling case studies. They also illuminate the pull that possessions exert on all of us. Whether we’re savers, collectors, or compulsive cleaners, none of us is free of the impulses that drive hoarders to the extremes in which they live.

Hoarding intrigues me because it’s so clearly the opposite of my personality. I also realize I wouldn’t be a good therapist for hoarders trying to change their ways — their process is way too slow (I’d want them to get started immediately, throw that out, you don’t need it, why are you keeping that, you’ll never look at that again…you get the idea) and many of them backslide.

With all the studies that have been done on hoarding, it makes me wonder if there have been any studies on minimalism (probably not, since hoarding possessions is considered a disorder, while getting rid of possessions is not). Unsurprisingly, reading about people collecting vast piles of junk made me want to go through my belongings and get rid of even more than I already have.

Okay

2) The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist, Matt Baglio

Description: Father Gary Thomas was working as a parish priest in California when church leaders asked him to train in the rite of exorcism. In Rome, as an apprentice to a veteran Italian exorcist, his eyes were opened to a darker side of the Catholic faith, and he came to see the battle between good and evil as never before. Journalist Matt Baglio had full access to Father Gary over the course of his training, and the story he found reveals that the phenomena of possession, demons, the Devil, and exorcism are not merely a remnant of the archaic past, but remain a fearsome power in many people’s lives even today.

This wasn’t a subject I had advance interest in, but when I came across the book, the concept seemed interesting. Exorcist training and exorcisms are still happening around the world, although they tend to be concentrated in certain areas (they’re especially prevalent in Italy, for example). I wasn’t enthralled by this book, but I liked that it was written by a journalist, and it contained a fair amount of information I didn’t know before.

3) When Breath Becomes Air, Dr. Paul Kalanithi

Description: At the age of 36, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. This book chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student, into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

I didn’t rate this book so low because of the subject matter (a very smart man is diagnosed with cancer and dies less than two years later). While he’s an admirable guy, I just wasn’t interested in reading about his life (childhood, medical training, living through his diagnosis). To me, the most moving part was the epilogue – written by his wife – where she recapped her husband’s final days and hours.

4) Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Description: Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

I wanted to be able to recommend this book because everyone else loves it. However, while I liked some of it, and found other parts poignant, I was bored by a lot of it and spent too much time re-reading sentences, attempting to figure out what he was trying to say. Unsurprisingly, my favorite part was when he obtained his first passport at age 37 and went to Paris.

5) Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans Are Looking Forward to the End of the World, Nicholas Guyatt

Description: Guyatt searches for the truth behind a startling statistic: 50 million Americans have come to believe that the apocalypse will take place in their lifetime. They’re convinced that any day now, Jesus will snatch up his followers and spirit them to heaven. The rest of us will be left behind to endure massive earthquakes, devastating wars, and the terrifying rise of the Antichrist. Bizarre, funny, and unsettling in equal measure, Guyatt uncovers the apocalyptic obsessions at the heart of the world’s only superpower.

Having grown up in a religious family (a way of life I later rejected), I’m all too aware of doomsday predictions and other scare tactics. Some parts of this book were hard to read because I recognize the language of Rapture prophecy and have bad memories. After all, having a preacher yell about how you’re destined to go to hell is a great way to ensure you adequately prepare yourself for the unknown. (Sarcasm.)

I wanted to like this more than I did, but it gets a little dense sometimes with biblical history; I preferred the parts where the author focused on his modern explorations and interviews. I also would’ve liked to hear more about everyday people who believe the Rapture is going to happen, instead of just well-known Doomsday dudes like John Hagee and Tim LaHaye. The author’s consensus: “It’s undeniable that Bible prophecy writers both feed upon and encourage anxieties about where we’re heading.”

I also liked this quote from the book: “Most of the prophecy enthusiasts I’ve spoken with have one big limitation: they haven’t successfully managed to predict anything, in spite of their claims that the Bible foretells the future.”

6) Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong, Susan Blumberg-Kason

Description: When Susan, a shy Midwesterner in love with Chinese culture, started graduate school in Hong Kong, she quickly fell for Cai, the Chinese man of her dreams. As they exchanged vows, Susan thought she’d stumbled into an exotic fairy tale, until she realized Cai―and his culture―where not what she thought. In her memoir, Susan recounts her struggle to be the perfect traditional “Chinese” wife to her increasingly controlling and abusive husband.

This woman annoyed me because of what she put up with for way too long. She was cowed by her husband; afraid to speak up. She contracted an STD; he denied cheating on her and she accepted that answer. He was volatile, extremely unreasonable, and did pretty much whatever he wanted without her saying anything. She finally left him but not before the book started to seem unnecessarily long.

