Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby (2023)

This collection of essays is another jewel from Samantha Irby. Quietly Hostile is full of her signature self-depreciating jokes, her enjoyment of growing older (which allows her to stop trying so hard), and her unapologetic love of all things average (think Dave Matthews and strip malls).

Irby’s essays tackle elitism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and fat-shaming with such funny prose you (almost) forget she is making sharp observations of how terrible some people really are. As she reflects on entering her mid-forties, she fully embraces the best things that era have to offer her, including: early bedtimes, comfortable pants, no more periods, and having no reason to hide that you take statins or arthritis medication.

All of Irby’s books are worth reading, but I recommend listening to the author read them on audio-book for the maximum enjoyment.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith (2023)

The poet Maggie Smith has written a gorgeous, nontraditional, vulnerable tale about motherhood, marriage, fame, feminism, and losing a husband but finding herself.

Told in short snippets — some one sentence, others a few pages — that look at her life and the inflection points that made her career, but were her husband’s undoing.

Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby (2023)

This collection of essays is another jewel from Samantha Irby. Quietly Hostile is full of her signature self-depreciating jokes, her enjoyment of growing older (which allows her to stop trying so hard), and her unapologetic love of all things average (think Dave Matthews and strip malls).

Irby’s essays tackle elitism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and fat-shaming with such funny prose you (almost) forget she is making sharp observations of how terrible some people really are. As she reflects on entering her mid-forties, she fully embraces the best things that era have to offer her, including: early bedtimes, comfortable pants, no more periods, and having no reason to hide that you take statins or arthritis medication.

All of Irby’s books are worth reading, but I recommend listening to the author read them on audio-book for the maximum enjoyment.

Life in Five Senses by Gretchen Rubin (2023)

Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of my Head and into the World

Gretchen Rubin is officially my favorite non-fiction writer (I have written many times about all of her books on this site that she has her own hashtag!) and I have been waiting eagerly for her most recent work, Life in Five Senses.

In this book, Rubin speculates about how much she is missing, and how diminished her enjoyment of her life has become, because she so regularly ignores the sensory experiences of her everyday routines. Once it is brought to her attention that she is taking her sense of sight for granted, she is shocked to learn that she takes ALL of her senses for granted. This book is documents her efforts to correct that oversight.

Going through each of the five major senses systematically — sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch — she examines her existing relationship that that sense and then pushes herself (gently) to bolster her experiences of it. She finds way to bring more color into her daily life, embraces buying fresh flowers and wearing perfume more often, listens to more music, goes on eating adventures, and explores how her sense of touch connects her to her loved ones.

This is a delightful book that is filled with thought-provoking questions (can you describe your sweetheart’s signature cologne?) and fun “try this at home” experiments (try eating blind folded) that jolted me out of my own ruts and sparked dozens of lively conversations with my friends and family about our favorite foods, smells, sounds, and sensations.

Happy Go Lucky by David Sedaris (2022)

David Sedaris, an absolute favorite of mine, just released a new collection of essays. These focus primarily on his father’s final years and on the COVID pandemic, but also cover Sedaris’ other favorite topics including his siblings, his partner, and include many of his trademark observations about just how absurd human beings can be.

Of note are his reflections comparing his mother’s death 30 years ago, to his father’s recent death and how the loss of someone who loved and championed him was unfathomably hard, while the death of a man who had spent most of his time and energy belittle and humiliating him felt like a relief.

While this collection was definitely readable, it felt a bit recycled (to be fair, some of it was run as columns in the New Yorker) and lacked some of the raw originality of Calypso or the utter hilarity of When you are Engulfed in Flames.

Quiet by Susan Cain (2012)

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

In this fantastic and immensely informative book, Susan Cain introduces readers to the historical, social, psychological, and scientific aspects of the introvert-extrovert dichotomy and offers in-depth explanation about why the distinction is important for everyone to understand. Cain uses a wide breadth of research-based examples to demonstrate that introverts are not a personality subgroup that is less-than or lacking in comparison to extroverts; but rather they are a group of people who have a unique and equally important set of skills and strengths that they offer the world. Introverts should be included, not forced to convert or conform, in decisions about how to design our classrooms, workplaces, and relationships.

Cain argues that beginning at the start of the 20th century, the long-valued character strengths of commitment, reliability, determination, and long-term goal setting began to give way to a “new” model of the ideal American: loud, outgoing, talkative, aggressive, comfortable with strangers or crowds, and quick to make choices. In other words: an extrovert. These skills allowed Americans living during the enormous changes of the Industrial revolution — including the rise of corporations, mass immigration to cities, decrease in work in single pursuits (farming, shop-keeping) in favor of working for large businesses — and workers who exemplified these new ideals were better suited to succeed in 20th century versions of education, business, and social life.

The worship of extroversion, and the demonization of introversion, soon had transformed education, advertising, religion, and psychology and even pediatrics. Quiet, reflective, people (especially children) who took time to make decisions, preferred to single-task, and needed quiet time away from others were seen as lacking and needed to be forced to change. As the century unfolded, American culture began to more and more reward extroverts and demand that introvert learn to “fake” skills of extroversion or accept lesser social and professional success. As of result, more than one hundred years later, the skills associated with extroversion have become the skills that represent “universal success.” It is has become widely accepted that louder, more outgoing, more assertive people are the ideal workers and partners.

Cain’s book seeks to transform that idea. She offers evidence that introverts, with their more subtle skills — long-range planning, aversion to risk, contemplative problem solving, and comfort with delayed gratification — can, if allowed to flourish, transform businesses, classrooms, research labs, and even personal relationships. Offering examples of well-known but successful introverts — Rosa Parks, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein — and presenting fascinating new research from social science, psychiatry, and neurobiology; Cain presents an alternative way of viewing the traits of introversion; she offers examples of ways that introverts are a valuable resource in all areas of life; and she even offers concrete ways that introverts can set up their environment for success…and ways that the world can better accommodate introverts.

