An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie, translated by James Kirkup

4/5 stars

What's it about? Togolese teen Kpomassie is promised to a cult after being healed from a dangerous encounter with a snake. While convalescing, he reads a book about Greenland, and, through charm and determination, finally arrives at the destination of his dreams after an eight-year journey. An endearing travelogue from a gifted storyteller.

How’d I find it? Of course, I found this one in the travel section at the ever reliable Solid State Books.

Who will enjoy this book? The Patrick Leigh Fermor fans will enjoy the journey with Kpomassie. It’s a story almost too incredible to be believed.

What stood out? An African in Greenland contains so much to admire: a snapshot of life in the 1960s for a young African, the unsparing descriptions of culture, and Kpomassie’s wholehearted embrace of the Greenlander way. He’s a surefooted travel guide whose curiosity anchors this book.

Which line made me feel something? The anthropological tidbits in An African in Greenland are utterly fascinating. Take the following sentences on the symbolism of the python for Kpomassie’s people: “He links heaven and earth: the golden patches scattered over his black skin recall the stars that sparkle in the sky at night. He is the image on earth of the rainbow that hangs in the air during a shower of rain. His movements resemble the flow of watercourses.”

The Birds of Pandemonium by Michele Raffin

3/5 stars

What's it about? Michele Raffin details her journey from animal lover to conservationist, as her California home evolves into Pandemonium Aviaries, a sanctuary for abandoned and endangered birds. A cozy read about compassion that will warm your cold human heart.

How’d I find it? I spent a year living in my spouse’s grandmother’s home in rural Virginia, and she generously left behind a wall full of books. This book was among them.

Who will enjoy this book? Helen Macdonald fans and those who liked The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery will want to pick this up.

What stood out? The stories of individual birds make up the most compelling sections of The Birds of Pandemonium. Take Sweetie, a joyful quail saved from becoming dinner by being forgotten in a supermarket produce section. Or Amigo, a red-headed Amazon parrot who survives a series of bad homes to fall in love with Michele’s son. The book is impactful in its urging to be better stewards of the natural world and to take responsibility for the lives that depend on us.

Which line made me feel something? Raffin shares a list of poetic flock names, of which I found particular delight in “an ascension of larks” and “a lamentation of swans.”

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib

5/5 stars

What's it about? A heritage, a celebration, and an elegy delivered with Abdurraqib’s romance and ruin. No one writes culture quite like Hanif, and his honoring of A Tribe Called Quest is a sweet masterpiece.

How’d I find it? Hanif is one of our finest writers, so I want to read whatever he’s putting out.

Who will enjoy this book? Sure, this book will speak to hip-hop listeners, but it’s also for the MTV generation for whom music was a lens for America.

What stood out? Smart, generous, and nostalgic, the essays of Go Ahead in the Rain chart the rise and fall of A Tribe Called Quest within the legacy of Black art. Abdurraqib weaves in his own coming-of-age vignettes as a kid in Columbus who used music as a foothold. The book is gorgeously written, especially the chapter “Lament,” written in the form of letters to Q-Tip, Phife, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad.

Which line made me feel something? It’s hard to pick just one in a book so excellent, but I’ll settle on the following: “Which is why the sample is a joy, isn’t it? The wind blows a memory of someone into a room through sound, and the architect captures that memory with their bare hands and puts it on wax.”

Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling

3/5 stars

What's it about? Kaling's second collection of essays muses on fame, work, and love. A light-hearted, delightful read.

How’d I find it? I’m a millennial who has seen every episode of The Office more times than she can count.

Who will enjoy this book? The bottom line: if you like Mindy and celebrity memoirs, you'll enjoy this book. Looking for a read-alike? Try You Can't Touch My Hair by Phoebe Robinson.

What stood out? Kaling's essay on weddings (and why being a bridesmaid stinks) is a hilarious and touching reflection on female friendship. "A Perfect Courtship in My Alternate Life" imagines Kaling's life if she'd ended up as a Latin teacher at a Manhattan private school, told via email exchanges.

Which line made me feel something? A loud cackle escaped from me at the following description of a certain sorority: "Their finely toned arms replace a finely honed sense of irony."

What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman

3/5 stars

What's it about? While contemporaries settle down and start families, sitcom writer Kristin Newman chases romance and adventure around the world. A lighthearted, sometimes bawdy read that guarantees a happy ending (thank you, thank you) as early as the dedication page.

How’d I find it? A delightful colleague at Solid State Books recommended this some months ago, and I picked up a copy at Multnomah County Library.

Who will enjoy this book? Amy Schumer’s The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo has a similar tone and energy.

What stood out? Newman delivers a cohesive narrative with developed characters (the enigmatic “Ferris Bueller,” her besties Hope and Sascha), and I enjoyed her travel recommendations. The book’s humor and epiphanies all read as too obvious for my taste, though this might not ring true for others.

Which line made me feel something? Newman and I share an ick: “There were a few months spent with an overly emotional French writer, who absolutely made it into my Top Three in the bed department, but who called his own writing ‘beautiful.’”

In Deep by Maxine Kumin

4/5 stars

What's it about? Poet Maxine Kumin talks craft and country living in this volume of essays about managing a farm in New Hampshire while maintaining a writing life. A warm hearth of a book.

How’d I find it? I picked this up at Normals Books & Records in Baltimore, which has the kind of selection that makes me say, “Ooh!” and pluck a book off the shelf that I never even knew existed.