7) An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist, Richard Dawkins

Description: A disarming account of world-famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s early life, from his childhood in colonial East Africa to the writing of one of the twentieth century’s seminal works, The Selfish Gene.

The good: Dawkins has no problem making fun of himself; he shares embarrassing stories from his early life growing up in Africa, and later, British private schools. The bad: Once he enters grad school, there’s a lot of in-depth explanation of his studies and experiments, and how he arrived at the theories that led him to write The Selfish Gene. I enjoyed the first half of the book, but I found the latter half a bit too technical for my liking.

I read 10 books in February (two were audiobooks), which brings my 2016 total to 20.

These are the books I started reading in February but decided not to finish:

• Did You Ever Have a Family, Bill Clegg
• Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind, Alex Stone
• The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain, Bill Bryson

I rank my books with these categories: Highly Recommended, Recommended, Okay, and Not Recommended.

Highly Recommended

1) So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson

Description: The shamed are people like us, people who made a joke on social media that came out badly or made a mistake at work. Once the transgression is revealed, collective outrage ensues and the next thing they know, they’re being torn apart by an angry mob, demonized, sometimes even fired from their job. A great renaissance of public shaming is sweeping our land. Justice has been democratized. We are mercilessly finding people’s faults. We are defining the boundaries of normality by ruining the lives of those outside it. We are using shame as a form of social control.

Confession: I heard about this book months and months ago but didn’t think I would like it. I’ve never been publicly shamed, so why would I want to read about what happens if that fate were to befall me? What is the author going to do, tell me how to avoid it?

When my husband expressed interest in reading the book, I checked out a physical copy for him and borrowed an electronic copy for myself. Once I started it, I flew through it.

The book’s title is catchy but also a little misleading. It turns out my assumptions were wrong. I should have known better, because I’ve read three other books by this author and always enjoyed them (The Psychopath Test, Them: Adventures with Extremists, and The Men Who Stare at Goats).

Ronson is the kind of person who chooses a subject but beats all around the bush looking at that subject from multiple angles that a regular person (like myself) would never think about. He also makes observations like this: “I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop.”

And if you’re like me, you’ll find yourself googling people he talked about in the book to see where they are now.

Recommended

2) Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir, Wednesday Martin, PhD

Description: When Martin first arrives on New York City’s Upper East Side, she’s clueless about the right addresses, the right wardrobe, and the right schools, and she’s taken aback by the glamorous women around her. She feels unwelcome until she begins to look at her new niche through the lens of her academic background in anthropology. As she analyzes the tribe’s mating and migration patterns, childrearing practices, bonding rites, etc, she finds it easier to fit in and even enjoy her new life. Then one day, her world is turned upside down, and she finds out there’s much more to the women she’s secretly been calling Manhattan Geishas.

I’ve always had an interest in social research (I was a Sociology major in college), so I liked how the author looked at her Upper East Side neighborhood from an anthropological perspective. Rather than just being an observer, she fully participated in community norms — like buying a very pricey apartment, going through the extensive preschool application and interview process, and procuring a Birkin bag (which generally cost around $10k).

In the author’s words: “I learned that motherhood was another island upon the island of Manhattan, and that Upper East Side mothers were, in fact, a tribe apart. Theirs was a secret society of sorts, governed by rules, rituals, uniforms, and migration patterns that were entirely new to me, and subtended by beliefs, ambitions, and cultural practices I had never dreamed existed.”

3) How to Grow Up: A Memoir, Michelle Tea

Description: As an aspiring writer in San Francisco, Michelle lived in a communal house; she drank, smoked, snorted anything she got her hands on; she toiled for the minimum wage; and she dated men and women, sometimes both at once. But between hangovers and dead-end jobs, she scrawled in notebooks and organized dive bar poetry readings, working to make her literary dreams real. She proves the road less traveled may be a difficult one, but if you embrace life’s uncertainty and dust yourself off after every screw up, slowly but surely you just might make it to adulthood.

It took Michelle a long time to get her shit together, but she’s made extraordinary leaps in her life since she gave up drugs and alcohol in her early thirties. Aside from one scene that almost made me vomit (it involved the presence of maggots in a fridge), I very much enjoyed reading about her adventures in dating before she found her current partner, getting her first solo apartment after living with roommates for many years, learning how to have a healthy relationship with money, and her decision not to go to college, among many other things.

