WHAT A YEAR
The following are my top 20 reads of 2020 along with my thoughts, some summary and some book descriptions from it’s cover pages. Next year I will switch back to the top TEN READS per year.
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
This was by FAR the BEST thing I have ever read. EVER. Amazingly hauntingly beautiful. What a year I had with it. Reading a chapter a day and keeping track of quotes and passages that I loved was something I truly needed for 2020.
I read this with a group of readers on instagram #ReadLesMis2020.
A French historical novel by Victor Hugo, first published in 1862, that is considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. In the English-speaking world, the novel is usually referred to by its original French title. However, several alternatives have been used, including The Miserables, The Wretched, The Miserable Ones, The Poor Ones, The Wretched Poor, The Victims and The Dispossessed.
Beginning in 1815 and culminating in the 1832 June Rebellion in Paris, the novel follows the lives and interactions of several characters, particularly the struggles of ex-convict Jean Valjean and his experience of redemption. Examining the nature of law and grace, the novel elaborates upon the history of France, the architecture and urban design of Paris, politics, moral philosophy, anti-monarchism, justice, religion, and the types and nature of romantic and familial love. Les Misérables has been popularized through numerous adaptations for film, television and the stage, including a musical.
Untamed Glennon Doyle
I cried. Then I cried some more. Wonderful book. Glennon teaches us through herself. I learn something about me everytime I read her books. Extremely empowering book. Especially for a younger person I would recommend this. “In her most revealing and powerful memoir yet, the beloved activist, speaker, and bestselling author of Love Warrior and Carry On, Warrior explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet the expectations of the world, and start trusting the voice deep within us.”
Love with a chance of drowning by Torre DeRoche
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and lived vicariously through all of Torre’s adventures and wanderlust. So much truth and a very raw honest portrayal of relationship. City girl Torre DeRoche isn’t looking for love, but a chance encounter in a San Francisco bar sparks an instant connection with a soulful Argentinean man who unexpectedly sweeps her off her feet. The problem? He’s just about to cast the dock lines and voyage around the world on his small sailboat, and Torre is terrified of deep water. However, lovesick Torre determines that to keep the man of her dreams, she must embark on the voyage of her nightmares, so she waves goodbye to dry land and braces for a life-changing journey that’s as exhilarating as it is terrifying.Somewhere mid-Pacific, she finds herself battling to keep the old boat, the new relationship, and her floundering sanity afloat. . . .This sometimes hilarious, often harrowing, and always poignant memoir is set against a backdrop of the world’s most beautiful and remote destinations. Equal parts love story and travel memoir, Love with a Chance of Drowning is witty, charming, and proof positive that there are some risks worth taking.
Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
One of the truest depictions of grief I have ever read in my life. Unfathomable what happened to Sonali. Grief and how you are just gutted told in truth and so real you can feel it. So well told. In 2004, at a beach resort on the coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala and her family—parents, husband, sons—were swept away by a tsunami. Only Sonali survived to tell their tale. This is her account of the nearly incomprehensible event and its aftermath.
In Five Years by Rebecca Serle
So unexpected. The most beautiful story of a soulmate friendship I have ever read in a nonclassical literature setting. This book was amazing. Extremely well written. It took my breath away. I had no idea going into it what this book was, who this author was or what the story would be. What a wonderful gift of a story. Where do you see yourself in five years?Dannie Kohan lives her life by the numbers.She is nothing like her lifelong best friend—the wild, whimsical, believes-in-fate Bella. Her meticulous planning seems to have paid off after she nails the most important job interview of her career and accepts her boyfriend’s marriage proposal in one fell swoop, falling asleep completely content.But when she awakens, she’s suddenly in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger, and beside a very different man. Dannie spends one hour exactly five years in the future before she wakes again in her own home on the brink of midnight—but it is one hour she cannot shake. In Five Years is an unforgettable love story, but it is not the one you’re expecting.
Men we reaped by Jesmyn Ward
“Words 2 My First Born” Tupac is quoted in the preface of the book. These words hit my hard as it is a reality for many of the kids I’ve worked with over the past decades. Tupac’s poetry is some of the most gut wrenching heartbreaking poetry I have ever read. If you have not read any of it I highly recommend you read it. As I was reading this book so much of the story was familiar and so much of it was exactly what I see or experience with students I have the privilege of listening to. The way ‘family’ is considered in this book is how the kids I am with everyday view it. It is your community or people in your house or surviving with you. I am considered family by many of the students I work with. So when there is a death it is a huge huge loss. We are a year out from our last shooting and death of a 14 year old young man, and it still stings. To have so many every single year there are no words.The inadequate of life valued is so prevalent where I live for the students I spend time with and do life with, and they feel it. I feel it for them. I remember watching years ago Boys in the Hood and the father telling his son and friend that the tests are racially biased only the math is equal. I never caught it the first time. Dealing with it every day and seeing it be true is something there are no words for. How young black men are treated is so horrific, and yet it is still going on. Guts me.
