ALL ABOUT LOVE: NEW VISIONS by bell hooks  

Is it an overt pun to say I loved this book? Part self-help, part memoir, hooks gives us the literary template for, in its simplest form, what every person on the planet strives for, to love and be loved. She contends that the noun love is overused and the verb love is more important and necessary. Acting on the feeling of love “validates those emotions.” True love, hooks maintains, requires patience, commitment, and above all else, honesty. Sounds simple enough, but is so rarely attained. We live in a society that undervalues romanticism for flexibility and ease of relationships. We’ve lost “the ecstasy of love” in our quest for all the meaningless nothings of our days. It’s the kind of book to read when the world is going to shit. Like right now.   

Favorite line(s): Love is as love does.

I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU by Rebecca Makkai

I follow Makkai on Twitter, and there isn’t a snarkier, astutely observant commentator on the irony of human behavior. And that colorful writing underscores every line in I Have Some Questions For You. The story is set at a New Hampshire boarding school where years ago, the narrator’s roommate was murdered. At the time of the crime, in 1995, everyone assumed the murderer was the Black athletic trainer who confessed under duress without a lawyer present. Decades later, the narrator returns to teach a film class at her alma mater and gets enmeshed in the case, and believes the wrong man sits in prison. Lots of characters to follow. Lots of leads to remember. A novel best read from start to finish without breaks.  

Favorite line(s): When I was still raw and unformed, everyone failed me. No one was permanent. Back home, there were people with good parts to them, but on the whole, they couldn’t be relied on. By fourteen, my bitter understanding was that I could rely on myself and only myself. So here I was in a place that looked nothing like home, and I was an island. You were one of the only people who saw me as that—as an island—and made me feel good about it. We’re meant to reject the selves we were at fourteen, meant to grow and learn. That college therapist worked so hard to convince me to trust, to find people I could rely on, to believe they wouldn’t vanish on me. So every year after Granby I tried harder and harder to lean on other people, and to defend them in turn. Partners and Jerome and my friends and my colleagues. And the problem was, I had. I’d leaned on them with all my weight. I’d sworn my loyalty. I’d always known, deep down, that it was a mistake.

YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL: A MEMOIR by Maggie Smith

I’ve read everything Smith has written—mostly poetry—and her memoir reads like one long exquisite poem on the aftershocks of betrayal and the trench digging it takes to re-fortify herself and her two young children after a divorce. Some chapters are a couple of lines. Other pages, but each exists to show the unflagging efforts Smith has made to rebuild a life into one of beauty and grace.

Favorite line(s): The Wife—The Mother, The Finder—would love to be someone who doesn’t give a fuck, or who at least gives considerably fewer fucks, but she is not that person. That’s not how she was built. The Wife’s factory setting is GAF. She gives so many fucks. All the fucks.

RECKLESS DAUGHTER: A PORTRAIT OF JONI MITCHELL by David Yaffe

I first heard Joni Mitchell’s music while staying at a youth hostel in Brussels. On a boxy record player in the sitting room, a scratched-up Blue played as the backdrop to so many conversations with other travelers. It wasn’t until I sat alone and listened that I appreciated the woman's poetic sentiments—like so many I knew—aching to understand why it was so hard to merge the desire for independence with the security of a relationship. Blue is a classic with “A Case of You,”; “River,”; “Carey,”; and “Little Green” about the baby Mitchell gave up for adoption. Many of Mitchell’s songs are mini short stories of doomed love, loneliness, and the madness and wonders of living which culminates in the genius of “Both Sides Now”—a song so deep in philosophical rumination you feel as if your own thoughts have been transcribed and sung back to you by a voice in your head. Amazingly, she was in her 20s when she wrote the song. We get to know Mitchell better through Reckless Daughter. Yaffe’s research gives us the backstory of Joni’s wounds and joys so as to better understand the place from which her masterpieces—from Blue to her jazz phase—were created.   

Favorite line(s): It was Mr. Kratzmann back in seventh grade who not only circled her clichés, but told her that if she could paint with colors she could paint with words.