4) Tales from the Back Row: An Outsider’s View from Inside the Fashion Industry, Amy Odell

Description: Cosmopolitan.com editor Amy Odell takes readers behind the scenes of New York’s hottest fashion shows to meet influential models, designers, celebrities, editors, and photographers. This is a keenly observed collection of personal essays about what it’s like to be a young woman working in the fashion industry.

I don’t know very much about the fashion industry and only have accidental knowledge of clothing trends (if I see a random article online), but I did like this book. The author is down-to-earth and smart, and while she writes about fashion she doesn’t try too hard. She writes about things like interviewing for a position at Vogue with Anna Wintour (she didn’t get it, and is thankful later because the pressure to dress up every day in that environment would have been overwhelming) and being backstage at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Entertaining read.

Okay

5) I Don’t Have a Happy Place: Cheerful Stories of Despondency and Gloom, Kim Korson

Description: Kim has an exquisite talent for negativity. It is only after half a lifetime of finding kernels of unhappiness where others find joy that she begins to wonder if she is even capable of experiencing happiness. This fresh-yet-dark voice is sure to make you laugh, nod your head in recognition, and ultimately understand what it truly means to be unhappy. Always.

As someone with a melancholy personality, I looked forward to this memoir. I was quite disappointed the book did not deliver as advertised until the last two chapters. Every once in a while she’d stick in a sentence about all the depression in her family, or seeing a glass as “less than half empty.”

I wanted tales of despondency and gloom, as the title promised! Instead she focused on the growing-up years of a kid who wasn’t popular, felt like she didn’t fit in, and in early adulthood couldn’t find a job she liked (doesn’t that hold true for most people)?

Those last two chapters? Worth reading. Everything else? I would skip it. Here are two quotes I liked (from pages 253 and 254, respectively):

“People say happiness is a choice, but I think that’s just what happy people say when they go out together to be happy. I don’t really care for going out.”

“I’ve spent most of my years thinking I was just in a bad mood. I was actually in a bad mood for twenty-nine years before it occurred to me that was an awfully long time to be cranky.”

6) The Invisible Girls: A Memoir, Sarah Thebarge

Description: After nearly dying of breast cancer in her twenties, Sarah fled her successful career, her Ivy League education, and a failed relationship, and moved nearly 3,000 miles from the east coast to Portland, Oregon, hoping to quietly pick up the pieces of her broken life. Instead, a chance encounter on a train with a family of Somali refugees swept her into an adventure that changed all of their lives.

This woman overcame incredible odds — breast cancer at a young age, recurrences, multiple surgeries, chemo and radiation, and her boyfriend breaking up with her when he couldn’t handle the pressure. Her history, and how she came to befriend a Somali family, made an interesting read. There were more religious aspects than I expected, but it wasn’t overwhelming (and she was questioning her faith a lot of the time). I looked up her blog and enjoyed this recent post about her work with Compassion International and how successful she’s been with getting people to sponsor needy kids.

7) Shanghai Girls, Lisa See

Description: In 1937 Shanghai, 21-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister May are having the time of their lives. Both are beautiful, modern, and carefree—until the day their father tells them he has gambled away their wealth. To repay his debts, he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from Los Angeles to find Chinese brides. As Japanese bombs fall on their city, Pearl and May set out on the journey of a lifetime, from the Chinese countryside to the shores of America. Along the way they make terrible sacrifices, face impossible choices, and confront a life-changing secret, but through it all they hold fast to who they are.

I fully intended to rate this book as Recommended until I got to end. Can I PLEASE read some fiction that doesn’t leave a major plot point up in the air? I don’t need every fiction book to wrap up everything in a perfect little bow, but the twist at the end of this one just made me mad. The author could have left the twist out completely and the book would have fine.

8) Running Like a Girl: Notes on Learning to Run, Alexandra Heminsley

Description: When Alexandra decided to take up running, she had hopes for a blissful runner’s high and immediate physical transformation. She hit the streets and failed spectacularly. She tells the story of getting beyond the brutal part, how she made running a part of her life, and reaps the rewards: not just obvious things like weight loss, health, and glowing skin; but self-confidence and immeasurable daily pleasure.

I feel like the author glossed over the whole “starting out as a beginner” part. Her first run was horrible and humbling (which is to be expected), but a page later she was running six miles at a stretch. I don’t know about you guys, but that never happened for me. I’ve tried to take up running various times over the years (I’m currently in non-running mode), and my problem is feeling like I’m never making any progress. I would have liked to hear more details about how she got from that horrible first run to running multiple miles at a time.

