I am a reader and it’s difficult for me to read unless I’m on vacation. I’m bad and don’t use my bed only for sex and sleep and read a chapter or so before turning in nightly. For some reason, I’ve read a bunch more recently and I think it’s because my house hasn’t had a deep clean. 🙂 These books are the last five that I’ve read. I think that I read them in about a month.

1. “Far From the Tree” by Andrew Solomon. It took me a long time to finish this one and I had, truthfully, started it a year ago, and picked it up right now when I’m procrastinating from cleaning a very large house. It’s long and organized into chapters about specific disabilities or challenges. Things that I liked about it were the well-researched applications that Solomon had throughout it and the narratives of people who he’d interviewed who were living with that particular horizontal condition. A vertical condition is something that is inherited from parents and has a sound genetic component. Horizontal conditions are not those shared by parents. For example, committing crimes doesn’t tend to run in families all the time and Solomon illustrates in that particular chapter how contexts and friends can shape criminals. The chapters on Autism and Deafness have resulted in my giving the book to a friend of mine who is a Speech and Language Pathologist.
2. “Maneater” by Ryan Green. This book is awful. It’s the only one that I have ever disliked from book club. It is poorly written and disingenuous. I was glad that we discussed it in book club, because the art teacher who attends helped me understand that in addition to my finding it gratuitous and sensational, it wasn’t believable. It read like fiction and was supposed to be true crime.
3. “Miracle in the Andes” by Nando Parrado. I loved this book from start to finish and ordered it right after watching “Society of the Snow” at home. I can’t believe that these 17 men lived. I know that I could say trite things about the human spirit and grit, but I don’t want to do so. I’m a huge Krakauer fan and really want to hang around Boulder, CO for a week to see if I could “run into” him. Anyway, he recommends this book in its marketing. I liked hearing the perspective of one of the people who had to become a climber with no climbing experience. Parrado had grown up on the plains.
4. “The Fire Line” by Fernanda Santos. Years ago, I stumbled across a news story about a cat bitten by a rattlesnake who dragged himself home, and the author and her daughter, having recently lost their husband and father to cancer, took their cat to the vet. With expensive treatment, he was saved. I was so touched. I emailed her and wanted to send her $50, but she said that there was no need because she got a 24-month interest free credit card instead. I finally read her book and it is excellent. I didn’t know that our government doesn’t fully fund wildfire mitigation and employee wildfire fighter salary. It also made sense to me that when I was hiking in Flagstaff in 2019 why the BLM had cut down so many Ponderosa Pines. Without indigenous practices of burning in the forest, we must clear trees. The story of the men was educational and contained enough about who each of them were personally to hold my interest from start to finish.
5. “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone” by Lori Gottlieb. A colleague handed me this book and I was afraid it was fiction (See number two.), and it was phenomenal. Anyone who counsels or delivers therapy understands that you walk a weird path with your client wherein they have problems that they’re addressing that you’ve addressed or are having currently when you’re working with them. It’s called a parallel process. I had that with the author. She talks about Andrew Solomon. She talks about grief and ending of relationships. Even if you don’t work in mental health, you should read this book wherein you’ll truly laugh and cry. It’s beautiful. (I’m going to give it to Mini Boss.)