This book is simply truth in words. Beauty in the telling. In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life―to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth―and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own. Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue higher education, she writes about this parallel American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter familiarity. A brutal world rendered beautifully.
Emily of New Moon by LM Montgomery
I have always loved Anne of Green Gables. However, I believe Emily is way more like me. I thoroughly enjoyed reading all three of the Emily books and she will hold a place in my heart right next to Anne. I imagine I will do a reread someday. Emily’s darkness was more similar to my own and therefore I like Emily more than Anne! WOW. I never saw that coming. Emily Starr never knew what it was to be lonely—until her beloved father died. Now Emily’s an orphan, and her snobbish relatives are taking her to live with them at New Moon Farm. Although she’s sure she’ll never be happy there, Emily deals with her stern aunt Elizabeth and her malicious classmates by using her quick wit and holding her head high. In this first volume of the celebrated Emily trilogy, Lucy Maud Montgomery draws a more realistic portrait of a young orphan girl’s life on early twentieth-century Prince Edward Island. Along with Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest, Emily of New Moon insightfully portrays the beauty and anguish of growing up.
The Paris Hours by Alex George
Paris. What’s not to love. This book read like 1800s classical literature. I adored the storyline and every single character. I love the plot and although the end left me wanting more I loved that too. I read this book in a day, it just captivated me. One day in the City of Light. One night in search of lost time.Paris between the wars teems with artists, writers, and musicians, a glittering crucible of genius. But amidst the dazzling creativity of the city’s most famous citizens, four regular people are each searching for something they’ve lost.Camille was the maid of Marcel Proust, and she has a secret: when she was asked to burn her employer’s notebooks, she saved one for herself. Now she is desperate to find it before her betrayal is revealed. Souren, an Armenian refugee, performs puppet shows for children that are nothing like the fairy tales they expect. Lovesick artist Guillaume is down on his luck and running from a debt he cannot repay―but when Gertrude Stein walks into his studio, he wonders if this is the day everything could change. And Jean-Paul is a journalist who tells other people’s stories, because his own is too painful to tell. When the quartet’s paths finally cross in an unforgettable climax, each discovers if they will find what they are looking for. Told over the course of a single day in 1927, Alex George’s The Paris Hours takes four ordinary people whose stories, told together, are as extraordinary as the glorious city they inhabit.
The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore
I knew very little about the actual history of Wonder Woman and found it to be quite fascinating. I will definitely be looking for more information and books on the topic. Very well done. A riveting work of historical detection revealing that the origin of Wonder Woman, one of the world’s most iconic superheroes, hides within it a fascinating family story—and a crucial history of twentieth-century feminism. Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator. Beginning in his undergraduate years at Harvard, Marston was influenced by early suffragists and feminists, starting with Emmeline Pankhurst, who was banned from speaking on campus in 1911, when Marston was a freshman. In the 1920s, Marston and his wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, brought into their home Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century. The Marston family story is a tale of drama, intrigue, and irony. In the 1930s, Marston and Byrne wrote a regular column for Family Circle celebrating conventional family life, even as they themselves pursued lives of extraordinary nonconformity. Marston, internationally known as an expert on truth—he invented the lie detector test—lived a life of secrets, only to spill them on the pages of Wonder Woman. The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights—a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later.
