Some Early Recommendations for 2018
I took some time out this December to start reading the 2018 releases I was most looking forward to. In early January I’ll preview another 25 or 30 titles I’m interested in, but for now here are eight books coming out in the first half of next year that I can heartily recommend, with ~130-word mini reviews to give you a taste of them. (These are in alphabetical order by author, with the publication details noted beneath the title.)
Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought by Lily Bailey
[Coming on March 15th from Canbury Press (UK) and on April 3rd from Harper Collins US]
“For as long as I could remember, I wasn’t me, I was we.” Lily Bailey had a sort of imaginary friend while she was growing up, but instead of a comforting presence it was a critical voice pushing her to be ultra-conscious of how her behavior appeared to others. This went on for years until she was finally diagnosed with severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Despite Prozac and CBT, she later landed in a psychiatric unit. She captures this inpatient stay with great verve, recalling the chorus of other patients’ voices and different nurses’ strategies. This memoir tracks Bailey’s life up until age 20, but her recreation of childhood and the first-person plural sections are the strongest. I’d recommend this to readers interested in learning more about OCD and mental health issues in general. (Full blog review scheduled for March 15th.) 
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
[Coming on January 9th from Tinder Press (UK) / G.P. Putnam’s (USA)]
Summer 1969: four young siblings escape a sweltering New York City morning by visiting a fortune teller who can tell you the day you’ll die. In the decades that follow, they have to decide what to do with this advance knowledge: will it spur them to live courageous lives, or drive them to desperation? This compelling family story lives up to the hype. I can imagine how much fun Benjamin had researching and writing it as she’s able to explore four distinct worlds: Daniel, a military doctor, examines Iraq War recruits; Klara becomes a magician in Las Vegas; Varya researches aging via primate studies; and Simon is a dancer in San Francisco. The settings, time periods, and career paths are so diverse that you get four novels’ worth of interesting background. (See my full review at The Bookbag.) 
Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved by Kate Bowler
[Coming on February 6th from Random House (USA)]
This was the 2018 title I was most looking forward to reading. It combines two of my niche interests: medical (especially cancer) memoirs, and the prosperity gospel, which I grew up with in the church my parents attend in America. An assistant professor at Duke Divinity School, Bowler was fascinated by the idea that you can claim God’s blessings, financial and otherwise, as a reward for righteous behavior and generosity to the church. But if she’d been tempted to set store by this notion, that certainty was permanently fractured when she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in her mid-thirties. Bowler writes tenderly about suffering and surrender, about living in the moment with her husband and son while being uncertain of the future. Her writing reminds me of Anne Lamott’s and Nina Riggs’s.
The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite by Laura Freeman
[Coming on February 22nd from Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK)]
A memoir with food, medical and literary themes and a bibliotherapy-affirming title – this debut ticks lots of boxes for me. As a teenager, Freeman suffered from anorexia. This is not an anorexia memoir, though; instead, it’s about the lifelong joy of reading and how books have helped her haltingly recover the joy of eating. Her voracious reading took in the whole of Charles Dickens’s oeuvre, war writers like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves (boiled eggs and cocoa); travel writers Laurie Lee and Patrick Leigh Fermor and their enthusiastic acceptance of whatever food came their way on treks; and rediscovered children’s classics from The Secret Garden through to the Harry Potter series. This is about comfort reading as much as it is about rediscovering comfort eating, and it delicately balances optimism with reality. (Full blog review scheduled for February 1st.)
Everything Here Is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee
[Coming on January 16th from Pamela Dorman Books (USA)]
Lucia Bok has been many people: a globe-trotting Chinese-American journalist, a shopkeeper’s wife in New York City, an illegal immigrant’s girlfriend, and a mother making the best of primitive conditions in Ecuador. Her schizophrenia means she throws herself wholeheartedly into each role but, as her mind turns against her, eventually finds herself unable to cope. We hear from Lucia herself as well as her older sister, ex-husband and boyfriend – in both first-person and third-person passages – over the course of 25 years to get an intimate picture of how mental illness strains families and how blame gets parceled out. Lucia’s first-person narration was most effective for me: “I take only one kind of medication now. They adjust the dosage. Sometimes I still slosh around, dense and slushy like a watermelon; other times I’m flat, defizzed.”
