This was recent, but my favorite book of the year is the new illustrated edition of "The Silmarillion," with Tolkien's own illustrations. On just a bookmaking level, it's a fantastic edition: full-color illustrations, archival paper (which won't yellow), and the binding is sewn, not glued (if you care about that sort of thing, and I do.)
One of the themes I've been thinking of is the role of sorrow in the book and how Tolkien can interweave sorrow and beauty and hope and wisdom together in such a poignant way where the grief is itself redeemed and also permanently acknowledged. (The tears never go, but you do grow from them.) For many of us dealing with personal sorrows, this is a very helpful framing and given Tolkien's series of traumatic losses in his childhood and young adulthood, I suspect that this was born from his own intimate experience with sorrow.
I can't say I enjoyed it but I am glad to have read "The Anguish of the Jews." it's a history of anti-semitism recommended by a professor of mine who studied in Jerusalem, who teaches Old Testament at a Catholic seminary. I'm Catholic and heard mostly from Catholics that historic anti semitism was largely an anti Catholic myth, and from secular sources that the Catholic Church is and has been seriously anti Semitic. This book traced the history in a way that was nuanced enough to be believable. Especially poignant was the beginning of the chapter in the Holocaust, when the author explains how hard it is to compose anything about it because, having traced anti Semitic violence for centuries, he's run out of superlatives, but finds that now he needs them more than ever.
I read "A Good Birth" by Anne Lyerly which I have read during both pregnancies and heartily recommend to any woman preparing to deliver a baby (or trying to make sense of past delivery experiences). Lyerly is an OB and a mom of four (five?). She and her team did a huge research project interviewing hundreds of women who had delivered babies in all kinds of situations (home, birthing center, hospital, emergency c section, planned c section, vaginal with and without epidural, things going as planned and not as planned, etc etc), plus numerous birth attendants: OBs, midwives, doulas, etc. She wanted to find out what makes for a "good" birth and why women make all different kinds of choices or come away with very different experiences of things that seemed very similar. She found out that it wasn't so much about the epidural (or whatever) but about things like... Presence, agency, connection, etc. To use the epidural example, some women found that they needed to "tussle" with the full pain of childbirth to feel fully present and other women found that pain relief helped them to be fully present, but pretty much universally women wanted to be "present" at the birth, and that was a big part of what made the birth good or bad. I found that it helped me think more clearly about my expectations and "plans" for birth and helped me articulate why I was drawn to some things more than others. It helped me shake off lingering guilt about not doing birth "right" and put me in a better place to make decisions that were best for me and for my family and be confident in those decisions. I delivered my baby this fall and l&d went nothing at all like anyone expected - while I was recovering in the hospital, the doctors were all like "yeah, I heard about you" - but thinking through my experience the way Lyerly presents things was really helpful in my own emotional processing.
I'm currently re-reading Night's Bright Darkness by Sally Read, about her conversion from atheism/feminism to Catholicism. She's a great writer and I'm really enjoying it, but I wish she'd go more in depth about her thinking.
I INHALED The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry. It was one of those books that gives a voice to every argument that had been lurking in my mind but hadn't quite coalesced yet. I think one of the things that struck a chord with so many people is that it's a book about sexual ethics that is in line with most traditional or religious perspectives, but written by someone who is a secular agnostic. Reading books like The Rights of Women by Bachiochi or Rethinking Sex by Christine Emba, you definitely get the feeling that while they are ostensibly writing secular books, they are holding something back--that there's some belief lurking behind the surface that they won't quite surface, because they don't want to write a religious book. Perry's position allows her to hold nothing back.
I think I've said this here before, but the book I've loved so far this year that seems most relevant to this community is Natan Meir's "Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800 - 1939." It's about the relationship of a marginalized community to those on its own margins, and the pros and cons of the transition from personal & religious premodern relations between rich and poor to institutional & regulated modern roles. And, perh most relevantly for this group, it's about whether various forms of weakness are distortions of what it means to be human or exposures of it.
A genre like that for me might be something like "incarnated thought": books that give a certain concreteness to phenomena that I was only able to grasp as words/concepts before reading the book. The most obvious examples from books I read this year were the Divine Comedy and P.D. James's The Children of Men (dystopian novel in which everyone has become infertile).