9) I’ll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist, Betty Halbreich

Description: In her late eighties, Betty is a true original. She has spent nearly 40 years as the legendary personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman, where she works with socialites, stars, and ordinary women off the street. She has helped many find their true selves through fashion, frank advice, and her own brand of wisdom. But Halbreich’s personal transformation from cosseted young girl to fearless truth teller is the greatest makeover of her career.

I read an article about this woman and found it interesting, so I decided to check out the audiobook. I enjoyed learning about her experience working in the store more so than the history of her childhood and marriage. Not a wonderful book, but I liked her as a person.

Not Recommended

10) My Confection: Odyssey of a Sugar Addict, Lisa Kotin

Description: This is a story of where sugar took a teenage mime when she left home in pursuit of artistic greatness. From the strict macrobiotic house where she is kicked out for smuggling Snickers, to her early days of Overeaters Anonymous meetings, Kotin careens from romantic disasters to caloric catastrophes. Kotin comes out of the (sugar) closet, finding allies who understand, and learns how to live healthfully in spite of her compulsion.

My biggest dislike for this book was that it wasn’t what I expected. I expected it to be in the same vein as Year of No Sugar. I knew this woman was a binge eater; I figured she’d get a grip on her disorder once she realized how evil sugar is and tell us about her process. Instead, the book is about her extreme binging, a dysfunctional family, and her insufferable personality — she was a spoiled brat who took money freely from her parents, totaled her sister’s truck, and tells us way too much about all the sexual encounters she participated in while attempting to feel better about herself.

She refused to eat from fast food restaurants and street vendors because they were “too unhealthy.” Yet there was no limit to how many candy bars and other processed sweets she’d consume.

The achievement of finally giving up sugar is mentioned in the first few pages (preface) and the last few pages of the book. It turns out all I needed to read were these lines in the preface, and I could have skipped the rest: “Maybe one day I’ll be able to eat a cookie. For today, one is too many, a thousand are not enough.”

I tried to cut back on my reading…and I still managed to consume 10 books in January (two were audiobooks).

As a new addition to this round-up, I’ve decided to list the books I started reading this month but decided not to finish. In January, those books were:

• Girl Waits With Gun (This came off as too YA for me. I wasn’t interested.)
• The Martian (I watched the movie instead. I could handle two hours and twenty minutes.)

I rank my books with these categories: Highly Recommended, Recommended, Okay, and Not Recommended.

Highly Recommended

1) A House in the Sky, Amanda Lindhout

Description: As a child, Amanda escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself visiting exotic locales. She later backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India; emboldened by each adventure, she went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. Then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia. On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road. Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda survives on memory—every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity—and on strategy, fortitude, and hope.

I liked this a lot more than I thought I would. How engaging can a story be when someone is held captive (often in a tiny, dark room) for over a year? As it turns out, she had a lot to say. There was also a daring escape (and recapture), rape, and torture. I was never bored with the story, and the description of the author’s life prior to being kidnapped was a good buildup to what happened later.

Recommended

2) If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran, Carla Power

Description: This is Power’s eye-opening story of how she and longtime friend Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi found a way to confront ugly stereotypes and persistent misperceptions that were cleaving their communities. Their friendship — between a secular American and a madrasa-trained sheik — had always seemed unlikely, but now they were frustrated and bewildered by the battles being fought in their names. Both knew a close look at the Quran would reveal a faith that preached peace and not mass murder; respect for women and not oppression. And so they embarked on a yearlong journey through the controversial text.

I had limited knowledge of Islam, Muslims, and the Quran before reading this book (and no desire to learn more), but the premise sounded interesting. I’m very glad I picked it up. What I appreciated most was how the (secular) author exposed and demolished religious stereotypes. (Muslims aren’t bad people, or prone to terrorism, any more so than Christians are.) She was very good at making what could have been a dry subject interesting.

3) Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Mary Roach

Description: Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? We meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of―or has the courage to ask. We go on location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal.

What I like about Roach is she presents science-related topics in a way that a non-sciencey person like myself can understand. Each chapter was on a different subject, some of which I liked better than others (I was more interested in the chapters on humans than the ones which focused on rodents and insects). Overall a good read, though.

4) Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, David K. Randall

Description: Randall explores the research that is investigating those dark hours which make up nearly a third of our lives. Taking readers from military battlefields to children’s bedrooms, we learn that sleep isn’t as simple as it seems. Do women sleep differently than men? If you happen to kill someone while you are sleepwalking, does that count as murder? This is a tour of the often odd, sometimes disturbing, and always fascinating things that go on in the peculiar world of sleep.