The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee
Just WOW. This is a YA young adult read and it is so very well done. Suffragism! Streetcar segregation! Interracial love! Women riding bicycles! Improper meetings between young folk! Illicit affairs! Elderly health! Millinery! Newspaper rivalries! A hotly anticipated horse race! Confederate monuments! Searching for one’s birth parents! Blackmail! A pseudonymous author! Women choosing not to marry! Intersectionality! Mansplaining! Entrepreneurship! Pants! As a Chinese girl living in late 19th century Atlanta, Ga., Jo Kuan constantly struggles to remain invisible. She was born in America but can’t be a citizen or even rent a proper apartment, so she lives in a former abolitionist’s hidden tunnels, secreted away underneath a newspaper office. Her job is in the back room of a hat shop where everyone wants her beautiful decorative knotwork — but not the comments of the opinionated girl who makes it. And when she loses that job, she must go work for the Payne family as a maid for their snotty daughter, who does everything she can to make Jo miserable. I just fell in love with Jo. This was an unexpected 5 start read for me. It should be in every high school library. By day, seventeen-year-old Jo Kuan works as a lady’s maid for the cruel daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta. But by night, Jo moonlights as the pseudonymous author of a newspaper advice column for the genteel Southern lady, “Dear Miss Sweetie.” When her column becomes wildly popular, she uses the power of the pen to address some of society’s ills, but she’s not prepared for the backlash that follows when her column challenges fixed ideas about race and gender. While her opponents clamor to uncover the secret identity of Miss Sweetie, a mysterious letter sets Jo off on a search for her own past and the parents who abandoned her as a baby. But when her efforts put her in the crosshairs of Atlanta’s most notorious criminal, Jo must decide whether she, a girl used to living in the shadows, is ready to step into the light. With prose that is witty, insightful, and at times heartbreaking, Stacey Lee masterfully crafts an extraordinary social drama set in the New South.
Spy by Danielle Steel
Keeping up with my read everything by this author for the past 30 some years I very much enjoyed this story and the historical backdrop. No one does historical fiction like Danielle Steel and I don’t think she gets near the credit she deserves as an author. Due to Covid and extra time I caught all the way up with her books and am for the first time reading her books as they come out at a rate of four times a year! These books have always been a soothing balm for me. I read them with in a few hours and sometimes slow myself down to enjoy the back drops depicted. A lot of people call this my guilty pleasure but I don’t have guilt, just calm from a known voice I’ve read decade after decade. This Spy story was really fun. Not something I would have thought of in the storyline she used. Quite ingenious. At eighteen, Alexandra Wickham is presented to King George V and Queen Mary in an exquisite white lace and satin dress her mother has ordered from Paris. With her delicate blond looks, she is a stunning beauty who seems destined for a privileged life. But fate, a world war, and her own quietly rebellious personality lead her down a different path. By 1939, Europe is on fire and England is at war. From her home in idyllic Hampshire, Alex makes her way to London as a volunteer in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. But she has skills that draw the attention of another branch of the service. Fluent in French and German, she would make the perfect secret agent. Within a year, Alex is shocking her family in trousers and bright red lipstick. They must never know about the work she does—no one can know, not even the pilot she falls in love with. While her country and those dearest to her pay the terrible price of war, Alex learns the art of espionage, leading to life-and-death missions behind enemy lines and a long career as a spy in exotic places and historic times.Spy follows Alex’s extraordinary adventures in World War II and afterward in India, Pakistan, Morocco, Hong Kong, Moscow, and Washington, D.C., when her husband, Richard, enters the foreign service and both become witnesses to a rapidly changing world from post-war to Cold War. She lives life on the edge, with a secret she must always keep hidden.
Titus of Andronicus by Shakespeare
I read quite a bit of Shakespeare every single year as I am in a Shakespeare Read A Long group, however this one just struck me this year and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The language is always wonderful for me. The discussions and history of this play really hit the mark for me. Fun. Titus Andronicus is the earliest tragedy and the earliest Roman play attributed to Shakespeare. Titus, a model Roman, has led twenty-one of his twenty-five sons to death in Rome’s wars; he stabs another son to death for what he views as disloyalty to Rome. Yet Rome has become “a wilderness of tigers.” After a death sentence is imposed on two of his three remaining sons, and his daughter is raped and mutilated, Titus turns his loyalty toward his family.Aaron the Moor, a magnificent villain and the empress’s secret lover, makes a similar transition. After the empress bears him a child, Aaron devotes himself to preserving the baby. Retaining his thirst for evil, he shows great tenderness to his little family—a tenderness that also characterizes Titus before the terrifying conclusion.
The Book of V by Anna Solomon
Queen Esther has always fascinated me and I have never quite believe how it was taught to me and in this book I think it’s way closer to truth than the ‘be like Esther’ preaching in parochial school that I got. The TRUE story is argued amongst most people: is it true or a parable or a legend. Vashti for me was always the one to be like. That being said this book is marvelous. The Washington post writes: Purim celebrates the story of Esther, who marries the king of Persia after his first wife, Vashti, is cast off. After winning a beauty contest, Esther — who is mistaken for a non-Jew — is exalted for outing herself and saving her people. When I was growing up, the Purim pageant play felt lacking in nuance. Esther was good; Haman ws bad; Vashti, the proto-goth, embodied an unexplored darkness. In her imaginative and fiercely feminist retelling, Solomon offers much greater complexity. Lily, one of the main characters in “The Book of V,” explains the holiday tartly: “lots of drunkenness and misogyny but also female worship, which you could argue is a form of misogyny, and a so-so king and good queen and evil side-guy, celebrated with a play and a big carnival and pageant and triangle-shaped cookies and also there’s a thwarted genocide of the Jews . . . it’s kind of a burlesque!”