I am an omnivorous reader who is willing to try almost anything so instead of properly answering the second question I'll give oddly specific genres for some of the books I read and enjoyed :-D
British Murder Mysteries - The Nine Tailors and Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy Sayers. I finished her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries this year and I will miss never having a new one to read again. If you are drowning in money to spend on books buy Stephan P. Clarke's The Lord Peter Wimsey Companion (or get it from inter-library loan like me) and keep it nearby to explain all the allusions to British law, English literature, and mythology that go right past those of us who don't have degrees from Oxford as Sayers did.
Parenting Memoir - this is probably the closest I come to a bookshelf label that would draw me in immediately. This year I read Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome, which is very well written and has the added bonus of being a twin parenting memoir (my subgenre of the subgenre).
Gut Punching and Brilliant Novels - Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward, Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley, The Round House by Louise Erdrich, The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.
History/Sociology You Didn't Learn in School - The 1619 Project, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.
Finally, hard to characterize but I really enjoyed Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. Ecology, biology, and anthropology of the Arctic written by someone with great prose and a sense of wonder. It took me awhile but it's the kind of book you can dip in and out of since there's no "plot" per se.
The best book I read this year was probably "Klara and the Sun". It's told from the perspective of an 'artificial friend' (a robot designed to provide companionship to children). Klara, the robot, finds herself inside of a family struggling with greif, separation, and illness. Reading from Klara's perspective was like reading from that of a child, and provided a lot of innocence. The book also poses some interesting questions about life and love. It didn't spend too much detail on technology/the logistics of AI, but kept it simple enough to feel natural.
If you like frigates, and you haven’t yet discovered the treasure trove of the Aubrey/Maturin novels, you’re in for a treat. I read all 20 this year and they are now, with Jane Austen and the Bible, something I am always going to be rereading. For those unfamiliar - these are what the movie Master and Commander is based on. They’re even better than the movie (beloved best picture). You have to put up with some nautical terms but it’s not like moby dick, done with no regard for the reader; it’s actually funny how some characters don’t know the jargon, along with you as the reader. Every single one is a masterpiece because it’s really all one novel. The longest, best thing I’ve ever read, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Can’t recommend them enough. :)
On the subject of womanhood and dependence, Motherhood: A Confession, is the best thing I’ve read in years.
Ah! I *just* finished Educated by Tara Westover, and if ever there was a book that Other Feminisms readers should read, it's this one. She writes beautifully, compellingly, tragically about self, community, family, girl & womanhood. Very pertinently to Other Feminisms readers, she was deeply impacted by Mary Wollstonecraft and other scholars' work about obligation and selfhood. Her doctoral thesis was "The Family, Morality and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813-1890"!
There's a genre I truly love, which I suppose you could call Mediocre Memoirs. They aren't written by Great Writers (or Great Ghostwriters), but by more ordinary people. Some chapters in this genre tend to be rather boring, more important to the author than the reader. And there are frequently revelations that seem embarrassingly obvious. But they also display real bravery in sharing their story and gift real wisdom to the reader.
The most recent book in this genre that I just read, and highly recommend to Other Feminisms readers, is Costly Grace, by evangelical minister and former Operation Rescue leader Rob Schenck. He shares his personal journey of three conversions and lays bare the danger to individual souls and families and communities of letting politics take the place of true religious conviction. It's a quick read, but also, like the best of this genre, will stay with me for a very long time.
Fiction: The last books in the Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner: political intrigue with a surprising "everything comes down to love (all four kinds) at the end of the day" heart. It's a six-book series, you'd think to look at it on the shelf, but it's really. . . I think the math comes out to eighteen? Because you read book 1 and think you've understood the plot, and then you read book two, which sheds an entirely new light on the previous proceedings, and you have to go back and read book one again. Then you read book three, which startles you into understanding so many seemingly throwaway details in books one and two, and you have to go re-read them again, and it's a new experience. Then you read book four ---
Vespertine, by Margaret Rogerson. The authour describes this as "medieval Venom starring a nun and a ghost. It’s about a girl training to be a nun who awakens an ancient spirit bound to a saint’s relic, and becomes a Joan of Arc type figure as she wields its power to battle the undead" (from Goodreads), and for bonus fun, the girl is heavily autistic-coded and we get to watch her revenant bully her into taking good care of herself for the first time in her life! It's the kind of book I want to take back in time and give to undiagnosed teenage me, who couldn't understand why she was worth the effort, and get her hooked on. It's very well-written, and the world is richly developed and avoids the "all religious people are evil in some way" trap.