I don’t have trouble sleeping but there’s a lot of interesting information to learn about the science of sleep. It’s all high-level, too, no in-depth science stuff if you’re not into that type of thing. Randall addresses topics such as: is it better to sleep in the same bed with your partner or not (answer: not); how to get your young child to go to sleep; what happens when people sleepwalk; alternatives to using sleeping pills; and if the firmness of your mattress really matters.

5) Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World’s Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself, Rich Roll

Description: One evening in October 2006, the night before he was to turn 40, Rich experienced a chilling glimpse of his future. Nearly fifty pounds overweight and unable to climb stairs without stopping, he could see where his current sedentary lifestyle was taking him. Plunging into a new way of eating that made processed foods off-limits and prioritized plant nutrition, vowing to train daily, Rich morphed—in a matter of months—from out-of-shape midlifer to endurance machine. When Rich left the house one morning to embark on a light jog and found himself running a near marathon, he knew he had to scale up his goals.

Sometimes you need to read a book about something you’ll absolutely never do (compete in ultramarathons) because it provides inspiration for you to do more in your much-less-exciting daily life. Rich’s success is all the more impressive due to his history with alcoholism and commitment to a vegan diet.

Okay

6) Negroland: A Memoir, Margo Jefferson

Description: Born in upper-crust black Chicago, Margo has spent most of her life among the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, “a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.” Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments—the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America—Jefferson charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions.

There was a lot to like about this book, and I would have rated it as Recommended until I got to the second half. I found her childhood more interesting than the grown-up years. Plus, the entire format of the book was strange (the addition of poetry and literature quotes, random interludes that didn’t seem to fit — there’s one in particular about the book Little Women that comes to mind). There were also many descriptions of her role and performance in various plays.

I did like where she talked about growing up in an upper-middle class black family and attending mostly-white schools. It was interesting to get that perspective.

She refers to upper-class blacks as the “third race” (to differentiate between whites and other black people). Here’s a quote: “We were the third race. We cared for our people — we loved our people — but we refused to be held back by the lower element. We did not love white people, we did not care for most of them, but we envied them and sometimes we feared and hated them. Our daily practice was suspicion, caution at the very least. Preemptive disdain.”

7) Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line, Michael Gibney

Description: This is an immersive, adrenaline-fueled run that offers a fly-on-the-wall perspective on the food service industry, allowing readers to briefly inhabit the hidden world behind the kitchen doors, in real time. This account provides regular diners and food enthusiasts alike a detailed insider’s perspective, while offering fledgling professional cooks an honest picture of what the future holds, ultimately giving voice to the hard work and dedication around which chefs have built their careers.

A day in the life of a sous chef, where he breaks down his role and aspirations, and lists other staff positions in the restaurant and what those people do, and gives long, involved descriptions of the food they make and how the various cuts of fish are prepared (because seafood is his specialty). Verdict: Meh. This book would be helpful if you’re considering going into this line of work and want in-depth knowledge of how a fancy New York kitchen works. For someone who has already read plenty of books about the inner workings of restaurant kitchens (as I have), there’s nothing new to learn.

8) Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites, Kate Christensen

Description: Christensen’s story takes us from her unorthodox childhood in 1960s Berkeley (as the daughter of a legal activist who ruled the house with his fists) to her success as a PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author. Hungry not just for food, but for love and a sense of belonging, Christensen writes honestly about her struggle to find the contentment she always yearned for.

While reading this book, I found myself asking, “Why should I care about this woman?” She wasn’t entirely uninteresting, but there was never a point where I thought, “Ah, yes, THIS is why she felt the need to tell her story.” The most interesting aspect was near the end when she divorced her husband and met a man 19 years(!) her junior. From what I could find online, they’re still together seven years later.

9) Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Jamie Ford

Description: Henry Lee is a Chinese-American in Seattle who, in 1986, has just lost his wife to cancer. After Henry hears that the belongings of Japanese immigrants interned during WWII have been found in the basement of the Panama Hotel, the narrative shuffles between 1986 and the 1940s in a story that chronicles the loss of old age and the bewilderment of youth. Henry recalls the difficulties of life in America during WWII, when he and his Japanese-American friend, Keiko, wandered through wartime Seattle. Forty years later, in the hotel’s dusty basement, Henry begins looking for signs of Keiko’s family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure.

This was mildly entertaining but the story felt predictable. I was also disappointed with the ending. I felt like the author was building up to a big Henry & Keiko reunion, but the book ended prematurely and left big questions unanswered. What had Keiko done in the decades since she and Henry parted? Did she know why she stopped receiving letters from him? Was that her in the crowd the day Henry proposed to Ethel?