Junk by Tommy Pico
[Coming on May 8th from Tin House Books (USA)]
Junk food, junk shops, junk mail; junk as in random stuff; junk as in genitals. These are the major elements of Pico’s run-on, stream-of-consciousness poem, the third in his Teebs trilogy (after IRL and Nature Poem). The overarching theme is being a homosexual Native American in Brooklyn. You might think of Pico as a latter-day Ginsberg. His text-speak and sexual explicitness might ordinarily be off-putting for me, but there’s something about Pico’s voice that I really like. He vacillates between flippant and heartfelt in a way that seems to capture something about the modern condition.
Sample lines:
“the lights go low across the / multiplex Temple of // canoodling and Junk food”
“Haven’t figured out how to be NDN and not have / suspicion coursing thru me like cortisol”
Indecent by Corinne Sullivan
[Coming on March 6th from St. Martin’s Press (USA)]
Expect a cross between Prep (Curtis Sittenfeld) and Notes on a Scandal (Zoe Heller). Imogene Abney, 22, is an apprentice teacher at Vandenberg School for Boys in New York State. She’s young and pretty enough to be met with innuendo and disrespect from her high school charges; she’s insecure enough about her acne to feel rejected by other apprentices. But Adam Kipling, who goes by “Kip,” seems different from any of the other people she’s thrown together with at Vandenberg. A fourth-year student, he’s only five years younger than she is, and he really seems to appreciate her for who she is. Their relationship proceeds apace, but nothing stays a secret for long around here. Being in Imogene’s head can feel a little claustrophobic because of her obsessions, but this is a racy, pacey read.
From Mother to Mother by Émilie Vast
[Coming on March 20th from Charlesbridge Publishing (USA)]
This sweet, simple picture book for very young children (it will actually be a board book, though I read it as an e-book) was originally published in French. Based on Russian nesting dolls, it introduces the idea of ancestry, specifically multiple generations of women. I imagine a mother with a child sitting on her knee. Holding this book in one hand and a photo album in the other, she points to all the family members who have passed down life and love. Each two-page spread has a different color motif and incorporates flora and fauna on the design of the doll.
I’m also currently partway through, and enjoying, Educated by Tara Westover [Coming on February 20th from Random House (USA) and February 22nd from Hutchinson (UK)], a striking memoir about being raised off grid in Idaho as the youngest of seven children of religious/survivalist parents – and never going to a proper school.
Coming tomorrow (my last post of the year): Some year-end statistics and 2018 reading goals.
Four Recommended May Releases
Here are four enjoyable books due out next month that I was lucky enough to read early. The first two are memoirs, the third is an audacious poetry book by an author new to me, and the last is the sophomore novel from an author I’ve loved before. I’ve pulled 250-word extracts from my full reviews and hope you’ll be tempted by one or more of these.
Last Things: A Graphic Memoir of Loss and Love by Marissa Moss
(Coming from Conari Press on May 1st [USA]; June 8th in UK)
“You’re not aware of last things,” Moss, a children’s book author/illustrator, writes in this wrenching memoir of losing her husband to ALS. We look forward to and celebrate all of life’s firsts, but we never know until afterwards when we’ve experienced a last. The author’s husband, Harvey Stahl, was a medieval art historian working on a book about Louis IX’s prayer book. ALS is always a devastating diagnosis, but Harvey had the particularly severe bulbar variety, and his lungs were quick to succumb. His battery-powered ventilator led to many scares – one time Moss had to plug him into the wall at a gas station and rush home for a spare battery – and he also underwent an emergency tracheotomy surgery.
This is an emotionally draining read. It’s distressing to see how, instead of drawing closer and relying on each other, Marisa and Harvey drifted apart. Harvey pushed everyone away and focused on finishing his book and returning to his academic duties. He refused to accept his limitations and resisted necessary medical interventions. Meanwhile, Moss struggled with the unwanted role of caregiver while trying not to neglect her children and her own career.
I’ve read several nonfiction books about ALS now. Compared to the other two, Moss gets the tone just right. She’s a reliable witness to a medical and bureaucratic nightmare. At the distance of years, though, she writes about the experience without bitterness. I can see this graphic novel being especially helpful to older teens with a terminally ill parent.
