Book bliss #9: January picks

January was incredibly generous with books. I started the year on such a high, bookwise, that I could not believe it. Each book was better than the last. I love when this sort of magic happens.

I picked it up at the Edinburgh airport, where I felt awkwardly at home and started drifting, as per usual, in my never-ending reflections on belonging and home. So, it is safe to say I chose the book because of the title. Nesting. I, who feel I have been snatched from my nest when I was a child.

This is a gut-wrenching book, but it also strangely provides a great deal of hope.

It is the story of a young mother who is in an abusive relationship. It does a great job in describing abusive relationships. How the abuser works first to gain the trust of a woman and slowly works to undermine it, to isolate her, to gaslight her. How often do they seem perfect, law-abiding members of society? The perfect father and husband.

It also perfectly describes the opposite process: freeing yourself from such a relationship. How the psychological layer and structural layer are often reinforcing leashes. The book is set in an increasingly expensive Dublin, pushing its citizens to the outskirts, with endless queues to social services offices that always seem to be at low capacity.

8/10

First of all, if this title triggers you because you struggle to understand who the author is and what the title is, “Same!”

This is the most serendipitous book of the three. I was at dinner with new acquaintances, and I exhorted, saying that men seldom read books by female authors, while we women read a lot of male authors. I still feel I have a point with that theory, with no data to back it. But I was proved wrong at that same dinner when my new friend gifted me precisely this book. And he happens to be a man. He introduced me to an author whose mastery I did not believe could be possible. The more I kept reading and the more I kept telling myself, “How can someone write so damn well?” I was loving this book, the characters, the poetry in it and the mastery of the writing all at the same time.

How to describe this book? It is difficult to. It is a sort of collection of stories turned into a novel. I cannot stand short stories because they leave me dissatisfied, but this book managed to fool me. I felt like back when, as a child, parents would give you food that looked yummy, and instead it was made of broccoli. It masterfully threads together the very anonymous lives of people living in the same small US village. We find out as the book goes forward that a lot of grandiose things happen within those people, to those lives that are not so much in motion anyway.

It describes with such poetry the emotional turmoil of what we call small lives. No life is small.

11/10

I found this through a recommendation from one of the most caviar-gouache journalists Italy has ever produced. I find her annoying as hell, but I am happy my determination to always mix my sources brought me to this book.

I think I have cried rivers over this book. And yet I have also felt good. It has given me hope; it has pacified something within me. This is the memoir of Katriona, now a PhD from Trinity College Dublin and an award-winning lecturer who survived a childhood raised by two heroin addicts.

Honest to a fault, there is no room for pity. Katriona does not need to be understood; she is not asking for permission to create and recall her story. This is a book full of dignity, poetry and accusation. The title is a provocation; she is not sugar coating it. She was poor, she was ashamed of it, she survived it.

This book should be the subject of debates in schools, universities, companies and public institutions. It makes you uncomfortable, it makes you tender, it makes you angry.

Gazillions of points/ 10

So small poll for men readers only:

And if yes, WHO?

I am testing you!

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