Lily is a mother and a daughter. And a second wife. And a writer, maybe? Or she was going to be, before she had children. Now, in her rented Brooklyn apartment she’s grappling with her sexual and intellectual desires, while also trying to manage her roles as a mother and a wife in 2016. Vivian Barr seems to be the perfect political wife, dedicated to helping her charismatic and ambitious husband find success in Watergate-era Washington D.C. But one night he demands a humiliating favor, and her refusal to obey changes the course of her life―along with the lives of others. Esther is a fiercely independent young woman in ancient Persia, where she and her uncle’s tribe live a tenuous existence outside the palace walls. When an innocent mistake results in devastating consequences for her people, she is offered up as a sacrifice to please the King, in the hopes that she will save them all. In Anna Solomon’s The Book of V., these three characters’ riveting stories overlap and ultimately collide, illuminating how women’s lives have and have not changed over thousands of years.
Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff
Cleopatra. She is quite interesting to me. I think people forget quite a few women rule and ruled. Cleopatra Reigned 51-30 BC. The internationally renowned “Cleopatra,” the historical Macedonian woman reigned as co-ruler with her brother Ptolemy XIII. Served as Egypt’s sole ruler from around 47 BC to 30 BC. … Cleopatra generally referred to herself as a queen, yet she is often described as “Egypt’s last pharaoh.” Egypt at the time had a thriving Jewish community, and many of Cleopatra VII’s most ardent supporters were Egyptian Jews. Historian and the author of this book Stacy Schiff, who won the Pulitzer Prize for this masterful biography notes that in First Century BCE Egypt, Jews “were river guards, police officers, army commanders, and high-ranking officials” and ardent supporters of Cleopatra’s line of succession. Egyptian Jews “numbered among Cleopatra’s supporters in the desert in 48. And they had fought for her during the Alexandrian War (in 47 BCE), at the end of which Caesar had granted them citizenship.” This and countless other historical text and make the book an absolute top read for the year. I learned so much more history and I also took every other Cleopatra book out of the library but nothing compares to this book that Stacy has written. I also got to listen to her speak about her book and her research from the New York Public Library virtual event and it made the reading of this book that much more fun. Cleopatra- A Life: Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator.Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and — after his murder — three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra’s supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff ‘s is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.
A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum
Gah, this book. “I was born without a voice.” How many women is this true for? “Marriage and motherhood are a woman’s worth “. Anyone told this growing up? Now? How many women believe this is true? “A man is the only way up in this world, even though he’ll climb a woman’s back to get there. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
I cannot recommend this book enough. Such a powerful read.Books are important. Reading a book about someone who looks like you, who lives in the same culture as you and/or is experiencing the same hell as you is a hugely important witness and tool of hope. Even in the darkest story. Even if to know you’re not the only one. Heartbreakingly beautiful.
What is a woman’s life worth? This question echoes across countries and generations through Etaf Rum’s intense debut novel, “A Woman Is No Man.” In her debut novel Etaf Rum tells the story of three generations of Palestinian-American women struggling to express their individual desires within the confines of their Arab culture in the wake of shocking intimate violence in their community—a story of culture and honor, secrets and betrayals, love and violence. Set in an America at once foreign to many and staggeringly close at hand, A Woman Is No Man is an intimate glimpse into a controlling and closed cultural world, and a universal tale about family and the ways silence and shame can destroy those we have sworn to protect.“Where I come from, we’ve learned to silence ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of—dangerous, the ultimate shame.”Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children—four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear.Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man.But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family—knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.
This Light Between Us by Andrew Fukuda
Rated TEEN This Light Between Us is a powerfully affecting story of World War II about the unlikeliest of pen pals—a Japanese American boy and a French Jewish girl—as they fight to maintain hope in a time of war. “I remember visiting Manzanar and standing in the windswept plains where over ten thousand internees were once imprisoned, their voices cut off. I remember how much I wanted to write a story that did right by them. Hopefully this book delivers.”—Andrew FukudaIn 1935, ten-year-old Alex Maki from Bainbridge Island, Washington is disgusted when he’s forced to become pen pals with Charlie Lévy of Paris, France—a girl. He thought she was a boy. In spite of Alex’s reluctance, their letters continue to fly across the Atlantic—and along with them, the shared hopes and dreams of friendship. Until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the growing Nazi persecution of Jews force them to confront the darkest aspects of human nature.From the desolation of an internment camp on the plains of Manzanar to the horrors of Auschwitz and the devastation of European battlefields, the only thing they can hold onto are the memories of their letters. But nothing can dispel the light between them.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I think it would be a wonderful class discussion book and it quite timely in our divisive world we are living in right now, this shows how life really is for connection. Not division.
