Books for Christmas
Books for the holidays: almost everyone on my list gets at least one! Here are my very opinionated picks, divided into my very opinionated categories. These are not all new books, but books have a long, long life: yes?
Reading about Grief:
The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham: The best book I read this year; perhaps one of the top ten I’ve ever read. Wickersham’s memoir of her father’s suicide strips the reader and writer bare.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion: I could barely breathe reading this memoir of Didion suddenly losing her husband.
Good Grief by Lolly Winston: A gentle and yet absorbing ride, this novel takes the reader through a too-young widow’s year of mourning.
Novels about the World Stripped Raw:
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty: Quirky Texas Rangers + the wildness of the early west + terrorizing villains + incredible writing=a book that will NOT be put down.
Warday by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka: It may be difficult to find this book, but when you locate this brilliant novel of this apocalyptic novel, depicting the world after a nuclear attack, you will want everyone you know to read it. And you will read it more than once.
Books Where Women Struggle with Food & Size:
Food and Loathing: A Lament by Betsy Lerner: This memoir by literary agent Betsy Lerner provides a compelling and wickedly funny account of Lerner’s struggle with depression and weight. Yes, that sounds like a dichotomy, but it’s simply a wonderful read.
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker: This story of Truly, a gargantuan woman struggling to find her place in a bleak town in upstate New York, will break your heart, and you will not want to get up until you finish.
Memoirs that Trace Lives:
We Are Your Sons by Robert and Michael Meeropol and An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey: The first book was written when the Meeropol’s (sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg) when they were quite young, the second was written just a few years ago. Read separately they capture the time of the son’s lives both immediate and in retrospect; read together, they are a heartbreaking and ultimately uplifting journey through their lives—going through the horror of having parents imprisoned and then executed during the horror of the McCarthy inquisition.
Truth & Beauty: a Friendship by Ann Patchett and Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy: Patchett’s unflinching story of her close and complicated friendship with Lucy Grealy, read together with Grealy’s brilliant and honest autobiography of her life after being diagnosed, at age nine, with a cancer that severely disfigured her face, provide an incredible look at both writer’s lives, with and without each other.
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