Not Recommended

10) Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay: And Other Things I Had to Learn as a New Mom, Stefanie Wilder-Taylor

Description: In short essays, Stefanie delivers the straight dirt on parenting, tackling everything from Mommy & Me classes to attachment parenting. She combines practical tips with humor and honesty, assuring women they can be good mothers and responsibly make their own choices.

My opinion can be summed up in two words: Not amused. I appreciate that she encourages moms not to make themselves crazy with all the options out there (Mommy & Me classes, stroller choices, pediatricians), and how she makes fun of overly-doting moms who don’t have a life apart from their child(ren). However, she can barely write two paragraphs without trying to inject her version of humor, which quickly became grating and annoying. I looked her up and discovered she’s written more books since this one came out, so it appears other people find her funnier than I do.

I read 15 books in December, which brings my 2015 total to 137.

December was a difficult reading month for me. I started at least eight (!) books I didn’t finish (and those are the ones I remember; I think there may have been one or two more). To be fair, some of them were checked out from the library simply because they happened to be available — this happens more often with e-books and audiobooks because the selection isn’t as wide, so I end up checking them out just to have something to read, and then I don’t finish them. I do have a number of e-books on hold that I’m looking forward to.

For 2016, will I set a goal to read more books than I did this year? No. I feel no desire to surpass this number unless it ends up working out that way on its own. If I find something else to take up my time, that’s perfectly okay with me. I’ll always be reading; it just may not be as much as this colossal year.

I rank my books with these categories: Highly Recommended, Recommended, Okay, and Not Recommended.

Recommended

1) My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem

Description: Steinem had an itinerant childhood. When she was a young girl, her father would pack the family in the car and drive cross-country searching for adventure and trying to make a living. The seeds were planted: Gloria realized that growing up didn’t have to mean settling down. And so began a lifetime of travel, of activism and leadership, of listening to people whose voices and ideas would inspire change and revolution.

I knew who Steinem was but I’d never read a book about her, or written by her, before this one. Other than the chapter on politics, I liked it a lot. What an impressive, hard working woman.

2) Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person, Shonda Rhimes

Description: She’s the creator and producer of some of the most groundbreaking shows on TV: Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder. This memoir chronicles Shonda’s life before and after her Year of Yes, where she forced herself out of the house and onto the stage, appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live; giving a Dartmouth commencement speech; when she learned to say yes to her health; yes to play; when she learned to explore, empower, applaud, and love her truest self.

I recommend this book because it’s a fun read, but certain parts of it bugged me. In three separate chapters, Shonda recaps the ENTIRE text of speeches she gave — which just seems lazy. It’s comparable to a blogger getting a book deal and lifting too much text directly from their blog, rather than coming up with new material.

I also expected Shonda’s Year of Yes to be more specific, rather than doing things like “saying yes to losing weight” and “saying yes to accepting compliments rather than constantly deflecting them.” She’s an entertaining writer though, and I got through the book quickly.

Here’s what she said about her life before starting the Year of Yes: “The years and years of saying no were, for me, a quiet way to let go. A silent means of giving up. An easy withdrawal from the world, from light, from life. Saying no was a way to disappear. Saying no was my own slow form of suicide.”

3) French Twist: An American Mom’s Experiment in Parisian Parenting, Catherine Crawford

Description: Short of shipping her daughters off to Paris for invaluable early-life lessons, Crawford did the next best thing: she brought French-style parenting to Brooklyn. In the process, she discovered her kids could actually hold a thought silently for two minutes without interrupting adult conversation, and that she didn’t need to buy out half the toy store to make their birthdays special. While combining the best attributes of the approach français with what she saw as American qualities worth preserving, Crawford found a way to save her household and her sanity.

I’m not a parent, but I like to read about the French and their child-rearing methods (I also enjoyed Bringing Up Bébé). The author makes the point that the French are, of course, not perfect in their methods — she doesn’t believe in spanking her kids, for instance — but there are many things we can learn, and she sees a big difference in her two girls’ behavior when she does.

4) Everything That Remains: A Memoir by The Minimalists, Joshua Fields Millburn

Description: Twenty-something, suit-clad, and upwardly mobile, Joshua thought he had everything anyone could ever want. Until he didn’t anymore. In the pursuit of looking for something more substantial than compulsory consumption, he jettisoned most of his material possessions, paid off loads of crippling debt, and walked away from his six-figure career. This is a story of what happened when one man decided to let go of everything and begin living more deliberately.

