'An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief.'From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living showing other women how to do the same. A mother to two small girls, she started out as a blogger and has quickly built herself into a confidence-driven brand. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains’ toddler one night. Seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, a security guard at their local high-end supermarket accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make it right.But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix’s desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix’s past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone “family,” the complicated reality of being a grown up, and the consequences of doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

This past week I was asked to read Gregory Michie's Holler if You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher and His Students for my Teaching of English in Diverse Social and Cultural Contexts course. Yes, it's a mouthful, but it's a great class!For those of you who haven't read it, Holler if You Hear Me is a series of anecdotes from Michie's 10 years teaching in inner-city Chicago, predominantly Mexican-American schools and the struggles he and his middle school students face: poverty, gang life, teen pregancy, and understaffed, unprepared schools--Michie originally applied for a position as a substitute and was offered a full-time position within a week, despite having no credentials. Right away, it probably conjures up images of Dangerous Minds, a correlation Michie and others have been quick to point out. However, where Holler sets itself apart from the Hollywood teacher-as-savior stories is in his failures as a teacher. His students don't all graduate, resist the call of the streets, and go to college. In fact, most of them don't.The purpose of Holler isn't to affirm budding teachers like me that we can "change the world"; it isn't even to show us what we're up against, though, arguably, it can do both of those things. It's purpose is give his students a voice. Each chapter begins with a short anecdote (usually a teaching moment but sometimes just a story) about his students, his school, or a fellow teacher. But each ends with an interview with a single-student related to that story. And it's here we learn about who these students are, their goals, where they're going, what they think about this or that. These are invaluable perspectives when our society is so often sold on "The Single Story" of inner-city schools. "They're all gang-bangers, drug-dealers, promiscuous, can't-be-taught-and-don't-want-to-learn"--when so often, the opposite is true. The result is that teachers, schools, and entire cities often give up on them before they've even been given a chance. So many of these children end up turning to the only lifestyle they're told they're suited for. And the cycle reinforces itself.As I mentioned earlier, this isn't a teacher-as-savior story, though it does have those moments. In an early chapter, Michie discusses an idea he has for teaching Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street to his Language Arts class, in hopes that the voice will capture his Latino students' attention. To help them get through it, he gets a group of older girls to record a dramatic reading for his class. What starts as one girl reading one excerpt becomes five girls recording multiple chapters for themselves in a kind of after-school book club. By the end of it, they're all so moved they decide to let Cisneros know in a letter, also inviting her to stop by the school if she's ever in town. And she does.I read The House on Mango Street at a time in my young adult life when I still didn't really know Mexican-Americans could be authors--Chicano literature would remain largely foreign to me until I started my Masters degree at New Mexico Highlands University. So, as for the "Mango girls", one line always stood out to me: "When you leave you must remember to come back for the others." It's appropriate then that one of those girls went on to college, became a teacher, returned to Michie's school, and sent students of her own off to college, too. So the book isn't devoid of hope, and if anything, it's a call to action.In the end, I'd recommend Holler if You Hear Me to any teacher. As my professor noted, it's also simply about the teacher as "other" to his students and how bridging that gap can make all the difference in an effective classroom.Questions? Quibbles? Controversies?

A housewife takes up bodybuilding and sees radical changes to her physique--which her workaholic husband fails to notice. A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking businessmen struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon--until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A woman working in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won't come out of the fitting room--and who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her husband's features are beginning to slide around his face--to match her own.In these eleven stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien--and, through it, find a way to liberation. The English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearlessly inventive young writers.

'Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices... Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?' A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived, from the internationally bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive and How To Stop Time.Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy – the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey's extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness.

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity.

Books

More lists by SweetButthole

Movies

TV