RSM Reads: Something New
Welcome to what I've been reading lately!
I’m a thirty-something momma to a thoughtful and curious 5-year-old, wife to a Harley guy, public sector consultant, former English teacher, MPA grad, and passionate bibliophile. Basically living proof that we all contain multitudes.
If you love reading a pretty wide variety of works, I hope you’ll love joining me here (about) monthly to share what I’ve been reading and hear from you too! I read Nobel Prize and Reese Witherspoon Book Club picks alike, but when reading fiction, I look for a story that brings me into the world of someone so completely, that it causes me to ask the big questions about whether we are loving our neighbors well. I’m also a cradle Episcopalian-Anglican, and these two commands from Jesus to love God and our neighbor are infused in this space. I hope you’ll find in this little Substack community a kind of belonging and room to explore what brings us together.
Lately, I’ve been enjoying:
Indigenous literature (Louise Erdrich being a particular favorite)
Fredrick Bachman’s novels
Some not-so-spooky thrillers
Any time Ann Patchett or Wendell Berry put pen to paper
Feminist retellings of Greek myths
Kate Baer poetry
Novels by Vietnamese authors
Anything Kate Bowler writes or posts
I’m going to backtrack just a bit and share the best of 2023 with y’all.
The Year in Books: 2023 Edition
Of last year’s 80 books read, these titles stand out to me as favorites.
Fiction:
Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (this was easily the best ready of the year, see more below)
Frederik Backman’s Beartown & A Man Called Ove (I cannot say enough about this man and the strength of his voice & story)
Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine
Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (retelling of the Iliad from Patrocul
Curtis Sittenfield’s Romantic Comedy (hilarious & cute read about a late-night comedy sketch show host falling for a writer)
Julia Heaberlin’s We Are All The Same in the Dark (great audiobook listen: think Longmire in the South)
Nonfiction:
Adam Grant’s Think Again (still thinking about this one constantly)
Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry
Kinship Vol. 1: Planet (a five-part series compilation of essays & poems speaking to our linkage to everything from the cosmos to the air we breathe. Robin Wall Kimmerer is among the editors and authors: enough said.)
Katherine May’s Wintering (such an important read on seasons of slowness and how to get the rest & reprieve we need in a busy world)
Book 46 of 2023: Kinship, Volume 1: Planet
“Worth thinking about—and perhaps thanking about—are the shared threads between kinfolk, especially plantfolk, that make this breath exchange possible. Your life, my life, all of our lives depend on the quality of relations between us—the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the food we become—within an exuberant, life-generating planetary tangle capable of nurturing intelligences that can spin webs and words.”
-Gavin Van Horn
This is the latest literary venture from Robin Wall Kimmerer (as an editor and contributor). To those of you who have asked me what my favorite book is (impossible question: I’ll give you my top 5-10 in no particular order instead), know that Braiding Sweetgrass is at the top of my list every time. My dad bought this set to read himself, but he is graciously letting me have the first pass. The first of five volumes, Planet collection of poems and essays on kinship with Earth, and with every living thing, where have fallen short, and what we can do to right the relationship.
From an Indigenous Hawaiian understanding of nature and a Devonshire woman’s ode to wild swimming to an essay advocating for esteem rather than triumphalism for our “sister satellite,” the Moon, and a history of wildness from a First Nations member, this selection of writings is simply excellent and spans the globe! I cannot wait to dig into Volume 2: Place. I’ll end with a quote from Kimmerer’s essay, where the animals, plants, and humans are having a family reunion after so much pain. The aunties speak to the humans with this:
“The most important thing you forgot, all this time we have fed you, provided every single thing that you need, sung you awake in the morning, and sung you to sleep at night, tried to teach you. We have loved you in every way we know how and you didn't even know."
Book 74 of 2023: Demon Copperhead
“A good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it.” -Demon
This book is a triumph of evergreen storytelling: starting with a well-known frame that Kingsolver uses to paint a masterpiece for our time. Kingsolver took the roots of David Copperfield (Dickens’ nearly autobiographical story of coming of age in institutional poverty and the horrific effects this had on children and greater English society) and has made a work completely her own, powerful enough to stand alongside the original with its razor sharp and equally cutting descriptions of life in rural Appalachia today.
Demon is a young boy who grows up taking care of his single mother (who struggles with substance abuse) in a double-wide in Lee County, Virginia. If she can keep her job at Walmart long enough to stock the seasonal aisles for several holidays in a row, they are doing well.
We follow him as he is put into the foster care system and does not truly go home again. He lives through several terrifying placements: an old man who takes in boys to live in squalor and work his tobacco farm, a family who takes the allowance for their own children while he must pay his way by working at a quick mart that is actually a meth lab, and last at the home of the Coach of the local high school football team who is treated like a king in town but behind closed doors is an absent alcoholic. As he comes of age in a place that has nothing for him, Demon’s resilience is at once heartrending and inspiring.
Kingsolver wields her pen like a sword, as Dickens did when he penned Copperfield, speaking truth to power about the real and current perils of the under-resourced foster care system, athletic success, child labor, rural poverty in Appalachia, disastrous young love, and the opioid crisis at its terrible beginnings. And writ large, it showcases the detrimental effects of coal mining and its swift move to mechanized methods of extraction on the land itself, as well as the economy, self-worth, and physical health of entire generations that were told coal was their entire identity, salvation, and lot in life.
This was easily the best book I read this year if not the past few years. I have not been haunted by specific passages and “brutiful” turns of phrase after closing a book for a long while, and this book stole my attention every time I picked it up. Kingsolver spent years on this work, and her Herculean efforts yielded masterful results.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this first foray, and I’m excited for you to come back for more reviews, thoughtful stories, and how what I’m reading is both confirming and challenging what I know to be true. For more of what’s on my current book stack, visit my Goodreads page.
Thanks for joining me here, dear readers. More to come from my shelves to yours!
But for now, happy page-turning,
-RSM