The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Cara Robertson
The trail in print and also so much back history and cultural to the times history. I went in thinking Lizzie was innocent and came out sure of it. Just astounding all the errors in this trial. Astounding to me how I always thought she was actually convicted of the crime, when in fact they did find her innocent. Very real look at society in a small town, especially in a hierarchy type culture involving money and religion and the rights of women. Not much has changed since 1892. Alas. When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her murder trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Reporters flocked to the scene. Well-known columnists took up conspicuous seats in the courtroom. The defendant was relentlessly scrutinized for signs of guilt or innocence. Everyone—rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars, and laypeople—had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence. Was she a cold-blooded murderess or an unjustly persecuted lady? Did she or didn’t she? An essential piece of American mythology, the popular fascination with the Borden murders has endured for more than one hundred years. Told and retold in every conceivable genre, the murders have secured a place in the American pantheon of mythic horror. In contrast, “Cara Robertson presents the story with the thoroughness one expects from an attorney…Fans of crime novels will love it” (Kirkus Reviews). Based on transcripts of the Borden legal proceedings, contemporary newspaper accounts, unpublished local accounts, and recently unearthed letters from Lizzie herself, The Trial of Lizzie Borden is “a fast-paced, page-turning read” (Booklist, starred review) that offers a window into America in the Gilded Age. This “remarkable” (Bustle) book “should be at the top of your reading list” (PopSugar).
The Living Clearly Method by Hilaria Baldwin
One of the best laid out books describing YOGA nutrition and how one lives their life. A perfect book for 2020. Described beautifully, easy to follow and very adaptable to life. I will be using this book for years to come. Hilaria Baldwin knows what it means to be pulled in many directions—as a mother of three, businesswoman, yoga instructor, Instagram sensation, and wife of actor Alec Baldwin, she has to work hard to remain centered. Through her life experiences, struggles, and personal growth, Hilaria has developed a method for using movement and mindfulness to create an unbreakable mind-body connection, an illuminating method that shapes her life.The Living Clearly Method shows how to blend purposeful movement with conscious breath to move through our lives with grace, calm, and positivity. By using Hilaria’s five simple principles—Perspective, Breathing, Grounding, Balance, and Letting Go—you can flow through any situation with the beautiful union of mind, body, and spirit that a yoga practice can create. But learning to honor the body and listen to the soul does not end when you get off the mat. Hilaria believes strongly in finding ways to integrate the five principles into your entire life, so for each step she also shares her own routines that keep her active all the time—from the little motions that engage her body during household chores and the foods that keep her well nourished to the philosophy that grounds her when she’s being pulled in a million directions at once. This book is also packed with practical tools such as timesaving tips, delicious recipes inspired by clean and plant-based eating, mini-workouts that seamlessly integrate into your everyday life, breathing exercises, and customized yoga and meditation routines. The Living Clearly Method teaches you to listen to your body, tune in to your mind, and develop the consciousness to clear your head and find peace in your life. It is a beautiful, intuitive guide for living the healthiest life possible, both inside and out.
Reread of The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
I first read this book as a teenager and then again somewhere in my 30s. It is still haunting and still beautiful. I learn a new lesson everytime I read it. I would never say it is written for me, a white woman, however the knowledge I glean from it and the enjoyment of the way Toni can write is a gift. The Bluest Eye It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove–a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others–who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different.
HUMANS by Brandon Stanton
I have followed HONY Humans Of New York since it’s beginning. The books that Brandon has published have been amazing. This latest HUMANS it gorgeous. The stories make you laugh, cry, gasp, anger, encourage and enlighten you. A lovely thing to look at in small moments while relaxing with coffee. Brandon Stanton created Humans of New York in 2010. What began as a photographic census of life in New York City, soon evolved into a storytelling phenomenon. A global audience of millions began following HONY daily. Over the next several years, Stanton broadened his lens to include people from across the world. Traveling to more than forty countries, he conducted interviews across continents, borders, and language barriers. Humans is the definitive catalogue of these travels. The faces and locations will vary from page to page, but the stories will feel deeply familiar. Told with candor and intimacy, Humans will resonate with readers across the globe―providing a portrait of our shared experience.
On to 2021 reading………
