Dear readers,
It's been a while since I shared a list of books I loved, but I haven't encountered many books this year that I was excited about, so it took some time to arrive
at these. I want to get it out to you today before I entirely disappear into the kitchen and the steam and scents of cooking and baking for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which begins tomorrow evening.
This is an eclectic list of
books, but I guess my lists always are. Please keep in mind I am only sharing books I loved, and that this is my personal taste and not a book review.
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Rivka Levy's book exemplifies why I love memoirs: It gave me a glimpse into another life I otherwise would not get. Hers are the musings of an Orthodox Jewish woman, recorded over the course of 2015 as she grapples with life in Jerusalem, mothers two adolescent daughters, seeks spiritual fulfillment, and discusses religious quandaries with her lawyer/yeshiva
student husband. She grew up in Britain and Canada and made aliyah (=emigrated to Israel) several years ago. While her background is hardly the topic of the book, she brings a certain worldliness to her struggles with everyday life in Israel. She calls herself "frum," the Yiddish term for Orthodox Jews, but she's very aware that she doesn't fit the regular mold of a "frum" Jewish woman. Here I learned a lot from her as that world is pretty alien to me--there was a plethora of Yiddish
and Hebrew terms and religious concepts that meant a lot to her but not to me. I had to investigate! I love it when an author makes me look stuff up and expands my horizons. I learned a bit about the Chasidic world she somewhat moves in--up until reading her book, for example, I had never heard about Jews making pilgrimages to Uman in the Ukraine, particularly for Rosh Hashana. Rivka Levy's Secret Diary of a Jewish Housewife was so engaging, so personal and so upfront that I wished it would go on and on. Thankfully, Rivka is an avid blogger, so I've been able to do just that.
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This brilliantly ambiguous story made me fall in love with Henry James and the study of literature as a high school student. Back then I loved ghost and horror stories (in 7th grade a friend got me into Edgar Allan Poe), and somehow that led me to Henry James's tale of a seemingly mundane, believable governess (the theme being an easy segue from reading Jane
Eyre) who turns out, perhaps, not to be a reliable narrator at all. Upon finishing this story, so many years ago, I immediately started dissecting the text, trying to figure out how James had done this. However, it is so well done that I found enough clues to prove either scenario. So, earlier this year, I welcomed the chance to reread this book with my son when it was assigned in his AP English class. Again, it had the same effect on me. We finished it, and I asked myself,
what the hell happened? But before I even thought that, my son blurted out, "So did she or didn't she?" (I'm not going to spill the beans here and spoil the story for you.) We had a hearty discussion about it, and what a lovely thing to seriously examine a work of literature with my son who otherwise couldn't be bothered. So I have to say, once again, thank you, Henry James, for a most extraordinary tale!
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For light reading, I love mysteries but I am quite particular with what kind I like, so I was leery to get on the Donna Leon bandwagon. But since I traveled to Venice earlier this year and like to read books that take place where I have been, I picked up the first in her Commissario Brunetti series. Alas, I got hooked and am now on book No. 3. However, it wasn't love at
first sight. Well, in a way it was, because the opening paragraphs of Death at La Fenice are so evocative that I was taken by her well-rendered prose. At times, however, her stories move slowly and are almost boring but they are also wonderfully quotidian. Unlike most other mystery story detectives, Commissario Brunetti is just a regular
guy with a wife he loves (who, BTW, also loves Henry James!) and two adolescent kids, and a job that's sometimes tedious and a pompous boss he's learned to manage. I just love tagging along with him in the beautiful and so unique city of Venice, which Leon does such a good job of conjuring. Furthermore, these Venice mysteries all have a deep undercurrent of human tragedy, of some evil that's bigger than our individual lives that often is at the source of the case Brunetti is trying to solve
and that lingers, even when he's figured out who did it.
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How refreshing (pun intended!) to read a book about Israel that has nothing to do with the Middle East conflict, except for the fact that due to its regional isolation, Israel has been forced to come up with ways to make the most of its own scarce water resources. Living in the water-rich Great Lakes region myself, I never much thought about water management beyond being
aware that the City of Chicago pumps its fresh water from the lake and thus keeps it fairly clean. This book explores Israel's many innovative ways of managing water but it doesn't get too bogged down in technical details. I learned so much about all aspects of water management: water supply, purification, irrigation, sewage treatment, leakage, desalination, growing plants that need less water, even reclaiming the cellulose from toilet paper--wow! And this book goes beyond Israel's borders by
showing how Israeli innovations are now used all over the world (with more to come)--drip irrigation being the most famous one. Never again will I look at water the same uninformed way I did before reading this book, now that I have an appreciation for all the infrastructure that's behind not only the water that comes out of my faucet, but also the water that runs down the drain.
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What a great title! I've found Tim Ferriss interesting ever since I discovered his book The Four-Hour Work Week a few years ago, and once in a while I listen to his podcast. So, when his newest tome (and it is a
tome!) came out, I bought it after listening to his interview with Paul Coelho, a short version of which you will find in Tools of Titans. This is not a book you're going to read straight through; rather, it's meant to be picked up whenever you want to be inspired by a few brilliant people. The premise is simple and
more easily digestible than Ferriss's long podcasts: he has distilled the wisdom of highly accomplished people by asking them how they did it and how they manage their lives, from their morning routine to what books they recommend to their creative process. Each portrait is relatively brief. The questions are not consistently the same, which keeps the tome (seriously, this is a wad of a book) entertaining. Many of my copy's pages are dog-eared now--my way of marking a page I want to get back to,
and my reading list has gotten significantly longer thanks to Ferriss's profiles.
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I hope I have added a book or two to your reading list as well, and if you do pick up any of these titles, I would love to hear how you felt about them.
Happy
reading,
PS: If you've read my book, please consider posting a review to amazon if you haven't already done so. It makes a big difference. Thanks! |
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