Bite-Sized Mini Reviews

I have read so many good books lately it's probably hopeless to do full reviews of all of them. Instead, here are some brief summaries that I hope will encourage people to check them out.


Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. The choice to use use a first-person plural ("we") narrator for this tragicomic novel of mundane office life is inspired--it perfectly sums up the tension between the groupthink of coworkers and the desire to be an individual. I found the passages about closet artists with day jobs in cubicleland painfully hilarious. (You can read a full review by my friend Amy Woods Butler here.)


Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, by Kenji Yoshino. This book blends memoir and writing about the law to explore the discrimination people face when they are forced to "cover"--that is, to hide aspects of their true selves in either their personal or their professional lives. Although much of the book is spent on the author's exploration of his roles as a Japanese-American and a gay man, he also has a very strong chapter on women (especially mothers) in the workforce. I loved that he recognizes "poet" as a "stigmatized identity"; it's no mistake that one of the writers in my critique group spoke of "coming out" to her parents as a fiction writer. I came away from this book feeling validated, angry, and inspired.


The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Stephanie Coontz. This landmark 1992 book explores our myths about the American family and argues that we need to understand where we've come from in order to make strong plans for the future. Her thesis: What we see as "crisis in the family" is actually a crisis of social and political (dis)connectedness. (Coontz's ideas are backed up by Bowling Alone, which I'm going to keep recommending until everyone reads it.)


Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. This graphic memoir about growing up in Iran during the revolution is both humorous and very, very dark. At the end, I almost burst into tears on the exercise bike at the Y. I finished it in less than a day, and then rushed to the library to find the sequel.


Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink. This book, about the psychology of eating, is fascinating. The author, whose background is in marketing, explores which factors cause us to enjoy our food and eat more. Did you know, for example, that when offered a bowl of M&Ms, people eat more if there are many colors versus just one? Or that when you give diners a free glass of wine that you claim is from North Dakota, they will rate their whole meal worse than they would if you told them the same wine was from California? The studies offer great examples of how you set up and test hypotheses. You can check out the author's web site here.


His Dark Materials Trilogy, by Phillip Pullman. I'll be honest: the first book, The Golden Compass, gets off to a slow start. (It's coming out as a movie this winter.) By the second book of this fantasy series, though, I was hooked--and I galloped through the third one. The books raise thought-provoking questions about religion, science, and the nature of humanity.


Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. In this memoir, Kalish reflects on her childhood. What I loved about the book was the author's good-natured humor. She describes great deprivation, and children who face adult responsibilities, but she shows how empowering it was for children to have a helpful role in the family and a secure place in the world. Thanks to this book, I've started getting Ben to help out more around the house--and I've discovered he enjoys it.



I'd be interested to hear if my readers have read and liked any of these books... and, as always, I'm open to suggestions about what to read next.