I’ve been reading The Minimalists for years — I really admire them (check out their recent post on Minimalist Gift-Giving for the holidays). They both gave up six-figure jobs to live more meaningfully and encourage others to simplify their lives. The book repeats a lot of what I already knew about them (having read their blog for so long), but I definitely encourage others to pick it up.

5) Bastards: A Memoir, Mary Anna King

Description: In the early 1980s, Mary Hall is growing up in poverty in Camden, New Jersey, with her older brother and parents who, in her words, were “great at making babies, but not so great at holding on to them.” After her father leaves the family, she is raised among a commune of mothers in a low-income housing complex. Then, no longer able to care for the only daughter she has left at home, Mary’s mother sends her to Oklahoma to live with her maternal grandparents, who have also been raising her younger sister. When Mary is legally adopted by her grandparents, the result is a family story like no other.

A woman has seven children and ends up giving six of them up for adoption. What. The. Hell. The kids find each other again later in life, and it’s both heartwarming and sad, but it was hard for me to get past the mother’s actions. She wasn’t on drugs, she wasn’t mentally handicapped. She was just lazy with her birth control. God, I wanted to slap her.

6) Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself, Amy Richards

Description: Richards addresses the anxiety over parenting that women face today, in a mix of memoir, interviews, historical analysis, and feminist insight. She covers everything from the truth about our biological clocks and the trends toward extending fertility, to parenting with nature and nurturing in mind, to our relationship with our own mothers, to what feminism’s relationship to motherhood is and always has been.

This book gave me some things to think about that I hadn’t considered before. I liked how the author shares her thoughts and worldview without judging other women’s choices.

Okay

7) Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath, Ted Koppel

Description: Imagine a blackout lasting not days, but weeks or months. Tens of millions of people are affected. For those without access to a generator, there is no running water, no sewage, no refrigeration or light. Food and medical supplies are dwindling. Banks no longer function, looting is widespread, and law and order are being tested as never before. With urgency and authority, one of our most renowned journalists examines a threat unique to our time and evaluates potential ways to prepare for a catastrophe that is all but inevitable.

I put this book on hold at the library after watching an interview with Koppel on CBS Sunday Morning. Although my pantry likely holds more items than someone who doesn’t cook at home regularly, I don’t buy food with the intention of stockpiling for a future doomsday. We don’t own a generator, or a grill, or any other way to heat food (unless you count a book of matches and some brush in our backyard we could set on fire), which means many of our perishables — quinoa, rice, bags of dried beans — wouldn’t do us any good without some way to prepare them.

If millions of people are without power for weeks or even months, that would be a big deal. Some people would have the resources to go somewhere the power still works, but many others wouldn’t. There would be rioting and looting. It would get ugly. Like Koppel, I do believe this scenario is a possibility and I’m also quite certain the government is not prepared to handle a disaster of this scale.

This book was helpful because I started thinking about ways I could be just a bit more prepared in case of an emergency. Other than that though, I didn’t find Koppel’s writing all that interesting. He does a lot of interviews (power company owners and operators, cybersecurity specialists) and most of them agree something could happen to our power grid, but nobody is taking ownership. I felt like a lot of the book was a repeat of that message, over and over.

8) One Second After, William Forstchen

Description: This is a story which can be all too terrifyingly real…a story in which one man struggles to save his family and his small North Carolina town after America loses a war. A war that will send America back to the Dark Ages. A war based upon a weapon, an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP). A weapon that may already be in the hands of our enemies. This has been cited on the floor of Congress as a book all Americans should read, a realistic look at a weapon and its awesome power to destroy the entire United States, literally within one second.

I recommend this book if you want to know what life could be like if everyone loses electricity (basically, it would be really scary, and a bunch of people would die), but I can’t recommend it if you want a well-written story. I didn’t like the author’s writing style, I found the narration to be stilted, and most of the conversations (huge chunks of the book) took place around conference tables.

Also, I got the impression that the author wrote with a male audience in mind — he was fond of mentioning how “cute” he found this female or that (seriously, it was a lot). And if he referred to his dogs as “those fools” one more time, I was ready to throw the book across the room. Which would have been unfortunate since it was an e-book I was reading on my phone.

9) Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

Description: This is the story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal.

I almost gave up on this several times, but I kept going back to it because the book got such great reviews (I hate when I do that). The tale of a hermaphrodite who doesn’t realize he’s a boy until age fourteen? I wanted it to be fascinating — and some parts of it were, but not enough. I found myself getting impatient with many aspects of the story.

10) Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon

Description: Alisa and J.B. began to research the origins of the items which stocked the shelves of their local supermarket. They were shocked to discover that a typical ingredient in a North American meal travels roughly the distance between Boulder, Colorado, and New York City before it reaches the plate. They were trying to live more lightly on the planet; meanwhile, their diet was producing greenhouse gases and smog at an unparalleled rate. So they decided on an experiment: For one year they would eat only food produced within 100 miles of their Vancouver home.

I’m a sucker for books about year-long challenges. I’ve thought about doing one myself but I haven’t identified anything that I think would be worth doing for so long. I liked the idea of this book, and it was certainly challenging for the authors, but it annoys me when people give themselves so many exemptions from their rules.

In this instance, the authors said they would only eat foods acquired from a 100-mile radius from their home. However, they didn’t have to follow that rule if they were invited to a friend’s house, or if they went to a restaurant for a work meeting. They also didn’t have to follow the rule if they were traveling — which they did quite a lot.

(You may recall my annoyance with Year of No Sugar for the same reason. Too many exemptions. If you’re going to do something for a year, then do it. Don’t half-ass it.)

11) The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey, Rinker Buck

Description: An epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way—in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn’t been attempted in a century. Traveling from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Baker City, Oregon, over the course of four months, Buck is accompanied by three cantankerous mules and his boisterous brother Nick. Along the way, they dodge thunderstorms in Nebraska, chase runaway mules across the Wyoming plains, scout more than 500 miles of nearly vanished trail on foot, cross the Rockies, and make desperate 50-mile forced marches for water.

I have a lot of admiration for what these two men did, but I wasn’t as entertained by it as I wanted to be (I started the book in early November and had to renew it several times before I finished it…I kept finding other things I wanted to read more). Oregon Trail history buffs would likely love it, as they intersperse their adventures with a bunch of trail history.

I did like the author’s reason for going on his journey: “The trail was my inebriate against depression, my hedge against boredom with life.” I fully approve of that.

12) The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern

Description: The circus arrives without warning and is only open at night. Within the canvas tents is a unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. Behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose. Despite themselves, they tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands. True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved hang in the balance.

I almost abandoned this book several times because there was too much fantasy, which I’m not a fan of. (Magic is considered fantasy, right?) I stuck with it though, and gradually the characters started to make sense and I found myself more interested in the outcome.

My biggest complaint: it was sometimes difficult to keep the dates straight — the story jumps back and forth in time a lot. I listened to the audiobook so I couldn’t just flip pages around to orient myself like I could have with a physical book.

13) Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson

Description: This is a memoir about a life’s work to find happiness. It’s a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the Universe as Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, which Winterson thought she had written over and repainted, rose to haunt her later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again.

This is the memoir of someone who had a difficult upbringing but grew up to become a successful author. I found certain sections engaging, but other parts rambled and it was difficult to stay interested.

14) Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome: A Memoir of Humor and Healing, Reba Riley

Description: Reba’s 29th year was a terrible time to undertake a spiritual quest. But when untreatable chronic illness forced her to her knees on her birthday, Reba realized that even if she couldn’t fix her body, she might be able to heal her injured spirit. And so began a yearlong journey to recover from her whopping case of Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome by visiting thirty religions before her thirtieth birthday.

I’ve read quite a few books about religion (especially people who had it and later lost it), but I ended up liking the idea of this book more than the execution. Reba chose to visit 30 religions before her 30th birthday, but it was just too many. Randomly dropping into a church service doesn’t mean you’ve actually experienced it.

She also has an overly-cutesy writing style, which annoyed me (there were multiple references to her made-up word, “Godiverse”). During one particular church service, she made the mistake of saying she “threw up a little in my mouth.” (It was not due to sickness; it was because she wanted to express her disgust over something that happened.) That phrase is one of my biggest pet peeves and happened early in the book, so I was biased against her pretty much from the start.

15) Happily Ali After: And Other Fairly True Tales, Ali Wentworth

Description: Moved by a particularly inspirational tweet one day, Ali resolves to live by the pithy maxims she discovers in her feeds. What begins as a sort of self-help project quickly turns into something far grander as the tweets she once viewed with irony become filled with increasing metaphysical importance. It’s not long before Ali expands her self-improvement quest to include parenting, relationship, fitness, and dieting advice. The results are painfully clear: when it comes to self-help, sometimes you should leave it to the professionals.

Not that it really matters, but I felt like this book wasn’t as advertised. Some of the early chapters start out with inspirational quotes, but there is nothing but a passing mention of Twitter, and after the first section the quotes disappear completely. Ali is humorous, so that’s fine, but I did like her first memoir better than this one.