Who will enjoy this book? In Deep is for horse girls young and old, as well as for Mary Oliver and Henry David Thoreau acolytes.

What stood out? In Deep owes much to Kumin’s admiration of Thoreau, whose influence can be seen in essays dedicated to taxonomic descriptions of mushrooms and species of cattle as well as in “The Unhandselled Globe,” which centers on Thoreau himself. Kumin rejects the Freudian links to women who love horses and gendered assumptions about her mares; she and the animals she loves are the focus here, and glimpses of her human family are brief. She writes beautifully about the day-to-day labors of keeping a farm running, from building fences to keeping everyone fed.

Which line made me feel something? From the closing essay, “A Sense of Place,” an outstanding analysis of the stamp of home on Kumin’s poetry: “In a poem one can use the sense of place as an anchor for larger concerns, as a link between narrow details and global realities. Location is where we start from. Landscape provides our first geography, the turn of the seasons are archetypes for our own mortality.”

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

4/5 stars

What's it about? Sarah M. Broom unpacks her family’s history, her upbringing as the youngest of twelve children, and the social, cultural, and political realities of her native New Orleans East before and after Hurricane Katrina. A thoughtful accounting of homecoming and place.

How’d I find it? My spouse’s family has links to New Orleans and collected multiple copies of The Yellow House over the years.

Who will enjoy this book? This is a must-read for memoir lovers, especially because Broom manages to craft an intimate look at her family while remaining at a remove herself, a technique that serves her complex narrative well. The book evokes home in a way that reminded me of The Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez.

What stood out? The first section of the book (“Movement I: The World Before Me”) draws the reader into its beautifully rendered portrait of heritage, gleaming with the author’s admiration for her family’s matriarchs. The Brooms and their wavelets of friends and ancestors comprise The Yellow House’s irreducible core, and you’ll yearn to return to them when the author focuses her attention elsewhere — another smart tool to reinforce periods of displacement. Despite some detours into platitudes (“namelessness is a form of naming”), Broom knows how to command the page.

Which line made me feel something? “When the presentation of the body stands in for all the qualities the world claims you cannot possess, some people call you elegant. Grandmother was that, yes, but sometimes elegance is just willpower and grace, a way to keep the flailing parts of the self together.”

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

4/5 stars

What's it about? Thoreau’s treatise on individualism and respect for the natural world originated from his two years of self-sufficiency beside the shores of Walden Pond. A blend of philosophy, memoir, and field guide, Walden urges readers to shed frivolity and experience life at its simplest.

How’d I find it? Though a longtime resident of the TBR list, Thoreau became a pressing read. I borrowed my spouse’s copy for the occasion.

Who will enjoy this book? Rather than who, Walden requires guidance on how to read it: ever so slowly. A chapter a day was the perfect amount to chew at a time. If you liked Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, this book will speak to you.

What stood out? The questions of truth and resistance in Walden are relevant no matter when you read them, and Thoreau’s descriptions of the flora and fauna he encounters around Concord provide context for his experiment in the woods. A time capsule of 19th-century Americana.

Which line made me feel something? “The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broke strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted, but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.”

Generations by Lucille Clifton

4/5 stars

What’s it about? Lucille Clifton sketches her family tree as she journeys with her family to her father’s home for his funeral. Each section is dedicated to one of Clifton’s ancestors, but others crowd in with their own tales and entanglements, mimicking the jockeying and overlappings within any family. Honest, powerful, and brimming with love and pride.

How’d I find it? I found this book by happenstance at Enoch Pratt Free Library and can never resist an NYRB title. This was gobbled up over beers while a football game held surrounding friends rapt.

Who will enjoy this book? At less than 90 pages, Generations is worth any reader’s attention. Folks who liked Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, and Ordinary Light by Tracy K. Smith, who opens Generations with a beautifully written introduction, will particularly appreciate this title.

What stood out? The structure of the book reinvents the memoir genre. Clifton curates an impactful collage of photos, dialogue, secondhand stories, memories, lines from Walt Whitman, and snippets of her journey to Buffalo. This is the experience of a funeral in real time, recreating the barrage of interconnectedness that loss unleashes, the lore we fall into when surrounded by the people who made us possible.

Which line made me feel something? “Things don’t fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept. ‘We come out of it better than they did, Lue,’ my Daddy said, and I watch my six children and know we did.”

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith

2/5 stars

How’d I find it? This was a purchase at Politics & Prose, one of my favorite spots to spend a few hours.

Why not 3 or more stars? Spending time with Smith’s mind is always a pleasure. Wanderlust, curiosity in others, and capacity for wonder season everything she writes, and the result is a companionable literary voice that inspires you to reread a classic or marvel at the worn seat of an idol’s chair. Year of the Monkey counts among the reactionary responses to the 2016 presidential election in the United States, an event that spawned a cohort of creative work marked by outrage and bitterness. Smith’s account of disillusionment with the world melds with her grief over those who’ve passed in a memoir that reads more like an incomplete draft, a manuscript dragged from underneath her still-editing hands to join in time the wave of anti-Trump sentiment saturating the bookshelves for hungry consumers needing answers. Year of the Monkey would not have contributed much new to the conversation, but it was a time when artists felt the urge to speak out and channel their understanding of this slice of human history.

At least, that’s what I thought this book was. Imagine my surprise to discover that Year of the Monkey was published in 2019. Without the solid footing of the context in which they were composed, Smith’s diary-like ramblings feel dated, an echo of an echo of an echo. Much like the dream states Smith tries to recapture, they fade before you wake.