You can find Susan Cain’s wildly popular TED talk The Power of Introverts and hear about her research into Introversion.

Wintering by Katherine May (2021)

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.” (13)

Rather than fight against the winter, dreading it or trying to battle it back under the pretense that life is the same as always, Katherine May invites readers to welcome it in. Using lessons from the natural world, from literature, from friends, and from her own experiences, she challenges us to see winter — the real season of the year and those low, slow metaphorical seasons of life — as times to downshift and embrace the other side of our sunny, summer selves.

Every one of us will dip into low seasons throughout our life, some more than others. Despite our cultural obsession with creating lives of “eternal…equatorial summer,” it is simply not possible to avoid periods in which we must slow down, step back, and go inward. (11) Since avoiding these “seasons of cold,” — which often mark periods of transition — is not possible, perhaps we can instead make friends with these dark, cold times and craft them to be as comfortable as possible while we weather them.(11)

Winter can become a season we look forward to and embrace for the special opportunities it provides us: more contemplation, more introspection, more appreciation of simple pleasures. Slower moving, less social, more focused on internal worlds — such as imagination, healing — than outer ones; we can take advantage of the regenerative nature of the slow, dark months and be more receptive to the magic that can be found there.

Summer is an external season: outdoors, frenzied, social, and exuberant. It is a time for travel, new experiences, new purchases; a time for using things up and draining every drop. Winter is about retreat, softness, and slowness. It is a time to repair, replenish, replace, and contemplate — to draw in (rather than expand out) and “treat our selves like our favorite child” with naps, soup, reading, cozy blankets, woolly sweaters, early bedtimes. Only after we have refilled ourselves, will we be ready for the new world that greets us in Spring.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (2021)

In this critically acclaimed memoir from singer/songwriter Michelle Zauner, readers are invited in to learn about the complex and fiercely loving relationship between the author and her mother. The essays cover all of Zauner’s life, beginning in childhood, and touch on the complicated relationship she had with her mother, with her Korean heritage, and how those changed as she grew older.

Zauner tries to make sense of the confusion she felt as a girl, with a Korean mother who did not act like the American mothers of her friends. Her mother’s demands of her felt cruel and unloving when she was a child, but as she got older and spent more time in Korea with her extended family, came understand the forces that shaped her mother’s life and, in turn, her own.

Stuck being somehow too Korean for some people in her life, and not Korean enough for others, Zauner’s deepest connections to her mother came through food. Even though she did not speak much Korean or “act Korean” like the children of other families, she was always applauded for “eating like a Korean.” As she explains her relationship with her mother, the stories center around food, eating, cooking, shopping, and the ways those acts connected two very different women who wanted to understand one another but could not always manage too.

As her mother began to lose her battle with cancer, Zauner is forced to set aside the small dramas that have marked their relationship and work to connect with her mother so that her mother can die knowing how much she is loved by her daughter.

A deeply moving and gorgeous memoir about how as we age and develop a more nuanced and complex understanding of our parents, sometimes that new understanding is alchemic, transforming the relationship for the better.

Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown (2022)

Brene Brown is a beloved celebrity of the self-health and mental health spheres for a reason: her razor-sharp intellect, her devotion to data-based solutions, and her funny, folksy manner are irresistible. In Atlas of the Heart, Brown is not giving us a work of self-help non-fiction as much as she is giving us an owners manual.

Laid out in a series of eighty-seven sections (some as brief as one paragraph, others a few pages long), Brown and her colleagues outline the primary human emotions and experiences and offer precise definitions of each. The purpose of the precision, Brown tells us, is that in order to truly understand ourselves we must understand our feelings and in order to do that we need to accurately label them.

Do you know how to distinguish stress and overwhelm? Envy and jealousy? Comparison and competition? By encouraging readers to dig deep and establish what Susan David calls “emotional granularity,” Brown is offering us the first step in easing our emotional distress.

Naming our exact emotion allows us to determine what is causing them and then — this is when the magic can happen — we know how to go about easing the pain the negative emotions are causing. (Or in the case of positive emotions, savor them, and increase the likelihood they will occur again.)

Negative emotions cannot be ignored, bottled, suppressed, or numbed: they always resurface and if we aren’t careful, they reek havoc on our lives. Brown encourages us to be brave, to face even the most difficult life experiences, and learn from them. As she says, “if we look an emotion in the eye and name it, it gives us power.”

Love’s Executioner by Irvin Yalom (1989)

Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

Irvin Yalom’s book does something that no textbook or psychological journal article would dare: it reveals therapy as messy, complicated, imprecise, frustrating, boring, and yet somehow still miraculous. Even though the world is indifferent, even though we are all alone, even though we risk every day losing the things we love the most — including our own lives — it is still an astonishing gift to be alive. Yalom’s therapy sessions remind us of the most profound truth of all: life is precious precisely because it is fleeting.

In the therapy room we see Yalom enraged at clients who refuse to stop lying to themselves and we also see him moved to tears by the exquisite insights they come to. While he cannot cure their heartache or loneliness or their fear of dying, he can be a present and willing witness to their pain and, in doing so, he can help lighten their burdens.

“The four givens in life are: the inevitability of death for us and those we love; the freedom we have to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and finally the absence of meaning or sense to life. However grim these givens seem, they contain the seeds of wisdom and redemption. It is possible to confront the truths of existence and harness their power in the service of personal change and growth.”

Yalom is not apart from his clients, but deeply and loving with them since these “givens” apply to him as much as to them. He understands their fears because he has them too, but he knows that together they can transform these fears into energy that powers clients to change their lives for the better.