Nonfiction: Practice Resurrection, by Eugene Peterson. It's a commentary on Ephesians, but accessible to the reader with no special theological education (he brings up Greek words a lot, as you have to, but transliterates them all, for instance). Really good on what a church is and is for, and is not and is not for, and how we're supposed to live that out with all these awful messed-up people who are somehow, mysteriously, our siblings.
Poetry: I discovered the work of the still-living Malcolm Guite, and will not shut up about it. I got his cycle of poems on the Psalms for my dad's birthday present, and ended up reading it several times myself.
Mine were: Benjamin Lipscomb's The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philipa Foot, Mary Midgely, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics (which I think readers here would also enjoy!), Phil Christman's How To Be Normal, Tara Isabella Burton's Strange Rites, and reading The Phantom Tollbooth aloud to one of my kids—somehow I missed it in school.
I had a really bad year serious-book-wise (turns out being a depressed and failed PhD student does bad things to my motivation to read), but I re-read War and Peace and it's just great. Not only are the "peace" parts with the romances and family stories great, with touching scenes and great characters, but the theory of history showed in the "war" parts is surprisingly modern.
I enjoy the genre "books about books"! Jessica Hooten Wilson's newest: " The Scandal of Holiness" was incredible.
Erika Bachiochi's "The Rights of Women" was enlightening, a must-read.
Was due for a re-read of Lewis's nonfiction, so I revisited "A Grief Observed", "The Four Loves", "The Screwtape Letters" and "The Great Divorce". Always worth it to come back to those every so often.
I also tried to incorporate more longer, classic novels this year in my audiobook listening: "Crime & Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamosov", "East of Eden" and "Kristin Lavrendsatter" were surprisingly more enjoyable than I was expecting!!
This was recent, but my favorite book of the year is the new illustrated edition of "The Silmarillion," with Tolkien's own illustrations. On just a bookmaking level, it's a fantastic edition: full-color illustrations, archival paper (which won't yellow), and the binding is sewn, not glued (if you care about that sort of thing, and I do.)
One of the themes I've been thinking of is the role of sorrow in the book and how Tolkien can interweave sorrow and beauty and hope and wisdom together in such a poignant way where the grief is itself redeemed and also permanently acknowledged. (The tears never go, but you do grow from them.) For many of us dealing with personal sorrows, this is a very helpful framing and given Tolkien's series of traumatic losses in his childhood and young adulthood, I suspect that this was born from his own intimate experience with sorrow.
I can't say I enjoyed it but I am glad to have read "The Anguish of the Jews." it's a history of anti-semitism recommended by a professor of mine who studied in Jerusalem, who teaches Old Testament at a Catholic seminary. I'm Catholic and heard mostly from Catholics that historic anti semitism was largely an anti Catholic myth, and from secular sources that the Catholic Church is and has been seriously anti Semitic. This book traced the history in a way that was nuanced enough to be believable. Especially poignant was the beginning of the chapter in the Holocaust, when the author explains how hard it is to compose anything about it because, having traced anti Semitic violence for centuries, he's run out of superlatives, but finds that now he needs them more than ever.
I read "A Good Birth" by Anne Lyerly which I have read during both pregnancies and heartily recommend to any woman preparing to deliver a baby (or trying to make sense of past delivery experiences). Lyerly is an OB and a mom of four (five?). She and her team did a huge research project interviewing hundreds of women who had delivered babies in all kinds of situations (home, birthing center, hospital, emergency c section, planned c section, vaginal with and without epidural, things going as planned and not as planned, etc etc), plus numerous birth attendants: OBs, midwives, doulas, etc. She wanted to find out what makes for a "good" birth and why women make all different kinds of choices or come away with very different experiences of things that seemed very similar. She found out that it wasn't so much about the epidural (or whatever) but about things like... Presence, agency, connection, etc. To use the epidural example, some women found that they needed to "tussle" with the full pain of childbirth to feel fully present and other women found that pain relief helped them to be fully present, but pretty much universally women wanted to be "present" at the birth, and that was a big part of what made the birth good or bad. I found that it helped me think more clearly about my expectations and "plans" for birth and helped me articulate why I was drawn to some things more than others. It helped me shake off lingering guilt about not doing birth "right" and put me in a better place to make decisions that were best for me and for my family and be confident in those decisions. I delivered my baby this fall and l&d went nothing at all like anyone expected - while I was recovering in the hospital, the doctors were all like "yeah, I heard about you" - but thinking through my experience the way Lyerly presents things was really helpful in my own emotional processing.