My rating: 
My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues by Pamela Paul
(Coming from Henry Holt on May 2nd [USA]; June 13th in UK)
I hold books about books to high standards and won’t stand for the slightest hint of plot summary, filler or spoilers. It’s all too easy for an author to concentrate on certain, often obscure books that mean a lot to him/her, dissecting the plots without conveying a sense of the wider appeal. The trick is to find the universal in the particular, and vice versa.
Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review, does this absolutely perfectly. In 1988, as a high school junior, she started keeping track of her reading in a simple notebook she dubbed “Bob,” her Book of Books. In this memoir she delves into Bob to explain how her reading both reflected and shaped her character. The focus is unfailingly on books’ interplay with her life, such that each one mentioned more than earns its place.
A page from my 2007 reading diary. Lots of mid-faith-crisis religion titles there. Starting in 2009, I think, I’ve kept this information in an annual computer file instead.
So whether she was hoarding castoffs from her bookstore job, obsessing about ticking off everything in the Norton Anthology, despairing that she’d run out of reading material in a remote yurt in China, or fretting that her husband took a fundamentally different approach to the works of Thomas Mann, Paul always looks beyond the books themselves to interrogate what they say about herself.
This is the sort of book I wish I had written. If you have even the slightest fondness for books about books, you won’t want to miss this one. I’ve found a new favorite bibliomemoir, and an early entry on the Best of 2017 list.
My rating: 
Nature Poem by Tommy Pico
(Coming on May 9th from Tin House Books)
Tommy “Teebs” Pico is a Native American from the Kumeyaay nation and grew up on the Viejas Indian reservation. This funny, sexy, politically aware multi-part poem was written as a collective rebuttal to the kind of line he often gets in gay bars, something along the lines of ‘oh, you’re an Indian poet, so you must write about nature?’ Au contraire: Pico’s comfort zone is the urban, the pop cultural, and the technologically up-to-date – his poems are full of textspeak (“yr,” “bc” for because, “rn” for right now, “NDN” for Indian), an affectation that would ordinarily bother me but that I tolerated here because of Pico’s irrepressible sass: “I wd give a wedgie to a sacred mountain and gladly piss on the grass of / the park of poetic form / while no one’s lookin.”
Some more favorite lines:
“How do statues become more galvanizing than refugees / is not something I wd include in a nature poem.”
“Knowing the moon is inescapable tonight / and the tuft of yr chest against my shoulder blades— / This is a kind of nature I would write a poem about.”
“I can’t write a nature poem bc English is some Stockholm shit, makes me complicit in my tribe’s erasure”
“It’s hard to unhook the heavy marble Nature from the chain around yr neck / when history is stolen like water. // Reclamation suggests social / capital”
My rating:
The Awkward Age by Francesca Segal
(Coming on May 4th from Chatto & Windus [UK] and May 16th from Riverhead Books [USA])
I adored Segal’s first novel, The Innocents, a sophisticated remake of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence set in a contemporary Jewish community in London. I wasn’t as fond of this second book, but in her study of an unusual blended family the characterization is nearly as strong as in her debut. Julia Alden lost her husband to cancer five years ago. A second chance at happiness came when James Fuller, a divorced American obstetrician, came to her for piano lessons. He soon moved into Julia and sixteen-year-old Gwen’s northwest London home, and his seventeen-year-old son, Nathan, away at boarding school, came on weekends.
Julia is as ill at ease with Nathan as James is with Gwen, and the kids seem to hate each other. That is until, on a trip to Boston for Thanksgiving with James’s ex, Gwen and Nathan fall for each other. Awkward is one way of putting it. They’re not technically step-siblings as James and Julia aren’t married, but it doesn’t sit right with the adults, and it will have unexpected consequences.
The first third or so of the book was my favorite, comparable to Jonathan Safran Foer or Jonathan Franzen. Before long the romantic comedy atmosphere tips into YA melodrama, but for me the book was saved by a few things: a balance of generations, with Gwen’s grandparents a delightful background presence; the eye to the past, whether it be Gwen’s late father or the occasional Jewish ritual; the Anglo-American element; and a realistic ending.
My rating:
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 