Good Reads: Gifts From Favorite Authors
“These Precious Days” by Ann Patchett
To read this book is to feel like you know Ann Patchett personally, or at the very least want to befriend her. Her novel, “The Dutch House”, was my favorite read last year, and her prior work, “Bel Canto”, causes some fans, me included, to sigh when they say how much they love it. Her latest book, “These Precious Days”, a compilation of previously published essays, continues to enthrall us.
Whether it be how Snoopy was an unexpected inspiration for her to become a writer, or how knitting helped save her life, or her 3 flawed but cherished fathers, she transforms her deeply personal life experiences into something meaningful and wise for others. Her essays make you think and look at the world in a fresh way.
The title piece, “These Precious Days”, is about an unexpected and extraordinary friendship she develops with actor Tom Hanks’s assistant, who develops pancreatic cancer. Having lost my mother to the same disease, the story touched me with a sorrowful reminder for us all that life can take some very unexpected turns.
Patchett ponders truth, art, friendships, disappointments, and hope. She notes, “The social contract between a book you love is not complete until you hand that book to someone else and say, ‘Here, you’re going to love this.’” I am doing that here.
“Carnival of Snackery” by Davis Sedaris
This book isn’t so much a gift as an offering from author and humorist David Sedaris. “Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003–2020”, is 576 pages of diary entries that follow him on his daily errands, book tours, and encounters with the world at large. The entries reflect a backdrop of changing times, society, and grappling with aging.
Glimpse into his relationships with his husband and family, and sample his quirky humor and sometimes disarming moments of humanity, like naming his vacation home “Sea Section”, after his husband rejects many far more offensive options. Or tearing up when he visits his 96-year-old father in a convalescent home and watching him struggle to unwrap a straw to drink his soup because “it makes less of a mess.”
This work may not have the crafted essays of his previous books, but he delivers a compilation of signature cynical observations of the world around him. There are laugh-at-loud jokes one minute, then, other entries as the book jacket warns, where “you might want to spit discreetly into a napkin.”
“The Sentence” by Louise Erdich
Last year’s Pulitzer-prize winner Louise Erdich told a story that pays homage to her Native American grandfather. “The Night Watchman” was a powerful and compassionate novel about the fight against the proposed displacement of Native American tribes in the 1950s.
She returns with the latest novel featuring a group of Native American booksellers in a small Minneapolis bookstore that is visited by the ghost of a former annoying customer. Efforts to solve the mysterious haunting are led by formerly incarcerated Tookie whose life was redeemed by reading books while she was in prison.
Erdich’s own love of books, as the owner of an independent bookstore in her hometown of Minneapolis, makes some personal autobiographical strains clear. Her story also weaves in the shocking background of the real-life pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, and the area’s subsequent violent riots.
There’s humor in the book that is contrasted with painful insights into an unsettling outside world…our world, and its collective struggle to understand and reckon with ghosts of racism past and present.
“Five Tuesdays In Winter” by Lily King
Contemporary novelist Lily King follows up last year’s highly acclaimed “Writers and Lovers”, and my personal favorite, the 2014 “Euphoria”, with the newly-released “Five Tuesdays In Winter”. This is her first collection of short stories, ten very fine ones, half previously published and half new.
King presents us with a startling and unexpected range of protagonists who tell their unique tales. A mother’s helper reading “Jane Eyre” is swept away by her employer’s son who is not what he seems, a neglected young boy who unexpectedly bonds with two exuberant college students, a gay man coming to terms with a homophobic ex-roommate…we immediately connect with these and the other engaging voices in this book.
Each moving story exposes intimate desires, heartbreaks, loss, and discovery. Hers is a hopeful and inspiring perspective on love and life, illuminating the potential of love as an essential transformative life force. This original, tender, and marvelous book is a gift from a gifted writer.