I'm currently re-reading Night's Bright Darkness by Sally Read, about her conversion from atheism/feminism to Catholicism. She's a great writer and I'm really enjoying it, but I wish she'd go more in depth about her thinking.
I INHALED The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry. It was one of those books that gives a voice to every argument that had been lurking in my mind but hadn't quite coalesced yet. I think one of the things that struck a chord with so many people is that it's a book about sexual ethics that is in line with most traditional or religious perspectives, but written by someone who is a secular agnostic. Reading books like The Rights of Women by Bachiochi or Rethinking Sex by Christine Emba, you definitely get the feeling that while they are ostensibly writing secular books, they are holding something back--that there's some belief lurking behind the surface that they won't quite surface, because they don't want to write a religious book. Perry's position allows her to hold nothing back.
I think I've said this here before, but the book I've loved so far this year that seems most relevant to this community is Natan Meir's "Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800 - 1939." It's about the relationship of a marginalized community to those on its own margins, and the pros and cons of the transition from personal & religious premodern relations between rich and poor to institutional & regulated modern roles. And, perh most relevantly for this group, it's about whether various forms of weakness are distortions of what it means to be human or exposures of it.
A genre like that for me might be something like "incarnated thought": books that give a certain concreteness to phenomena that I was only able to grasp as words/concepts before reading the book. The most obvious examples from books I read this year were the Divine Comedy and P.D. James's The Children of Men (dystopian novel in which everyone has become infertile).
I am an omnivorous reader who is willing to try almost anything so instead of properly answering the second question I'll give oddly specific genres for some of the books I read and enjoyed :-D
British Murder Mysteries - The Nine Tailors and Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy Sayers. I finished her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries this year and I will miss never having a new one to read again. If you are drowning in money to spend on books buy Stephan P. Clarke's The Lord Peter Wimsey Companion (or get it from inter-library loan like me) and keep it nearby to explain all the allusions to British law, English literature, and mythology that go right past those of us who don't have degrees from Oxford as Sayers did.
Parenting Memoir - this is probably the closest I come to a bookshelf label that would draw me in immediately. This year I read Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome, which is very well written and has the added bonus of being a twin parenting memoir (my subgenre of the subgenre).
Gut Punching and Brilliant Novels - Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward, Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley, The Round House by Louise Erdrich, The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.
History/Sociology You Didn't Learn in School - The 1619 Project, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.
Finally, hard to characterize but I really enjoyed Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. Ecology, biology, and anthropology of the Arctic written by someone with great prose and a sense of wonder. It took me awhile but it's the kind of book you can dip in and out of since there's no "plot" per se.
The best book I read this year was probably "Klara and the Sun". It's told from the perspective of an 'artificial friend' (a robot designed to provide companionship to children). Klara, the robot, finds herself inside of a family struggling with greif, separation, and illness. Reading from Klara's perspective was like reading from that of a child, and provided a lot of innocence. The book also poses some interesting questions about life and love. It didn't spend too much detail on technology/the logistics of AI, but kept it simple enough to feel natural.
If you like frigates, and you haven’t yet discovered the treasure trove of the Aubrey/Maturin novels, you’re in for a treat. I read all 20 this year and they are now, with Jane Austen and the Bible, something I am always going to be rereading. For those unfamiliar - these are what the movie Master and Commander is based on. They’re even better than the movie (beloved best picture). You have to put up with some nautical terms but it’s not like moby dick, done with no regard for the reader; it’s actually funny how some characters don’t know the jargon, along with you as the reader. Every single one is a masterpiece because it’s really all one novel. The longest, best thing I’ve ever read, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Can’t recommend them enough. :)
On the subject of womanhood and dependence, Motherhood: A Confession, is the best thing I’ve read in years.
Ah! I *just* finished Educated by Tara Westover, and if ever there was a book that Other Feminisms readers should read, it's this one. She writes beautifully, compellingly, tragically about self, community, family, girl & womanhood. Very pertinently to Other Feminisms readers, she was deeply impacted by Mary Wollstonecraft and other scholars' work about obligation and selfhood. Her doctoral thesis was "The Family, Morality and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813-1890"!
There's a genre I truly love, which I suppose you could call Mediocre Memoirs. They aren't written by Great Writers (or Great Ghostwriters), but by more ordinary people. Some chapters in this genre tend to be rather boring, more important to the author than the reader. And there are frequently revelations that seem embarrassingly obvious. But they also display real bravery in sharing their story and gift real wisdom to the reader.
The most recent book in this genre that I just read, and highly recommend to Other Feminisms readers, is Costly Grace, by evangelical minister and former Operation Rescue leader Rob Schenck. He shares his personal journey of three conversions and lays bare the danger to individual souls and families and communities of letting politics take the place of true religious conviction. It's a quick read, but also, like the best of this genre, will stay with me for a very long time.
Fiction: The last books in the Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner: political intrigue with a surprising "everything comes down to love (all four kinds) at the end of the day" heart. It's a six-book series, you'd think to look at it on the shelf, but it's really. . . I think the math comes out to eighteen? Because you read book 1 and think you've understood the plot, and then you read book two, which sheds an entirely new light on the previous proceedings, and you have to go back and read book one again. Then you read book three, which startles you into understanding so many seemingly throwaway details in books one and two, and you have to go re-read them again, and it's a new experience. Then you read book four ---
Vespertine, by Margaret Rogerson. The authour describes this as "medieval Venom starring a nun and a ghost. It’s about a girl training to be a nun who awakens an ancient spirit bound to a saint’s relic, and becomes a Joan of Arc type figure as she wields its power to battle the undead" (from Goodreads), and for bonus fun, the girl is heavily autistic-coded and we get to watch her revenant bully her into taking good care of herself for the first time in her life! It's the kind of book I want to take back in time and give to undiagnosed teenage me, who couldn't understand why she was worth the effort, and get her hooked on. It's very well-written, and the world is richly developed and avoids the "all religious people are evil in some way" trap.
Nonfiction: Practice Resurrection, by Eugene Peterson. It's a commentary on Ephesians, but accessible to the reader with no special theological education (he brings up Greek words a lot, as you have to, but transliterates them all, for instance). Really good on what a church is and is for, and is not and is not for, and how we're supposed to live that out with all these awful messed-up people who are somehow, mysteriously, our siblings.
Poetry: I discovered the work of the still-living Malcolm Guite, and will not shut up about it. I got his cycle of poems on the Psalms for my dad's birthday present, and ended up reading it several times myself.
Mine were: Benjamin Lipscomb's The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philipa Foot, Mary Midgely, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics (which I think readers here would also enjoy!), Phil Christman's How To Be Normal, Tara Isabella Burton's Strange Rites, and reading The Phantom Tollbooth aloud to one of my kids—somehow I missed it in school.
I had a really bad year serious-book-wise (turns out being a depressed and failed PhD student does bad things to my motivation to read), but I re-read War and Peace and it's just great. Not only are the "peace" parts with the romances and family stories great, with touching scenes and great characters, but the theory of history showed in the "war" parts is surprisingly modern.
I enjoy the genre "books about books"! Jessica Hooten Wilson's newest: " The Scandal of Holiness" was incredible.
Erika Bachiochi's "The Rights of Women" was enlightening, a must-read.
Was due for a re-read of Lewis's nonfiction, so I revisited "A Grief Observed", "The Four Loves", "The Screwtape Letters" and "The Great Divorce". Always worth it to come back to those every so often.
I also tried to incorporate more longer, classic novels this year in my audiobook listening: "Crime & Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamosov", "East of Eden" and "Kristin Lavrendsatter" were surprisingly more enjoyable than I was expecting!!
Why We Swim
Once Upon A Wardrobe by Patti Callahan. I've given out gobs of copies